by John Domini
“Just a touch,” Paul might’ve said. “A-all she needs is a touch.”
The same as he’d said over his father, a week ago down by the Naples waterfront. But Barbara was thinking of other trouble, worse, back outside New York.
“C-can’t you feel it?” Paul might’ve said. “Can’t you just tell?”
There was also the reek of carpentry, another reminder of downtown. Every alleyway in the centro had some kind of construction going, and with that thought the mother staggered at last off her chair, away from Silky’s cologne. The change in perspective gave her a moment’s relief, she no longer saw her child as a rapist, but on second look Paul’s body-length embrace began to seem, if anything, even more of a nightmare. Barbara glanced at Maddalena, the only other person here who’d been present at Jay’s healing. What had she heard last time, and what did she think now?
The camerawoman was merely doing her job, swinging this way and that under the fluttering purple and lavender. Now she took in the pileup around the wheelchair, now the crowd’s reaction. And DiPio too, though he was a part of the pileup, didn’t seem to realize what the boy could be up to. The doctor showed more concern for the girl, saying something like Easy, please, and nudging the liaison man aside in order to reach towards Paul. When the black-and-white child straightened for a moment to undo the work belt, DiPio caught hold of one narrow shoulder; when Paul pulled free Barbara felt pride. They couldn’t stop her boy. A mother’s pride, fond and blushy, how about that, on top of fear on top of rage on top of guilt—all slashing back and forth under her breastbone, along with thoughts of the other kids, the boys in the hospital and the girls in the kitchen—how about that, a mother’s bedlam?
Around the cross-clutching over the wheelchair the dim tent had grown louder. The foreigners buzzed and the cameras went click, while the preacher had started bawling in mixed languages.
Guarda! Look! L’amore di Dio, sempre nuova! God’s love, forever new!
Well, maybe new, but certainly strange. Once Paul got his shoulder free, he wedged his small hips more deeply between the gypsy’s thighs. He actually pawed the girl. One hand worked around her waist, clutching her unresponsive body up into his, while the other traveled over shawl and neck to face. The doctor bent closer, his own odors tickling Barbara’s nose; his soap had a hint of rose. The more Paul manhandled the girl, the farther stretched the wrinkles on the old man’s face. Then DiPio’s voice started to rise, yet another strain of frenzy in the tent.
“E possibile?” he yelped. “Possibile?”
In Barbara’s hand the gypsy’s grip likewise revealed mixed emotions, shifting and sweating. Her sideways glance, however, revealed something more sophisticated. The eyes remained angular and warlike as ever, but they suggested a touch of amusement, like Somebody get a leash for this puppy. As Paul gripped her you couldn’t help but notice her young breasts, too, her sweetly tapered midsection, and Barbara had to wonder about the wheelchair’s decoration. What was the point of all this tasseled party drapery, all but leopard-skin? And how could the girl within find the fun in today’s muttering assault? Yet Paul did look a little like a puppy, at play across the gypsy’s body. A boy at a game, again. With the hand around the gypsy’s waist he searched for some spot between spine and wheelchair, pulling at her bohemian swaddling.
“Son,” Kahlberg stage-whispered, “you don’t know what you’re messing with.”
Talk about a boy playing a game… by now even the Lieutenant Major could see that whatever was going on, it wasn’t about sex. What kind of sex involved one partner taking hold of the other’s tongue?
“Mrs. Lulucita,” the liaison said, “aren’t you the parent in charge around here?”
“Mary, mother of God.”
“Never mind her. Think about the Siren on the rocks, the devil in a woman. Think about where that tongue has been—”
Or maybe that was what the officer said; Barbara tuned him out, looking instead to the chaplain. Interstate had been silenced with mouth open. One thin arm held a Bible overhead, and his un-sleeved elbow revealed what was either a fresh bruise or more purple shadow. DiPio meantime had clamped one hand around his neck-stuff, the crucifix and Mr. Christopher, and his stare looked likewise clenched. He was rooting for the miracle so openly that Barb had to look away. She had to avert her gaze from all three of these looming full-grown white guys, casting her eyes across the congregation, dun-brown to domino-black, layered in castoff exotic colors (fig-blue to mirror-silver) and quieted for the moment. But the scene the mother had to deal with remained right in front of her, the willowy boy with his hand sunk to the knuckle between the girl’s lips.
