Blues Lessons by Robert Hellenga

Author:Robert Hellenga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Janis received her Ph.D. at the end of the second week in June. Her parents came out from Cambridge. Reverend Taylor came with us to the commencement ceremony in Rockefeller Chapel, and afterward we ate lunch at Tai Sam Yan, on Sixty-third Street, and then that afternoon Janis and her parents left for a monthlong trip to Rome— Janis's graduation present. They were going to stay with friends in a palazzo on the Esquiline Hill. They were going to leave Janis's Volvo in Kalamazoo, take the train into Detroit, spend the night, and fly out the next evening: Detroit-London-Rome. After lunch Reverend Taylor and I walked down Sixty-third Street, past the little Episcopal church that he had an eye on, past the drugstore where Bobby Franks's father had waited by the telephone, with $10,000 in a cigar box, for instructions from Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, past the Illinois Central station where Muddy Waters had gotten off the train in 1943. We cut through Jackson Park and walked all the way out to the Point, where we sat on a bench and kept an eye on the lake and thought our own thoughts till the sun started to go down behind us, and then we walked back.

I'd bought most of Janis's furniture, including the double bed and the TV, but she was taking the ottoman with her. In the morning, after they left, I stacked the leftover boxes of clothes and books for Kalamazoo College by the door. I was going to mail them to Janis at Kalamazoo College when she got back from Italy. And then I went down to the shooting range at the police station on Eleventh and State. I had to qualify once a year for the handgun that I had to carry on the train. The range officer checked my gun, which I'd cleaned and oiled the night before. I stepped up to the firing line. My father had taught me to shoot rats out at the dump with a nine-shot .22 pistol, and I was a pretty good shot.

The gun was a .38 double-action snubnose revolver known as a banker's special because it had once been favored by bank messengers. It was designed to shoot someone who was standing right in front of you—a train robber coming down the narrow aisle of the RPO car—but I still had to qualify at fifteen feet, at thirty feet, and at sixty feet. We used cardboard bullets at fifteen and thirty feet, and live ammunition at sixty feet. The closer targets were regulation bull's-eyes, but the sixty-foot target was a human silhouette. We used a one-handed target-shooting stance: front sight, squeeze the trigger. The .38 rose automatically to eye level and aimed itself, like a Zen gun, directed solely by some spiritual force within my body, or that had taken over my body, but as the sight came on target I could see a human face smiling at me: Monroe, giving me that big goofy whole-body smile of joy, of ecstasy that simply can't be contained.

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