The Wreckage (36 page)

“She was Catholic,” Wish said.

“No one said a word about it all those years.”

Wish made an attempt to get to his feet but began drifting awkwardly sideways. Bella jumped up to grab his arm.

“You okay?” she said.

He pulled his arm free. Used both hands to smooth the white hair ringing his head. “Mercedes,” he said, as if he was trying the word out for the first time. Tried to recall McCarthy’s phrase, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.

“It must have been hard for her, all those years. She told Ag that Nan sat her down with a hymn book the first week she was here and said, ‘You learn them, missy. Because there’s no micks in this house.’”

Wish was still unsteady on his feet and Bella waited beside him, her hands ready. He was staring down at the black headstone. “Well, missus,” he said. He seemed about to say something more but turned away to look at Bella and then at Mercedes. He started toward the church and they watched him go, nodding to himself as he walked along the path toward the Spell Rock.

Bella said, “Is that what you brought him out here to tell him?”

“I guess so.”

“She was afraid of losing you. Your mother.”

“She wanted to spare me what happened to her, I imagine. She was afraid I’d lose my family altogether.”

“She wasn’t far wrong there, was she.”

Mercedes looked up at Bella, at the angry smile on her face. She could smell the chlorophyll of the freshly cropped grass drifting across the clearing. She reached for a hand. “Let’s go,” she said.

2.

B
ELLA DROVE THE FIRST LEG
of the trip back to St. John’s. Mercedes heard Agnes whisper across to Wish in the backseat, “What happened over there?” But he didn’t say anything in response that she could make out.

In Clarenville they stopped for gas and ate fried chicken at a Mary Brown’s that was empty but for them. Dusk when they walked back to the car, and they pushed on into the night, Wish driving, the tide of darkness settling over them as they travelled east. By the time they crossed the isthmus onto the Avalon Peninsula it was pitch outside, their world reduced to thirty feet of road in the headlights, no stars overhead. Agnes and Isabella nodded off in the back and Mercedes glanced across at Wish to make sure he wasn’t drifting. He seemed to feel her watching.

He said, “The things the Monsignor used to tell us about you.”

“Who?”

“Your people. Protestants. Threw you all in together, Billy Sunday and Christian Science and the Quakers and Alexander Dowie, the Sally Ann. Trial marriages and prison reform and prohibition. A diseased imagination, he used to say, at odds with the genius of Catholicism.”

“The what?”

“The genius of Catholicism. Funny how I spent all my time at mass daydreaming about some girl’s tits and I can still quote him, chapter and verse.” Wish took a breath. “Father Power didn’t think much of you crowd,” he said.

She could see he was furious.

He said, “It’s Spanish, did you know that?”

“What is?”

“Mercedes. It means compassion or mercy or some goddamn thing.”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t know that.”

Wish wagged a finger in her direction without taking his eyes from the road. He said, “You wanted to know everything, is that right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You haven’t changed your mind about that?”

She hesitated, wondering if she wasn’t too tired for it. But in the end she said, “I’m too old to change.”

He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel as if to get a better grip. He said, “There was a guard at the camp I spent the war in. He was an interpreter there the last six months. Nishino, his name was.”

She shifted in her seat to watch him as he talked, his face lit by the dashboard lights. He went on for the better part of an hour, speaking levelly and without emotion, as if he was providing an affidavit, listing dates and events, victims and perpetrators and bystanders, answering questions to clarify, interpreting phrases, naming names when he remembered them. Osano, McCarthy, Spalding. Koyagi, van der Meulen. Nishino. Nishino. Nishino.

He told her about losing Anstey and carrying the urn to the French Temple, happening on the interpreter asleep in the crypt. Like a gift. He said, “We busted in on him there the next night. Me and Harris and Spalding. He was sitting with his back against the far wall and the gun in his hand. Put it up to his head and pulled the trigger. Click, click, click, like that. Just kept pulling the trigger. Click, click, click. We all stepped in, me and Harris and Spalding following behind. And Nishino knelt up to meet us, his hands down by his side. He just give up. We had these wooden clubs the guards at the camp used on us and we started right in. He stayed upright a long time. Pushed himself up off the floor once or twice. Never made a sound.”

She could tell he was fighting not to go under and she said, “It sounds to me like maybe he got what he deserved.”

“I was called there, is how I saw it at the time. It was a righteous thing.” He cracked his window open, as if he was afraid of being overheard and wanted the noise of the wind to cover his voice. “But right and wrong never come into once we got going. It was just … His little piggy eyes, you know. It could have been anyone of his kind, is what I think now.”