At least this time the love-bite hadn’t drawn blood.
Again the cripple’s hand fluttered in Barbara’s. Already Paul was withdrawing his fingers from her mouth, releasing her to an involuntary birdlike moan. And when the gypsy arched her upper body after his retreating spit-slick touch, it seemed natural, a spasm. Certainly she didn’t mean to show off her figure, curving up from where the boy’s other hand still cupped her spine.
“All, all she needed was s-someone to hold her.” Barb heard him clearly that time. “Couldn’t you just f-feel it?”
Mr. Paul let go altogether, sinking onto his haunches, folding backwards from between the girl’s legs. The quake victim collapsed too, dropping into her chair, and Barb found herself thrown into yet another brand of confusion. She suffered a letdown. She didn’t want the girl to collapse. She’d brought everyone out to the chapel, and she wanted something to come of it.
But then the gypsy gathered herself and stood. At that the reporters and the congregation went berserk—erupting, attacking—and Barbara and the others in charge were left looking stupid.
They were left helpless, as the crowd’s toy-store colors flared up everywhere, erupting, smothering. The mother was knocked onto all fours. The wheelchair somersaulted over her back, a stab in the back, an end to her dithering. How could she have been so stupid? How could she never have realized what Paul’s magic would mean for people like these? How many of their barrel-bottom tatters did they need to wave in her face, and how loudly did they need to raise their searching prayers? Now as she lay beside the altar’s riser, at first she couldn’t tell if she were seeing stars or only the dots and dashes that decorated their t-shirts and dashikis. Anyway the view from the floor called to mind something else as well, the slash and blot of cave paintings, lit by dancing torches. Stick-figures agitated the air and the noise wasn’t anything Barb recognized either. She couldn’t tell whether the mob was calling on God or her husband or, in some third or fourth language, somebody else again. She only understood the clang and rattle of chairs toppling over, the whisper of blood-dark tent-hangings spiralling down. The reporters were in it too, shouting and elbowing over her head, fighting for a decent camera angle on Paul and the gypsy.
The resurrected girl had taken Barbara’s youngest boy in a deep embrace. A standing embrace, both on their own feet, though the gypsy had wrapped herself around Paul from neck to ankle. Their hug might’ve been the riot in microcosm, a starved and ferocious response to a child who had no idea what he’d meant when he first held out his offering. Paul’s own arms hung at his sides. He searched beyond the head that lay on his shoulder till his eyes fell on his mother’s, at his feet. He went on mouthing his bewildered denials: Just a touch, th-that’s all.
Well, what was she doing down there? Her legs were fine, her elbows sharp, and in another moment Barb was back on her feet and between the boy and girl. She was bracing herself for a tussle. But the gypsy let go at once, moving out of reach with a toss of her lank hair, a spatter of miracle-sweat. The mother had figured the girl wrong, the girl too. The gypsy’s look might’ve been flinty, almost an accusation. But that was the way a lot of young people appeared to Barbara. Her son was the one she had to worry about, and now she wrapped her arms around his undersized chest and began to haul him backwards. Behind the tumbled coffee-table she shuf
fled, and her heel caught briefly on the altarcloth, sticky with lamp-oil. The flame had been snuffed, at least, in the fall, and the mother had gotten some breathing room for herself and the boy just by pulling him away from the girl. That dark and attractive stranger was, for a moment, the one drawing a crowd, the reporters in particular. The camerawoman Maddalena already had attached herself to the gypsy. Barbara meantime discovered a protected space, a corner of the tent, loosely walled off by the doctor, the chaplain, and the liaison. All three of the men had regrouped behind the fallen wheelchair and the cross.
It was Interstate who’d taken up the cross, brandishing it like a quarterstaff. With this barricade before him, he began shouting again, throwing some French into the mix. The meaning was as clear as DiPio’s hand signals, palms out, arms out. Calm down, calmavi, calmez vous. A step apart from those two Kahlberg stood relatively unruffled. Relatively—the mother didn’t like the way he fingered his jacket.
