Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  Maddox paid the idling van no attention as he struggled up the street. He stepped with his left foot, paused, reached out deliberately and set the cane, paused, rolled forward on his bad right hoof, and then rested for two beats.

  There was something graceful about Maddox, the rhythmic way he moved. Billy’s thumb tapped the steering wheel, keeping time with the old cop.

  Step. Pause. Reach. Pause. Step. Pause. Pause.

  Step. Pause. Reach. Pause. Step. Pause. Pause.

  In truth, Maddox was neither old nor a cop. He was maybe fifty, though the stringy mop of white hair added a decade. He was no longer on the police force, having retired as a sergeant on a disability pension, forty-eight hours after the crash that had crippled him.

  Maddox was a soft-shouldered bear of six three, with a Neanderthal brow atop a big square head. His fists were like cobblestones. Maddox reminded Billy of the plastic boxers standing toe-to-toe in Bo’s Rockin’ Sockin’ Robots game.

  There was something odd about seeing such an imposing physical specimen struggle with something as simple as walking, something Billy could do all day. Billy noticed that Maddox had withered below the waist. Where were the cannon legs?

  This was a rehabilitation walk for Maddox, of course. He was getting over the crash, getting on with his life, thirteen months after he had been mangled.

  Billy’s eyes stung. He refused to cry, but he allowed his eyes to flood. Through tears, he watched Maddox’s sloping shoulders from behind as he shuffled. His torso was shaped like a tombstone.

  Billy tasted blood and realized he had been chewing the inside of his cheek.

  He thought about his father, who, at this hour, was probably fighting to get his own decrepit body into the bathroom, where his old-man weaknesses were most plain to him, and where he cursed the commandments and cried to himself and complained out loud to God or to nobody that old men had no dignity, and why did he have to sit to piss?

  Billy thought about Bo, asleep in his twin bed. Bo’s quilt was from the Star Trek exhibit at the Las Vegas Hilton, though the boy didn’t know Kirk from Spock, because his mother had informed him that that sort of television was crap and had never let him watch it. Bo would leave the room out of guilt when Billy and the old man watched science fiction. Begging the boy to stay did nothing; it was as if his mother’s ghost were dragging him from the television.

  Billy wondered about free will. Does a person always have free will? Or are there acts larger than ourselves, which we must do according to the way nature’s rules are scratched into our souls?

  Seventy yards down the road, Maddox came to the curb, looked both ways for traffic.

  Billy wiped his sleeve over his eyes and looked for traffic, too.

  None. Nobody was around.

  Nobody was working on this Sunday. It was still too early to leave for church.

  With a wobble, Maddox stepped off the curb to cross the street.

  Billy slid the gearshift into drive.

  He would have to hide the van, of course. Maybe drive it straight to New York City later this morning. Then take the tags, abandon the old Ford on Seventh Avenue, with the windows down and the keys inside, and ride Amtrak back to Providence in the afternoon.

  Pay cash for the train.

  Billy eased his foot off the brake and let the van creep forward. It rolled on without Billy having to touch the gas, as if driving itself toward Maddox.

  Maddox stopped unexpectedly in the road. With his weight on his good leg, he bent to the ground, facing his ass toward Billy.

  What the hell is he doing? Mooning me? He doesn’t even know who lam.

  Billy’s foot hovered over the gas pedal as the van rolled steadily forward.

  If the damage was not too severe, Billy could keep the van in the driveway, with a tarp over the nose. He could tell Mr. Metts, the landlord, that he needed a few days to fix some old dents. Then he could remove the damaged panels, the grille, headlights—whatever—saw them up, stuff them in his kayak, and scatter the scraps over the bottom of the bay.

  Maddox slowly stood, facing away from Billy, and paused against the cane to gather himself.

  Billy’s fingers dug deep into the fur over the steering wheel. His right foot lowered toward the gas; his left foot tapped on the high beams.

  What the—

  Two ghostly green dots appeared over Maddox’s shoulder, boring at Billy like lasers.

  Billy tapped the brake.

  Cat’s eyes…

  Maddox had picked up a cat and thrown it over his shoulder. The eyes bounced Billy’s headlights back at him.

  It was Ziggy.

  Angie’s cat.

  Billy hesitated.

  Of course Maddox would have the cat. Angie had brought Bo when she had moved in with Maddox; she would have brought her cat.

