Touch (1987) (2 page)

Elwin said, "You want to know something? Virginia's mother give us these dishes when we got married and all that time, Christ, twenty-one years, I hated those goddamn dishes. Got little rosebuds on 'em--"

Bill Hill turned to Elwin and took the dishpan from the table.

"--but I never said nothing. All that time, you'd get down through your mashed potatoes and wipe up your gravy? There'd be these little goddamn rosebuds looking at you. The only thing I said once, I said it looked like a goddamn little girl's tea set and Virginia got sore and started to cry. Shit, anything I didn't like, if I said it? She'd start to cry, like I was blaming her for it. I'd say goddamn it, what I think has got nothing to do with you, does it? She'll do it again. She'll reach up in the cupboard and say where's all my good dishes for heaven sake? And I'll tell her I got rid of those goddamn rosebud dishes finally, I finally got the nerve to get rid of them." Still rough talking, but his tone had changed, the meanness gone. Bill Hill noticed it.

He said, "Well, you might've bought some others first, since you're out of work and you got all this extra cash laying around."

"He come in here and says what're you doing. Juvie did," Elwin said. "I told him I always hated those goddamn rosebud dishes and I'm busting them. And he said, you know what he said? He said, 'I don't blame you.' "

Bill Hill wanted to ask about the young guy, who he was. Was he AA or not? Did he work at the Center in rehabilitation? If he did, how come he took a drink?

But Virginia began to call. She said, "Elwin?" In a sharp little surprised tone. She said, "Elwin, my God. Come here."

Both of them went into the living room, Elwin still holding the broom.

Virginia was sitting up, holding the dishcloth in her lap and turning her head carefully, as though she had a stiff neck, turning to the piano and then slowly turning her head toward the kitchen doorway. She looked different.

Elwin said, "Jesus, I cut her, didn't I?"

Bill Hill said, almost under his breath, "No, you didn't. I'm sure you didn't." That was the whole thing, why he was more surprised than Elwin; because he had wiped off her face and looked at the bruise closely. Except for a scrape and the swelling there hadn't been a mark on her. But now there was a smear of blood on her face, over her forehead and cheeks. At least it looked like blood.

Bill Hill said, "Ginny, you all right?"

Something scared him and kept him from moving.

He noticed now that the young guy, Juvenal, wasn't in the room. Though he might've gone up to the bathroom. Or he might've left. But that would be strange, coming here on a call and then leaving without saying anything.

Elwin said, "Virginia, I got to tell you something."

She said, "Tell me."

"Well, later on," Elwin said.

Bill Hill kept staring at her. What was it? She moved on the sofa, turning now to look directly at them. She looked worse than before. Battered, swollen, and now bloody. She seemed about to cry. But--what it was--she didn't seem miserable now. She was calm. She was looking at them out of dark shadows and her eyes were alive.

"What're you doing with a broom?" Virginia said and seemed to smile, waiting.

Bill Hill didn't take his eyes from her. He heard Elwin say, "Jesus Christ," reverently, like a prayer. Neither of them moved.

"I can see," Virginia said. "I can see both of you plain as day."

Chapter
2

BILL HILL had to ring the doorbell to get into the Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Center, then had to explain why he wanted to see Father Quinn--about his good friend Elwin Worrel who'd been here and was drinking again--then had to wait while they looked for Quinn.

It was not like a hospital. The four-story building on the ghetto edge of downtown Detroit had once been a branch of the YWCA for black women, before integration, and that's what he decided it looked like, a YWCA.

He watched a man in pajamas, with slicked-back, wet-looking hair and round shoulders, go up to the reception desk where a young guy in a T-shirt and a good-looking black girl were on duty. The man in pajamas, feeling his jaw with his fingers, asked for some after-shave lotion. The young guy handed him a bottle of Skin Bracer. The man stuck his chin out, rubbed the Skin Bracer over his face and neck, and walked away, leaving the bottle on the counter. The young guy screwed the cap back on and put the bottle away somewhere.

