Forty Martyrs Page 6

  In the old days, back at the college where he taught before this one, Nick would always drink beer and sit around and loudly wonder about women. “I mean, what the hell do they want?” he’d say, his voice and beer mug raised, and with bemused delight Lowell Wagner would lift his mug, too.

  “They probably want the truth!” Lowell would offer, the perfect straight line. Lowell was Carol’s shrink. That other place, it was a very small town.

  “Oh God, not the truth!” Nick would call out, and they’d both laugh at the boys-will-be-boysness of it. Lowell never knew about Nick and Carol, although this had always made Nick wonder what Carol did talk about in their therapy sessions.

  In those days, everybody was always saying this or that about what people wanted, like it was really discoverable or like it even mattered. Mostly, men acquiesced to just about anything if the sex was good and there was a modicum of wiggle room. Women were more mature about it, it seemed, and more particular. During Nick and Carol’s secret rendezvous, Carol would lie back and receive every bit of the conveniently little Nick could offer in cramped space and stolen time. Nick loved the illusion that this secrecy and stolenness was what women wanted, and Carol let him have that illusion for many months before, suddenly, out of nowhere, she married Wally Brown.

  “Jesus!” Nick would bark, and Lowell would raise his hands in the air, the universal gesture of men’s feigned puzzlement about women. “No, I mean it. Women are like dealing with a frigging cat.”

  Nick hadn’t made friends like Lowell in the new place. The bar they always drank at was at the township line, out in the country, because back then the town itself was dry. Nick’s eyes would take in the waving oaks through the neon Busch sign in the bar’s small front window. They were the trees of Rice’s Woods, a dense oak forest with random roads leading in—one of Nick and Carol’s favorite parking spots. The fact that Lowell hadn’t known all that was going on was yet another in the chain of betrayals Nick regretted, and also doggedly maintained, in his scattered little life. To make it all worse, toward the end of his time there, Lowell quit drinking. No more loud commiserations out at Squeak’s.

  Nick and Dave came up the front walk at last, and Nick worked the lock and slid back into the house. Still dark, but NPR had clicked on which meant it was six o’clock. In the kitchen, he toweled off Dave who submitted to this rubdown like Al Capone at French Lick.

  He showered fast, put on jeans and a jacket, pulled his cell phone off the charger, and looked in on Buck, who was still hunkered, bunkered, and asleep. “Davie’s walked and fed. See you in a couple of days.”

  “Uh-huh” came the grunt from under covers. “Where you goin’?” Two blankets covered the boy in so many heaps it was hard to discern a body in the bed.

  “Down to the river to meet with some turkeys from Louisville, I told you before.”

  “Okay.” The sleeping behemoth rolled over. “Have fun,” he grunted. A third blanket was artfully draped over the window so Buck could sleep well into broad daylight. “Did you walk the dog?”

  “It’s handled. Sleep good.”

  •

  Even Athens, Ohio had a beltway, Highways 50 and 33, and after hitting McDonald’s for supplies, Nick got on a stretch of it and went down two exits to the interchange with Hocking Road. He had a bag load of bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits and three large cups of coffee, and at the Hocking exit he slowed way down and tried to spot Mac Pellier, his old homeless Vietnam buddy. He squinted down through the fog and saw something moving. Had to be Mac. So Nick rolled down the ramp with the flashers on because stopping on an exit ramp in the dark and the rain, even at the lightest beginnings of deaver Athens’ miniature rush hour, was a good way to get smacked, and this promised later to be a fairly busy exit ramp or Mac Pellier wouldn’t be out there leaning on his crutch with his “will work for food” sign. Nick honked and flashed, and Mac waved. Checking his rear view, all clear, Nick took one sandwich out of the McDonald’s bag and set it in the passenger seat. Out of the drink holder on the floor he got one of the cups of coffee. He pulled close to the left curb at the bottom of the ramp. Mac was already up off his golf stool (Nick gave him the stool in the winter) and wielding his crutch expertly to the car.

  “Hey, man, it’s fucking wet out here,” Nick said through the window.

