Eddie and the Cruisers Read online

“All on my own” was awkward. I never got past it. If Eddie were around, I’d have had the heart to complete the lyric and serenade Joann, I thought. But then, if Eddie were here, he’d be upstairs, loving Joann.

  She came to me when it was still dark and placed her hands on my chest, wakening me with her whispering.

  “Didn’t you hear it?”

  “What?”

  “The phone’s going crazy. You didn’t hear it?” Her hands were shaking. I held them. They were cold. “Every five minutes for the past hour.”

  “Did you answer?”

  “Yes,” she said. She raised her hands to her face, carrying my hands along, and I felt tears. “It was … he said he was … Eddie.”

  We were both shaking now, two scared people in a dark farmhouse, and the phone upstairs kept ringing. I told her about the quonset. That didn’t help a bit.

  “Did you ever see his body, Joann?”

  “No. He let me out down the road. We’d had an argument. He was so low, and I tried to cheer him up. Dumb me. Kissing him and ruffling up his hair, like that would make it better. He let me out. That was the last I saw of him. Ever. … You?”

  “I was in the following car. I thought I saw him. I mean, there was a body, halfway through the windshield. Head, arms, I thought it was Eddie. I don’t know. I ran toward the car, but the gas tank went, and after that …”

  The phone was still ringing.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said.

  We listened to it ring. That wasn’t much good either. Each ring sounded different. Some rings were sad and some were mad, and when the phone finally quit ringing, it left a certain anger in the air.

  “Do you think … there’s some way … that Eddie could be out there?” she asked, and I was dismayed to notice that her voice was hopeful.

  “No way,” I insisted, sounding surer than I was. “Why would he stay away so long? Why would he come back now?”

  “You stayed away yourself,” she countered, “just the same as Eddie.”

  Every time she said his name, it came a little easier. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, like a refrain in a song. My boyfriend’s back and there’s gonna be trouble. Hey, bird dog, get away from my quail. You really got a hold on me. Some hold it was.

  The phone rang again. Once. And stopped.

  “That’s it!” she burst out. “Swear to God, that’s Eddie. One ring, that’s our signal. It means get ready, he’s coming over. He’ll be here any minute.”

  She rushed upstairs, almost forgetting me. “You better go, Wordman. He finds you here in the middle of the night … I wouldn’t want Eddie to get the wrong idea.”

  Now—not five minutes from now—but now was the time to choose. Did I believe in miracles? Did I want to believe?

  Joann Carlino had cast her vote. That one ring of the phone had turned the trick. Eddie-my-love was on the way over.

  I couldn’t buy it. I didn’t believe. I didn’t want to. I admit it, shamefully, with a sense of betrayal: I wanted Eddie to be dead, to have been dead. God forgive me.

  I went out the back door, closed it quietly, and stepped around to the driveway. Damn it! Whoever was coming had picked a perfect night for it. It was a balmy summer night, a light salt breeze punching through the humidity, and a full moon lifting over the pines. The top of the summer. They’d be open all night along the boardwalk. A wonderful night for midnight swims and late-night makeouts. Drink beer on porches, go for a spin, let the kids stay up. It was the kind of night that stretched the limits of the possible, that loosened lips and loins, that made believers out of doubters. Oh yeah, what a little moonlight can do.

  I didn’t want him to know I was there. I parked my car inside the barn, next to Joann’s, and closed the door. Back in the kitchen, I picked up the pistol and slipped it in my pocket. The moonlight flooded into the house. It was bright enough to read a newspaper out on the front porch. But in one far corner, there was a pocket of darkness, just large enough to contain me. There I sat, waiting.

  “Wordman? You still here? Wordman?” Twenty minutes later she came downstairs. I didn’t answer. She stepped out onto the porch and glanced out to where my car had been. She stood there looking at the empty space. Perhaps she was whispering good-bye, but I didn’t hear it.

  She thought she was alone now, and I guess that made her nervous. I’d be nervous too. She was waiting for Eddie. It hurt me, sitting there, watching her wait, seeing her pace up and down, look down the road, loving Eddie.

