Forty Martyrs

by Philip F. Deaver

  “Okay. First, tell me what you thought when she was talking to you.”

  “Well, it would have been just my luck, she appears to me and then speaks Hebrew or something.”

  Vasco heard someone squawking in the earphone.

  He went on: “It happened so quietly. In the movies, you know, they’ve got the closeups and the background music.”

  “Go on.”

  “And well, there was some personal stuff I’m not going to tell you, and she popped off a few good ones about baby boomers.”

  “No.”

  “She said she was irritated by the yuppie rush-hour joggers, that crowd, that runs in their little shorts and designer shoes in pure carbon monoxide rather than run unseen on side streets. And she was equally irritated by these people who must go to the biggest, bestdressed church, and all those people who think they’re saved. She said all of them better get that smug look off their face. There’s a hell. She promised me there is a hell.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea. She popped off a couple about money, too. Money as religion, greed, that sort of thing.”

  “She sounds very down on American society.”

  “Yeah, but—I mean—she was cute about it.”

  The woman was away from the phone a second, then came back. Her earphone was really crackling.

  “Yes. Well, Mr. Whirly just a little background. This happened at your house? The house I’m looking at right now?”

  “I don’t know what you’re looking at right now, but yeah, in the yard, yeah.”

  “What’s your profession?”

  “I’m a college professor. English. But I lost that job.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’m in Safety at the Murdock Mine, in Murdock—actually, sort of under Murdock. It’s a coal mine. Coal.”

  “Coal. I see.” He vowed not to try to be funny during the rest of the interview. “Mr. Whirly, what are you going to say to the many people who refer to you as a real whackjob?”

  “You think they will?”

  “Yes. Many people think that already, members of the public and community, et cetera. You’ve had yourself locked up since May nineteenth.” She paused a moment. “They’ll say, playing devil’s advocate here, people will say, Mr. Whirly, that you’re in some kind of state of mind. The local paper referred to you as, I’m quoting here, ‘hapless.’ And there’s a complicated divorce and a tacky little redneck struggle over the children. Collapse on the racquetball courts. You were dumped from your job at the university. Mid-life. The whole drill, you know.”

  He sighed. “Well, I…”

  “There are allegations that you’re funded by the Religious Right, did you know that? But I don’t think so, now that I speak with you. Now that I look at this picture of you in the paper flashing an obscene finger sign. I’ve talked with people around here that know you. I think you might be some kind of peculiar misfit. You’ve been round-holesquare-pegging it for a long time in this community.”

  “Well, I…”

  She said, “I can hear something in your voice, hostile and unstable. Or I think maybe you’re pulling my leg here, the public’s leg as it were. With this whole business.”

  “You don’t think the Virgin Mary would appear to somebody?”

  “Not in Illinois, no.”

  Vasco hung up.

  It was a full hour later before the phone rang again, and Vasco was just about to jerk the cord out of the wall. But it was Melanie Junior: “Dad, guess what happened. You know the lady from TV you were talking with? Well, the WCIA news truck just hit a pole over by the courthouse. The driver split his lip, and they’ve taken the interview lady to the hospital with a broken leg. I mean, she totally broke her leg!”

  •

  June 13th began on June 12th. Lowell and Ann Rook kept phoning, leaving new developments on the recorder. Traffic in the area was reported to be increasing. The local motels were full. The Catholic Diocese of Springfield put out the word, and the Franciscan Monastery at Illiopolis and the Benedictines from Aurora had met deaver together and come up with a concelebrated sunrise mass that would be held outdoors in the Tuscola park amphitheater. The merchants planned sidewalk sales.

  Scott Street was blocked off from Court Street to Ohio, and Niles Avenue from Daggy to Ficklin. Big gray plastic portable toilets were set up in a row on Scott down by Judge Helm’s house.

  Vasco was looking out the window, watching the flapping of the canvas awning over the t-shirt stand down by the Rivertons’.

  What a strange life, he thought.

  •

  On the morning of the 13th, he moved the chest of drawers blocking his bedroom door, went down the front stairs, and walked out onto the front porch of his house. There was scattered applause. He calculated it for about nine o’clock. Gloria Steinem had had Orson Morrell rope off the whole area in the sideyard between the Rittenauers’ and Vasco’s own place, using crime scene tape. A modest crowd was there, and quiet. Some people in the crowd had signs. One said:

  vasco for pope!!

