The flashlight again.
“What do you think?” asked the boss.
The other guy growled. “Too skinny.”
“Hell, I can do skinny.”
Jill started coughing again. Deep hacks from her lungs, like she really was tubercular. More flashlight.
A crunch of a beer can. It bounced off the floor.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here. She’s probably infectious.”
And they left.
Marbury said that once the car drove off they both ran upstairs to dress. They wanted to pack up and leave as quickly as possible. And they would have if they hadn’t smelled something first.
Smoke.
The one man, in his haste, had thrown the blanket on the kerosene heater. When Marbury and Jill came back downstairs they saw the room in flames. Everything was on fire. And it was moving fast, too fast for Marbury to react. The house was old and the timber half rotted and dried out, but Marbury made a vain attempt to save the place. He grabbed a bucket from the bathroom and tried to fill it, but he couldn’t. The pipes were frozen. No water.
“Jill ran one way, I ran the other. That was the last time I saw her.”
Marbury went back to his shoes, tying together the broken laces. I just thought about the whole story from Marbury’s childhood on up to this last piece with Jill, and I could barely believe any of it. But Marbury didn’t seem to care. He just seemed happy that I knew.
“You said Henry Burk had a car. What model was it?”
Marbury smiled. “A Volvo. That’s the car.”
He said that he drove away and never looked back. Marbury said that he was somewhere in New York State, with only about a hundred dollars in his pocket and no place to go, when he made a decision. Or rather God made one for him. He told himself that he would go anywhere the next out-of-state license that he saw on the highway was from.
“Then I noticed it. A pickup. It was from Minnesota.”
“And you drove all the way here?”
Marbury nodded. He said that he drifted into Minneapolis with the gas tank nearly on empty. Eventually he got a job and went back to school as well, and then everything else that led up to this point.
He said, “Like they always say, the rest is history.”
Marbury finished with his shoes and led me downstairs to the parish basement. It was largely a meeting room, with fold-up chairs and tables and a small kitchen used for serving coffee. But there was also a backboard and basketball net on the far wall, exactly where Marbury said it would be.
I could see on the opposite walls behind him various pictures of Marbury with his flock. Pictures of him smiling, clowning in front of the camera, with both old people and young, some afflicted and infirm, others appearing as perfect as the day they were born. Marbury looked natural here. Something that surprised me, for I had always assumed him to be uncomfortable, certainly not in control like he was at the shelter, and yet the photographs belied such a fact. He was happy. I could see it on his face.
“I didn’t know you were so photogenic,” I said.
“We have a few camera buffs. What can I do but go along?”
But he didn’t appear to be resisting.
He noticed that and said, “I guess I’ll have to get rid of them.”
“You will when you leave, yes.”
Marbury gave me a kind of half smile. It didn’t make him angry or upset, what I said. It just struck him as humorous, as though he knew something that I didn’t. An inside joke.
But I brushed that off.
I said, “Let’s play.”
Marbury gave me the ball and I bounced it a few times, making my way to the basket. When I turned around I saw him standing there, no shirt, the bones from his chest sticking right out. He looked like one of those old men in pictures from New Delhi.
“You start, Marbury.”
I checked him the ball and he took his first shot. He made it.
He just shrugged. “Luck.”
But luck carried him on for three more shots. And I was rusty, as though I hadn’t played in a hundred years. Everything that I threw up bounced right into Marbury’s hands, which surprised me. He always had such poor hands. And the more that we played, the more an eerie feeling started to come over me. As though my entire view of history was being challenged right before my very eyes.
Marbury didn’t look nearly as bad as I remembered him, nor I as good. In fact, he was sinking shot after shot to my misses. Maybe I should have expected that. Over time we evened out, reverted to the mean. Having spent an inordinate amount of energy on my job in the last several years, something had to go, which was my interest in basketball. And yet, I always saw basketball as not unlike riding a bike. You never forget.
After a few more moments I found myself hopelessly out of shape, wheezing and puffing more than even Marbury. And the shots that I would have buried as a youngster, I found skittering off the rim for a miss. Marbury, on the other hand, though not great, was vastly improved. He dribbled better now, at least keeping the ball away from me, which he couldn’t always do. And his stamina was enhanced as well, or perhaps mine had eroded, I wasn’t sure. His running circles around me did nothing but anger me, and I played harder just to catch up. Two quick shots on my part evened the score. We wrestled with the lead over the next ten minutes, me running full tilt, at heart-attack speed, fueled only by my desire to show him up. Or reclaim what I always enjoyed over him on the court. Complete superiority.
Marbury broke his joined hands apart in one motion.
He said, “Water break.”
“Are you tired?”
I puffed so hard that the words hardly sounded like any intelligible language, just garble. And my knees, supporting the full weight of my arms on them, wobbled with exhaustion. He was killing me.
“Just thirsty,” said Marbury.
He was cool and relaxed. A faint bead of sweat crossed his brow, the only thing betraying any sense that he was exercising.