Nonetheless in back of these three, in back of the wheelchair and chapel’s storage trunk, Barbara found a moment’s safety for herself and her boy. She shuttled Paul around behind her, one last barricade, and in the process she bumped a hip against the tent’s corner pole. The upright wobbled, the nylon rattled around her ears. With one backwards-reaching hand she discovered a seam was torn.
A torn seam, the least she could expect, in a place like this. Then it occurred to Barbara that she could tell the boy to run. He could duck out through the seam.
Mr. Paul could do it, looked like. Whatever this child’s prodigies took out of him, they left him nowhere near so rattled as Barb. Her own clothes were soaked through, jammed up, and yet while the mother had been pressed against her boy, one hand at his neck and the other across his lightly-downed chest, she’d found Paul’s pulse only a few ticks fast and his muscles just lightly trembling. He still had that carpenter smell, but his skin was dry.
She thought of heatstroke, of shock. One push would put him out in the fresh air. What would other people do?
But both of Paul’s cures had been miracles in an inferno. Today, even if the boy escaped this particular volcanic circle, this bruising ritual of the hunt, he’d still be in the Underworld. He’d have to move through poison clouds. The family portraits overhead were supposed to guide him, but their deformed and colorized smiles had been fake to begin with. The whole camp would be on the child before he’d cleared the central amphitheater, and then there were the infantrymen from NATO. God knows what they might do. So Barb kept her boy with her, crooking one arm around him, and as she eyed the oncoming crowd she set herself the way Jay used to at the scrimmage line.
Hadn’t there been a lot of brave talk about the end of everything? Well what would she call this, out beyond a crucifix turned sideways? The crowd had kicked aside the fallen coffee-table, and behind the people who’d come for the service, others were rushing into the tent. Others wanted to see what the fuss was about, they’d heard something and they’d wanted to see, and more of the chairs went over. There was bawling across the steam and the language of metal. Barb had to worry again about her girls and their guards, about Jay and the boys and the agitators in the camp, the ones in league with the hunger strikers. Not all the refugees would get excited over this, a scrap from the table of the white man’s God.
But then too, Maddalena and the born-again gypsy had found a quiet spot at the other end of the tent. Among toppled chairs and fallen drapes, they were doing an interview. The older woman gestured conversationally, with her free hand. Her subject had struck a pose, hand on hip, camera-friendly.
They were doing an interview. Still the mother was clenching her jaw, bent and sweating. Hardly five feet from her face a gang of refugees clamored against the chaplain’s jerryrigged barricade. They waved and bellowed as if they didn’t have any words, let alone whole questions. Nor did they look anything like a movement with a plan, a political organization or some sharp cosa nostra. Rather the mother faced an addled and hollering urge to grab, the fireworks of their shirts and caps not nearly enough madness for them. Now the obese Venus in the Parthenope shirt had grabbed one of the smallest new arrivals, a boy with half a face. The rest of the kid’s face was a crumpled gray-green smear, maybe a birthmark but more likely a scar. The color didn’t match his own pink palms, nor his mother’s either.
She was his mother, surely, this screaming mound of flesh. “Ancora!” Again. “Ancora, questo!” Again, this one.
Did this woman honestly expect another healing? On demand, just like that?
“Ancora!” the mother screamed. “Per l’amore di Dio!”
By now Interstate and the doctor had backed almost off the riser. Silky Kahlberg had eased sideways, but he was at Barbara’s shoulder, and the trunk that had held the Bibles nudged her toes. Meanwhile the scarred mother and her scarred child slammed against the chaplain’s crossbar, the woman’s pleading gone raw. What did she expect, once she got their hands on Paul? But what had Barbara expected, what simple international exit symbol, when she’d come to the Center?
Then Kahlberg pulled a pistol from under his jacket and fired into the air.
