“No, okay?”
“You’re the boss.”
The room got blurred up slightly. He leaned his head back against the pillow. “What’s in those things? The pills, I mean.”
Ed picked up the little brown plastic bottle. He said: “It’s called Percodan. ‘Extremely addictive. Use only under the direction of a physician.’ Well, we’re doing that.”
Steven said: “I don’t think I’m addicted. I really don’t want it, except for the pain. It makes me too tired.”
Ed put the bottle back down. “Well, that’s what it’s for.” He shifted again on the bed, as though he were thinking about getting up. But this was one of the longest conversations Steven had ever had with him, and he wanted to keep him there without being too nerdy about it.
“You know, drugs aren’t that cool,” he said, then blurted ahead. “I smoked some weed with the guys that beat me up.”
His dad simply nodded, taking it in. “How’d you like it?”
“You’re not mad?”
“I’ll get mad later. Right now I’m still just glad you’re alive. You mind if I have some of your water?” He poured half a glass and downed it in a gulp. “The pitcher’s almost empty,” he said.
He got up, blocking the light from the door as he passed through it, and left Steven alone. He heard a clock ticking somewhere, then some water running in the bathroom down the hall. He looked around the dark room at the rock-and-roll posters. Suddenly he didn’t like them very much. They seemed kind of phony and stupid. They were one of the few things he and Eddie hadn’t agreed on, but Steven had always felt that he had to have something that set him apart at home so they’d know he was alive.
His father returned with the pitcher filled up and sat back down where he’d been, on the side of the bed. Steven’s foot was beginning to throb slightly.
“You want to do me a favor?” his dad asked.
“Sure.”
“You want to try those things, try ’em at home.”
“I don’t think I—”
But Big Ed interrupted. “Look, there’s going to be lots of things like marijuana. Beer, for example. Or maybe cigarettes or cigars or something, although God forbid you get into that. Sex . . .”
Steven almost jumped at the word.
“Sex, no, don’t bring that home.”
Was Pop, grinning at him like they were friends, saying this stuff out loud to him? It blew him away. “But the other stuff—you want to experiment, even with some other guys, you bring ’em around and go out to the garage and check it out. But do it here, okay? So we can be sure you’re all right.”
“You’d let me smoke weed?”
“I wouldn’t be too thrilled about it. I wouldn’t want it to become a habit, but it probably wouldn’t kill you. It didn’t last weekend, did it?”
“Almost.”
Steven hung his chin down to the cast, but Big Ed lifted his head with a finger. “You’re gonna do things we don’t like. Hell, I’m sure we do things you hate. But we’re living together here, and everybody cuts everybody else a little slack so we can get along. The main thing is we’re a family, we stick together. Sound like a deal?” He punched him lightly under the chin.
That hurt a little, jerking the collarbone around, but obviously Big Ed hadn’t meant it and Steven would take a lot more physical pain than that if his dad would talk to him like this once in a while.
“But what about Mom?” Steven asked.
“What about her?”
“What if she doesn’t, uh, want to let me do stuff? Or even want me around?”
Ed slumped. His face clouded over. “Of course your mother wants you around.”
Steven tried a response, but it didn’t work. Big Ed sighed deeply. “Your mother is having a hard time, Steven. We’re all having a hard time.”
“You don’t think I wish Eddie were still here?”
“No, I know you do. It’s not that. It’s just your mother . . . She’s . . .”
“She wishes it would have been me instead of Eddie.”
Ed shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. Not on any level. She loves you, too, just like she loved Eddie.”
There wasn’t any use arguing over that one.
“She’s just having a hard time accepting it. Her world’s all turned around, and maybe she doesn’t know where to put things so well for a while. Haven’t you ever felt like that?”
He nodded.
“So, what I was saying about giving people some slack, maybe you’ve gotta be the first one. Try and understand what she’s going through if you can.”
“I know what she’s going through. I miss Eddie too. So bad.”
