Requiem, Mass. Page 4

  Garnet finally got hold of Sophie Anne, who by then had a husband and a baby of her own. Garnet told Sophie Anne that she feared for her life, that Karl and his whore were stealing her meds. And then she asked Sophie Anne what the baby’s name was. Prudy. How old? Six months. The husband’s name? Alex? What’s he do? In the Army in Iraq. Sophie Anne asked her mother if she’d called the police. Garnet told her the cops wouldn’t come there anymore. Sophie Anne said, Tell the asshole to leave. I did; he won’t. Sophie Anne said, Mom, we can’t take you in. We have no room. You need to be in an assisted living facility with people who are trained to care for you. Garnet hung up. She called Brad and left a message on his machine. Between sobs, she begged him to come and get her, said he was the only person in the world who could save her. She pleaded. Karl is trying to kill me.

  Brad listened to the message with his wife, Robinella, who told him he had to do something. What can I do? he said. Robinella hugged his waist, laid her head on his chest. You could go to her. Let her know she’s not alone in the world. Brad called his daughter, and they agreed to meet in Mass. in three days. What will we do? We’ll figure something out. He had to find someone to sit in for him with the band for the week or ten days he’d be away. When he got off the plane in Providence, he checked his cell phone for messages. One: a male voice told him that Garnet was dead, that her body was in Four Crowned Martyrs. That’s it. No explanation. No condolences. No introduction.

  Garnet died just two weeks ago, about the time that Annick and I were out on the deck discussing my manuscript. A memorial service was held at St. Simeon Stylites. Friends and family gathered to say a few words about Garnet, about tribulation and storm clouds, about the furnace of affliction and the bread of tears. Brad held his granddaughter in his arms, stared into her dense brown eyes. Sophie Anne summoned tears that would not come. The body was being held for burial at a later date. The Requiem police are calling the death “suspicious.” Garnet died from an overdose of Avonex which sent her into a fatal seizure. Here I go again: Karl, I’m sure, or Karl and Diane, shot Garnet up while she slept. She would not have felt the stabs in her thigh.

  Diane went back to her husband to wait out the medical examiner’s investigation. Karl’s staying with a buddy from the surveying crew. Karl and Diane have been asked not to leave town. When Karl was asked if he could explain how Garnet could have injected herself, he said no, sir, he couldn’t, but she was a remarkable woman, indeed. A third of all murders in this country go unsolved. I remember Garnet and I sitting at my kitchen table, way past my bedtime. She was eating my Wheaties, and she asked me if I wanted a sister or a brother, and I said, Do I get to choose? I watched her left eyebrow lift and her right dimple appear.

  I Know You Are, But What Am I?

  DELUXE SAT ON the bathtub drain and batted a marble, a blue and yellow swirly, around the tub. In her bedroom, Audrey packed her pink and black vinyl GOING TO GRANDMA’S overnight bag for our babysitting sleepover at the Sandilands’. Mom was in the kitchen baking her tomato soup cake and whipping up her signature Honolulu dip for the party. Cocktail franks in barbecue sauce simmered in what Audrey called the clutch oven. Mom had been talking nonstop to Arthur since we’d gotten home from school, telling him mostly about the lives of people on The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow. Someone named Jo has a daughter, Patti, who’s having an affair with a married man. When I reminded her that Arthur was dead, she took the cigarette out of her mouth and smiled. She licked the wooden spoon and said, “Is that right, Mr. Memento? Well, let me tell you that my relationship with your brother Arthur is the only honest and dependable relationship I have. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  “You could try talking to your flesh-and-blood children once in a while.”

  “Arthur knows how to listen.”

  “You could talk about—”

  “Without interrupting.”

  I watched Audrey fold her clothes and allowed myself to think that this time Dad might not be coming home, that he had already vanished into the heartland. I was, of course, being melodramatic, which was my way in those days. But I also knew how easily such a disappearance could happen. Dad could drive his rig off some foggy mountain road, and no one would ever find him. Or if they found him, then his body and his wallet would be burned to ashes, and no one would know how to contact his next of kin. Or he might knock his head on the corner of a motel medicine cabinet and get amnesia. I’d seen just this sort of thing happen on TV plenty of times. You get conked on the head, and you lose your memory. Only another conk on the head will get it back, but once you’re conked, you don’t know that any more than you know your name or the names of your children, if you have any children. You don’t even know what memory is. Or Dad could get waylaid by bandits. Bad guys rob trucks these days the way they used to rob stagecoaches back in the Lone Ranger’s days. Dad told me that’s why he kept a pistol stashed under his driver’s seat.

