Before heading to the VA Hospital, Ricky stopped at his motel and changed into the black suit. He also took with him the item that he’d borrowed from the property room of the theater department back at the university in New Hampshire, fitted it around his neck and admired himself in the mirror.
The hospital building had the same soulless appearance as the high school. It was two stories, whitewashed brick seemingly plopped down in an open space between, by Ricky’s count, at least six different churches. Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic, Congregational, Unitarian, AME, all with the hopeful message boards on their front lawns proclaiming unfettered delight in the imminent arrival of Jesus, or at least, comfort in the words of the Bible, spoken fervently in daily sessions and twice on Sundays. Ricky, who had gained a healthy disrespect for religion in his psychoanalytic practice, rather enjoyed the juxtaposition of the VA Hospital and the churches: It was as if the harsh reality of the abandoned, represented by hospital, did some measure of balancing with all the optimism racing about unchecked at the churches. He wondered if Claire Tyson had been a regular church visitor. He suspected as much, given the world she grew up in. Everyone went to church. The trouble was, it still didn’t stop folks from beating their wives or abusing their children the remaining days of the week, Ricky thought, which he was relatively certain that Jesus disapproved of, if He had an opinion at all.
The VA Hospital had two flagstaffs, displaying the Stars and Stripes and the flag of the State of Florida side by side, both of which hung limply in the unseasonable late spring heat. There were a few desultory green bushes planted by the entranceway, and Ricky could see a few old men in tattered gowns and wheelchairs on a small side porch sitting about unattended beneath the afternoon sun. The men weren’t in a group or even in pairs. They each seemed to be functioning in an orbit defined by age and disease that existed solely for themselves. He walked on, through the entranceway. The interior was dark, almost gaping like an open mouth. He shuddered as he walked in. The hospitals where he’d taken his wife before she died were bright, modern, designed to reflect all the advancements in medicine, places that seemed filled with the energy of determination to survive. Or, as was her case, the need to battle against the inevitable. To steal days from the disease, like a football player struggling to gain every yard, no matter how many defenders clung to him. This hospital was the exact opposite. It was a building on the low end of the medical scale, where the treatment plans were as bland and uncreative as the daily menu. Death as regular and simple as plain, white rice. Ricky felt cold, walking inside, thinking that it was a sad place where old men went to die.
He saw a receptionist behind a desk, and he approached her.
“Good morning, father,” she said brightly. “How can I help you?”
“Good morning, my child,” Ricky replied, fingering the clerical collar that he’d borrowed from the university property room. “A hot day to be wearing the Lord’s chosen outfit,” he said, making a joke. “Sometimes I wonder why the Lord didn’t choose, oh, those nice Hawaiian shirts with all the bright colors, instead of the collar,” Ricky said. “Be much more comfortable on a day like this.”
The receptionist laughed out loud. “What could He have been thinking?” she said, joining him in the humor of the moment.
“So, I am here to see a man who is a patient. His name would be Tyson.”
“Are you a relative, father?”
“No, alas, no, my child. But I was asked by his daughter to look him up when I came down here on some other church-related business.”
This answer seemed to pass muster, which is what Ricky had expected. He didn’t think anyone in the panhandle of Florida would ever turn away a man of the cloth. The woman checked through some computer records. She grimaced slightly, as the name came up on her screen. “That’s unusual,” she said. “His records show no living relatives. No next of kin at all. You’re sure it was his daughter?”
“They have been deeply estranged, and she turned her back on him some time ago. Now, perhaps, with my assistance, and the blessing of the Lord, the chance of a reconciliation in his old age . . .”
“That would be nice, father. I hope so. Still, she should be listed.”
“I will tell her that,” he said.
“He probably needs her . . .”
“Bless you, child,” Ricky said. He was actually enjoying the hypocrisy of his words and his tale, in the same way that a performer enjoys those moments onstage. Moments filled with a little tension, some doubt, but energized by the audience. After so many years spent behind the couch keeping quiet about most things, Ricky actually found himself eager to be out in the world and lying.
