The cop raised my arms so high I fell on my knees.
“Tommy, don’t hurt him.”
“This doesn’t hurt,” he said.
“I went to school with Carl,” she said angrily. “Carl has been a friend of mine for twenty-five years. If you think I’m going to allow some bum, some fucking drifter, to clean him out—”
“C’mon, asshole,” the cop said ripping me to my feet. “You’re hitting the road.”
The cop pushed me to the door and the doctor walked into Carl’s library bedroom.
We stepped onto the porch, and he closed the door behind me. He kicked me hard in my ass, and I lurched forward, lost my balance, and fell down the eight or ten steps to the walk. Carl had done a nice job with his yard. The lawn was thick, and the variety of healthy-looking trees was amazing. At the bottom of the stairs, my face bounced next to a pink azalea, and I could imagine, at that inappropriate moment, a healthy Carl preparing the Indiana dirt for his plants.
The big cop pulled me to my feet almost gently and unsnapped the plastic handcuffs. I was swaying a little, and the more I tried not to sway, the more I swayed.
“Hope you enjoyed Providence,” he said happily. “Oh, by the way. . . .”
Tommy’s kidney punch felt as if he had broken me in two fat pieces. I fell. I peed in my pants. I got to my feet and tried to move to the end of the walk. I threw up.
“Jesus,” Tommy said disgustedly.
I fell again, got up, fell, got up. My head felt worse than when Carl’s truck hit me. I could feel flows of things crashing up my neck, rolling to the front of my head.
“Tommy, Tommy, wait, wait! It’s a mistake! We made a terrible mistake! I just talked to Carl!”
I turned, facing the porch. The doctor came onto the landing. She let out a breath I could hear when she saw me. Tommy seemed nonchalant.
“What do you mean, ‘we’ made a mistake? You told me to scare this creep off.”
“I didn’t tell you to hit him.”
“This is how we scare creeps off, and so help me God, on the graves of my mother and father, I never laid a hand on him.”
I threw up again and pitched forward onto an American Beauty rose.
34
I let Pop take pictures. Me. Me in my uniform. Me with my Purple Heart. Me and Mom, Me and Pop. Then Me, Mom, and Pop with the camera timer on. Then we went onto the back porch, and I asked them where my sister was. It’s not important that you know this. But I knew she was gone, and I had to ask, because I had to lead them to talk. I know it all sounds like I think I’m so damn important, leading Mom and Pop, but I feel and felt as common as always. They needed the tears. I sat opposite them in our old chaise lounge while my parents wept.
I think they wept that I was all right, too. I was part of it, I know, because Mom saw me with my shirt off before I went to bed, and she cried again. What’s wrong with a man who lets his mother see him and all his new holes? I could have run headfirst into a doorknob. I could have poked one of my eyes. I disgust myself. My poor mom. Me. But on the porch they cried the tears of loss and release. I walked over and sort of stooped down so I could hug them both at the same time. I could touch Mom and Pop. I didn’t feel bad about touching them the way I did about other people. Bethany could touch me, too, of course, because I loved her. Love her.
My pop stood up and brushed his tears away. He didn’t cry much.
“Gone,” he said, looking past me out into the dark backyard. “She took the money she saved from her job with the church and packed up and left.”
“She’ll come home soon,” Mom said.
“She will,” I said.
My pop kept looking out through the porch screen, and Mom sat crying into her hands. This was before my lagers, my pretzels.
I stood skinny and unsure. I didn’t have the legs for my family. She was gone.
“Such a beautiful, such a beautiful, beautiful girl,” Pop said. “You could hear her singing in her room, and you would just not believe . . .”
We were there in the September night. Bugs hit at the screen, swarmed near the lights.
“She will come back,” Mom said.
“She will, Mom,” I said.
