Midnight Diner 3

by Edoardo Albert

  "I’m going to call an ambulance," I say. I’m not expecting him to respond, but I hope he does, just to give me a sign he hasn’t died on me yet.

  "No!" He flings his hand onto mine. "No doctors, no ambulance."

  "You need stitches!" The wound is too deep for gauze and tape and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to look at it without passing out.

  "You know how to sew."

  "This isn’t a battlefield!" The man is breaths away from the boneyard and we’re arguing about who gets the dubious honor of patching him up. "You need a real doctor."

  "One of the morphine junkies on the third shift?" He coughs and blood from his busted lip dribbles down his chin. "I’ll take my chances on your handiwork. Just sterilize the needle with iodine, it’ll be fine." He squeezes my hand. "Please."

  What am I supposed to do? His eyes are too desperate and if I don’t act soon, he’ll die before the ambulance gets here. Besides, the sirens will wake the kids, and I haven’t yet figured out how to explain this as it is.

  I douse a gauze pad in iodine to wipe away the dried blood and he lets out the most animalistic strain of a scream I’ve ever heard. Instinctively, I brush damp strands of hair off his face. My good intentions do him no good; my hand graces a bruise on his eye and he nearly breaks his teeth trying to keep quiet.

  "You’ll be all right," I murmur, like he’s one more kid with a scraped knee. If words are sedatives, mine are about as soothing as ice water on frostbite."This is going to hurt like hell, but you’ll be all right."

  He hisses in a breath when the needle breaks the skin, but compared to what he’d probably been through earlier, I bet it feels like a happy ending at a back-alley massage parlor. I keep waiting for my hands to tremble, but I’m as relaxed as if I’m basting hems on Christmas dresses. I tie off the knot and although he looks like a comic book zombie, it’s a vast improvement. I get him a drink of water and he thanks me hoarsely.

  There’s no saving that shirt. I pick it up with the intention of hiding it at the bottom of the garbage can when I notice what it’s covering—a revolver. The revolver that dropped on my foot.

  I pop open the chamber. Three bullets are missing and the rest go into the palm of my hand. What does a preacher need a gun for? Protection, maybe but the missing bullets and the scars add up to something else.

  He must see me fondling his piece. "Derringer ..." he gasps. "Derringer, please...please don’t tell the kids. I’ll explain later, but please, please don’t say anything to the others."

  "Get some sleep," is all I say, reaching over and turning off the lamp. I sit in the chair across from his bed, holding the revolver in my hand and never closing my eyes.

  ~

  I lie to the kids for the first time since I arrived, telling them that the Preacher Man has pneumonia and it’s very contagious, so he’s quarantined in his room. They buy it. I’m sure some of the older kids think he’s suffering from the gin-bottle flu, but nobody asks me any more questions and I don’t offer up any more answers.

  I put the little ones down for a nap and slip away to check on him. He sleeps, hissing when he breathes too deeply. He wakes when I start to close the door and reaches for the empty glass beside his bed. I scoop it up and filled it in the bathroom sink. He drains it in one swallow.

  "How are you feeling?" I ask, even though I was pretty sure the answer isn’t going to be good. "Awful," he confirms. "What did you tell the kids?"

  "I said you had pneumonia—figured it would give you a few days of bed rest and explain why you had trouble breathing. It’s gotta hurt like hell to take a deep breath."

  "It does," he agrees. "But it’s not like I can stop, right?"

  "Why didn’t you go right to the hospital?"

  He reaches over and squeezes my hand, his palm is the sun and I’m a cherry Popsicle. I’m melting quickly, but he speaks before I can spill all over him. "If I didn’t come back you’d never forgive me," he says. "All I could think of was getting home to you kids, if I was here, I’d be all right. With every step I prayed for the strength to take one more. I didn’t want you thinking I’d abandoned you." He coughs. No blood this time. "I know it hasn’t been easy here, and I’ll have to be dead to walk out."

  I feel awful about mistrusting him in the first place and stammer for words to thank him with. "I’m not ready to lose you just yet," I say, sounding more sentimental than I intended to be. I try again. "Do you want a shirt?"

  "Sure," he says.

