Wolf at the table, p.22
Wolf at the Table, page 22
There’s no toilet on the houseboat and when no one’s looking he’ll often just piss over the edge. When he’s drunk enough he’ll even move his bowels in the same spot, plopping logs right into the Ohio.
There is a kerosene heating system that provides some warmth and a sleeping nook big enough for his long, aching limbs. His bedding is a nest of old Salvation Army blankets and a halfway decent sleeping bag that he found at a campsite just outside Lexington. For light, when he needs it, he uses a pair of hurricane lamps that burn slowly and efficiently on paraffin oil, which goes for about ten dollars a canister at the local hardware store. But after the sun goes down he prefers the dark anyway.
Except for his Mickey Mantle rookie card, which he keeps in its Lucite casing and stores in a three-inch slot that he carved into the moldering wood beside his bed, Alec has very little of value. Although he knows the card is worth a lot, he refuses to sell it, as it’s the one piece of insurance he has in fending off complete destitution. He may need it down the line. At night, for safety, he padlocks the houseboat’s front entrance from the inside. There is also an aft half door, or his “midget door” as he likes to call it, which he’s barricaded with an old woodstove that no longer works because the flue rotted out. He had to patch the exhaust portal with plywood.
For clean water, every other day he goes into town with a gallon jug, which he fills at the Paducah YMCA’s reception area water fountain, because he’s managed to charm the fat front desk receptionist, Ginny, into thinking that he likes her.
“When are you gonna let me take you out, sweet Ginny?” he’ll say to her while filling up his jug.
“You stop that now, Jack,” she’ll say, blushing, her giant arms wobbling as she waves away his attention.
He sleeps with a bowie knife under his pillow and has his heart set on a snub-nosed revolver with a pearl handle that he regularly visits via bus at a pawnshop on Washington Avenue in Louisville. It’s only $250 and he knows it will change his life in a meaningful way. He’s already procured three boxes of bullets for it.
Alec sits at his makeshift table, which he’s constructed from an old door that he found in the lane behind the poultry plant where he applied for a job and was swiftly rejected. He reaches for the bottle of Maker’s Mark he keeps under the table, unscrews the top, then is reminded, cruelly, of its emptiness. Not even a drop remains. Tomorrow he’ll have to go to the blood bank again. He’s given more goddamn blood to that place than can be expected of one human. He’s O negative and he knows this is his one true asset. His goddamn blood.
He sits there, in the exact same spot, feeling his houseboat swaying this way and that for what seems like several hours. His thoughts turn to cement pins in his head: money, bourbon, loneliness… money, bourbon, loneliness… money, bourbon, loneliness…
When it finally gets dark he cries, a sound from a boy, or a woman even, his voice high, unrecognizable, wheedling. He is so lonesome he has the thought to douse himself with kerosene and set himself on fire. He could walk out onto the back deck of his houseboat and dance a final, flaming fuck-you to the world, before plunging into the water, dead and charred, only his teeth spared by the inferno.
He lights a match, considers the flame, and then joins it to the end of a cigarette, which he smokes while choking back his sobs, swallowing them whole like wads of dry bread. He will give the bastards another pint of his blood and use the money to buy a bottle of Maker’s, groceries, insect repellent, athlete’s foot spray, a canister of paraffin oil, and a new pack of underwear. He’ll put forty of it in the little coffee can under his bed, which is dedicated to that pearl-handled snub-nosed .38 over in Louisville.
When he is halfway finished with his cigarette he strikes another match and lights the wick of one of his hurricane lamps and watches the season’s first mosquito flit about the glowing nimbus, its sound like a tuning fork that someone has struck in some far-off nonexistent room.
“Please come see me on Monday,” he says aloud to the walls of his moldering, floating cabin, thinking of his new friend, Grady, and fighting the urge to cry again. “Please, please, please come see me. I’ll be waiting for you.”
