Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  Then too, it’d been more than a week since the healing. A week was a long time in a place like this. The aborted kidnap, just day before yesterday, must’ve gotten hashed over a thousand times by now. In camp, no doubt, every morning hatched a fresh crop of rumors. Everyone was so willing to clutch at a wild hair.

  Before leaving the girls, Jay looked to Kahlberg. The officer shot a glance at his soldiers, and the blue-shirts slung off their semi-automatics. With the guns at their feet, the troopers settled into the coolest corner of the kitchen they could find. Then the father took Barb and the boys over to the infirmary in the adjacent Big Top, accompanied by the press and fifteen or twenty clandestini still hopeful of getting on the news. These strays thinned out further once the group reached the hospital and everyone went to work. Paul was put on the same detail as John Junior and Chris, fitting together beds and shelving. At that point a couple of the reporters decided they had enough, and a couple others elected to stay with Jay and the boys. When the mother set off to find the chapel, only the woman with the half-gloves followed.

  Barbara believed she recognized the woman, but she wasn’t going to say anything. The reporter was busy anyway, checking a light-meter and then switching on her spot. The chapel tent ran longer than broad, with rows of dull folding chairs facing a riser on which stood a low table. The walls were strung with wraps and scarves, from blush-purple to grape-blue, polyester or even silk. What with the heat, the flutter, the color, a visitor seemed to have arrived at the sacred campsite of God’s chosen refugees. It seemed like sunset, time for worship, so much so that Barbara enjoyed a mild wave of spirit-tension, a tremor or two. Ahead, front and center, a low table held a burning oil lamp, a willowy flame that sweetened the camp’s dank and sent glimmers along the first row of chairs. Before this makeshift altar sat a dark girl in a wheelchair.

  Dark, but not African. A gypsy, rather, the girl had features of a near-Asian sleekness, and her skin matched the color of the heavy liquid in the lamp. Someone had fitted her legs into limp black jeans, and topped these with a flamboyant wrap, its indigo flecked with tassels and in-sewn coins. The wheelchair itself was a one-woman gypsy caravan, draped along the arms with gilded velvet.

  In the next minute the camerawoman was asking for a shot of Barb and the girl together. The invalid made excellent copy, a pretty face and a crumpled body.

  Barbara ignored the request. If she started striking poses she’d be no better than Kahlberg back in his print facility, gussying up the family photos. Anyway the press would have a Suzy Spotlight soon enough, after Jay’s mother arrived. The wife, with her back to the camera, fished her rosary out of her purse. Propping herself against one of the locked chair wheels, she went down on one knee. From that angle, in the false twilight, the eyes of the cripple beside her appeared almost supernatural. The eyes of a Mongol goddess. La Mama Americana kissed her beads and began—but how could she have failed to realize that prayers made terrific television? While she worked through the first Hail Mary, trying to get to the bottom of her rage, the camerawoman went into a crouch and began looking for the best angle, spider-legging now left and now right in glamour jeans. She paused only to gesture go on. Barbara got the picture, another Nativity scene, even as she kept up her murmuring. She was never comfortable stopping mid-rosary. Her mind’s eye however returned to profane business. Wasn’t this young woman with a camera a ghost from that first dusty morning downtown? Wasn’t she the one who’d taped the attack and the healing? The camera had been a smaller model, that morning, but this was the woman, all Cher-hair and bold moves.

  Barbara finished her Ave and stumbled back, up then down, seating herself with a thump on the riser. The curve of her spine brushed the rim of the coffee-table altar. When the reporter lowered her camera, for a moment Barb couldn’t distinguish between the two flashy younger women. Then the reporter started to ask questions. Had Mrs. Lulucita always known such faith? What sort of a churchgoer was her mother?

  Barbara eyed the gloves, accessories of a career girl. “I don’t know how to talk to you,” she said.

  “Tell me about Paul, signora. A woman of the Church, you must wonder about Paul. What do you make of him, the miracle?”