  I pull a black button-down off the hanger. My fingers grace his shoulders and trickle along his collarbone as I help him dress. He’s the first man I’ve ever touched and I surprise myself by savoring the rush of blood to my fingertips. I yank my hands away and turn the subject back to him. "What happened to you?"

  "I got jumped," he answers as he buttons. "I was preaching at Mickey’s and two thugs jumped me while I was walking home. A passing police car scared them off, but not before they took my wallet and left their mark."

  He’s lying. I know when someone’s twisting my tits and he’s got mine in a brass grip. His wallet’s on the dresser, only the revolver’s missing from his story. "What about the gun?" I ask. "There were three bullets missing. Where’d they go?"

  "I only keep the chamber half loaded—that way, I only have a fifty-fifty chance of hurting someone. It’s mostly just for show, but I need to know I’ve got the backup if such a crisis arises. My overcoat was buttoned; I didn’t have time to reach for it."

  I believe him even less. "Finish your soup," I snarl, not even trying to hide my disgust.

  ~

  I don’t see him again until after the kids go to bed, when I go into his room with a bucket of ice and a contraband bottle wrapped in brown paper. He’s still awake. A little color’s returned to his face and he’s sitting up as best he can, pillows piled against his back. His Bible is open on his lap and the glass of water I left on the bedside table is empty.

  "How are you feeling?" I ask again. "Better—thanks for the soup. How are the kids?" "They’re in bed." I place a bottle on the table.

  "What’s that?" "Gin."

  A slow grin stretches across his face. "How did you get your hands on a bottle of gin?"

  "I gave a bum ten bucks out of petty cash and let him keep the change. It’s been awhile since you took the painkillers, so I brought you some battlefield medicine."

  "You’re the best nurse I’ve ever had," he says.

  I drop a couple of ice cubes into the glass and slosh a generous measure of gin over them. He takes a sip, tips his head back and kills the rest.

  " Take it easy," I say. "We’ve got all night."

  He holds out his glass. "Pour me another, will you? I’ll torture this one." I oblige and he sighs. "Join me?" he offers.

  "No thanks."

  "I didn’t think so," he says, taking another sip. "But it would be rude not to offer."

  ~

  He exhales slowly and sinks into his pillows, lolling his head against his shoulder and glancing over at me with a glazed smile. "I feel so much better," he says, his words paced. "I’m going to feel like hell tomorrow, but right now, I feel great."

  I smile. So far, things were going exactly as I planned them. I wasn’t entirely sure a man of God would take the bait, but we’re running out of ice and I haven’t even started my excavation. "How did you get hurt?" I dig.

  "I was preaching at Mickey’s," he answers, draining his glass without looking at me. "I got jumped in the alley on my way home."

  He’s good. Even drunk he’s still lying to me. There’s not much of my five-dollar truth serum left. "What about the gun?" I try. "Where did those three bullets go?"

  "Chamber’s only half loaded. Russian Roulette."

  I grit my teeth. This always works the movies. For one second I consider that maybe he is telling the truth, but something’s missing. I can’t stop thinking about the gun that blows holes in his story. He’s rehearsed his lie so well that by now he probab
ly believes he did get jumped walking ever-so-innocently home.

  He interrupts my analysis. "You’re a beautiful girl."

  I should hit him. I should walk away, but it’s been too long since someone’s said I was beautiful. My father was the only person who ever complimented me in those same exact words, you’re a beautiful girl. It could be the liquor, but my father always said, in wine, there is truth.

  He’s not going to tell me anything tonight. I take his glass and cap the bottle. "Get some rest," I say. "I’ll see you in the morning."

  I pace the floor between the girls’ beds twice before I sit on my own bunk and punch my pillow. He has me all knotted up, I’ve had crushes on boys before, but this, this is something else.

  Boys in high school always passed me by. I know the cops on Murder By Law aren’t grinning at me. I’m plain and I’ve got bigger worries than my wardrobe, so I never expect anyone to pick me out of a crowd.

