“Lucky,” he said. “Nobody signed for it all night.”
The car was a dark green Ford Pinto with a dent in the passenger door. We drove out of the city, past the Pentagon and along a freeway that glowed with a gaseous orange phosphorescence.
“Hey,” Tom said, “since we’re out here, can I show you something?”
I thought of my empty apartment. “Sure,” I said.
We escaped the freeway past gray office blocks and turned into a Catholic cemetery. An immense slab of concrete, an image of Jesus in hollow relief, stood guard in the floodlit circle at the far end of the drive. Its right hand was raised in a forbidding gesture, but the drama was ruined because the statue’s face had been fashioned with cartoon-like features. Tom slowed the car. He was grinning.
“Watch Jesus’ face,” he said.
It was a trick of the lights. As we drove past, the round face seemed to turn and follow us with an angry expression. Tom put the car in reverse and backed up. The face still watched us carefully.
“It looks like Grumpy of the Seven Dwarves,” I said, and started to giggle.
Tom put on the brakes. The face stopped moving and glared at us.
“I call it the Jesus of Washington,” Tom said. “It’s my comic relief. When I’m feeling bad about the Church and having a hard time praying, I come here. I look at that stupid statue and it’s so damn tacky it makes me laugh. Then I can pray. I sit right here in the car and pray.”
“Pretty risqué,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah. One time the caretaker came up to check on me. I think he was disappointed when he found out I was by myself.”
He eased the car a little farther down the drive, then stopped and cut off the motor and lights.
“I think about Number Thirteen a lot,” he said. “I remember Hassel and that damn bridge. And Louella Day’s poems.”
“There were bad times too,” I reminded him.
“Sure, but the bad times were part of it, like tacky statues are part of the Church. If I’d never lived at Number Thirteen, I’d be a different sort of priest.” Tom leaned back. “You know, that was the happiest time of my life, those VISTA years.”
“Me too,” I said.
“You were part of that,” he said. “I liked having you around. And now to see you all grown up, well, it’s pretty amazing. You’re just like I thought you’d be.”
He touched the sleeve of my coat, turned his head toward me. His face was half light, half dark.
“I’d like to keep seeing you,” he said. “It would mean a lot to me.”
“Me too,” I said.
He smiled and didn’t look away. I still felt lightheaded from the beer, and it was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around him and burying my face in his neck.
I said, “This is the moment you’d kiss me if you weren’t a priest.”
He stopped smiling. “I am a priest,” he said.
I felt my face grow hot and I looked out the window at Jesus, who glowered back.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I can be real stupid sometimes.”
Tom let off the brake. “Where do you live?” he asked. “I’ll take you home.”
I felt like crying. Tom pulled down the driveway and drove silently. I wouldn’t look at him, leaned against the car door, ready to bolt as soon as we reached my apartment. When we stopped in the parking lot I turned away and grabbed the door handle. Tom put his hand on my arm.
“Wait,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come work at the Cervantes Center? We decided to hire another lobbyist for the Hill. With Reagan in town things will be a hell of a lot harder. And we need someone to put out our newsletter.”
I froze, tried not to show my surprise. “I don’t know,” I said.
“You’d be perfect. We could pay you twelve thousand a year.”
“Twelve thousand! You expect someone to live in Washington on that?”
“There are lots of group houses in Mount Pleasant. You could move into one of those.”
He walked me to my door. I was afraid to invite him in, afraid he’d think I was being forward again.
“Call me if you want the job,” he said. He scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper, leaned over, and hugged me goodbye, patted my shoulder.
I went inside, flicked on the stereo, flicked it off, opened all the drawers and closets, opened the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, stared at the jars I never opened, the clothes I never wore, the records I never played. Junk. I sat without moving until he’d had time to get home. Then I called him and said, “Where is this office of yours anyhow?”