Mom and Pop had come out to Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver when I first was flown there. Bethany came, too. I think the time in Denver, as far at least as her looks, was Bethany’s best period. The guys in my ward could only stare. I was so proud of her. She wore a different kilt each time she visited. I felt so bad for Mom and Pop. I felt so damn bad. Stupid, really. On top of Bethany’s voice, I had to go pee in that swamp and get slaughtered like that. Then this really handsome kid next to me, who had been wounded in the chest, too, and who looked a whole lot healthier than me, had the bullets shift near his heart or something and just died with a huge groan, and with my pop and mom standing right there. They didn’t need that.
I stayed in Denver for four months and then flew to Providence and our porch.
“Three months now. About,” Pop said.
“Has it been three months?” Mom asked.
“About.”
Somewhere crickets rubbed their legs together. I was happy at least that that night our backyard crackled into the night and left silence behind. We sat and listened to the evening. I thought about Norma, and I had a feeling she was watching. I will never understand, really, why the Ides left our little Norma there. It seems too easy to put it on Bethany. To say we didn’t have any more to give or be for anyone else, even our Norma behind venetian blinds, is not enough. I will never understand.
“Uncle Count had a heart attack,” Mom said.
“Another one?” I asked.
“Too much meat,” Pop said.
We stopped talking for a while, and then I said, to be saying something, “How many is this?”
“This was number twenty-eight,” Mom said.
“Twenty-eight,” I said.
“They count all the little ones,” Pop said. “They count all the tiny ones. It wasn’t twenty-eight big ones.”
Mom nodded. “Eight big ones.”
“Or nine,” my pop said.
Crickets.
35
I had walked back up the porch stairs and into the house under my own power, although I don’t remember it at all. I went upstairs to the guest bedroom, a large blue room with Indian pictures all over it, and got into a bed. I don’t remember doing that either. It was night outside when I woke up. Bugs were working loud, and because I lay still, only moving my eyes a little, they seemed even louder than they actually were. I listened to the bugs. I heard the buzzsawing mosquitoes. I heard the whap and bang of the moths on the screens trying for the table lamp someone had switched on. I wanted to switch it off and save them.
I had to pee, but I lay there a long time and thought about it, and thought maybe the urge to let go of the water would just go away, but it didn’t.
“Kidneys,” I said.
The bedroom had its own bathroom. I pulled my bed covers down and stood. Oddly, I didn’t feel all that bad. Nana used to tell us whenever we got sick that there was nothing wrong with us a good night’s sleep couldn’t fix. I had made it into the bathroom and was standing over the toilet when I realized that I was naked. For the first time, I remembered the doctor. I felt sorry for her. A person could go blind, seeing me naked. I peed.
I peed in spurts, and each spurt brought a terrific pinch of pain, but my pee was pee, and even though I looked closely for the blood that had seeped into my pee at Father Benny’s, I didn’t see any.
I smiled to myself, and then I laughed, and then I said out loud that the big blond cop Tommy couldn’t punch worth a shit. Although he could. And he did.
I needed to brush my teeth, so I looked in Carl’s medicine cabinet for a guest toothbrush like Mom used to have around. I couldn’t find one, and I squeezed some toothpaste onto my finger and rubbed my teeth good. In Carl’s medicine cabinet was a large box of Epsom salts. Epsom salts works. It helps you. I st
arted a hot bath and poured the whole box in.
“Epsom salts,” I said. “It really helps you.” I soaked for fifteen or twenty minutes, and I did little stretches and shoulder shrugs to keep myself clear and loose. I feel childish in a hot tub. I keep expecting Mom or Nana to come in and wash my hair and give me those hard rubs on my back with a facecloth. I closed my eyes and smiled stupidly to myself, but I would be four again if I could have those heavy rubs.
“You’re awake.”
I put both hands over my private parts and sat up in the tub. The doctor had come into the bathroom. She hadn’t even knocked or anything.
“Did you urinate okay?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Blood? Discoloration?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Oh, that’s good. Oh, that is so, so good.”
She knelt down on the bathroom rug, put her hands on the rim of the tub, and leaned in close to me.
