A SPECIAL THREE-PART SERIES:
Part 3: True Northtown
My hometown had changed in more ways than one. It was still a rustbelt town in the Midwest, less well off than some but not as bad as many in the county that were harder hit by the loss of jobs. Boats on the Great Lakes were few and far between. Most lakeboat fleets were cut in half or sold off for scrap. The plastics industry had fallen off in the same way. If there was one positive in the lack of heavy industry, it was in the air and water quality. When I left to go sailing, Lake Erie was filthy. Bats used to hang in the rigging to catch flies from the filthy brown water extending ten miles from shore. The Northtown River was stank with effluent from the chemical companies. Greenpeace came to town that summer and stuck black upside-down smiley faces in every yard where someone had died of an unusual form of cancer. You could follow the signs all the way to the river from their source, a notorious Superfund site called Field’s Brook, where the children of the second wave of Italian immigrants used to play. I remember driving home in the early morning hours from a date when Route 11 deadheads in the harbor a half-mile from the bascule bridge and even a shorter distance from the plants on Lake Road. I drove smack into a fog bank. It was like driving into a whiteout in winter, except that this cloud was made of carbon tetrachloride from one of the plants nearby, and the gas was enough to damage more than the lungs. Most residents in that section of the harbor kept their cars in garages to prevent the factories’ emissions from destroying the finish on their cars.
The name that rang the bell belonged to a former elementary school classmate. I didn’t recall him well from those long days at St. Bartolomeo’s slogging through the teachings of the blue nuns or had any memory of his father at all. Joey Kerns and I were never friends but maintained a passing acquaintance through high school.
He told me on the phone he was city auditor, and I asked if I could drop by his office. He seemed agreeable at first on the phone, but I had to dispel the notion I was involved in a class reunion, which seemed uppermost in his mind. He seemed less interested when I told him it was about Tony Kantola from St. Bart’s, and I had to bite my tongue when he responded: “You mean Drano Boy? I forgot all about that.”
We met in his office on the first floor of the municipal building downtown. I declined his offer of coffee, but he insisted, I thought, more to show me he could order a secretary to fetch it anytime he wanted. The small talk was short, and neither of us interested in it. He asked me if I thought the downtown had changed much in the twenty years I was gone, and I said it looked bleak. There was no traffic on Main Street in the middle of the day except for a few pedestrians heading into offices. The high-rise one block over held the town’s welfare cases and those on disability. On my way past, I saw clusters of males sitting on benches outside the building or standing around talking and smoking. Half the storefronts were shuttered; some had opened in the wake of the economy’s collapse and sported hand-drawn signs, many of which had a dollar symbol in them.
“Drugs have killed this town,” he said. “Opioid capital of Ohio, right here.”
The metal plaque on his door referred to him as Joseph A. Kerns, C.P.A., and his wall was littered with diplomas and certificates of recognition from organizations like the Lions and Moose clubs. He wore a college ring on one hand and a ring with the letters A, O, H on the other. I recognized it. My father used to drink at a place on Depot Street called the Glass Bar. That’s when he told me he was a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, although he had attended church one time in all my years of growing up.
“Crack whores in the park right across the street. I can see them with my binoculars. Can you believe it?”
I couldn’t, actually. I’d had such romantic views from the shipboard of so many small towns up and down the Great Lakes that I was used to seeing them from a distance, like Duluth with its houses scattered across the hillsides above the harbor at sunset. Mothers walking babies in strollers, people jogging in the park, the Jimmy Stewart small town at its best. Somehow, I’d thought my town would remain as it was in my memory, but I was constantly reassessing what I remembered with the reality of what I saw around me, like Joey Kerns. He was a tubby, unathletic, acne-scarred teenager in high school with a yelping laugh that made him the butt of jokes from the jock clique he wanted to be part of. His suitcoat jacket hung behind him on the expensive executive chair, and he found reasons to bunch his biceps to the point that his bone-white shirt strained the fabric. A little flick of his neck muscles from time to time helped him show off his built-up deltoids. He was clean-shaven, confident, and growing more bored with me the longer I stayed once he realized I wasn’t in town for a reunion.
“Thank God,” Joe said. “I thought I’d missed the email. You know how Frank is.”
It took me a moment to remember Frank Carrabia was our senior class president.
“Did your father ever say anything to you about Tony’s suicide in the days after it happened?”
Kerns tried to look thoughtful but spoiled the effect by glancing at his expensive wristwatch. “No, sorry, man, he never said a word to me about it. I think we all heard about it the same way—one of the nuns told us in class, remember? Those goofy nuns, man, remember what they did to poor old Ray—”
“Joe, listen, when your father and the Knights of Columbus met to practice for their ceremonies, did they say anything about sponsoring Tony for a scholarship to high school?”
