The Unspeakable (12 page)

“Will you look at that guy? All nerve.”

“There are a million jerks like that, Peter. Try prison.”

The man went back to his friends, laughing and joking. But I couldn't help thinking that I was the real butt of his joke and not the waitress.

Marbury was pouring himself yet another cup of coffee, not paying attention. He was busy playing with the new bags of sugar that our waitress left him. Stacking them up like sandbags, he built tiny walls around his coffee cup. I imagined Marbury as a child and wondered what would have happened to him had his mother never died. Another direction maybe. Another life altogether.

“You said that your father was innocent.”

Marbury looked up. “How did you get all the way to there?”

“Just thinking about prison, that's all.”

The man was still laughing. It was like I never existed.

“Interview ten inmates and you'll get the same story. What makes you so certain of your father's innocence?”

“Because I was there.”

Marbury said that the reason his father went to prison all began with pool. It was good fun at first. He would set up shop while his father was working late, or on Saturdays. Marbury said that he hung around like a kid should, drinking soda and keeping himself
clean from bad influences. No smokes. No beers. And certainly no girls. He did this to please his father, but more importantly, he did this to check out his clientele. While people drank more than they could hold, Marbury would size up the competition or watch the games already in progress. Or if no one was playing, he would rack up a set to play alone, certain to dump a few easy shots in case anyone was watching. Which they usually were. Eventually a person would take up the cue against Marbury. Money would be mentioned, then set aside for safe keeping by the bartender, and it would all begin.

Marbury said that his father kept a blind eye to the pool table, or at least if he knew that his son was playing he wasn't objecting any. Money was still trickling in and he was busier than ever, running around just to cover all the bases. And the number of clients, though not as many as in the past, proved a godsend for the young pool shark. For it meant a steady stream of people, some terrible at playing, some worse than they thought, others just fair to middling. Marbury worked these folks hard, he said, because they were his bread and butter, but also because he knew that others would work them even harder.

“I never let anyone walk away completely broke. They always had cab fare. Lunch money at the very least.”

I wasn't impressed with his magnanimity.

I said, “Maybe you could have allowed someone else to win.”

“I only did that once. That was enough.”

It was a bright autumn day, Marbury said, and he was finishing up with someone, beating the pants off him. Marbury was tired and wanted to go home when he walked in. A sleazy hood of a man, his hair oiled back, with bushy eyebrows that tried to conceal a vicious scar over his eye but couldn't. Marbury said that he had a bad feeling from the start, an instinct about the fellow, and tried to wiggle away. But it was too late. He saw the money. Hundred-dollar bills.

There was an unspoken code in the neighborhood, a kind of ethics of pool hustling, that kept the sharks away from one another. Only one hustler per bar, that was the rule, for if the public knew that sharks were on the loose, all money would dry up, disappear completely, and nobody wanted that. Marbury said that he gave anyone who even looked suspicious a wide berth, refusing to play or even just to hit a few for he knew the consequences. A full-fledged war with all the casualties of combat.

“I guess this means you played him.”

Marbury nodded.

He said, “He couldn't even hold a stick. I found out why later.”

Marbury tried to get out of playing, he said, by throwing the first few games. He thought that if the man was bored, or saw that no real money would ever come of it, that he would just quit. But he didn't. In fact, the opposite happened. The more Marbury lost the more interested the man got. He threw in more money, doubling it after every win. And it didn't matter how much Marbury contributed or even whether he contributed at all, the man threw in money anyway.

“Finally it became too much. Maybe I got greedy.”

Marbury, exhausted but sensing his biggest payday, started to play better. He won a few games easily and it went to his head. He started to feel invincible. Money was added to the pot, escalating the game and his ego more. Shots went back and forth, routine stuff except for one shot, a banker that left the man deep in a corner. Too deep for a left-hander, which he was, but the man tried to compensate by shifting to his right. And that's when Marbury saw it. The scam.

He was a natural right-hander.

Marbury took advantage of the next break to play his hardest, ending the game as quickly as possible, before the man had the opportunity to switch to his good side. After the eight ball was dropped Marbury reached over for the money, which wasn't left with
the bartender as usual, who was in the back room resupplying, but in a plastic cup. Marbury said that he'd had enough.

A hand reached down.

“It ain't over till I say so, kid.”

“I started to back away,” said Marbury to me. “A bad move.”

It was a bad move because the man came after him with a pool stick. Marbury, barely seventeen, quickly found himself cornered against the door of the men's room with nowhere to escape.

“Playing games, eh, kid?”

“Just pool, mister. Take the money and we'll call it even.”

Marbury was scared.

“I don't care about the money.”

The man with the scar flashed an evil grin, along with a knife. The sort of knife that one used to clean deer and wild animals.

“Don't care about the money at all.”

Marbury said that he was about to say his final prayers, kiss his life good-bye, when he saw his father, who had heard the commotion all the way in the back room.

He said, “Let the boy go, mister.”

The man turned slightly, still pinning the blade into the boy's stomach.

“I'll gut this kid. You get in the way and I'll gut a second.”

“I'm his father.”

“Then I guess I'll have to gut you both.”

The next events were sketchy. A fight ensued, the sound of pool sticks being snapped, the flash of a moving knife. Before he knew it, the three were on the floor fighting for their lives, when suddenly Marbury found himself holding the knife. Everything stopped.

The man stood up, laughing. “Got the hair to do me, kid?”

Before Marbury could answer or even think, the man with the scar over his eye lunged forward and in one motion, sheer reaction on Marbury's part, the knife moved straight into his chest, stabbing him.

“I must have severed the aorta. Anyway, he was dead.” Marbury took a sip of coffee as I just sat there. Dead.

