Decatur (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE
The Price of Plush

There had been a learning curve in the beginning for Gar. And his first sojourns were messy affairs as he learned just how far he could go and what he was willing to do to lift the curse that haunted him. Now he rarely looked back and, in fact, had a hard time remembering many of the details of his travels over time—only fragments of memories remained like pottery shards from a broken ancient urn etched with warriors unearthed on a far-away island. He remembered floating in the sea for a long time, and coming to a new shore, and then the hunger beginning all over again. He was always welcome at the start. He would be welcome here too. As he stood at the basement steps leading up to the main floor of the parish house with bags of rose food and blood meal in both hands, he breathed in the damp air deeply. The old parish priest had touched the source and so he would be touched.

No-one had ever seen a garden grown wild be tamed so quickly. The tramp hacked and trimmed at the roses, impervious to their thorns, feeding them and spreading blood meal around their roots, so that when they bloomed in June there was sure to be a riotous profusion of color. He hauled the left-over stones that had littered a dark corner of the church basement since anyone could remember and made neat pathways, shoveling the dirt aside, spreading sand, and pressing the stones into place. For two days Gar worked feverishly, only pausing for meals, which Mrs. Napoli would leave for him on the kitchen table while giving dark looks to Father Weston when he questioned how long they were going to keep “the itinerant gardener.” Gar said very little and stuck to his work determined to make a good impression on the parish household.

On the third day Monsignor Lowell rose from his bed and, looking through his bedroom window, saw his garden being restored and declared himself pleased. On that day Gar took communion in the church at the 8AM Mass from Father Troy and was shown by Mrs. Napoli with some satisfaction to a proper bedroom with a real bed on the attic floor of the parish house. From his window there Gar could look out over Eldorado Street and the plain little modern city belching its processed crop fumes fed by the endless flat fields of corn and soybeans just beyond the Decatur city limits. This view offered great comfort to Gar because he knew out there somewhere was the source, and the old priest offered him the first clue as to where to find it.

Father Troy found himself humming snatches of “Peace Train” all that week. He hadn’t felt this good in a long time. At last he was engaged in the work that had led him into the priesthood - he was tending to God’s flock in an active way. Never mind that Father Weston bought him from Smith’s music store downtown the sheet music to “
Fools Rush In
”, he could keep his old school ways and snide remarks to himself. Gar was a lonely deep soul, a homeless vet in a cold uncaring world, and he needed help. Father Troy was answering the call and walking his talk.

Gar put his heart into everything he touched, thought Father Troy. It was spring carnival week at the parish, the biggest fundraising event all year for the school, and of course volunteers were short. All that week, Gar winked at the nuns as he bolted together the flimsy stalls made years ago by the Knights of Columbus. Picnic tables had to be unloaded and spread out over the asphalt playground and the rental tent set up for the school band and Pop’s Prairie Accordion Orchestra, a St. Pat’s spring carnival staple since the fifties, Father Weston said, overruling any new musical suggestions by Father Troy with a withering look. Father Troy lent Gar his bicycle that week so he could cycle all around town to make pick-ups of the borrowed Japanese lanterns and tablecloths which he would pile high in the wicker basket, looking almost like a happy overgrown teenager in his eagerness to help. But when the couple of hired carnies arrived with their two-bit games of chance and strength, Gar easily went from one to the other, smiling and lightly tapping their chests, laying down a kind of law. Even though the older bearded carnie was nearly the same size as Gar it was no contest as to who was the stronger. You could tell Gar had their number and wouldn’t be afraid to play it. Last year there had been some rumor of cheating: not any more. The carnival committee was glad for the help and while they viewed his vet status with the usual suspicions they were too short-handed to be anything but Midwestern nice.

