Stillness in Bethlehem (18 page)

Reggie was lying on the couch in the living room, watching Oprah Winfrey and pretending to have a fever. He wanted a bottle of Molson’s Golden Ale and a bowl of potato chips. Candy put them both on a tray and brought them out from the kitchen, moving carefully so she didn’t spill anything. Spilling something could get Reggie started all over again, and spilling something would be easy. She had never really learned to walk in these shoes.

Candy put the tray down on the coffee table at Reggie’s side. Usually, by this point in one of their bad days, she would be feeling totally washed out, nonexistent, invisible. She would at least be giving herself a mental lecture, telling herself she had to stop being so stupid, had to learn not to provoke him, had to get her act together so she wouldn’t do the things that made sessions like this necessary. Today, she wasn’t. Today, she was gliding along in total numbness, her body still, her mind silent.

“Do you want anything else I can get you?” she asked Reggie. “We’ve got sour cream. I could make onion dip.”

“Onion dip will give me gas,” Reggie said. “I told you I was sick, for Christ’s sake. What are you trying to do to me?”

“If you don’t need anything else, I’d like permission to go back to the kitchen. The stove needs cleaning.”

“
You
need cleaning,” Reggie said. “To hell with the stove.”

“Do you want me to take a bath?”

“You’re going to have to take a bath before you go pretend to be a movie star tonight. If you go looking like you are, they’ll probably fire you and find somebody else.”

Candy shifted a little on her feet, redistributing the pain. These shoes always hurt. Listening to Reggie talk about the Nativity committee getting someone else for her part panicked her. Candy kept expecting it to happen. She was astounded that it hadn’t happened yet.

Reggie stuffed a handful of potato chips in his mouth. “What’s that book you left out there in the kitchen? Since when do we have money for you to throw away on trashy paperbacks?”

“We don’t,” Candy said virtuously. She was lying. She had seen the book in the window of the used-book place on Carrow for days, and finally she’d stolen enough change from Reggie’s pockets to buy it. “I borrowed it from the reading room over at the Congregational Church the time we went there to rehearse because they were putting on some children’s thing in the auditorium. It’s something to do when I’m waiting around backstage.”

“Why do you need something to do?”

“Because it’s boring. Just sitting there, I mean.”

“Why don’t you talk to people? It’s just too damn bad this happened to you instead of me. You’re too stupid to make anything out of it. Practically everybody important in town is in that play or has something to do with it. If it was me, I’d get to know them. I’d get myself a few opportunities.”

“You’re not supposed to talk backstage when the play is going on,” Candy said, “and all they ever talk about between acts is the shootings. I don’t have anything to say about the shootings.”

“You don’t have anything to say about anything. It’s too damn bad. It really is. It’s just too damn bad. I wish I was the one who’d shot ’em, though. I wouldn’t have bothered old Dinah Ketchum. I’d have gone straight for those two dykes down the road.”

“Everybody in the play says it was Jan-Mark Verek getting rid of his wife so he could marry that Gemma Bury who’s the priest now at the Episcopal Church. They’re supposed to be very much in love.”

Reggie stuffed more potato chips into his mouth and followed them with a swig of beer. “Love crap. She’s an old bag. His wife was an old bag, too, but why kill one old bag for another?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know something,” Reggie said. He sat up and reached for his belt. He had left it draped over the back of the couch, in case he needed it, in case he could think of some other use for it. Candy felt her stomach turn over and her mind go blank.

“You know what I know?” Reggie said. “I know how I like to see you best when you’re wearing that stuff.”

“Yes,” Candy said.

“Hands and knees,” Reggie said. “On the floor.”

“Yes.”

“When I get done with this, I’m going to take you just like a dog,” Reggie said, “just like a dog. That’s all you are anyway, you stupid bitch. Just a dog.”

“Yes,” Candy said again, and thought:
The carpet needs cleaning. It’s supposed to be green and now it looks like swamp.