  Audrey held a maroon and white Stormy Petrels T-shirt to her shoulders and checked herself in the vanity mirror. (We were the St. Simeon Stylites’ Stormy Petrels.) She said, “Both our grandmothers are dead. So what do you think Mom was trying to say when she bought me this overnight bag?”

  Just so you know, Audrey possessed a whimsical fashion sense. She wore her oversized cowgirl boots with every outfit, including her maroon plaid school uniform. The uppers were red with white shooting stars; the vamps were white with pointy blue toe boxes. We’d found them one Saturday morning at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store. Audrey liked wearing corduroy slacks under her skirt and tucking the pants legs into the boots. Her hair was jet-black like Dad’s, and shoulder-length in those days. She was fair and freckled and had a gap in her front teeth. She could whistle with her mouth closed. I told her to pack her pajamas, and I ran downstairs to get the mail. From the porch I saw Veronica Carrigan, whom I had a crush on, carrying a grocery bag and getting on the eastbound #5 bus. Probably going to stay with her father and his girlfriend for the weekend. They lived in Wheelock, just outside of Requiem. They didn’t have lawns in Wheelock; they had mud yards. That’s what Veronica told me. Mud yards, broken fences, and cars up on blocks. And all the dogs in Wheelock were mangy and mangled. They either had one eye or three legs or their tails were hacked off or their ears were chewed up.

  I came back upstairs and read Dad’s reassuring postcard from Jerome, Arizona, Ghost Town City, to Audrey. He wrote that he was off to Flagstaff to pick up a load of—and I couldn’t read what he’d written—to deliver to St. Louis. When I showed Mom the postcard, she laughed. I said, What? She said, isn’t it funny that the invisible man is in a ghost town? I’m tired of his shit.

  I showed the card to Audrey. “So he’s on his way home,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s driving east. Pick up and deliver.”

  Audrey sucked at the strand of hair in her mouth.

  I said, “You do know what deliver means, don’t you?”

  She pulled the hair from the corner of her mouth. “To take the liver out of.”

  “I’m going downstairs to talk to Blackie.”

  Audrey cocked her head. “Are you?”

  WHAT SENT me to Blackie was the letter from St. Simeon’s addressed to my parents. I’d opened it on the stairs. Sister Superior and Monsignor wrote that they were concerned, were, in fact, alarmed at Audrey’s peculiar and disruptive behavior, and they were sending the school nurse, Miss Delilah Berthiaume, and the guidance counselor, Sister Mary Eustochium, to our home for a consultation on Saturday at noon. Tomorrow. I was hoping Blackie would know what to do.

  Blackie was my parents’ age, but looked older with his thin graying hair and his paunch. Out of the house he wore a kind of uniform—black T-shirt, black chinos, black loafers, and white socks. That afternoon he wore a wine-colored robe over his lime-green pajamas—he’d just gotten up—fluffy blue house slippers, and a hairnet. His face glistened with some kind of gel. He wore a gold and ebony
ring on his left pinky. The ring was a welcome-home (from prison) gift from Miss Teaspoon, Blackie’s good friend and constant companion.

  Miss Teaspoon was taller than Blackie by several inches. She was thin to the point of frailty and stood with a slight stoop. Miss Teaspoon certainly had a first name, but I never heard anyone use it. Blackie insisted that they were not romantically involved, but they were devoted to each other. I don’t recall any public displays of affection, but I did notice that when they spoke with each other, they spoke quietly, leaned in, looked into each other’s eyes, and finished each other’s sentences. Miss Teaspoon’s eyes, by the way, were an alarmingly pale blue, so hueless as to seem defenseless against the light. Blackie’s eyes were gray.

  Miss Teaspoon and Blackie were partners in Copperhead Films, and Blackie, the creative half of the team, was then at work on what they hoped would become the company’s first movie, The Devious Dr. Diabolus, about an evil civil engineer who commands a squadron of robotic assassins and aims to overthrow the Canadian government. The movie’s heroes are a Mountie named Shep Warner and his fiancée, the scientist Tinkerbelle Houghton. Blackie had promised me a not-insignificant role in the movie, and I thought it might be nice to be someone else for a while.

