The Unspeakable

by Charles L. Calia

  Marbury, who had been staring out the window while I railed away with exactly this, turned to me. His eyes twinkled again, a fresh energy surging, or maybe the thought of a good fight.

  He always loved a good fight.

  “All I’m saying is this. My happiness isn’t a condition to be debated.”

  “Who said that it was?”

  “You implied it. You were unhappy; now I must be too.”

  “Are you?”

  I diced up what remained of my omelet, cutting it into smaller and ever smaller pieces until I was left with only mush. The thought of defending my own mental state to Marbury seemed absurd, and not something I wanted to pursue. The truth was, I was neither happy nor unhappy but an odd mixture of both, an idea that Mar bury wouldn’t understand. For him, the world was divided into two camps with no separating ground, no gray at all. And sometimes all I felt was surrounded by gray.

  “I’m pleasantly content,” I said.

  Marbury smiled. It was the same smile that I remember from all those years ago, a smile bred from victories large and small. He liked to win, and living in those cramped seminary rooms, stifled with the many inconsiderations that we were forced to contend with, cold showers, poor food and such, battles were fought every day. Not that many of us joined him. We, I include myself as well, we endured the boiling hot classrooms, the old communion wine, the books with torn spines and covers, assuming that this was part of our newly chosen life.

  But not Marbury. He spoke up, or if he didn’t speak up he protested in other ways. Like the showers. Colder than the Arctic Ocean, our showers were the morning humiliation that each one of us detested but shuddered to resist. Nobody could figure out the source of the problem, cold water, whether from the plumbing or one arranged for us to overcome. Everyone complained of course, to themselves mostly, afraid that real complaints might lead to an obscure call somewhere or worse, a call to a town so small that the only showers left were cold ones.

  Marbury laughed at us like sheep being led to the slaughter.

  He said, “You want to blame the boiler but you shouldn’t. Try Christ. He bathed in cold streams, why shouldn’t you? Enjoy it, I say.”

  And he did.

  Much to my surprise and amusement, Marbury made a game of freezing in the showers. If the water was freezing, more freezing than usual, say like the temperature of liquid hydrogen, he would complain that they were too hot. He would yell to the Father Janitor to rush down more cold water, words that I heard myself. And the Father complied. Eventually Marbury used this tactic with everything. If the soap smelled bad, as it often did, he used more. Or if the telephone was out of order he would say that he thought we should go without. The other seminarians, myself included, all thought that Marbury had lost his mind, or his will to rebel. Not that we were so brave as to demand better ourselves, cowards the whole lot. But we still fought, albeit quietly, with the contempt of a beaten dog toward his master.

  Marbury observed this behavior from his perch. While we raced in and out of the showers at lightning speeds, Marbury lingered. He sang. He soaped himself languidly. He dawdled for as long as human skin allowed before turning blue or until he was told to put a move on it. It was a force of will that I later came to recognize, born from the pool hall, playing one perception against another. But it was something else. It was Marbury taking up the ultimate cross, which the rest of us spent time evading. For he loved the very thing that tortured him most, and by loving it, he transformed himself forever.

  Weeks passed with this strategy. Then it happened. I was in the shower at the time, barely getting wet, when I felt it. A brief splash of warm water. It lasted for only a moment or two before surrendering back to the cold but that was enough. Hot water. Maybe this was meant to throw off Marbury, remind him that hot showers did exist somewhere in the world. I don’t know. I do know that he never flinched. No reaction at all. Gradually more and more hot water arrived, especially when Marbury was showering. He just did his same old routine, singing and lingering and sometimes even yelling for more cold. Soon, I adopted his strategy as well. Others followed on cue, grinding their frozen teeth and singing until our showers began to steam over with hot water.

  When I asked Marbury if he remembered this he just smiled.

  He said, “Don’t be too impressed with that.”

  “Why? We had warm showers again. We won.”

  “If they wanted to crush us, Peter, they could. Turn off the water and people would beg for showers. Any shower.”

  “Even you?”

  “I’d be the first one in line.”

  I nodded. This wasn’t the Marbury of twenty years ago, the cocksure kid who froze in the shower to make a point. This was another Marbury, a compromised man. Or a man compromised by the power of God, he might say, compromised of his freedom, or the perception of his freedom, by a force larger than the sum of all things. God was in control of all that was: of darkness and light, of cold and hot, and straddling these nuances, or even worrying about them, was an exercise in futility.

  I said, “Then you’ve changed.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  I couldn’t answer that. Not honestly. For in the spirit of change I’ve seen people cast off their old selves with reckless abandon, shucking off skin and history in the pursuit of something new, which usually was, in Marbury’s words, just the old recycled. And I was afraid of it.

  “Change is natural, Peter. You can admit that.”

  “Leaves falling from trees, that’s natural. Reversing full course—”

  “And you believe that I’ve done that?”

  “Yes.”

  Marbury just shook his head. “Then you don’t know me very well.”