“It doesn’t appear that there is much time for a reconciliation, father. I’m afraid Mr. Tyson is in the hospice section,” she said. “I’m sorry, father.”
“He is . . .”
“Terminal.”
“Then perhaps my timing is better than I hoped. Perhaps I can give him some comfort in his final days . . .”
The receptionist nodded. She pointed to a schematic drawing of the hospital. “This is where you want to go. The nurse on duty there will help you out.”
Ricky made his way through the warren of corridors, seeming to descend into worlds that were increasingly cold and bland. It was as if, to his eyes, everything in the hospital was slightly frayed. It reminded him of the distinctions between the button-down, expensive clothing stores of Manhattan, that he knew from his days as a psychoanalyst, and the secondhand, Salvation Army world that he knew as the janitor in New Hampshire. In the VA Hospital, nothing was new, nothing was modern, nothing looked as if it worked quite the way it was supposed to, everything looked as if it had been used several times before. Even the white paint on the cinder-block walls was faded and yellowed. It was a curious thing, he thought, to be moving through the midst of a place that should have been dedicated to cleanliness and science, and get the sensation that he would need to shower. The underclass of medicine, he thought. And, as he passed the cardiac care units and the pulmonary care units and past a locked door that was labeled psychiatry, things seemed to grow increasingly decrepit and worn, until he reached the final stage, a set of double doors, with the words hospice unit stenciled on them. The person who had done the lettering had placed the words slightly askew, one on each door, so that they failed to line up properly.
The clerical collar and suit did their job impeccably, Ricky noted. No one asked him for identification, no one seemed to think he was out of place in the slightest. As he entered the unit, he spotted a nursing station, and he approached the desk. The nurse on duty, a large, black woman, looked up and said, “Ah, father, they called me and told me you were coming down. Room 300 for Mr. Tyson. First bed by the door . . .”
“Thank you,” Ricky said. “I wonder if you could tell me what he’s suffering from . . .”
The nurse dutifully handed Ricky a medical chart. Lung cancer. Not much time and most of it painful. He felt little sympathy.
Under the guise of being helpful, Ricky thought, hospitals do much to degrade. That was certainly the case for Calvin Tyson, who was hooked up to a number of machines, and rested uncomfortably on the bed, propped up, staring at an old television set hung between his bed and his neighbor’s. The set was tuned to a soap opera, but the sound was off. The picture was fuzzy, as well.
Tyson was emaciated, almost skeletal. He wore an oxygen mask that hung from his neck, occasionally lifting it to help him breathe. His nose was tinged with the unmistakable blue of emphysema, and his scrawny, naked legs stretched out on the bed like sticks and branches knocked from a tree by a storm, littering the roadway. The man in the bed next to him was much the same, and the two men wheezed in a duet of agony. Tyson turned as Ricky entered, just shifting his head.
“I don’t want to talk to no priest,” he choked out.
Ricky smiled. Not pleasantly. “But this priest wants to speak to you.”
“I want to be left alone,” Tyson
said.
Ricky surveyed the man lying on the bed. “From the looks of things,” he said briskly, “you’re going to be all alone for eternity in not too long.”
Tyson struggled to shake his head. “Don’t need no religion, not anymore.”
“And I’m not going to try any,” Ricky replied. “At least not like what you think.”
Ricky paused, making certain that the door was shut behind him. He saw that there was a set of earphones dangling over the bed corner, for listening to the television. He walked around the end of the bed, and stared at Tyson’s roommate. The man seemed just as badly off, but looked at Ricky with a detached expectancy. Ricky pointed at the headphones by his bed. “You want to put those on, so I can speak with your neighbor privately?” he asked, but in reality demanded. The man shrugged, and slipped them onto his ears with some difficulty.