  Blackie had served four years in the county jail, but he wouldn’t tell me why. “The past is past,” he said. “Kaput. Finito, Benito. We have to live for the future, Johnny.” I’d once overheard his mother, Violet, on the phone telling someone that Blackie had been betrayed by the Judas who led the cops to the naked man stuffed in the trunk of a stolen car. “I was young, and I was foolish,” Blackie said. “Young, foolish, drunk, and immortal.”

  We sat at the kitchen table. Blackie put on his reading glasses, sipped his coffee, and read the letter from school. Violet brought out two china saucers with white paper doilies on them. She put three Oreos on each doily and set the saucers before us. She served us apple juice in red-striped glasses. She stood behind Blackie, her hands on his shoulders, and smiled at me. She said, “It’s so sad about Timmo.” Her nephew Timmo Donovan had died just the week before. He was waterskiing on Metacomet Pond, trying to execute a 360 when a mallard flew into his face. Timmo died of a blunt facial trauma. Donny O’Leary, who’d been driving the boat, said he turned around and Timmo was gone. Patsy Flynn, who was supposed to be watching Timmo, had passed out drunk in the back of the boat. Donny found Timmo and hauled him onto the boat. He found the mallard’s remains and turned them over to the detective in charge of the investigation. Violet said, “God have mercy on his soul.”

  Blackie said, “Someone should have yelled, ‘Duck!’”

  Violet slapped his head. “You’re wicked, you! Show some respect to the dearly departed.” And she laughed, blushed, and excused herself.

  Blackie took a Phillies panatella from one robe pocket and a can of air freshener from the other. He lit the cigar with a series of quick puffs. He told me there hadn’t been a straight face at Timmo’s wake. He exhaled the smoke, sprayed the air with Glade, and fanned the smoke with his hand. I coughed. He held up the letter. “Well, this powwow should be a hoot.”

  I said, “I don’t want it to be a hoot. She has to act normal.”

  “That’s your answer right there.”

  “What is?”

  “Acting,” he said. He blew a smoke ring, watched it rise and expand. He puffed and sprayed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll tell Frances the meeting is a screen test. She’s to play the very sane mother of two adorable, well-behaved children. The nurse and the counselor are actors, we’ll tell her. We’ll improvise.”

  “That won’t work.”

  “She’s a trouper, your mother.”

  CAELI SAT at her dining room table applying her makeup. Audrey sat beside Caeli, her hair held away from her face with a turquoise sweatband. I sat at the front window, watching down on O’Connell Street to see who might be arriving for Mom’s party. I saw Tom Bergie in his wheelchair, flipping the bird at a passing motorist. Tom sold newspapers downtown, but his dream was to become a nightclub comic. He idolized Lenny Bruce. Tom’s dream was our nightmare. He wasn’t funny. He was toxic. Blackie and I saw him perform on open mic night at the Y-Not Coffee House. Tom had a snare drum in his lap with which he played his own rim shots. He opened with this line: “I don’t do stand-up.” Ba-doom BA! He ranted against the recent Democratic convention. He called the delegates the spawn of Satan. He scowled at our silence, made eye contact with all eleven of us. He described lady Democrats as “corn-fed, no-makeup, natural-fiber, no-bra-needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons,” which not only didn’t make sense, but wasn’t, as I said, funny. Tom dismissed us as unhip and naive and told us to fuck ourselves. Blackie stood and applauded as Tom rolled off the stage. I asked him why. He told me this was conceptual art and very witty in a grim and insolent kind of way.

  The last time I’d seen Tom, I was at the counter at Charlie’s Soda Shoppe drinking a chocolate frappe. Tom tried what he called a joke out on me. He said, “What’s worse than having termites in your piano?” I didn’t know. He said, “Having crabs on your organ.” I didn’t laugh, he slapped me on the back of the head. I called him an asshole. He said, “I know you are, but what am I?” Jeez! Tom could hit you, but you couldn’t hit him back. He was a hemophiliac. He could die from a paper cut. I figured he was coming to the party and was waiting for someone to carry him up the stairs.

