House of Prayer No. 2 (17 page)

THE NEWSPAPER SUITS YOU
, it's all about the Navy and its ships. On the way out of D.C., you had tried to enlist in the Navy, and they wouldn't have you because of your hips. You even drove to the merchant marine school in Piney Point, Maryland, and they wouldn't have you either. The owner of the newspaper is a big, fearless, boisterous guy with a beard who reminds you of the pioneer in the TV show who lives on the frontier with a pet grizzly bear. His wife, who keeps the books, is a pretty Cuban girl with a nice Tidewater accent. She keeps a sharp edge on her accounting pencil and on her carving knife at home. You know the front office will be secure, and it looks as though you can bank a steady paycheck of ninety dollars a week because money is tight and you don't care, and after all the sales and layout people go home, you and the owner and his wife run the vacuums and mops and brooms and then go have nice dinners at a restaurant that advertises in your newspaper and pays in trade.

Your editorial desk is in a room with a gaggle of salesgirls, some of whom have substance and boyfriend problems. A couple
will come back from long lunches disheveled and clammy, and will brag about landing a new account in the backseat at a used-car lot or in a quiet corner of a bed and mattress showroom. The girls are funny and loud, and you like them a lot.

In the back the layout people are generally potheads who share their dope and tell you when good funk bands are coming to town.

Overall it's a good place, and you fill the pages with your name and several of your pseudonyms. You cover the world's largest naval base and its air wings, NATO, the shipyards, the weapons centers, and anything else that interests you, and it all does. You interview admirals and senators, enlisted men, pilots, and junior intelligence officers in their crisp khaki skirts whom you talk into taking you into the restricted areas down in Dam Neck. You write editorials for the Op-Ed page, and you write scathing letters under fake names back to yourself, and you write letters the next week in answer to those, and you feel like Mark Twain, and it's a lot of fun to feel like Mark Twain.

AFTER A FEW MONTHS
the circulation increases, your boss and his wife have put the business plan into effect that he had argued with his father about, and the base in enjoying all the coverage you are giving them. Ronald Reagan helps, saying his goal is to have a six-hundred-ship Navy. You get a raise, and your boss trades some ad space to a high-rise on the beach where you can live in a penthouse for free. You have been living in a cheap motel on the Virginia Beach strip with a drummer from the Hilton house band,
a tall buff Jewish kid named Kenny. It is a transient kind of place. One night there is a fight upstairs among some redneck construction workers building a hotel next door, and somebody goes out the second-story window and lands on the hood of a car outside your window. The roommate of the girl you found who almost bled out on the Outer Banks works in housekeeping. In the evenings you mix manhattans in a plastic hospital bedside water pitcher that a previous tenant had left and wait for your roommate to come home at 1:00 a.m. because it's no use going to sleep when the band shows up ready to unwind. You catnap until 8:00 a.m. and get in your truck and go to the paper. You are young, and this is possible. Kenny says he remembered seeing you once before at the High on the Hog outdoor music festival wearing just bib overalls, no shirt, and a button on one of your overalls straps that said
I SHOULD HAVE STOOD IN BED
, and when a mutual friend later introduced you as a possible roommate, Kenny's first thought was
Whoa, it's that retarded dude
.

THE CLOSEST BAR TO YOUR PENTHOUSE
is across the street on the beach, the Thunderbird Lounge, and it suits you too. It's an off-season nexus of the strip, a strictly locals place. There's the marine biologist moonlighting as the bartender, the undercover cop with the hash pipe, the magician who picks pockets off season, the pretty registration clerk who sleeps with entire visiting hockey teams, the rubber auto parts satyr, the commercial fisherman who tells you there's a Carolina logger in
Moby Dick
, there's the enormous leonine bookie, there's the owner of
a nearby bar whose arms are always broken in casts because he can't pay his gambling debts, the two gay busboys who will later be convicted of murder, the Navy nurse junkie, the tragic widower, the duck-carving hero of Guadalcanal, the mob boss's son trying to become a fireman, the doe-eyed harelip girl who always wants to sleep with you, and there's old Fitz, the driving instructor who has his own shamrock shot glass in a special place behind the bar to steady his nerves after a day riding shotgun with old Filipino women students on the expressway.