  “Ah, not too bad.”

  “Ha. Not too bad.”

  “It’s nothin’, to tell the truth. To what ya get sometimes.”

  “Whatever you say.” Nick handed him the food bag. He checked the rearview again. “Nobody’s coming—just set it down and come back so you don’t spill this.” He lifted the big cup of coffee.

  So Mac did that, he put the sandwich bag down on a tuft of soaked scrub grass next to the golf stool, then gimped back to Nick’s car. Nick looked into the dark, the shadows of the overpass, the undergrowth planted by the state on the slope up to the highway. Rough mean cable fence. Hard wet galvanized metal guardrail. God what a life.

  He handed over the big cup. “I’m going to keep the rest of the coffee then, if that suits you.”

  “Whatever floats your boat,” Mac said in his growly voice. Now he was holding his cup, leaning on the crutch and using both hands to get the flap up on the plastic lid. His hands were shaking. He looked in the car. “You all packed for something?”

  Nick shifted into drive. “Yeah. Going down to the river to meet some people. Just overnight. Where’d you sleep?” Nick knew he probably didn’t want to know.

  “Didn’t yet. Going into the shelter this afternoon. Got a toothache.” Mac looked up the exit ramp toward the highway.

  Now from this angle Nick saw that half the ruddy old face was swollen. “Oh damn, I hate a goddamned toothache. You okay?”

  “My dad pulled his own tooth once,” Mac said, and he was laughing. “I couldn’t do that in a million jillion.” He sipped at his very hot coffee.

  Nick slipped the car into park and checked the mirror again. He popped the trunk and climbed out into the rain, careful not to knock Mac down with the door. In his bag, in his shaving kit, he thumbed out a few aspirin, and he also spotted one of those tiny plastic airplane bottles of Johnny Walker—God knows how long that had been in there. He thought about it for a nanosecond and grabbed it, too.

  Standing out there with Mac, he pulled down his bucket hat. “Why don’t you go into the shelter earlier?” Before Mac could answer, he said, “You got a pocket?” He dropped the aspirin and scotch into Mac’s ugly bent hand and Mac jammed the stuff into his big raggedy blue-green army overcoat. Then Nick handed Mac a ten-dollar bill and that went into the coat, too. “Won’t the shelter take you before the goddamned afternoon?”

  “I ain’t at the shelter.” Mac drank coffee, stared at Nick. This was the logic Nick loved. Under Mac’s raincoat was a sweatshirt with a hood, and the hood was soaked, draped over his skull.

  “Well, it’s raining, man. You need to be at the fucking shelter. That’s what they’re for. That’s why they call ’em that. C’mon, I’ll carry you over there right now.” Nick’s current girlfriend, a woman named Emma, worked at the shelter, and he really didn’t want to encounter her as he slipped out of town on this particular mission. But she didn’t get in until eight o’clock, so the coast was clear for a couple of hours.

  “Afternoon’s fine.”

  “C’mon, Sergeant, get in the car.”

  “Afternoon’s fine. Just call me Mac.”

  Mac and Nick had a friendship that was this and this only, based, for Mac’s part, on their commonality, which was that they’d both served in Vietnam, and actually had both gone deep into Cambodia deaver back in the day. This particular thing they had in common really made them brothers, because it wasn’t just every Vietnam veteran who was there in the time we were chasing Charlie over that border. Mac seemed to like Nick because of this and didn’t know the whole Nickin-Vietnam thing was a huge fucking lie.

  Nick looked into Mac’s eyes and vowed that someday he’d stra
ighten this story out. Mac leaned hard on the crutch, looked up the exit ramp over Nick’s shoulder. Nick stepped off the curb and into his car. “They got a dentist at the shelter?” He dried his face with his coat sleeve, found a McDonald’s napkin and tried again.

  “They got pliers there and somebody that can get ahold of it. That’s alls ya need.” Mac laughed, and Nick remembered Mac was already missing a front tooth. “You got any sugar?”