“I wanted to tell you about Pennsylvania.”
“Now?”
“We can do both. Rest and talk.”
Marbury paused at the water bottle, his lips pursed. He said that Barris left after telling everyone the awful news that Helen was dead. Marbury was crushed. He had invested so much into hoping that Helen would make it, and despite not knowing her or even having ever talked to her before, he said that he felt a rapport. But Lucy seemed to show no emotion at all.
“You see this sometimes with children. Abused ones especially.”
“So you were finally convinced that she was abused?” I asked.
“At that point I was, yes.”
Marbury said that he tried to start a dialogue with her, which was difficult because she didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.
He said, “She was your mother, Lucy. I’m very sorry.”
“Don’t be so sorry.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. I still have her boo-boo.”
She held up her tiny fist, which was still closed.
“I think you can let it go now. She’s gone.”
Marbury looked at her. A tear came to his eye just thinking about what would happen to Lucy now that Barris was so distraught. Maybe a foster home. He simply couldn’t be trusted anymore with her, Marbury knew that. Broken bones could easily become something else. Something much worse and violent.
He said, “I’m afraid your mother’s resting with God now, Lucy. But I’ll take care of you. You won’t have to go back to Jacob anymore, I promise.”
“What about my dolly?”
“She can come with you.”
“Dolly likes her room. Jacob made her a chair.”
“I’ll get the chair back.”
“It rocks, you know.”
“Your dolly’s chair will rock in any room, Lucy.”
“But it won’t be my room.”
“You’ll have a brand-new room.”
“Not with stars. I ha
ve stars over my bed. They glow.”
“There are stars everywhere.”
“And a moon. I want my moon.”
“I’ll find you a new moon.”
“And God too. God likes my room.”
“God follows you everywhere, Lucy.”
“It’s cold, mister.”
“I know. It won’t be cold anymore, I promise.”
She fell back on her pillow and Marbury covered her up even tighter than before. Lucy was freezing.
She said, “I still have the boo-boo, mister.”
“Let it go, Lucy.”
“It’s in my hand.”
“Then give it to me,” he said.
“You won’t drop it.”
“I’ll hold on tight. I promise.”
Lucy cracked a faint smile and with her eyes starting to nod off to dreamland she relaxed her fingers.
She said, “Say hello to Mommy for me.”
Marbury didn’t pay attention to that and just scrounged up another blanket from the closet. But she was so cold. He could feel her little body shaking, teeth chattering. Marbury opened up the door and propped it, to get some heat from the hall. But that didn’t work. Like a fireplace with an open flue the room just became colder.
“Can someone get a space heater in here?”
One of the supply nurses went looking for one and came back with a few electric heating packs. She went in to hook them up.
“It’s freezing in here. We’ll move her next door, Father.”
“Is she OK?”
“Probably a draft.”
“She doesn’t look well,” said Marbury. “You know that she’s diabetic.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Marbury was about to help, moving the bed and Lucy in it, when he heard something, a loud wail. It was from Barris.
Marbury excused himself and ran down the hall to find out what was going on. He half wondered to himself whether Barris had finally gone off the edge and injured himself, or worse, injured the closest doctor that he could find. But he was wrong. Barris wasn’t hurt, Marbury discovered. He was just leaning against a wall—the wall holding him up, more like it—a stunned expression on his face.
“What is it?”
Barris stammered, “It’s Helen—”
“I’m sorry, Jacob. I—”
“No, no. She just asked for a glass of water.”
I screwed the plastic cap back on the water bottle and looked at it. Strange timing. Meanwhile, Marbury was bouncing the ball in between his legs with uncanny skill, grinning and acting like he could whistle without actually doing it. I was beginning to feel that I was being played a fool and I didn’t like it one bit.
I said, “You’re telling me a dead woman asked for water?”
He pulled up. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“How is this possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what did the doctors say?”
“They didn’t believe it. But then none of them actually saw her dead.”
“There you go. It was a setup.”
“By who?”
“Barris. Surely you didn’t trust him?”
“She was pulled from a wreck in front of my eyes, Peter. I saw it.”
“So?”
“So she was dying. I could even see that.”
“Dead people don’t sit up, Marbury, except in horror movies.”
He shrugged. “This one did.”
But Marbury said that he understood my reluctance to believe the story. He had a tough time believing it himself at first, instead focusing on what nobody thought about. The electricity. Helen was left on the life support machines throughout the power outage, and once they came back on so presumably did the machines.
“It was an explanation. But not the real one.”
“I guess you’re going to say next that you healed her.”
“No. Lucy did.”
Marbury said that he was listening to what Helen was telling a doctor, about how she felt, following his penlight with her eyes, when Abigail pulled him to the side. Her voice was almost a whisper.
She said, “It’s Lucy. I think she’s in trouble.”
Marbury left to find a bevy of doctors huddled in Lucy’s room. They were bent over and looking at her, flashing lights into her eyes and talking in medical talk. But Lucy wasn’t responding.
