Seven Days Dead (3 page)

Lescavage shortens his gait to suit the other’s man’s ministeps. “We’ve been through this. I’m not Catholic, neither are you. I don’t do confession.”

“You’re not even a believer! So don’t tell me what you do or don’t do. You’re a fraud. But you will hear my confession.”

In the past, he’s advised him to call in a Roman Catholic priest if he’s so hell-bent on confessing before his death, but he lost that debate then and presumes he’ll lose it again. Still, he insists, grumbling, “I don’t hear confessions.”

“You’ll hear mine,” Orrock tells him, a tone that sounds like a warning. “By the way, Ora wanted out tonight. That’s why you’re here. I’ve been working her too hard. The poor girl needs to get laid. Not that you don’t, but for her it’s an option.”

The bathroom, the minister once remarked, is as large as his own living room, and he might not be wrong. Perhaps this is where the idea of a swimming pool comes from, as there’s nearly enough room for one, and the spa tub is huge. The reverend assists the man to the toilet and gets him turned around. They both work to aim his bum above the bowl. Lescavage tugs the pajama bottoms down, exposing his skinny legs. With his arms wrapped around his nurse for the evening, Orrock lowers himself. A difficult descent. His legs provide only wobbly scaffolding. Seated, he bends forward, which strikes the minister as an act of modesty as the pajama shirt flops over his privates. He’s not surprised when the old man retaliates, for this is humiliating to him, and he will not go through it without inflicting damage on his only witness.

“First, sniff my poop, Simon Lescavage. Then wipe my ass. Don’t forget to flush. Next, fix me a drink. After that, have the decency to hear my confession.”

Neither man speaks as they listen to the tinkle of urine.

“I’ll fix that drink now. While I’m waiting.”

“Sure. Go ahead. Pour a stiff one for yourself. You’re going to need it.”

Suddenly, Orrock is interrupted by a pain across his belly. He jerks forward and cries out, an involuntarily reflex as he clutches his helper and hangs on.

“You all right?” Lescavage immediately regrets his words. He expects Orrock to lash back at him for the inane comment. Of course he’s not all right. But the man is in too much agony to ridicule him just yet.

“Christ, that hurt,” he whispers.

His skin color seems more pale now, washed out. Lescavage observes him as the man releases his grip and eases back down on the toilet seat. “At least it doesn’t stink so bad,” the minister says.

Orrock accepts the kindness. “Small mercies, hey. Small mercies.”

He needs a minute to recover.

Toilet paper is stacked on a portable stake. People in town would probably say it’s pure silver, but it’s polished aluminum, standard fare. Orrock removes the top roll from the column, then holds it out to his helper. He gazes up at him.

“Now wipe,” he says.

The two men have locked eyes. Neither moves.

“I can’t bend around,” Orrock explains.

Still, Lescavage stands still. He feels like a man being tested who does not understand the rules of engagement, or the possible outcome or the repercussions.

“I can’t reach,” the man on his humble throne stipulates.

Lescavage looks away, across the marble floor, over the spa tub to the window, where the wind and rain fiercely pound, then back at him.

That peculiar smile appears again, the one for which there is no evidence. He’s not pleading, Alfred Orrock is only being contemptuous, when he adds, “Please.”

The minister takes the paper roll in hand. Unwinds a section. He has a sudden desire to tell this man that he’s done this before. He suffers a need to share that experience, but at the same moment he knows he won’t, for that would be breaking an unspoken pact, so he stifles the impulse. Still, he wants to explain that he’s not mortified, because once he wiped his own mother’s bottom when she was at a similar stage in her life and the nurse was absent. Like Orrock, she had every speck of her wits about her, but unlike him, she worked to mollify his trepidation.

“After what I’ve been through, dear,” she said, “with physicians and the nurses—some of them look like mere kids to me—all their awful tests, oh, after those intrusions, these silly indignities don’t matter much anymore.”