  Nick looked in the bucket seat next to him, nothing. “Hey, maybe it’s in the bag with the food.” He indicated down on the ground behind Mac, the plastic bag. “If it isn’t there, we’re out of luck, sorry.” The rain was really coming down now. “If you get something in the stomach, your tooth will feel better.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “Last call on the ride to the shelter.”

  Mac worked his one-legged way back to the golf stool, and when the light turned, Nick shot across Hocking Road and back onto the beltway heading south on Route 50 toward the Ohio River. The first sign of light was beginning to show in the dark blue, water-filled sky.

  •

  He was glad it was raining, even if Sergeant Mac had to hobo wet today. He was glad for the cottony wafts of fog that ran across the road in the low places, and for Carol’s voice once she called and began chattering to him as she made her way to the same place from her own direction. She told him about her recent piano recital, held in great old Music One, a special recital room in the venerable music building he remembered so well. He remembered the wintery sound of her piano. He remembered the warmth from the radiators that heated each glassed-in practice room, so that the outside windows would first steam, then stream with condensation, the cold held at bay outside, the red flush of Carol’s cheeks as she played, and the music and the timelessness of the rooms themselves holding the warmth in. That was back when they’d first been together, when she’d been between marriages. He turned up the volume on the phone so he could hear over the road noise and wipers, and once his wet jacket was off and stretched over the back of the passenger seat, and the car heater was cranking and the coffee was cool enough to drink, he was pretty happy.

  “Ben came,” she said. Ben Carlyle, cranky chair of the English Department but a lover of good music. “He sat with Wally and the kids.” Her voice was desolate when she said his name, always had been. Lord knew what their history was. She’d been married to Wally four years come August. Shortly after the wedding, Nick and his son had moved to Nick’s new job in Ohio.

  “Did Wally enjoy the recital?” Nick asked her. It was a probing question, and there was information in the tone of her reply.

  “Hell if I know.”

  The driving was automatic. Old highways of the north have their own cracked-up rusty awful charm. There’s a Reduce Speed sign, then 45, then 35, and the road worms into the heart of some dead business district, chipped glass beads on a worn strand of string. Normally the car dips through the town, grudgingly conforming to its speed requirements, then shoots out the other side with some considerable relief. Good. At least that’s not where we’re going. Good. That’s not where we always lived, a tiny place on Fourth Street across from the church and Grandma’s waiting for dinner. Good. Onward, miles to go. He drank the coffee and slowed down the wipers.

  “Yeah, I guess Wally enjoyed it,” she said. “Is it foggy where you are?”

  “I think so. I think that’s fog.”

  “Very funny. You have some coffee?”

  “How’s Wally doing?”

  “Who knows? Not me.”

  Nick leaned back in his bucket seat and remembered Wally Brown, his big, dark brown eyes, his focus and intensity, his eccentric bent way of fast-walking across campus, books under his arm, steaming toward his classroom where he’d give ’em hell.

  “Still getting stellar evaluations from the students though. He’s great with the kids.”

  Nick sought to change the subject. “What did you play in the recital, honey?”

  “The usual stuff. Wow, it’s foggy here, too.”

  “Where are you?” Nick loved cell phones. When people used to talk on the phone, “Where are you?” wasn’t a likely question. You had to know where a person was to be talking on the phone with her. The phone was hooked to a place.

  “In some hills or something. I don’t know where I am, actually. How’s Dave?” Dave was a pup when Carol last saw him, before Nick moved away.

  Her voice brought back the old days. No matter how good your memory is, when you talk to someone you once knew, and still kind of do, the edges of what’s specifically that person always come back and surprise.

  “He’s been a pretty good dog. He and Buck will have a good time while I’m gone.”

  “Buck’s a good boy, too,” she said. “Not in a dog way, of course.”

  “Yeah. Buck is a good guy.”

  The connection crackling, Carol said, “I want to tell you something before we get cut off.”

  “Good news or bad news?” The connection was fading fast.

  “No, really. I want to be real honest with you. Can you hear me?”

  Then there was a beep in his ear. “I’m getting another call. Back in a second.” Nick fumbled with the phone. “Hello?”

  “It’s still me,” Carol said. “I want to tell you something.”

