The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  “Is he out there?”

  The priest said carefully, “Can’t you tell him from the others?”

  “Not with all their winter stuff on.”

  They went to the window and stood watching—the silverhead man and the bald one.

  “He’s wearing the green coat with the fur in the trim of the hood,” the priest said. “Don’t be offended, the fur is acrylic.”

  The tall boy labored hand-over-hand up the chain of a swing while the others barked at him. His hood fell down. A peculiar face was exposed, small and blunt, a surprising face in that it did not right away mean to Tilly anything. The priest watched Tilly, while Tilly watched the boy ascending through the snow like a salmon fighting the rapids.

  “The dossier you left was in sparkling good order,” the priest said.

  “A lawyer prepared it.”

  “He seemed to have excellent command over our law on these questions.”

  “We hired a consulting attorney over here.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  Tilly said, “The consultant doesn’t think Elroy will come to grief from the authorities unless he tries to come back here. Do you agree?”

  “I suspect Interpol has more important work to do, if that’s what you mean. The judge will likely accept you and Mrs. Tilly as next of kin. Given your ages he wouldn’t give either of you custody by yourselves, but together as you are I think you have a clear case, at least morally. However, I’m confused about something.”

  Tilly went on watching the snow and the strange child climbing the chain while another child stood apart looking at a phone and chanting the time.

  “You and Mrs. Tilly were divorced.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And she is Mr. Heflin’s stepmother.”

  “In practice, his mother.”

  “In the same merely practical way that you are to be considered his father. And you have reconciled and remarried.”

  “We have.”

  “But the dossier is mute as to when this second union took place. Was it before you received my letter? The court will want to know when exactly you and Mrs. Tilly remarried.”

  “It was six months ago.”

  “Goodness. Congratulations. It must be—no, I can’t pretend to imagine the challenges of marrying at our age. But you see the question about which the judge will wish to satisfy himself, regarding the stability of the home? A marriage cobbled together for the placation of the court—forgive me if I presume.”

  Tilly waited for some veil to lift, to see in the distant boy what Louisa had seen in the picture.

  “Why has Mrs. Tilly not come with you? If I am being intolerably intrusive you might simply say that she has a phobia of flying.”

  “We flew together from Albuquerque. Before we went through passport control at Newark, she changed her mind. She feels a life has a right perimeter that’s unique for everybody, a fixed distance from where you started. You get a warning when you’re about to cross it. Once you do, you can never go back.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  “I crossed my perimeter a long time ago. She’s at a hotel in Newark, waiting. She believes if she went back home to wait it would be like saying she doubted you would let us take him with us.”

  “Saying to whom?” the priest asked.

  “You know,” Tilly said.

  “I do not.”

  “To God.”

  “If you’ll permit me to advise, when you speak to the judge, you might better say that your wife has a phobia of flying rather than dragging God into it. Also, the judge will want to assure himself of the household’s material capacities.”

  “Did you not see the financials in there?”

  “I should think three point two million U.S. dollars is sufficient, but I am speaking of the home itself.”

  “The house is almost done. We’re halfway moved in. I can have her send photos. There’s a school down in the village. Will the judge be an obstacle?”

  “Where?”

  “Near Santa Fe. A town called Chimayo. Will the judge be an obstacle?”

  “The judge will never grant your petition if he believes there is only one of you to look after the boy. He will conclude, and I won’t disagree, that the boy is better off here under the supervision of the state system than if he were likely to be orphaned in his teenage years.”

  “Fine.”

  “You see the boy coming down the chain there? In the green coat. You see his face clearly now?”

  “I do,” Tilly said.

  “I’m sorry to confess a trick, Mr. Tilly, but that boy is Georg. He arrived only last month.”

  Tilly turned around.

  “Don’t be angry.”

  In fact the American looked less angry than betrayed, and the priest feared the nascent bond between them had broken, and he had broken it, and made himself again an outcast, when he might have made himself a friend.

  “I don’t understand why you’d do that,” the American said. “I never said I’d met him. Listen, we won’t accept the boy growing up this way.”

  “Which way?”

  “Alone,” the American said.

  “I wonder whether you and Mrs. Tilly have any true relationship,” the priest said in a prosecutorial spasm he immediately regretted. “I wonder whether either of you has any relationship with the boy at all.”

  “Nobody else does.”

  “Nobody save one perhaps.” The priest did not identify this one. The question who this one was hovered like a spider building a web in the air between them, one man seeing its backside, the other its front. At certain angles the web was invisible, and each saw only the creature moving in space according to a path of its own imagining.

  “We have to do this, Louisa and me.”

  “And what if the judge should say, ‘Too bad. Your “have to” is not my “have to”’?”

  “I let Elroy down, I know that. He started with his reckless nonsense when he was a teenager. He tore things apart. He kicked and slugged. I don’t know if it gave him relief or some kind of euphoria, but it was my job to straighten him out, and I failed.”

  “What if the judge should say, This boy is not a table for you to atone yourself upon?”

