Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “Uh oh,” Leah said. “Those four guys are gonna get it now.”

  “The Great Dog Chippie walked over to take a peek at what was going on. The nearer she got to those four the more cunning and wolflike the Great Dog Chippie became. In fact, she seemed to grow stockier and more muscular and her fangs sharpened as she caught a scent of evil like she’d never smelled before. She leapt up on the counter of the bar and moved like a great cat, stepping gingerly over coffee cups so that she didn’t spill anybody’s cappuccino. By the time she reached the end of that counter, the Great Dog Chippie had transformed herself into a dog of war, a dog of blood. The city where a wolf had once suckled Romulus and Remus had need of wolves again, fiercer and more bloodthirsty than the one who had mothered Rome’s founders. Rome called for a wolf …”

  “And the Great Dog Chippie answered,” Leah cried out.

  “The Great Dog Chippie answered, all right,” I said. “The four men began to take out their AK-47’s and their hand grenades. They then turned toward a crowd of people who had gathered at the Pan Am and El Al ticket counters. One of them pointed at sweet and wonderful Natasha Jones and another man pointed his rifle at the delightful and beautiful Leah McCall and just before they began firing, the four men heard something that froze the roots of their souls with fear.”

  “Ggg-rrr,” Leah snarled fiercely.

  “Ggg-rrr,” I snarled along with her.

  “They had forgotten about one thing,” I said.

  Leah said, “They’d forgotten about the Great Dog Chippie.”

  “The Great Dog went for the first terrorist’s throat and her fangs severed the carotid artery as they tore through the neck of a man who’d never hurt anyone else again. His rifle went off, harmlessly spraying bullets into the ceiling. The second terrorist shot at the Great Dog Chippie but that dog had already sunk her fangs into that man’s genitalia and the scream from that man brought security police running from everywhere. Then Chippie whirled and ran through a hail of bullets as the remaining two men standing knew who their true enemy was now. The Great Dog Chippie was hit by one of the bullets, but one bullet isn’t enough to stop the Great Dog Chippie.”

  “No way,” Leah said happily. “One bullet’s nothing to the Great Dog Chippie.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t see that damn dog,” Lucy said.

  “The third man had a knife scar that went the length of his face. The Great Dog Chippie went for that scar. Her fangs ripped into the man’s face and as the man hit the ground the dog leapt toward the throat of the last man standing. The last man stood his ground and fired all his bullets into the Great Dog Chippie. Chippie, the Great Dog, staggered toward the last man, but did not have the strength to make it. She turned to Jack and Leah and Lucy and gave them a last affectionate bark of farewell. Then the Great Dog Chippie put her head between her paws and died a sweet and peaceful death. An El Al security guard shot the man who killed the Great Dog Chippie and killed him on the spot.”

  “No, Daddy,” Leah said. “The Great Dog Chippie can’t die. It’s not fair.”

  “Chippie died when I was eighteen, sweetheart,” I said. “Because your mama died, I never wanted to tell you that Chippie’d died too.”

  “Chippie’s grave’s in the backyard,” Lucy said. “It’s kind of pretty. Jack made the tombstone himself.”

  “I’ve been waiting for that story since you were hurt, Daddy,” Leah said. “I wish it were true.”

  “Stories don’t have to be true. They just have to help,” I said. “Now, darling, I’m exhausted.”

  “Let him get some rest, Leah,” Lucy said. “I’ll take you home and feed you.”

  “I’m staying here,” Leah said.

  “You’ll do what I say, young lady,” Lucy insisted and I could hear the fear and the relief in my mother’s voice.

  “Leah and I are a team, Mama,” I said. “Let her be.”

  “Are we still going back to Waterford when you get well?” Leah asked.

  “Yeh, kid. I didn’t do this right. You don’t know any of the stories that made you who you are.”

  “The movie’s on, Jack,” Ledare said. “Mike sent me the first check when he heard you were shot. You’re hired whether you want to be or not.”

  “Some of the stories Mike wants,” I said, “are the ones I need to tell Leah.”

