White Oleander - Janet Fitch [190]
But she was sure old Henry’d showed up with the other granolaheads, lit incense, and rang finger cymbals and blew some pot, no doubt, in John’s memory. Om rama rama. Did John Lennon really want all that? Was that what he was about? From what she’d heard, the guy’d had some wit and brains — did he really want to be the dead guy of the hour, like a melting centerpiece?
Finally, the artist stepped away from his easel, sighing. “What say, Jo-say. Pack it in?”
She unfurled her legs, felt the blood rush back, that tingle and burn, stretching fragile shoulders, their delicate bones clearly visible, small breasts with their dark nipples, the black triangle that contrasted with her unlikely bleached hair, roots coming in dark. She put her clothes back on — a vintage dress she ’d traded for a domino bracelet, torn leggings — and worked her feet into spike-heeled pumps from Goodwill. While Henry cleaned his brushes, she touched up her bloodred lipstick then joined him on the couch, orange velvet edged in brown dirt. He rolled a joint, special dope he called “The Spider” — brown turds of buds his friends in Hawaii sent him. Old hippies got so into their pot. She didn’t mind sharing, but you didn’t have to make a cult out of it.
As they smoked, Henry went on about John Lennon, how he couldn’t believe he was dead, like the guy was some fucking saint. “He’d finally found himself,” he kept saying. “That cat had just finally worked it out.”
She toked along with him, knee to knee, and thought about the guy who shot Lennon. Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate. Got his signature and then shot him down. The saddest thing about it was that she wasn’t more shocked. To Josie, it just seemed part of the way things were heading, Ronald Reagan, greedheads running everything. Killing John Lennon seemed like just mopping up. Thirty thousand people were missing in El Salvador, those nuns, and everybody in America was worried about who shot JR.
She and Henry leaned back against the couch. The Spider, she had to admit, was major deluxe. Henry turned his head slowly, keeping it supported on the couch back, looking at her with his small pot-reddened eyes that always smiled, even if he was angry or sad. He smelled of some weird liniment he brewed himself for nursing his tai chi injuries, roots and licorice and some kind of bugs. He put his hand on her knee. “Jo-say, you still with that guy, that Harvard cat?”
His hand on her knee. Henry Ko was like thirty-five, what was she supposed to do with an old guy like that? “Michael. Yeah, we’re still together.” At least she hoped they were. Maybe he was back. In fact, he might be home right now, waiting for her. Suddenly, she had to go. She put her child-sized hand on top of the artist’s turpentine-dry one. “But I’ll let you know if we break up, Henry, I swear.”
SHE DROVE back to Lemoyne in her rattly Ford Falcon, a powder blue relic with band stickers on the trunk — X, Germs, Cramps. It was normally a three-minute drive, but she hit a line of cars with their lights on. Why were they going so slow? Maybe another John Lennon thing. She honked, wove, and passed until she got to the front and saw it was a hearse. Mortified, she turned off onto a side street and stopped, red-faced. How was she supposed to know — a line of cars crawling along with their lights on? Some days it felt like her sister Luanne had just dropped her off at MacArthur Park day before yesterday.
She drove the rest of the way under the speed limit, parked in front of her house, took the mail from her mailbox, and pulled the noose on the gate. Careful in her high heels, she descended the rickety steps to the little