One shot: consummate PR. One shot and the tent went silent, other than the clatter of the falling cross. The thing must’ve hit someone in the facing crowd, it must’ve bounced and caught someone’s shin or toes, but nobody made a peep. Parthenope the Earth Mother whipped around, putting her bulk between Silky and her damaged boy. A few of the refugees threw up their arms or ducked their heads. But by and large the crowd went catatonic and baby-faced. The chill even dropped over the plank walkway outside. From beyond the purple nylon came a creak of wood under pressure, someone shifting their weight. Barbara herself had to remember to breathe. She recalled the wide leeway given her bodyguards as the family had descended into the camp. “These people” had long since learned what to do when The Man pulls a gun.
The liaison ran the muzzle along the tent-top, as if cocking a tennis racquet for a serve. The fabric buzzed against the steel.
“Terremoto?” the officer asked. “Sono io il terremoto.”
Barb realized she hated the man. Whatever name she’d given her feelings before this, it hadn’t been nearly strong enough.
“Y’all want an earthquake?” Kahlberg went on—the dandy, the power freak. “You don’t understand, Fm the earthquake.” He stepped around the startled chaplain. “I’ll bury y’all so deep your Mama won’t know where to look.”
DiPio was the first to move, scuttling back into the corner beside the mother and Paul. The doctor held his neckwear as he went; he didn’t want it to rattle. Nonetheless by the time he reached Barbara, a white man in motion, the refugees had begun to allow themselves the same. The mountain-woman with the scarred chest eased herself and her discolored child back down off the riser, away from the weapon, and with her shifted the crowd’s center of gravity. The cave-dancers turned to sleepwalkers. Arms down and eyes averted, they backed around fallen chairs and reporters pushing forward.
Barbara hated this Lieutenant Major—now the creep would say he’d rescued her—but she had better things to worry about. One of the reporters had stepped between her and Kahlberg, raising a camera. These digital models made everyone an expert, and the PR man didn’t mind having his picture taken with a gun in his hand. Barb retightened her hold on her boy, not yet Paulie, and she tried to think. She remembered Silky’s huddle with his troops, before they’d left the Vomero; more than likely the blue-shirts were on their way already. The cavalry was coming, and the clandestini were running off The congregants found ways out all over the tent, their splashy outfits turning to shadows beyond the synthetic walls. The space grew airy and the bunting that hadn’t fallen dangled freely again. In five minutes the scene had changed from Armageddon to the End of the Prom.
Behind her the boy began to speak: Mom, come, come on, 1-let me go.
Then Jay showed up, bear-like and ready for trouble, under the far flap. Barbara made sure he had the kids with him, the girls i
n particular. The youngest in fact appeared to be the safest, bracketed between both their own older brothers and the NATO gunmen. Not that Dora and Syl took any time for Mama. For them, slack and moon-eyed, this was all about Paul. They’d heard what their brother had done, of course they had. The whole camp was on the network, no-secrets-dot-com. Barb’s husband however took in the scene more carefully. He looked over the puddles of torn and bunched drapery and the naked metal branches of the upended chairs. The wheelchair had wound up face-down against one nylon wall and the gypsy girl, up on her feet, kept whispering to the camerawoman. Finally, for a long, crook-necked moment, the Jaybird stared across the tent at his wife and middle child. When he at last spoke, he gave orders.
“Silky, hey. Lose the gun. Come on, man. Nothing happens till that happens.”
“You know the drill, big shooter.” The liaison sounded conversational. “Escalating situation.”
But he was already lowering the gun. After the iron was hidden once more under Kahlberg’s jacket, Barbara realized how her shoulders were aching. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep her arm around Paul.
Jay carried his arms loose at his sides, his chest up. A polar bear, in those whites. “Silky,” he said, “translate for me.”
Barb tugged her dress more into place. Why should the NATO man translate?
“Help me, Silky. You know the drill.”
What drill, and why Kahlberg? Barbara could handle the Italian for whatever the capo had to say. Then there was the chaplain, hardly brainless, though a little shaky still. His purple stole had somehow gotten knotted around his wrist.
Once the Jaybird began to speak, Barb didn’t catch every word. She needed to concentrate elsewhere, on the upheaval of her interior strata, the outrage and lingering panic and fresh suspicions. Jay’s voice came across the wrecked chapel as if via a transatlantic relay.