9
ELMIRA, NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER 7, 1985
AVA
THE INTERIOR OF THE confessional is downright foul. It smells as if someone’s eaten half of a liverwurst sandwich and left its remains under the confessor’s bench. Ava Larkin sits across from Father Gattas, who joined the parish after Father Oates, the longtime senior priest at St. John the Baptist, died in March. Father Gattas is young, perhaps only thirty, and came to Elmira from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Despite his youth, he delivers his sermons with the cool articulate calm of a man beyond his years, like some veteran movie actor playing a presidential candidate.
Father Gattas’s pale profile, obscured by the perforated filament separating priest from confessor, is mostly in shadow. He possesses a round, open face and the same baby-blond hair as Ava’s youngest, Lexy. Although there is a mahogany bench, Ava chooses to kneel on the padded tuffet. She is sixty-six years old and in the past few months the simple act of genuflecting has become a painful exercise. While working in her garden, she spends far less time on her knees than she did even three months ago, at the beginning of the summer. But kneeling is the least she can do, especially during the sacrament of confession. Jesus suffered so much more for our sins, after all. In recent weeks it’s become difficult for her to extend her torso for more than a minute in this position without collapsing forward. Inserting a pair of tube socks into the hollows behind her knees helps alleviate the pressure—she can relax just slightly. The socks were her late husband’s and she finds it comforting to carry something of Donald with her to church. Next Thursday will be the first anniversary of his death, and the ache behind both knees seems to have gotten worse with each passing month, as if her husband’s ghost is starting to take hold of her joints.
It’s quite muggy for September and Ava’s brow is already damp. In one hand she clutches her white rosary and in the other a postcard she received in yesterday’s mail. The rosary beads are made of seashells that were purportedly blessed in the nineteenth century by Pope Leo XII on the papal altar of the Basilica of St. Peter. Ava inherited the rosary from her mother toward the end of her life and, like her husband’s tube socks, Ava carries it with her everywhere she goes. On the front of the postcard is a black-and-white photograph of a small clapboard church and on the back, in blue ballpoint ink, the name TIMOTHY DETTBARN is written in cursive, as well as a number she assumes to be his age, fourteen, and below that, in the same penmanship, the phrase SAYING HELLO AND GOODBYE. This is the twelfth such postcard she’s received. Each one, which arrives in her mailbox toward the beginning of the month, features a church on the front, and a boy’s name, a corresponding number, and the same mysterious, unpunctuated greeting/farewell on the back. The thing that has driven her into St. John the Baptist’s confessional is that she knows the SAYING HELLO AND GOODBYE handwriting all too well: It belongs to her son, Alec. Ava realized this after she received the third postcard, all the way back in December. She went up to the attic and unearthed his old school papers from a storage box. The H and the G were unmistakably the same—the posts of the capital H listing toward each other like a pair of foal’s legs, the capital G bloated and sagging to the right, its curled bottom serif too small compared to the rest of the letter.
Following the confessional exchange, Ava has been kneeling for what feels like several minutes. She knows that it’s her responsibility to begin the next part of the conversation. The silence is marked by the sounds of the old church: its creaking choir loft, the wind mewling through cracks in the large stained-glass window above the confessional; an echoey voice in the nave practicing a few phrases of the Latin Mass. Ava has attended this church since she was a little girl. She and Donald were married here. Her children were baptized and had their first communions here. All of them but Joan completed their confirmation here. It’s truly been a second home, a place of refuge.
“You’re awfully quiet today,” Father Gattas finally says.
Ava apologizes. In the small confines her voice sounds weak and hollow. She is usually far more confident.
“What’s on your mind, Mrs. Larkin?”
Ava stares at the postcard. The white church’s humble square structure looks more suited to a roadside filling station or a small family bakery. The wooden sign driven into its narrow front lawn reads WOOLRIDGE BAPTIST CHURCH. The postmark is from Missouri.
