King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

“Dom joined the army because he wanted to,” I reminded her. “He didn’t have to. His father could have kept him out of it. And the family—”

  “Family, my ass!” she exploded, cutting me off. “Say the word right: Fah-mee-lee-yah. Famiglia! Goombahs. The Friends of the Friends. Not my real family. Papa was just . . . Papa, and both of us loved him. But he was always two people. Our father and the don. And sometimes one would get in the way of the other. As our father, I think Papa understood why Dom thought he had to go to ‘Nam and was maybe even proud of him for it, even though he thought the war itself was dog shit, just more arrogance and stupidity from the pezzovenante running the show back in Washington.”

  I nodded. “A lot of people looked at it that way. That’s why everything about that time is so hard to explain to the people who weren’t there—or who were in other wars.”

  “Damn right! Even Pete talked about it in his letters home. And later, what little time we had together. I guess you know

  he was in ‘Nam for different reasons than Dom. Okay. But like he used to say, anyone who played in the band learned the tunes. He and Dom only met one time, but they could talk and understand each other on that without any trouble. And I guess it was the same with me and Dom, about Papa. We loved him and that was enough and it would take me the rest of my life to tell you about that and explain why, and even then, nobody but us would really understand. Which leaves me all alone with it, now. Everyone else is dead.”

  She paused, looking out at the last rays of the sun reflected from the tops of the clouds as they made their nightly pilgrimage into the pass below.

  We had drifted out of the office when Margery left and were sitting now in the front of the house, where it would be time to build a fire soon.

  But I didn’t feel much like a fire just then.

  “Dom wasn’t my brother,” I said when the silence finally got too long and too heavy. “And I didn’t even know him until I got to ’Nam the second time.”

  Angela wasn’t looking at me. But she was listening.

  “Being friends there,” I went on, “had more to do with sharing a hooch and being responsible for some of the same people than it did with background or point of view. Another time or another place we might never have met—or wound up not remembering each other’s names if we did. But this wasn’t that time or that place, and it changed both of us in ways that have nothing to do with how many eyes I’ve got or how many pieces they cut off of Dom before they ran out of territory.”

  “He lived up here at Best Licks some of the time between operations, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. And not on sufferance, because we’d been friends, or because of anything anybody owed to anybody else, but because he was a valued and functional member of this community. Somebody who counted. Whose advice was sought and who provided a service that no one else could offer.”

  Angela was looking at me now with eyes that were swollen by the pressure of unshed tears.

  Dom would have known what to do about that. But Dom was dead.

  Dead . . .

  “Yoichi Masuda,” I said, “is a master of mahayana—the Greater Vessel of Buddhist belief and practice—and one of the things he does best is help individuals get in touch with their own essence. With the core of themselves. It is his approach to life and living and it has enabled him to rise above the paralysis that makes his body virtually useless below the neck. It has taken him a lifetime to acquire the knowledge and understanding required to do this.

  “But you should have heard him laugh after his first conversation with Dom.

  “I asked what was so funny, and he told me he was laughing at himself. And at the pretensions of all scholars, whatever their disciplines and attainments. ‘Your friend,’ he said, ‘has found for himself, unaided, the persuasions and awareness’s that are central to life in the universe. Not a Buddha, no. But one whose company would have been agreeable to the Enlightened One.’ ”

  “Dom? My brother . . .?”

  “Your brother, Angela. This town is a refuge, a place of care and nurture and renewal. Master Masuda is trained in these things; I have had some training, too. But Dom was more effective than either of us. It was his presence and his understandings that kept half the local population from going right into the cosmic dumper. I know, because—”

  And then the tears came. Hers. And mine. Cleansing and releasing in the only way that counts with the lonely traveler. A final gift, bequest of infinite value, from friend and brother and teacher.

  Good-bye.

  There was nothing more to say that night, and the fire never got lighted.

  Tears were followed by silence and letting go, and a little later Angela followed Margery to the house just down the slope from my own and I thought about the blockader jar in the office and realized I didn’t want or need it. For the moment, anyway.

  Sleep came within minutes. There were no dreams.

  I heard more of the Gideon story on the way down the hill the next day.

  A phone call to Sacramento told us Dom had made practical arrangements nearly a year ago. He wanted to be cremated, with the ashes to be held for his “cousin,” the one called Preacher. But the bureaucrats were in a tizzy—a last-minute check of old army records had disclosed the possible existence of nearer relatives. Could we be of any help?

  Angela took over, identified herself, and said she would be glad to sign anything that had to be signed in order to carry out her brother’s wishes. The clerks had a little committee meeting while we waited on the line, and finally said that would be all right.

  We said we’d be there by late afternoon and started out in the town’s one and only real automobile—as opposed to jeeps, pickups, ATVs, and the like—as soon as we were packed.

  Ordinarily I’d have opted for the faster route—quick trip to the nearest airport and commuter jump to Sacto. But we would need transportation to Glen Ellen later, and I had some half-formed plans beyond that could be awkward if they had to involve rented wheels. So, I put the sweet-running old Volvo in second gear and let it set its own pace down the switchbacks to the valley.