  Our waitress came by and cleared the dishes. She balanced everything on one arm like in the movies, holding the swaying cups and plates. I saw her scramble into the kitchen, stopping first to pour coffee for a few truckers with her free hand. One of the men, a burly fellow with a thick red beard, looked at me and stared. I stared back.

  Marbury, noticing that I was watching something, turned around. The man was still staring at me, despite his friends laughing and cooing with the waitress. She slipped a long bang of blond hair behind an ear as she talked. Everyone laughed, including the man with the beard. He broke his gaze for an instant, just long enough to reach up behind her skirt and pinch her. The waitress squealed but the man only looked at me and winked.

  I felt Marbury’s hand.

  He said, “This isn’t the O.K. Corral.”

  “Will you look at that guy? All nerve.”

  “There are a million jerks like that, Peter. Try prison.”

  The man went back to his friends, laughing and joking. But I couldn’t help thinking that I was the real butt of his joke and not the waitress.

  Marbury was pouring himself yet another cup of coffee, not paying attention. He was busy playing with the new bags of sugar that our waitress left him. Stacking them up like sandbags, he built tiny walls around his coffee cup. I imagined Marbury as a child and wondered what would have happened to him had his mother never died. Another direction maybe. Another life altogether.

  “You said that your father was innocent.”

  Marbury looked up. “How did you get all the way to there?”

  “Just thinking about prison, that’s all.”

  The man was still laughing. It was like I never existed.

  “Interview ten inmates and you’ll get the same story. What makes you so certain of your father’s innocence?”

  “Because I was there.”

  Marbury said that the reason his father went to prison all began with pool. It was good fun at first. He would set up shop while his father was working late, or on Saturdays. Marbury said that he hung around like a kid should, drinking soda and keeping himself clean from bad influences. No smokes. No beers. And certainly no girls. He did this to please his father, but more importantly, he did this to check out his clientele. While people drank more tha
n they could hold, Marbury would size up the competition or watch the games already in progress. Or if no one was playing, he would rack up a set to play alone, certain to dump a few easy shots in case anyone was watching. Which they usually were. Eventually a person would take up the cue against Marbury. Money would be mentioned, then set aside for safe keeping by the bartender, and it would all begin.

  Marbury said that his father kept a blind eye to the pool table, or at least if he knew that his son was playing he wasn’t objecting any. Money was still trickling in and he was busier than ever, running around just to cover all the bases. And the number of clients, though not as many as in the past, proved a godsend for the young pool shark. For it meant a steady stream of people, some terrible at playing, some worse than they thought, others just fair to middling. Marbury worked these folks hard, he said, because they were his bread and butter, but also because he knew that others would work them even harder.

  “I never let anyone walk away completely broke. They always had cab fare. Lunch money at the very least.”

  I wasn’t impressed with his magnanimity.

  I said, “Maybe you could have allowed someone else to win.”

  “I only did that once. That was enough.”

  It was a bright autumn day, Marbury said, and he was finishing up with someone, beating the pants off him. Marbury was tired and wanted to go home when he walked in. A sleazy hood of a man, his hair oiled back, with bushy eyebrows that tried to conceal a vicious scar over his eye but couldn’t. Marbury said that he had a bad feeling from the start, an instinct about the fellow, and tried to wiggle away. But it was too late. He saw the money. Hundred-dollar bills.

  There was an unspoken code in the neighborhood, a kind of ethics of pool hustling, that kept the sharks away from one another. Only one hustler per bar, that was the rule, for if the public knew that sharks were on the loose, all money would dry up, disappear completely, and nobody wanted that. Marbury said that he gave anyone who even looked suspicious a wide berth, refusing to play or even just to hit a few for he knew the consequences. A full-fledged war with all the casualties of combat.

  “I guess this means you played him.”

  Marbury nodded.

  He said, “He couldn’t even hold a stick. I found out why later.”

  Marbury tried to get out of playing, he said, by throwing the first few games. He thought that if the man was bored, or saw that no real money would ever come of it, that he would just quit. But he didn’t. In fact, the opposite happened. The more Marbury lost the more interested the man got. He threw in more money, doubling it after every win. And it didn’t matter how much Marbury contributed or even whether he contributed at all, the man threw in money anyway.

  “Finally it became too much. Maybe I got greedy.”

  Marbury, exhausted but sensing his biggest payday, started to play better. He won a few games easily and it went to his head. He started to feel invincible. Money was added to the pot, escalating the game and his ego more. Shots went back and forth, routine stuff except for one shot, a banker that left the man deep in a corner. Too deep for a left-hander, which he was, but the man tried to compensate by shifting to his right. And that’s when Marbury saw it. The scam.

  He was a natural right-hander.

  Marbury took advantage of the next break to play his hardest, ending the game as quickly as possible, before the man had the opportunity to switch to his good side. After the eight ball was dropped Marbury reached over for the money, which wasn’t left with the bartender as usual, who was in the back room resupplying, but in a plastic cup. Marbury said that he’d had enough.

  A hand reached down.

  “It ain’t over till I say so, kid.”

  “I started to back away,” said Marbury to me. “A bad move.”

