The Wreckage (37 page)

“In Nagasaki.”

“What was that like?”

“What was it
like?”

“Yeah,” she said uncertainly.

“Jesus, I don’t know.”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

He laughed to himself. Shook his head. Thought of how he’d tried to describe Nishino’s mutilated face to Mercedes, clawing after a few words that wouldn’t obscure or falsify or mislead, managing only to diminish the reality of it. The ineffable fact of it, lying there at his feet. He didn’t have the stomach for another failure of that sort now. Talking seemed just another way of forgetting.

Bella could see the hesitation in him. She said, “You don’t think it was right.”

“They did it because they could,” he said and shrugged, as if to withhold judgment. “I’ll tell you what I thought at the time. I thought the Americans were the only ones in the world had the guts to drop those bombs and God bless them. I prayed for more, is the truth of it. Even after I saw what it did.”

“Is that why you didn’t come looking for Mom after the war?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, Isabella.”

“She could have set things right, you know.”

“Set what right?”

“Whatever it is that went wrong with you over there.”

He looked away.

“I’m being serious.”

“I know you’re being serious,” he said. He shook his head. “You crowd are all alike, every last one of you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll tell you what I think now, Isabella,” he said. He spoke without raising his voice. “There isn’t another country in the world could have dropped those bombs and then carried on claiming love is the cure for all that ails the world. What a feat that is. Hallmark and Disneyland and Hollywood and whatever the fuck else makes you believe such bullshit. What a
feat,”
he said again. He could feel his legs quivering under the table.

Bella held up her hands. “Okay,” she said. “Forget it. I didn’t come out here to fight.”

“Why did you come out here, Bella?”

She craned back in her chair, her arms wide, her eyes on the ceiling. Folded into herself again. “There’s a museum in Boston, an art museum Mom likes to go to.”

“Art?”

“It’s my namesake, this place, the Isabella Gardner Museum. Mom used to take Marion there. You know my sister, Marion?”

“I know her.”

“They never talked about Marion, my parents. Her name was never mentioned in the house. But Mom used to take me to the museum when I was a girl, before I was old enough to know the difference. There was one picture there she used to spend a long time looking at, something by Vermeer called
The Concert
. You know it?”

He raised his hands helplessly.

“There’s a girl at a harpsichord, a piano-type thing, and another girl singing from a score. And there’s a man in the centre of the painting, a big man with shoulder-length hair and a sash over his coat. All you can see is the back of him, he’s staring straight ahead as if the whole scene is something he’s imagining. He always creeped me out, that guy, I could never figure what he was thinking. Felt like he was about to swallow those girls whole.”

Wish scratched at the tuft of hair over his ear. “Bella.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Doesn’t matter. The thing is, the painting was stolen a few years ago.”

“Stolen how?”

“Right off the wall is how. I don’t know the details. There were a couple of other pieces went missing with it. It was in the papers for a while, the Vermeer was worth millions, they said.”

Bella’s voice was calm enough although Wish could see her face changing, colour coming into the cheeks. It was anger, he thought, some ancient grudge so familiar to her she hardly recognized its presence.

“They’ve got a blank frame on the wall now where
The Concert
used to hang. And Mom still goes in every year on the anniversary of Marion’s death to see it.” Isabella stared across at him. “That’s Mercedes,” she said. “In a nutshell.”

He looked past her, thinking hard. “So what you’re saying,” he said.

“What I’m saying is, me and Dad were always her number twos. That empty frame is where Mercedes spends her quality time.”

He had to hold back a smile, not expecting something as simple or as sentimental from Isabella. He said, “That hardly seems fair to your mother.”

“Then you don’t know her.”

The thought seemed to embarrass them both and they were quiet awhile.

“So,” she said finally. “You felt guilty to be alive. Is that why you didn’t go looking for her? You didn’t deserve a happy, normal life?”

He got up to pour himself a coffee at the counter, took a mouthful. It had been sitting in the pot for hours and it was brackish and grainy. He leaned against the counter, took another sip. Stared into his cup.

“Don’t be so fucking coy,” she said.

He glanced up, surprised at the emotion in her voice, the raw disappointment. Saw the simple equation. It wasn’t anger he’d seen in her face at all. He said, “Maybe I’m not the one feels guilty to be alive.”

Bella settled back in her chair, trying to keep her face carefully blank.

“There’s nothing can happen between your mother and me that will bring Marion back, Isabella. Or change how she is with you.”

Bella said, “Jesus.” She gave an angry little laugh to dismiss the notion. She picked up her glass and drank off half the water and got up from her chair. She walked to the porch and stopped with her hand on the door. She said, “Tell me something, Wish. Were you as ruthless a prick before the war?”

“I imagine I always had it in me,” he said. “Yes.”

After Isabella left he sat in the car in the driveway, trying to talk himself out of heading over to Mercer’s for a drink. Thought of the medal with the head of King George in his dresser drawer and slipped back into the house, tucked it away in his shirt pocket like a saint’s medallion. For the heft of it. He went over his conversation with Bella as he drove, trying to repeat some of the things he’d just said, but the words seemed absolutely foreign to him. It was like trying to recall the details of a drunken argument after sobering up. He couldn’t even say if he understood what the words meant, let alone whether or not he believed them.

There was no one else at Mercer’s but Gail behind the bar, a white T-shirt pulled tight over her generous breasts that read
Itty Bitty Titty Club
. She looked at him suspiciously as she opened the beer but took his money without a word.

“Keep the silver,” he said when she handed him his change.