  I lean over the bed and feel for my box. Every orphan has a box, some are fireproof lockboxes with a key they wear around their necks, some are shoeboxes covered with stickers and tape. It’s an unspoken rule not to ever peek insides anyone else’s box unless invited to. Our whole lives are inside, when we leave here, this is all we take with us. In a place where sweaters, books, dinner, affection and punishment are all shared commodities, it’s important to have something—a cool- looking bottle or a broken bracelet—that belongs exclusively to the owner.

  I take Alice out of her nest of magazine cut-outs and pretty pebbles, a couple bank lollypops and a picture of my dad taken before I was born, and hold her to my chest, feeling half my age. Alice’s brown yarn hair was thin in places, I’ve sewn her left button eye on twice and her stuffing is compressed so that she’s almost flat.

  Alice came before the storm. Maureen took off when the regime changed and for a long time I hated her for not sticking around to protect us. Maybe it was then, somewhere in my eight-year- old brain, I decided never to leave this place.

  I sandwich Alice between my palms and curl up under my blanket with my hands between my knees. I rock a little bit, trying to ignore the wet burning in my eyes and repeat the Preacher Man’s words over and over until I drift off to sleep.

  ~

  I’m in the middle of reading to Lydia and Harley when the doorbell rings. I pick up Brittany and leave them with the picture book and a warning not to tear out the pages.

  Standing on the porch is a man wearing a plain suit and a detective shield. "Is your headmaster here?" he asks.

  "He’s not feeling well," I answer. "I can tell him you stopped by."

  The Preacher Man makes his own decision. "It’s all right, Derringer," he says. His voice is barely audible and wincing, he’s only walking with the help of the wall. His eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks are flushed underneath three days of stubble, but his hair’s wet, he must have stood long enough to shower. "Come on in," he greets, nodding me off and gesturing for the man to follow him to his room. I go back to the den to see that Lydia and Harley didn’t listen about that book.

  ~

  "Who was your visitor?" I ask when I brought him dinner.

  "Detective Archer Finn," he says. "He had some questions to ask about the mugging, and I told him I wasn’t in any shape to come down to the station to make a report."

  I don’t remember bringing him the phone, nor do I remember him getting up to make any calls. But I have to give him credit for sticking to his story. I sit on the edge of his bed and hand him a bowl of potato soup. "You’ve got one hell of a con job going on here," I say, only half-teasing. "Not this time," he says. "I’ve pulled them before, just petty street kid stuff, but not anymore. Not since I discovered there were better paths to walk."

  That wasn’t the answer I expected to hear, but it might be the first thing he’s told me that I believe in whole. Looking into his tired eyes and scruffy face, it isn’t a stretch to imagine him sleeping on a fire escape.

  "What denomination are you?" I ask.

  "Does it matter?" he says. "It’s all the same God. I take a bit from here, a bit from there. Most street preachers do. After all, it does no good to draw lines across beliefs when you’re trying to help someone see God’s light. I have to be able to reach all the lost souls."

  "Did you convert anyone the other night?"

  He gives me another slow smile. "One or two."

  Part Three: Preacher Man

  The next Friday night, the Preacher Man asks me to tuck in the children while he worked on Sunday’s sermon. I go in to find him after I finish putting the kids to bed; I’m not ready to go to sleep and there aren’t any chores left to do. Maybe I should have knocked first, but the door’s cracked and I take the liberty of walking in. He’s sitting on his bed, revolver in hand, loading bullets into the chamber. Everything adds up in this moment: the scars, the knife wound, the gun itself.

  He looks at me with cold eyes and then back to the gun in his hand. He doesn’t have an answer for me and offers no explanation. "You weren’t preaching the night you got knifed," I say, just to break the silence. "You were on a hit."

  "I was preaching eye for an eye," he replies, shoving the last bullet into his revolver and snap- ping the chamber closed.

  "Whose eye are you taking in exchange?" I take another step into the room and close the door behind me.

  "The eyes of every bastard murderer in this town!" he cries. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him raise his voice. "Every bastard who made these children orphans! This is for them!"

  "Bedtime stories are for them. Sunday school is for them. This...this is just...absurd!" I spit out the first word I can think of. "It does us no good if you get yourself killed, don’t you have a knife scar to prove that?"