“No, nothing—wait, maybe, yeah, Aino. He did say something one time about Aino. You remember Anto Aino, right? The guy was built like a brick shithouse at thirteen; bench pressed three hundred pounds at the Y. My father said if he wasn’t such a psycho, the K of C would have paid his way right into Ohio State. If the guy wasn’t such a maniac, he could be drowning in money and quiff now instead of living in some shithole in the harbor.”
It was like a switch had been flipped, and the temperature in his air-conditioned office dropped ten degrees. Suddenly, Joe Kerns had no more time for me. I detected the bitterness at the end of his last statement: Aino was everything he had wanted to be and even had his own father’s admiration.
“Anto was hard to forget,” I said. It was all I could do not to rub my sore jaw.
“He tortured Eddie Trotter all through high school, man. I felt so sorry for that kid. I heard he had a nervous breakdown after high school. Turned into a hermit, I heard. Stayed in his house for three years without leaving it.”
“I never knew that. Eddie still in town?”
I remembered a gangly boy with acne. He took general courses and our paths never crossed.
“Yeah, if you can believe it, his parents left him enough money to buy a business.”
Kerns had a twisted smile on his face.
“What’s funny about that, Joey?”
“He bought a bar, of all things,” Kerns said. “He owns that dump on Lake Road. Oh, that’s right, you’ve been gone. It’s a gentlemen’s club,” he sneered. “The Candy Apple. Strictly low class—skanks for dancers and clientele that give white trash a bad name. Cops make calls there every other night. City manager’s been trying to close it down for years.”
I was still thinking of Trotter being victimized by my boyhood terror. I’d been in town less than a week, but Aino’s name kept coming up.
“Hey, man, look, let’s get together for a beer sometime. Right now, I’ve got this planning commission meeting I can’t be late for.”
He shot his cuffs and grabbed his jacket from behind the chair.
“Hey, Jack, let me ask you something. I always heard Kantola drank a whole can of Drano. Is that right?”
I didn’t say anything. When I closed the door behind me, he adjusted his tie knot and gave me a wink like a guy heading off for a sexual rendezvous, not a business meeting.
Compiling a list of names was a false start. I called several people from my past. Many didn’t remember me well or Tony at all. I had a line on where his family had come from: Poland, initially to Cleveland and the steel mills, and then to Northtown around the turn of the last century. It was a similar migratory pattern for the Scandinavians of “Swedetown,” who took over the docks and shipping before moving on to the railroads. The Irish followed them and brought over their clans. Last came the Italians in the 1850s, who did the grunt work on the docks, dug the sewerage system of Northtown, and endured the same race hatred as the other nationalities before them. They moved into vacated Swedetown last; today, there were still a few old Italians left in Swedetown—no Swedes or Finns—but some whites from Appalachia and a few black families. Blacks always seemed to be in Northtown, small in number, and invisible until recently.
Tony’s mother was still in the phonebook, but I learned she lived in the county nursing home. That turned out to be a disaster. Mrs. Kantola was being treated for Sundowner’s syndrome and was incoherent on the first day I visited her in her room. She didn’t remember me, much less answer any of my questions, and when she did speak, it was to ask me to tell the priest hiding under her bed to go away. On my second visit, she was being restrained in her room in what resembled a huge high chair for toddlers, except for the leather straps buckling her in. She gabbled nonsense and spat curses at me and anyone who passed by in the hall.
I didn’t know if Tony had other relatives who might know something and would be willing to speak to me—or if they were even still alive. Many of the older people I wanted to hear from who might have known or heard something were gone literally—now residing in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, in retirement homes in Florida, or living with children and couldn’t be traced without a private investigator’s help, which I was unwilling to do at that point—or gone mentally with memories as clouded as their retinas, whenever I did arrange a meeting in their homes or at the rehab center. A few lived in private nursing homes or the county’s, less than a mile from my B & B. After a couple of visits, I dreaded going back to talk about an event that wasn’t crucial to their lives but to mine. Besides, it was demoralizing to realize that, whether time existed or not, whole ranks of people from my past were walking in lockstep toward the cliff’s edge. Some were suspicious of my motives and thought I was some kind of scammer. Often, when I did get past that stage to discuss growing up in Northtown, I couldn’t get the conversation back on track. People wanted to talk about their memories of the harbor, and I often wound up trying to answer their questions.
