Ricky, with his provocative question, must have seemed to him to be some sort of deathly apparition. He saw the man’s hand start to reach for a button on a wire hanging over the headboard, and he knew that was the nurse call button. He bent over Tyson and pushed the device out of his grasp. “We’re not going to need that,” he said. “This is going to be a private conversation.” The old man’s hand dropped to the bed and he grasped at the oxygen mask, sucking in deep draughts of enriched air, his eyes still wide in fear. The mask was old-fashioned, green, and covered the nose and mouth with an opaque plastic. In a more modern facility, Tyson would have been given a smaller unit that clipped beneath his nostrils. But the VA hospital was the sort of place where old equipment was sent to be used up before being discarded, more or less like many of the men occupying the beds. Ricky pulled the oxygen mask away from Tyson’s face.
“Who you be?” the man demanded, fearful. He had a voice filled with the locutions of the South. Ricky thought there was something childlike in the terror that filled his eyes.
“I’m a man with some questions,” Ricky said. “I’m a man searching for some answers. Now, this can go hard or easy, depending on you, old man.”
To his surprise, he found threatening a decrepit, aged man who had molested his only daughter and then turned his back upon her orphaned children, came easy.
“You ain’t no preacher,” the man said. “You don’t work with God.”
“You’re mistaken there,” Ricky said. “And considering as how you’re going to be facing Him any day now, maybe you’d best err on the side of belief.”
This argument seemed to make some sense to the old man, who shifted about, then nodded.
“Your daughter,” Ricky started, only to be cut off.
“My daughter’s dead. She was no good. Never was.”
“You think you maybe had something to do with that?”
Calvin Tyson shook his head. “You don’t know nothing. Nobody know nothing. Whatever happened be history. Ancient history.”
Ricky paused, staring into the man’s eyes. He saw them hardening, like concrete setting up quick in the harsh sun. He calculated quickly, a measurement of psychology. Tyson was a remorseless pedophile, Ricky thought. Unrepentant and incapable of understanding the evil that he’d loosed in his child. And he was lying in his death bed and probably more scared of what awaited him, than what had gone past. He thought he would try that chord, see where it took him.
“I can give you forgiveness…,” Ricky said.
The old man snorted and sneered. “Ain’t no preacher that powerful. I’m just gonna take my chances.”
Ricky paused, then said, “Your daughter Claire had three children…”
“She was a whore, ran away with that wildcatter boy, then run on up to New York City. That’s what killed her. Not me.”
“When she died,” Ricky continued, “you were contacted. You were her closest living relative. Someone in New York City called you up and wanted to know if you would take the children…”
“What did I want with those bastards? She never married. I didn’t want them.”
Ricky stared at Calvin Tyson and thought this must have been a difficult decision for him. On the one hand, he didn’t want the financial burden of raising his daughter’s three orphans. But, on the other, it would have provided him with several new sources for his perverted sexual urges. Ricky thought that would have been a compelling, almost overwhelming seduction. A pedophile in the grips of desire is a potent unstoppable force. What made him turn down a new and ready source of pleasure? Ricky continued to eye the old man, and then, in an instant, he knew. Calvin Tyson had other outlets. The neighbors’ children? Down the street? Around the corner? In a playground? Ricky didn’t know, but he did understand that the answer was close by.
“So you signed some papers, giving them up for adoption, right?”
“Yes. Why you want to know this?”
“Because I need to find them.”
“Why?”
Ricky looked around. He made a small gesture at the hospital room. “Do you know who put you on the street? Do you know who foreclosed on your house and tossed you out so that you ended up here, dying all by yourself?”
Tyson shook his head. “Somebody bought the note on the house from the mortgage company. Didn’t give me no chance to make good when I was short one month. Just bang! Out I went.”
“What happened to you then?”
The man’s eyes grew rheumy, suddenly filling with tears. Pathetic, Ricky thought. He curbed any nascent sensation of pity, though. What Calvin Tyson got was less than he deserved.
