The Altar Girl: A Prequel

by Orest Stelmach

  Whenever our paths did cross again, one thing was certain. No loving mother was going to pick me up and save me from the undercurrent of the ocean.

  I was on my own.

  CHAPTER 15

  WATER. SHE NEEDED water.

  During the early afternoon of the second day of her survival test, Nadia ate half of her buckwheat bread and washed it down with half of her jar of honey. It took all her discipline not to finish the bread and the honey because she felt as though she was starving. Her body was sending her a signal that she needed nutrition, but she ignored it. She could deal with the hunger. Water was the key to her survival.

  The one thing she knew not to do was drink from the stream. One of the boys had done that last summer camp and ended up in the hospital with a Cryptosporidium parasite and diarrhea for a week. Nadia could name fifteen parasites that lurked on the Appalachian Trail. She’d memorized them from a guidebook she’d studied as soon as she learned she was going to try to pass the survival test.

  After lunch, Nadia trudged toward the stream to keep her mind occupied. Her legs wobbled a bit and she got winded much faster than usual. But the challenge of surviving a night without fire consumed her and she couldn’t stand the thought of sitting around thinking about what awaited her. It wasn’t the realization that she was surrounded by wild animals that scared her. She was an animal, too, and even though she was still a kid she was bigger than most of them. And she had a knife.

  No, it was the uncertainty that scared her. The darkness, the noises, the openness of her camp. A fire offered not only heat and light, it issued a warning to every living thing in the vicinity. It did so not only with its flames, but with its spitting and cracking noises. Nadia had once seen a sign hanging on the shed of a house near the Uke campground in Colebrook. It said, “Fuck the dog, beware of owner.” That’s what the roar of a blazing fire told the animals. “Forget the fire, beware of the girl who built it.”

  Nadia took a circuitous route toward the stream to waste some time and see something new. In doing so, she stumbled upon a spectacular marble face. It formed an “L” on the ridge above the water. She knelt down beside the marble and swept a layer of limestone off the rock to reveal rich swirls of bronze and sapphire. When she nestled into their confines, Nadia felt like a princess in one of the corny Egyptian movies her mother liked to watch.

  She closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the sky. The sun soaked her face like warm syrup. Her exhausted body absorbed the heat, and in less than a minute, she drifted to the border of consciousness. It was a delicious place, better than sleep itself.

  A honk startled her. Nadia snapped upright. Scanned the horizon. A heron swooped down in slow motion from its perch on a limb across the stream and spread its wings six feet wide. As it dove, the bird’s blue-gray plumes cast a dark shadow on the water. The heron landed on a rock midstream and snatched a fish from the water with its yellow bill, barely causing a ripple. It tossed the fish in the air, uncurled its “S”-shaped neck, lunged forward, and swallowed its prey midair. Batted its wings three times and soared over the trees out of sight.

  Awesome.

  Mrs. Chimchak had taught Nadia that the forest was no different from the city. There were two types of creatures in both places. The hunter and the hunted. Which one did she want to be?

  Maybe the other kids in her neighborhood in Hartford were tough when they were in groups. Maybe they tossed bubble gum in her hair and chanted “lesbian” when she walked by because there were usually three or four of them and she was alone. Maybe they wouldn’t be so strong out here, alone in the wilderness, where you had to be a hunter to survive.

  An hour later, Nadia turned to head back to camp. The late morning sun shone on four bumblebees buzzing around a cluster of creeping bellflower, their open purple blossoms still wet with dew. Something about the scene struck a chord somewhere, but Nadia couldn’t figure it out so she moved on.

  A minute later, a wind shook a grove of beech trees and sent a shower of nuts sprinkling to the ground. One of the nuts hit Nadia in the head. She picked it up. It was as green as the skin of a lime, and totally useless. Beech nuts could be ground into soup with boiled water but they’d probably make her sick if she chewed on them raw.

  The nut glistened with moisture, like the inside of the bellflower. As Nadia’s fingers absorbed the wetness it dawned on her: there was water for the taking every night. Just as the bees could extract pollen from a plant, she could pull it from the ground by collecting dew.

  When she returned to camp, Nadia used a sharp rock and her bare hands to dig a ditch big enough to fit the bowl from her mess kit. She pounded away at the rocky soil for more than an hour, pausing to rest every few minutes. When she was done, Nadia secured a plastic bag over the bowl with twine, poked a tiny hole in its center, and placed it in the ditch. She dropped a pebble on top so the plastic fell inside in a concave fashion. That would force the dew to stream down into the bowl.

  When darkness fell, she jumped into her lean-to and crawled inside her sleeping bag. Excitement over the prospect of having water in the morning yielded to her current reality. Without the crackling sounds and blistering flames to distract her, each rustle of leaves and chirp of a cricket struck fear in her heart. How would she ever fall asleep?

  She underestimated her fatigue, though, and after fifteen restless minutes she passed out.

  A hoot from an owl roused her from her sleep. A flash of light pierced the darkness outside her lean-to. A second one followed quickly, and a third. After a pause, three more flashes of light followed, each of them longer than the first three.

