The Infinite Plan (48 page)

“OK,” he said, “I'm out of here,” uneasy at the sight of the white man wearing a gray suit and tie—a kind of joke in that place—but out of curiosity he lingered in the doorway.

“What happened? Where's a telephone? Who are you?” Reeves asked as he removed his jacket to cover his naked daughter.

“I don't have nothing to do with this; I don't even know the girl. And hey, who are you?”

“Her father. Thanks for calling me—” And Reeves's voice broke.

“Shit. . . . Holy shit . . . Let me help you.”

The black man lifted Margaret as if she were a baby and carried her to the car, where King Benedict was waiting to prevent its being stolen. Reeves sped off in the direction of a hospital, weaving through traffic and a mist of tears; his daughter, scarcely breathing, was curled into a little ball on King's lap, and he was crooning one of the timeless spirituals his mother had sung when she rocked him to sleep. Reeves strode into the emergency room, carrying Margaret in his arms. Two hours later they allowed him to see her for a few minutes in one corner of the intensive care unit, where she lay spread-eagled on a bed, connected to a respirator and various monitors. The resident gave him a preliminary assessment: a generalized infection had attacked her heart. The prognosis was grim, he said; they might be able to save her with massive doses of antibiotics, but she would have to change her life radically. Subsequent examinations revealed that Margaret's body was that of an old woman: her internal organs were wasted from drugs, her veins were collapsed from shooting up, her teeth were loose in her gums, her skin was like scales, and her hair was falling out by the handful. She was bleeding badly because of successive abortions and venereal infections. Even with that list of afflictions, the prostrate girl lying unconscious in the shadowy room looked like a sleeping angel, with no outward sign of shame, her innocence intact. The illusion was short-lived, however, and her father soon learned just how deep was the cesspool she had fallen into. The hospital staff tried to cut off her drugs, but she was shaken by spasms of agony. They prescribed methadone and gave her nicotine chewing gum, but had to place her in restraints to keep her from drinking the rubbing alcohol or stealing barbiturates. During all this, Gregory Reeves could not locate Samantha, who was somewhere in India, following her guru. Desperate, he went to Ming O'Brien, pleading for her help, although in truth he had lost any hope of wresting Margaret from the claws of damnation. As soon as the sick girl had emerged from the worst crisis, Dr. O'Brien visited her regularly, staying to talk for hours. Gregory Reeves came in the afternoons, where he found his daughter torn with self-pity, with the face of a madwoman and an uncontrollable trembling in her hands. He would sit by the bed, wanting to hug her but not daring to touch her, silently listening to an endless string of accusations and bloodcurdling confessions. It was then that he learned the extent of the black martyrdom his daughter had borne. He tried to ascertain what had led to her Golgotha, what unshakable rage and what dark loneliness had warped her life to that degree, but she herself did not know. At times she told him, sobbing, I love you, Papa, but an instant later she railed against him, howling with visceral loathing, blaming him for all her misery.

“Look at me, you goddam sonofabitch, look at me,” and with one sweep of her hand she threw back the sheets and spread her legs, pointing to her sex, weeping and laughing with the ferocity of madness. “You want to know how I earn my living while you go gallivanting around Europe buying jewels for your lovers and while my mother sits meditating in the lotus position? Do you want to know exactly what the drunks and beggars and addicts do to me? Oh, but I don't need to tell you, because you're an expert in whores; you pay us to do all the shit no woman would do without being paid. . . .”

Ming O'Brien tried to help Margaret confront her reality, to help her accept the fact that she could not save herself on her own, that her treatment would take a very long time, but it was a game of illusions played before a fun-house mirror. The girl pretended to listen and said she was sick of her life of excess but, as soon as she could walk, slipped down the hall to the telephone to ask her contacts to bring heroin to her in the hospital. Other times she was totally dispirited, horrified by her own condition; she would begin telling the details of her long descent into depravity and then silently sink into a slough of remorse. Her father offered to pay for her rehabilitation in a private clinic, and finally she accepted, apparently resigned. Ming spent the morning pulling strings to have her admitted, and Gregory left to buy tickets for a flight to southern California the next morning. That night Margaret stole another patient's clothes and escaped without a trace.

“Her infection isn't cured; we merely contained the most alarming symptoms. If she doesn't continue the antibiotics, she will obviously die,” the doctor said in an unemotional voice. He was hardened to every kind of emergency and had little sympathy for drug addicts.

“Don't look for her, Gregory,” Ming O'Brien advised the stricken father. “At some moment you must accept the fact that there's nothing more you can do for your daughter. You have to let go. It's her life.”