  He clicked away, trying the switch again. He got a glimpse of the phone screen and saw that the second caller was Buck. He looked back at the road. This is how people have wrecks.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Hey, Dad,” Buck said. “Your girlfriend called, wants you to give her a buzz. She’s at work.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Okay, I’ll call her. Everything else all right?”

  “Yeah. Rain. I hate it.”

  “Me too. I’ll call you when I get to the river.”

  “I’m gonna make spaghetti. Bye. This afternoon I mean. Bye.”

  Nick clicked back to Carol. “Back. It was Buck, speak of the devil. I have to call somebody. I’ll be back to you, maybe an hour or so. I’m about two hours from the river.”

  “Wait, I have to tell you something.”

  Nick didn’t want to hear whatever she was going to say.

  “First off: I’m going to have to leave early.”

  Nick could hear the road running along under her tires, wherever she was.

  “And I didn’t throw away the letters. Don’t be mad.”

  “I knew you’d say that.” He took a deep breath. They were good letters. Maybe he was glad she still had them. “I’ve got to make some calls. I’ll get back to you later. I have a confession to make, too. Bye.”

  He cut her off as she was saying “okay” and fumbled through his contacts list—all this and driving at the same time. Now he was feeling sour. Carol was the other person he’d lied to about Vietnam. He remembered when it came out of him, six years before. And, for him, it had plagued the relationship ever since. It was always a really bad lie, which was why he didn’t tell it anymore, but there was a time when he thought he could handle it or when he thought he needed it or when he thought whatever he thought when, on a moment’s notice, deaver in some cul-de-sac of conversation, he slipped into it. Over the years, this particular lie, hanging out there between him and Carol, wore him out, and he felt plenty of self-disgust when it surfaced from time to time and he came to the road’s fork where either he had to rid the world of it and be humiliated or sustain it with a couple of relevant remarks and quickly engineer a change of subject. He’d told the lie only a couple of times and always hated himself afterwards, but from it he learned, over long years, the natural force of truth, which had a tug like an undertow and his arms were growing tired of resisting. He and Carol had rendezvoused a number of times over the years. This time he was going to fix the lie even if it cost him the woman. And then, while he was bleeding, maybe he’d come home and purge it with Mac Pellier, too.

  He called Emma.
“You rang?” he said.

  “Yes, Buck gave you the message?”

  “He just said to call.”

  “Okay, well, two things.”

  “Why didn’t you call me yourself?”

  “I had something I wanted to talk to him about, too. Some work. That’s good, right?”

  “Yes. But calling him is brutal at seven-thirty in the morning.”

  “I noticed that,” she laughed. “But you know, he’s going to have to get up in the morning for any job.”

  “True that. So it was a test?”

  “Stop it. Not a test. Anyway, two things. A job we have here for Buck. And this: we sent somebody out to pick up the Sarge and he said he saw you this morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “He showed me a small bottle of scotch that he said you gave him.”

  Nick sighed audibly if not theatrically. “God, that guy’ll say anything.” And he winced inside himself. “What has happened to the mental health system in this country?”

  “Anyway, he got it somewhere.”

  He laughed. “I’m telling ya, you just can’t trust the homeless anymore.”

  Always earnest, Emma didn’t hear the joke. “Not you, okay. That’s what I thought. He didn’t drink it—we’re real proud of him.”

  Nick sighed again. “I gave him the scotch.”

  “Oh,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. “That’s not a very good thing, in his specific case.”

  “I know. I did it on a whim. The guy’s face was out to here with that toothache.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Nick—don’t make excuses.”

  “Well I also gave him coffee and two bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits, and I didn’t see you guys out there in the rain making sure he had breakfast in the roadside weeds standing on his one-and-only remaining goddamned leg. A war patriot. Gave a limb to that fucking mess over there. Begging food on the Hocking exit.”

  “He didn’t eat the food. He got tormented by this bottle of scotch and phoned us from a pay phone on Hocking. He was all worried he’d go on a bender and be tossed from the program. He said he doesn’t trust you anymore.”