The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  Wish didn’t feel a goddamn thing from the drinks. He ordered a double dark-and-dirty and sat nodding in the gloom. He’d taken out the box of matches he used to score Lilly’s crib games and he was lighting one after another as he sat there, letting them burn down till they scorched his fingertips. Waiting for the alcohol to kick in.

  By eight o’clock he’d surrendered his table to stand at the bar, telling war stories to Gail and a handful of other solitary drinkers on the stools. He was showing around the medal to make up for the lack of visible scars.

  “What did you get this for?” someone asked him.

  “Buddy of mine took it off a dead Jap.”

  “Where did the Jap get it?”

  “Stole it, I’d say.” He swallowed back half his drink. “He was a mean prick, that one. Almost beat me to death.”

  Gail said, “That was in the camps, was it, Wish?”

  “Just before the big one hit Nagasaki. He had me locked up in a bamboo cell when the bomb dropped.” His half-smile was so reluctant he looked like he was in pain. He and Harris were both thrown in the cells after the beating and missed their shift at the shipyard, three miles closer to ground zero. They’d trucked past it on their way to collect and cremate bodies in the city and there was nothing left of the place but scrap metal.

  “What does this mean?” a man at the opposite end of the bar asked. He held the medal up. “What’s this written on the back?”

  “Give it here,” Wish said. “You fucking pricks,” he shouted. He walked the length of the bar and grabbed it, shoved it into his breast pocket. “Can’t trust you fucking crowd with anything.”

  “You should have something to eat,” Gail said to him. “A bag of chips or something.”

  “Chips, fuck,” he said. “Fuck. Who wants a drink?” he said.

  Hours later he went to the bathroom, found the stall and single urinal occupied. He shifted back and forth on his feet, waiting. Looking around the tiny room. Unzipped his pants and pissed into the sink. The door squealed open behind him and a man’s voice said, “Jesus Christ, Furey.”

  “Get in line,” he shouted over his shoulder. And laughed to himself.

  Gail refused to serve him another drink. He argued with her until she picked up the phone and threatened to call her husband to throw him out. He sat in his car then, too drunk to get the keys into the ignition. Thinking Nishino, Nishino, Nishino.

  That erection was what tipped him, the man dead on the floor at his feet and his own shins wet with blood. He meant to cable a message to Mercedes as soon as they landed in San Francisco and couldn’t bring himself to send it. Sick with the thought all the way back to the East Coast, dreaming of her every night and that phrase he’d briefly forgotten was the only thing she said to him. The train passing through Montreal before he saw it whole, the details lining up one next the other so he could almost hear the pieces snap into place. Harris and Spalding yelling slant-eyed prick as they pissed over the mutilated face, yellow bastard, and Wish standing there with a hard-on, Jesus fuck. His hand between the legs of the little Protestant girl too good for the likes of him, her superior cunt of a mother off saying her prayers and his cock as stiff as a poker.

  He’d taken the bet with Hiram on their trip back from Twillingate to harden his resolve in the matter, to make sure he wouldn’t falter. Five dollars to bed Mercedes and though there was no way the mother would know about the wager, he liked to imagine her hearing it said aloud. That furious little engine churning inside him. His hand wet and no sign of reluctance in the girl until the moment she pulled away. Don’t make a whore of me, she said. He was bewildered by that moment of prescience. It sounded like someone else’s words in the girl’s mouth, the accusation so plaintive and shrewd it felt as if some angel or saint had intervened to shame him with his own intentions.

  He took up with Mercedes almost as a kind of penance then, an act of attrition, as if loving her would prove the accusation wrong, as if he could erase his own sense of guilt by offering the girl some comfort in the wake of her father’s death. Convince himself he was a different person than he was. It was an elaborate lie that even he was taken in by, a fiction that comforted him through the length of the war as if it were real.

  Harris stretched out across the seats opposite as the train shuddered toward Halifax, clumps of hair coming away from his scalp. He said, “You’ll stay with me when we get there, Wish. You won’t let me die alone.”

