The One-in-a-Million Boy (12 page)

Now the story—his wonderful story—felt like poison. He stood in the mowed backyard among the bright corpses of flowers. He said, “Does Juke know what's coming?”

“I don't know.”

“He wasn't a PA when I knew him,” Quinn said. “He had a kid, though. And a wife. A good egg, I always thought. Good player, too.”

“I can't listen. I can't listen to this.”

“All right,” he said. Maybe he was wrong; maybe revenge—a long, protracted lawsuit—would get her over the hump. “Belle?”

She scrambled to her feet.

“I'm not second-guessing, Belle,” he said, following her up the slope to the house. “I'm not. I'm just asking. Amy said chronic anxiety. Is that what he had?”

“I don't know what he had.” She turned. “What he had was
us.
My body plus your body, and it made him who he was.”

Belle looked at him, distractedly at first, then intently. “This is none of your business anyway,” she said, very quietly. “It's not your business now.” Her armored expression faded then, in stages, until the old Belle, the real Belle, the Belle who liked children and old ladies and him, appeared as a rush of blood in her cheeks. Her arms dropped to her sides. “I don't cry,” she quavered. “I don't cry because I can't stand to wound them with my pain.”

“Wound me,” he said, and this she was willing to do. She pitched herself into his arms, her cries soft and sloppy and heart-crushing. Her anguish left him feeling justly pummeled and rendered his own afflictions hardly worth mentioning. His own misery—or whatever you called it—existed as a mounting pressure, like breath held too long underwater. She cried and cried and he took it standing up.

“Ted's been a rock,” she said at last, swabbing her face with her sleeve. “Just an absolute rock. But he went through so much when his wife died. And he—he has his sons. I keep resenting him for it. I'm sick with envy.” She lifted her bloodshot eyes. “I'm telling you this because you won't judge me.”

“It's all right. You're entitled.”

“No. I'm really not entitled. They're beautiful boys. They've been so kind. Even the youngest, Evan, he's only nine, he's been so kind. But it's there anyway. The envy. I'm aching with it.” She waved him away. “And Amy, my God. I feel like a specimen under glass.”

It was time to go, he could see that, so he walked her back up the slope to the breezeway. He slipped the check from his pocket. He'd kept back just enough to keep his landlord paid and had taken to turning off lights behind him, making his morning coffee at home, switching to black to save money on cream. He'd disconnected his landline and bought a cell phone package even cheaper than the one he'd been using before.

“I wasn't bored,” he whispered to her. “It was never that.” He laid the check on a small table that had once held their joint mail.

“You have to stop, Quinn. Money is—irrelevant.”

“It's what I have.”

“What you owe him,” she said quietly, “you can never pay.”

She let the check lie there. She didn't pick it up or give it back. She just let it lie. Her anger toward him was gone, he realized; in its place, pity.

“Ask the God Squad to pray for me,” she said, then went into the kitchen without him.

Eventually, he left. Giving her money only made him feel worse. He supposed that was the point.

After the bus dropped him off downtown, Quinn walked home by way of the art museum, where he peered through the fence, looking for the sculpture he always looked for: a massive human figure made from a net of steel wire, its insides packed with stones. A human figure literally weighted down, one colossal knee resting on the ground, torso bent nearly in half, head bowed but not bent. A man, Quinn thought, suffering in private. The man was mute. Sheltered by small sweet trees. To find him you had to already know he was there.

Quinn took out his phone, which had a 104-year-old woman on its call log; how had this happened?

“Oh,” she said, recognizing his voice. “I thought you were going to be a man from Pakistan trying to sell me a credit card.”

“I can't make it next week,” he said, and could have left it there, but she'd tripped him up by knowing him at hello. He added, “How's Sunday?”

“Do you assume,” she asked him, “that one day is the same as another to me? Because I'm old?”

“I've got a gig I can't pass up.”

“I make my biscuits on Sunday morning.”

“Make them on Saturday.”

“After that, one of the ladies picks me up for the ten-thirty Mass.”

“Then I'll come early.”

“You never come early.”

“I'll come early, Ona.”

