Touch

  Okay, things to do today, Friday, August 19:

  Be at WQRD at 3:00 P.M. sharp.

  Call Greg, get about twenty guys from the Gray Army lined up to be in the audience if the show was broadcast live tomorrow night. No armbands, no demonstrating; but with prepared questions in case Hart opened it up to the audience.

  Try Juvenal again.

  August dialed, sitting at his dad's desk in the print shop, and the snotty colored girl on the desk at Sacred Heart answered. She tried to disguise her accent, but August could tell it was her.

  (Had Saint Augustine, before he was a saint, fooled around with colored girls in North Africa?)

  "I called all day yesterday and he wasn't there." Like it was the girl's fault.

  "And I kept telling you he wasn't, didn't I?"

  "Where is he today?"

  "He's on his vacation."

  "On his vacation? What do you mean he's on his vacation?"

  "I think I mean he went on a vacation. Isn't that what I said?"

  "Where'd he go?"

  "Up north somewhere."

  "I don't believe you."

  "I'll take a polygraph," the girl said, "and send you the results. He's not here, he picked up his suitcase and he's gone."

  "When'd he pick it up?"

  "I have no idea," the girl said. "There's a little three-by-five card here says, 'Juvie on vacation. Gone up north. Back eight twenty-six.' Now what else can I tell you?" She blinked at the sound of August hanging up his receiver and added, under her breath, "Motherfucker."

  It was annoying, agonizing, frustrating . . . infuriating--he'd get the right word--to try to do something intrinsically meaningful and have a bunch of mindless . . . pretentious people always in the way . . .

  Thinking this as he went to the front door of the shop, opened it, and picked up the Friday morning Free Press.

  Thinking, he had to get Juvenal away from everybody, under wraps, so he could prepare him, condition him, get him in the right frame of mind . . . as he brought the paper back to the desk, glanced at the front page, turned it and saw, jumping out at him from , Juvenal and the girl, the girl, grinning at each other like two little kids above the headline:

  Says the Woman in Juvie's Life: "He's Really a Neat Guy . . ." By Kathy Worthington Free Press staff writer

  "Isn't he cute?" said Lynn. "I could eat him up." Don't be surprised at anything you read these days. Neither Lynn nor Juvenal is the least bit bashful on the subject of love and their intention to marry "once we have time to talk about it and make plans." Charlie Juvenal Lawson is the former Franciscan brother who, day by day, gains more national notoriety as mystic faith healer and the world's only known stigmatic. Or is it stigmatist? "Either is accepted," said Juvie.

  "Oh, God--" August groaned. And missed what Kathy wrote about Juvie's boyish charm belying his ability to empathize, a gift that appeared to border on extrasensory perception. August missed it as his eyes dropped like a stone to:

  "Lynn Faulkner, who makes her home in fashionable Somerset Park, digs cranberry crushed velvet, chrome and Waylon Jennings, was a career-minded pop-record promoter, until she met Juvie. "He's really a neat guy," said Lynn, "kind, considerate . . ."

  "Noooooooooooooo!" August shrieked. "God! What are you doing to me!"

  He crushed the section of the newspaper together, squeezing, squeezing with all his strength to compress it into a ball, a limp rag of paper. Then stopped and sat absolutely still, staring at the venetian blinds on the front window, hearing the faint sound of morning traffic. He began to open the ball of paper, flattening it on the desk, trying to smooth out the creases, looking for again and the picture . . .

  There.

  Lynn Faulkner . . . fashionable Somerset Park. What did she do to him?

  Put something in his coffee, some kind of drug.

  Paraded naked in front of him.

  Enticed him, lured him, appealed to his libido . . . ambushed him! Assaulted his purity! Seduced him! Dragged him down to her depths!

  "God, please help me," August prayed, not in a toga now, not with one of those short Roman swords either. No, with something way better than a sword right in the desk drawer. His dad's .38 caliber Smith and Wesson Commando.

  Chapter 22

  TWENTY-TWO FIFTY-SEVEN GOLFVIEW. There it was, Faulkner, the fourth name; upstairs. August rang. There was no response.