There's Witcher, whom you meet the first day you set foot in the place, who entered talking about having approached a single-lane, one-mile bridge over a swampy river hauling a repossessed double-wide house just as a big rig tandem log truck was entering the other end, no possible way for both trucks to pass on the ancient rust-cornered span, but neither seeming to back down, and Witcher saw the log truck and the log truck saw Witcher and they began accelerating toward each other, both blaring their big diesel bassoons, big Witcher working through the gears of his tractor truck, seeing the log truck beginning to furiously flash its headlights but not slow down either, both barreling down to the point of impact in the middle of the bridge, Witcher saying he just kept pouring it on, and you could tell he didn't know why,
he was just led to do it
. You've crossed that bridge many times and had ridden a tugboat beneath it, in fact it's where the tugboat once sank and a steamboat was overturned by a white tornado on a full-moon night years before. Witcher said just before the point of almost head-on impact he flung himself across the seat …

It is here in the story Witcher lifts the water glass of vodka to his lips and drinks about half of it and sets it back down, and the bar allows the warm rush of the alcohol to settle his nerves before someone says,
For God's sake, what happened?!

He says the first thing that happened was that the mirrors on either side of his cab were ripped off: the right side by the girders of the bridge and the left side by the leading edge of an oversized load of loblolly pine logs. The edge of the logs must have then caught the leading edge of the repossessed part of the double-wide home because he felt a shearing feeling and the noise of a great impact as the boarded-up wall to the transported living room was ripped off, its pieces exploding into space and fluttering down into the river, and then there was nothing for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, and he realized the truck was still racing forward, and he didn't know if it was going off the side of the bridge or still barreling down the bridge, so he decided to sit up and get back behind the wheel, so he did, and the truck was flying across the bridge at a great speed
about
to veer and plunge off the bridge, so Witcher grabbed the wheel while sneaking a look in the rearview mirror, where the log truck's brake lights were lit through braked-wheel skidding smoke betraying that the driver had lost his nerve or had become confounded, and Witcher also saw cheap living room furniture, a fold-out couch and an ottoman (you remember his saying
ottoman
) and other crap blown out on the bridge road, and he realized he's lost the inboard and maybe outboard walls to the repossessed double-wide he was hauling, but he had not lost his nerve, had driven what remained of the repossession and delivered it as it
was to the double-wide dealer boasting low, low prices just outside of Suffolk, had gotten in his car and driven straight to the Thunderbird, and there he stood finishing the bottom half of his straight water glass of vodka, no ice, a Pepsi chaser.

You will remember the story because you have a reporter's notebook in your back pocket and because afterward you go in the bathroom and you write it down sitting on the lid of a toilet, thinking,
Here I am, I have found a home among some of God's other special children
.

THE SECRETARY AT THE PAPER
knew to call the T-bird bar phone when anyone was looking for you, either there or the putt-putt golf course down on Pacific. You were usually at either place in the late afternoon. It's where your mother calls you one night from a neighbor's house in your hometown. Your father has been drinking and listening to his jazz records, and she asked him if he wanted her to put his dinner on a plate, as usual, because he was doing what he usually did when he came home, opening up the freezer, putting ice in a glass, and from the stove she would hear the noise she said she always dreaded, the clink of his flying tiger class ring tinking against the bottle of bourbon as he grabbed it from under the sink. Your sister, a teenager now, has told you she couldn't bring friends home because she wasn't sure what they'd find. This night, a rainy night, your father has grabbed them both by their arms and thrown them out the front door into the rain, slammed the door, loudly locked it, and turned off the front porch light.

You drain your glass at the T-bird and get in your big green Caprice with the 350 engine, and you burn up the forty-seven miles to your house. You break into your house and grab your father up out of his stuffed chair, where he looks up pleasantly surprised at first to see you, Coltrane blaring, and you grab him by his arm and throw him out the front door, but he's in pretty good shape from working on the lake property, and the time you remember as being almost the last time you see your father will be this time when you're pushing each other around in front of your house in the rain and wrestling down in the mud.

UNDER THE LAW, YOUR
father is entitled to anything he has brought into the marriage. When he backs up a truck to your mother's house to claim what is his, you have sent your mother and sister away, and you have two friends there to back you up, one is David, the son of The Preacher, the other is George, a son of the Commonwealth's Attorney. Your father takes the old carved beds and marble-topped dressers and big furniture, dining room table, dressers, plus all the hand-painted vases and china and silver and pretty much anything else of value except a couple of things you have hidden off-site, a clock your grandfather said was yours one day, a .30-.30 Winchester your grandfather used to hunt with in the East Texas bayous, and an aluminum ladder you use to put up Christmas wreaths on the front of the house.