I thought I’d try one more thing before I called in a private investigator, knowing I was out of my depth. The parish registry at the church probably still existed. St. Bartolomeo’s hadn’t operated its elementary school in ten years, but it might have some old records books in storage or file cabinets I might get permission to go through. Nowadays, the church was in decline, the local population had shrunk, and the remaining parishioners had aged, which meant that one priest handled all the parish duties for the three Catholic churches. It was unlikely any records were digitized, which meant I might have a shot at seeing the books if I could talk my way past the housekeeper or the priest. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking for, but I told myself I’d know it when I saw it.
I called the parish house next door to St. Bartolomeo’s and left a message and the phone number of the B & B. It dawned on me I’d have to join the rest of the technology herd in possessing that device, too, and get a cell phone if my investigation was to go anywhere.
I’d bought a suit and tie at the nearby Goodwill to enhance the effect I wanted to make and tried out some smiles in the bathroom mirror. No wonder, I thought with the brutal honesty that forces itself upon us once in a while, I couldn’t get a girl or a steady woman. I was in the prime of life, and yet nothing was looking back at me in the mirror but a man in his mid-thirties with a scowl that seemed chiseled into his face. I was a man in motion for twenty years, and now I had come to a screeching halt with no direction or purpose in life. I didn’t even know why I was chasing this boyhood ghost. Tony and I would have grown up, probably gone our separate ways, and maybe met up in the Wyandotte once or twice, like with Paul. It didn’t make sense.
An old woman with wild-looking gray hair and thick glasses answered my knock. She looked at me with suspicion while I explained who I was. I tried out that smile I’d worked on back in the room.
“There’s no one here,” she said, reluctant to let a strange man inside.
“I understand, ma’am,” I said. “I left a message on the machine for Father—”
“Father diMare,” she finished.
“Yes, Father diMare. I don’t know him, but I used to go to St. Bartolomeo’s. My name is Schroeder, John Schroeder. Would you have him call me, please? My number’s on the machine.”
“You can come in,” she said. “I know your family. Your father’s name was Jack.”
“That’s my name, too,” I said.
“I’m Mrs. Salem.”
As my mother would have said, it was another kick in the slats from memory. I remembered her now: Rose Salem. She was a familiar presence inside St. Bartolomeo’s church; she ran the Altar and Rosary Society. The older altar boys used to pantomime sexual antics behind her back whenever old Fr. Hanratty was conducting one of his infrequent classes for us on how to serve the special masses. She was an olive-skinned, middle-aged beauty with extra-large breasts that made the fledgling bosoms of our female classmates resemble what Tony used to say: “as if they got hit in the back with a couple of Roman candles.”
Knowing that she knew me also meant she knew all about my family. Parishes were no different from anywhere else where gossip flourished. It was one of the reasons I wanted out of Northtown.
Despite the messy hair, I could see that she wore it the same way. It used to make me think of a row of women telephone operators from the 1940s. Time hadn’t seemed to ding her memory, however, and before I knew it, I was talking to her freely about some classmates from school or families in the harbor and the people we had in common.
I brought the conversation around to my Confirmation class and said I was interested in seeing if I could track down some people for a reunion. She hesitated, thinking. I took a moment to regard her. Like Aino, I towered over her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, ma’am,” I said. “Just a stomach twinge. A little indigestion is all.”
“Does it have something to do with your face, too?”
“No,” I said, “that was an accident at work.”
If she knew, I’d just then recalled my vivid images of her, she might have screamed and jumped back in fear. But who knows? I was a man. I had no idea what women thought about men and boys lusting for them like crazed animals.
She led me past the foyer to a storage space below the stairwell. She opened the sliding door and pointed at stacks of Xerox boxes with years marked on them in a black marking pen.
“Here’s where the old parish registers are kept,” she said. “You can use the study in that room until Father diMare gets here. He’ll be saying late mass around four.”
I thanked her and got to work. I took the boxes out one at a time and went through them. There was nothing organized inside them. A jumble of old receipts, photos, mass cards, newspaper clippings, and hundreds of church bulletins assessing the week’s news for that year.
I found no parish registries or names. I went through three boxes and examined everything for the years before and after I made my Confirmation. I found one photograph of the Knights of Columbus dated for the same year. The eight men in the photo were posed in the church nave, swords raised, black cloaks with red silk lining, and black hats with white plumes. We boys and girls in white suits and white dresses must have walked through this display at the end of the ceremony, but I had no memory of it. I barely remembered my uncle being with me. My father never went to church with me except for one memorable occasion when I was very young and lay down on the kneelers instead of attending the mass.
I remembered one classmate whose father was a member of the Knights of Columbus. He wasn’t on my list of names. I stowed the box back under the stairwell and called upstairs for Mrs. Salem. She came down with one hand on the banister, slowly, with a moan every few steps.