  “Make of him…” Barbara tugged at a seam.

  “Is it a miracle, do you think? What do you think?”

  “Oh, listen. If you learn anything as a mother, you learn that once a kid gets out of the house, sooner or later they’re going places you never dreamed of.”

  Tough Mama. Barb let her dress alone and sighed.

  “I know you,” she said. “You were there that first morning.”

  The woman’s smile was the last thing Barbara expected, a grin straight off the playground. “Yes, si.” Her nod came from the waist. “I was there, I was. After that I am having this new position.”

  She hoisted the camera, the light briefly blinding. “Yes,” she went on, “your son does good for many people that day.” And she introduced herself, Maddalena.

  “Really? You’re saying, you got this job because…?”

  “Oh yes. Before then I am always looking, looking, with my little camera. But that morning, colpo d’oro.”

  A stroke of gold. And if anyone seemed made for media work it was Maddalena, chic and electric right down to her cobalt fingernails. “Beato lei,” Barbara said, blessed are you. Blessed was any woman who knew what she wanted.

  “Beato lei, Madonna Americana.”

  Barbara wasn’t that bewildered. “The American Madonna,” she said evenly, “is someone else. She’s a pop star.”

  Maddalena showed she deserved her job, recovering fast. “But the mother of jesus,” she declared, “she too is a pop star. The American Madonna, she takes for herself what is already for a pop star. La Madonna dijesu, for two thousand years she has all the songs. She has the merchandise. In Naples you see her ojetti votivi.”

  Barbara dropped her gaze. “Listen, all right but…listen. I can’t do this, all right? I didn’t come here for an interview.”

  “Per carita. You didn’t come here simply to pray.”

  What’s your answer to that, Owl Girl? As Barbara slid her beads over her open palm, she was relieved to hear a different voice in the tent.

  “C’e qualcuno? Is there someone to help the girl?”

  The voice was a man’s, vaguely familiar, but the mother couldn’t see through the light from the video-cam.

  “To help the girl, someone?”

  It was a pair of men, coming around the rows of chairs. One wore a coat and tie, he had a goatee, and the other wore all-purpose khakis and revealed a shiny bald dome. After a moment Barbara recognized Dottore DiPio.

  “Please,” the doctor said, “wait for me for the girl.” Then, blinking at Barbara blinking at him: “Ma si! Signora Lulucita. Where else would I find you?”

  The other man was the first to extend a hand. Still young for someone so hairless, he had a German name, something like Interstate, and he served as the Center’s chaplain. “Well,” he said, “chaplain, schoolteacher, bookkeeper, and general errand boy for that force of nature you call a husband.”

  His English smacked of Middle America. Around his neck hung the Franciscan T, the italicized wooden capital, very different from the doctor’s elaborate silver clatter. Also the chaplain kept calling everyone a saint, first the Jaybird, “a saint of energy,” and then DiPio, “very generous, a saint.”

  The doctor bent over the girl, shining a penlight into her black eyes.

  Interstate went on, “If I weren’t able to stay with the doctor here, who knows? I might be living in a tent myself.”

  He was setting up the altar, lifting the oil lamp, tossing a purple cloth across the tabletop. There didn’t appear to be a cross. Maddalena withdrew up the aisle between the chairs, trying to get a shot of the group. Barbara closed in on the chaplain.

  “You live with him?” she asked. “With DiPio?”

  “Yeah. He’s got a big old place up on the hill, in the
Vomero. You know the neighborhood?”

  “I—know it, yes.”

  ‘Yeah, you take the funiculare. The doctor’s family has lived up there for a hundred years. He’s got a garden out back, a veritable hermitage.”

  But Barb didn’t want to hear any more about saints. “The Vomero, this was the doctor’s idea? It was him who set it up?”

  “Sure it was him.” The chaplain circled the altar, adjusting the cloth cover. “Who else could’ve arranged something so comfy?”