When my mother and I lived at Number Thirteen, we would have been struggling by most Americans’ standards. But we had so much more than everyone else, it sometimes felt like we were rich. Then my mother married Arthur Lee, and we lived in the brick house on Annadel hill with the swimming pool and all the latest appliances. At Christmas, Arthur Lee always gave me some expensive piece of jewelry, even though I never wore jewelry and would have been embarrassed to show off such costly stuff if I had. Money was Arthur Lee. Money was my father, distantly remembered and vaguely threatening, gloating about making wampum.
So when I donated all my furniture except for my books and bookcases to the Salvation Army, sold my car and gave the proceeds to a soup kitchen, it felt like shedding a suit of armor. I wrote Arthur Lee the only letter I’d written in three years to tell him what I’d done, just to infuriate him.
I moved into a Catholic Worker house on Eighteenth Street just off Mount Pleasant. It was a brick row house, four floors high. When Raymond, one of the people who lived in the house and ran a homeless shelter, escorted me into the dark basement kitchen and turned on the light, roaches burst like spilt brown rice across the counter tops.
“Sorry,” Raymond said. “We sprayed last month but it doesn’t seem to do any good.”
“I don’t mind.”
It was true. The gloomy kitchen thrilled me. So did the sofa covered with a worn blanket and the rummage sale lamps, like Louella Day’s living room, and grimy Mount Pleasant Street with paper cups in the gutters and bits of squashed food on the sidewalk and old posters plastered over brick walls.
Tom and I spent a lot of time together, going to cheap movies on week nights we weren’t working late, and Millie and Al’s on the weekends. We would order beer and scout the other tables. Lots of people left a couple of slices of pizza, and Tom would swipe the leftovers while I kept an eye out for the waitress.
I could almost pretend it was a relationship. We did the same things every other couple did on dates, except for the sex. He told me things about himself I hadn’t known.
Once I asked, “Do you see much of your mother?”
“No,” he said. “My dad died when I was kid, you know. My mother and I aren’t close.”
“I figured she’d be proud to have a son who’s a priest.”
“Hell, she didn’t even come to my high school graduation,” he said.
“That’s terrible!”
“Yeah, well, she’s an alcoholic. I was an only child, and my dad and I were real close. I think she was jealous of what we had. He did everything with me. He was a football coach, so he was always proud of what I did in sports. And devout as hell, typical Polak. Went to Mass several times a week.”
“How did he die?”
“Heart attack. It was my first junior high football game. I was only in the seventh grade but I was already starting, wide receiver. Dad was so proud. It was all he talked about the week before that game. Anyway, I dropped a pass in the first quarter. I could hear my dad in the stands yelling ‘Tomacz! Tomacz! That’s OK!’ It’s what he called me to let me to know he loved me. I wanted to catch one so bad for him, but the quarterback didn’t throw to me again until near the end of the game and we were down by four points. I was in the end zone and the ball hit me smack in the chest and I held on to it. The defender nearly took my head off but I still held onto that damn ball. I
was lying there with guys piled on top of me, listening for my dad. But I didn’t hear him. And when I stood up and looked at the place he’d been sitting, I couldn’t see him, just a bunch of people standing with their backs turned.
“Nobody could tell me if he had had the heart attack before I caught the pass or after. My mother got tired of me asking about it and said, ‘Is it important?’ ” Tom shook his head. “It was the most important thing in the world to me. When she said that, I think I hated her. And she knew it.”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Still in Paterson. She remarried, not very long after my dad died either. My stepfather owned a steak house and drank too, used to raid his own bar. The house would be empty when I got home from school, and I’d cook my own supper. Then they’d come in from the restaurant around ten while I was doing my homework and go to their room. I used to pretend they didn’t exist.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Anyway, the Jesuits are my family.”
“I used to want to ask you about your family,” I said, “but I never had the nerve. I had this hero-worship thing about you, like I didn’t dare ask you something personal. Silly.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “but you were just a kid.”