If you stared long enough, the sculpture appeared to quaver, as if the rocks themselves were breathing, giving breath to the man. “There's these—kids. Their lead guitarist's gone again, and I'm in, and it looks like they're on the brink of something.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Something
good,
” he amended. “A
good
brink.”

“Oh. I thought they were planning to jump off a cliff.” She paused. “Are these boys—do they play rock-and-roll music?”

He smiled to hear her say it. “Gospel rock,” he said. “Nothing in it to worry your grandma.”

“My grandma's far beyond the reach of worry.”

“They're gallingly talented. And their mother's a walking bank.”

“Aha. Opportunity knocks.”

“Let's hope.”

“Hope is a perilous thing, Quinn.”

“So I hear.” He'd thought himself finished with hope, but here it was again, that urgent, nearly spiritual ache, an open wound looking for a balm. How did Ona know this?

“Sunday's good anyway,” she said. “I like the Saturday Mass.” She sounded chirpy. “Even if one day
is
the same as another around here, it's not polite to make a lady admit it.”

“I'll make a note.”

“You do that.”

“Biscuits sound good,” he said.

“I'll make a note.”

The sculpture was still breathing, or appearing to. Quinn felt suddenly stone-heavy himself, a caged body packed with rocks, a stone man hiding under the trees.
Get up,
he whispered, but the stone man remained where he was, suspended, poised to rise up despite his burden, or to give in at last to the force of its staggering weight.

 

HEAVY

1. Heaviest butterfly. Over 25 grams. Queen Alexandra's birdwing. Country of Papua New Guinea.
   

2. Heaviest baby born to healthy mother. 22 pounds and 8 ounces. Country of Italy.
   

3. Heaviest bus pulled by hair. 17,359 pounds. Pulled by Letchemanah Ramasamy. Country of Malaysia.
   

4. Heaviest annual rainfall. 38.94 feet per year. Mawsynram. Country of India.
   

5. Heaviest object removed from stomach. 5 pounds and 3 ounces. Ball of hair. Country of UK.
   

6. Heaviest flying bird. Great bustard. 46.3 pounds. Country of Hungary.
   

7. Heaviest heart. Up to 1,500 pounds. Blue whale. Country of the oceans.
   

8. Heaviest cat. Himmy. 46.8 pounds. Country of Australia.
   

9. Heaviest dog. Kell. 286 pounds. Country of England.
   

10. Heaviest man. John Minnoch. 1,400 pounds. Country of USA.
    

 

 

* * *

This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life shards on tape. This is Part Three.

I don't know about
shards.

. . .

Because it makes me sound like something broken and un-put-back-togetherable.

. . .

Memories, then. But they're not, really. They feel like something else.

. . .

Never mind.
Shards
is fine. Go.

. . .

I'll tell you where I was: waiting. Same as the mothers now. Same as the mothers from the beginning of time. Randall was in law school, padding off to his tax-code classes on two flat feet; but Frankie, he joined the navy. Over my nearly dead body.

. . .

“Think of all those shocked-up boys who came back from the first one,” I told him. “Take a look at your own half-buttoned father.” But Frankie wasn't a listener, like you. Frankie was a talker. He wrote the most beautiful letters, from his LCT in the northern Marianas.

. . .

It's a large vessel that carries things. Tanks and men, mostly. It carries them across God's great green sea and then dumps them spank into harm's way. You should have seen his letters. Howard kept them from me when I left.

. . .

“I saw a bird with ten-foot wings, Mama.” “I like my shipmates real well, Mama.” That kind of thing. “The skies here turn such colors, Mama, like a fighter's bad-punched eye.” My Frankie had a way with words.

. . .

Well. Six months later, after the Battle of Saipan, a sniper got him on one of the boys' rare evenings ashore. The rest of the fellows were on the beach watching a movie, but not Frankie. Frankie pilfered a jeep and off he went, unauthorized as usual, a joy ride down a secured road. Which was not as secure as he thought. There was liquor involved, no doubt. And a girl. Even out there in the middle of God's empty palm, Frankie would have figured a way to work in a girl.

. . .

You know, I wondered the same thing? The exact same thing. But nobody could tell me. They didn't think it was important. I figured something with Bob Hope in it.

. . .