Then he added, “He moved more than they do on television. One leg kept flopping up and down, then a minute later it didn't.”

Marbury said that the wail of a police siren pierced the air. Someone from the beauty shop next door actually called the police, unusual for a betting joint, he said, which only reinforced in his mind the ferocity of the fight. While he and his father waited for the law, Marbury said that his father did a strange thing. He took the knife from his son's shaking hand and kept it. The police found it that way.

As the cops pulled him out, handcuffed and confessing to the murder, his father, Marbury said, whispered something into his ear that he never forgot.

He said, “Live a good life, Jimmy. Second chances are rare.”

“I still try to remember that,” said Marbury.

I felt myself slumping in the booth. The story stunned me, I'll admit it. The random horror, the sheer gruesomeness of it, struck me on many levels and I found it fantastic, like something you watch on television but discover only later happening to you in real life.

“What did they do to your father?”

“He went to prison. I wanted to tell my side of the story, the truth, but he wouldn't let me. He figured the cops would nail him one way or another.”

“But if he was innocent—”

“None of us is that innocent.”

I shook my head. The story was coming to me in waves, still building.

Marbury knew what I was thinking, for he said, “I killed a man.”

I tried to water things down. “It was self-defense.”

“Was it now?”

“You were fighting for your life, man.”

“I shouldn't have been there in the first place.”

I didn't know what to say. The problem with relationships really. No matter the amount of empathy employed, how much human intimacy created, it was still nothing more than employed intimacy, manufactured empathy. I didn't plunge a knife into a man's chest, and I couldn't feel the horror of watching a man bleed to death in front of me, no matter how long I lived.

“Well, you were a child anyway.”

Marbury smiled. “God doesn't wait for birthdays. Neither do killers.”

“Surely you don't believe God was involved?”

“Not directly perhaps. He didn't take the knife.”

“Then how?”

“One path ends, another begins. Everything changed after that.”

Marbury said that the judge gave his father a reduced sentence after he heard about the difficulties that the family had suffered through and the fact that the murder was in self-defense, though the judge never could really buy that. In his mind gambling led to murder anyway and couldn't just be explained away with the vagaries of a street fight. So he sent Marbury's father to prison. Hard time. But soon after his arrival Marbury said that his father began to throw up blood and he was found to have stomach cancer.

“He didn't last long after that.”

It suddenly hit me. “You had ho family.”

Marbury shook his head. Fortunately he had an aunt to live with. A woman descended from good Puritan stock, she believed that everyone should make their own way in the world, without help from anyone. But when she saw the younger Marbury the aunt couldn't help but bend her own moral rules and offer up her home, which she did.

She was a widow whose husband left her a small fortune, money that he made on Wall Street, and she lived on a small estate in
Connecticut. The aunt never had any children, a good thing, said Marbury, for children wouldn't figure easily into her extended cruises and trips abroad. Not even teenagers. Marbury found himself alone in the house for months at a time. After he tired of the surroundings, the horseback riding and fishing, he found other things to occupy him. Trouble mostly. The stuff the late sixies were so famous for. But the important thing, said Marbury, was that despite the rebellion of his youth, God still left him with a choice. Prison or the priesthood, though it wasn't obvious to him at the time. It was just another path.

He said, “So I chose the other path. God's prison.”

Our waitress came by holding up two pieces of cake.

Marbury looked at me, then at his watch. It was almost lunch. His eyes widened as if to tell me what he wanted without having to sign it to me.

“He'll take chocolate,” I said.

She pushed the aroma with her hand. “Fresh baked. Can he still—?”

“Taste? I'm afraid so. Taste. Smell. Hear.”

“Oh, God. I did it again. I'm sorry.”

Marbury offered her a smile but she was too embarrassed to take it. She just left our cake on the table and walked away. Marbury shrugged.

“I seem to have that effect on people.”

“You have some sort of effect. I'm just trying to figure out what.”

Marbury thought I was being vague but I wasn't. Several members of his congregation that I interviewed told me that they attended church only because of Marbury, that he made them feel closer to God.

One of them said, “I've gone to maybe twenty churches since I
was a kid. But nobody made me feel like I actually belonged like Father Marbury.”

Another one: “I didn't like it here before. The other priests made me feel helpless, like just because I can't hear I need God more than you. They preached a good line, equality. But I never could buy it. Now I can.”

Marbury listened as I read these quotes to him, his head bobbing. When I asked him for his thoughts about why people would say this, why he had struck such a nerve, he tried to brush me off.

He said, “I'm just one of the gang. Another quiet one.”

“Except that you can heal. How do you do that?”

“I've told you already. I don't do anything. God does.”

“But God listens to you.”

“I just pray, Peter. Good old-fashioned prayer.”

“And does prayer absolve sins? Or do you personally?”

He gave me a hard glance.

He said, “I pray, that's it. God deals with sin.”

“Kneeling or standing?”

“What?”

“Your prayers, do you kneel or stand? Eyes open or closed? I'm interested in your methods, Marbury. If you have a key—”

“I have nothing.”

He took a bite of cake as if to punctuate himself.

I just sat there and toyed with my fork. Marbury was like a stone wall. He denied or confirmed nothing, and everything was built on a fault line and could come crashing down at any moment.

“What are you fishing for, Peter?”

“You already know. No more healing. No more prayers.”

“I mean, what are you really looking for?”

I was hesitant. Finally:

“The Bishop has a job for you. I'd consider it.”

“Let me guess. Something with an office. Probably a tiny one.”

“You can work behind the scenes.”

“You mean, I can work where nobody will see me. No thanks.”

“This is an opportunity, Marbury.”

“Really? It sounds more like a death sentence.”