When he shared things like that I wanted to hold him, to comfort him. But he seemed to sense it, and afterward weeks would pass without me seeing him outside the office. When I asked about a movie, he’d make an excuse, say he was tired or had to take work home. I wasn’t sure I believed him. Sometimes when we stopped by his house, I thought the other Jesuits treated me coldly. I imagined they were warning him away from me, that they saw me as some kind of temptress, which seemed like a big joke because I couldn’t tempt my way out of a paper bag.
Then I would be bent over my desk, pasting up headlines on the newsletter, and he would stick his head in the door.
“How about a flick at the Circle tonight?” he’d say.
And I’d say Yes, right away, even if I was tired or had seen the movie before, because in those days I had no pride when it came to Tomacz Kolwiecki.
JACKIE
I travel Blackberry Creek in my mind at night as I fall asleep. Memories melt into dreams of black coal tipples and curving stone walls, of dusty summer weeds and the wail of a train as it swings through the hollow. Before I sleep, I remember the time I went on a home nursing visit with my mom to see about a woman who had tuberculosis. We drove up Trace Mountain until the road turned to mud and then we walked. Mom told me that long ago people lived in log cabins, but then the timber companies took over the land the coal companies didn’t want and people couldn’t get wood without trespassing, so they covered their crumbling old houses with cast-off roofing material. Better-off people called the houses “tarpaper shacks.”
I went inside the consumptive woman’s tarpaper shack with my mother. The floor was part blood red linoleum, part splintered wood. Blackened newspapers covered the wall behind a pot-bellied stove. The only furniture in the main room was a threadbare chair and a small table. Mom whispered that I shouldn’t sit on the chair. She disappeared into the bedroom to bathe the sick woman. The woman’s husband was dead, killed in the mines. I sat on the floor with my knees drawn up under my chin. A blonde girl sat across from me, her back against the wall, silent. We stared at each other. I was afraid to say hello. When Mom was done, the girl’s mother wobbled out of the bedroom in a tattered pink housecoat. She was thin like Louella Day and coughed a lot like Betty Lloyd. Mom was trying to convince her to enter the tuberculosis sanitarium in Beckley.
“What would happen to my younguns?” the w oman kept asking.
Then I dream. The woman keeps asking the question. No one answers her. She goes back and forth from me to my mother, her face closer and closer, her breath damp and contaminated, what will happen to my younguns what will happen to my younguns what will happen to my younguns? Her nose touches mine, I feel a fine spray across my face, and I try to pull away. Then I wake up in Washington and the woman is a million miles away. I want her close again. And I want my mother.
JACKIE, 1982
Raymond, who lives in the bedroom above mine, is tall with thinning gray hair and a full beard. He used to be a Republican, but then he met Daniel Berrigan at a parish pot luck in Falls Church during the Vietnam War, had a religious experience, and took to throwing blood at the Pentagon. Raymond plans the meals for the Catholic Worker house, usually things like Swiss chard casserole or sweet and sour soybeans. A lot of the food comes from the dumpster behind the Safeway. Raymond keeps a crock pot going all the time. Leftovers go into the pot along with a bit of water. Vegetables about to go bad also go in. Everyone else—mostly kids fresh out of college who work at the homeless shelter—calls it perpetual soup. The soup was started before I arrived and no one can remember what the original ingredients were. Over time it has taken on a light chocolate coloring that grows darker if nothing new has been added for a while. I stay away when the color gets toward black, but usually it isn’t too bad with crackers in it.
When the telephone rings, Raymond is eating breakfast, Cheerios in powdered milk because we are sending all of the dumpster milk to the soup kitchen. I am having a slice of toast and jam instead. Powdered milk is where I draw the line. I will die before I drink it.
I pick up the phone and Dillon is on the other end, his voice shaky and faraway like he is calling from inside the coal mine.
“I can barely hear you,” I yell. “Bad connection.”
“I said I’m coming to Washington for a demonstration. Riding on a bus tomorrow night that will get there Monday morning.”
“What kind of demonstration?”
I make out black lung budget cuts and Reagan and sonofabitch in between pops on the line.
“Where?”
“Union headquarters. Try to find us. It’s been too long since I set eyes on you.”