  It was a bad move because the man came after him with a pool stick. Marbury, barely seventeen, quickly found himself cornered against the door of the men’s room with nowhere to escape.

  “Playing games, eh, kid?”

  “Just pool, mister. Take the money and we’ll call it even.”

  Marbury was scared.

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  The man with the scar flashed an evil grin, along with a knife. The sort of knife that one used to clean deer and wild animals.

  “Don’t care about the money at all.”

  Marbury said that he was about to say his final prayers, kiss his life good-bye, when he saw his father, who had heard the commotion all the way in the back room.

  He said, “Let the boy go, mister.”

  The man turned slightly, still pinning the blade into the boy’s stomach.

  “I’ll gut this kid. You get in the way and I’ll gut a second.”

  “I’m his father.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to gut you both.”

  The next events were sketchy. A fight ensued, the sound of pool sticks being snapped, the flash of a moving knife. Before he knew it, the three were on the floor fighting for their lives, when suddenly Marbury found himself holding the knife. Everything stopped.

  The man stood up, laughing. “Got the hair to do me, kid?”

  Before Marbury could answer or even think, the man with the scar over his eye lunged forward and in one motion, sheer reaction on Marbury’s part, the knife moved straight into his chest, stabbing him.

  “I must have severed the aorta. Anyway, he was dead.” Marbury took a sip of coffee as I just sat there. Dead.

  Then he added, “He moved more than they do on television. One leg kept flopping up and down, then a minute later it didn’t.”

  Marbury said that the wail of a police siren pierced the air. Someone from the beauty shop next door actually called the police, unusual for a betting joint, he said, which only reinforced in his mind the ferocity of the fight. While he and his father waited for the law, Marbury said that his father did a strange thing. He took the knife from his son’s shaking hand and kept it. The police found it that way.

  As the cops pulled him out, handcuffed and confessing to the murder, his father, Marbury said, whispered something into his ear that he never forgot.

  He said, “Live a good life, Jimmy. Second chances are rare.”

  “I still try to remember that,” said Marbury.

  I felt myself slumping in the booth. The story stunned me, I’ll admit it. The random horror, the sheer gruesomeness of it, struck me on many levels and I found it fantastic, like something you watch on television but discover only later happening to you in real life.

  “What did they do to your father?”

  “He went to prison. I wanted to tell my side of the story, the truth, but he wouldn’t let me. He figured the cops would nail him one way or another.”

  “But if he was innocent—”

  “None of us is that innocent.”

  I shook my head. The story was coming to me in waves, still building.

  Marbury knew what I was thinking, for he said, “I killed a man.”

  I tried to water things down. “It was self-defense.”

  “Was it now?”

  “You were fighting for your life, man.”

  “I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The problem with relationships really. No matter the amount of empathy employed, how much human intimacy created, it was still nothing more than employed intimacy, manufactured empathy. I didn’t plunge a knife into a man’s chest, and I couldn’t feel the horror of watching a man bleed to death in front of me, no matter how long I lived.

  “Well, you were a child anyway.”

  Marbury smiled. “God doesn’t wait for birthdays. Neither do killers.”

  “Surely you don’t believe God was involved?”

  “Not directly perhaps. He didn’t take the knife.”

  “Then how?”

  “One path ends, another begins. Everything changed after that.”

  Marbury said that the judge gave his father a red
uced sentence after he heard about the difficulties that the family had suffered through and the fact that the murder was in self-defense, though the judge never could really buy that. In his mind gambling led to murder anyway and couldn’t just be explained away with the vagaries of a street fight. So he sent Marbury’s father to prison. Hard time. But soon after his arrival Marbury said that his father began to throw up blood and he was found to have stomach cancer.

  “He didn’t last long after that.”

  It suddenly hit me. “You had ho family.”

  Marbury shook his head. Fortunately he had an aunt to live with. A woman descended from good Puritan stock, she believed that everyone should make their own way in the world, without help from anyone. But when she saw the younger Marbury the aunt couldn’t help but bend her own moral rules and offer up her home, which she did.

  She was a widow whose husband left her a small fortune, money that he made on Wall Street, and she lived on a small estate in Connecticut. The aunt never had any children, a good thing, said Marbury, for children wouldn’t figure easily into her extended cruises and trips abroad. Not even teenagers. Marbury found himself alone in the house for months at a time. After he tired of the surroundings, the horseback riding and fishing, he found other things to occupy him. Trouble mostly. The stuff the late sixies were so famous for. But the important thing, said Marbury, was that despite the rebellion of his youth, God still left him with a choice. Prison or the priesthood, though it wasn’t obvious to him at the time. It was just another path.

  He said, “So I chose the other path. God’s prison.”

  Our waitress came by holding up two pieces of cake.

  Marbury looked at me, then at his watch. It was almost lunch. His eyes widened as if to tell me what he wanted without having to sign it to me.

  “He’ll take chocolate,” I said.

  She pushed the aroma with her hand. “Fresh baked. Can he still—?”

  “Taste? I’m afraid so. Taste. Smell. Hear.”