Meanwhile, the date for King Benedict's trial was approaching. The insurance company had stood firm in refusing to pay compensation for the accident, arguing that the alleged amnesia was a hoax. They had subjected Benedict to humiliating medical and psychiatric examinations to prove that no physical injury was attributable to the fall. For weeks they questioned him about every insignificant event that happened between the time he was a teenager and the current year. They wanted him to identify old baseball teams, they asked him what dances people were dancing in 1941 and what day war broke out in Europe. They also hired detectives, who followed him for months hoping to catch him out in some deception. Benedict tried with good faith to answer their interminable questioning, because he did not want to be considered ignorant; except for some facts he remembered from his daily stint in the library, however, everything else lay hidden in the serene haze of things yet to come. We don't know anything about the future, whether it even exists, all we can see in our mind is the past, his mother had told him many times, but he could not get a grasp on his past; it was a slippery shadow that had eaten up forty years of his time on earth. Gregory Reeves, who lived tormented by a too perfect memory, found his client's tragedy fascinating. He, too, questioned him, not to trap him in a lie but to learn how a man feels when he has the chance to wipe out his life and begin all over again. He had known King four years and during that time listened to his boyish fantasies and dreams of greatness, but he had also watched him retrace, step by step, the road already traveled, like a somnambulist trapped in a recurrent dream. King did nothing significantly different; it was as if he were placing each foot in tracks from an earlier time: he went to night classes to finish high school, received the same bad grades he had as a boy, and finally dropped out; a couple of years later, about the time he would have been sixteen, he presented himself at several recruiting offices to try to sign up with a branch of the armed forces but was rejected at each. He had seen a lot of movies about the war, and his head was filled with military glory; as consolation, he bought himself a uniform.

“In a couple of years now, he'll marry a no-good like his former wife and father two kids like my useless grandchildren,” Bel Benedict complained bitterly.

“It's hard for me to believe you can trip twice over the same exact stone,” replied Gregory Reeves, who had begun his silent journey into his past and often wondered what would have happened had he made different choices along the way.

“You can't live two lives or two different fates. Life doesn't come with an eraser,” Bel said.

“Surely we can, Mrs. Benedict; I'm certainly trying. You can alter your story and correct the rough draft.”

“No. What's been lived can't be changed. We can do better in what lies before us, but the past is the past.”

“You mean we can't undo our mistakes? Isn't there any hope, for instance, for my daughter, Margaret? She's not even twenty yet.”

“There's hope, but the twenty years she lost she can never get back.”

“That's a terrifying idea. It means that with every step we cement a piece of our history; we carry all our desires and thoughts and actions with us forever. If that's true, we
are
our past. My father used to preach about the consequences of every act we commit and our responsibilities within the spiritual order of the universe; he said that everything we do comes back to us, and that sooner or later we pay for the evil and benefit from the good.”

“He was a wise man.”

“He was out of his mind, mad as a hatter when he died. His theories were a lot of tangled threads I could never unravel.”

“Well, he had his values right, it seems.”

“He didn't preach by example, though, Bel. My sister tells me he was an alcoholic and a pervert, that he was obsessive about controlling things and ruined our lives—at least hers. But he was a strong man, and I felt good when I was with him; my memories of him are happy ones.”

“Seems like he taught you to walk a straight path.”

“He tried, but he died before he could finish. My road hasn't been too straight.”

Later, when he was discussing this conversation with Ming O'Brien, Reeves started telling her about his client, and Ming, who usually listened attentively and rarely opened her mouth to offer an opinion, now interrupted to ask more details. Had King Benedict been subject to unusual pressure? What kind of childhood had he had? Was he a calm and balanced person, or would Reeves say he was unstable? Her final comment was that his type of amnesia was rare, but there were documented cases. She pulled a book from a shelf and handed it to Gregory.

“You might want to look at this. It's probable that in his adolescence your client suffered a severe emotional shock or a blow similar to the one he received in the accident. When the experience was repeated, the impact of the past was intolerable, and he blocked out the memory.”

“I don't think there was anything like that.”

“But there must have been something very painful or threatening that he doesn't want to remember. Ask his mother.”

Gregory Reeves spent the night reading, and by breakfast time he had a clear idea of what Ming O'Brien had suggested. He remembered the time King Benedict had fainted in his office while being asked to identify photographs from a magazine, and he remembered Bel's strange reaction. She was waiting outside during the deposition and when she heard the uproar had run into the library, seen her son on the floor, and bent over to help him; at that moment the open magazine on the table had caught her eye, and impulsively she had put her hand over King's mouth. She had refused to let the questioning continue, had taken King home in a taxi, and from that day had insisted on being present at all the interviews. Reeves attributed her behavior to concern for her son's health, but now he had doubts. Excited about this chink through which he could glimpse a glimmer of light, Reeves drove directly to Timothy Duane's parents' house to talk with King's mother. Bel was in the kitchen cleaning silver when the butler announced Reeves's visit, but before she could come to meet him, Gregory burst into the kitchen. We have to talk, he said, taking her by the arm, not giving her time to remove her apron or wash her hands. Alone with her in his office, he explained that very soon he would be staking her son's future on the turn of a card, and winning depended on his ability to convince the jury that King was not feigning amnesia. Until yesterday he hadn't seen how that was possible, but with her help today they might change the outcome of the case. He repeated Ming O'Brien's theory and begged her to tell him what had happened to King Benedict when he was young.