Mercedes reached a hand across but he shrugged away from her. Through the window lay the invisible sprawl of barrens and brush land she’d flown over leaving the island fifty years before. She could feel the massive splay of it ravelling through the darkness to either side of them, as if the countryside itself were shadowing his words. It seemed malevolent somehow, she thought. Or simply indifferent, which amounted to the same thing.

Wish said, “It was hard work given the shape we were in. We had to take it in shifts, just to have breath enough to keep at it. We’d brought a couple of handguns and Spalding said we should finish him off and get out. But that’s not what we wanted.”

Mercedes looked out at the road, at the stretch of pavement coming at them. They were less than half an hour outside St. John’s, a sallow glimmer of city lights reflected under clouds on the horizon, as if the place had been set afire when they left the day before and the ruins were still smouldering.

Wish said, “Do you know what we wanted, Mercedes?” She didn’t answer, and he said, “You can change your mind if you like.”

“Just finish it, Wish.”

He nodded but didn’t say anything more for a while, as if he’d changed his own mind about it.

“Wish?”

He said, “We were on our way out the door after we were through and Harris grabbed my arm, told me to hold the flashlight. I turned the light on Nishino and Harris went through his pockets. He had some American money, an old medal. When Harris was done I flicked the light over the corpse one more time. Over the face. There was blood running out of his ears and the eyes swollen shut.”

“Jesus
, Wish.”

“I’m almost through,” he said. “We were all just standing there then, looking at what we’d done to him. And Harris. I don’t know. Harris stood over him and opened his pants and he—” Wish looked out the side window, then back at the highway. “He pissed on him. Right where I had the light shining. He was saying, ‘How do you like that, you yellow bastard.’ And then Spalding stepped up and joined him.”

“That’s enough,” she said.

“That’s
what we wanted, Mercedes.”

She rolled her window all the way down, leaning her head out into the roar of it so she wouldn’t have to hear another word. She filled her head with the cold and the noise until Bella woke in the back and told Mercedes to roll the window closed.

WISH

H
E TURNED OFF THE HARBOUR
arterial just outside the downtown core, taking the exit for the Southern Shore highway out to Calvert. Keeping a close eye on the speedometer. All the while he was talking to Mercedes he’d caught himself picking up speed and had to ease off the accelerator. They hadn’t said another word after Mercedes rolled up her window but he kept losing himself in the basement of the French Temple and the needle would climb above 100, 110.

He’d driven in and out the Southern Shore highway in a similar state of distraction when he came home to Newfoundland to settle things for Lilly. He was in hard shape at the time, drunk most of the day and not able to function in any sensible way when he was sober. He often had no memory of the trip to St. Pat’s when it was done, on autopilot the whole way. He stopped for a coffee and a doughnut in Churchill Square and ate half a container of Tic Tacs before going in to see Lilly, but there was no hiding the condition he was in. She could see it in the slovenly way he dressed, in his rheumy eyes and the sallow colour of his skin, in the perpetual three-day whisker. One afternoon she leaned toward him out of her chair and said, “You have to ask God for help with this.” She tipped her hand to her mouth to show him what she meant.

He’d just that week spent half his life savings on a car and the house in Calvert and had no idea how he was going to get by. He was in a foul enough mood to argue with a crazy woman. He said, “There is no God, Lilly.”

She said,
“Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini qui fecit coelum et terram
. Without Him,” she said, “we can do nothing. You have to say the prayer of a special intention to Our Blessed Lady, every day for thirty days, to ask for her intercession.”

“I brought a crib board,” he said. “Interested in a game?”

He’d quit drinking half a dozen times in his life, always to appease women who left anyway once they saw that sobriety made him no easier to live with. It had never occurred to him to quit when he was alone. But he poured a bottle of Screech down the sink when he got home from St. Pat’s that night. In the morning he brewed a pot of coffee and made a fresh pot every hour. Did the same every day afterwards, morning to night, black coffee strong enough to stand a spoon up straight. Drank it as fiercely as the rum. Just to prove Lilly wrong in the matter, to settle something for himself. He stumbled a few times, spent an evening at Mercer’s hammering back dark-and-dirties until he puked. Each slip goading him sober for longer periods. It had been years now since he last took a drink. And there was some small comfort in staying dry of his own volition.