Oh, Bob Hope was wonderful. Very funny man. So that would be my guess. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, probably one of those dopey road movies with Dorothy Lamour prancing around in her white sarong. All those well-behaved boys with better mothers, doing what they're told, watching pretty Dorothy Lamour. And then there's Frankie in his jeep speeding past a field of sugar cane.

. . .

Possibly. I never thought of that. Hmm. The sky out there is so famously open. But jeeps make such a commotion. And the sound system would have been a little on the mushy side. I don't imagine he could make out actual words. But maybe he fiddled out the funny parts just from the rise and fall, the timing. Bing and Bob were famous for their timing.

. . .

Me, too. I hope the sound carried. I hope he died laughing.

Quinn hadn't entirely believed the Omaha-deejay coast-to-coast story until he got on the road and discovered shiny throngs of boys and girls wearing Resurrection Lane T-shirts and singing all the words. They bought the boys' CD in multiples, the shows went long, and Quinn winged through the prodigal cousin's smeared charts, improvising his own sluicing guitar hooks in a state of dislocation and glee.

It was just a job—with a fangless pack of absurdly talented Jesus lovers who called him Pops—but the same thing happened every time: he cared. They pestered him for advice and he gave it out like money he didn't need, feeling expansive and necessary. He shuffled the set list in Providence, tweaked a muddy house system in Springfield, finagled the primo spot in a Worcester triple bill. He cared about their quadrupling crowds and T-shirt sales. He cared about their music—straight-arrow constructions aquiver with chordal surprises—and he cared about what their music did to all those upturned faces. At the end of each night his jaw ached from smiling.

As usual, Sylvie kept showing up to keep an eye on things, though with Quinn aboard the usual glitches didn't much signify. He'd rewired a faulty connection during the sound check, which to Sylvie was the equivalent of building a microwave oven out of paper clips and a Zippo. “How do you
know
everything?” she asked.

The answer: twenty-five years futzing with hard-used equipment, coaxing balance and tone out of barrooms with ass-crap acoustics.

“My boys can barely manage a wall plug,” she said. “Doug's even worse. I married a
brain
surgeon
who can't reset our house alarm.” This was their last night, intermission, and they were hanging out at the swag table, where Sylvie guarded a trove of T-shirts emblazoned with the band's motto,
WALK THE LANE
, in crucifixion red. She turned to her helper, a volunteer from campus ministry, a florid man in a gingham cowboy shirt. “Did anybody do a headcount?” she asked.

The man said, “Six hundred, easy.”

Quinn let the number settle.

“It's that song,” the man said. “The local guy's been playing it.”

“Quinn told them to save it for the encore,” Sylvie said. She kissed her fingers and swatted Quinn's chin. “Make 'em wait, says the expert.” She was fifty-five and looked younger than Quinn, her skin lasered smooth as a nectarine, her hair expensively sun-kissed. As she scanned the room, her shrewd eyes narrowed behind her sleek, urban eyeglasses. “Last time we were in Boston, forty-seven people showed up.” She had to yell a bit over the milling crowd.

“Sometimes you get lucky,” Quinn said.

“Fifty weeks on the road isn't luck,” Sylvie said. “Here you go, sweetie.” She handed a shirt to a girl who gave Quinn the eye through the purplish slats of her bangs. The Christian circuit wasn't always as vanilla-pudding as people thought.

“If fifty weeks on the road were luck,” Quinn said, “I'd be living pretty large by now.”

Sylvie regarded him thoughtfully. Over the past three years they'd spent enough time in each other's company to become friends, after a fashion. “I suppose this must be galling,” she said, “to someone who's kicked around as long as you have.”

Onstage the boys were orchestrating the altar call, exhorting the unsaved to make themselves known to Jesus. Nothing too fire-and-brimstone; it sounded more like an invitation to a backstage party. Sweat-beaded fans swirled stageward to be prayed over by faith counselors who led them to rooms and corners for a teaching moment and complimentary Bible. The idea was to get right with Jesus, then fill out a decision card, which came in cartons of two hundred and included checkoff boxes:
I commit,
et cetera;
I recommit,
et cetera;
I want more information on,
et cetera;
I wish to receive Resurrection Lane's weekly e-mail meditation.
This was the ministry portion of the show, scheduled for certain preselected venues, the details of which the boys spent many long hours finessing.