“I was out on the street. Got sick. Got beat. Now I’m fixing to die, just like you said.”
“Well,” Ricky said, “the man who put you in this bed all alone is your daughter’s child.”
Calvin Tyson’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “How that be?”
“He bought the note. He evicted you. He probably arranged to have you beaten as well. Were you raped?”
Tyson shook his head. Ricky thought: There’s something Rumplestiltskin didn’t know about. Claire Tyson must have kept that secret from her children. Lucky for the old man that Rumplestiltskin never bothered to speak with the neighbors or anyone at the high school.
“He did all that to me? Why?”
“Because you turned your back on him and on his mother. So, he repaid you in kind.”
The man sobbed once. “All the bad that happened to me…”
Ricky finished for him, “… comes from one man. That’s the man I’m trying to find. So, I’ll ask you again: You signed some papers to give the children up for adoption, right?”
Tyson nodded.
“Did you get some money, too?”
Again the old man nodded. “Couple thousand.”
“What was the name of the people who adopted the three children?”
“I got a paper.”
“Where?”
“In a box, with my things, in the closet.” He pointed at a scarred gray metal locker.
Ricky opened the door and saw some threadbare clothes hanging from hooks. On the floor was a cheap lockbox. The clasp had been broken. Ricky opened it and rapidly shuffled through some old papers until he found several folded together, with a rubber band around them. He saw a seal from the state of New York. He thrust the papers into his jacket pocket.
“You won’t need them,” he told the old man. He looked down at the man stretched across the dingy white sheets of the hospital bed, his gown barely covering his nakedness. Tyson sucked at some more oxygen and looked pale. “You know what,” Ricky said slowly, his cruelty astonishing him, “old man, now you can just go about the business of dying. I think you’d be wise to get it over with sooner rather than later, because I think there’s more pain waiting for you. Much more pain. As much pain as you delivered on this earth multiplied a hundred times. So just go ahead and die.”
“What you going to do?” Tyson asked. His voice was a shocked whisper, filled with gasps and wheezes and constricted by the disease eating away at his chest.
“Find those children.”
“Why you want to do that?”
“Because one of them killed me, too,” Ricky said, as he turned to leave.
It was just before the dinner hour, when Ricky knocked on the door of a trim two-bedroom ranch house on a quiet street lined with palms. He was still wearing his priest’s regalia, which gave him an extra bit of confidence, as if the addition of the collar around his neck provided him with an invisibility that would defy anyone who might ask questions. He waited while he heard shuffling inside, and then the door cracked open and he saw an elderly woman peering around the edge. The door opened a little wider when she saw the clerical garb, but she remained behind a screen.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Hello,” Ricky replied cheerily. “I wonder if you might help me. I’m trying to trace the whereabouts of a young man named Daniel Collins…”
The woman gasped, and lifted a hand to her mouth to cover her surprise. Ricky remained silent as he watched the woman struggle to recapture her composure. He tried to read the changes her face underwent, from shock, narrowing to a harshness that seemed to him to be filled with a chill that reached right through the screen door. Her face finally set stiffly, and her voice, when she was able to use it, seemed to employ words carved from winter.
“He is lost to us,” she said. There were some tears that battled at the corners of her eyes, contradicting the iron in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” Ricky said, still maintaining a cheeriness that helped mask his sudden curiosity. “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘lost ’? “
The woman shook her head, not replying directly. She measured his priest’s outfit, then asked, “Father, why are you looking for my son now?”
He pulled out the phony cancer letter, guessing that the woman wouldn’t read it carefully enough to find questions in it.
As she started to eye the document, he started to speak, figuring that she wouldn’t really be able to concentrate on what was written while he spoke. Distracting her from asking questions of him didn’t seem like a difficult chore. “You see, Mrs… Collins, correct? The parish is really trying to reach out to anyone who might be a marrow donor for this youngster who is related to you distantly. You see the problem? I’d ask you to take the blood screening test, but I suspect you’re beyond the age where marrow can be donated. You’re over sixty, correct?”
