When the two men were done pissing on the corpse, they wanted Wish to take a turn. “Have a go there, Liquor Man,” Spalding said, waving toward the dead man. “Let’er rip,” Harris insisted. They were both angry when he refused, as if they felt his reluctance was a judgment on them. But the truth was more pedestrian and bizarre: his cock, Wish realized, was stiff as a poker. He’d gone months in the camp without a gig, without a single subterranean niggle to suggest he’d ever manage an erection again. Then this freakish, inexplicable hard-on. “Let’s go,” he said to them. “We’re done here, let’s go.”
Mercedes reached out to touch his arm and the road came back to him suddenly, a winding stretch near Tors Cove. The speedometer just shy of 120 kilometres an hour. He eased off, touched the brake.
Bella spoke up from the backseat. “Maybe I should drive awhile.”
“Calvert’s just up the road,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” He glanced across at Mercedes but she had gone back to staring out her window into the dark. Trying to piece it together, he guessed, trying to see where and how she fit into the mess. Or just wanting to get clear of the whole goddamn works, to put it out of her head for good.
The house was dark when they pulled up. Bella took his seat behind the wheel and he walked up the steps. He watched through the screen door as the car backed down the driveway, Mercedes staring straight ahead as they went, refusing to meet his eye. They stopped at the bottom of the drive and he could see Mercedes talking with Bella, an animated little exchange that continued for a few moments after Bella put the car into park. They seemed a long way off to him.
Mercedes stepped out of the car and walked up the driveway. She stopped at the foot of the bridge and looked up to him behind the screen.
“You have to give me something,” she said.
“What?”
“You can’t leave it like that,” she said. “Give me something, anything at all. Make something up if you have to.”
“What are you saying, Mercedes?”
“I’m telling you right now,” she warned him.
He pushed the screen door open and took one step down onto the bridge. She looked directly at him and he thought she might actually be counting to ten in her head. He raised both hands to smooth down his little ring of hair. Tried to talk himself into letting her go, letting it end where it was.
She started back to the car.
He said, “For fuck sake, Mercedes,” but she ignored him.
“Mercedes.”
She turned around, walking slowly backwards down the drive. She looked tired and worn, the dead side of her face completely expressionless, which made the wear seem permanent, irredeemable.
He said, “I met Marion.”
She stopped where she was. “You what?”
“I came down to Lowell once,” he said. “Years ago. You were living in a duplex, a yellow two-story that backed onto a park. You and the girl were sitting in the backyard.”
He’d had no trouble tracking them down. He sat on a park bench in a fedora and sunglasses, throwing breadcrumbs to ducks at the pond’s edge. The path around the water looped within three feet of their back fence and he circled it occasionally, to have a closer view. Mercedes drinking lemonade beside the girl, who was curled up in a deck chair with a sketchpad. The phone rang in the house periodically and one of them would disappear inside to answer it. Mercedes flipped through magazines and fell asleep with her arm over her eyes. As if she’d never known him.
Mercedes said, “What was she wearing?”
“Jesus, Mercedes. It was thirty years ago.”
“Think for a minute.”
“Shorts,” he said. “I don’t know what colour. She had nothing on her feet. A white blouse, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She had a big pad of paper on her lap. Barrettes to keep her bangs out of her face.” He motioned toward Mercedes. “She was about the age you were the first time I laid eyes on you.”
“What do you mean, you met her?”
“You were gone inside to answer the phone and she … Marion … she was sitting there alone. I strolled by the fence. Said hello as I passed by. She didn’t know me from Adam. I said what a day it was, or some such thing.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Only hello back and it was a fine stretch of weather. Just talk. She had one foot up on the chair and she was swinging the knee back and forth right lazy like. Not a care in the world.”
Mercedes had a hand against her mouth and he stopped there. He said, “That’s all I got for you.”