  It was near dawn when he woke, slumped in the front seat. He was still drunk but managed to start the car, backed slowly out onto the deserted highway. Gail had shaken him by the shoulder when she was closing up, asking if he was all right, and he’d pushed her away. Passed out again after she closed the door. Dark-and-dirty, he remembered as he drove, all afternoon and night, the bile coming back on him.

  The woman nursing her infant among the desolation of Nagasaki filtered out of that haze, as she often did in the long hangover of his adult life. How he felt nothing for her or the baby as he salvaged and torched corpses like so much driftwood. It was what he’d prayed for at the time and there was no remorse in him. It would be years still before he came to see that wishing such a fate on them had made it so. His wish alongside the wish of others like him. He might as well have stripped the skin from the woman’s scalp with his own fingernails, held the baby over the fires cremating the city’s dead until the skin bubbled black.

  More than any other it was his memory of those two nameless figures that made a place for him among the outer planets. Somewhere beyond human. The mother’s eyes dead and the infant sucking listlessly at the breast. Madonna and child. Halfway up the road to his house he pulled over and opened the door, leaned out to vomit onto the pavement.

  Billy-Peter’s truck was in the driveway and Wish found him asleep on the chesterfield, the television still on. He went to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Sat at the table, waiting for it to perk, his two hands trembling like an engine idling high.

  Thursday afternoon he drove in to St. Pat’s.

  He was showered and freshly shaven and wore the only decent white shirt he owned, buttoned to the throat. He stopped for coffee in Churchill Square and picked up an apple fritter as a treat for Lilly. Walking down the corridor to her room he could make out the singsong Latin of a priest celebrating mass, could hear the formal timbre of it in her voice. He stood in the doorway a minute, watching. Lilly was draped in towels to approximate a priest’s vestments. She had a mug in her hands and a toothbrush she was using to anoint the room with holy water. Kathleen was standing near Lilly in her flowered uniform, a towering altar boy.

  “Jesus, Kathleen, would you stop humouring her with this?”

  “Sure what’s it hurting?”

  “You got her made up like a circus freak.”

  “It’s only a few old towels, Mr. Grumpy-pants.”

  He stepped into the room and set his coffee down on the bedside table, took off his raglan.

  Kathleen said, “Look at you, done up like a stick of gum.”

  “How long’s she been at this?”

  “Sometime this morning.” She checked her watch. “Duty calls. She’s all yours.” She touched his arm on her way past. “You do look nice,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “I’m sober,” he said. He leaned over Lilly to look into her face and raised his voice. “No cards for you today, Father?” he said. “No Wheel of Fortune?”

  Lilly ignored his questions, handing him the cup to be set on the tray beside her wheelchair. She dipped her fingers and crossed herself and started the Pater Noster.

  It struck him funny suddenly, watching the old woman with her vestment of towels and holy water toothbrush. Nishino inadvertently saving his miserable little life in Nagasaki. Mercedes’ mother a Catholic like himself. Everything that had ever happened to Wish seemed part of some mad joke designed to be the end of him. He started giggling stupidly at the thought that so far it had failed. That he clung so fiercely to hi
s coffee and pirated satellite television and Billy-Peter’s pots of stew, to the second-hand car he kept alive with spit and tape and a prayer. As if some impossible moment of redemption was bound to materialize out of that fog. He tried to catch Lilly’s eye. He said, “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken, hey, Father?”

  He pulled a chair up close, started reciting the prayer along with her. Pinching his arm savagely to stifle the laughter.

  MERCEDES

  JOHNNY BOUSTANI TOOK CARE of Mercedes, as he promised. And Mercedes had learned to love him, as he predicted. Even now that simple arithmetic surprised her.