  Another said:

  support the ths band trip, fourth of july parade, chicago

  One said:

  hail mary, full of grace

  He was struck by the color and the quiet of the little crowd. He saw everybody, Melanie Senior and the girls, Lowell, Gloria Steinem—Ann Rook, in the distance, standing alone, in the shade of Ruth Fuller’s horse-chestnut tree. He even saw Ben Carlyle there, too—mysteriously, his arm was in a sling. Vasco went around to the side yard and turned on the sprinklers.

  It never occurred to him that after all this, she might let him down and not show. He stood in the driveway watching the area where she had appeared before. In time there was a stir in the trees and the sun seemed to spin like a pinwheel. She was visible only to him. He felt his soul open to her like a rose. On this visit, she spoke only of him and his character, and he listened the whole time. Maybe this is what you wanted to know: at the end of it, she blessed us all, though Vasco Macon Whirly was the only one who knew it for sure.

  THE FIRE

  LOWELL AND THE ROLLING THUNDER

  Long before the fire, back when things were going fairly right, Lowell Wagner found himself out in the Douglas County countryside on a car ride with Wally and Carol Brown. They were coming back from an AA meeting in West Ridge during a phase when they’d all quit drinking and this short car-pooling journey put them together, as friends and fellow recoverings. Ironic perhaps—perhaps somewhat inappropriate, too, in that Lowell, at that time, was Carol Brown’s shrink. It was a small town.

  Lowell had counseled Carol for years, predating her marriage to Wally. Though Lowell knew Wally a little (they both were professors at the college, Lowell in Psychology, Wally in History), he didn’t know him well. From a distance, he seemed bright, intense, often funny but a little sullen sometimes. Not that Carol said much about him—she didn’t. Just that it was a small town.

  So that’s where things stood on the day of the West Ridge drive. And while Wally seemed quiet and odd en route, he was completely out of whack driving back. He had expressed the opinion that crosscountry was shorter and quicker than the highway and, being the captain, he insisted. Lowell, not wanting a boring male-ego argument about the best route, and having no classes or appointments that afternoon, acquiesced. Accordingly, they headed home from West Ridge on the diagonal, northeast to southwest. It was early June, and they sank into the humid countryside, fields of soybeans, knee-high Illinois corn, bluest sky, brightest sun. Lowell was comfortable, riding shotgun, sitting sideways so he could see Wally and also Carol, who was sitting in the middle of the backseat. Wally, eyes dead ahead, leaned forward over the wheel and pressed a mile west, then a mile south, then another mile west, doggedly pausing to decide at every unmarked crossroad.

  Carol was originally from New York City and, even for an AA meeting held in the modest West Ridge Methodist Church basement, was dr
essed up. In fairness, the West Ridge AA meeting was known to be more upscale than what you got at the Green Street Y in Champaign or the Boy Scout Cabin facility in Tuscola or the Catholic Church hall in Cerro Gordo. Drying-out doctors countywide opted for the West Ridge meeting, as did many attorneys and thus the other entitled professionals, including the most landed of the farmers. In fact, the West Ridge gathering had the feel of the Kaskaskia Country Club, which was where this same caste had nurtured their alcoholism before one by one they bottomed and went on the wagon. Carol wasn’t overdressed, though she wouldn’t have cared if she had been because she did like to look good.

  And she seemed to enjoy the company of two men on the leisurely drive. She chattered and waved her arms, positing gossipy theories and stretching each actual case to make the story better. Meantime, as he listened, Lowell began to notice that, despite the air conditioner pumping frigid, beads of sweat were welling on Wally’s forehead and lip. One drip streamed from his sideburn down his cheek and, after a flash from a sunbeam, slipped into the creases of his neck. Then for a moment Lowell was drawn into a Carol story, and when he checked back again, their silent driver had gone blotchy and dank. Whatever was coming over Wally was coming fast. Carol acted as though she didn’t notice, and maybe in fact she didn’t, or maybe, Lowell rationalized, this was normal enough for Wally and nothing to be concerned about. But about the time he considered that, Wally slowed the car and steered it to the slanting edge of the country road, on what would have to pass for a shoulder but was more of a ditch, and rolled to a stop.