He went in the door again and closed it behind him, walking through the dark to his bedroom and closing that door as well, without waiting to see whether it was enough to satisfy her.
The rest of the weekend was coffee and satellite television. The Expos leading the NL East and on their way to the pennant if there was no strike, as the papers kept predicting. Mary Poppins and John Wayne in The Searchers. Reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard and Three’s Company. Billy-Peter showed up on Monday evening and he went straight for the kettle, put it on the burner, set about making himself a cup of tea. Wish was sitting in the living room, flicking aimlessly through channels. Australian-rules football. Country and western videos. “Some fucking friend you are,” he said. “I could have been lying dead up here this days.”
“You’d be better company dead,” Billy-Peter said. “How was the trip to Fogo?”
America’s Most Wanted. A southern evangelist sweating on a stadium stage in Brazil. A black man in a suit and tie shadowing the preacher’s every move, translating each sentence into Portuguese. Braves and the Phillies, no score in the second.
Billy-Peter came and sat in an easy chair while he waited for the kettle to boil. Wish set the remote down and looked across at him. Relieved to see he didn’t expect an answer to his question, all his attention on the ball game. When the kettle whistled in the kitchen Wish waved Billy-Peter back into his seat, got up to see to it.
“Any word from Mercedes?” Billy-Peter shouted.
“Not since they dropped me home Saturday.”
“Do you know where she’s staying in St. John’s?”
“With her sister, up in the Torbay apartments.” He brought the mug in and set it on the coffee table.
“You going to track her down?”
“She knows where I am.”
Billy-Peter smiled to himself and picked up the mug.
“What?”
“Nothing, forget it.”
“Forget what?”
Billy-Peter took a sip and made a face. “Jesus, Wish. Didn’t anyone teach you how to make a sensible cup of tea?” And he went off to the kitchen for more milk and sugar.
Wish turned up the volume and stared blindly at the television. Aufer a me, Domine, cor lapideum, he thought. Take away my heart of stone. Wiping his eyes clear of tears before Billy-Peter came back to his seat.
And neither man mentioned Mercedes again.
Tuesday afternoon there was a knock at the door. He was asleep on the chesterfield in front of the television and wasn’t sure at first what had woken him. Stumbled to the porch when the knock came again.
“You look surprised,” Isabella said.
“Jehovah’s Witness are the only crowd that knocks at a door around here.” He looked past her to Agnes’s car in the driveway.
“Just me,” she said. “Mind if I come in?”
He backed away from the door and she went by him to sit at the kitchen table.
“Tea or coffee?”
“Just some water would be fine.”
He rooted through the cupboard for a glass, ran the tap to let the water cool. Pulled out a chair and sat down next to her. “What can I do for you, Isabella?”
“I just thought I’d drop in.”
“Your mother know you’re here?”
“Let’s just say I’m trying to satisfy my own personal curiosity.”
He laughed. “About what exactly?”
She put both her hand
s around the glass of water on the table, shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t seem to know what to say now that she was there beside him. Her right wrist was crowded with woven bracelets, a dozen or more in a rainbow of colours. Wish felt sorry for the woman, there was a lostness about her that suggested a bystander at the scene of a fatal accident. Her obvious discomfort made him fidget in his chair.
He said, “Mercedes ever tell you about my birthmark?” He leaned forward. “What does that look like to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “An animal, maybe. Dog? Horse?”
“Exactly right,” he said. “Your mother wouldn’t admit it. But that’s what it is.”
She sat back in her chair with her arms folded, her expression meant to say, Do you have a point?
He told the story of his pregnant mother walking in over the slide-hauling trail, the burning horse barrelling past them, his mother falling and clutching at her neck.
“Someone actually, literally, set a horse on fire, is that what you’re saying?”
He nodded.
“That’s some fucked-up shit.”
“I never did tell your mother what that was all about.”
“There was a reason? Jesus.”