“Good,” Ricky said, turning back to Tyson. “You know who sent me?” he asked.
“Got no idea,” Tyson croaked. “Ain’t nobody left that cares about me.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Ricky answered back. “Dead wrong.”
Ricky moved in close, bending over the dying man, and whispered coldly, “So, old man, tell me the truth: How many times did you fuck your daughter before she ran away for good?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The old man’s eyes widened in surprise and he shifted about in his bed. He put up a bony hand, waving it in the small space between Ricky and his sunken chest, as if he could thrust the question away, but was far too weak to do so. He coughed and choked and swallowed hard, before responding, “What sort of priest are you?”
“A priest of memory,” Ricky answered.
“What you mean by that?” The man’s words were rushed and panicked. His eyes darted about the room, as if searching for someone to help him.
Ricky paused, before he answered. He looked down at Calvin Tyson, squirming in his bed, suddenly terrified, and tried to guess whether Tyson was scared of Ricky, or of the history that Ricky seemed to know about. He suspected that the man had spent years alone with the knowledge of what he’d done, and even if it had been suspected by school authorities, neighbors, and his wife, still he’d probably deluded himself into imagining it was a secret only he and his dead daughter shared.
Ricky, with his provocative question, must have seemed to him to be some sort of deathly apparition. He saw the man’s hand start to reach for a button on a wire hanging over the headboard, and he knew that was the nurse call button. He bent over Tyson and pushed the device out of his grasp. “We’re not going to need that,” he said. “This is going to be a private conversation.” The old man’s hand dropped to the bed and he grasped at the oxygen mask, sucking in deep draughts of enriched air, his eyes still wide in fear. The mask was old-fashioned, green, and covered the nose and mouth with an opaque plastic. In a more modern facility, Tyson would have been given a smaller unit that clipped beneath his nostrils. But the VA hospital was the sort of place where old equipment was sent to be used up before being discarded, more or less like many of the men occupying the beds. Ricky pulled the oxygen mask away from Tyson’s face.
“Who you be?” the man demanded, fearful. He had a voice filled with the locutions of the South. Ricky thought there was something childlike in the terror that filled his eyes.
“I’m a man with some questions,” Ricky said. “I’m a man searching for some answers. Now, this can go hard or easy, depending on you, old man.”
To his surprise, he found threatening a decrepit, aged man who had molested his only daughter and then turned his back upon her orphaned children, came easy.
“You ain’t no preacher,” the man said. “You don’t work with God.”
“You’re mistaken there,” Ricky said. “And considering as how you’re going to be facing Him any day now, maybe you’d best err on the side of belief.”
This argument seemed to make some sense to the old man, who shifted about, then nodded.
“Your daughter,” Ricky started, only to be cut off.
“My daughter’s dead. She was no good. Never was.”
“You think you maybe had something to do with that?”
Calvin Tyson shook his head. “You don’t know nothing. Nobody know nothing. Whatever happened be history. Ancient history.”
Ricky paused, staring into the man’s eyes. He saw them hardening, like concrete setting up quick in the harsh sun. He calculated quickly, a measurement of psychology. Tyson was a remorseless pedophile, Ricky thought. Unrepentant and incapable of understanding the evil that he’d loosed in his child. And he was lying in his death bed and probably more scared of what awaited him, than what had gone past. He thought he would try that chord, see where it took him.
“I can give you forgiveness . . . ,” Ricky said.
The old man snorted and sneered. “Ain’t no preacher that powerful. I’m just gonna take my chances.”
Ricky paused, then said, “Your daughter Claire had three children . . .”
“She was a whore, ran away with that wildcatter boy, then run on up to New York City. That’s what killed her. Not me.”
“When she died,” Ricky continued, “you were contacted. You were her closest living relative. Someone in New York City called you up and wanted to know if you would take the children . . .”
“What did I want with those bastards? She never married. I didn’t want them.”