  “At first,” she said, apropos of nothing, when we finally got to the straightaway, “I just went along with Gideon’s . . . religious things . . . as a way of staying out of trouble.”

  I resisted the temptation to interrupt and ask questions, and after a moment she went on.

  “It seemed important to please him,” she said in the voice of someone recounting long-ago events or a dream. “I don’t think I can explain that very much. Even to myself now. But it was all part of the way he handled himself. And me. The sex was part of it, I think; at first he was a little careful—when Maria Theresa was around, anyway—but later, when you’d think he might have slacked off a little, he just seemed to become more demanding. And less careful. Terry came in once when he had my skirt up and his pants open there in the kitchen, and I remember her eyes and how I wanted to cry and hide. But I couldn’t. Couldn’t even seem to move. And he just laughed and reached a hand out toward her.”

  The voice stopped and I thought for a moment she was done talking, but she wasn’t.

  “Terry ran away that time,” she said, “and I thought maybe he’d be more cautious afterward. But it worked the other way. He seemed to wait for opportunities to let her see what we were doing—and after a while I understood. She didn’t run away anymore, and then one day I found her on her knees, praying the same way he did and I had started to do, and I knew what had happened. Was happening. But I didn’t do anything about it.”

  The eyes blinked as she remembered that time and worked through the worst parts of it. But no longer with the fear I remembered. I touched the wa, and it was tremulous. But warm.

  “That’s the thing I still have trouble with,” she said. “The praying, and the need to keep . . . him . . . happy.

  “I could get up in the morning and put on my clothes and fix breakfast and even do the things that had to be done about the winery
and make business calls and work on the books and go to the bank and . . . everything. Just as if nothing had changed. But it had. All those things, all those normal things, were crowded up into a little corner of my mind and had to get along with only that much of me because the rest was taken up with Gideon. He was the dreams I had and the first thought in the morning and never out of the front part of my mind all through the day and night, and the main thing—the only thing—was how he might feel about something. I would do anything, anything at all, just so he wouldn’t frown at me. Because if he frowned, then he would hurt me and he could do that in ways I’d never even heard of before. Things he would slip on over his penis to rub me raw inside, and ways to use his fingers. And teeth.”

  More silence.

  We came to a little town and she stopped talking while I tiptoed through local traffic and found my way back to the main road. And then more words.

  “But he didn’t have to use those things later,” she went on as though there had been no interruption. “Not after he taught me to pray. He disappeared for a day just a week or so after he arrived, and I was fool enough to hope he might have gone for good. But he came back with new clothes and a new car and other things—including something he said he’d had ‘made special’ for him in San Francisco. It was a cross. All silver and pretty, I thought at first. But then I noticed the loop at the top . . . ”

  I remembered the obscene little shrine in her home but refrained from saying so.

  “He made me clean out one of the bedrooms in the new part of the house and paint it black—even the windows—and then he built a little altar and put the loop-topped cross on it. With a bowl. To burn things in. I thought it was like churches I’d seen where you burn oil with a wick or incense or, I don’t know, money, even. Or something. But it wasn’t like those churches. It was more like the horror movies I used to turn off every time I found Maria Theresa watching them on television. The bowl was for burning living things—while they were still alive. He started with our old cat.”

  I glanced at her, thinking that the memory might start the tears again. But it didn’t. Angela’s had all been shed, and she was taking the steps back from the place of sorrow one at a time. Shedding the sharpest parts of the memory, word by word, in the only way that really works.

  “He made you take part in this?” I said.

  She looked at me in what I could see was astonishment.

  “I wanted to,” she said. “Don’t you understand? That was the whole thing by then. I wanted to. I loved that old cat and I loved my little girl and I still had the memory of loving Pete, and none of that had changed and I knew that I didn’t love Gideon and maybe even hated him and everything that he was doing and making me do. But at the same time, I wanted to do it. Wanted to, because it would keep him happy. Make him leave me alone. And after a few days—I don’t know how long it was, really; time started getting all mixed up about then, but it couldn’t have been very long—I was praying the way he’d taught me. To the One, the Thing that he’d taught me was listening. And the worst part was that I seemed to getting an answer from It . . . the kind of answer I’d never gotten in a regular church.”

  Still no tears, but the breath was coming in shorter and shorter gasps as memory took her through the experience for what must have been the ten or twenty or thirty thousandth time. No wonder her night terrors had been so real.

  “I was never what you’d call religious,” she went on after a moment. “Oh, sure, Dom and I were raised Catholic. After Mama died, Papa saw to it that we both went to church and that we made it through catechism and confirmation right on time. And parochial schools until it got to be too much of a hassle because of the bodyguards we needed after Papa got to be the don instead of just a capo the way he was when we were younger. And even then, the fancy private schools we went to out of town were run by the church, and like all good little Catholic girls I thought about being a nun once. For about five minutes. So, you could say we had a pretty religious kind of upbringing. But not the kind that gets heavy. Later, when I was out of school and had a lot of things to do, church seemed sort of like organdy party dresses and playing with dolls. For kids. So, I skipped mass as often as not and didn’t feel guilty and didn’t even think about it much until it was time for Pete and me to get married, and then it was more a matter of getting all the papers signed for us to be married in the church, and after that we moved out here and Pete went into the army and I didn’t know anyone in the parish or the town.”