“I’m Donna Trivitch, Dr. Trivitch from the ER, and I am so embarrassed and so ashamed and so sorry about everything.”
“I’m Smithy Ide.”
“When Carl told me how he hit you and how he took you to the hospital and you ended up taking care of him . . . well, I am just so . . . sorry.”
“I don’t have any clothes on.”
“Just a sec.”
Dr. Trivitch left the bathroom and came back a minute later carrying a red terry-cloth bathrobe and a towel.
“I’ll leave these right here. This is Carl’s. I have to go down to Carl now.”
“How is he?”
“Carl’s going to die tonight. I’m going to be here all night with him.”
She wasn’t teary or solemn or anything. I wanted to get out of the tub, but not with her standing there.
“We went to school together,” she said. I noticed how tired she looked and probably older than she really was, but it was a sweet face, and I would call it pretty. She had on chino pants and a plain white T-shirt. Her breasts were smallish, and I don’t mean that in a way that evaluates them—it’s just that I do notice breasts. Smallish, but I’d bet very pretty. Red-brown hair, tall.
Dr. Trivitch started to leave the bathroom but turned back.
“I had the wildest crush on Carl, and maybe I still do. He’s very gay. I’m pretty dumb, huh?”
“I used to think . . . I used to think I loved my sister, and now she’s dead.”
Dr. Trivitch looked at me with an empty face and left the bathroom. I dried off, put on Carl’s red robe, and went down quietly to the kitchen. In the bookshelf corner, Carl lay on his side and Donna Trivitch lay with him. She rubbed his back and sang a song I didn’t know. Carl’s eyes were open. He lifted his hand a touch and tried to speak, but only a wet mumble came. She put her hand over his.
“I know. I know, Carl. I know.”
36
The Young People’s Fellowship at Grace Church gave me a service award because I got wounded, and they displayed my Purple Heart in the chapel entrance on Westminster Street. After the award I stood with the rector while people shook my hand. It was nice of them to do this, but I hated it very much. My pop circulated among the kids with a small notepad, asking questions about Bethany. This was not her group. They were much younger than my sister, and I tried to tell Pop that, but the detective work was part of him now and stayed a part. On that last visit to Maine, Pop brought up his Bethany File, and a day never went by when he didn’t add to it.
“That Carlson girl knows something,” Pop said on the ride home. “She kept staring down at her feet. It’s a giveaway. She knows something.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I’m telling you.”
Pop followed every lead, real and imagined. I stayed around the house, still recovering. I had a little limp. I was taking some vodka for it. One night I was drinking some vodka at the kitchen table—Mom and Pop had gone up to bed, so I guess it was around twelve or one—and the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said.
I always sound sort of anxious on the telephone, or sort of like I’m out to please everyone. It’s one of those subservient hellos that really say “I’ll do anything for you,” but of course I don’t really feel that way and I won’t do anything for you.
“Hello. Hello.”
I could hear something on the other end like teeth sliding over other teeth. It wasn’t loud, but it was a grating noise, enough to make me wrinkle up my face.
“I can’t hear you,” I said.
The teeth noise stopped, and there was nothing.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“I can’t hear you. Maybe it’s a bad connection. I’ll hang up, and you can call back.”
“Fuck,” something rasped.
“I . . .”
“F-U-U-U-U-C-K, fuck!” something screamed.
“I don’t . . .I . . .”
“They killed. They fucking . . . fuck. Fuuuuck.”
It was the voice of an old man. Like an old man would sound yelling at you. Older than that. A very old man with a cheese grater of a voice.
“Who killed . . . ?”
“THEY KILLED YOU! THEY KILLED YOU!”
“Bethany?”
“All those holes. I knew they’d kill you.”
The old man screamed into the phone from some deep part of Bethany’s stomach. “F-U-U-U-U-C-K!”
“They didn’t kill me, Bethany. I’m here. Hook’s here. Where are you?”
“Sometimes I’m all dirty.”