  There was no way of arguing with her. I could try to tell her that nobody came back from the dead, but after what had happened in the quonset, I wasn’t sure. Or I could say that no lovers reunite after twenty years, but there I stood, proof that I was wrong. The then and the now, my careful compartments, were breaking down. Eddie, Joann, and I were all in a strange, illogical territory, where dates, tenses, time itself played tricks, and decades were brushed aside by a single phone call.

  She jumped up and ran for the receiver.

  “Eddie!” she cried. “Yes … yes … sure I do … I’ll be here …”

  This time he didn’t keep her waiting long. Anyway, what was ten minutes after twenty years? He gave her just enough time to go upstairs, dig out the tapes, and come back down. And then, like that, he arrived. He came jolting down the road in a boxlike ’51 Ford, radio blaring, pulled into the driveway, and honked the horn—beep-beep-beep beep-beep—just like old times.

  The horn-blowing was a nice touch. It sent chills down my spine. So did that old Ford sitting in the moonlight, beckoning her to start in right where she left off, like twenty years was just a detour, and death itself nothing more than a wrong turn. I guess I might have stopped Joann. I could have tackled her or tied her up or knocked her out. But it wasn’t in me. She was on the edge of the sort of miracle we all dream about. If I stopped her now, she’d never forgive me.

  Joann held back at the door, crying, afraid. She stood in the doorway looking out, waiting for Eddie to step out into the moonlight so she could rush toward him. But Eddie was too cool for that.

  The headlights flashed to high, dimmed, flashed high again. The door on the rider’s side swung open for her. The radio went down low, and that familiar voice called out to her.

  “Hey, baby? What’s the holdup? You know what I like!”

  “Eddie,” she whispered, but so low I could barely hear her. “Eddie!”

  “Come on, honey!” Eddie shouted. “Let’s get on with the music!”

  That brought her out, running, crying, racing down the corridor of light that led from her front doorstep to the headlights of the Ford. She took her best shot at happiness, Joann did.

  And so did Eddie.

  I saw it, right where I expected to see it, a silver barrel pointing out from the driver’s side, resting against the rolled-down window.

  “There’s a gun!” I shouted. Joann saw it, just as it fired. She dropped and rolled across the grass.

  Crouching in darkness, I pointed through the screen and fired three or four quick shots in the direction of the Ford. One of them somehow found a headlight.

  The door slammed shut, the engine raced, and the old Ford cut across the lawn, spun onto the driveway, and raced down the road.

  She lay on the grass unharmed, watching the car disappear down the road. You could hear him lay rubber when he turned onto the highway. Then the crickets and tree frogs reclaimed the night, and a dog that was barking somewhere down the road.

  I knelt beside her. One look told me what she needed. No consolation. No I-told-you-so. Just my company, if only I could keep my mouth shut. I managed. She motioned for me to hold her. I managed that, till the night started turning gray.

  “Thanks,” she said. She put coffee on the table, toast and eggs, and pork chops she’d cooked for me. She only wanted coffee for herself.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m angry.”

  “At?”

  “Myself, of course! I wasn’t so smart last night. And y
ou know what? I knew better. I knew it wasn’t Eddie. The odds were—what?—a thousand to one against. You know what I was going to say, first thing? ‘Where the hell have you been for twenty years?!’”

  “You still went for it.”

  “I know. The phone call did it. And the car, blinking the headlights, beeping the horn. And that voice! Whoever it is … they’re good. It’s frightening how good.” She shuddered, but it passed. It felt comfortable sitting there with Joann, her watching me eat the meal she’d prepared on a sunny summer morning.

  “After Eddie died, I made a promise to myself. A resolution, you could call it. Not to act on impulse anymore, not to let my feelings sweep me off. You can’t live that way. Think. Plan. That’s what I decided the day of the funeral. I kept that resolution, too. I did okay. Not great, but okay. Till last night.”

