The Evening News (4 page)

Only a white milk truck moved down the street. Gino walked along the sidewalk darkened by the evening's rain. The night had seen a real storm. He stepped over flattened leaves, twigs, branches thick as his arm. There'd been plenty of lightning and low, rolling thunder, the kind that lasted many seconds and rattled the windowpanes and terrified Gino's younger brothers and sisters, but he hadn't been afraid. The storm was right, wonderful. Gino knew it stormed because the girls had seen Jesus in the church.

The miracle hadn't been in the newspaper. Gino had wondered
why, then concluded that the people who printed the newspaper weren't Catholics. At supper when he told his parents they'd misunderstood. No, he argued. No. You have to believe! “Eat,” his father had told him.

They'd see, Gino thought. And he would be special because he knew and believed from the beginning. He walked past the school, breathing the cool air that tasted wet and fresh from the night's storm, then cut through the empty parish courtyard and entered through the side doorway of the church.

The dark hallway leading to the altar boys' room stretched ahead of him. He dipped his fingers into the holy water fount and made the sign of the Cross. On the wooden floor by the fount were pages torn from a parish hymnbook. Gino picked them up, then saw the edge of another torn page crushed beneath the inner side door. What? He opened the inner door of the church.

His breath tripped in his throat. Covering the marble floor were scores of shattered vigil lights. They looked like they'd been thrown there. The wrought-iron stand that had held them lay on its side. More hymnals had been flung to the floor. Gino looked at Mary's side altar. The blue embroidered cloth hanging over it had been slashed. The gold candlesticks were knocked down, and each candle was broken. Flowers and more vigil lights lay smashed on the altar's steps. The heavy tabernacle beneath the statue of the Virgin had been tipped from its base, as if shoved by a giant, and rested at a dizzy angle. Glass crunched beneath his feet as he stepped forward. He turned and ran.

Gino ran up the dark hallway to the altar boys' room. Pitch black. His fingers found the light switch. Nothing there had been damaged. No one else was there. He hurried down half the length of the dark passageway that ran behind the center altar and led to the sacristy and rectory, calling out, “Father! Father!” But when he heard no response he stopped in the darkness. He listened to his pounding heart. There was nothing
to do but return to the servers' room and dress for Mass. Numbly, he took his black cassock from the closet. He threw on his surplice. Then he buttoned the top button of his white shirt. His fingers were shaking. Gino looked at his hands, then genuflected and held them for a moment to his face.

Then he took a long breath and walked again down the passageway, hearing the echo of his footsteps. Someone was there now—a priest, smoke curling from a cigarette.

“Father!” Gino cried. “Father, the church!”

“I know,” Father Manning said, cinching the cord around his alb.

“But, Father—”

The priest walked toward him and put his hand on his shoulder. “You'll forgive me. I don't usually smoke here. I don't want to give you a bad example. You don't smoke, do you, Gino?”

“No, Father.” The hand still held his shoulder.

“Good. I wish I shared your self-control.” The priest withdrew his arm.

“But the church—” Gino began.

“We'll clean up the mess before too many people see it. Don't be upset.”

“But I thought it was a miracle, Father.”

“What?” Father Manning said.

Gino looked away, then at the priest's face. “I thought that Maureen and Donna—”

Father Manning took a deep drag off his cigarette. “There was nothing miraculous about what happened here.” Smoke streamed from his mouth. The priest turned to finish dressing.

Gino nodded, confused, events still piecing themselves together. He went to the wine closet for the cruets. Father Manning called out, “Full.” So Gino filled one of the cruets with wine, the other with cold water. The water splashed in the sink. He set them next to the dish and cloth and patens that rested on the table next to the altar, and then returned to the
sacristy for the long pole used to light the candles, and he lit the center pair, and tears welled in his eyes.

No miracle. A flush as burning as the flame washed over him. Fool. To try to be special. To believe. For a moment he stood quietly at the altar, holding the flame to the tall candle, feeling the tears drip from his cheeks to the altar cloth. Then a sudden sorrow fell over him. All at once the world seemed very dark and very big.