In the air above the back of her the belt was whistling and screaming, really screaming, as if it were alive. It was talking to her and she could hear every word it said.
You asked for it. You always ask for it. You’re so stupid and so bad, if you didn’t have somebody like Reggie to do this for you you’d go straight to hell, just straight to hell, because you’re bad, you’re evil, you’re rotted right to the core and if a doctor had to cut you open all he’d find was pus and stink.

That was what the belt was saying, but oddly enough, for once it wasn’t what Candy’s conscious mind was saying as well. Candy’s conscious mind was on a tangent of its own, and what it was telling her was this:

It was a damned good thing that Reggie couldn’t read too well, because if he could, and if he read the back of that paperback book she had left sitting on the kitchen table, he would probably kill her, in self-defense.

The name of that book was
The Burning Bed
, and it was all about a woman whose husband had beat her up and beat her up and beat her up day after day and year after year until one night when he’d passed out dead drunk on the bed, she doused him with gasoline and lit a match.

Y
EARS AGO, JUST AFTER
the Second World War, when the money had first started really rolling in, the citizens of Bethlehem, Vermont, had had an argument about the seating for the Nativity play. From the beginning, the Nativity play had been staged in the town park with the gazebo as the stable. From the beginning, people coming to watch had stood along the park’s edges in the cold, their heads covered with thick woolen hats and their ears straining to hear whatever they could. It was a kind of theater in the round
gigantus
. Some of the people in Bethlehem wanted to leave this as it was. People had been coming and standing for over a dozen years and would probably come and stand for over a dozen more. One citizens’ committee had insisted on the construction of a bandshell with poured-concrete audience tiers. They envisioned busloads of tourists from Delaware and Ohio, all in search of the post-War definition of reasonable American comfort. They envisioned Bethlehem ringed by discreetly placed motels, Howard Johnsons taking up the slack when the inns in town couldn’t provide the New American with the New American idea of plumbing. A third group wanted to do something sensible, but not drastic. Obviously, the crowds were getting out of hand. They couldn’t just go on letting people crowd along the edges of the park. There were too many of them, and too many of them were from Away. People pushed. People shouted and got angry. People drank. The Nativity play needed an organizing principle, and what that organizing principle was was this: a set of collapsible bleachers with a canvas tent shield and portable space heaters, combined with a very sophisticated sound system that included spot mikes and strategically placed speakers. It was elaborate, unwieldy, ridiculous and expensive as all hell, but it worked, and the town stuck with it. By the time Gregor Demarkian was making his way from the Green Mountain Inn to the center of town in the company of Bennis Hannaford and Father Tibor Kasparian, on his way to the first night of his first performance of the Bethlehem nativity play, it had become a town tradition. The original collapsible bleachers had been replaced with new ones that included cushioned benches. The original canvas tent shield had been replaced with one especially designed for the Celebration and including air vents and low-noise fans to blow the heat from the space heaters upward at the people who needed to be warmed. The new sound system had benefited from decades of experimentation by rock musicians and the CIA. That was frosting. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had always been the transformation of the center of a small New England town into the center of a small Palestinian one. It always would be.

The collapsible bleachers were divided into six sections with natural aisles in between. Each section was split in the middle by a makeshift stair, so that older patrons didn’t have to climb the bleachers like monkeys or junior high school students. The natural aisle at the very northernmost part of the park, the one nearest Carrow Street, was triple the width of all the others. Coming into his own set of bleachers, just to the left, Gregor could see the dark shapes of animals shifting and shuddering at the far end of it. Tibor, who had been so interested in how and where the animals would come, now seemed not interested at all. He plodded along behind Bennis with an air of leaden pessimism, the black skirt of his cassock brushing against the snow. Leading them, Bennis kept referring to their tickets and muttering to herself. Gregor thought it was a good thing. He had gotten back to the Inn just after lunch, his pockets stuffed with notes and a crudely reproduced map of what he and Franklin Morrison had begun to call “the problem.” He had been trying ever since to talk it over with somebody. At first, he had been alone, deserted by Bennis and Tibor, who had gone off to listen to Christmas carols or check out the souvenir stores or something. Then he had been in the midst of too much activity, with Bennis and Tibor getting back late and scurrying to get ready to leave in time, with Tibor mumbling about everything Bennis had and hadn’t eaten, with Bennis panicking because she couldn’t remember where she’d put the tickets or the program or her reading glasses or her cigarettes or anything else. Now, of course, they were filing in to see the Nativity play, which would effectively cut off conversation for the next two hours. Gregor thought it was typical. When he didn’t want to talk about crime or cases or bloody murder, Tibor and Bennis were all over him like feathers, probing and prodding, driving him crazy. When he did want to talk about them, they had something else to do.