“Arthritis in my knees.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
I showed her the photograph and asked her if she remembered the names of the men in it. She put on a pair of bifocals and regarded the photo for a long time.
“I know six of them,” she said after another lengthy pause. “But these two, no, I don’t remember.”
I asked her if she would allow me to make a copy of it. She looked at me again, and I knew she had doubts about my stated motive, but she turned around without a word and walked off with the photo. I stood there, unsure what to do if she called. Fr. diMare about the nosy intruder in his house. She returned with the photo and a copy and handed it to me.
“I wrote the names on the back. I’m not sure of the spelling.”
I turned it over and noticed a delicate, elegant script. Each name was matched to its Knight on the other side. She preceded me down the foyer. As I turned around on the brick steps to thank her again, she looked at me and said, “You were friends with that boy who drank the Drano.”
Before I could reply, she shut the door on me.
I would spend every day for the next two years finding out everything I could about every name and every relative of every name who knew or might have some grain of truth to add to the accumulated data I now possessed.
In the end, I thought I had a “narrative,” not the truth, but a good part of it. It was a sordid tale, one that would ultimately rock the Vatican on a far more massive scale than my own investigation. A group of boys were recruited and paid money to box to entertain prominent people in the diocese. They held these boxing matches every few months or so. The boys wore protective gear. A deacon from a Pennsylvania seminary refereed the bouts. No one was seriously hurt. The matches took place in an impromptu ring in the school gymnasium. The boys showered afterward. One boy, Anto Aino, gained the privilege of organizing the boys before and after I concluded that Tony might have been groped when Aino, paid by this deacon, kept Tony back from the other boys after their shower so the deacon could approach him and offer him money to molest him.
Many people in the parish knew of these boxing matches. I doubt anyone knew of the arrangement between the deacon and Aino. Far worse was happening in other places in hundreds of parishes by men and corrupt boys like this pair. The same understanding we had of shame still exists. Cyberbullied teens kill themselves all over America. Tony must have felt he had no one to talk to. That still feels like a knife in my chest to realize he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to me. I can’t shake the feeling I failed him somehow.
If Tony were alive, would we even be friends today? Would he remember whatever happened to him, or would we plot sensational revenge on Aino and the deacon like a pair of television action heroes? I sorted through all the information I had collected and lined everything up in different stacks: the emails, newspaper clippings, and Xeroxes, enough to fill three Walmart totes. I had a disk packed with dozens of files and hundreds of pages. Looking at it spread all over the floor, I felt the weight of it crushing me. I hauled everything outside, and in one huge backyard auto-da-fé, I burned it all, even the disk, which I watched melt in the flames.
But you can tell yourself a hundred times you’re done with something, but unless it’s done with you, it won’t last, and the gnawing pain comes right back to choke you awake. It sat on my chest, scratching, a cat clawing. It reached the point that a daily bottle of bourbon wouldn’t be enough to stop the noise. I would never find the men responsible. I would die not knowing. The realization was enough to choke me and fill me with rage.
It took me years to find solace in my ignorance, a grudging acceptance that this was life, not something in my head made up from watching cowboy movies in my youth like Shane, riding off wounded after saving the sodbusters from evil Jack Palance, leaving Brandon deWilde to look on and call Shane’s name until the echoes died in the valley. He’d never see his hero again. I’d never discover why Tony chose to die like that. Closure, a TV word. It tasted like ashes in my mouth.
I called this collection of memories a “reverie,” but is that true? There’s nothing pleasant in the aftertaste. I had failed. I thought that a grand gesture of exiting the Pierce would make me Shane, riding into my hometown to bring justice and restore equilibrium. Instead, I found myself back in my room overlooking Northtown Harbor, packing my belongings. I called the Greyhound bus station to enquire about the bus arriving soonest and going the greatest distance in any direction from here. I wasn’t escaping failure. I was acknowledging it. And my own hubris. Or was it simply cowardice? A refusal to stay and fight harder for the answers? People make decisions in all kinds of places, the hardest ones in the most depressing, where they have had little time or strength to prepare. Cramped rooms like the one I was about to vacate probably saw some of those decisions made by real heroes. I was simply leaving, letting the waters close over the heads of Tony Kantola and me.
-END-
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Bumstown Reverie: A Mystery
By Terry White
BIO- Terry White was born and raised in Northeastern Ohio, Terry White has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels as well as genre and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies under such pseudonyms as Robb T. White and Terry White. Nominated for a Derringer in 2019, his crime story “Inside Man” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. Betray Me Not (Grand Mal, 2022) was selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance as a Truly Independent Book of 2022.
Follow Terry White at:
TWITTER- @tomhaftmann
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