The Unspeakable (24 page)

Abigail's face started to twist in horror. “She isn't diabetic.”

“I checked her blood sugar myself.”

“I'm telling you, she's isn't diabetic.”

“But Father said—”

Marbury was stunned. “She wears an ID bracelet.”

One of the doctors, upon hearing this, picked up the child's arm. A metal bracelet dangled in the air.

“He's right!”

But Abigail just shook her head.

“That's not her bracelet,” she said. “It's her mother's. She's the diabetic.”

“But surely insulin won't hurt her?” asked Marbury. “Will it?”

We continued our game but I wasn't playing well. At least as well as I once remember playing against him. Easy shots I missed. Layups and open jump shots went wild, rolling off the rim straight into Marbury's reaching arms. And the shots that he made were ones that I thought to be impossible for him, hook shots and long bombs that in seminary he'd always attempted but to no avail. Now everything that he threw up went in, making him look more invincible and me only more hapless.

I tried to make up for my lack of a game with sheer hustle and determination. I challenged every shot, I dribbled around in circles trying to tire him out, I rebounded with a fury reserved for a larger man than myself. But none of it worked. I was still falling behind. After Marbury sunk two more shots he called time, taking pity on me and my lungs before he readied me for the final doom.

“Guess I'm hot today,” he said.

I wanted to wipe that smile off of his face and might have with my fist if not for something that I remembered. Once a week in
seminary, I punished him just like this, whether in a game or one-on-one, I creamed Marbury like no man before was ever creamed. And I showed him little mercy. Certainly not half the grace that he was showing me. He took the beatings well, unlike myself, and I never saw him as a loser, only as a man out of his element.

“You're in good shape,” I said.

But Marbury said that wasn't always the case. Before he left for Pennsylvania he was at the lowest point in his life, made only lower by the fact that he didn't know exactly how low he was.

“I was fat. Not blubber fat but fat thinking. A real hotshot, I thought I knew everything. But God shut me up.”

“Or you elected to shut yourself up.”

“And why would I do that?”

“I don't know. Maybe this is your idea of a joke.”

“It's no joke, Peter.”

“Then say something. Say something and I might be able to help you.”

“What can you do?”

“I'll talk to the Bishop.”

But Marbury just shook his head.

He said, “I want to speak. Lord knows I try every day.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, but it's gone.”

I must have given him a nasty look, for he added, “Haven't you ever lost anything before? It's horrible.”

He knew that I had.

Maybe Marbury didn't mean it that way or maybe he did and I was just kidding myself. I don't know. But my thoughts went back to that day with Sandra and suddenly I was there again. I could see the whole scene unfold before my eyes.

We were at the railroad tracks.

Sandra saw the man from the caboose and took off running. I don't know how but I bolted out as well, and the man didn't try
to stop me. Not at first. I was a few steps out of the caboose door and already down the stairs when I heard him yelling.

“Superman!”

But I just kept on running. Sandra was ahead of me, running at full speed. Her feet were flying along the railroad ties, taking two or three at a time. She was petrified. I ran as hard as I could, hoping that I could intercept her but I just couldn't catch up. She couldn't hear me. She didn't even know I was behind her. My chest started to burn as I ran and I began to wheeze and cough.

It was my asthma.

“You'll forget Superman!”

The man from the caboose was closing in on me. I started to run as fast as I could but I was falling behind. Sandra was ahead of me, crossing a thicket of trees right at the crossing signal. But the signal wasn't on.

I turned around to find the man almost on top of me. I tried to push it but I just collapsed; my lungs were getting the best of me. The man trotted up and looked down at me. I thought that he was going to grab me, take me back to his caboose or something horrible, but he didn't. He just smiled.

“Take Superman. I've already read it.”

And he handed me his comic book.

I couldn't breathe. My heart was pounding, my head hurt. But the man just stood there. He didn't do anything.

Then I heard a whistle.

“Four o'clock. Choo-choo.”

And he smiled.

Game point.

Marbury threw up a shot that missed, giving me a golden opportunity to take advantage. Thanks to my fierce play I managed to hack my way back up to even the score, a real accomplishment
considering just how badly I was playing. I took the ball at the top of the key, or more likely where the key would have been if a podium wasn't there first, and made my move. I dribbled a few times and spun to my left, a move that in my heyday would have faked Marbury out of everything below his belt. But not this time. He stuck to me like damp chalk, following me to the basket as my shot soared wide. He took the rebound, stepped back, and gunned.

A winning basket.

The ball bounced on the floor until it died. I lost. In all my years of playing Marbury I had never lost; I had not even come close to losing. And he seemed to recognize the occasion, the rarity of it, for he smiled.

He said, “Easy roll. It's the rim.”

Marbury was being gracious. But the truth was I knew better. He beat me, thrashed me soundly, despite the score. A part of me could blame it on my physical condition or on the fact that I was rusty. I hadn't played in several months. But that didn't cut water. I lost because I assumed myself to be better, fat, in Marbury's words, presuming to know the outcome of something before it even began. I was no better off than Marbury; I was just presuming something different.

“It's only a game, Peter. Forget about it.”

I glanced at him, his blue eyes flashing delight. And then it came to me. An image of him in the pool hall, hustling all comers into a contest of wit and guile. What if Marbury had always held back, even in seminary? What if he never played as well as he could? Maybe Marbury was like one of those Zen masters who perfected failure as some bizarre form of meditation. Where would that leave me? All those years of gloating, my personal reveling in his destruction on the court, might have been nothing but a giant sham. A simple con.

“You weren't dogging me, were you, Marbury?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this is a first. You never win.”