  Nadia sat up.

  Five seconds later the flashes started again. Nadia rubbed her eyes. Three short followed by three long. Pause. Three more short followed by three long.

  Morse code.

  The SOS signal.

  Someone was in trouble. Someone needed her help.

  The flashes of light grew brighter as the person approached. The footsteps came rapidly.

  Nadia had stored the whistle her father had given her in her knapsack. She remembered her brother getting in trouble for blowing it and vetoed the idea. Whistles were for losers.

  Instead, she retrieved her knife from her lean-to and unsheathed it. Placed her thumb on top of the handle and turned the edge facing upward.

  Forward grip, edge up. Forward grip for maximum reach. Edge up for finesse and flexibility.

  Nadia slid behind the largest tree on the periphery of her camp, its trunk wide enough to hide her entire body, and waited for the source of the SOS to reveal itself.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE NEON SIGN on the outside flashed “Brasilia,” and the New Hampshire license plate nailed to a wall on the inside foyer read “ASS4U.” My brother had built custom motorcycles for twenty-one years until Hartford real estate took a dive and never fully recovered. I’d heard he’d bought a bar but this was my first visit. It was located in a seedy section of Willimantic on the outskirts of the University of Connecticut, twenty-five miles east of Hartford. When I first learned Marko had bought a bar, I expected it to be a bare-bones watering hole consistent with his biker sensibilities. But I wasn’t prepared for a strip joint. It’s hard for a woman to imagine her brother making a living by serving up naked portions of any kind of ass to anybody.

  Brasilia reminded me more of a bar in Deadwood than a beach in Rio, and the woman on stage looked more like a refugee from Woodstock than the girl from Ipanema. A wave of nausea washed over me while she gyrated to Joe Cocker singing God lift us up where we belong. As she arched her skinny-fat hips toward her sole pair of customers, the older one said to the younger one, “Pay attention, son. This is a preview of hell.”

  My apprehension about seeing Marko for the first time in six years exceeded any anxiety I’d experienced visiting my mother. In her case, I took some comfort in my sense of self-righteousness that
she was a worse mother than I was a daughter. In his case, I could find no such solace. In his eyes, I’d become the opposite of the little sister he’d loved as a child. He considered me trash and he’d disowned me, and the sad thing was I didn’t disagree with his decision. I thought he was fully justified in doing so because I’d done something unforgivable.

  The place was cavernous, with two bruised and battered wooden bars and a dance floor big enough for a Hells Angels’ convention. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, which explained why there were only twelve losers in the entire place, human stools with shot-glass hands and thirsty stares. I pulled my jacket tight and lowered my head as their cumulative eyes fell upon me. I guessed that was to be expected in a strip club, but I still hated them for it, almost as much as I hated myself for not looking as good as I wished I did.

  A waitress whose figure could have turned ketchup into Tabasco told me Marko was in the back. I found him and his wine barrel of a body aging in his office, nursing two bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth beer and watching a Red Sox game on a big old square TV. As a young man, he’d seduced women on sight. Now he looked like a cautionary tale to high school heroes who lived in the past, except he’d never even been all that.

  He did a double take when he first saw me. I held my breath as I sought evidence of residual affection: a raised eyebrow, a curl of the lip. A few choice Ukrainian obscenities would have sufficed. After all, why swear at your sister if she doesn’t matter to you? But he bestowed no such gifts upon me, the undeserving. Instead, he inflated his cheeks with apathy.

  He looked out the window at the parking lot as though it were a portal back in time. “What do you want?”

  He asked the question as though I were the last person on Earth he expected to see, and that my arrival necessarily meant I needed something from him, which of course, it did.

  I could barely look at him. Sadness over his physical deterioration and guilt over our recent past left me in a constant state of melancholy whenever I thought of him, let alone was in his presence. If I tried to ease into the conversation, we might never get started. I couldn’t even imagine him pretending to have small talk with me. To get his cooperation, I had no choice but to provoke him.

  “I saw Donnie Angel the other day,” I said.

  It was a cheap shot of a greeting, and I almost felt guilty about it. Marko’s head turned on a swivel. His expression didn’t betray his emotion, but the turn of his neck made my heart sing. No matter how much he hated me, the thought of me anywhere near Donnie still infuriated him. He’d left the house by the time the Grantmoor incident took place, but I’m sure my mother had told him about it, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d confronted Donnie and threatened him without telling me anything about it.

  “Why are you going anywhere near that psychopath?”

  “It wasn’t planned. Our circumstances collided in New York.”

  “Do yourself a favor. Next time collide with someone else.”

  “Why?”

  It was pathetic, I knew, trying to provoke him into another display of affection, but I couldn’t help myself. Marko realized it immediately. He contemplated saying something—probably a scolding for being so obvious in my search for a kind word—but turned to look out the window instead.

  “Do you know anything specifically about what he does for a living?” I said.

  “Sure. He’s on staff at Hartford Hospital on the cutting edge of medical research. Is that why you’re here? To talk about Donnie Angel?” He added a sarcastic ring to his pronunciation of the name.