He’d hoped to receive some of the same comfort in telling Mercedes his story, some sort of release or relief, but there was none. It felt like an act of cruelty, almost a violent thing in the aftermath, to carry through as far as he did when he could feel Mercedes pulling away. And even then he was holding back, refusing to give up the one detail not even Harris or Spalding knew.

When the two men were done pissing on the corpse, they wanted Wish to take a turn. “Have a go there, Liquor Man,” Spalding said, waving toward the dead man. “Let’er rip,” Harris insisted. They were both angry when he refused, as if they felt his reluctance was a judgment on them. But the truth was more pedestrian and bizarre: his cock, Wish realized, was stiff as a poker. He’d gone months in the camp without a gig, without a single subterranean niggle to suggest he’d ever manage an erection again. Then this freakish, inexplicable hard-on. “Let’s go,” he said to them. “We’re done here, let’s go.”

Mercedes reached out to touch his arm and the road came back to him suddenly, a winding stretch near Tors Cove. The speedometer just shy of 120 kilometres an hour. He eased off, touched the brake.

Bella spoke up from the backseat. “Maybe I should drive awhile.”

“Calvert’s just up the road,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” He glanced across at Mercedes but she had gone back to staring out her window into the dark. Trying to piece it together, he guessed, trying to see where and how she fit into the mess. Or just wanting to get clear of the whole goddamn works, to put it out of her head for good.

The house was dark when they pulled up. Bella took his seat behind the wheel and he walked up the steps. He watched through the screen door as the car backed down the driveway, Mercedes staring straight ahead as they went, refusing to meet his eye. They stopped at the bottom of the drive and he could see Mercedes talking with Bella, an animated little exchange that continued for a few moments after Bella put the car into park. They seemed a long way off to him.

Mercedes stepped out of the car and walked up the driveway. She stopped at the foot of the bridge and looked up to him behind the screen.

“You have to give me something,” she said.

“What?”

“You can’t leave it like that,” she said. “Give me something, anything at all. Make something up if you have to.”

“What are you saying, Mercedes?”

“I’m telling you right now,” she warned him.

He pushed the screen door open and took one step down onto the bridge. She looked directly at him and he thought she might actually be counting to ten in her head. He raised both hands to smooth down his little ring of hair. Tried to talk himself into letting her go, letting it end where it was.

She started back to the car.

He said, “For fuck sake, Mercedes,” but she ignored him.

“Mercedes
.”

She turned around, walking slowly backwards down the drive. She looked tired and worn, the dead side of her face completely expressionless, which made the wear seem permanent, irredeemable.

He said, “I met Marion.”

She stopped where she was. “You what?”

“I came down to Lowell once,” he said. “Years ago. You were living in a duplex, a yellow two-story that backed onto a park. You and the girl were sitting in the backyard.”

He’d had no trouble tracking them down. He sat on a park bench in a fedora and sunglasses, throwing breadcrumbs to ducks at the pond’s edge. The path around the water looped within three feet of their back fence and he circled it occasionally, to have a closer view. Mercedes drinking lemonade beside the girl, who was curled up in a deck chair with a sketchpad. The phone rang in the house periodically and one of them would disappear inside to answer it. Mercedes flipped through magazines and fell asleep with her arm over her eyes. As if she’d never known him.

Mercedes said, “What was she wearing?”

“Jesus, Mercedes. It was thirty years ago.”

“Think
for a minute.”

“Shorts,” he said. “I don’t know what colour. She had nothing on her feet. A white blouse, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She had a big pad of paper on her lap. Barrettes to keep her bangs out of her face.” He motioned toward Mercedes. “She was about the age you were the first time I laid eyes on you.”

“What do you mean, you met her?”

“You were gone inside to answer the phone and she … Marion … she was sitting there alone. I strolled by the fence. Said hello as I passed by. She didn’t know me from Adam. I said what a day it was, or some such thing.”

“What did she say to you?”

“Only hello back and it was a fine stretch of weather. Just talk. She had one foot up on the chair and she was swinging the knee back and forth right lazy like. Not a care in the world.”

Mercedes had a hand against her mouth and he stopped there. He said, “That’s all I got for you.”

He went in the door again and closed it behind him, walking through the dark to his bedroom and closing that door as well, without waiting to see whether it was enough to satisfy her.