  “Funny,” I said. “I made a resolution that was just the opposite of yours. Cut down on thinking. To go with my feelings more. Trust them. That’s what got me in my car this summer. And brought me here.”

  “And now?”

  “I want to find out who’s out there.”

  “It’s that important to you?”

  “Yes. Enormously.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to be able to feel right about it all. About Eddie and the rest of them.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “First I thought it was somebody who was left over from the Lakehurst sessions. Not one of the big names. Some bodyguard or sideman. A small-timer with a long memory. Maybe that’s it.”

  “What else?”

  “Mannheim. Or somebody like Mannheim. A researcher digging into Eddie’s career, or Buddy Holly’s, anybody who came across that missing month. Those guys are crazy. They sift garbage, they reconstruct schedules from twenty years ago, laundry lists, tax returns, dentist’s bills, they want it all. Anybody doing a job like that would come across that month in Lakehurst.”

  “You buy that?”

  “No,” I said. “Not after last night. Not after the way the phone rang, and the way he hit the horn. I’m afraid it’s someone closer to home. Someone we know. Someone who knows us. It’s gotten personal.”

  “All right,” she said. “A Cruiser. Let’s go through the list.”

  “There’s Wendell,” I began.

  “But he’s in prison.”

  “Not always,” I replied, explaining Wendell’s furloughs in the custody of Reverend Hopkins. Then there was Hopkins himself, the turtlenecked cleric who always kept his options open. If you believed in miracles, you could trust Kenny Hopkins. But Kenny had told me he didn’t believe in miracles. And neither did I. People don’t change that much.

  There was Sally. That hurt, but it was hard to ignore him. All those years of playing oldies but goodies in motel lounges. His proprietary relationship with Eddie, his sense of having been ignored and wronged. Maybe Sally had convinced himself he had a valid claim. If so, he had the manpower to back it up. And a lead singer who sounded just like Eddie.

  “So all we know is somebody killed Doc Robbins,” Joann summarized. “Somebody robbed Eddie’s parents. Somebody spooked you at the quonset. And came after me. It could be one of the old Cruisers. Or the new ones. Or somebody else altogether. Or some combination of the above.”

  “Yes,” I conceded. Joann had this way of making me feel very unimpressed with myself.

  “We know what they’re after, though. The tapes they think I have. But you know what bothers me?”

  “What?”

  “You bother me. I don’t know what you’re after. I can’t seem to get a handle on that.”

  “I was alive back then,” I said. “It’s odd how you keep waiting for your life to happen, to lift off the ground. You wait for that one period of time when you can say to yourself, this is it! Well … that was it.”

  “But it’s over now. It’s in the past.”

  “No it isn’t. Why do you think you went running across the lawn last night?”

  “Okay,” Joann said. “Okay.” She asked me to wait a minute while she went upstairs. I poured myself another cup of coffee and wondered what came next. Joann returned with an overnight bag in one hand and a small cake-size cardboard box in the other. She handed it to me.

  “The tapes?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I glanced inside the box, counting five boxes of recording tape. I wondered if I’d have the heart to play them. How could the results of that month in the quonset ever match the nobility of the conception? I’d almost prefer to keep hoping that Eddie, that all the Mr. Blacks and Mr. Whites, had pulled off a miracle. Isn’t that what we always want to believe, when someone dies and we go rummaging through their trunks and attics, searching for the last masterpiece, the farewell message, the final expression? And wind up with bits and pieces, interesting failures, and ambitious plans, and we have to admit that’s all there is, there is no more? We hope, by finding something more, to cheat death. But what we find, if we find anything, only confirms it.

  “You’re giving them to me?”

  “I guess. If you want them.”

  “What’s on them?”

  “Would you believe it … I don’t know.”

  “What? You never played them?”

  “It was Eddie’s secret.”

  “His death didn’t change that?”

  She shook her head and handed me her suitcase. I opened the barn door, put her suitcase in her Volkswagen. She started the car, backed, and turned. I followed, pulling alongside.

  “Where are you headed, Wordman?”

  “South.”

