“He’s really gone,” he told everybody, and they all seemed to wheeze inwardly. Then they really did disperse until only Charlie Boy McCall, face gone white, sat down at Scotty’s feet and stared fully at the end of something. And he said, in his native way, “Holy Mother of God, that was a quick decision.”
“Somebody we should call, Charlie?” Martin asked the shocked young man.
“His wife,” said Charlie. “He’s got two kids.”
“Very tough. Very. Anybody else? What about his father?”
“Dead,” said Charlie. “His mother’s in Florida. His wife’s the one.”
“I’ll be glad to call her,” Martin said. “But then again maybe you ought to do that, Charlie. You’re so much closer.”
“I’ll take care of it, Martin.”
And Martin nodded and moved away from dead Scotty, who was true to the end to the insulting intent of his public name: tightwad of heart, parsimonious dwarf of soul.
“I never bowled a guy to death before,” Billy said.
“No jokes now,” Martin said.
“I told you he was a busher,” Billy said.
“All right but not now.”
“Screw the son of a bitch,” Morrie said to them both, said it softly, and then went over to Charlie and said, “I know he was your friend, Charlie, and I’m sorry. But I haven’t liked him for years. We never got along.”
“Please don’t say any more,” Charlie said with bowed head.
“I just want you personally to know I’m sorry. Because I know how close you two guys were. I’da liked him if I could, but Jesus Christ, I don’t want you sore at me, Charlie. You get what I mean?”
“I get it. I’m not sore at you.”
“I’m glad you say that because sometimes when you fight a guy his friends turn into your enemies, even though they got nothin’ against you themselves. You see what I mean?”
“I see, and I’ve got nothing against you, Morris. You’re just a punk, you’ve always been a punk, and the fact is I never liked you and like you a hell of a lot less than that right now. Good night, Morris.”
And Charlie Boy turned away from Morrie Berman to study the corpse of his friend.
Martin Daugherty, infused with new wisdom by the entire set of events, communicated across the miles of the city to his senile father in the nursing home bed. You see, Papa, Martin said into the microphone of the filial network, it’s very clear to me now. The secret of Scotty’s death lies in the simple truth uncovered by Morrie Berman: that Scotty would not give a sick whore a hairpin. And Papa, I tell you that we must all give hairpins to sick whores. It is essential. Do you hear me? Can you understand? We must give hairpins to sick whores whenever they require them. What better thing can a man do?
Two
Martin Daugherty, wearing bathrobe and slippers, sat at his kitchen table, bleeding from sardonic wounds. In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, who will savor the Father when the Son is gone? He salted his oatmeal and spiced it with raisins, those wrinkled and puny symbols of his own dark and shriveling years. He chewed a single raisin, thinking of Scotty dead, his own son gone to the seminary. But the boy was alive and free to change his mind in time, and the bitter-sweetness of this thought flowed on his tongue: treasure lurking among the wrinkles.
“You’re mad entirely,” Mary Daugherty said when she saw him smiling and chewing, grim and crazy. She broke into laughter, the lilt of Connacht, a callous response to madness in her morning kitchen.
“You can bet your sweet Irish ass I’m mad,” Martin said. “I dreamed of Peter, carried through the streets by pederast priests.”
That stopped her laughter, all right.
“You’re at the priests again, are you? Why don’t you let it alone? He may not even take to it.”
“They’ll see he does. Fill him full of that windy God shit, called to the front, cherub off Main Street. Give the helping hand to others, learn to talk to the birds and make a bridge to the next world. Why did God make you if it wasn’t to save all those wretched bastards who aren’t airy and elite enough to be penniless saviors?”
“You’re worried he’ll be penniless, is that it?”
“I’m worried he’ll be saved entirely by priests.”
The boy, Peter, had been sitting in a web of ropes, suspended beyond the edge of the flat roof of home. Billy Phelan, in another suspended web, sat beside Peter, both of them looking at Martin as they lounged in the ropes, which were all that lay between them and the earth. Martin marveled at the construction of the webs, which defied gravity. And then Peter leaped off the web, face forward, and plummeted two stories. His body hit, then his head, two separate impacts, and he lay still. Two priests in sackcloth scooped him into a wheelbarrow with their shovels and one of them pushed him off into the crowded street. Billy Phelan never moved from his web. Martin, suddenly on the street, followed the wheelbarrow through the rubble but lost it. In a vacant lot he confronted a band of children Peter’s age. They jogged in an ominous circle which Martin could not escape. A small girl threw a stone which struck Martin on the head. A small boy loped toward Martin with an upraised knife, and the circle closed in. Martin rushed to meet the knife-wielding attacker and flew at the boy’s chest with both feet.
He awoke and squinted toward the foot of the bed, where the figure of an adolescent, wearing a sweater of elaborate patterns, leaned back in a chair, feet propped on the bedcovers. But the figure was perhaps beyond adolescence. Its head was an animal’s, with pointed snout. A fox? A fawn? A lamb? Martin sat up, resting on his elbow for a closer look. The figure remained in focus, but the head was still blurred. Martin rubbed his eyes. The figure leaned back on the legs of the chair, feet crossed at the ankles, leisurely observing Martin. And then it vanished, not as a dream fading into wakefulness, but with a filmmaker’s magic: suddenly, wholly gone.
Martin, half-erect, leaning on his elbow, heard Mary say the oatmeal was on the table. He thought of the illustrated Bible he had leafed through when he’d come home after Scotty’s death, compulsively searching through the Old Testament for an equivalent of the man’s sudden departure. He had found nothing that satisfied him, but he’d put out the light thinking of the engraving of Abraham and the bound Isaac, with the ram breaking through the bushes, and he had equated Isaac with his son, Peter, sacrificed to someone else’s faith: first communion, confirmation, thrust into the hands of nuns and priests, then smothered by the fears of a mother who still believed making love standing up damned you forever.
Had Martin’s fuzzy, half-animal bedside visitor been the ram that saved Isaac from the knife? In a ski sweater? What did it have to do with Peter? Martin opened the Bible to the engraving. The sweatered animal at bedside bore no resemblance to the ram of salvation. Martin re-read what he had written years ago above the engraving after his first reading of the Abraham story: We are all in conspiracy against the next man. He could not now explain what precisely he had meant by that phrase.
It had been years since the inexplicable touched Martin’s life. Now, eating his oatmeal, he examined this new vision, trying to connect it to the dream of Peter falling out of the web, to Peter’s face as he left home two days before, a fourteen-year-old boy about to become a high school sophomore, seduced by God’s holy messengers to enter a twig-bending preseminary school. Peter: the centerpiece of his life, the only child he would have. He raged silently at the priests who had stolen him away, priests who would teach the boy to pile up a fortune from the coal collection, to scold the poor for their indolence. The assistant pastor of Sacred Heart Church had only recently sermonized on the folly of striving for golden brown toast and the fatuity of the lyrics of “Tea for Two.” There was a suburban priest who kept a pet duck on a leash. One in Troy chased a nubile child around the parish house. Priests in their cups. Priests in their beggars’ robes. Priests in their eunuch suits. There were saints among them, men of pure love, and one such had inspired Peter, given him the life of Saint Francis to read, encouraging selflessness, fanaticism, poverty, bird calls.