Their fears appear nightly, as routinely as the newscaster's face. Framed by the plastic black rectangle of the portable color television set Maria's parents had given them, the newscaster's head and shoulders normally fill two-thirds of the screen, and the man's face is always calm, pale salmon. Behind him is a soothing gray-blue backdrop. The other third of the picture is left to maps of Poland, EI Salvador, the Falkland Islands. Paul wonders who chooses the colors for the maps. EI Salvador is usually brown; Poland, nearly always red. Argentina is green and jagged. Paul likes to tinker with the knob labeled
TONE
to make the countries any color he wants them to be. Sometimes when Maria isn't in the room he turns down the
BRIGHT
knob and makes everything turn black. Paul's parents didn't have a color television when he was growing up. Whenever he watches baseball he likes the colors to be true, but not so gaudy that he is distracted by them. The grass in the infield has to be lime green, the dirt around home plate barely orange. Paul has been to Atlanta. The earth is barely orange in Atlanta. Atlanta is nearly five hundred miles away, but cable picks up all the televised games. The Braves now call themselves America's Team. During the first week they had the set Paul waited patiently for a shot of the American flag flying out in center field; then he quickly locked in the flag's red stripes, its
square field of blue, its crisp wrinkled lines of white, then marked each knob with a Flair pen so he could always return the colors to where they were supposed to be, clearly there on the screen, bright and true, but not so loud as to be distracted by them.

Maria doesn't care about the color. When she turns on the TV set, any colors are all right with her, even black and white. Maria is seven months pregnant. The color set was a pregnancy gift. Each day when she comes home from the university library where she works she watches “General Hospital,” her favorite soap opera, usually in black and white. She calls the soaps “the dopes.” She hasn't smoked any marijuana since she learned she was pregnant. Though the baby wasn't planned, Maria takes all the right vitamins and eats enough protein and vegetables to make herself sometimes so sick of doing things right that she wants to roll a fat joint and get high, but she doesn't have any grass in the house and she knows that drugs are probably bad for the baby. She drinks red wine instead. Seldom more than seven glasses a week. Paul drinks a lot of wine, mostly imported, now that they can afford it. He grew up drinking inexpensive homemade wine. None of the expensive imported wine is as good as what he remembers drinking. He thinks of himself as ethnic. At a Sociology Department party he joked that America was a Wonder Bread culture, soft and white, slickly packaged with pictures of colorful balloons. You think you're holding something of integrity and substance, but when you squeeze it you have mostly preservatives and air. Maria doesn't know what to think of herself. Her Spanish isn't fluent, and she has never been to Mexico, where her grandparents were born. She always feels peculiar checking the box next to H
ISPANIC
on the equal opportunity forms. Paul is much less American than she, and he has no box to check. Today he comes home unexpectedly early from his teaching job at the university and sees Luke Spencer's worried face on the screen in black and white, and
he adjusts the knobs, making darker marks with his Flair pen.

“Why don't you set this thing right?” he asks Maria. “Why do we have color if you don't use it?”

“You're blocking the picture,” Maria says. She tries to stare past him. “You make a better door than a window.”

Paul asks Maria if he can get her anything, if she felt O.K. at work, if she wants her feet or back rubbed. Maria waits until a commercial to tell him no, yes, no.

He checks the morning newspaper to see if the Braves have an afternoon game. Today is an off-day. In the kitchen he pours a glass of apple juice. At the sink he rinses the evening's vegetables, then chops them at the table in the dining room. He sneaks behind Maria and kisses her on the cheek. He makes the salad and adds the imported black olives she hadn't seen him slip into the grocery cart. Paul likes doing things for Maria. He loves her, more than he knows, especially now that she is going to have a baby. This is a special, if tense, time in their lives—this spring, a year after the baseball strike, the year Paul is going up for tenure, the year Maria received a higher classification and a 5.2 percent raise at the library, the year they are learning Lamaze. Their afternoons together are cool and peaceful, and Luke Spencer is searching for his missing Laura, and the Braves are hot, on a winning streak. Yesterday the chairman of the department told Paul he needn't worry. Earlier in the week the obstetrician told Maria she was coming along just fine. The evening news won't be on for a few more hours. Paul readjusts the color of Luke's curly mop of hair as Maria chews a slice of celery and then closes her eyes and naps on the sofa facing the portable television.

Earlier that year they had a dog. Her name was Bingo, and she was a dumb mistake. An impulsive decision made in a shopping mall the day before Christmas Eve two years ago. Paul and Maria paused before a pet store window and predictably Paul said, “Look at the cute puppies.” He had never had
a dog. He hadn't bought Maria's present yet. A toddler in a harness and leash pulled his mother toward the window, pointing with a wet finger he'd just taken from his mouth. Beneath the vague noise of footsteps and muffled conversations a Christmas carol was playing. From the doorway of the store a salesman in a doctor's white lab coat smiled at Maria, then caught Paul's eye and winked.