Bill Hill strolled over and leaned against the counter. He said to the good-looking black girl, "Is Juvenal around?"

She said, "Juvenal?" a little surprised. The young guy in the T-shirt said, "I don't think he's here." He turned to look at a schedule of names and dates tacked to the wall above the switchboard. "No, Juvie's off today."

Bill Hill said, "What's his last name again? I forgot it."

The good-looking black girl was quite thin and appealing in a sleeveless knit top, her little breasts pointing out. She said, "I don't know he has a last name."

"Are you in the program?" the young guy asked.

"You mean in AA?" Bill Hill said. "No, but this very close friend I mentioned is. Elwin Worrel? I met Juvenal over at Elwin's." Bill Hill waited.

It gave him a funny feeling. The two behind the counter seemed relaxed and friendly, not the least bit guarded; but to them he was an outsider. To be "in" here you had to be an alcoholic. The young guy said he could have a seat in there if he wanted and pointed to an empty reception room off the lobby where there was a piano, a fireplace, and hotel-lobby furniture that must've been sitting there thirty or forty years.

Bill Hill moved to the front windows of the reception room and looked out at the brewery that was across the Chrysler Freeway but seemed as near as next door. Above the red-brick complex was a giant sign that lit up red at night and said Stroh's Beer for all the alcoholics to see. It could make them thirsty, he bet. Or it could remind them of gutters and weeds and cold, vacant buildings. Bill Hill was wearing a yellow outfit today. Yellow-and-white-striped sport shirt, cream-yellow slacks, white belt, and white loafers. It was hot in here with no air conditioning. A dim, depressing place.

There he was, all yellow. And the priest appeared in a green-and-white warmup suit and sneakers. A couple of rays of sunshine in the musty old room, greeting each other by name, Bill Hill warming up, glancing at the windows and asking if that big Stroh's Beer sign was a temptation or a warning to the patients here. He meant to keep it light and chatty for a few minutes.

"The residents," Father Vaughan Quinn said, "they can look at the sign and think whatever they want, as long as they know they have three choices. Die, end up in a mental hospital, or quit drinking. It's their decision."

That wasn't keeping it light. Bill Hill said, "I'm afraid the only thing Elwin's trying to decide is which he likes better, Early Times or Jim Beam."

Another bad sign: the priest pushed up his sleeve to glance at his watch. He said, "Elwin's trouble, he knows he's an alcoholic, but he hasn't hit bottom hard enough to feel it."

That was a good lead. "Well, he's sure hitting other people fairly hard and doing a job on his house," Bill Hill said. He had a feeling he wasn't going to be asked to sit down, so he sank into a chair next to the big empty sofa, saying, "You know Virginia, Father?"

It was a mistake. The priest remained standing in his green-and-white outfit, gazing down at him now, a priest who played hockey and might've been a street fighter at one time. He could be a mean bugger, Bill Hill decided. A hip priest, graying hair over his ears, and with the look of a guy who could tell when you were bullshitting him, used to drunks lying to him, making excuses.

The priest said, "Sure, Virginia's been here."

There was a scar, forty-two stitches in his chin, from a blind-side meeting with a hockey puck, playing with the Flying Fathers. Bill Hill remembered that from the time he saw Father Quinn on a TV talk show.

"I understand she used to play the organ at your church," Quinn said.

See? The man knew things. Bill Hill smiled, shaking his head. "That was years ago."

"You're an ordained minister, aren't you?"

"I sell recreational vehicles, motor homes," Bill Hill said. "No, but I used to have a church--Uni-Faith. Actually it was an outdoor setup . . . amphitheater could seat fifteen hundred, we had a chapel, a gift shop kinda like Stuckey's . . . but what drew the crowds, we had the world's tallest illuminated cross of Jesus, a hundred and seventeen feet high with 'Jesus Saves' at the top in blue neon you could see at night all the way from Interstate 75."

"Around here?" Quinn asked, interested.