He sat alone at one of the small square tables and drank the beer in three long mouthfuls. He ordered a dark-and-dirty and another beer to chase it. Looked around as he finished them off. A row of small windows up high along one wall, a neon Labatt sign and a television on over the bar. The rest of the room in a cool, damp dark like the church and fishermen’s halls where they’d showed movies on the coast.

The horse was called Ocean Star, for the Virgin Mary and for the white mark on her forehead. A household name on the Southern Shore, even when he was a youngster, though she was dead and gone by then. In his parents’ day anyone travelling through Renews would stop in to watch her grazing in the open fields and feed her half an apple or a handful of tobacco. Priests up and down the shore offered special prayers to bring her luck in the March races. On the Feast of St. Francis there was an outdoor service near Mass Rock to bless her, the Monsignor making the sign of the cross over her forehead. Until the year she was sold to a merchant in St. John’s, a man born into more money than God gave Solomon, a man who already owned a dozen horses. The merchant was a Protestant and the story going around said he planned to shorten the animal’s name to Star.

His mother woke to Wish kicking and she went out into the moonlight with Lilly to walk through the discomfort. They passed three men on the path by the cemetery, local men they recognized by their voices as they said hello in the dark. They carried on out over the mash, thinking nothing of the encounter other than it was late for anyone to be about. One of the three would have held the bridle and whispered to calm the horse while the other two doused her back with kerosene. Led her to the open door where they set the perfect black coat aflame and let her run straight to hell.

Wish didn’t feel a goddamn thing from the drinks. He ordered a double dark-and-dirty and sat nodding in the gloom. He’d taken out the box of matches he used to score Lilly’s crib games and he was lighting one after another as he sat there, letting them burn down till they scorched his fingertips. Waiting for the alcohol to kick in.

By eight o’clock he’d surrendered his table to stand at the bar, telling war stories to Gail and a handful of other solitary drinkers on the stools. He was showing around the medal to make up for the lack of visible scars.

“What did you get this for?” someone asked him.

“Buddy of mine took it off a dead Jap.”

“Where did the Jap get it?”

“Stole it, I’d say.” He swallowed back half his drink. “He was a mean prick, that one. Almost beat me to death.”

Gail said, “That was in the camps, was it, Wish?”

“Just before the big one hit Nagasaki. He had me locked up in a bamboo cell when the bomb dropped.” His half-smile was so reluctant he looked like he was in pain. He and Harris were both thrown in the cells after the beating and missed their shift at the shipyard, three miles closer to ground zero. They’d trucked past it on their way to collect and cremate bodies in the city and there was nothing left of the place but scrap metal.

“What does this mean?” a man at the opposite end of the bar asked. He held the medal up. “What’s this written on the back?”

“Give it here,” Wish said. “You fucking pricks,” he shouted. He walked the length of the bar and grabbed it, shoved it into his breast pocket. “Can’t trust you fucking crowd with anything.”

“You should have something to eat,” Gail said to him. “A bag of chips or something.”

“Chips, fuck,” he said. “Fuck. Who wants a drink?” he said.

Hours later he went to the bathroom, found the stall and single urinal occupied. He shifted back and forth on his feet, waiting. Looking around the tiny room. Unzipped his pants and pissed into the sink. The door squealed open behind him and a man’s voice said, “Jesus Christ, Furey.”

“Get in line,” he shouted over his shoulder. And laughed to himself.

Gail refused to serve him another drink. He argued with her until she picked up the phone and threatened to call her husband to throw him out. He sat in his car then, too drunk to get the keys into the ignition. Thinking Nishino, Nishino, Nishino.

That erection was what tipped him, the man dead on the floor at his feet and his own shins wet with blood. He meant to cable a message to Mercedes as soon as they landed in San Francisco and couldn’t bring himself to send it. Sick with the thought all the way back to the East Coast, dreaming of her every night and that phrase he’d briefly forgotten was the only thing she said to him. The train passing through Montreal before he saw it whole, the details lining up one next the other so he could almost hear the pieces snap into place. Harris and Spalding yelling
slant-eyed prick
as they pissed over the mutilated face,
yellow bastard
, and Wish standing there with a hard-on, Jesus fuck. His hand between the legs of the little Protestant girl too good for the likes of him, her superior cunt of a mother off saying her prayers and his cock as stiff as a poker.

He’d taken the bet with Hiram on their trip back from Twillingate to harden his resolve in the matter, to make sure he wouldn’t falter. Five dollars to bed Mercedes and though there was no way the mother would know about the wager, he liked to imagine her hearing it said aloud. That furious little engine churning inside him. His hand wet and no sign of reluctance in the girl until the moment she pulled away.
Don’t make a whore of me
, she said. He was bewildered by that moment of prescience. It sounded like someone else’s words in the girl’s mouth, the accusation so plaintive and shrewd it felt as if some angel or saint had intervened to shame him with his own intentions.

He took up with Mercedes almost as a kind of penance then, an act of attrition, as if loving her would prove the accusation wrong, as if he could erase his own sense of guilt by offering the girl some comfort in the wake of her father’s death. Convince himself he was a different person than he was. It was an elaborate lie that even he was taken in by, a fiction that comforted him through the length of the war as if it were real.

Harris stretched out across the seats opposite as the train shuddered toward Halifax, clumps of hair coming away from his scalp. He said, “You’ll stay with me when we get there, Wish. You won’t let me die alone.”

It was near dawn when he woke, slumped in the front seat. He was still drunk but managed to start the car, backed slowly out onto the deserted highway. Gail had shaken him by the shoulder when she was closing up, asking if he was all right, and he’d pushed her away. Passed out again after she closed the door. Dark-and-dirty, he remembered as he drove, all afternoon and night, the bile coming back on him.