Maria and Paul sat inside a paneled cubicle, and the man in the white doctor's coat brought them the smallest of the puppies swaddled in a clean white towel. The puppy trembled, then licked Maria's fingers. “He's so frightened,” she said.

“She,” corrected the salesman. “But you'll see that in a moment or two she'll relax.”

The dog did. Maria petted the pup's soft fur. Paul absently touched the checkbook in his sports jacket pocket, then stood and told the salesman they'd have to think about it.

Outside the store a Salvation Army volunteer rang a silent bell and held up a sign that read
RING
,
RING
. Shoppers rushed about. Paul and Maria shared an Orange Julius. “It's a lot of money,” Paul said.

“She's so adorable,” Maria said, her dark hair spilling over the leather collar of her coat. “I can't stand to think of her having to spend Christmas in that damn window.”

There was nothing they could do. By the time Bingo was two years old she'd had kennel cough, bronchitis, seizures, and finally allergies. Paul and Maria sat in the waiting rooms of veterinarians. There was little the vets could do except mark the dog's chart and cash Paul's checks. The last vet was named Alonzo Scarr, and at a red light on the way home Paul joked that clearly the man had never had a future as a plastic surgeon. Maria held Bingo in her arms. She didn't smile. “So of course he became a veterinarian,” Paul said, forcing his joke, hoping to make Maria laugh, to break the tension. “I mean, with a last name like Scarr—”

Maria said nothing. The car behind them honked. The red
light had changed to green. Dr. Scarr had said with compassion and utter seriousness that Bingo was allergic to nearly everything.

This was after Maria and Paul had followed his advice and put the dog on a cottage cheese and vegetable oil diet. Dr. Scarr said, “Your dog has severe environmental allergies, and I could check her for sixty agents but she'll show positive on fifty-eight of them.” Paul said, “Then she's allergic to life.” The vet scratched his head and nodded. By then Bingo was a mass of scabs—an itching, bleeding mess of fur and nail, flesh and tooth—and nothing, not even the bimonthly shots, could heal her.

“It's a real racket,” a professor in criminal justice told Paul one afternoon in the department mailroom. “See, they breed these poor animals in puppy mills in states where animal welfare regulations are lax. The pups are neurotic and plagued with genetic disorders common to their breed. The dogs are literally bred to death. My neighbors made the same mistake. Had to have the dog put down. Their kids really took it hard.”

Maria was working the night shift at the library that semester. “We have to do something,” she'd tell Paul when she came home. She was just starting to show. She'd drink a glass of juice and sigh, then rock Bingo in her arms and say she wished she knew the answer. Paul watched television with the dog that semester. Their favorite show was “All Creatures Great and Small” on PBS. The set was new and Paul liked to make the colors bright, giving Mr. Herriot's face a garish redness. He talked to the dog when Maria wasn't home. “See,” he'd say to Bingo, who'd squat beside him on the wooden floor, incessantly scratching her chest and neck, “Tristan's got himself in hot water with Siegfried again, but Mr. Herriot's sure to save the day.”

Dr. Scarr was silent as he filled the large hypodermic. Maria's small hands held Bingo's trembling face. Really, it was the best thing; the dog couldn't even eat without scratching
herself. “Relax, honey,” Maria said. The first of her tears splashed on the stainless steel table. Paul was at school, teaching his seminar. Something about stratification. His specialty was something about stratification. It was all too complex. They could try another vet, but they'd already been to three and now Bingo's skin was badly infected and it wasn't even flea season and in five months if everything went well they'd have the baby. Dr. Scarr stepped forward, then coughed. The night before, watching Bingo try to eat, Paul had announced, “I'm going to firebomb the pet store.” “Is it the right thing?” Maria had asked. “You know, is it cruel to kill her?” Paul paced the length of the kitchen. “The only thing holding me back is knowing I'd have the blood of innocent goldfish on my hands.” Bingo was licking her chops, then scratched open a fresh scab. “It's more cruel to let her live,” Maria concluded. She stroked the dog's ears. Scarr withdrew the needle, and Bingo slumped. “Oh,” Maria cried. He listened to the dog's sides with a stethoscope. Maria would tell Paul what she'd done that afternoon at lunch. A person shouldn't have to kill his first dog. “It's O.K.,” Maria said to Bingo, her voice thick.