That Saturday, the weather conspired to give St. Pat’s a perfect day for the fund-raiser and soon pick-up trucks, station wagons and sedans lined the streets around the church, parish house and grade school. Father Troy and Father Weston, both in long black frocks, milled around the crowds from their parish and the one across town, St. James’s. Father Troy kept his eye out for Gar, he didn’t want some insensitive soul to insult the parish guest but he needn’t have worried. Gar was in rare form, smiling widely as he strolled the carnival “grounds”. Father Troy was amazed how easily Gar won the classic “Ring the Bell, Win a Kewpie Doll” -- one swing and the bell rang like a five-alarm fire bell. And then Gar gave the doll to the first little girl he saw. The parishioners, wary at first of the big man, crowded around him as he tore through contests of strength and agility, putting something akin to respect even in the hardened hired small time carnies’ eyes. Everyone began calling him “Cigar” with easy familiarity as if they had all known each other for a long time and insisted he try the spicy mini hotdogs and chili that was the daring food feature of the ladies refreshment committee. Gar gamely downed three bowls to much admiration including a group of young married women, with their bright head-scarves and beads, Father Troy noted with the faintest tinge of jealousy. And when Gar carried the old Monsignor down the parish house steps and put him gently into a plastic lawn chair in his rose garden so he could visit with the old timers, Father Troy couldn’t help but think that the stranger was giving them far more than they were giving him.

The carnival was just beginning to wind down as the first pink streaks appeared like spun candy trails in the spring sky. Little Rhonda Cleary, the only daughter of Chris and Suzanne of Cleary’s Dry-Cleaning, had been sucking up to the young pony-tailed carnie with the orange and turquoise plush animals that were the prizes for the bull’s eye and bowling pin game all afternoon. Rhonda was used to getting her way, and the carnie’s deaf ears to her pleading for just one of the littlest aqua bears to take home drove her nearly insane. She had long naturally-blond platinum hair that everyone loved and at thirteen her body was as tight as a rosebud. When, exasperated, he finally whispered the going price in her shell-like ear, she didn’t even blink. Rhonda had figured out already that life was a series of exchanges, and if he wanted her to kiss him behind the booth for one of the
medium
sized blue bears, so be it.

The pony-tailed carnie had tight blue jeans on and pointed black boots and his polyester shirt was open halfway down his hairless chest. He pulled little Rhonda out of sight of the thinning crowds behind the booths where the straw, packing carts, and thick electric cords plugged into a what looked like an oversized car battery made a messy backstage for this two-bit school carnival. The carnie impatiently pushed her to her knees onto the straw and, looking both ways, unzipped his fly. The brass zipper made a ripping sound, like another world opening up. Big blue and red bulbs were now lit overhead and little Rhonda could hear the other older bearded carnie yelling, “Don’t miss your Chance. Everybody Wins.” Rhonda felt dizzy suddenly as the pony-tailed man fished what looked like a thick pink eyeless snake out of his jeans and pointed, grinning. The straw was sticking uncomfortably into her knees and she wanted to get up but his hand was pressing the back of her head, pushing it down towards the blind upward-rising snake.

“You want the bear, dontcha? Well, this here kiss is called a blow job,” was all he said.

Her hair fell like a silky cream veil on either side of the snake, and Rhonda felt a moaning sound gurgling up from her throat as it came to her in a chaotic stream of playground misinformation what was going on even as her head was forced steadily downwards and onto the carnie’s penis. The words
blow job
flashed over and over in her mind as he pushed himself into her mouth and some picture of her first grade nun Sister Theresa crossing herself replaced
blow job,
and then without really meaning to little Rhonda with her tiny pearly teeth bit down, not hard really but in a warning sort of a way, like a pet might do when unhappy. In a flash and a muffled swearing scream, the carnie pulled back the snake, slapping Rhonda’s face away, his zipper whizzing up and kicking her away. Little Rhonda fell onto her side breathing hard. A
large
aqua plush bear was not worth this, was all she thought.

She sat on the stone steps leading up to a side entrance of the church for awhile, shaking and, well, she knew the word,
pissed.
Across the playground she could see her mother and father talking to Father Troy. It was almost dark and the big man she heard called Gar was helping the two carnies, the skinny awful one and the bearded brown-haired one, load their truck. They seemed in a hurry. Finally she got up and went over to her parents and said in her clearest voice, “Daddy, ask that carnie with the pony-tail what he did to me. He called it a blow job.”