  Carol leaned forward over the seatback. “Are you okay?” She touched Wally on the shoulder and leaned forward so she could see his face. “Yikes, you look awful.”

  Wally looked over at Lowell. “It might be good if you took over.”

  “Okay,” Lowell said. Quick, he slid out to go around. They were so much on the slant that his door fell open, and he stepped out into gravel and weeds. To close the door he had to lift it until it latched. And then, as happens sometimes in this world when things are going right, Lowell made a casual but fortuitous decision. Instead of taking the easier route out of the ditch around the front of the car, he was, after wrestling with the door, sort of leaning to the rear and so went around that way instead. He was, in fact, exactly behind the car when suddenly the most astounding thing happened. It took off. The tires spewed gravel and clods of tar, sandblasting him, and the Browns’ aging Chevrolet peeled out and tore away down the road. Lowell stood staring, mouth open. In the first flash, he wondered if they’d conspired to leave him out there. He knew that wasn’t it, but it was hard to imagine anything else. He heard the Chevy’s eight-cylinder engine wind out and then go above wound out, to a sort of high-octane scream, the car swerving left and right between the ditches. Rumbling toward them from the opposite direction was a loaded gravel truck, clouds of dust behind it. The Chevy swerved, corrected, swerved again, tires raging against the sun-softened blacktop. The truck went deep into the east-bound ditch and Lowell involuntarily raised his hands to his head as the Chevy whipped by it, narrowly missing, the truck driver blasting the horn, the Browns’ motor loud against the quiet of the countryside even though the car was now a chrome dot sailing into the distance. The rumbling, angry gravel truck whammed past Lowell, the bearded driver offering him his middle finger, as Lowell stood dumbfounded in the middle of the road.

  Now the Browns’ car was out of sight and the countryside was quiet again. Light wind and the call of the redwing blackbird. An airplane high above and far away, car tires on a distant road somewhere else. Prairie wind. There was nothing else to think: the Browns were dead. Had to be. The car had ducked a bumper, went end over end, rolled a few times ejecting the pilot and his dressedup wife, skidded on its top into a field. Boom crash bang. Had to be. Lowell stared up the road.

  Presently a car appeared. Presently it was clear it was the Browns’ car, coming back for him. Presently it pulled up, Carol driving.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  •

  While Wally sat in the back seat and Lowell drove, Carol rode shotgun and apologized a lot. Between apologies she told Lowell every detail she could remember about the wild ride.

  What happened?

  As Lowell slid out of the car and wrestled with the door, Wally lost consciousness. It was a bench-style seat, and as Wally slumped over, his right leg and foot pressed the gas pedal. The car was still in gear.

  Luckily, Carol was already leaning over the seat. Though the acceleration threatened to throw her back, she managed to grab the wheel. Then she was half standing in the back, leaning way over and craning to see out the windshield, with one hand trying to steer, the other attempting to rouse her husband back to duty. His thighs were pressing up against the lower arc of the steering wheel, and freeing the wheel by pushing down on his legs resulted in pressing his foot harder on the gas. It crossed her mind to turn off the ignition, but something told her that would lock the steering wheel. The swerving threw her around and that caused more swerving—she knew she would flip it. The motor roared and the tires squealed, and she could see the gravel truck coming, and she yelled at Wally, “Wake up, you stupid fuck—you’ll kill us both!” and was driving with one hand and pounding on him and tugging at his shoulder with the other, but the red stripe on the speedometer stretched past eighty miles an hour and Wally didn’t move. She knew they were both as good as dead. She saw the intersection coming. She bent her legs like a jockey standing in the stirrups and they shot onto the rise where the two roads crossed. The tires left the ground––she could almost feel the air beneath them–– before it slammed down a little sideways on the other side, and in the lurch from that she hit the gear shift, wonderful old gear shift on the column, and found neutral. Then, even though the motor was revved, the car slowed and glided and slowed some more and finally stopped just as Wally sat up in his seat.