  Another pause, and I could feel the confused rush of emotions triggered by the memory. Smorgasbord for a psychoanalyst, maybe. But our needs were more specific.

  “So, you went once or twice to the church in your parish,” I prodded, “and they were nice enough and made a point of welcoming you and introducing you to so many people nobody on earth could keep the names straight and invited you to join a couple of the organizations. And you did—but missed a meeting or two and felt ashamed of it and missed a couple of Sundays and then never went back.”

  “Except for Christmas.”

  “And maybe Easter . . . ”

  She looked away from the passing scenery and blinked at me. “You been reading my diary?”

  I laughed.

  “No,” I said. “But every minister, priest, and rabbi in North America could have written it, day by day and month by month, without even knowing your name or denomination. It’s one of the central problems of the parish church in modern society—and one of the reasons why the television evangelists have such easy pickings. But getting back to Gideon . . . ”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  The black eyes blinked again, changing gears, and went back to their out-the-window focus.

  “At first,” she said, “the praying was just words for me, a kind of singsong, hypnotic thing he used when he wanted to have sex and I got to thinking of it that way. But then it changed, and I remember how I felt the first time I really thought about the words and what they meant and realized he wasn’t talking about the God I’d been told about.”

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  “Yes. No! Well . . . sort of. I kind of hesitated once and he stopped me and told me about it—part of it, anyway; I got the rest in bits and pieces later—and I guess I listened and nodded my head that time because by then I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, and after a while it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Even when he brought in that crazy box of sharp rocks for me to kneel on.”

  And suddenly she was weeping, great dry sobs that left her out of breath at the end of each spasm, but still without the release and balm of tears, even when she finally achieved sufficient control to utter the words that were uppermost in her mind.

  “Maria,” she said in a voice made of pain and utter desolation. “Marie Theresa. My baby girl. Oh, dear God . . . Terry!”

  I stopped the car at the side of the road and took her in my arms and held her, for the simple comfort of warmth and human contact that was all anyone could offer just then.

  We sat there a long time.

  But even dry-eyed weeping ends eventually, and finally it was time to go on.

  I had the sense of a milestone passed, one emotional excursion ended and another begun. Angela had made her way through the land-mined landscape of her time with Gideon and, barring accidents, might not have to make the trip again. Which was all to the good, though it left me with a not entirely new array of doubts about the plan still forming in my own mind.

  The miles filed past in silence.

  We got to Sacramento by midafternoon and were done signing papers and talking to bureaucrats and sifting through personal effects a couple of hours later.

  Dom’s ashes were in a little cardboard box, and we put them in the trunk of the car for the next leg of the journey. One of the VA counselors had suggested that they be shipped back to the family mausoleum in New York, but Angela vetoed that without comment and he had sense enough not to press the point.

  The s
ilence that had settled in after our earlier conversation was still in the car with us when we headed south again. But it was companionable, the warm quiet of friends, and there seemed no need to break it even when we stopped briefly for a hamburger and coffee in Sonoma before making the final turn toward Glen Ellen.

  It was nearly an hour past sunset by the time we arrived, and there wasn’t much to unload, so I moved to gather up luggage from the trunk while she hurried to unlock the front door.

  But someone had already done that for her.

  I arrived on the porch, both hands full, to find her standing outside with the keys forgotten in her hand. The lock was intact, but the heavy old door frame was splintered as from a single tremendous blow.

  The door gaped open on darkness.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  To the satisfaction of that craving, then, he dedicates his every effort.

  And for it, no sacrifice is too great.

  FOURTEEN

  My first instinct was to get her out of there—back into the car and away—before anything else could happen.

  But she dug in her heels and it seemed the wrong time to argue, so I compromised by having her sit in the driver’s seat with the engine running and the doors locked while I made sure we weren’t going to be interrupting any rude strangers at their work.

  A light switch was just inside the door and I was careful to keep the more vulnerable parts of myself out of sight as I snaked an arm inside to reach for it.

  But the lights went on without triggering any loud noises, and I was sure our visitors were gone even before I stepped inside with senses tuned to maximum sensitivity.

  The place felt empty.

  All the same, I took time to check it out room by room before going back for Angela, and in the process gained a clear impression of who the intruders had been. Or at any rate who had sent them.

  The house had been thoroughly and systematically searched, no outright vandalism so far as I could see, but every drawer dumped, every cupboard emptied, every upholstered chair or couch upended and the burlap ripped away from the springs in the grand professional manner. The real telltale, however, was an omission: One room seemed to have entirely escaped the burglars’ attentions, and I just couldn’t believe it was an oversight.