“Where are you? Mom . . . and . . . and Pop—”
“Say I’m away.”
“We know you’re away. We want you to come home.”
“Fat-ass. Watch out.”
I waited. The old voice coughed and faded. I waited longer, my heart rumbling into my ear.
“Hook?” The voice was soft. Bethany again.
“I’m here, Bethany. Where are you?”
“Oh, Hook, I’m all disgusting. I’m all dirty and disgusting.”
“We love you, Bethany. Where are you? I’ll come get you. We miss you.”
“I miss you. I miss my room.”
“Where are you?”
The light in Mom’s kitchen seemed dull. It might have been the vodka.
“Where?” I asked again.
“Providence. I’m at church. I’m across the street now at a telephone booth, but now I’m going to go to church.”
The connection held, but I heard the receiver hit against the base of the phone booth and knew she had dropped it.
I grabbed Pop’s keys to the old Ford. Drove down past Woody’s gas station and took 95 over the Old George Washington Bridge into Providence. No cars were at the church this time of night, and I parked directly in front of the main entrance. Across the street and to my left was the phone booth she had called from, and the receiver still hung free. I limped around the front of the car and up the concrete stairs. The heavy, ornate wooden doors were locked. Like the jerk that I am, I pounded on them a little and shouted her name.
I limped to the Westminster Chapel entrance, and it was open, even this late. Occasionally the sexton would have to drive some old bum out of the back pews, where he’d be trying to bed down for the night, but mostly then, in the late sixties, doors could still be open without asking for something awful to happen.
I walked into the church, past the side chapel, and stopped in front of the choir stalls.
“Bethany?”
I stood very still. A dim light fell on the main altar, and moonlight peeked in through the beautiful stained-glass windows. Grace Church’s windows on the moon side of the building depicted Christ’s seven last words. They seemed eerie in the semidarkness.
“I’m so happy you called, Bethany. I missed you so much.”
I walked up to the choir stalls and began to look up and down each row. I started with the soprano row, of course.
“I’m limping a little. See how I’m limping? Bethany? See? But all that’s wrong is
the limp, and it’s going away. Pretty soon I won’t even be limping. That’s all.”
I thought I saw something at the end of the baritone row, but it turned out to be a stack of hymnals. I took one and carried it up the ten steps to the marble sermon mount.
“All my friends . . . all those other soldiers you saw in Denver? They all thought you were so beautiful. I mean it. Bethany?”
My favorite thought, still, about Grace Church, was how I felt when I looked over the old church with its columns and arches and carvings, from up here on the marble sermon mount. I used to sneak up here after choir practice when no one was around. You could just feel you had things to say standing here. Important words for all the congregation. And they would listen and even sometimes nod their heads and turn to their wives and things when you said something that could particularly make everything clear for them. Of course, I never had anything to say. Clear anyway.
“Remember . . . remember how Dr. Homer would take so long to get up here and how he would get himself angry during his sermons and start yelling? Remember, Bethany?”
I listened. My head hurt.
“And no matter how loud old Dr. Homer kept yelling and shouting and how loud he kept banging on the podium, Pop would go right on snoring.”
“And Mom would poke him.”
“Bethany?”
“Oh, Hook, and then we’d go get doughnuts to bring home, and we’d throw the ball with Pop.”
“Bethany.”
My eyes strained in the direction of her voice. I saw her under the stained glass of Jesus being fed a sponge of vinegar by the centurion. She was by the baptismal font. No. No. She was in the baptismal font. I walked down the stairs to the church floor and over to her. She sat on the edge of the font, and she was splashing water over herself. Slowly.
“I’m being baptized. I’m baptizing myself. I’m going to be all right now. Right? Hook? I’m going to be all right? I can be Bethany?”
“Yes,” I said.
I wanted to look away, but I wanted to look at her, too. That was how I was with her, and she knew it, and I knew she knew it, and if there was one thing right now, thinking so hard about my sister, one thing I would change, I would never, ever let myself want to look away.