“Marty?”
He turned. The nurse was standing at the foot of the bed, a tall, chunky woman in her mid-thirties, her dark hair cut short and tucked under her cap. She was smiling down at him.
“It’s Emily.”
“Jesus, Emily, I’m sorry. I’m so distracted, I…”
“It’s all right. Gosh, it’s good to see you again. You look terrific, Marty.”
“Thanks. You look great, too, Em. When did you become a nurse?”
“After working a year in the tannery. If you don’t have any ambition, that’ll give it to you in a hurry.” He smiled and his eye caught the wedding ring on her finger. She saw the glance. “I’m married. Have two girls.”
“Who was lucky enough to get you, Em?”
“Joe Stewart. Do you remember him? He graduated two years ahead of you.”
“Tall guy. On the wrestling team, wasn’t he?”
“Bowling.”
“Oh, right.”
“How about you?”
“Never got around to it. I wouldn’t want to wish me on anybody.”
She cocked her head slightly to one side and her face softened into a memory smile.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “It broke my heart when you left. I still think about you. You know how it is, somebody will bring something up, it shakes up my memories.”
“I think about you, too.”
She stopped for a moment, embarrassed suddenly by how quickly the conversation had become personal. “I’m sorry about Ma Cat,” she said. “She really fought hard, Marty. You would have been proud of her.”
“I am proud of her.”
“Good. It won’t be much longer. I’ll be right outside at the nurse’s station.”
“Thanks.”
An hour passed. He kept talking, hoping he would stir a moment of recognition from her. And then there was an almost imperceptible pressure as she tried to squeeze his hand.
“Can you hear me, Ma Cat?” he asked softly. “I love you, Ma.” He kissed the back of her fragile hand, rubbed it softly against his cheek. “Hear me, Ma? I love you.”
The pressure loosened and her hand relaxed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”
When it was over and they had taken her away he sat in the room for a long while, watching them strip the bed and move the equipment out. Emily appeared in the doorway.
“I’m off duty,” she said. “Want to go over to Sandy’s and get some breakfast?”
“Sounds like a great idea.”
They walked to the city park behind the hospital and strolled along the riverbank toward Main Street.
“Bet I know what you’re thinking,” Emily said.
“You too?” Vail answered.
She nodded. “Every time I come to the park.”
“I still think about that day all the time,” Martin said. “I’ll be doing something, you know, see an old movie or some kids playing sandlot ball and it’ll remind me of him. I guess it never goes away, losing your first friend that way. First time we realize we aren’t immortal.”
“It was like we made fun of him. I mean, it wasn’t really that way, but it seemed so for a long time after.”
“You remember it that well?” Martin asked.
“Don’t you?”
Vail nodded. “Oh yeah. I can still see him out there in the river, flailing his arms, bobbing up and down. We all thought he was kidding around.”
“I just stood there laughing,” said Emily.
“We all did.”
“Then you and Art Hodges both went in after him at the same time.”
“And you ran for the cops …”
“And you and Artie were still out there when we got back, still diving for him …”
“Little Bobby Bradshaw …”
“God, when they brought him out…”
“I know, I dreamed about that. I saw that little kid all blue like that for a couple of years after.”
“His mother still works at the shoe factory. I see her now and again. She never has got over it, you know? After all these years—how long has it been?”
“Twenty-two years. I was ten, Bobby was eleven.”
“After twenty-two years she still looks down when we pass. Never speaks. Know what I think, Marty? I think I remind her. I mean, I’m sure she never forgets but I make it…”
“Valid,” Vail said. “She sees his old friends, it all comes back like a bad show. I’m sure in her own way she blames us for it.”
“Or maybe because it was Bobby instead of one of us.”
“That too.”
She reached out almost reflexively and took his hand and they stood on the bank. The river was brownish green with ash-gray foam broiling along the banks. Farther up, steam rose from its murky banks. It seemed somehow to demean Bobby Bradshaw in death, as if the river when it was healthy and pure had been a living memorial to him. Now, bubbling with poison like the witch’s cauldron in Macbeth, it abused his memory.
“Bobby was always the defendant,” she said. “Used to make him so mad, that he was always the bad guy.”
He looked over at her, confused by the remark, but she was staring at the polluted stream, lost in her daydream.
“And you were always so”—she lifted her chin impudently—“well spoken. Strutting up and down, preaching all that made-up law to us.”
Vail had known he wanted to be a lawyer all his life but he could not evoke the moment or time at which he first became obsessed with the goal. Her description of him playing first defender, then prosecutor, then judge, with his friends forced into the roles of defendant or juror, sitting patiently while he paced back and forth acting out his fantasy, all that seemed as if she were talking about somebody else, a boy he did not remember—an artifact from his youth. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed by the reminder, or that he didn’t want to remember; it was a void in his memory—even her reminiscence did not jar loose any visual recollection of his performances. But he didn’t tell her. He smiled and went along with it.
