Lily Doom and Rhapsody in Blue

I don’t know exactly when Woody Doom moved to the Valley to work at the Zinc Plant. Here’s what I do know. At first, he lived somewhere in Smelterville and then moved into a trailer home in a court just west of town near a big bend in the gray North Fork of the Couer d’Alene River, the Lead Creek. He didn’t have a wife. I know he had a daughter named Lily. Lily Doom. I know she went to Silver King Elementary when she first moved to the Valley and that somehow Woody got her into the Catholic School, St. Rita’s to start junior high.

My dad took a liking to Woody. He had him over to the house sometimes for dinner and he and Woody would drink can after can of Heidleberg beer. Woody had the Vitalis look, the Johnny Cash look, with his deep black and gray hair oiled back. I don’t know where I first met Lily. Maybe she came to the house one time or maybe Dad and I went to the trailer home to visit Woody and Lily.

All I know for sure is that Lily was one of those girls who seemed about sixteen when she was in the sixth grade. Something in her face looked older, like she knew things the rest of us didn’t, and she was more developed in the chest and the legs and in her behind than a lot of other sixth grade girls.

The last time I remember seeing Woody Doom was when I started working maintenance at the Zinc Plant in May of 1973. I remember thinking he looked a little bit high and it was early in the morning. He was chewing Copenhagen and he knew I liked a chew so he offered me some. I gladly accepted and once I got a pinch settled between my teeth and gums, I started, my eyes flashed.

“You like that shit, boy?” Woody laughed.

“Uh, yeah.” I mumbled.

“Jack Daniels. It ain’t a chew if ain’t got some Jack to keep her moist.”

I didn’t think to ask Woody that day about Lily. She’d been out of town since at least the ninth grade. She wasn’t at junior high long after she finished the eighth grade at St. Rita’s. Woody never left, but Lily did.

My last clear memory of Lily was at her trailer home. She’d called me one evening to see if I’d come to a party at her place, that I’d be the only one there from the junior high, but that she really wanted me to come. She was having some friends over from St. Rita’s and didn’t I know Denice Rinaldi and Cathy Vergobbi and Tim O’Reilly. They’d all be there. I said sure.

I was naïve. It never dawned on me before Lily let me into her trailer home that this was a boy/girl, boy/girl party. I can’t remember who was “matched” with whom, but it became pretty clear by the social arrangement that I was to be Lily’s match that night. I wore my Sunday School white shirt buttoned at the top under a maroon V-neck sweater with black slacks. My mom gave me a ride to the party and it wasn’t long before I knew I had to get out of there. I can’t remember what we all did. The trailer was cramped and the windows were fogged up from the propane heat and maybe the oven where Lily baked some frozen pizza and we sat around, ate some snacks, talked about things. I don’t know what excuse I made up, but I said I had to go and that my house wasn’t too far away. It wasn’t. I walked home.

Mom wondered why I was home so early and I said I didn’t know anyone very well and wasn’t having a very good time. She wondered if I had hurt Lily’s feelings. I hadn’t thought about that. I went upstairs to my bedroom and did what I often did on Saturday nights after going to a high school basketball game or a failed party: I played Leonard Bernstein conducting “Rhapsody in Blue.” I took off my black dress shoes, my maroon sweater, my white shirt, my black slacks, and put on my pajamas. I listened as the “Rhapsody in Blue” built to its inevitable climax, the music carrying me away so that I quit worrying about Lily Doom living in a trailer with her dad, Woody, and probably never thought, as I went to bed, that I would never see or talk with Lily Doom again.