“I appreciate your cooperation.”
She reached for a pen and small pad on the cash register, wrote on the top sheet, tore it off, folded it, and handed it to DeMarco. She said, “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been to see you again. Let’s do it again another ten or twelve years from now.”
He stood, slid the paper into his shirt pocket without looking at it, gave her a smile, and turned away.
“I’ll tell Ariel you said good night.”
“Don’t,” he answered without looking back.
“I know love when I see it,” she said.
Thirty-Three
Like some character out of a Flannery O’Connor story, Huston thought. This was what he had come to. Hiding in a shed. A misfit. Hunted. Hated. Huddled like a criminal in the dirty darkness.
He had lain beside the fire ring for a while, falling through his darkness. Eventually he realized he was not going to get his wish and he would never hit the bottom of that darkness. He had no choice but to live awhile longer. When he stood and reached down to set the kitchen chair aright again, he saw that he had the tool he needed right there in his hands. If he could work one of the metal legs loose from the rusty screws that held it to the seat pad, he could flatten one end and use it for a pry bar. Thirty minutes later, he was safely inside the equipment shed at Bradley Community Park.
The shed had no windows, but he had wedged the door open with the handle of a baseball bat. Through the inch-wide gap along the doorframe, the night’s darkness seeped into the shed and lightened what would have been pitch-blackness. He could make out the three long shelves holding boxes of dirty baseballs and softballs, bases, batting helmets, and two sets of catcher’s equipment. Beneath the shelves were two fifty-gallon plastic drums, one holding baseball bats, the other, softball bats. His two grocery bags and the nearly empty jug of orange juice sat an arm’s length away.
In his wallet were two tens and four ones. Two credit cards with a combined credit limit of fifty-four thousand dollars. Two ATM cards giving him access to another thirty-eight thousand. He owned a beautiful home filled with the mementos of a hard-won comfort, but the home was no longer habitable, it was a cursed place now. It cried out to him for fire and obliteration.
He knew that O’Connor would have rendered this scene with a gentle humor. The narrative would unwind slowly, building to a moment of grace for the desperate man. Huston had been an admirer of O’Connor’s stories and the sometimes-wild incongruity of their characters’ lives. The incongruity of his own situation would have made him smile as O’Connor’s stories had, if only he were not so acutely aware of its permanency. He knew that his life would never get better than this. He could never climb higher than this, his lowest point.
He knew he should eat something, but just the thought of food made his stomach roil with nausea. It seemed a very long time ago that he had eaten the pizza. He had only one thing left to do, and then, if all went well, he could return to his beautiful house and gather his family around him one last time and send all their spirits wafting into the clouds on the rising thermals. He knew too that he would have to sit there among the flames and watch the spirits rise, but he was prepared for that as well.
Another incongruity, Tom. He heard those words in Claire’s voice. He let her speak for him. Her voice could be trusted, but his own could not.
You’re going to send our spirits to heaven, she said, when you don’t even believe in heaven? How does that work? He could feel her fingers playing with the hair at the nape of his neck, could feel her sweet breath on his face.
Yes, he told her. I want you all in heaven.
And what about you? Have you started to believe in hell now too?
Only this one, he said.
And is this where you will always be?
He stared at the crack of gray light along the door, but he could discern no answer there. No answer in the scent of dry dust on the floor. No answer in the grocery bags or in his wallet or in the nausea that never left him.
I love you, baby, was all he could think to say. Please forgive me. Please try to forgive me someday. Please, baby. Please.
Thirty-Four
DeMarco felt too restless to go home. His last cup of coffee had been at least eight hours earlier, yet he felt as if his nerves were spiked with caffeine, as if his skin did not quite fit and he wanted to wiggle out of it. If he drove straight home, he would get there before ten thirty. And then what? Turn on the television, unscrew the Jack, sip, and stare until sleep overtook him.