“It was a fellow out in Renews owned the horse, she was black as a night without stars but for a white mark on her forehead and built to run. He used to take her into St. John’s every March for the races on Quidi Vidi Lake and there wasn’t a horse in town could touch her. She was the pride of the Southern Shore.”
Bella started laughing. “Wasn’t this a movie of the week or something?”
He glared at her but caught himself. “Never mind,” he said.
She started back-pedalling, as if a voice in her head had reprimanded her. “No, come on. You may as well finish it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. Every bit of his sympathy drained away.
“All right, fuck. I’m listening. Tell me about the goddamn horse.” She watched him a while longer until it was obvious to her that he was done. Sipped at her water. She said, “Mom tells me you served in the Pacific.”
“I did.” A low buzz of nausea starting up, like the first hint of seasickness.
“You were in Japan when they dropped the atom bomb?”
“In Nagasaki.”
“What was that like?”
“What was it like?”
“Yeah,” she said uncertainly.
“Jesus, I don’t know.”
“You were there, weren’t you?”
He laughed to himself. Shook his head. Thought of how he’d tried to describe Nishino’s mutilated face to Mercedes, clawing after a few words that wouldn’t obscure or falsify or mislead, managing only to diminish the reality of it. The ineffable fact of it, lying there at his feet. He didn’t have the stomach for another failure of that sort now. Talking seemed just another way of forgetting.
Bella could see the hesitation in him. She said, “You don’t think it was right.”
“They did it because they could,” he said and shrugged, as if to withhold judgment. “I’ll tell you what I thought at the time. I thought the Americans were the only ones in the world had the guts to drop those bombs and God bless them. I prayed for more, is the truth of it. Even after I saw what it did.”
“Is that why you didn’t come looking for Mom after the war?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, Isabella.”
“She could have set things right, you know.”
“Set what right?”
“Whatever it is that went wrong with you over there.”
He looked away.
“I’m being serious.”
“I know you’re being serious,” he said. He shook his head. “You crowd are all alike, every last one of you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ll tell you what I think now, Isabella,” he said. He spoke without raising his voice. “There isn’t another country in the world could have dropped those bombs and then carried on claiming love is the cure for all that ails the world. What a feat that is. Hallmark and Disneyland and Hollywood and whatever the fuck else makes you believe such bullshit. What a feat,” he said again. He could feel his legs quivering under the table.
Bella held up her hands. “Okay,” she said. “Forget it. I didn’t come out here to fight.”
“Why did you come out here, Bella?”
She craned back in her chair, her arms wide, her eyes on the ceiling. Folded into herself again. “There’s a museum in Boston, an art museum Mom likes to go to.”
“Art?”
“It’s my namesake, this place, the Isabella Gardner Museum. Mom used to take Marion there. You know my sister, Marion?”
“I know her.”
“They never talked about Marion, my parents. Her name was never mentioned in the house. But Mom used to take me to the museum when I was a girl, before I was old enough to know the difference. There was one picture there she used to spend a long time looking at, something by Vermeer called The Concert. You know it?”
He raised his hands helplessly.
“There’s a girl at a harpsichord, a piano-type thing, and another girl singing from a score. And there’s a man in the centre of the painting, a big man with shoulder-length hair and a sash over his coat. All you can see is the back of him, he’s staring straight ahead as if the whole scene is something he’s imagining. He always creeped me out, that guy, I could never figure what he was thinking. Felt like he was about to swallow those girls whole.”
Wish scratched at the tuft of hair over his ear. “Bella.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Doesn’t matter. The thing is, the painting was stolen a few years ago.”
“Stolen how?”
“Right off the wall is how. I don’t know the details. There were a couple of other pieces went missing with it. It was in the papers for a while, the Vermeer was worth millions, they said.”
Bella’s voice was calm enough although Wish could see her face changing, colour coming into the cheeks. It was anger, he thought, some ancient grudge so familiar to her she hardly recognized its presence.