There was a pause then. Her father, a blond puffy man with no eyelashes and a fondness for loud flowered shirts, sputtered, “What are you talking about, Rhonda?” Her mother, quicker, she was always quicker, said in a high tight voice, “Father Troy, get them men to wait. Now!”

Father Troy felt the blood rush to his cheeks and he looked at Rhonda with a sense of horror. Where was Father Weston, it should be him calling out to the carnies, he was the senior priest, not him. Mrs. Cleary’s hand grabbed his forearm in a deathlike grip as he heard the doors slamming shut on the panel truck as it started up. “Gar!” Father Troy heard his voice shaking as he called out to him. Gar pivoted around on the balls of his feet to look at him as Little Rhonda Cleary broke into a tearful scream and the panel truck gunned it out onto Eldorado Street with the pony-tailed carnie at the wheel and running a red light with a turquoise stuffed bear upended on the dashboard. A horn blared as the truck barreled through and kept going.

Later in the parish office, with Father Weston and Father Troy both sitting behind the desk and the three Clearys in the chairs in front of them, they heard the story pretty much as it happened except for the part where Little Rhonda agreed to kiss the carnie in exchange for a plush stuffed animal. Father Weston looked grim as he thumbed through the rolodex for the archdiocese contact who had recommended the Big Top Entertainment from wouldn’t you know it Gary, Indiana, which had long since lost its Music Man reputation and had become a pretty terrible place with gangs moving in from the south side of Chicago. He said a prayer over the Clearys and reminded them that it probably wasn’t a good idea for anybody, least of all Rhonda, to blab about it. When Mrs. Cleary asked about the police Father Weston said that was one sure way of everyone knowing, what with the Decatur Herald having a direct line into the department. Father Troy was having a hard time concentrating as the Cat Stevens song “
Oh, Baby Its a Wild World
” was playing over and over in his mind. Father Weston hardly looked at him as he promised the Clearys that they would take the necessary steps to make sure that the pervert was no longer allowed to work any Catholic events in the entire country. Father Weston then congratulated Little Rhonda on keeping her purity intact, recommended five Hail Mary’s before bed as a tonic, and saw them out. It was then that Father Troy noticed Gar had been loitering outside the parish office.

CHAPTER SIX
In the Map Room

Marilyn hadn’t been sleeping well in over a week as she thought about Max Rosenbaum’s request and something else, too, something that was running underneath the surface, just below where she could see it. Sometimes, after hours spent fighting insomnia, she would roam restlessly out of her body and, peering from her bedroom ceiling, she would look down on her form, a lump under a peach-colored chenille bedspread, and shake her head impatiently and then just as suddenly fall back into her body with a shock that would leave her nerves jangled for hours. When she did sleep, her dreams rushed by in an uneasy torrent and in the morning she would try over-black coffee to make sense of them but it was like trying to hold water in your hands.

Rowley, her mixed spaniel-and-border collie, would look up at her, his tawny eyes cautious, from his worn sheepskin bed in a cardboard box near the kitchen door. Rowley adored Marilyn but he could smell when one of her changes was coming on, it was like something was burning somewhere just under her skin, and it made him ache for his mistress. He knew she couldn’t help the things that could then happen, she was more creature than human, and Rowley felt a fierce protectiveness because of it. Marilyn had found him abandoned in an alley near where they lived together some seven years ago and Rowley never forgot the first smell of her fingers when she picked his half-starved puppy body up and carried it home.