“What’s happening?” yelled Marbury.
Abigail said, “She’s unconscious. But she’s in good hands.”
The doctors kept mumbling to themselves but Lucy wasn’t moving.
Marbury turned pale, almost white. He felt woozy, as though he would pass out, and might have had he not propped himself up, his arm bracing the back of a chair for support.
Then it came to him. She was in insulin shock.
“Did she get her insulin?”
“Insulin?” Abigail blinked.
From the back of the room a voice spoke up.
It was the supply nurse. “She’s diabetic, Abby.”
Abigail’s face started to twist in horror. “She isn’t diabetic.”
“I checked her blood sugar myself.”
“I’m telling you, she’s isn’t diabetic.”
“But Father said—”
Marbury was stunned. “She wears an ID bracelet.”
One of the doctors, upon hearing this, picked up the child’s arm. A metal bracelet dangled in the air.
“He’s right!”
But Abigail just shook her head.
“That’s not her bracelet,” she said. “It’s her mother’s. She’s the diabetic.”
“But surely insulin won’t hurt her?” asked Marbury. “Will it?”
We continued our game but I wasn’t playing well. At least as well as I once remember playing against him. Easy shots I missed. Layups and open jump shots went wild, rolling off the rim straight into Marbury’s reaching arms. And the shots that he made were ones that I thought to be impossible for him, hook shots and long bombs that in seminary he’d always attempted but to no avail. Now everything that he threw up went in, making him look more invincible and me only more hapless.
I tried to make up for my lack of a game with sheer hustle and determination. I challenged every shot, I dribbled around in circles trying to tire him out, I rebounded with a fury reserved for a larger man than myself. But none of it worked. I was still falling behind. After Marbury sunk two more shots he called time, taking pity on me and my lungs before he readied me for the final doom.
“Guess I’m hot today,” he said.
I wanted to wipe that smile off of his face and might have with my fist if not for something that I remembered. Once a week in seminary, I punished him just like this, whether in a game or one-on-one, I creamed Marbury like no man before was ever creamed. And I showed him little mercy. Certainly not half the grace that he was showing me. He took the beatings well, unlike myself, and I never saw him as a loser, only as a man out of his element.
“You’re in good shape,” I said.
But Marbury said that wasn’t always the case. Before he left for Pennsylvania he was at the lowest point in his life, made only lower by the fact that he didn’t know exactly how low he was.
“I was fat. Not blubber fat but fat thinking. A real hotshot, I thought I knew everything. But God shut me up.”
“Or you elected to shut yourself up.”
“And why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this is your idea of a joke.”
“It’s no joke, Peter.”
“Then say something. Say something and I might be able to help you.”
“What can you do?”
“I’ll talk to the Bishop.”
But Marbury just shook his head.
He said, “I want to speak. Lord knows I try every day.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, but it’s gone.”
I must have given him a nasty look, for he added, “Haven’t you
ever lost anything before? It’s horrible.”
He knew that I had.
Maybe Marbury didn’t mean it that way or maybe he did and I was just kidding myself. I don’t know. But my thoughts went back to that day with Sandra and suddenly I was there again. I could see the whole scene unfold before my eyes.
We were at the railroad tracks.
Sandra saw the man from the caboose and took off running. I don’t know how but I bolted out as well, and the man didn’t try to stop me. Not at first. I was a few steps out of the caboose door and already down the stairs when I heard him yelling.
“Superman!”
But I just kept on running. Sandra was ahead of me, running at full speed. Her feet were flying along the railroad ties, taking two or three at a time. She was petrified. I ran as hard as I could, hoping that I could intercept her but I just couldn’t catch up. She couldn’t hear me. She didn’t even know I was behind her. My chest started to burn as I ran and I began to wheeze and cough.
It was my asthma.
“You’ll forget Superman!”
The man from the caboose was closing in on me. I started to run as fast as I could but I was falling behind. Sandra was ahead of me, crossing a thicket of trees right at the crossing signal. But the signal wasn’t on.
I turned around to find the man almost on top of me. I tried to push it but I just collapsed; my lungs were getting the best of me. The man trotted up and looked down at me. I thought that he was going to grab me, take me back to his caboose or something horrible, but he didn’t. He just smiled.
“Take Superman. I’ve already read it.”
And he handed me his comic book.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding, my head hurt. But the man just stood there. He didn’t do anything.
Then I heard a whistle.
“Four o’clock. Choo-choo.”
And he smiled.
Game point.
Marbury threw up a shot that missed, giving me a golden opportunity to take advantage. Thanks to my fierce play I managed to hack my way back up to even the score, a real accomplishment considering just how badly I was playing. I took the ball at the top of the key, or more likely where the key would have been if a podium wasn’t there first, and made my move. I dribbled a few times and spun to my left, a move that in my heyday would have faked Marbury out of everything below his belt. But not this time. He stuck to me like damp chalk, following me to the basket as my shot soared wide. He took the rebound, stepped back, and gunned.
The Unspeakable Page 18