Earthquake I.D. (11 page)

“Well,” the chaplain put in, “it's not a Mass, strictly speaking.”

“But for the service,” DiPio said. “Would you come hold the girl's hand?”

Interstate (was his accent from Missouri?) had no objection. He handed a Bible to a refugee woman a good three times his size, an African Fat Venus, tucked sausage-tight into a t-shirt that bore the words
Lido Parthenope
. She had a chest scar—though nothing ritual, no mark of initiation. The wound on this obese
clandestina
had left a ridge of tissue clearly visible under the fabric, a line that cut down one breast in a jug-handle curve. It crossed and dented the nipple.

“Signora,” the doctor said. “You may help.”

Per carita
, she hadn't come simply to pray. Certainly the need in this crowd had touched her, chilled her; that dented nipple reappeared each time she blinked. But Barb doubted that she could deliver much at today's service. The tent was filling, a sensation like children clustering under a beach umbrella, and she could feel already how distant the German's prayers would seem. She'd have to squeeze into a packed row of folding chairs, and there wouldn't be room for the spirit-muscle. There'd be nothing like that, the flex out of nowhere, despite the tremor Barbara had felt when she first stepped into this artificial twilight. There wasn't even a crucifix.

But the doctor was only asking for, what, half an hour? DiPio wasn't the one suggesting she spend the rest of her life in a lie. Besides, who could say what else Barbara might discover during the service? Interstate might poke another glowing peephole in Jay's high moral screen.

The mother sidled past a few of the seated worshippers, holding her breath against the worst of the pesticide. She settled into the chair the doctor had pulled up beside the gypsy. But when Barbara took the girl's hand, the invalid responded with a squeeze. Her fingers found a good fit. Barb looked up startled, and the gypsy's lashes fluttered.

DiPio didn't miss a moment of it. “Yes,” he said. “Sympathy.”

Whatever that meant. The man had his crucifix in his goatee, picking, scratching, and Barb shifted her attention back to the chaplain. Pacing the riser, Interstate looked eager to start. The voices behind Barbara's back sounded the same, and judging from the air the place was nearly full. For something like the fifth time the German adjusted the purple throw across his knee-high altar, then returned to the box that held the Bibles. He fished up a scarf, striking, Prussian blue.

She had to ask. “So what happens now?”

The chaplain kissed the silk and hung it around his neck, evening its ends around his dangling T, and explained that he worked freeform. “As far as I'm concerned, the
terremotati
can do anything this side of animal sacrifice.”

“What? What are you saying? Is this a church service or not?”

“Mrs. Lulucita. In here, it's new heaven, new earth. If someone's in the camp, that means they've seen their world destroyed twice over.”

“But, seems to me, that's why they need something reliable. If you show them one God one day and another the next, you'll only confuse them.”

Somebody laughed, somebody American. American, with an accent more Southern than the minister's. Silky Kahlberg, sure, and Barb couldn't suppress a scowl. She hadn't been joking. She wondered whether, just by coming to the Center, she'd
asked
for everything and the kitchen sink.

The NATO liaison had already worked his way to the front of the tent. He'd made it through the congregation even though he was walking backwards, cupping to his stomach one end of some long stick of furniture. In his ice-cream suit, and still chuckling, he backed past Barb. Behind him, carrying the other end of the piece, came Paul. The boy acted on the officer like an anchor, stumbling, never knowing where to put his feet. As his mother watched, the eleven-year-old had to stop and hike up his carpenter's belt. Yet Barb remained where she was, her hand in the gypsy's. When she wasn't watching Paul, she eyed the two reporters who trailed him.

Of course Silky had brought along the remaining media. He and the
Americanino
toted a great visual, a freshly constructed cross. Freshly treated pine on a simple box stand, it went up tall and bare as chaplain Interstate.

“We heard you could use one of these,” the liaison announced.

Barb looked the thing over. Insta-Icon, the cross revealed uneven stain along its upright and furred sanding at the corners. Then there was her child, his face drained, his gaze intent. He wasn't two feet from his mother and her quake victim, yet he squinted at the two women as if trying to make out some distant temple frieze.

Kahlberg turned and squatted beside Barbara, finger-combing his hair. “A little lay ministry?”