Up at the front of their single-file line, Bennis had stopped, checked their tickets again and started to turn. “This is it,” she said. “Second row up. No problem at all. I’m going to have to do something really spectacular for Robert Forsman to pay him back for this.”

“Please,” Tibor said, “Bennis, listen to me. Nothing too spectacular.”

“I was thinking of sending him a nice inscribed Rolex watch.” Bennis gestured at the bleachers. “Twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three. Next row up. You want to climb or use the stairs?”

“I will use the stairs.”

The “stairs” were slightly modified, closed-fronted bleacher slats in the center of the stand. Gregor watched Bennis watch Tibor walk over to them, step up one step, and start coming down the bleacher back to them. Then she climbed to the second row herself and shook her head.

“It’s been crazy all day,” she told Gregor. “He keeps trying to make me eat. I mean, he’s always trying to make me eat, they all do, that’s half of what Cavanaugh Street is all about, but not like this. We went to this little performance the grade school was giving and I ate six of these enormous chocolate chip cookies—the size of dinner plates, Gregor, I’m not kidding—and he kept trying to make me eat two more. And then when I wouldn’t, he got mad at me.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“I think it’s the stress,” Bennis told him. “I always did think he was under too much pressure. I just hadn’t realized how far it had gone.”

“I have seen the camels,” Tibor said, seating himself between Bennis standing on their own bleacher and Gregor standing on the ground. “We are right where the animals come, it is very good. I still cannot see where they come from in town.”

“There’s a field back there somewhere,” Bennis said brightly.

Tibor ignored her.

Gregor climbed up, sat down, and decided to remove his coat. In spite of the fact that it was more than fairly cold outside—the forecast was for snow and more snow over the next three days—in the bleachers it was actually warm. The space heaters and the fans and the specially made tent with its air flaps worked. Gregor looked across the park and saw that now that he was sitting down, one of the two stands of tall evergreen bushes effectively cut off most of his view of the animal passage. Since he didn’t want to see the animals coming in and out anyway, he didn’t worry about it.

Gregor got his little map out of his pocket, unfolded it on his knees and waited. Bennis sat down, looked at Tibor and finally turned to Gregor. She had to talk over Tibor’s head, but there was nothing for it. Tibor was staring glumly in the direction of the gazebo, ignoring them both. The gazebo was lit up with colored spotlights and dressed in distressed wood and evergreens. Gregor didn’t think it looked much like Palestine, but he did think it looked nicer than it had the day before, when it had apparently been in some kind of rest state. The whole town had apparently been in some kind of rest state. Now it looked energized.

Gregor held his map up, looked around to see that they were still more or less alone, and decided that Tibor and Bennis had once again made him much too early for something he had only wanted to be on time for. Tibor was bad, but Bennis was the worst Gregor had ever known. She had once gotten him to the dentist forty-five minutes before his appointment. He waved the map in the air and acquiesced when Bennis reached out to take it.

“It’s very nice,” she said politely. “You’re learning to draw better. Donna would be proud of you.”

“Yesterday you were chomping at the bit for some sort of mystery,” Gregor told her. “Today, all you can do is insult my drawing.”

Bennis handed the map back. “I don’t understand why it’s such a mystery. Now all that about the guns. What were you saying back at the Inn? Both of them took two hits, in the shoulder and the neck. That seems like a mystery to me. Do you suppose it was some kind of gangland hit?”

“In Bethlehem, Vermont?”

Bennis shrugged. “It sounds like that sort of thing. With the two guns, I mean. I suppose I don’t understand why any ordinary person would have two guns.”