  The American infuriatingly refused to be angry. “You have your rules, I understand. But if there’s no one else to take him, why stop us?”

  “Yet there is someone else.” The priest recognized they were on the brink of a miscommunication and chose to exploit it in order to impose on the American his own version of who the someone else was. “Her name is Wolbert,” he said.

  But the American had already pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket and taken out a slip of paper and was saying, “We’ve prepared for this.”

  “Her given name is Nora.”

  “Do you have a computer in your phone?” the American asked.

  “I advised her not to give up.”

  “Can you use the phone to get on the internet?”

  “But the judge obstructed her at every turn.”

  “Do you know how to use email?”

  The priest’s neck stiffened. “Of course.”

  The American read a web address. The priest conceded to enter it in the navigation bar on his phone’s browser. The American read him a username. Then the password FreedomToFire1971. The priest said he had understood Mr. Tilly not to have email, but the American, as if reciting from a script he had committed to memory, asked if he knew how to access the file of personal contacts inside of an account.

  “Why?”

  “Search for last name, D-R-U-V-I-E-T-E. First name E-V-I-J-A,” he said.

  The priest’s adroit thumb jabbed the letters. He read back an address.

  “You should see a phone number for that name in the contacts file.�
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  “I see it, but if this is not your email account is it instead Mr. Heflin’s?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We are violating the law. Whose phone number is this?”

  “The mother’s,” the American said.

  A thump came at the window. Snow splattered it. The priest did not look to record the party responsible.

  “I deny it,” the priest said.

  “You’re so sure about Elroy, but your letter makes it sound like you never considered the mother even existed. That’s her phone number. Call it.”

  “I am not sure of anything. That’s why I wrote you. What will happen if I call this number?”

  “Try it and see. The boy has a mother like anybody.”

  “Mr. Tilly, if I’ve fallen to treating you like an adversary, I hope you’ll forgive me. But please understand that for forty years I have been confronting this assumption based on my vocation that I regard women as poisonous or doers of dark magic or not-exactly-human creatures or that I don’t notice when women are there. I don’t deny the boy has a mother someplace. We have used every means to identify her. We have used all the relevant NGOs. We have made inquiries from Argentina to Switzerland, all of them blind stabs admittedly. No one is missing the boy anywhere. With any reciprocal action on her part, any whatsoever, she would surely have found us by now. I refuse to believe she’s dead. So then—and it costs me a lot psychologically to admit this, I don’t want it to be possible—the only conclusion I can reach is that she wants nothing to do with him.”

  “Why not call her and find out?”

  “You’ve already done it, I presume.”

  “She doesn’t pick up,” Tilly said.

  “If I have treated you as an adversary please understand that I have to, but only to a point. Have you called always from America? She would see that and know not to answer.”

  “Go ahead and try from here. If you can get her to answer the phone, I’ll stand up and applaud.”

  “I am not your adversary,” the priest repeated.

  “Don’t worry, Father, I know that,” the American said. “Is the judge my adversary?”

  “The judge is not your adversary. The judge is Mephistopheles.”

  The American laughed. Neither a scornful nor a polite laugh, but a true laugh. Easy in his body. The air went in and came out in a burst. “Good,” he said. “Let’s lick him.”

  The priest was alarmed. The American explained the usage. The priest did not understand and asked for a synonym.

  Tilly said, “Let’s you and me together knock him down.”

  They shook hands. The priest’s skepticism left him at the moment of the handshake, and he recognized it was on this man’s side that he had been working from the beginning.

  Yet the priest had to dial the number. The fluids of his inner ear seemed to slosh. Up resembled down. He rifled his jacket pocket and found a strawberry-flavored wafer cookie and tore open the foil wrapper and scarfed it while the phone rang, praying no one would answer, or better yet, the line would prove to have been disconnected. He offered his heart to the Lord with trust, thanksgiving, misgiving, fear. He gave back to the Lord the entirety of the life the Lord had given him, and the phone picked up, and a voice spoke in a language he knew for a fact was not Estonian. He had been studying Estonian in the free time he did not have.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN TILLY GOT BACK to Newark he took the hotel shuttle and found Louisa in the lobby bar looking daggers at a newspaper and scrawling all over it.

  It was almost suppertime, but neither of them could eat and instead they talked over what had happened: the voyage, the priest, the boy climbing the chain, the pensioner who had answered the phone, the priest trying four languages before with elementary Russian he was able to communicate with the draggle-voiced old woman who suggested that if he should manage to track down Miss Druviete, might he please remind her that a certain pensioner was still owed four months’ rent? Four months! One month of which perhaps Miss Druviete might be forgiven as the pensioner had long ago pawned Miss Druviete’s cheap furniture, and another let us say one month for the phone Miss Druviete had left in her apartment and which the pensioner had appropriated, although the pensioner still had had to pay for a charger, so let us calculate approximately seventy-five days’ rent was still owed. A considerable sum for one who had only the savings of a florist’s assistant. But she was not trembling in wait for her compensation. She had not seen Miss Druviete in three years.