Barb made no answer. Paul too ignored everyone other than her and the invalid. The boy hardly gave a jiggle when Interstate opened the service by clapping him on the shoulder and loudly giving thanks.

“You don't
know
the good you do,” the chaplain declaimed. ‘You and this gift from God you call a family.”

“Mn,” the Lieutenant-Major whispered, “if I were you, Ma'am, I'd be careful about the way Paul's looking at that girl.”

What? Barbara's grip on the gypsy's hand retightened.

“A girl like her, you'd never find her in church before the quake, know what I mean? Not unless there were a hundred Euro in it.”

Now the mother was angry plain and simple—her first entirely clear and justifiable emotion all morning.

“Fact is, anybody who comes to church in this place, he's playing catch-up ball. These people're nothing but lowlife.”

Another word and she would've clawed out the man's eyes right there before the altar. But in the next moment Paul stepped away from the cross and the coffee table, away from the preacher. Interstate had let go of him and launched into some swaying prayer, and as the man's arms rose the boy went down. He knelt between the girl's useless legs. Clumsy preadolescent though he was, Paul managed this without interference from his tool belt, his movement in fact appeared seamless, and he tugged off his heavy gloves too, he flung them aside, all nothing like the hobbled mess he'd made of coming in. Also he was talking, Barbara's middle child, though she couldn't hear what he was saying, muttering, since to see him like this, easing himself between those young legs, mounting the helpless girl—to see Mr. Paul like this sent the mother's emotions into whistling new cartwheels, and she herself began to speak.

“Honey,” Barb groaned. “No, no, honey…”

She needed to jump in and she couldn't even get her hand free. Barbara remained in the gypsy's grip as she jerked off her chair, or half off, tottering into the NATO man's cologne. The scent made her eyes prickle.

“The chaplain can handle it,” Kahlberg was saying. “He gets a lot of holy rolling at these things.”

“Mr. Paul.” Barbara touched a hand to the boy's back, a white slab against the girl's spangled upper body. “Baby, I'm sorry…”

The hundred-throated prayer around them drowned her out. Not that these strangers needed to hear about it anyway, the trouble Barb recalled, seeing her youngest boy in so nasty an embrace.

“Just a touch,” Paul might've said. “A-all she needs is a touch.”

The same as he'd said over his father, a week ago down by the Naples waterfront. But Barbara was thinking of other trouble, worse, back outside New York.

“C-can't you feel it?” Paul might've said. “Can't you just tell?”

There was also the reek of carpentry, another reminder of downtown. Every alleyway in the
centro
had some kind of construction going, and with that thought the mother staggered at last off her chair, away from Silky's cologne. The change in perspective gave her a moment's relief, she no longer saw her child as a rapist, but on second look Paul's body-length embrace began to seem, if anything, even more of a nightmare. Barbara glanced at Maddalena, the only other person here who'd been present at Jay's healing. What had she heard last time, and what did she think now?

The camerawoman was merely doing her job, swinging this way and that under the fluttering purple and lavender. Now she took in the pileup around the wheelchair, now the crowd's reaction. And DiPio too, though he was a part of the pileup, didn't seem to realize what the boy could be up to. The doctor showed more concern for the girl, saying something like
Easy, please
, and nudging the liaison man aside in order to reach towards Paul. When the black-and-white child straightened for a moment to undo the work belt, DiPio caught hold of one narrow shoulder; when Paul pulled free Barbara felt pride. They couldn't stop her boy. A mother's pride, fond and blushy, how about that, on top of fear on top of rage on top of guilt—all slashing back and forth under her breastbone, along with thoughts of the other kids, the boys in the hospital and the girls in the kitchen—how about that, a mother's bedlam?

Around the cross-clutching over the wheelchair the dim tent had grown louder. The foreigners buzzed and the cameras went
click
, while the preacher had started bawling in mixed languages.

Guarda! Look! L'amore di Dio, sempre nuova! God's love, forever new!

Well, maybe new, but certainly strange. Once Paul got his shoulder free, he wedged his small hips more deeply between the gypsy's thighs. He actually pawed the girl. One hand worked around her waist, clutching her unresponsive body up into his, while the other traveled over shawl and neck to face. The doctor bent closer, his own odors tickling Barbara's nose; his soap had a hint of rose. The more Paul manhandled the girl, the farther stretched the wrinkles on the old man's face. Then DiPio's voice started to rise, yet another strain of frenzy in the tent.