Ricky had no idea whether bone marrow ceased being viable at any age. So he made up a phony question where the answer was obvious. The woman lifted her eyes from the letter to respond, and Ricky reached out and took it from her hands, well before she’d had the opportunity to digest all of it. He said, as he did so, “This has a lot of medical stuff in it. I can explain, if you’d prefer. Perhaps we could sit down?”
The woman nodded reluctantly and held the door open for him. He stepped into a house that seemed as fragile as the old woman who lived there. It was filled with small china objects and figurines, empty vases and knickknacks, and had a musty aged smell that overcame the stale air of the air conditioner pumping away with a banging sound that made him think some part was loose inside. The carpets had plastic runners and the couch, as well, had a plastic cover, as if the woman were afraid of any dirt that might be left behind. He had the impression that everything had a proper position in the house, and that the woman who lived there would be able to sense instantly any item that had shifted position even a fraction of an inch.
The sofa made a squeak as he sat.
“Your son, is he available? You see, he might be a match…,” Ricky launched ahead, lying easily.
“He’s dead,” the woman said coldly.
“Dead? But how?”
Mrs. Collins shook her head. “Dead to all of us. Dead to me, now. Dead and worthless, nothing but pain, father. I’m sorry.”
“How did he…?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. But soon enough, I’m thinking.”
Ricky leaned back, making the same squeaking sound. “I’m afraid I don’t precisely understand,” he said.
The woman reached down and removed a scrapbook from a shelf beneath a coffee table. She opened it, flipped through several pages. Ricky could see newspaper stories about sports games, and he remembered that Daniel Collins was a high school athlete. There was a graduation picture and then a blank page. She stopped there, and handed it across to him. “Turn the page,” she said bitterly.
Centered on a single sheet of the scrapbook was a single story from the
Tampa Tribune
. The headline was: man arrested after barroom death. There were few details, other than Daniel Collins had been arrested slightly over a year earlier, and charged with homicide following a fight in a barroom. On the adjacent page, another headline: state to seek death in bar fight slaying. This story, clipped and glued to the middle of another page, had a photograph accompanying it, of a middle-aged Daniel Collins being led handcuffed into a courtroom. Ricky scanned the newspaper clipping. The facts of the case seemed simple enough. There had been a fight between two drunken men. One of them had gone outside and waited for the other to emerge. Knife in hand, according to the state prosecutors. The killer, Daniel Collins, had been arrested at the scene, unconscious, drunk, bloody knife near his hand, victim spread-eagled a few feet away. The victim had been eviscerated in a particularly cruel fashion, the newspaper hinted, before being robbed. It appeared that after Collins had murdered the man and taken his money, he’d paused to swig another bottle of some cheap liquor, become disorientated, and passed out before fleeing the scene. Open and shut.
He read meager stories about a trial and a conviction. Collins had claimed that he was unaware of the killing, so addled with drink that night. It wasn’t much of an explanation and it didn’t work well with the jury. They were out deliberating for only ninety minutes. It took them an additional couple of hours to recommend the death penalty-the same explanation being offered up in mitigation that was ignored. Official death, cut and dried, wrapped up and packaged with a minimum of messiness.
Ricky looked up. The old woman was shaking her head.
“My lovely boy,” she said. “Lost him first to that bitch girl, then to drink, now to death row.”
“Have they set a date?” Ricky asked.
“No,” the woman replied. “His lawyer says they’ve got appeals. Going to try this court, that court. I don’t really understand too well. All I knows is that my boy says he didn’t do it, but it didn’t make no difference.” She stared hard at the clerical collar snug around Ricky’s neck. “In this state, we all love Jesus, and most folks worship on Sundays. But when the Good Book says ‘Thou Shall Not Kill,’ it don’t seem to apply to our courtrooms none. Us and Georgia and Texas. Bad places to do a crime where someone dies, father. I wish my boy’d thought of that before he took up that knife and got into that fight.”
“He says he’s innocent?”