What he wanted to share, and oddly, with Orrock, was that the intimacy of the act, of wiping his mother’s bottom as she had done endlessly for him as a babe, invoked such tenderness in both of them, such a sense of love and sadness, that the act itself didn’t vex him and never stuck with him. He’s forgotten about it until now. In a way, mother and son recognized that these failing bodies did not constitute their lives. The act was a mere trifling, and did not prove to be an indignity for either of them, certainly not a humiliation. Perhaps the contrary. He was not anticipating a similar reaction in this instance, except that in invoking the previous experience he discovered himself inoculated against Orrock’s contempt and his effort to mock him, so that he could deny the pleasure the other man derived from his intended insult.

He finishes with a last full swipe, flushes, and shows Orrock no glimmer of distress.

The man grunts. Lescavage waits to be told what to do next.

“Don’t just stand there, you gutless jellyfish,” the old man gripes, by way of thanks, but his voice reflects his defeat. “Haul me up.”

They manage the slow shuffle across the floor, although pain accompanies Orrock’s repositioning upon the bed. Sweat breaks out across his brow and he succumbs to a dry wheeze and hacking.

“That drink,” he commands. “You know where I keep my liquor. You’ve raided the shelf often enough, with and without my permission.”

That’s something townsfolk never think to exaggerate. They’d be impressed with the extravagance of his bar. Enough to make the entire island tipsy.

“I don’t mind if I do help myself,” Lescavage remarks.

“Make mine a double. Then you’ll hear my bloody confession.”

Lescavage looks at him. At the skin pulled across the old man’s cheekbones and jaw, at the slack mouth. The dull pallor of impending death. He supposes that his reluctance to hear this man’s confession derives less from his pastoral tradition than from his interest in what the vile man might have to say. He actually
wants
to know what’s on Orrock’s mind at the hour of his death, if this is that hour, after a lifetime of subterfuge and villainy. What really counts, now that nothing is left in this world to be gained? For the clergyman, the prurient impulse is not something he welcomes in himself. Clearly unprofessional, not in the least ministerial. He feels himself a helpless gossip about to hang on to each syllable of a red-hot rumor. He’s hopelessly and, he concludes,
morbidly
curious. For that reason alone, he feels ashamed. He does not want to hear this man’s confession precisely because he so very much desires to absorb every detail.

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Orrock says, as if reading his mind. “I know you’re a fraud. That’s not news to me. Just remember, we’re not hearing
your
confession tonight, simple Simon. Only mine.”

Lescavage lowers his head, then shakes it slowly. He whispers, “You’re the devil himself, Alfred. Incarnate. I’m about to hear the devil’s own confession.”

“Whatever,” murmurs Orrock. His eyelids flutter. He licks his chapped lips. “Something like that anyway. If you’re lucky. Fetch the whiskey, you wormy slime bucket. You shit wiper, you. Loosen my tongue.”

As always, Lescavage yields ground. “Sure. I’ll make mine a double as well.”

TWO

Falling off the shoulder of the road, the sleek gray Porsche skims across a rapid series of shallow potholes, causing the undercarriage—the shocks in need of repair—to sound like an old-fashioned Gatling gun. Then the car bucks out of a deeper puddle sending a whole other cascade of water up and over the vehicle. Barely hanging on, the driver steers back onto the road, or what she thinks is the road, and taps the brakes gently. Wipers fight against the wet but the windshield takes its own sweet time to clear. When she can peer through the opaque smudges again, she sees lights. She’s arriving in a town, the only one left before the land drops into the Bay of Fundy and the sea.

The town’s name is Blacks Harbour, commonly referred to as Blacks. Any apostrophe has been lost to time or never existed.

Crossing the border from Maine into New Brunswick, she stopped for a pee, but otherwise it’s been straight through from Portland, where she gassed up and grabbed a coffee and doughnut, and before that, Boston, where she took the call from her father’s maid. Or whatever she is. Whore, perhaps. With him, you never knew. In a bout of honesty one time (who could tell if that’s what it was or if he was ever close to speaking the truth), or if not honesty, then at a moment when he appeared to have no particular agenda and no special grudge, her father mentioned in passing that he never found himself interested in women who were, in his words,
difficult.
He said, “When the nitty gets down to the gritty, everybody has their thing. My thing is, I’m only attracted to promiscuous women. If they’re not sleeping around, they’re not sleeping with me.” He was explaining why he’d never remarried. At the time, she didn’t know what to make of his
thing.
The peccadillo seemed unique, she’d give him that, but it also kept him safe from marriage, for what man married a woman with that proclivity? If real, his preference dovetailed with his nature—was he not being cruel? Did he not just call every woman he ever slept with a whore, by virtue of his
thing
? And didn’t that include her own mother? And wasn’t that just the cat’s meow?