  On their way back to town, Lowell drove, and Wally rode embarrassed and silent in the backseat. Lowell stole glances at him in the rearview mirror. What was up with this guy? The sun went behind afternoon clouds, and Lowell dropped himself off at the college. He had no idea what to say. He gave them a perfunctory goodbye, then got in his own car and watched as Carol slid back into the driver’s seat and drove away.

  •

  Lowell was married to Veronica. Had always been. Would always be. He’d lived crazy in his youth. After he was married, twenty-two years ago, things got better. Recently, he had ten active clients, enough to make a steady flow. Apart from teaching class, department committee work, and all that. His clients would sit a few at a time in his waiting room, then come in and talk to him for an hour. Astounding, the things he heard in those sessions. The range of human behavior, the irony, the confusion, the primitive simplistic maneuvers and convolutions, the courage, beauty, loss, inconsistency, grief. The lies. For some, things never went right and, for many, though he would never say it, there was no hope.

  Veronica, for some reason, was hope for Lowell. Always had been. Years before they were married they’d attended a Dylan concert in Chicago. Rolling Thunder Revue. Lowell had been to many concerts, but this one caught him in a different way. Even though they were close to the stage, he had binoculars—not dopey little opera things but real field glasses. Through the haze of weed, the blast of music, and the dizzying wonder of bouncing girls, Lowell stared at the famous Mr. Bob Dylan, icon. The binoculars were powerful. He could see the eyes. He could see the guy was as crazy as he was rich—and somehow also he was innocent, dangling right at the end of his boywonder phase, a little Howard Hughes starting to show at the gills, as he mutilated old favorites––“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Don’t Think Twice.”

  Maybe all poets and/or rock stars were like this, Lowell was thinking. Maybe that was their thing, pushing themselves further and further until they were pretty much out of earth orbit. Or maybe that old motorcycle accident had done something profo
und and permanent. Then, inside the round optical field of the binoculars, as Lowell watched Dylan begin the traditional folk song “The Water Is Wide”—did this happen?—suddenly Joan Baez stepped into the circle of light and joined Dylan at the microphone. She had grown into full adulthood—beautiful and somehow open, her hair shorter now, a grace and calmness, Nixon gone, the war over. The audience raised a big cheer. She smiled and then through the speakers her voice joined Dylan’s—hers lithe and steady, braided into his rasp and growl. Something loose and desperate in him, something anchored and solid about her. He was doing his thing. She was trying to get him to remember their rehearsal. Through the binoculars, Lowell watched them stare at each other as they sang.

  In bed the night of the Browns’ Car Debacle, Veronica and Lowell, on clean sheets in their small, sweet-smelling home on the northwest side of town, lay close. Their daughter, who was in college but lived at home, was in her room down the hall.

  “So, how was the meeting?” Veronica said into his ear.

  “What meeting?”

  “I thought you went to AA.”

  “It was good.”

  “Good,” she said. She kissed him on the neck. They stayed quiet again for a while. “So,” she said, “what’s up, besides not you.”

  Yes, he was preoccupied. Until then, he’d said nothing about the drive home from West Ridge. In the hours since, in his mind, the story had evolved into a new insight into his client, Carol Brown—her super-human insistence on survival—some fierce thing in her that stood up to her own death and said, “Not this time, pal,” and about how a day that had seemed ordinary, even peaceful, had so suddenly become dangerous. There, in bed, Lowell still smelled the oily metallic burn of near death.

  Staring up at the ceiling, he told his wife about it. She was speechless.

  “But anyway…” he said, hand relaxed on her leg, “turned out fine.”

  Then up on one elbow, she stared at him. “Well.” She was tense. He could feel the heat. “Worst case, I’d have gotten a phone call this afternoon, and tomorrow your daughter and I’d be arranging the funeral.” She sighed big, thrashed her pillow to get it right. “Lowell, Lowell, Lowell.” She flung herself back to the other side of the bed and was fidgety for a while. Soon she said, “Do you remember the Trumbull Street house in New Haven? And we slept the whole summer on a fold-out couch?” She always did this. When she was bedeviled in some way about him, she would tear into the past for something stable to shore up their common foundation. It was her intuitive way of re-establishing their balance.