  "I’ve got a dozen scars worse than that and two dozen kills to heal them." His tone is as icy as his eyes.

  I shiver and wrap my arms around my chest. "So you’re a mercenary," I state. "Nobody pays me."

  "What about that detective who came to the door when you were recovering?"

  "Finn had some information for me—I take care of the scum the cops leave behind, and in this town, that leaves a lot of work."

  "Who are you going after tonight?" I ask.

  He looks me dead in the eye. "Freddie Capollo—the man who killed your parents."

  If he’s trying to get me to sympathize, he’s failing. He starts for the door, but I call after him, "Gregory." He turns back and I continue. "That’s your name, isn’t it?"

  "How did you guess?"

  "Your medallion," I point at his chest. "I looked it up. Blessed Gregory of Verucchio was kicked out of his church and taken in by another order."

  "That’s my story," he said. "From the Loring Home for Boys to the Warren Orphanage." "Who gave it to you?"

  "My mother," he says. "Right before I left for camp."

  He sits back down on the bed and I sit next to him. "Imagine being called out of Arts and Crafts at Boy’s Camp and sitting down with two counselors named Tonto and Howdy who tell you that your parents are dead. They were wearing cowboy hats and orange shirts and all I could picture when they told me about the faulty fuse was how we all laughed when Tommy’s hot dog caught on fire." He clasps his hands between his knees. "I didn’t even get to finish out the week; I was packed before the afternoon and some social worker in a gray pantsuit drove me to the Boy’s Home in a van. I remember lying awake holding my teddy bear and thinking how Berry Boy was the only thing I had left in the world—a battered bear and a sleeping bag and Blessed Gregory around my neck.

  "I spent the next nine years in that prison," he explains. "I started off as a good kid, but as I got older, I rebelled. It didn’t seem right to praise God when He took my parents away and then told me I was the sinner? I lost my faith at thirteen, and without faith as a guideline, I didn’t see any reason to obey anybody else’s rules either. I took off when I was sixteen and spent the next ten years on the street—I hustled pool mostly, jacked a car once, mu
gged more men than I’m proud to admit. Drank a lot of gin, won more bar fights than I lost and lost more than I’ll ever own up to, slept in flop hotels and once in awhile, paid a beat girl just so I’d have some clean towels."

  I reach over and put my hand on his. He sets the gun down on his pillow and smiles at me, looking tired. He kisses my hands and continues, "You want to know how I found my way back to God?" He doesn’t need to give me time to answer. "I was twenty-seven. One night I was out drinking, alone as usual, and when my glass and my wallet were empty I went in the alley to take a piss. I saw this guy beating up on some spike-heel broad, screaming about respect, she didn’t respect him after all he did for her, she was just a slut without him, and with each insult came another slap across the face. I jumped him, smashed his head against the brick wall of the bar and kicked him until he stopped moving. It was the worst I’d ever knocked a guy, but I wasn’t scared or horrified or disgusted with myself. I felt good, like a three-color hero on the back page of the newspaper. She got up and I gave her my coat and my shirtsleeve to mop the blood off her face. She thanked me. If it hadn’t been for you right there, she said, Ace was gonna kill me. I’ve got a kid at home, Ace was gonna make my boy an orphan. I lifted her pimp’s wallet, got us a cab and saw her home. She hugged her son at the door and the two of them waved goodbye to me.

  "That night I went to church and I sat in the back, thinking about that kid and his banged- up mother, wondering about all the other kids who mothers were walking the streets when they should have been tucking their babies into bed, kids who don’t have shoes because Daddy needed his fix. I confessed all my sins, which took about an hour, and gave myself to the service of God. "But it wasn’t enough. The promise of tomorrow’s salvation doesn’t help a junkie today, Heaven doesn’t seem real when the rent’s due and your pimp takes an extra cut. I’d go out and I’d preach on street corners and I couldn’t turn their hearts like the Church promised I’d be able to. I kept thinking about that woman and Ace in the alley, and how at the end of the day, the memory of that night made me feel like I was doing God’s work. I realized that the only way to make a difference was to resort to Old Testament tactics—eye for an eye." "Isn’t playing God a little blasphemous?"