On Friday night, she tossed and turned and when an elephant charged in her dream she saw his foot coming down on a small vial and she screamed. So neither she nor Rowley were too surprised when her favorite painting, a little grey circus elephant with a bright blue background hand-done by her great aunt who had gone into the orders at twelve, leapt off the wall and burst from its frame right in front of them. When Marilyn came home from work that late Saturday afternoon, the elephant canvas was splayed on one side of her orange covered couch and the walnut wood frame in four pieces on the other, just as it had been when it flew off the wall that morning while she drank her first cup of coffee. She hadn’t imagined it, like she had told herself all day. The dog was staying well away from the mess, and the way he cocked his head to one side, his ears half pricked up as if to say, “What’s next?” It was then that Marilyn made up her mind to call the professor. She picked up the receiver on her cheap black desk phone and dialed the numbers, the round dial clicking with each rotation of her finger, and waited for his voice. A shiver ran down her spine. Another week of troubled sleep and her second floor duplex in the cut-up old house would be a shambles, she knew from experience. At sixteen in the throes of her first love gone wrong when she and her mother lived here the whole place had nearly exploded, candy dish, pickle jar, family pictures, perfume bottle, one night even a shoe flew through the air. And to a lesser extent the same thing had happened when her mother had finally shuffled off the mortal coil some fifteen years later, wheezing her last breath in the bed that Marilyn now tossed and turned in. Something was stirring, so perhaps if she helped this professor with his peculiar work he could help her feel more normal or at least keep her home from becoming a wreckage site.

Max drove a ’66 pale green Impala, a throwback from happier days when, as a young professor with a devoted wife, he had bought himself what seemed like a slightly racy car because he, Max Rosenbaum, was going places. Now it rumbled down North Street away from the shabby houses and seemed very much like just another aging car in this neighborhood except for the fact that Marilyn, still her in waitress uniform but also with a coral silk scarf wrapped glamorously around her dark hair, smoking a cigarette out of the lowered window, was perched in the front seat. Max punched a button on the radio and someone was singing a shivery longing ballad and the air felt damply warm with spring and possibilities.

“I don’t know if St. Pat’s carnival is still going but if it is we could stop by and say hi to your pal Father W.,” she offered languidly as the car pulled up to the intersection of Eldorado. The sun had just set, leaving a syrupy twilight, and the sky was that beautiful darkening blue that always reminded Max of a velvety carpet.

“My pal?” he said in a sort of wise-ass way but his smile was warm so it that took any sting out of it. “Whatever the lady wants, the lady gets.” Inside he wondered if she wanted to let Father Weston know that she was talking to him just in case. In case of what, he thought, but suppressed the familiar doubt and fear that now bubbled up anytime he approached the kind of study that had once made him famous.

The parish and school grounds were full of booths, and a tent and the big old-fashioned strings of outdoor lights and Japanese lanterns crisscrossing the asphalt made a gay little scene as they neared, but the cars were thinning and it seemed mostly over. A panel truck inexplicably roared out of the school driveway and ran the red light as Max laid on the horn like any good ex-Chicago driver might. “Who the hell is that?” he shouted, scared as the truck kept speeding away from them. Marilyn shrugged, her eyes narrowing, a quiver in her heart as she saw a large man turning lightning quick towards Father Troy and a couple. His back was to her as they called to him but it was like she knew by heart the distance between his shoulder blades and the way his waist tapered. She shivered; shaking it off, the night was cooling down, that was all.

Suddenly Father Weston in a long black frock and roman collar was standing leaning into the car.

“Carnival’s over, kids. I could use an old fashioned in the worst way. What are those people waving at me for? Good God, Father Troy, he is a real lily of the valley. You should see his latest project. If you’re up for talking I’ll be at the Brown Jug later. Bless you and be careful.” Father W winked at Marilyn then and turned, heading towards a little cluster of people near the Parish office. The big man broke from the little crowd just then and started loping back across the playground towards them. To get Father W? It was hard to tell, but Max wasting no time had put the car in reverse and pulled away out onto Eldorado Street.

Max headed towards campus weaving his way through the long line of cars and Chevy trucks cruising aimlessly up and down the main drag and managed to look just once in his rear-view mirror for anyone following.

The visiting Professor Rosenbaum had keys to only one building on campus, the old liberal arts and science building, built of red brick in 1901, the year the small university was founded by liberal minded Presbyterians. On a Saturday night the whole campus was pretty much empty except for the two modern dorms on the far side of the athletic field. Max swung his car confidently up to the visitor spot next to the liberal arts building and quickly got out so he could open Marilyn’s passenger side door. Flowering trees had been planted decades ago and the smell of pink crabapples just blooming filled the air. Marilyn sat for a moment before she got out pretending to enjoy their scent as she thought over why she had decided on an impulse to trust someone she barely knew in this way.