  Rather than eating, Tilly and Louisa each drank two shots of bourbon—they had never drunk liquor together before. The occasion called for wild departures.

  She touched his speckled hand. She said, “I think it’ll work.”

  “Me too. But we have to go together next time. Unless there are two of us, they won’t let him go. The earliest the judge will meet us is March.”

  It was the seventeenth of January 2014, a Friday. Louisa made a door-creaking noise in the back of her throat. It was a new noise, and he didn’t yet know what it meant.

  * * *

  • • •

  UPSTAIRS IN THE HOTEL, with the blinds open to the thronged highway, they lay in the dark, naked and unashamed. Talking over things, then not talking.

  He thought about every part of her as he touched it, calling it by its right name and attaching it to the corresponding place in his mind. The deep mind that knows the elementary things before learning. Water and feet, sunlight and food. The mind that knows the time of our going out of being, and bears the record of our coming in. Memorizing her once and for all. There was a rock at the center of him, and he carved her name in it.

  19

  Potter Frade showed Annie Frade into the dark house.

  He stood behind her in the little foyer, and she held back her arms, and he pulled the loden coat from her shoulders. She stomped her overshoes on the rag mat to dislodge the snow on them. She poked her head toward the doorway that gave on the parlor, not stepping away from the mat, as though it were home base in a tag game. She looked aside to the kitchen and upstairs toward the bedrooms.

  Frade sang, “Home again, home again,” shoulders tight, his back bent as he unbuckled his boots and tied on his kidskin house shoes. He resembled a wood sprite, his ears pointed. “We could change the paper if you like,” he said, indicating the crinkled walls. “Mother won’t mind.”

  “Do you show me the room now, or how does it go?” she asked.

  But he said, “Larder’s over here.”

  She went with him and his lamp around the corner.

  “Mrs. Frade sleeps in there,” Potter said, pointing down a narrow hall to the room of his mother, who had gone away for the night of the wedding and was staying with relatives in town.

  The powder on Annie’s chest gave off a smell of peaches. He lit a lamp and showed her through the larder, stacked with pickled beans and watermelon rind, then to the kitchen and the back door. He opened it and pointed in the dark to the invisible barn and the old salt shed, which he had lately dismantled, fitted with glass walls, and turned into a greenhouse for the kitchen garden.

  She asked, “May I have a glass of water, Frade?”

  He worked the iron pump handle in creaking heaves. The room was dark and foreign with a wife in it.

  The water sopped her mouth: a bitter mineral tang. Before long, the town water would drain out of her, and her body would be composed of this here, her husband’s own element. To inhabit a place is to drink the water there.

  He rinsed the glass under the pump. Even his best clothes smelled of hay. The open rear door let in the stink of the cow manure in the near pasture. He said, “We could build an awning out there, for a place for you to read.”

  The wind pricked her face and she shut the door.

  She said, “Shall we go to the room now?”
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  He took her ponderous bag for her, and they went on up the stairs. The freshly painted spindles of the banister shone with white lead in the lamplight. Her big haunches pulled the legs up each step, and the nailheads flashed in the soles of her shoes.

  Two bedrooms comprised the second story, one to each side. Her belongings lay stacked on the landing where her brother had left them that afternoon. A vanity lamp stood atop the heap, but the old house had no electric yet.

  Frade said, “You choose which room you’d like to have. I sleep in this one here, but you could have it. This other was Louis and Fred’s.” He showed her the unused room, which had only a bed and bureau.

  Her eyes pursued him into the empty closet. Her stout red face tried to conform into a smile but failed. She said, “May we see your room, please?”

  In his own room the taller ceilings did not impede his head. Brass pins affixed topographical maps to the deal paneling. Bunk beds; a sawbuck table by the window and a plate of oatmeal cookies. The disassembled parts of a two-strike chainsaw engine sat atop the bureau alongside a diagram ripped from a catalog. A photograph of his two brothers who had died, one of diphtheria, one more lately in the war; a hand mirror next to a basin by the window; in the dustbin a mound of his hair he had cut for the wedding. She opened the top bureau drawer and found three pairs of his striped underpants, ironed, and a stack of tobacco plugs.

  He would not stop telling about the pieces of the engine, and she saw the larynx moving inside his shaven throat, exposing the place where his blood fed his brain.

  She took her bag from him. Then she approached his throat and seized it between her jaws. He was a lean man, and she had a big mouth, and she pressed her hand behind his neck, her teeth around the larynx, which tasted of wintergreen.

  He had been trying to tell her the chainsaw engine needed new gaskets, that was all. Then she bit him. It hurt some. And he stopped talking. Some part of his innards was killing him. A pain he could not exactly place, near the bottom of the pelvis, something inside, as though inflating. His hands took her shoulders and turned her backward. It seemed to him impolite of them to have done this. Though he stood in his own room, he was confounded as to where he was or what he was doing. A row of costume pearls ran like rivets along the bones of her spine, and his fingers began to undo the pearls from their loops.