  Johnny quit the army two years after she arrived in Lowell to avoid a transfer, started offering music lessons, tuning pianos across Massachusetts, ran a store for a while that sold second-hand instruments and sheet music. Through most of the fifties and early sixties he played with a jazz quartet at clubs around Boston. With Marion to look after, Mercedes only saw him perform on occasion and found it increasingly disconcerting to see him so unselfconscious, so at ease. The world never quite fit Johnny, except when he played. The music altered something in him, like an engine revving in neutral suddenly dropped into gear. Velocity and torque. A mechanical thrum so smooth it was nearly inaudible. It was like watching a stranger inhabit the face and hands of her husband.

  She fell in love with the man she’d dismissed completely during the war, the earnest maladroit. The same artless, gawky innocence she found so jarring when they met became the thing she relied on most in him. His endearing ineptness in the world of ordinary things.

  She was struck by the loss of that again now, turning from Wish at the door of his house in Calvert and making her way down the driveway to the car. Bella watching through the windshield as she came. No one spoke a word all the way into St. John’s. Johnny wouldn’t have been able to stand that. He would have sung something, attempted an off-colour joke and spent several minutes trying to explain the humour after he screwed up the punch line. He would have told one of his infamously mortifying stories of personal embarrassment to distract her, and Mercedes would have felt safer to hear him talk. It would have made her feel more human.

  They went to bed as soon as they arrived at Agnes’s apartment, and Mercedes fell immediately asleep. Woke early the next morning, lay listening awhile to the traffic on Torbay Road. The steady swish and fade almost as soothing as the sound of ocean surf on the beach. She loved those first few minutes of the morning, the brief amnesia of it, before her life filtered through the calm.

  Wish came back to her first, the dark corridor of his voice only an arm’s length away in the front seat of the car. Everything, she’d asked for and she felt glutted to the point of nausea now. Blood on his shins, he said. The two men pissing on the mutilated face of the corpse. She’d stopped him there, rolling down the window to avoid hearing him confess he’d done the same or something worse.

  It was no wonder people needed God to talk to, she thought. No one else could stand it.

  She sat up on the side of the bed, waited a moment for the habitual dizziness to pass before getting to her feet. And then Marion struck her. Wish saying he’d met her, strolling by their house beside the park. Mercedes sat back down, letting the fact of it roam in her head. That Wish could have come within a stone’s throw and Mercedes not know it, not have the slightest inkling. That he could have sat there for hours and left without giving her a sign. Marion sitting with one foot on the seat of her chair, her knee tick-tocking like a pendulum. She and Wish having the most innocuous conversation about the weather in Lowell. It was like being handed a photograph from a stranger’s collection, one more unexpected glimpse of that face when she thought her memories of it were complete.

  Mercedes rested her face in her hands. Her mind was teeming and her head felt thick with it all, sodden. Plemmed tight, her grandmother would have said. “You’ll lie here some day,” she told Mercedes. “Don’t let love go by.”

  She finished pulling on her clothes and made her way downstairs. Bella was still asleep on the pullout couch in the living room. Mercedes sat on the edge of the bed beside her, pushed her daughter’s hair back from her ear. Something flickered across Bella’s face, a brief shadow. Then a long calm exhalation. Mercedes had always loved watching her daughters sleep, loved how the features softened, relaxed, so they looked much as they did when they were girls. Vulnerable and defenceless and completely secure. She’d always thought no harm would ever come to her children if there was a God who saw them as she did, as they slept.

  By Tuesday morning there was still no word from Wish.

  Bella said, “How about I go down and talk to him.”

  Mercedes watched her daughter a moment. “Come on, Bella.”

  “What?” she said. “You want us to wait around this apartment all summer? I’ll drop in for a visit, sound him out.”

  “Promise me you won’t pick a fight with him.”

  “Why would I do that, Mercedes?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s in your nature.”

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Agnes whispered from a rocker in the corner.

  “Shut up, Agnes,” Mercedes said.