  “Chuck the tapes. That’s my advice. They’re trouble. What we had going for us back then … it’s got nothing to do with what’s happening now. No connection at all.”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll play them, huh?”

  “Yes. Once, anyway.”

  “Anybody asks me where the tapes are, what do I say?”

  “You tell them. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay.” She started rolling up her window. Then she rolled it down again. “Sometimes I almost played them. When my marriage went bad, and I got thinking about the past. I thought there might be a message in there for me. Or at least a better good-bye than what we had.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I didn’t want to say good-bye …”

  “I get you.”

  “Not till last night. That was good-bye.”

  “I understand.”

  “And call me when it’s over. If you … want to.”

  “Okay if I come back?”

  “Oh, sure. Come on down. There’s blueberries in the summer. Cut yourself a Christmas tree in December. In between … I don’t suppose you hunt?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “So?”

  “Sure,” she said, rolling up the window. “Better late than never. ‘Come see about me.’”

  Then she rolled the window down, just an inch; she sounded like she was warning me off and bidding me on, all at once.

  “If you’re ready,” she said.

  15

  From South Jersey, it was less than two hours to Philadelphia. Odd, random moments linger from that trip. I came up behind a yellow school bus and tried to pass it for half an hour, nosing out into the middle of the road, always blocked by oncoming traffic. The kids in the bus were singing and laughing, like they were on their way to a class picnic, and some of them made a game out of teasing me: stop, go, hurry up, get back. When I finally edged by, they cheered me, and when I looked up to return their greeting, I saw that they were senior citizens—canes, braces, and all. The youngest person was the bus driver. I drove, without stopping, through Vineland. Eddie’s home was three blocks off Landis Avenue, to the left. His grave was behind a church, on the right. I looked for signs that Vineland honored its favorite son—a banner or
a marker—but if they were there, I missed them. What I noticed was what Eddie used to say: how the town smelled of vegetables, tomatoes, spinach, or asparagus, every day a different smell in the air, depending on what the canneries were processing. The flavor of the day was celery. Forty-five minutes later, just when the highway lifted up towards the bridge across the Delaware, and with Eddie’s Leaves of Grass beside me on the seat, I drove over Camden, a vast red sore slowly hardening into an everlasting scar. Strange. Some places, to be born again, all they need is a new mayor, a can-do governor, a concerned president. Other places, it’ll take a personal appearance from Jesus Christ himself. That was Camden.

  I parked in the long-term lot near the airport, rode the shuttle bus to the terminal, and checked the departure screen. I chose a flight down to Florida. I wanted to hide away in a place that was hot and old and out-of-season. I thought I’d head for Cape Canaveral-Kennedy. With space shots out of fashion, there’d be weeds in motel parking lots, and empty beaches, and an appropriate sense of things-winding-down. But near Melbourne, a gas jockey tipped me to the Golden Years Trailer Court, and I decided that here was where I’d make my last stand. There must be a homing instinct in northerners, that whenever life’s warning light starts blinking red, we head down South to a place like this, hoping to delay that last and coldest season.

  They may look tacky when you pass them on the highway, but these trailer courts turn out to be little Walden Ponds. You pare life away the way an impatient reader thins out the irrelevant sections of a bloated Sunday newspaper. Out go travel and real estate, sports and classified, current events and business. Gardening, stamp collecting, health: those are the important things.

  Still, busy as I’ve been, news of the outside world does intrude. In California, The Eddie Wilson Story rushes in front of cameras. I have this information from watching the first half hour of the Carson show with Ed Riley, while we were waiting for A Walk in the Sun on another channel. The hero will be portrayed by Michael Landon, his buxom, omnipresent, and thoroughly supportive wife by Adrienne Barbeau, and Michael Jackson will be featured—obviously—as Wendell Newton. They didn’t mention who’d be me. If anyone. No matter, it’s a walk-on. Musical arrangements and “new material” by Johnny’s guest, a short, witty man named Paul Williams, who claimed he’d been a fan of Eddie Wilson’s since he was this tall.