During her drive, she’d been doing this, chewing the cud of her past, regurgitating old debates and conversations as though she might masticate history until it became something quite different. She could scarcely believe it, but on occasion the water on the windshield was less of a problem than the tears in her eyes, but she
could
believe it when she assessed that she was not grieving for
him,
but for all the old gripes and the nasty memories and for what caused them, and she grieved for the life that might have been yet never had a snowball’s chance in a pizza oven. He was not a man she’d ever want to know yet knew him to be her father. That thought dredged up a well-worn anxiety—namely, how much of him existed in her?

Blacks is not a large town, although the drive in from the outskirts takes a while. The homes spread out, then a lengthy stretch of woodland returns, followed by shopping areas and more bungalows. Finally, the road dips to a mere smidge above sea level and a big arrow rears up on the right, indicating Grand Manan. The ferry won’t be running at this hour. She carries in her purse a phone number passed along by her father’s maid. A while back, she made the call, which gave her an address. She remembers the town well enough that she finds the street without too much difficulty, missing her turn once on account of the rain, but she circles back and finds it on the next pass and drives slowly along, checking numbers. Seeing anything is virtually impossible in these conditions. She gets out once and is soaked in an instant. She runs to a door and checks the civic address, then counts houses after that to hopefully land at the right one. She gets out again and gets soaked again. Some numbers were skipped so she’s gone too far, but on her third attempt at walking up to a door she’s right on the money.

She rings the bell and hears chimes.

The man’s been waiting for her. He lets her in as far as his vestibule and shuts the door behind her. They don’t know each other. Suspicious, his wife hangs back in the hallway and two small kids gape up at the visitor from behind their father’s thighs. She supposes that on a night like this she might resemble a feral cat.

A very wet feral cat.

From her eyes she clears hair away that feels knotted and pasted on her skin.

“Hi,” she says. Often the tallest in the room, she’s a head above him.

“You’re wet,” he says.

“It’s raining,” she replies.

“I believe you,” he says.

“Are you Mr. McCarran?” She tries to smile, first at him, then at his kids, but gives up when she receives no similar expression in return. She won’t bother trying her act on the man’s wife. The two women are about the same age. The man is much older.

“Sticky,” he says.

“Ah, excuse me?”

“My name. It’s Sticky.”

Perfect, she thinks. “Ah, okay. Sticky. Sticky McCarran? I’m the one who called. I need to get to Grand Manan.”

“In this weather? You don’t mean tonight.” When she does not answer promptly, he thinks that she just might. “Don’t you know how bad it is out there?”

“I’m led to believe that you own a good boat. I understand that you’re a pretty good skipper.”

“That doesn’t make him stupid,” his wife says from fifteen feet away.

The man doesn’t turn his head when she speaks. He continues to study the new arrival.

“I’ll pay four times your usual rate,” she says. “A fair price, times four. On account of the hour and the storm, and everything.”

He’s not a large man, but by the way he carries himself she can tell that he’s as strong as a bear. Being a fisherman, he would be. He seems to mull over her offer, then points out to her, “There’s a ferry in the morning. Usually that’s how people go. Plus, you can take your car.”

She nods, to accept his reasoning, and returns the gaze of the little girl on his left side. The boy seems the shier of the two, and looks back to his mom often, as though to make sure that she’s still there. Someone to run to should things get scary. Or more puzzling. The girl is waiting with bated breath.

“Mr. McCarran, it’s my father. He’s dying. Maybe tonight. This might be my last chance to see him alive.”

She notices now that he was quite determined when she first showed up, although she hadn’t noticed then, to dismiss her request. Now that he’s hesitating, she can spot the difference in his attitude. Almost like his son, he glances back slightly toward his wife, who takes a step forward and clutches her left elbow in her opposite hand.