“I guess I’m looking for guidance,” she says, dabbing at her brow with the back of her hand holding the rosary.
“What kind of guidance?”
She turns the postcard over in her lap to reveal Timothy Dettbarn’s name and, below this, SAYING HELLO AND GOODBYE in her son’s penmanship, the blue ballpoint ink weakly scrawled into the thick laminated stock. It’s as if Alec wrote these four words on his knee. Ava pictures Timothy Dettbarn as a thin farm boy with wheat-colored hair. Freckles across the bridge of his nose, skinned-up knees. But if he is indeed fourteen, then she’s imagined him too young. Somehow she can’t help but conjure innocence. Most fourteen-year-old boys are well into puberty, whereas she has summoned an eight-year-old.
“I’m afraid a member of my family has lost their way,” she says.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the priest says. “Can you be more specific?”
She can see Alec so clearly. She’s summoned him the night before she and Donald told him he had to leave. He was sitting across from them at the dining room table. His black hair was long and thick and starting to get curly in the back. In the past year his shoulders had noticeably broadened. Faint splotches of acne marked his chin and forehead. He was trying to grow a mustache, which looked like a collection of miniature spider legs above his lip. Compared to her daughters he appeared crazed, like some unshowered, feral drifter who’d broken into the house.
“Are you talking about one of your children?” Father Gattas asks.
He’s young but smart. He can sense things in the pauses. He really does possess an impressive speaking voice, one that would be perfect for radio commercials. He could do an ad for a bank or a shoe store. He was probably captain of his high school debate team. She imagines him reciting Shakespearean sonnets in front of a mirror.
“… Mrs. Larkin?”
“It’s my older boy,” she says.
“Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“I’m almost certain that he is, yes.”
“With the law?”
“I don’t think it’s like that,” Ava says.
Again he asks her to be more specific. But she feels truly tongue-tied.
“Mrs. Larkin, in the short time that I’ve been acquainted with you I’ve never known you to be this unforthcoming at confession.”
“It may be more about his soul,” she says. “I think he’s been adrift.”
“Have you been estranged from…?”
“Alec,” she replies. Saying his name—when was the last time?—causes her jaw to go slack. She has to bring her fingers to her lips and swallow. Again she can see her son’s hair. Is it still dark? Has it turned gray? Is it salt-and-pepper? His eyes were always so brown, like those of a Spaniard or an Italian. He was the only one in the family whose skin immediately tanned in the summer. Everyone else burned so easily.
“So tell me about Alec,” Father Gattas says.
“He’s my only son,” Ava says. “My only living son. He was an altar boy here.”
“How old is Alec now?”
“He’s in his mid-forties,” she says. “He was always troubled.”
She doesn’t bother mentioning the offertory theft that took place at this very church—the incident that caused her and Donald to kick him out of the house. It was the one smirch in what has been an otherwise long and reliable family presence at St. John the Baptist.
“When was the last time you were in touch with him?” the priest asks.
“Oh, many years ago,” she says, dabbing at her forehead again. “Twenty years, at least.”
“And you’re worried about him now because…?”
There’s a rustling of paper and she envisions Father Gattas removing a stick of chewing gum from its foil, folding it into his mouth. Or maybe he’s taking notes? She turns the postcard over, revealing the small church.
“I think he’s wandered so far from what would be considered a good path,” she says. “He could never find his place in the world. And now I fear that he’s living in…”
“In what?”
“Well, in a very bad way,” she says.
“In sin?” the priest asks.
The simple three-letter word carries a terrible implication. She sees Alec moving through a dark room, stealing things from the top of a bureau: a comb, a letter opener, a woman’s hatpin. Is he still thin? Have his large veiny hands gotten thicker? He’s carrying a small kitchen knife and his eyes are fixed upon the back of a young boy who is staring out a window.
“I’m afraid that whatever he’s up to,” Ava says, “might be something much worse than anything I can even conceive of.”
