Scout’s Honor: Chapter 24

Jonnie

Austen had been wandering the streets for hours, muttering and gesturing, and was fumbling for change in a phone booth, oblivious of the urine smell. A pair of pigeons roosted atop its buckled roof. Despite his gift for numbers, he knew the phone numbers of only two women and had just sworn to forget one. Nearly a year after Ann Koch’s sandwich offer, he had stopped by the Swiss Bank to tell her his Harridan building was in escrow at last, hoping she would reconsider his loan application. The young Swiss receptionist stumbled before she hit upon the word moonhoney to explain Ms. Koch’s extended leave. Outside, Austen flung the bouquet of roses to the sidewalk, picked it up, tossed it in a trash bin. 

He seldom drank without Parson Shoer, but he’d started that afternoon. He’d spied the bottle of drugstore gin left behind in a vacated apartment, telling himself he would toast the building’s sale. Sitting in his underwear in the airless apartment, he gulped gin and tap water, assuring himself he was celebrating, that his drinking had nothing to do with the lost Ann Koch or his string of loan rejections or his solitude. 

Drunk, sweating gin, scratching at his paint-splotched t-shirt, he dialed Jonnie’s number, knowing she had to be home. It was ten o’clock in California. A nasal voice pronounced the toll. He was short a few quarters and surprised the operator when he politely apologized for troubling her. Two blocks uptown, he found a convenience store where he set a Schlitz and a twenty on the counter and asked the Arab clerk if he might have three dollars’ worth of quarters, telling the kid to keep the change. He pulled the tab off the beer can, guzzled it like a Marine on R&R, wiped his mustache, and threw the empty at a passing bus, cursing as it sailed wide. He stumbled back to the phone booth, redialed Jonnie’s number, and inserted the quarters. He hoped she still answered the phone with yes, remembering her husky cigarette voice as if they had spoken the day before. 

“Hello?” 

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. Mrs. Collins, please.”

“This is she.”

 “Jonnie?” Austen asked, bewildered. 

“Who? Oh my. Oh … Wait a second. Dear?” Muffled sounds behind a covered phone. “Just a moment.”

“This is Dr. Collins. With whom am I speaking?” 

Austen recognized the thin voice, recalling Jonnie’s mocking descriptions of her husband. “Sir, I need to speak with Jonnie.”

“Who is this?”

“Friend, a friend of hers. Where’s Jonnie, Doctor? I need to talk to her. I need her advice.” 

“She passed away, over five years ago. Now, may I know the nature of your call?”

“She’s dead?” Austen cried, his voice cracking, stunned into a momentary silence. “No… no, not dead. Five years ago?” His straight back crumpled, forehead drooping against the filthy booth.

“I’m hanging up if you don’t identify yourself.”

He choked back a sob, bawled, let the phone slip from his hand and swing on its metallic cord. He sank to the pavement. 

“Hello? Hello?” Dr. Collins demanded. “Is anyone there? Hello? Darn it, I’m hanging up.”

Austen groped for the dangling receiver. “Where’s she… where’s she buried? I have to visit her, her grave. Where?”

“Here, at Holy Cross cemetery. I really must insist—” 

Austen flung the phone at its cradle, crept out of the phone booth, and sat at the curb, sobbing into the night. He rocked back and forth, with his face buried in his big rough hands, ignoring the stares of the wounded night people.

Weeks became months before Austen convinced himself to risk California. When the chestnut leaves turned, he bought a one-way ticket with cash and a phony name and flew to Los Angeles. He found a used car in the Times classifieds, and a few hours later paid a grieving Armenian woman cash for her dead daughter’s Toyota. She asked for eight hundred dollars, but he countered with a thousand when he glimpsed the candled shrine with its fresh mourning lilies in the woman’s living room. 

He drove to the Holy Cross cemetery that evening and vaulted its black steel fence. Despite the full moon and his half-trotting gait, it took him hours to find Jonnie. He’d started his search among the carved mausoleums, moved on to the elegant marble and granite tombs, then the grandest of tombstones. He cursed when at last he spied her tarnished metal plate—one of thousands—in the cemetery’s working-class neighborhood along Hilltop Drive. The square marker contained only her name, her life bracketed by dates and the words “Loving Wife and Mother.” 

“Goddamn it.” Outraged at Dr. Collins’s miserliness, Austen kicked the damp, grassy earth and then paced, calming himself. He sat down, setting roses above where he felt her heart lay. He stayed half the night, swearing at Dr. Collins, picking at weeds, scratching his car key against her plate’s tarnish, chewing blades of grass. Asking Jonnie whether she would do it. Whether he should do it. 

 “I’ve been trying to work smarter, Jonnie, but I don’t have any credit, I can’t borrow shit and, instead of looking for new deals, I’m spending all my time keeping my dumps from falling down. I need that money to really get started. That stuff belongs to me more than anyone else, doesn’t it?” When the moon set, he leaned over and kissed the cool plate. 

Then he drove to Lemon Grove.

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