  No one on the street or the walks leading up to the cluster of apartment buildings. Everybody away or at work or in out of the sun. He walked around to the back--or the front of the building, whichever it was--where two cement-slab patios and two balconies above looked out on the golf course and two people way off on another fairway. One balcony stripped, empty, the people obviously away. So it wasn't hers.

  The other balcony was hers, with the porch furniture, August reasoned, because he knew the colored girl had lied to him. Juvenal wasn't away on vacation, he was being seduced by the little blond cunt who wasn't answering her doorbell and was up there right now "maneuvering, manipulating, contaminating him with her body, shoving it in his face"--lines for a pamphlet--"draining his will, which was innocent, unsuspecting, and tragic ally, treacherously"--check The Word Finder-- "weakened or sapped by the determined thrusting of her sex at him." Or, "the relentless thrusting."

  It would never occur to August that he was sometimes dumb-lucky, that he made the right move for the wrong reason. Half right, anyway. Yes, it was Lynn's apartment. But no, there was nobody home.

  To find it out he took two metal chairs from the downstairs patio, piled one on top of the other, tested them, climbed up, caught the toe of his goddamn sandal in a chair rung, fell with the chairs and hit his forehead on the cement; climbed up again, reached the balcony railing, and pulled himself over--not wasting any time now--wanting to punch a hole in the glass door with his gun butt, Christ, and shattered the whole pane, hunching his shoulders at the sound, but it was done; he slid the door open and rushed through the apartment to the bedroom, revolver ready, like he was raiding a whorehouse.

  Shit.

  He stood there looking around.

  August had never been in a girl's apartment before. It was quiet. He felt strange. He wondered what was in here, if she had sexual objects, picturing a garter belt and a black vibrator. He began opening drawers. He looked at her panties. He looked at a box of Tampons and read the directions. He looked at bras that were so flimsy he could hold them up and see light through the cups. He found a little enema behind the bathroom door; good, she was constipated. There were jars and tubes in the bathroom bearing names like Elancyl and Ethera, which August believed were applied, somehow, to female reproductive organs, but he didn't find a garter belt or a vibrator. He went out to the front room and looked at Waylon Jennings, studying the giant face, having no idea who it was. August wanted to do something to that face. Mess it up, throw something on it. But what? His hand came up and rested on the row of pens and Magic Markers in his shirt pocket.

  "There's more about Elvis," Lynn said. Then, after a few minutes, she said, "Oh, my God."

  Juvie opened his eyes--"What's the matter?"--and raised his head from the towel, seeing a glare of sky and sand and the high dunes of Sleeping Bear way off where the beach curved out into Lake Michigan . . . and Lynn in the yellow bikini sitting cross-legged on a towel. She was looking down at the newspaper on her lap, the Chicago Tribune, holding one temple of her sunglasses so they wouldn't slip off.

  "Something terrible happened to Waylon."

  "What?"

  "Poor guy. He was picked up on a dope charge. Coke. I guess possession."

  "Oh." Juvie lowered his head and closed his eyes again.

  "Yeah, possession," Lynn said. "One gram, that's all. They arrested him in Nashville."

  "Is that a lot, a gram?"

  "Hardly more than a small party, depending who your friends are. He could get fifteen years and a fifteen-thousand-dollar fine. God, one gram."

  "Do you use it?"

&
nbsp; "I have, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it. It's okay," Lynn said. "But listen, you know what I'd like to do? I mean when we have time. Go down to Luckenback, Texas."

  "Okay." Juvie's eyes remained closed. He wore red swimming trunks and a glaze of suntan lotion.

  "You know where I mean?"

  "In the song," Juvie said. "What's there?"

  "Nothing, really."

  "Then what do you want to go for?"

  "It's got one fireplug, one store, two houses, a shade tree, and a lot of cold beer, and you know what? Everybody's going there to see it on account of Waylon's song . . . to get back to the basics of life. If it was spring we could go down for Mud Dauber Day. It's an annual event; people go down there and drink beer and wait for the first mud dauber wasps to show up. But you know what? I like 'If You See Me Getting Smaller' better than 'Luckenback, Texas.' "

  "I like 'Lucille'. . . in a bar in Toledo," Juvie said. "The place I'd like to see is Nashville."