  “You tell the ones you know,” Ledare said. “I’ll fill in where I can.”

  “Ledare?” I asked. “Did you come here because of the movie?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Ledare answered. “I came because you needed me.”

  “You’re welcome to Italy and everything in it,” my mother said. “I’ll be getting back to Waterford day after tomorrow. Need to get out of this crazy country. Course, I’m gonna hire an armored car to ride to the airport. I won’t feel safe again till I smell collard greens cooking.”

  “We’ll follow you when we can, Mama,” I said.

  “Jordan was on television,” Ledare said, “giving you the last rites. Mike has the tapes. So does General Elliott.”

  “The plot thickens.”

  “Why is Jordan hiding, Daddy?” Leah said. “He’s been here to the hospital a bunch of times. But always in the middle of the night.”

  As I tried to answer, I felt myself falling away from all of them and sleep felt like a black hole where all time fell in an endless cascade that began with lost words at the touch of Leah’s hand against mine and ended in a sleep too soon in the coming.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I left the hospital days later with a plum-tinged wound of entry that Leah touched tenderly as my bandages were removed for the last time. Dr. Guido Guccioli, who had saved my sight, gave me last pointers about the necessity of resting my eyes and the dangers of strain. He explained how the rods and cones clustered like colorless grapes along retinal nerves and how the operation he performed was much like tuning a piano the size of a quail’s egg. The doctor and three of the nurses came down into the street as Ledare and Leah helped me into the taxi that would take me home. “Hey, Guido. Can I French-kiss you?” I asked. “No, of course not, it would be undignified and unsanitary,” the doctor said as he kissed me on both cheeks. “But with Signora Ledare, it would be a different story.”

  On the taxi ride home, I rolled the window down and let the soft, pillowed air flow over and through me. It was smooth as new linen across my face. Even the Tiber smelled rich and dark when we passed above it as it divided itself into two congruent fragments of river and embraced the sharp prow of the Isola Tiberina.

  In the Piazza Farnese, a small group from the neighborhood had gathered outside of my building. Maria, her fingers entwined with her rosary, was there, as were a few neighbors; two nuns wearing gardening gloves emerged from their jewel-box cloister, the Ruggeri brothers ran over from the alimentari, their hands smelling of cheese; there was Freddie in his white waiter’s coat, the olive man and two of the fruit ladies from the Campo, the chicken-and-egg lady, the beautiful blonde from the office-supply store, Edoardo the master of coffee and cornetti, Aldo the newsman, and the owner of the piazza’s single restaurant.

  A small cheer went up among the assembled friends when I emerged from the taxi and made my way unsteadily toward the front door. Because of my being wounded, the massacre had touched this piazza in a direct and personal way. The merchants sent over fruit and vegetables from the Campo dei Fiori and would not take Ledare’s money during the first week of my return. The fishwives sent up mussels and cod. The chicken man brought up freshly killed hens. My generous neighbors took care of everything during the first weeks of my convalescence at home.

  Each day, I walked among them through the narrow streets, building my strength.

  Though I have traveled on almost every continent and spent time among scores of nationalities, I have never quite fathomed or understood the gruffness and originality that Romans bring to tenderness. Their instinct for the small gestures of friendship is unerring. The proficiency the
y bring to the task of embracing the acceptable stranger is a form of municipal cunning. My neighbors welcomed me back to the piazza, and rejoiced in my recovery. Romans, Romans, I thought. They cannot crook their little fingers without teaching the rest of the world inimitable lessons about pageantry and hospitality.

  Watching my return, I later learned, through a pair of high-powered Nikon binoculars, was Jordan Elliott, clean-shaven and dressed in jeans, worker boots, and a well-cut Armani dress shirt. He watched as Ledare and I entered the building, me leaning more on her than on the tubular rubber-tipped walking cane they had given me at the hospital. The bureaucratic process for checking out of the hospital had just about finished me and the emotional homecoming so touched me that it took away the last bit of strength I could muster. The portiere held the door as though a prince were returning and I smiled my thanks to him. A photographer from Il Messaggero captured the authentic note of cordiality and nostalgia in the homecoming. The flower ladies pressed bouquets of anemones and zinnias into Leah’s arms.