  “But there’s the UN relief—”

  “Oh, the UN, Lord no. That housing stipend of theirs, huh. Most of the staff live two to a room.”

  “Niente,” the doctor said, pocketing his light.

  “Housing stipend?” Barbara asked.

  Behind the altar, the riser, Interstate squatted to unlock a trunk full of Bibles. “It’s peanuts I know, but then, after all.” His long face regained its smile. “None of us came to Naples for the money.”

  His arms full of the floppy black books, he strode back past Barbara. He lay one on every fourth or fifth chair. “This isn’t about having a nice apartment.”

  As he angled between the rows of chairs, in limp khakis, his body language seemed to call the Center’s flock to worship. Refugees began to duck in under the far tent flap. They came in respectfully, buttoning their thin shirts or pulling off their spangled caps. A couple stopped to brush daubs of the reeking pesticide out of their Afros. Barbara hadn’t expected this, and there in Maddalena’s spotlight she couldn’t do anything about the sham of her good dress and morning makeup, settled and bourgeois. A Vomero mother. Under the surface of course she remained another business altogether, a feral clawing for scraps. She wondered how much she should tell the chaplain about his Saint of Energy.

  “Signora Lulucita?”

  This was DiPio, fingering his neckwear. “Signora, perhaps the sympathy of a mother. Perhaps if you held her hand for the, the messa.”

  It came to Barbara that he was speaking about the crippled gypsy.

  “Well,” the chaplain put in, “it’s not a Mass, strictly speaking.”

  “But for the service,” DiPio said. “Would you come hold the girl’s hand?”

  Interstate (was his accent from Missouri?) had no objection. He handed a Bible to a refugee woman a good three times his size, an African Fat Venus, tucked sausage-tight into a t-shirt that bore the words Lido Parthenope. She had a chest scar—though nothing ritual, no mark of initiation. The wound on this obese clandestina had left a ridge of tissue clearly visible under the fabric, a line that cut down one breast in a jug-handle curve. It crossed and dented the nipple.

  “Signora,” the doctor said. “You may help.”

  Per carita, she hadn’t come simply to pray. Certainly the need in this crowd had touched her, chilled her; that dented nipple reappeared each time she blinked. But Barb doubted that she could deliver much at today’s service. The tent was filling, a sensation like children clustering under a beach umbrella, and she could feel already how distant the German’s prayers would seem. She’d have to squeeze into a packed row of folding chairs, and there wouldn’t be room for the spirit-muscle. There’d be nothing like that, the flex out of nowhere, despite the tremor Barbara had felt when she first stepped into this artificial twilight. There wasn’t even a crucifix.

  But the doctor was only asking for, what, half an hour? DiPio wasn’t the one suggesting she spend the rest of her life in a lie. Besides, who could say what else Barbara might discover during the service? Interstate might poke another glowing peephole in Jay’s high moral screen.

  The mother sidled past a few of the seated worshippers, holding her breath against the worst of the pesticide. She settled into the chair the doctor had pulled up beside the gypsy. But when Barbara took the girl’s hand, the invalid responded with a squeeze. Her fingers found a good fit. Barb looked up startled, and the gypsy’s lashes fluttered.

  DiPio didn’t miss a moment of it. “Yes,” he said. “Sympathy.”

  Whatever that meant. The man had his crucifix in his goatee, picking, scratching, and Barb shifted her attention back to the chaplain. Pacing the riser, Interstate looked eager to start. The voices behind Barbara’s back sounded the same, and judging from the air the place was nearly full. For something like the fifth time the German adjusted the purple throw across his knee-high altar, then returned to the box that held the Bibles. He fished up a scarf, striking, Prussian blue.

  She had to ask. “So what happens now?”

  The chaplain kissed the silk and hung it around his neck, evening its ends around his dangling T, and explained that he worked freeform. “As far as I’m concerned, the terremotati can do anything this side of animal sacrifice.”

  “What? What are you saying? Is this a church service or not?”