  "You ain't ever been to Nashville?" Lynn would get more down-home at the mention of it. "I'll tell you what. We go Interstate 65 to Nashville, turn right, head over to Texas and pick up 35 south to Austin and it's eighty miles to Luckenback."

  "You've been there?"

  "Uh-unh, but I know the way."

  They ate smoked chub they bought on the dock in Leland where the fishing boats came in . . . went for a thrill ride in a dune scooter, a trip across the Sahara on the shores of Lake Michigan . . . returned to the motel and made love in the afternoon and slept in each other's arms, it was so good.

  Look at it now, calmly, Lynn thought. Why should it end?

  She read their horoscopes in Town & Country and felt encouraged; read his first, Aquarius, aloud, beginning with, " 'Saturn has put you through the mill the last couple of years . . . ' "

  He said, "That's who it was."

  " ' . . . but it has also in some way refined you. So what you experience this month may be no more than a total and final truth session.' Neat? 'You also enter a completely different phase in your career now and over the next few months.' Really, I'm not making it up, that's what it says." There were also references to "matters of a partnership nature" and deciding "whether or not the bonds are strong enough to hold a relationship together."

  "Are they?"

  "They're awful strong," he said.

  That was good because Lynn, a Libra, wasn't going to "have much time for friendships and close involvements," she'd be "preoccupied with your career."

  "What do they know?" Lynn said. "But wait. 'The New Moon on the fourteenth'--that was last Sunday--'heralds an entirely new chapter and one in which you will want and certainly be required to present quite a different face to the world.' Now that part's true, isn't it?" Lynn said. "I just read it for fun, I don't believe in it. But every once in a while it comes pretty close; like a new beginning on the fourteenth, that's certainly true. Town & Country and Cosmopolitan are the best. The ones in the paper, I think they make them up." She paused. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Are you sad?"

  "Maybe; I don't know."

  "It's all right to be sad," Lynn said. "There are sad things." She waited a moment, lying on the messed-up twin bed with the magazine, Juvenal on the made-up twin after popping open cans of beer and lying down there to listen to their horoscopes.

  "Are you thinking about the little boy on the beach?"

  "I was."

  The boy, about six years old, with withered stick legs, had been with his family, his two sisters, his mother and father, at a campsite of beach chairs, blanket, picnic basket, rubber rafts. His father had carried him down to the water and held him while the boy waved his arms, screaming happily, and splashed and pretended to swim . . . Juvenal sitting on his towel watching them.

  "You can't just . . . heal everybody, can you?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did anybody ask Padre Pio, you mentioned, or any of the saints that healed people?"

  "Ask them what?"

  "If they could heal everybody."

  "Not that I know of."

  "What you said before--doesn't the person have to feel something? Like want to be healed?"

  "I don't know. I thought so, but I'm not sure."

  "Did you want to? I mean with the boy today."

  "Yes. But I was afraid it wouldn't happen, I wouldn't be able to."

  "Have you been afraid before?"

  "No. In the times before I never thought about it. It just happened," Juvenal said. "Except in church last Sunday I was beginning to think about it--I remember now--and be afraid, with the children coming up the aisle. What was gonna happen? What was I supposed to do? But then the boy ran up to me."

  Lynn waited again. "You're not responsible for everybody."

  He didn't say anything.

  "Do you think you are?"

  "No. I mean I don't know. Tell me what I am responsible for."

  She said, "It isn't something you can think about, is it? Or you can't say, if I'm this . . . if I'm a house painter I should paint houses, it's what I'm supposed to do. It isn't like that, is it?"

  "No," he said, "it isn't clear. It seems to be, but it isn't." He was silent a moment. "I grope, feel my way along."

  "Who's being dramatic now?" Lynn said.

  He looked over at her and seemed to smile; but it was like someone trying to hide grief or pain. "A time comes every so often, I say to myself, why me?"

  "Like the little boy on the beach will say to himself one day," Lynn said.

  He kept looking at her with the expression of concealed grief until she came over to his bed to lie close to him and hold him.

  "I need you," Juvenal said.