At the office, Tom finds the news item in the Post—“Coal Miners Rally against Reagan Black Lung Cuts.”
“I ought to invite Dillon to stay a while,” I say.
“If he stays overnight he’ll miss the bus home,” Tom points out.
“I could drive him back to West Virginia. I’d love to see Justice County again.”
“But you’ve got those hearings on the Philippines coming up on Wednesday,” he says.
“Shit,” I say.
I am sick of hearings. Washington is more and more depressing. Dillon and the other miners think if they come all the way here and hold a rally, someone will actually care. Or maybe Dillon is just along for the ride. He never had many illusions where politics is concerned.
“I’ll come to the rally with you,” Tom says.
“If you want to,” I say.
I crave the mountains. They invade my dreams, and so do my kin, living and dead. Last week it was Dillon I saw while I slept. He was walking along the bank of Blackberry and he fell in. I jumped in and hauled him out.
I tried to interpret the dream to Tom. I said Dillon in my dream was not Dillon, he was all my people, and I should go back and help them because if I don’t, who will? Tom says I am a romantic, that it is my childhood I miss, not the mountains. He says if I went back I would be disappointed.
But he shares my restlessness. What he will say is, “I’m too safe here. Maybe I should talk to my provincial about a transfer to Central America.”
So I think, Why should I listen to you, when you talk about leaving, as if I didn’t matter. Slowly I am coming to accept that my life will never belong to a man, not even to Tom. Especially not to Tom. I am my own planet and constellations. And I am making up my mind.
At McPherson Square, Tom and I watch the men climbing off the buses. They are in their shirtsleeves, some in blue jeans and large belt buckles, but most are older men wearing polyester pants. It is a hot, sunny day, and the grass in the park is dry and yellowed. People from nearby office buildings hurry along the sidewalks, men in white s
hirts and ties with jackets hung over their arms, women in cotton dresses and heels. Only a few stop to read the signs, and the miners who tentatively hold out leaflets are waved off.
We stand in the shade of an oak facing union headquarters, a large stone building that resembles an old bank. A disembodied voice on a loudspeaker drifts toward us: “Ronald Reagan doesn’t care if you have to breathe on a respirator. He doesn’t care if your wife and children are left behind without financial support while you go to an early grave. We’re here to tell him we won’t stand…” then disappears in an amplified screech. I stand on tiptoe with my hand shading my eyes and look for Dillon, finally see him on the edge of the crowd, in olive green work pants and a faded plaid shirt. I slip away from Tom, sneak up behind Dillon, and touch his arm. He turns part way, sees me, and hugs me to him. He smells of Old Spice.
“Hey, girl,” he says. Then he notices Tom. “Well, lookee here! If it aint the VISTA!”
They shake hands. Dillon says he is tired, that he didn’t sleep well on the bus, “but I aint never been to Washington, and I wanted to see this youngun.” He squeezes me again.
It is getting hotter and we fan ourselves with the leaflets the miners pass out. Senator Byrd is on the platform saying how much he has done for the miners. The men applaud politely.
“How much time you got?” I ask Dillon.
“We’re supposed to meet the bus behind the White House at three-thirty.”
“Anyplace you want to visit?”
“I just want to visit with you,” he says. “And I’m starved to death.” He waves his hand to take in the crowd. “This here is just pissing in the wind anyhow. Let’s get something to eat.”
We find a deli on I Street. Glass cases that hold blocks of meat and cheese line one wall, and the tables are slabs of white formica. I sit beside Tom, with Dillon across from us. We order beer and hot pastrami sandwiches, because Dillon has never eaten pastrami and wants to try it. I ask about Number Thirteen. Dillon says Hassel and Junior are fine, that Toejam is courting Brenda Lloyd, that Betty Lloyd lost her black lung benefits, and the government says she owes it back thirty thousand dollars. He says American Coal has put new machines underground and opened more strip mines, so the coal is going out but there aren’t as many jobs. Tom is quiet, watches Dillon and me carefully as we talk.
The Unquiet Earth Page 27