Big Ed took a deep breath. He swallowed, then jerked his head around toward the hallway. Still looking away, he spoke hoarsely. “We’re all taking it differently, I suppose.”
Steven’s foot was really hurting now. He kept forgetting how bad it was, and hoping every time that it would let up the next time the pills wore off, but that wasn’t happening yet.
He let a long time go by, or what seemed a long time, with his dad staring off somewhere breathing hard every couple of seconds. Then he said, “Pop.”
Big Ed slowly came back around.
“I think I need one of those pills pretty soon. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“Yeah there is, Pop. There really is.”
His dad reached for the medicine bottle, opened it and shook out two pills. “Well, let’s start fresh, then. We’ve got a hell of a family left here, okay?”
He popped the pills and drank a little of the water.
“Maybe Frannie’s kid will make up for Eddie a little. Mom might like that.”
Big Ed jerked again as though he’d been stung. “Frannie’s kid? What do you mean, Frannie’s kid?”
It frightened him, Ed almost yelling like that. “You know, the kid Frannie’s gonna have. Her and Eddie’s kid.”
“Frannie’s pregnant?”
He strained to remember. Who had told him that? Damn. The pills were working gangbusters already. His eyelids were lead. Was it Jodie? He was sure it wasn’t Mom. No, it wasn’t her. Maybe Frannie while she’d been staying here?
He couldn’t put his finger on the exact time he found out. “I don’t know,” he said lamely, “maybe I just dreamed it. I don’t remember.” But he knew he hadn’t been dreaming at all. He couldn’t recall even a scene from one dream.
Big Ed seemed to calm down. He put his palm flat against Steven’s forehead again. “It’s okay,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll find out about that tomorrow.”
He felt his dad’s bulk get up from the bed. Big Ed’s hand went through his hair, surprisingly gentle, and he felt a kiss on his forehead.
Maybe Pop did love him. And if he could only do something so Mom might think he was okay, they could all live together, maybe someday be happy again.
But it was getting harder, almost impossible, to keep thinking. He was sure Frannie was pregnant, but if Jodie and Mom and Frannie hadn’t told him, who had? The only other people he’d talked to had been Father Jim last night and that guy Hardy today. And how would either of them know? Frannie would definitely have told Mom first, wouldn’t she?
The light faded, then was out completely. He forced his lids apart, and there was Eddie standing in front of one of his posters, just looking down at him, smiling. He went to reach out to him, but then he was asleep.
Hardy, slouched over the table, was looking into the priest’s face perhaps a foot from his. Something was there, still unsaid after a lot of talking, and the idea kept popping up between them like an insistent panhandler checking out the pickings at the late-night tables in near-empty bars.
Cavanaugh looked down through his Irish, Hardy thinking he might be trying to stare right through the table with his X-ray eyes. They’d been talking and drinking, starting with light stuff and getting heavier as things wore on, for the better part of three hours. Cavanaugh
kept going in and out of focus.
“Maybe anybody can do anything,” Hardy said, “you give ’em enough juice.”
“Anybody—anything,” Cavanaugh repeated.
“Not a priest, but—”
“Ha. The things I know priests have done, you wouldn’t believe.”
“I probably would. High school there were some guys like springs, they were so wound up. I’d hate to see what would happen if they let go.”
Hardy and Cavanaugh, slowing down, just a couple of guys, finishing their drinks, closing a place. Half hearing each other, half listening to Billy Joel doing “Piano Man,” that old bar-closer.
“You know what an incredible pain in the ass it is being a priest sometimes? That old turn the other cheek? Both my cheeks are callused turning them back and forth.”
“Yeah, but you do it anyway. You keep doing it. What I’m talking about is guys who snap. Zinc buildup or whatever.”
“Sex, you mean?”
Hardy nodded.
“Sex is easy. I mean, at least it’s tangible, or understandable. You either get the physical release somehow or you, as we say, offer it up. But either way, it’s out there and you can deal with it.”
“You saying sex doesn’t bother you guys?”