  Howard Hart spoke to a man from Garden City who had been a few years older than Elvis when they were both growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi. The man said Elvis was always following the older boys around and they'd have to yell at him to go on home. "He was just a snot-nosed regular boy," the man from Garden City said.

  Howard was told by an educator from Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina, that Elvis was "morally debauched" and contributed to the ruin of America's moral fiber and the breakdown of the family unit. Howard asked the educator if he'd say that on the air.

  He read in the paper about Elvis pulling a gun and shooting out his TV set the time Robert Goulet was singing, as described by one of Elvis's bodyguards. Howard told his secretary to see if she could reach the bodyguard by phone.

  He spoke to a girl who said her name was Peggy Chavez and claimed to be Elvis's real girl friend and not that Ginger somebody who was supposed to have found him dead. Peggy said, "Sure, I was with him plenty times in Vegas and L.A." Howard wondered if it was the same girl who once claimed to have been with Ozzie Nelson plenty times in Bakersfield.

  It didn't matter. He invited the boyhood friend from Garden City, the educator, and the girl friend--he couldn't reach the bodyguard--to be on the program this Saturday, Howard Hart's Elvis Presley Memorial Show, and had his secretary go out and tell the "miracle crowd" waiting in the lobby he'd get back to them in a couple of weeks.

  The psychiatrist said, "Don't call us, we'll call you, uh? What's he got, some hermaphrodites? Forget it." He walked out. The hematologist and the theologian sat there not knowing what to do, the theologian lighting another cigarette. Bill Hill said, well, they could go over to the Perfect Blend and have a two-for-one happy hour drink. Antoinette Baker said fine with her. August Murray, tense, said he was going to "get some straight answers out of Howard Hart if he had to break the man's arm, or worse."

  Bill Hill and Antoinette were on their second round of dry Manhattans, four for the price of two, when August walked in, sat down with them in the empty side of the booth, and ordered a ginger ale.

  Bill Hill said, "No luck?"

  "They tried to keep me out," August said. "I went in his office, looked around the studio; he wasn't there."

  "I meant to ask you," Bill Hill said, "what y
ou did to your head."

  "I bumped it."

  "That's a mean-looking bruise."

  "Poor Richie," Antoinette Baker said. "Everybody's calling him fuzz-head now, the other kids. I told him"--pouting as she said it--"don't you pay any attention to the little shitbirds."

  She was a stylish woman and she smelled nice, had on turquoise Navajo earrings and a low V to her white dress, giving Bill Hill a glimpse of healthy breasts with little blue veins. She wore her nails long, polished a deep red, and a big turquoise ring, the hand holding a cigarette and tapping off the ash every few seconds. She had told them Richie was back "on the ward" again, but just for observation. That's why she hadn't brought him. He was healed, she knew it; and he'd be fine on the TV program if they ever went on the air. She said she had told Richie to just act natural and say yes, sir, and no, sir, which he would because he was a little gentleman. But it sure pissed him off when the kids called him fuzz-head.

  Antoinette talked a lot, but was not hard to steer, Bill Hill found. He had been suggesting he could contact the National Enquirer for her. Maybe she'd like to sell them a copyrighted interview as the working mother of a boy miraculously healed. But he didn't want to talk about it in front of August, who sat hunched over the table holding onto his glass of ginger ale--in case anyone were to come up and try to grab it away from him. Dumb shit. He was going to get round-shouldered. Down there stewing, smoldering, instead of holding his head up, alert to opportunity; yes, and all kinds of young happy hour secretaries coming into the place now, eyeing the young hotshots in their three-piece business suits.

  He said to August, "There's a lot of talent around, if you're interested."

  August looked past his shoulder at the secretaries; he didn't say anything.

  Antoinette said, "I was really surprised to read about Juvenal and his girl friend. That kinda surprised the hell out of me. I mean a holy person--you don't, you know, think of them making out or even being interested in girls. He was very nice and Richie liked him a lot--"

  "I guess he would," Bill Hill said.

  "--but he didn't strike me as being that way, you know, even though you read about priests all the time now running off with nuns"--flicking ashes-- "which is fine, I mean I'm not gonna judge or condemn anybody as long as they're not hurting other people."