“Do you ever wish,” she said, and hesitated for a moment, “do you ever wish time stopped then, that we never grew up? That the river still smelled kind of earthy and fresh and the sky was still the color of bluebirds? Do you ever wish that, Marty?”
He smiled sadly and said, “Yeah. Ain’t progress a bitch.”
“You know Artie’s president of the Chamber of Commerce now.” She snickered. “Got a real bad attitude problem about it—thinks he’s important. People laugh behind his back.”
Artie, president of the Chamber of Commerce? That self-serving league of losers, a club of flawed little failures who deluded themselves into thinking greed was accomplishment and blight was achievement.
“Maybe we can get some of the old bunch together,” she said brightly. “Go out to Barney’s for dinner.”
His memories were suddenly tainted by the children of his youth, now grown to pitiful, small-minded sycophants begging greedy scavengers to bring the plague they called “progress” to the land of his adolescence. He did not want to see any of them, did not want to be ashamed for them, did not want to be reminded that they had all sprung from the same roots, roots they had corrupted by their betrayal of their homeplace.
“I’d rather not,” he said.
“Everybody’s forgotten the case by now,” she said.
“I haven’t.”
“You did a great job. Everybody says you did a great job. I mean, you were just starting out and you were up against all those big-shot lawyers from the East.”
“It wasn’t lawyers, it was money, Em. It’s always money. All those people, fighting to keep the industrial park from spreading into Pine Hill, trying to hang on to a way of life—all they had was me. No, it wasn’t the lawyers, it was the big corporations. They bought out the county politicians, the Chamber, hell, they even bought the goddamn judge. I lost the case, those people lost homes that had been in their families for a hundred years, and the pr
edators gobbled up a little more of the town’s tradition.”
“But the town’s grown some, hasn’t it?” she said.
“It’s grown all right,” Vail said. He looked across the river at the corporate slum they called an industrial park. “Trouble is, the growth is malignant.”
She was surprised at his vehemence.
“Even animals know better than to foul their own nest,” he said.
And Emily looked up at him sadly and the memories of good times gone by faded with her smile.
“If I didn’t know better I’d swear you just had a small fugue experience,” Molly said with a smile. “You were a long way from here for about three minutes.”
“Daydreaming. Or night dreaming as the case may be,” he said. “Is that a fugue state?”
“In a way, yes. You were temporarily out of touch with reality.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “There’s a window box outside one of your windows. What say we give these guys a chance at living outside in the real sunlight?”
She watched as he poured rich, dark soil into the box, filling it about halfway up, then spreading it out evenly with the palms of his hands. He spread a second layer of topsoil into which he carefully planted six of the plants, pressing gently around the stems until they were well supported. Then he covered the earth with a thin layer of moss and dribbled water slowly across the entire surface.
“These are river flowers,” he said. “They love water. I always replant at night. Flowers die a little at night, then they spring back to life with the sunlight. We’ll see how they do. They may make it.”
“Thank you,” Molly said. “Do I water them every day?”
“In the morning,” he said with a nod. “Just that way. Kind of sprinkle the water gently over the moss. It holds the water, gives them a little drink at a time.”
He had performed each step precisely and with almost loving care, and Molly had watched entranced as this man, who was so protective of his past, revealed what she was certain was a vulnerability few people had ever been permitted to see. He broke the spell.
“Let me ask you,” he said, wiping his hands with a towel. “Knowing what we do about Aaron, do you think if he actually saw somebody killing Rushman it would have been shock enough to put him into this fugue state? I mean, he’s had a lot of shocks to his system. Wouldn’t he be pretty insulated against that kind of thing?”
She answered immediately. “No. The mind might cope with many different types of shock, then one particular act, one visual experience, can short-circuit it. There’s no telling what his mind will absorb and what it will reject. Hopefully we can find out.”
“So the science isn’t that exact.”
“Let’s just say we know what we know. There are some gray areas. We’re dealing with the human mind, remember.”
“What I mean is, it isn’t exact the way two and two equals four is exact?”
“That’s right. All Homo sapiens react differently to different stimuli. That’s what thought is all about. If it was as absolute as mathematics, we’d all be robots.”
“That’s very interesting,” Vail said.
“It’s basic.”
“That’s what I mean. It isn’t as precise as, say, a fingerprint. A fingerprint is unequivocal. You can’t really argue about it. If it’s there, it’s there. But a mental disorder? There you have variables.”
“We’re learning,” she said. “We know the symptoms, we usually can peg the disorder itself, even tell what caused it. And, a lot of times, we can cure the patient.”
“Let’s just say Aaron did kill the bishop, that he was acting from some dark disorder. Do you really think he can be cured after doing something that… insane?”
“If I didn’t, I’d quit.”
“What got you into this business?”
“My brother’s been catatonic for almost ten years.”
“My God! What happened?”