The rest of the weekend was coffee and satellite television. The Expos leading the NL East and on their way to the pennant if there was no strike, as the papers kept predicting.
Mary Poppins
and John Wayne in
The Searchers
. Reruns of
The Dukes of Hazzard
and
Three’s Company
. Billy-Peter showed up on Monday evening and he went straight for the kettle, put it on the burner, set about making himself a cup of tea. Wish was sitting in the living room, flicking aimlessly through channels. Australian-rules football. Country and western videos. “Some fucking friend you are,” he said. “I could have been lying dead up here this days.”

“You’d be better company dead,” Billy-Peter said. “How was the trip to Fogo?”

America’s Most Wanted
. A southern evangelist sweating on a stadium stage in Brazil. A black man in a suit and tie shadowing the preacher’s every move, translating each sentence into Portuguese. Braves and the Phillies, no score in the second.

Billy-Peter came and sat in an easy chair while he waited for the kettle to boil. Wish set the remote down and looked across at him. Relieved to see he didn’t expect an answer to his question, all his attention on the ball game. When the kettle whistled in the kitchen Wish waved Billy-Peter back into his seat, got up to see to it.

“Any word from Mercedes?” Billy-Peter shouted.

“Not since they dropped me home Saturday.”

“Do you know where she’s staying in St. John’s?”

“With her sister, up in the Torbay apartments.” He brought the mug in and set it on the coffee table.

“You going to track her down?”

“She knows where I am.”

Billy-Peter smiled to himself and picked up the mug.

“What?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

“Forget what?”

Billy-Peter took a sip and made a face. “Jesus, Wish. Didn’t anyone teach you how to make a sensible cup of tea?” And he went off to the kitchen for more milk and sugar.

Wish turned up the volume and stared blindly at the television.
Aufer a me, Domine, cor lapideum
, he thought. Take away my heart of stone. Wiping his eyes clear of tears before Billy-Peter came back to his seat.

And neither man mentioned Mercedes again.

Tuesday afternoon there was a knock at the door. He was asleep on the chesterfield in front of the television and wasn’t sure at first what had woken him. Stumbled to the porch when the knock came again.

“You look surprised,” Isabella said.

“Jehovah’s Witness are the only crowd that knocks at a door around here.” He looked past her to Agnes’s car in the driveway.

“Just me,” she said. “Mind if I come in?”

He backed away from the door and she went by him to sit at the kitchen table.

“Tea or coffee?”

“Just some water would be fine.”

He rooted through the cupboard for a glass, ran the tap to let the water cool. Pulled out a chair and sat down next to her. “What can I do for you, Isabella?”

“I just thought I’d drop in.”

“Your mother know you’re here?”

“Let’s just say I’m trying to satisfy my own personal curiosity.”

He laughed. “About what exactly?”

She put both her hands around the glass of water on the table, shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t seem to know what to say now that she was there beside him. Her right wrist was crowded with woven bracelets, a dozen or more in a rainbow of colours. Wish felt sorry for the woman, there was a lostness about her that suggested a bystander at the scene of a fatal accident. Her obvious discomfort made him fidget in his chair.

He said, “Mercedes ever tell you about my birthmark?” He leaned forward. “What does that look like to you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “An animal, maybe. Dog? Horse?”

“Exactly right,” he said. “Your mother wouldn’t admit it. But that’s what it is.”

She sat back in her chair with her arms folded, her expression meant to say,
Do you have a point?

He told the story of his pregnant mother walking in over the slide-hauling trail, the burning horse barrelling past them, his mother falling and clutching at her neck.

“Someone actually, literally, set a horse on fire, is that what you’re saying?”

He nodded.

“That’s some fucked-up shit.”

“I never did tell your mother what that was all about.”

“There was a
reason?
Jesus.”

“It was a fellow out in Renews owned the horse, she was black as a night without stars but for a white mark on her forehead and built to run. He used to take her into St. John’s every March for the races on Quidi Vidi Lake and there wasn’t a horse in town could touch her. She was the pride of the Southern Shore.”

Bella started laughing. “Wasn’t this a movie of the week or something?”

He glared at her but caught himself. “Never mind,” he said.

She started back-pedalling, as if a voice in her head had reprimanded her. “No, come on. You may as well finish it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. Every bit of his sympathy drained away.

“All right,
fuck
. I’m listening. Tell me about the goddamn horse.” She watched him a while longer until it was obvious to her that he was done. Sipped at her water. She said, “Mom tells me you served in the Pacific.”

“I did.” A low buzz of nausea starting up, like the first hint of seasickness.

“You were in Japan when they dropped the atom bomb?”