“How do you expect me to remember something that happened so long ago?”

“I'm sure you won't have to think very hard to remember, Mrs. Benedict, because you have never forgotten, not even for a minute,” Reeves replied, opening his briefcase and removing the magazine that had triggered her son's attack. “What does this ranch mean to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Were King and you ever in a place like this?”

“We've been a lot of places; we moved all the time while I looked for work. We picked cotton at several places like that.”

“When King was fourteen?”

“Maybe; I don't remember.”

“Please, don't make things more difficult for me, because we don't have much time. I want to help you. We're playing on the same team, Bel; I'm not your enemy.”

Bel Benedict was silent, looking at the photograph with an expression of obdurate dignity, while Gregory Reeves watched admiringly, thinking what a beauty she must have been as a young woman and that had she been born in a different time or under different circumstances she could have married a powerful man who would have sported his sleek pantheress on his arm and no one would have dared object to her race.

“All right, Mr. Reeves, I'm backed into a corner,” she said at last, sighing. “If I keep my mouth shut, like I have for forty years, my baby will end up a helpless old man without a cent to his name, and if I tell what happened, I'll go to jail and my boy will be all alone.”

“There may be still another way. If you consult me as your lawyer, anything you say will be confidential and won't go beyond these four walls, I promise you.”

“You mean you can't report me?”

“No, I can't.”

“Then I want you to be my lawyer; I'm going to need one anyway,” she decided after another long pause. “It was self-defense, as they call it, but who's going to believe me? I was a poor black woman passing through the most racist part of Texas. My son and I worked our way from farm to farm, earning a living at any job I could find; all I had was one suitcase of clothes and two arms to work. I had terrible headaches in those days. I didn't want to, but I kept getting into fights. I attracted trouble like flypaper draws flies. I never lasted anywhere very long; something always happened to make us move on. I was surprised when this big-time farmer gave me a job; all the rest of his workers were
braceros,
Latino men, but it was the season for picking cotton, and I thought he was hard up for help. I couldn't stay where the men lived, so he gave Baby and me a dirty old cabin on the far side of his land, a long ways away, where a truck came to pick us up in the morning and took us back at the end of the day. It was a good job, but the boss had his eye on me. I knew we were headed for trouble, but I was willing to put up with a lot; I promise you, I couldn't be that picky. I had my priorities in order, and putting food in my son's mouth always came first. Why did it matter if I had to go to bed with some man? Ten or twenty minutes and it was all over and you could put it right out of your mind. But he was one of those men who can't do it like everyone else; he liked to use his fists, and if he didn't draw blood, he couldn't do what he came for. Who would have suspected? He seemed like such a good man, his workers respected him, he paid a fair wage, he went to church every Sunday—he was a model boss. I let him rough me up a couple of times and call me a filthy nigger and worse. He wasn't the first; you kind of get used to it . . . and what woman hasn't taken her licks? That Sunday Baby was off playing baseball when the man drove up in his truck. I was alone, and I could see in his face what he was looking for; besides, I could smell the liquor on him. I'm not real sure what happened, Mr. Reeves, but I know he had pulled off his belt and was going at me hot and heavy, and I think I screamed, and that's when Baby came in and got between us and the man hit him hard with his fist. Baby hit the back of his head against the corner of the table. I saw my boy lying senseless on the floor, and I didn't even have to think. . . . I picked up his baseball bat and swung at the man's head. Just one swing with all my heart . . . and I killed him. When Baby came to, I washed off his wound; he had a real bad gash, but I couldn't take him to a hospital, where they would ask a lot of questions; I stopped the blood with cold water and some clean rags. I got the boss's body into his truck, covered it over with gunnysacks, and hid the truck away from the house. I waited till dark, drove twenty miles away from the farm, and ran the truck into a ravine. Nobody knew. Then I walked the five hours back to the cabin. I remember I slept with a clean conscience the rest of the night and the next morning was at the door waiting to be picked up for work, as if nothing had happened. My son and I never talked about any of it. The police found the body and thought the man had had too much to drink and run his truck off the road. They questioned the
braceros,
but if anyone had seen anything they didn't tell it, and that's as far as it went. A little later Baby and I left that place and never set foot in Texas again. Isn't that life for you, Mr. Reeves? That forty years later that ghost would come back to haunt me?”