He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. My own imagination was saying enough. Maybe Marbury was tired of my dominance over the years and practiced for this moment. Working himself with hours of dribbling and shooting just on the off chance that we might meet up again. Maybe he even planned it that way, mysteriously losing his voice just to force this game and his eventual outcome in it. Or the lost voice itself might be the real game here, the final victory to negate every other defeat in his life. His father, his mother, Jill, the man Burk in the bar. I could have kept on thinking these thoughts until I realized something. That's what a con man does. He forces you up against yourself.

I said, “I'm just surprised, that's all. I thought you didn't play.”

“I don't play. Doesn't mean I still don't shoot around.”

I took his explanation in stride. Whatever the reason, I'd lost.

“I guess a guy can't lose forever, Marbury.”

Words that I pulled out from my past. For I'm not sure that I really believed it. Growing up, watching certain farmers lose year in and year out, despite the weather, despite the lay of the land, had taught me otherwise. My father always referred to these poor fellows as unlucky, without any hope of luck, which only made me think about the opposite of that. The lucky. That was us, for a while. Our farm prospered. Even during rough times we somehow averted disaster, whether by our wits or luck or just plain intelligence I could never quite figure out. Sometimes it was hot and people lost their corn, but we rarely did. It was the same with other crops, and even our animals. We sold at always the right time. Never low enough to bury us; never too high to make us zealous. It was like someone was looking out for us.

My mother said that someone was God. That God looked out for all pious people everywhere, helping them whenever the Almighty deemed it necessary to intervene. And I grew up with that explanation, I might even have believed it until that day when I
realized that we weren't so lucky, just awaiting our turn at life's guillotine.

It started when my father got sick, several months before Sandra and the railroad tracks. He never had a good heart but we didn't think much about it, he was so strong. But a heart attack changed all that. He became frail, losing fifty or so pounds of muscle built up over the years by hoisting hay and seed. My brothers took over the farm, except that they were only kids themselves, still in school, and we needed to hire help, which was expensive. But we persevered this way for over two years, everyone pitching in where they could.

At least until the grasshoppers came.

It was the hottest summer on record, I remember that. No rain for two months straight. And the only clouds were clouds of grasshoppers moving across the fields like hungry demons. You couldn't walk without crushing a fistful of them. They would jump through crops and strip a field bare. What there was left to strip. For the ground was like concrete, hard and cracked like those pictures of the desert in magazines. Except that this desert was our own land. Entire lakes dried up under the scorching heat. Rivers ran into nowhere. Fish died. Leaves turned brown well before autumn. And the heat made everything brittle, ready for a match, lives as well.

We went into debt that summer. My father sold a tractor just to make ends meet. But that didn't last long. He had a payroll to meet and when he couldn't pay anymore the workers just left. No sympathy, for they had families to feed as well. We sent more animals to slaughter but prices were low, and the luck that we enjoyed all those years expired without so much as a friendly good-bye.

A man can't lose forever. My father said that, walking around with a cane, his crops dying, the grasshoppers eating up the last of his self-respect. He said it as a rallying point for the family, but I don't think he saw it that way. For we were surrounded by losers. People who had lost farms, fathers who had lost sons in wars, mothers who had lost daughters, people who had lost faith. In life, it
sometimes seemed that people could go on losing forever and often did, though they called it something else.

Marbury gave me a sideways glance.

He said, “Losing I've never been afraid of. It tempers one anyway.”

I've heard people say that before. On radio, on television talk shows, in self-help books. But I must admit to never believing any of it. Nobody likes pain, and even if that pain could be exchanged for something else, something greater than the sum of its parts, it could never equal the pain itself.

“I don't believe that, Marbury. Steel is tempered but it's hard. It's hard because it can't feel. Same with people. Push them hard enough and they wind up feeling nothing. They wind up as nothing.”

I was breathing fast, almost blurting out my words.

“Is that what happened to you, Peter?”

I just looked at him.

“Your mother said you witnessed it.”

“I saw everything, yes.”

“Even the train?”

The train.

I could hear the whistle but I was wheezing too bad to move. My sister was still running and she never turned around. The man from the caboose was just standing there making sounds with the whistle, going choo-choo like he was a little kid.

And then it turned a corner.

I looked up and saw the brakeman. But he couldn't see what it was that I was seeing, Sandra going at a direct intercept. She was running past the few inactive tracks down a small ravine and then up again where the main track was. Trees were on one side. Another blast from the whistle.

She couldn't hear it.

The man from the caboose stopped his idiotic whistling and started running. He didn't know that Sandra was deaf but he could see what was happening. I never saw anyone sprint so fast. He was like some sort of wild animal, jumping over holes and logs trying to get to her. Then I started running as well, I had to, but my lungs were failing me.

The train took the last stretch and the brakeman blew the whistle. His view was still blocked by the trees and he slowed down just a bit. Not nearly slow enough. Sandra turned now, the only time she ever did, and saw the man from the caboose running after her. She only ran faster.

The caboose man was closing in and I was right behind, puffing along. But the train was faster. Sandra made a last dash across the trees. I knew where she was going. Across the road to my father, who was probably finishing his business at the feed store.

But she never made it.

Everything went into a dream after that. I saw a body flying and the sound of screeching metal brakes. Sparks and fire and smoke filled the air. The man from the caboose, thinking that he was at war again perhaps or maybe aghast with the horror, threw his arms over his face and screamed. I screamed too.

The train limped to a stop a few hundred yards later. Several men ran out of the locomotive yelling and acting all frantic. I caught up to the man from the caboose by now, who was standing over Sandra's body. One of the men pushed him out of the way and slid into her, tearing open a medical kit. But he didn't need one.

“Aw, Christ! No! No!” he said.

Voices and confusion.