  Caeli blotted her lips on a Kleenex, wiped her front teeth with her finger. She told us that Nunziato would not be coming to the party. Friday night was his night with the family, with Carmela and the kids, Junior and Rosalie. Family night was sacred to Nunziato. Nothing interfered with it. “He’s sweet like that,” she said. “Takes them out for supper at the Black Orchid, then for a few strings at Rock and Bowl.”

  Audrey said, “If Nunziato is married to Carmela…”

  “What am I doing with him?” Caeli held Audrey’s chin in her hand, brushed some blush on her cheeks. She worked the blush with her finger. “Life is more complicated than you know, sweetie. Now close your eyes, please and thank you.”

  “He’s your boss,” I said.

  “Reason number one. A lawyer’s work is never done.”

  “Number two?” Audrey said.

  “Nunzie is a man with—how do I say this? He’s more man than one woman can handle.”

  Audrey said, “Bondurant Number Ten: Reject all thoughts that weaken you.”

  Caeli said, “How do I look?”

  Butchie Franklin walked up O’Connell Street playing his flute and balancing a case of beer on his head, flattening his enormous Afro. Butchie claimed to be descended from Masai warriors, which may have been true. He was a tall drink of water. Six-four, six-five. Sometimes he stood in front of Charlie’s and jumped straight up and down for fifteen or twenty minutes. Audrey called him Pogo. Sometimes he put his face right into yours and shouted what sounded like babble, but was, Butchie claimed, Purko, and may have been. When Butchie was five, his father Bunny lifted Butchie over his head and tossed him off the Cadillac Street overpass onto the expressway. Butchie landed in the bed of a pickup, but only for a moment. He bounced, struck the pavement, and rolled into the weedy right-of-way. His bones healed, but his brain did not. Butchie would sometimes space out and not respond to anything or anyone around him for several minutes. You could shake him, scream in his ear. Nothing. Other times he let out piercing shrieks for no apparent reason, and then he’d laugh so hard the laugh turned to a coughing fit, and he’d hold his sides and double over. Bunny was found to be insane, by the way, and lived out his years at Bridgewater State Hospital wearing a football helmet and leather mittens.

  Butchie walked up to Tom, put the flute in his pocket, laid the case of beer on the sidewalk, took out two bottles, and opened them with the church key hung from a chain around his neck. He sat on the case and they drank. Biscuit Sweeney arrived, and they all s
lapped hands. Tom pointed to our second-floor apartment. Butchie disappeared with the case. These three characters were headed to Mom’s party. That was not a good sign. Biscuit’s job, if that’s what you’d call it, was running errands for some of the local merchants. Buying a coffee, walking to the mailbox, hosing down the sidewalk, and like that. Whatever he made, he spent on beer. He lived with his mother, Pearl, a Realtor, who wore large flowery hats. Biscuit had a wicked underbite, a thick and glossy lower lip, and a face as flat as a dinner plate. He didn’t exactly resemble a biscuit the way people said, but there was in that face, I thought, the insinuation that when Biscuit was in the oven, all of his features bubbled to the surface and then cooled at delivery and settled back toward the skull. Tom hopped on Butchie’s back. Biscuit folded the wheelchair and hauled it up the stairs. I told Caeli she ought to get down there pronto before any trouble started.

  Audrey and I played Monopoly following her improvised rules, which were always capricious, but, curiously, did not always work in her favor. The police department might be on strike, so there would be no reason to go to jail. Instead, you could take your ill-gotten gains and go directly to Boardwalk. New York Avenue might be closed for construction, and you’d be left cooling your heels or spinning your wheels on Tennessee Avenue for several turns. Oh, no! A Rottweiler has been slammed by a car on Oriental Avenue or has been—oh, the humanity!—flattened by a freight train on the B&O line. Audrey was always the race car. I was always the old shoe.

  We went to sleep close to midnight, and the music downstairs was still pumping, “La-La (Means I Love You)” by the Delfonics. God, they were slow-dancing down there. I didn’t want to think about it. I put the bolster over my head and fell asleep. I was awakened from uneasy dreams by someone yelling, “Audrey!” Once I got my bearings, I switched on the light and followed the voice to the spare room. I found Audrey, wide awake, on her back, shouting her name to the ceiling.