Ricky stared at Calvin Tyson and thought this must have been a difficult decision for him. On the one hand, he didn’t want the financial burden of raising his daughter’s three orphans. But, on the other, it would have provided him with several new sources for his perverted sexual urges. Ricky thought that would have been a compelling, almost overwhelming seduction. A pedophile in the grips of desire is a potent unstoppable force. What made him turn down a new and ready source of pleasure? Ricky continued to eye the old man, and then, in an instant, he knew. Calvin Tyson had other outlets. The neighbors’ children? Down the street? Around the corner? In a playground? Ricky didn’t know, but he did understand that the answer was close by.
“So you signed some papers, giving them up for adoption, right?”
“Yes. Why you want to know this?”
“Because I need to find them.”
“Why?”
Ricky looked around. He made a small gesture at the hospital room. “Do you know who put you on the street? Do you know who foreclosed on your house and tossed you out so that you ended up here, dying all by yourself?”
Tyson shook his head. “Somebody bought the note on the house from the mortgage company. Didn’t give me no chance to make good when I was short one month. Just bang! Out I went.”
“What happened to you then?”
The man’s eyes grew rheumy, suddenly filling with tears. Pathetic, Ricky thought. He curbed any nascent sensation of pity, though. What Calvin Tyson got was less than he deserved.
“I was out on the street. Got sick. Got beat. Now I’m fixing to die, just like you said.”
“Well,” Ricky said, “the man who put you in this bed all alone is your daughter’s child.”
Calvin Tyson’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “How that be?”
“He bought the note. He evicted you. He probably arranged to have you beaten as well. Were you raped?”
Tyson shook his head. Ricky thought: There’s something Rumplestiltskin didn’t know about. Claire Tyson must have kept that secret from her children. Lucky for the old man that Rumplestiltskin never bothered to speak with the neighbors or anyone at the high school.
“He did all that to me? Why?”
“Because you turned your back on him and on his mother. So, he repaid you in kind.”
The man sobbed once. “All the bad that happened to me . . .”
Ricky finished for him, “. . . comes from one man. That’s the man I’m trying to find. So, I’ll ask you again: You signed some papers to give the children up for adoption, right?”
/> Tyson nodded.
“Did you get some money, too?”
Again the old man nodded. “Couple thousand.”
“What was the name of the people who adopted the three children?”
“I got a paper.”
“Where?”
“In a box, with my things, in the closet.” He pointed at a scarred gray metal locker.
Ricky opened the door and saw some threadbare clothes hanging from hooks. On the floor was a cheap lockbox. The clasp had been broken. Ricky opened it and rapidly shuffled through some old papers until he found several folded together, with a rubber band around them. He saw a seal from the state of New York. He thrust the papers into his jacket pocket.
“You won’t need them,” he told the old man. He looked down at the man stretched across the dingy white sheets of the hospital bed, his gown barely covering his nakedness. Tyson sucked at some more oxygen and looked pale. “You know what,” Ricky said slowly, his cruelty astonishing him, “old man, now you can just go about the business of dying. I think you’d be wise to get it over with sooner rather than later, because I think there’s more pain waiting for you. Much more pain. As much pain as you delivered on this earth multiplied a hundred times. So just go ahead and die.”
“What you going to do?” Tyson asked. His voice was a shocked whisper, filled with gasps and wheezes and constricted by the disease eating away at his chest.
“Find those children.”
“Why you want to do that?”
“Because one of them killed me, too,” Ricky said, as he turned to leave.
It was just before the dinner hour, when Ricky knocked on the door of a trim two-bedroom ranch house on a quiet street lined with palms. He was still wearing his priest’s regalia, which gave him an extra bit of confidence, as if the addition of the collar around his neck provided him with an invisibility that would defy anyone who might ask questions. He waited while he heard shuffling inside, and then the door cracked open and he saw an elderly woman peering around the edge. The door opened a little wider when she saw the clerical garb, but she remained behind a screen.
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