  But there was little sentimentality in Jordan’s surveillance of the scene. His binoculars were trained on the crowd, not on me, as I disappeared into my apartment building, its huge black doors closing behind me like the wings of an archangel. Only when the crowd broke up did Jordan isolate the object of his patient oversight. The man was trim and soldierly in bearing and Jordan figured that he must have watched my return from the safety of the simple cafe on the piazza and emerged only when the crowd had begun its wordy dispersal. When he reached the fountain nearest my apartment, Jordan shivered as he reflected how odd it was to be studying in all the intimacy of magnification the robust figure of his own father. General Elliott moved with an infantryman’s attention and grace, studying each face as it passed by him. He was clearly looking for Jordan and Jordan could imagine his father’s impatience as he failed to see him in the crowd.

  Soon after I had been brought to the hospital, Jordan had appeared on television sets all over the nation as the ambulance doors opened and I was wheeled into the emergency room. As a Trappist priest who had spent much of his adult life in a monastery, the one thing Jordan little understood was the power and rapidity of modern communication. The expression of grief and horror on Jordan’s face when he caught sight of me became famous the moment it was flashed by satellite into all the newsrooms of the world. As he took my hand and leaned down to whisper the words of the last rites in my ear while I was wheeled from a ramp down the corridors of the alerted hospital, the lines of worry and compassion on his angular face came to define the dynamic, rugged symmetry of Italy’s own communal agony. His face became famous on the peninsula within a twenty-four-hour period. By accident, the conferral of Jordan’s anguish became an eloquent gift to Italy. His face expressed everything that Italy felt about the slaughter of the holiday travelers. Italian journalists began to search for the mysterious priest. But Jordan sank back into the hidden depths of the priest-haunted city as photographs of him began to appear on the front pages of American newspapers.

  On the Isle of Orion, General Elliott recognized his son immediately. When the same tape rolled again fifteen minutes later on CNN, he copied it so he could return to it at his leisure. General Elliott’s face was unreadable, but his son’s face had always been a book open for all the world’s inspection. The well-trimmed beard hid the dimple he had inherited from his mother. But the handiwork of fifteen years had not changed his son’s face, only deepened it, made it more recognizable. Jordan’s eyes were unforgettable and his father had certainly not forgotten. He told his wife Celestine nothing and she did not hear about my misfortune until late the next day. By then, as we later learned, the general had already gotten in touch with Mike Hess and Capers Middleton. That night, they all compared the photographs of the priest coming out of the confessional on the Aventine hill with the priest who met my ambulance at the hospital in Trastevere. In a secret phone conference the next day, all agreed they had found their man.

  His being captured by the camera’s eye for just that split second had brought on a wave of visitors Jordan never would have wanted, but immediately after, Jordan vanished into the terra-cotta silences of monastic Rome. Before the surgeons had returned me to my hospital room, Jordan had moved from an obscure monastery located in one of the more uncelebrated abbeys in the Caelian hill to a halfway house in Trastevere that cared for priests who had problems with drug addiction. A barber had shaved his beard and he was issued a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

  An underground machine had gone into operation as soon as Interpol in Rome headquarters had received a photograph of young Jordan Elliott and myself after a baseball game our senior year in high school. It was accompanied by a blowup of the photograph of Jordan looking tenderly down at my body as it was being wheeled hastily up the emergency ramp. A fingerprinter’s assistant at Interpol had copied the information and sent it to her brother who worked for a monsignor who oversaw a committee to reform the system of accounting at the Vatican Bank. Jordan Elliott was wanted for questioning in the death of a young Marine corporal and his girlfriend that had taken place in 1971. The bulletin indicated that Jordan might have changed his name and was believed to be masquerading as a Catholic priest of an unknown order. Jordan Elliott was described as being very intelligent, physically powerful, and perhaps armed as well. General Elliott had secretly notified Naval Intelligence, who got in touch with their connections in Interpol and Italy.