“Vietnam happened. He came back and just gradually slipped into another country, someplace he created. I suppose subconsciously I blame myself for not getting him help, but we didn’t know. We knew he was suffering but I guess we thought he’d get over it. They’ve just recently begun to deal with the problem. In World War I, it was called shell shock. World War II, it was battle fatigue. Now it’s been identified as a form of mental trauma called posttraumatic stress syndrome.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“It depends on the individual. But I have a theory that affection, love, touching … and forgiveness … might have a lot to with it.”
“Forgiveness?”
“There’s tremendous guilt involved. I think part of that is because they were really badly treated when they came back. They were kind of sneaked in, like unwanted children. There was a lot of alienation.”
“I defended a Vietnam vet who shot a clerk in a holdup. Didn’t kill him but it was just luck he didn’t.”
“What happened to him?”
“Three years for armed robbery and aggravated assault, he did eighteen months. The court was lenient because of the Vietnam experience. He claimed he always carried a gun—it was like a fetish with him …”
“A conditioned obsession,” she said. “Probably because it was such a critical part of his survival for so long.”
“That’s what he said. Anyway, the store owner was a Korean. They got into an argument about something stupid and Jerry lost control, started flashing back to Vietnam. The guy was Oriental and—bang—he shot him in the shoulder. Then—and here’s the part that the D.A. couldn’t swallow—he says he didn’t want to admit he went berserk, so he grabbed twenty bucks from the register to make it look like robbery. Fact is, I didn’t use that. The jury would never have bought it.”
“It was probably true.”
“I know it was true; I believed him from the start, but in court the truth sometimes can be detrimental to the health of your client. Some jurors won’t accept the fact that truth can be stranger than fiction.”
“Yours is a strange business, Mr. Vail.”
“Look who’s talking.”
The front doorbell ended the discussion.
“What time is it?” Vail asked.
“About eight.”
“Wonder who the hell that can be?”
He went downstairs and opened the front door. A disheveled Goodman was standing in the doorway.
“Want to see a movie?” he said.
TWENTY
“What happened to your hand!” Molly said.
Goodman looked down at his swollen fist and half smiled. “Well, for one thing I found out it still has a little TNT left in it,” he said.
She took the damaged hand gently and ran her fingers across the back of it.
“Is anything broken?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been numb for five years.”
“Come in the kitchen, we have to put some ice on this and get you to a doctor.”
“No doctor. Ice is okay but I have an allergy to doctors-medical doctors, that is.”
She smiled and led him to the kitchen with Vail tagging along.
“What about the tape?” Vail said.
“Let’s fix his hand first,” Molly said.
“Forget his hand. It always looks like that.”
“Well, thanks,” Goodman said, and then looked at Molly rather pitifully. “It’s very painful,” he said.
Vail rolled his eyes as Molly got out an ice tray and rolled up several cubes in a dish towel. She laid it on the back of the battered fist.
“Wow,” he groaned, closing his eyes.
“He’s faking,” Vail growled. “I know when he’s faking and that is definitely a fake.”
“How do you know?” Goodman demanded.
“I know fake when I see it. It’s one of my talents. Can we hear this saga of yours now?”
As Molly wrapped a towel around the ice pack she had jerry-rigged for Goodman’s swollen hand, Goodman slowly detail
ed his confrontation with Alex and Batman and the conversation afterward. His remarks were greeted with a combination of stark amazement and shock by both Vail and Molly.
“The bishop took part in it and directed it?”
“That’s what the kid said, but let’s check out the tape first.”
They went back into the office, where Martin put the tape in the machine. He sat across the room from the monitor and pushed the play button on a remote unit connected by a long cord to the video machine. The first ten minutes was a recording of a Mass. There were two altar boys serving the bishop, neither of whom Goodman recognized. They were in their early teens and Goodman assumed they were not members of the “Altar Boys.” Perhaps the tape was a genuine study tape, Goodman thought to himself, feeling a little foolish. Then the screen went blank and a few moments later a new scene came on. It was a bedroom.
Here we go, Goodman thought.
The girl entered the scene first. She was tiny, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her breasts mere buds, her face, despite garish black makeup around pale blue eyes, a veil of innocence. She was dressed in a shin-length summer cotton pinafore and looked about twelve years old. She did not look scared, but rather apprehensive, even a bit insolent. Somewhere off-camera a stereo was playing the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” She walked into the frame and began to dance to the music, at first with lackluster indifference. There was a ripple of applause from two or three people off-screen. Spurred by the small unseen audience, her dancing became more spirited. She spun around and the skirt billowed out to reveal a glimpse of black stocking. As her dancing became more spirited, the skirt swelled more and they could see she was wearing a trashy garter belt and black panties under the innocent dress.
At that point, a voice off-screen said, “All right, Billy, your turn,” and a tall, skinny boy wearing tight pants and a silk shirt entered the screen and began dancing with the girl. The performance became more spirited and sexy. The off-screen voice started giving directions, ordering what was a slow striptease until they both were naked. Then his directions became more specific, more sexually oriented. Eventually he ordered Peter into the scene.