  “Mrs. Lulucita. In here, it’s new heaven, new earth. If someone’s in the camp, that means they’ve seen their world destroyed twice over.”

  “But, seems to me, that’s why they need something reliable. If you show them one God one day and another the next, you’ll only confuse them.”

  Somebody laughed, somebody American. American, with an accent more Southern than the minister’s. Silky Kahlberg, sure, and Barb couldn’t suppress a scowl. She hadn’t been joking. She wondered whether, just by coming to the Center, she’d asked for everything and the kitchen sink.

  The NATO liaison had already worked his way to the front of the tent. He’d made it through the congregation even though he was walking backwards, cupping to his stomach one end of some long stick of furniture. In his ice-cream suit, and still chuckling, he backed past Barb. Behind him, carrying the other end of the piece, came Paul. The boy acted on the officer like an anchor, stumbling, never knowing where to put his feet. As his mother watched, the eleven-year-old had to stop and hike up his carpenter’s belt. Yet Barb remained where she was, her hand in the gypsy’s. When she wasn’t watching Paul, she eyed the two reporters who trailed him.

  Of course Silky had brought along the remaining media. He and the Americanino toted a great visual, a freshly constructed cross. Freshly treated pine on a simple box stand, it went up tall and bare as chaplain Interstate.

  “We heard you could use one of these,” the liaison announced.

  Barb looked the thing over. Insta-Icon, the cross revealed uneven stain along its upright and furred sanding at the corners. Then there was her child, his face drained, his gaze intent. He wasn’t two feet from his mother and her quake victim, yet he squinted at the two women as if trying to make out some distant temple frieze.

  Kahlberg turned and squatted beside Barbara, finger-combing his hair. “A little lay ministry?”

  Barb made no answer. Paul too ignored everyone other than her and the invalid. The boy hardly gave a jiggle when Interstate opened the service by clapping him on the shoulder and loudly giving thanks.

  “You don’t know the good you do,” the chaplain declaimed. ‘You and this gift from God you call a family.”

  “Mn,” the Lieutenant-Major whispered, “if I were you, Ma’am, I’d be careful about the way Paul’s looking at that girl.”

  What? Barbara’s grip on the gypsy’s hand retightened.

  “A girl like her, you’d never find her in church before the quake, know what I mean? Not unless there were a hundred Euro in it.”

  Now the mother was angry plain and simple—her first entirely clear and justifiable emotion all morning.

  “Fact is, anybody who comes to church in this place, he’s playing catch-up ball. These people’re nothing but lowlife.”

  Another word and she would’ve clawed out the man’s eyes right there before the altar. But in the next moment Paul stepped away from the cross and the coffee table, away from the preacher. Interstate had let go of him and launched into some swaying prayer, and as the man’s arms rose the boy went down. He knelt between the girl’s useless legs. Clumsy preadolescent though he was, Paul managed this without interference from his too
l belt, his movement in fact appeared seamless, and he tugged off his heavy gloves too, he flung them aside, all nothing like the hobbled mess he’d made of coming in. Also he was talking, Barbara’s middle child, though she couldn’t hear what he was saying, muttering, since to see him like this, easing himself between those young legs, mounting the helpless girl—to see Mr. Paul like this sent the mother’s emotions into whistling new cartwheels, and she herself began to speak.

  “Honey,” Barb groaned. “No, no, honey…”

  She needed to jump in and she couldn’t even get her hand free. Barbara remained in the gypsy’s grip as she jerked off her chair, or half off, tottering into the NATO man’s cologne. The scent made her eyes prickle.

  “The chaplain can handle it,” Kahlberg was saying. “He gets a lot of holy rolling at these things.”

  “Mr. Paul.” Barbara touched a hand to the boy’s back, a white slab against the girl’s spangled upper body. “Baby, I’m sorry…”

  The hundred-throated prayer around them drowned her out. Not that these strangers needed to hear about it anyway, the trouble Barb recalled, seeing her youngest boy in so nasty an embrace.