  “I saw Mama this morning.”

  He barked a laugh. “Good for you, Saint Nadia. What are you doing, some sort of lost-cause tour?”

  “Thought I’d swing by and see your place.”

  “You are doing a lost-cause tour. Lucky me.”

  “What’s with the name? Brasilia? I didn’t hear any Portuguese out there.”

  He rolled his eyes as though the answer were obvious. “It sells. You take any product, mix in the Brazilian theme, and men eat that shit up. Now answer the question. Why are you here?”

  I walked farther into his office, lifted a stack of fliers promoting some XXX-rated movie star’s appearance at the club, and sat down. He grimaced as I approached, no doubt wishing I’d jumped out the window rather than made myself at home.

  “You weren’t at my godfather’s funeral,” I said. “Or the panakhyda, or the reception.”

  “Very observant.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because your godfather was an asshole.”

  His characterization shocked me. I didn’t remember him holding any animosity toward my godfather growing up. If anything, they’d been closer than Marko and my father, not that this was saying much. My godfather’s presence seemed to mollify my father, which was reason enough for all of us to love him. But my godfather also had taken a special interest in Marko, buying him baseball cards, offering him a sip of Narragansett when my father wasn’t looking, and making fun of his sideburns when he came back from a PLAST camp looking like Elvis.

  “Why would you say something like that?” I said.

  He chugged from one of the beer bottles. My eyes went to the grotesque middle finger of his right hand. It looked as though it had fallen off and had been reattached by a sleepy child. The digit protruded at an odd angle from the hand. He appeared to have two knuckles on that finger instead of one, and they both pointed sideways. I suppressed the gut-wrenching memory it summoned and tore my eyes away. That finger defined our childhood, the effect of our parents’ childhoods on them, and always left me wondering what it would have been like to have had a normal American upbringing.

  Marko put the bottle back down and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “Because it’s true. Your godfather was not a good guy. But I believe in letting the dead rest, so let’s not talk about him anymore. Let’s talk about what you want so you can get out of here and leave me alone.”

  “No. You can’t make a statement like that and not back it up. We will discuss it some more.”

  He bored into me with a toxic gaze that reminded me that no one told him what to do, let alone his no-good, ungrateful, bitch sister.

  “Please,” I said. “He’s the reason I’m here. The faster we talk about him, the faster I’ll leave you alone.”

  “You do know how to bribe a guy. Like I said, the guy was an asshole. Pick your poison. For one thing, he tried to get with Mama after our father died.”

  The image of my godfather making a pass at my mother flitted through my mind. It was grotesque. He was like a brother to her, or so I’d thought. “What?”

  Marko nodded firmly.

  I laughed. It was an uneasy nervous laugh, the kind that escapes your lips when the foundation of your life teeters and you question everything you’ve ever believed. “She told you that?”

  “Not only did she tell me that, your godfather confirmed it when I had a discussion with him about it.”

  Another vision flashed before my eyes. This time it was Marko pushing my godfather down the stairs. But that was ridiculous. If Marko had wanted to intervene, a few choice words would have delivered the message to stay away. There would have been no need for violence.

  “He tried to romance her,” Marko said. “He took her out for the best veal on Franklin Avenue. She thought it was just a dinner with an old family friend so she said sure. She said it was real nice, mixing pasta with the past, talking about old times and all that. After dinner they stopped at Mozzicatto’s to get some pignole cookies and baba al rum, and she wasn’t suspicious about his motives at all. But then he tried to slip her his cannoli from behind while she was making espresso in the kitchen.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Lines sprang in Marko’s forehead. “Who would make stuff up like that about his mother?”

  “He must have be
en drunk—”

  “He wasn’t that drunk. He was just an old lecher. He fooled me for the better part of my life. Fooled you your entire life. Why do you think he never married?”

  “I used to think it was because he never found anyone. Then as I got older, I started to think he might have been gay.”

  “Wrong on both counts, though I wouldn’t put it past him to have been some kind of bisexual deviant.”

  “Marko!”

  “The guy was a swinger in his younger days. Trust me. We were naïve. He belonged to a sex club in Hartford. Used to go to orgies and shit. In a Victorian house right next to the building where we went to the dentist. What was that guy’s name?”

  A wave of nausea left me weak. “How do you know all this?”

  “Once he hit on Mama, I asked around.”

  “Asked around where?”

  “I asked an old friend in the Uke community. One of the guys I grew up with. He pointed me in the right direction. When you work on bikes, you get to know a certain clientele. You get to know the right people to ask about something like this.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I paid him a visit and told him to leave our mother alone. That I knew all about his lifestyle and if he didn’t, I’d expose him for the pervert he was. Ruin his reputation in the button-downed Uke community forever, and possibly kick his ass all over town to boot.”

  “And I assume it worked?’

  “Of course it did. Would you want to mess with me when I’m pissed at you?”

  “You ever talk to him again?”

  “I did a job for him.”

  “A job? What kind of job?”

  “That’s when I found out what a real scumbag he was in business, too. That’s the other poison.”