“What do you think? We cut our nuts off? I’m just saying that it’s not always the hardest thing.” He grabbed at his glass, swirled the ice and drained it.
As if by magic, Hardy thought, the waitress came around for last call. Cavanaugh ordered the round: “Give us a couple doubles.”
Hardy didn’t fight it. It was get-down time for him, too, that old “since we’ve already passed propriety time, let’s hang it out and see where it goes.”
“There’s just no release ever,” Cavanaugh was saying. “It’s not a job where some guy goes to work and gets off at five and then gets drunk or fights somebody. It’s like you can never ever”—he stabbed at the table—“ever do anything that really lets the valve loose. That’s the hardest part.”
“Hey, Jim, that’s just adulthood. Who ever really gets to blow it out anymore? And you think you’ve got it tough, try being a cop.”
Cavanaugh shook his head. The girl came back with the drinks. “Priests can make cops look like Boy Scouts.”
Hardy paid for the round. “Cops can’t let out a thing, Jim. They gotta keep it in control.”
“Yeah, but they also let out a lot. You get the adrenaline pumped up pretty good and you’re allowed—hell, you’re supposed—to do something, direct it to something. Shoot a guy, make an arrest, get in somebody’s way. I mean, there’s something there. You don’t go walking off—Mr. Mellow—and read your breviary.”
Hardy took a good swig of his own Irish. “Cops don’t let out near enough,” Hardy said, defensive. “Why you think you got drinking cops? You got cops on drugs? You got just plain mean motherfuckers?”
“What I’m saying is just multiply that by about twenty for priests.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It isn’t. Maybe that’s where the sex comes in. Your cop at least has that option.”
“So why do you do it? Why do you guys keep at it?”
Cavanaugh drank again. “I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know at all. You believe in the theory, I guess. You believe that the suffering is worth it.”
“You believe in God?”
“You had better do that. You sin and you sin and you sin again and you keep thinking maybe it’s going to get easier someday and you won’t have to feel like breaking out so often, that maybe God’s gonna give you a break. Take a doctor with a headache, he knows fifty ways it can be terminal. You, it’s a headache, it’ll probably go away. A doctor knows it could be a tumor, cancer, the beginning of a stroke, or whatever. Same with priests. We can’t even allow ourselves to think we’re going to be okay. If we do, that’s pride! The number-one sin. But if I think I’m a totally worthless piece of shit, then that’s false modesty, another sin. Everything’s a sin, Dismas. And if it’s not, it’s a near occasion. Being a little loaded right now—sure it’s a release, but it’s also one of the seven deadlies. Drunkenness. There’s no escape ever,” he concluded, reaching for his glass again, putting down half of what remained. “None. Ever.”
Hardy sat back, shaking his head. “All this from the perfect priest.”
“Who thinks that?”
“Erin Cochran.”
Cavanaugh sucked in a breath. “What does she know?”
“One would think she knows you.”
Cavanaugh sighed. “She’s God’s reminder to me that I’m not perfectible, much less perfect.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means, you’d think after twenty, thirty years, the old spell she throws would wear out.” He started to lift his glass, then put it back down carefully, as though afraid he might break it somehow, maybe squeezing it too hard. “Sometimes I still . . . I think I’ve been in love with her since the day I met her. And I wasn’t close to being a priest back then.”
Hardy wanted to ask, but Cavanaugh answered before he could get it out. “You don’t think I haven’t wanted to make love with her like any other man . . . ?”
Hardy lifted his own glass and took a drink. He thought about Jane, about getting back with her, their hurried and aching coupling after the years apart. He said, “That must be very tough.”
The priest made some noise, like a laugh, but he wasn’t laughing. “They say love and hate are so close. Sometimes, I don’t know, I hate her, I hate ’em all. . . .”
And there he was, unbidden, that old panhandler again, reaching out his hand. Hardy looked at the hand a minute, then flipped a quarter that fell into the middle of his palm.