“They’ve got a blank frame on the wall now where The Concert used to hang. And Mom still goes in every year on the anniversary of Marion’s death to see it.” Isabella stared across at him. “That’s Mercedes,” she said. “In a nutshell.”
He looked past her, thinking hard. “So what you’re saying,” he said.
“What I’m saying is, me and Dad were always her number twos. That empty frame is where Mercedes spends her quality time.”
He had to hold back a smile, not expecting something as simple or as sentimental from Isabella. He said, “That hardly seems fair to your mother.”
“Then you don’t know her.”
The thought seemed to embarrass them both and they were quiet awhile.
“So,” she said finally. “You felt guilty to be alive. Is that why you didn’t go looking for her? You didn’t deserve a happy, normal life?”
He got up to pour himself a coffee at the counter, took a mouthful. It had been sitting in the pot for hours and it was brackish and grainy. He leaned against the counter, took another sip. Stared into his cup.
“Don’t be so fucking coy,” she said.
He glanced up, surprised at the emotion in her voice, the raw disappointment. Saw the simple equation. It wasn’t anger he’d seen in her face at all. He said, “Maybe I’m not the one feels guilty to be alive.”
Bella settled back in her chair, trying to keep her face carefully blank.
“There’s nothing can happen between your mother and me that will bring Marion back, Isabella. Or change how she is with you.”
Bella said, “Jesus.” She gave an angry little laugh to dismiss the notion. She picked up her glass and drank off half the water and got up from her chair. She walked to the porch and stopped with her hand on the door. She said, “Tell me something, Wish. Were you as ruthless a prick befor
e the war?”
“I imagine I always had it in me,” he said. “Yes.”
After Isabella left he sat in the car in the driveway, trying to talk himself out of heading over to Mercer’s for a drink. Thought of the medal with the head of King George in his dresser drawer and slipped back into the house, tucked it away in his shirt pocket like a saint’s medallion. For the heft of it. He went over his conversation with Bella as he drove, trying to repeat some of the things he’d just said, but the words seemed absolutely foreign to him. It was like trying to recall the details of a drunken argument after sobering up. He couldn’t even say if he understood what the words meant, let alone whether or not he believed them.
There was no one else at Mercer’s but Gail behind the bar, a white T-shirt pulled tight over her generous breasts that read Itty Bitty Titty Club. She looked at him suspiciously as she opened the beer but took his money without a word.
“Keep the silver,” he said when she handed him his change.
He sat alone at one of the small square tables and drank the beer in three long mouthfuls. He ordered a dark-and-dirty and another beer to chase it. Looked around as he finished them off. A row of small windows up high along one wall, a neon Labatt sign and a television on over the bar. The rest of the room in a cool, damp dark like the church and fishermen’s halls where they’d showed movies on the coast.
The horse was called Ocean Star, for the Virgin Mary and for the white mark on her forehead. A household name on the Southern Shore, even when he was a youngster, though she was dead and gone by then. In his parents’ day anyone travelling through Renews would stop in to watch her grazing in the open fields and feed her half an apple or a handful of tobacco. Priests up and down the shore offered special prayers to bring her luck in the March races. On the Feast of St. Francis there was an outdoor service near Mass Rock to bless her, the Monsignor making the sign of the cross over her forehead. Until the year she was sold to a merchant in St. John’s, a man born into more money than God gave Solomon, a man who already owned a dozen horses. The merchant was a Protestant and the story going around said he planned to shorten the animal’s name to Star.
His mother woke to Wish kicking and she went out into the moonlight with Lilly to walk through the discomfort. They passed three men on the path by the cemetery, local men they recognized by their voices as they said hello in the dark. They carried on out over the mash, thinking nothing of the encounter other than it was late for anyone to be about. One of the three would have held the bridle and whispered to calm the horse while the other two doused her back with kerosene. Led her to the open door where they set the perfect black coat aflame and let her run straight to hell.
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