“E possibile?”
he yelped.
“Possibile?”

In Barbara's hand the gypsy's grip likewise revealed mixed emotions, shifting and sweating. Her sideways glance, however, revealed something more sophisticated. The eyes remained angular and warlike as ever, but they suggested a touch of amusement, like
Somebody get a leash for this puppy
. As Paul gripped her you couldn't help but notice her young breasts, too, her sweetly tapered midsection, and Barbara had to wonder about the wheelchair's decoration. What was the point of all this tasseled party drapery, all but leopard-skin? And how could the girl within find the fun in today's muttering assault? Yet Paul did look a little like a puppy, at play across the gypsy's body. A boy at a game, again. With the hand around the gypsy's waist he searched for some spot between spine and wheelchair, pulling at her bohemian swaddling.

“Son,” Kahlberg stage-whispered, “you don't know what you're messing with.”

Talk about a boy playing a game… by now even the Lieutenant Major could see that whatever was going on, it wasn't about sex. What kind of sex involved one partner taking hold of the other's tongue?

“Mrs. Lulucita,” the liaison said, “aren't you the parent in charge around here?”

“Mary, mother of God.”

“Never mind her. Think about the Siren on the rocks, the devil in a woman. Think about where that tongue has been—”

Or maybe that was what the officer said; Barbara tuned him out, looking instead to the chaplain. Interstate had been silenced with mouth open. One thin arm held a Bible overhead, and his un-sleeved elbow revealed what was either a fresh bruise or more purple shadow. DiPio meantime had clamped one hand around his neck-stuff, the crucifix and Mr. Christopher, and his stare looked likewise clenched. He was rooting for the miracle so openly that Barb had to look away. She had to avert her gaze from all three of these looming full-grown white guys, casting her eyes across the congregation, dun-brown to domino-black, layered in castoff exotic colors (fig-blue to mirror-silver) and quieted for the moment. But the scene the mother had to deal with remained right in front of her, the willowy boy with his hand sunk to the knuckle between the girl's lips.

At least this time the love-bite hadn't drawn blood.

Again the cripple's hand fluttered in Barbara's. Already Paul was withdrawing his fingers from her mouth, releasing her to an involuntary birdlike moan. And when the gypsy arched her upper body after his retreating spit-slick touch, it seemed natural, a spasm. Certainly she didn't mean to show off her figure, curving up from where the boy's other hand still cupped her spine.

“All, all she needed was s-someone to hold her.” Barb heard him clearly that time. “Couldn't you just f-feel it?”

Mr. Paul let go altogether, sinking onto his haunches, folding backwards from between the girl's legs. The quake victim collapsed too, dropping into her chair, and Barb found herself thrown into yet another brand of confusion. She suffered a letdown. She didn't want the girl to collapse. She'd brought everyone out to the chapel, and she wanted something to come of it.

But then the gypsy gathered herself and stood. At that the reporters and the congregation went berserk—erupting, attacking—and Barbara and the others in charge were left looking stupid.

They were left helpless, as the crowd's toy-store colors flared up everywhere, erupting, smothering. The mother was knocked onto all fours. The wheelchair somersaulted over her back, a stab in the back, an end to her dithering. How could she have been so stupid? How could she never have realized what Paul's magic would mean for people like these? How many of their barrel-bottom tatters did they need to wave in her face, and how loudly did they need to raise their searching prayers? Now as she lay beside the altar's riser, at first she couldn't tell if she were seeing stars or only the dots and dashes that decorated their t-shirts and dashikis. Anyway the view from the floor called to mind something else as well, the slash and blot of cave paintings, lit by dancing torches. Stick-figures agitated the air and the noise wasn't anything Barb recognized either. She couldn't tell whether the mob was calling on God or her husband or, in some third or fourth language, somebody else again. She only understood the clang and rattle of chairs toppling over, the whisper of blood-dark tent-hangings spiralling down. The reporters were in it too, shouting and elbowing over her head, fighting for a decent camera angle on Paul and the gypsy.