“Yeah, I’ve been tempted to wipe out all the happiness I see there. Why should they get it all? You think that seems fair?” He stared at Hardy, not seeing him, looking inside himself. “There was a moment, God help me, when I was almost happy about it, about Eddie being dead. Let them feel what it’s like to have things go wrong, to have your love lost, the sum of your life reduced to zero. Erin thinks I’m perfect, huh?
“Not close, Dismas. Not even close. If I could feel like that, even for a second, when the boy was like my son, my only son . . .” He put a hand up to his face. “Going back to the Cochrans’, burying Eddie”—he shook his head again—“after feeling that, as a penance. You believe in a good God, you believe you’re doing something worthwhile, that being around someone you love, denying it, is strengthening you, making you a better priest, a better person. Your reward is in heaven, after all.” He tipped up his glass. “You go back. You keep going back. It’s like the old Augustine monks who slept in the same bed with their women every night to test their celibacy. The roots go way back. Deny, conquer, deny again, sin, conquer it again. That’s the road to salvation, right? Ain’t it a piece of cake?”
Hardy sat in the lengthening silence, sipping at his drink, shaken somewhere even through the booze. Cavanaugh was in such obvious pain he couldn’t believe he’d been blind to it before.
“Hey,” Hardy said. “Let’s quit bullshitting around and talk about something we really care about.”
Gradually, Cavanaugh’s face softened. He laughed quietly. “You’re okay, Dismas.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, Jim.”
Another pause, then Cavanaugh saying, “So how ’bout them Giants, huh?”
“Humm baby,” Hardy said.
Hardy switched on the light in his hallway, shivering slightly from driving home with the windows open in the light fog. He hadn’t worn a jacket. On the way home, really cold with the Seppuku’s top down, he’d bounced along singing a dirty country song about rodeos. A good song. Kept up his good mood.
Imagine feeling that a priest could be a regular friend of his, maybe even a close one. It was surprising, the charge Hardy got out of Cavanaugh’s company. Jim’s conversation was a soup, a stew, a goulash of politics, sports and what he called the “cheap m’
s” of popular culture—music and movies—all seasoned—peppered more like it—with roughly equal parts vulgarity and poetry. Like, who else but Cavanaugh would have known off the top of his head that Linda Polk wasn’t, couldn’t have been, descended from James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States? Because Polk had been childless.
He was also fun to hang with because you met a lot of women. Though the guy had to be close to sixty, he had three times Hardy’s hair, and all of it looked better. While they talked and drank (Cavanaugh in some baggy khakis and a loose blousy light-green thing with an open neck), three women had joked with them, butting in, leaving openings you could drive a truck through. But he’d closed the door on them all with a practiced grace that told Hardy this happened all the time.
Another reason they probably got along, he told himself, was that they still had Eddie Cochran in common. Except for Jane, it was pretty much the only thing on Hardy’s mind, and once he’d started talking, Cavanaugh had seemed as obsessed with it as Hardy was himself. It didn’t get boring—at least going over it with Jim, who still leaned toward the late Sam Polk as the murderer even after Hardy said that he’d been visible that whole night at a party his wife had thrown.
That was the bitch of the whole thing—none of the suspects could have done it unless one of them had at least one accomplice. And there was no indication of that at all.
Back in his office, undressed for bed, Hardy saw the three darts stuck on either side of the 20. About five drinks (and one double) unsteady (which he thought wasn’t very), he pulled them from the board and went back to the line in front of his desk.
He took a deep breath and held it, then let it out slowly. He shook his head once quickly, then let fly the first dart, nodded as it plocked into the 20.
“Okay,” he said.
One thing was certain—neither he nor Cavanaugh accepted Ed’s death as a suicide, although Jim’s feeling seemed to be more visceral than Hardy’s. To Hardy, even forgetting the suspects and their alibis, the facts simply didn’t support that finding. With Jim it was more an article of faith. Eddie Cochran wouldn’t have done it—not that way, not any way.
Dead Irish Page 27