“Come on, we’ll go to the Map Room, no-one ever goes there,” he said, and she could tell by the way he offered her his hand when she got out -- cool, dry but with the faintest throb in the fleshy part of his thumb joint -- that he was a little nervous too and trying to cover it up.

Charlesworth University’s Map Room was a sort of magical place for Decatur, Illinois. It had two long leaded glass windows that could open at the bottom for fresh air, so the room while old never felt musty. There was a long library-type table with the classic green glass-shaded lamp, a big atlas on a book stand, and two or three cracked leather chairs. Maps of the world could be unrolled like oversized window shades on each wall. Of course they were out of date, with countries and boundaries changing with both World Wars and then the Korean and now the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the various communist revolutions -- it would have been impossible to keep these big sepia colored maps with countries marked in vermillion, indigo blue, hunter green and saffron up to date but Max pulled the big maps down on each wall, saying that just knowing there was a bigger world out there made him feel better, and Marilyn felt a sudden lightness. He had been talking for some time, all the way up the worn blue stone stairs to the third floor where the Map room was located and as he pulled each map down: Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Max’s voice was low and soothing as he mentioned that they were going to do a little hypnotism, just to open a crack up in Marilyn’s psyche, nothing too big, just a sort of beginning exercise. He said he had been hypnotizing people for years and to no bad effect. He thought he might be able to help her understand why she was acting as her own poltergeist, with a sort of spontaneous telekinesis. Max talked about how Father W suspected that Marilyn had a deeper connection to her soul than most people and that he, Max, thought so too. He talked on about how hypnotism was a technique for giving yourself a kind of pass to deeper understanding that your conscious mind might throw roadblocks up at. That all Marilyn needed to do was relax and focus on his voice and nothing else except her breathing. His voice sounded more like water falling the longer he talked about how the soul was real and we were all part of the Divine and didn’t Marilyn know that and that was perfectly okay if she felt a little sleepy. Did she know that nearly a century ago it had been proven that a soul had a weight of twenty-one grams, and when a person died they were always that much lighter because the soul travelled on. To its next body, next incarnation, next sojourn.

Marilyn was standing stock still in front of the country labeled Siam. Her eyes were closed but her hand made a Buddhist hand gesture. Marilyn’s pinky and index finger were extended while her second and ring finger bent down onto the palm and was closed with her thumb. The Karana Mudra, recognized Max with a thrill, used to cast out demons. “Here,” she breathed. “He pursued me here.”

“Who? Who pursued you, Marilyn? ” Max asked as if he was asking her what grocery stores she liked. Marilyn breathed through her nostrils as if expelling something and shook her head impatiently. Max made a quick jot in his notes and kept talking. He didn’t want to make any rash judgments, just observe and record.

“Sometimes when you get in touch with the Presence within, things come to the surface.” Max said in his rain-coming-down voice and Marilyn glided away from him to the map of the Americas. She stroked the saffron-colored states of the Middle Atlantic and moved north to the Berkshire Mountains until her finger landed on a little town called West Pittsfield. “Here, too. We crossed again. It had been a long time. I had nearly forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?” Max asked softly. She didn’t answer and instead turned to the map of Europe. Italy was marked in a faded hunter green and Marilyn caressed the boot shape with her hand pulling it out into the Mediterranean not to Capri but the larger island next to it that Max had never really noticed. Ischia. “Here. It all started here.” Then her eyes widened into big black pools and you could see her mind racing as if she was seeing something from a long time ago as a small tortured scream escaped her throat. Max knew it was way too early to tell if she was a hysteric or if she was calling up some kind of repressed memory but in any case it was time to end the session. He clapped both hands onto her shoulders and pressed down steadily saying, “It’s okay, it’s over now. You can wake up. Wake up, Marilyn.”