"No, outside of Dalton, Georgia. I moved the whole show up here and went bankrupt. But that's another story."

"Fascinating," the priest said.

"Virginia was our organist--yeah, you knew that." Bill Hill paused. "You must also know she recovered her sight."

"I understand you were there when it happened," Quinn said.

"And a fella from the Center here by the name of Juvenal," Bill Hill said. "Virginia thinks he performed a miracle on her."

Quinn didn't seem startled or even change his expression. He said, "That's interesting, but what's a miracle? Some pretty amazing things happen around here all the time."

"I don't know," Bill Hill said, "it could've been a jolt to her head. Unless you think this fella did it laying on hands."

"Is that what he did?" Quinn asked.

"Well, I'm using that as a figure of speech. We had a young prayer healer at Uni-Faith, Reverend Bobby Forshay, used to lay on hands, so to speak. He wasn't too good at it. But something touched Virginia Worrel. Her face was clean before it happened; I saw it. Then when I looked at her after there was blood on it--around her eyes, on her forehead. You hear about that part, the blood?"

"Maybe it was from her nose. She touched her face and spread it around." Quinn pushed back the elastic cuff of his warmup jacket to glance at his watch.

"She wasn't bleeding from her nose. Virginia says she didn't have any cuts at all, not even in her scalp."

"How about a hemorrhage behind the eyes somewhere--I don't know, we're out of my area," the priest said. "You wanted to talk to me about Elwin, is that right?"

"Well, he's part of it," Bill Hill said. "This Juvenal's the other part. I wondered if you discussed it with him, about Virginia?"

"Listen, we're gonna have to make it another time," the priest said, starting to turn away. "We've got a volleyball game scheduled and I'm late as it is."

"Maybe I could talk to Juvenal--"

"Sure, any time."

"You can understand, Father. A woman, a good friend of mine, was blind fifteen years and now she can see. Juvenal was there a few minutes--I saw him sit down on the couch with her--then he was gone. How come? Did he witness her sight restored and it scared him or what?"

"You'll have to ask him that." The priest was moving off. "He'll be glad to talk to you."

"They said he's not here today." Bill Hill was pulling himself out of the chair now.

"Come back any time." Quinn paused in the doorway. "And, hey, if you've got any clothes you don't need, bring 'em along. You look like a pretty snappy dresser."

Shit, Bill Hill said, standing alone in that dim reception room. A pretty snappy dresser.

He came back to the Center the next day with two doubleknit leisure suits and a pile of sport shirts, some hardly ever worn. He buzzed and they let him in, glad to see him again. They were sorry though, Father Quinn was in Toronto and Juvie was up in detox with a new arrival. Bill Hill waited more than an hour. When the switchboard checked detox, Juvie was gone and no one seemed to know where.

On the third visit Father Quinn was back from Toronto, but was out for the day, not expected to return until late. Juvie was around somewhere, they'd try to locate him. But somehow never did.

The place wasn't that big. Four floors including a gym and a swimming pool.

The day of Bill Hill's fourth visit Father Quinn was getting ready for a board of directors meeting. Juvie was out on a call; it would be hard to say when he'd be back.

Bill Hill said to the good-looking black girl, "You know what it's like, the feeling people are avoiding you?"

"Tell me about it," the black girl said.

"I don't know what it is," Bill Hill said, "everybody here's so nice and cooperative. But I don't seem to be getting anywhere." He leaned against the counter, tired.

"Some days are like that," the black girl said. "I know you been coming here--I'd like to give you Juvie's phone number but, you understand, anonymity is part of the deal, why it's called Alcoholics Anonymous?"

"You know him very well?"

"I'm not gonna tell you anything," the black girl said, "so don't ask."

But why not? Waiting around, Bill Hill would begin to lose interest and then something like this--why all the mystery?--would perk him up. Why was Juvenal hiding from him?

He said, "Let me ask you a straight question, okay? How does a person get in this place? I mean an alcoholic."

"Put your name in, get on the waiting list."