  This was the first time since he had escaped to Europe that Jordan knew for sure that he was a hunted man. Though he had long suspected it, he had withdrawn from his life in South Carolina with such finality—there had even been a funeral service—that he had thought any pursuit of him had long since miscarried through lack of evidence or a fresh trail. Only his mother and I were partners in his conspiracy. Jordan had lulled himself into a feeling of invisibility and now, as he watched his father, he realized that his concern for me had put both of us in a dangerous situation.

  The general positioned himself in the shadows of the fountain’s splashing sarcophagus, made of Egyptian granite, surrounded by illegally parked cars.

  He was still uncommonly handsome, Jordan thought, as he studied his father’s regular features with his weather-beaten golfer’s face and tanned, muscled arms. Jordan also noticed the first signs of wattles erupting beneath his father’s chin. He doubted a son had ever feared a father as Jordan had feared his and the word “father,” so sacred and primal in world religions, so central to the harmonic mystery of Catholicism, had always sent a shivering down his spine. It came to Jordan not as a two-syllable sound of a sweet-breathed, comfortable man armed only with rattles and lullabies, but as an army in the field with blood on its hands.

  “Father.” Jordan said the word out loud. Your father is home, your father is home, your father’s home.… The four most feared words of his boyhood coming from his sweet-lipped mother’s mouth. Jordan’s fear and hatred of his father had always been the purest and most unclassifiable thing about him. The power of that hatred had shaken the composure of every confessor that Jordan had gone to for the forgiveness of his sins in his career as a priest. His abbot had told him as recently as a year ago that the kingdom of heaven would be denied to him if he could not find it in his heart to forgive his father. As he studied his father he realized that he was no nearer to that heavenly kingdom than he had been as a ten-year-old boy weeping after still another beating and dreaming of the day he would kill his father with his bare hands.

  His mother had written to Jordan—his father wanted a reconciliation, and Jordan was preparing for that rendezvous when his youthful photograph arrived in the Rome offices of Interpol and made its secret way through the labyrinthine alleyways and courtyards of the Vatican to his abbot’s small office. Jordan thought his father had betrayed him. But he also thought it was possible that Capers Middleton had sold out his old friend as a dramatic setpiece for his governor’s campaign in South Carolina. His abbot agreed. The abbot po
ssessed an Italian’s scrupulous mistrust of politicians, and also a sweet but starchy sentimentality about fatherhood.

  A few days after I returned home, Maria answered the doorbell and escorted Mike and Capers into the living room where I was with Ledare. Mike’s impatience was a palpable force in the room and he paced beside the windows, a motor on overdrive somewhere in his central nervous system. But Capers was unflappable and controlled and seemed interested in taking a careful inventory of all my antiques and paintings. As his eyes wandered among my possessions, he said, “You have nice things. What a surprise, Jack.”

  “Take a quick inventory, then get the hell out of my house,” I said.

  Mike interrupted quickly. “This is a business call. About our movie. You don’t have to fall in love with Capers. Just listen to him.”

  “I don’t like Capers,” I said. “I tried to make that clear in Waterford.”

  “You were clear, but wrong,” Mike said.

  “Mike,” Ledare said, “you shouldn’t’ve done this to either one of us.”

  “You’re under contract, darling,” Mike said. “I’m not required to run things by you. Ask the Writers Guild.”

  “Capers is a lit match with us,” Ledare said to Mike. “We’re the gasoline. You know it well.”

  “We both wanted to see if Jack’s all right. We were worried,” Mike said.

  “I’ve been praying for you,” Capers said, at last.

  “Mike,” I said. “There’s a Bible on my night table. Turn to the New Testament and start reading the story about Judas Iscariot. Capers’ll find it eerily autobiographical.”

  “The cat’s never at a loss for words,” Mike said in admiration.

  “Ol’ Jack,” Capers said. “Always comparing himself to Jesus.”

  “Only when I’m with the man who once crucified me and all my friends,” I said, feeling cold and angry. “Normally I model myself after Julia Child.”