  Bella left shortly after lunch and the sisters sat together on the couch by the patio doors. Soap operas murmelling on the television. The sky bleak grey, still too cold to sit outside. The day had a murky, attenuated feel, like every day since they’d dropped Wish in Calvert. Nothing Mercedes saw or heard touched her in any real way. She ate and carried on conversations and looked through the TV guide or the paper, but it was as if she was merely recording events to experience them at a later date, when the purgatorial suspension lifted. She recognized the sensation. It was the same sallow, consuming half-life she’d lived in St. John’s during the war, a kind of active waiting, like pregnancy: every present, tangible thing subordinate to mauzy anticipation, to a sucking undertow of anxiety.

  Wish’s confession shadowed the waiting, the details visceral and caustic. She could see how what he’d witnessed, what he’d been party to, would make it feel ridiculous to love someone, make the ordinary world seem too prosaic to be real. What did it mean to kneel before a girl on a summer night, to stand naked by a pond and let her take you in?

  But there were moments when she was certain there was more to it, that she’d stopped him before he managed to say exactly what kept him away all those years. Something to do with her and the Cove and the bet with Hiram, with her mother and the Monsignor and that night in the back kitchen held him beneath the surface of the life they almost had together. And it felt like a failure of nerve on her part, a kind of cowardice, to have pulled back from the truth.

  She didn’t get up when she heard Bella come through the door. Waited while her daughter hung up her coat in the closet, took off her shoes, put the kettle on in the kitchen. As if she was more interested in the shenanigans on The Young and the Restless than what might have happened in Calvert that afternoon.

  Bella settled on the opposite end of the couch. “Where’s Aunt Agnes?”

  “Upstairs for a nap. How did it go?”

  Isabella said, “Why are you watching this crap?”

  “What did he have to say for himself?”

  “He wasn’t much in the mood for talking.”

  Mercedes felt as if she was prying into one of her daughter’s disastrous love affairs. There was the same cold, hurt look on her face, the same falsely casual attitude. The acid undertone of some deep personal disappointment that meant Bella had written a man off completely. She said, “You didn’t pick a fight with him, did you, Isabella?”

  She dropped her head onto the back of the chesterfield. “Mercedes.”

  “I knew it was a mistake to let you go down there.”

  Bella looked directly at her. “Let me ask you something, Mom. Why would you choose that kind of trouble now? At this point in your life?”

  She wasn’t sure she knew herself. She’d left something behind when she flew out of St.
John’s after the war, something she felt in the back kitchen with Wish, his hand drifting up the V of her thighs. And his mouth down there, kissing her, that terrifying elation. It was as if he revealed a part of herself she hadn’t known existed, named it for her, created it simply by touching her. And she’d always thought of it as his in some measure. The world had thrown up one more chance to recoup that loss and the gambler in her couldn’t resist it. She said, “I bet everything I had.”

  Bella shifted away to face the television. “He won’t come looking, I can tell you that much. You’ll have to go after him.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Whatever it was that drove him away,” she said, “will keep him away.”

  Mercedes was awake early Thursday, too anxious to lie in bed. She went down to the kitchen, tried to make tea without waking Isabella. Still no word from Wish and she had to admit that Bella was right about this much. Whatever drove him away, she’d said. Mercedes sat at the table waiting for the kettle to boil, daylight slowly filtering through the apartment. You’ll have to go after him, Bella said.

  That afternoon Mercedes snuck the keys to the car into her shoulder bag and told Bella and Agnes she was walking to the mall across the road. “Just want some fresh air,” she said. “Back in an hour or so.”

  She disliked driving and could never have made it out to Calvert on her own, even if she could remember the way. But she thought she might manage as far as St. Pat’s. She crawled along in the right lane on Torbay Road, pausing at every stoplight even when the light was green, looking carefully left and right while horns blared behind her. Smiling and waving as cars pulled into the left lane and roared past. She turned onto Elizabeth Avenue and slowed down even more, trying to identify the turnoff for St. Pat’s. Her right signal light on the entire length of the road.