Father Gattas tells her that it’s okay if she’s not ready to fully discuss the matter; she can come back in a few days when she’s formed more specific thoughts and feelings. He adds that if it would make it any easier, he’d be happy to speak more informally with her outside the confessional. “Do you know where Alec is?” he asks.
“I don’t,” she says. “He used to keep in touch with his oldest sister, but that stopped a while ago.”
“And am I correct in assuming that you’re feeling somehow responsible for his lack of direction?”
The word Ava’s father would use for someone like Alec was shiftless.
“Yes,” Ava says.
According to her father, anyone who wasn’t ready either to work a forty-hour-a-week job or to answer the call of duty was shiftless. Stuart Farrell. Who’d grown up in Dublin, had moved to the United States when he was eight years old, had lived to be ninety-three, and could effortlessly quote the sermons and poetry of John Donne.
“All you can do is pray for your son,” Father Gattas says.
Through the thin partition Ava glimpses the priest wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Part of her wonders if she should forgo the advice from this young priest and contact the authorities. Could the police help her find her son? Or would this postcard and the other eleven she’s been keeping in the junk drawer below the phone in some way implicate him? The simple thought of somehow turning him in, of somehow alerting the authorities, is too much to bear. Besides, she doesn’t even know where he is. What police station would she call?
“And you can also pray for forgiveness for the part you might’ve played in his wayward path,” he adds. “But that’s only for God to judge.”
“I keep thinking something must have happened to him,” Ava says. “Something I wasn’t aware of.”
“Why do you feel this way?”
“Because we raised our children to be good,” she says. “Donald set such a fine example. And none of them are perfect, but Alec’s sisters genuinely care about others.” Ava squeezes her rosary. “We tried our very best with him, we really did.”
“I’m sure you and your husband gave Alec every opportunity to have a good life. Sometimes there’s nothing more we can do.”
After Father offers her an act of penance, Ava quickly recites the Act of Contrition.
“Give thanks to the Lord for He is good,” Father Gattas says.
“For His mercy endures forever,” Ava says, and pauses on the notion of mercy. She can’t help but think of Alec. Can she be as forgiving as the Holy Father? If her only living son is doing terrible things, can she find it in her heart to be merciful? Even in the confessional this feels nearly impossible.
“The Lord has freed you from your sins,” Father Gattas says through the partition. “Go in peace.”
“Thanks be to God,” Ava says.
After exiting the confessional booth, she sits in a pew near the back of the church and quietly thanks God for the Gift of His Mercy. She then recites her penance while continuing to clutch her rosary, which she still plans on bequeathing to Myra. She wishes Myra had had a girl to continue the tradition of the oldest daughter receiving the long-standing family heirloom. It’s a shame that Fiona turned out to be an atheist, that Joan will never have children, and that Lexy married a Jew. Lexy and her husband, Barry, a vice president at a top-level Wall Street financial firm, have twin girls, Eve and Elizabeth. They live in a beautiful Tudor home in Rowayton, Connecticut. Barry looks like he could be the brother of Lexy’s college sweetheart, Ed, who wound up breaking Lexy’s heart after he graduated from Yale and moved to Switzerland. Why Lexy is so drawn to Jewish men is truly a mystery. Perhaps someday Myra’s son, Ronan, will also have a daughter?
AT THE GROCERY STORE Ava buys a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk, a pound of lean ground beef, a pound each of ricotta and mozzarella cheese, two cans of tomato paste, and a package of lasagna noodles. While waiting in the checkout line she is confronted with a periodicals rack containing one of those awful tabloids whose front page features a picture of the movie star Rock Hudson. He is shirtless, lounging on the deck of a small yacht. The headline says that Mr. Hudson has contracted the AIDS virus, that his health is in serious decline. The smaller print claims that he’s had sex with over 20,000 men, that his entire career has been a lie. In the photo he looks thin, hollowed.