  Angie died, Bo went to Billy, and the cat had stayed.

  Ziggy had to be ten years old by now. Billy recalled old Ziggs as a kitten, just gray fuzz, like a lump of dryer lint, small enough to nap in a coffee mug. He remembered how he had wrapped the cat in a Christmas box. He smiled, recalling the kitten whining from under the tree, and Angie cuffing Billy lovingly on the arm to scold him for wrapping a cat. He pictured her cuddling the kitten against her cheek that Christmas, both of them near sleep; it seemed neither could have been any happier.

  Maddox gave Billy’s van an uninterested glance and then plodded for the sidewalk.

  Ziggy turned toward Billy and stared at him over Maddox’s shoulder with those supernatural eyes.

  Billy’s foot pressed down on the brake.

  five

  Yellow pinpricks shone like stars through the screen of stretched silk that separated Billy Povich from the priest. In the confessional, silk was as strong as steel.

  The priest cannot speak a word of this, Billy reminded himself as he absentmindedly traced the sign of the cross and then wiped wet palms on his blue jeans.

  Through the beige screen, the priest was a shadow with blurred edges, the way he might have looked to a man who was nearly blind. “Father Capricchio?” Billy whispered, unsure. His foot found the kneeler; he lowered himself to it.

  The shadow grew darker as the priest leaned closer to the screen. He replied, “Yes, my son.” The voice was at the same time gentle and grave.

  “Holy shit,” Billy whispered in delight. “You padded the kneelers since last time I was here.”

  The priest chuckled. “Hello, Billy,” he said. “No more kneeling on that pine board.”

  “Is this real velvet?”

  “The thickest I could find,” said Father Capricchio. He spoke in a deep, clear voice, enunciating each syllable as if announcing the words in a spelling bee. “The cushioning is a space-age gel, like they use in expensive running shoes. I passed the basket an extra time in April. You like?”

  “So soft—I feel like I could confess all night.”

  The priest laughed in a happy, deep-bellied sputter. Billy had never seen the padre’s face, but he imagined him with thinning blond hair chopped in a bowl cut, dark eyes cradled by sleepy lids, a set of floppy jowls and reddened cheeks, rough and windburned. Billy smelled coffee breath through the screen, and imagined gray teeth.

  The priest had never seen Billy’s face, either—Billy had made sure of that by driving into Massachusetts, just over the state line, into the border town of Fall River, to this little yellow-brick church on a dead-end street in a deforested neighborhood of asphalt and cinder block, where the priest would not know him.

  “We’re sinners on this side of the screen,” Billy said, teasing the padre. “Should you be coddling us with luxuries?”

  “We’re sinners on this side, too,” the priest reminded him. “And I have here for my comfort a bottle of coffee milk and some Skittles.”

  Billy imagined the priest smiling. He held the image in his mind a few seconds. When it faded, cold silence filled the confessional and Billy shook with a chill. “Well,” he said finally, “I should prob
ably get the show started with a prayer. I guess that’s the rule.”

  “Eh,” the priest said, sounding unimpressed with the idea. Eddie heard him sip coffee milk. “However you want to do it, my son. It’s more of a guideline than a rule.”

  Billy’s throat tightened. “But not the secrecy, right? That’s a rule!”

  The priest was nonchalant, “I’d die for your secrets.”

  Suddenly, Billy was hot. “What does that mean? You die if you tell?”

  Billy heard a plastic bag crackle behind the screen. “What happens here stays here,” the priest promised. “Like in Las Vegas—and I know you’re familiar with Vegas.”

  Father Capricchio chewed candy. The scent of artificial fruit made Billy’s mouth water.

  Billy confessed: “I think I’m going to kill him.”

  I think I’m going to kill him.

  The ring of certainty in the gambler’s voice froze Father Capricchio in mid-chew; there was a confidence in the way he spoke. This was new. He had heard Billy’s confession seven times before—well, they had been more like therapy sessions than confessions, which was all right with Father Capricchio; not everyone could afford two hundred dollars per hour for a professional to listen to their problems. And he liked talking to the gambler, who had introduced himself as Billy—if that was his real name. Billy was without pretension. All of the people who confessed on their knees with Father Capricchio said that they were sinners, unworthy of God’s grace; Billy truly seemed to believe it.

  Father Capricchio knew each of his 166 parishioners. This man, Billy, the gambler, was not one of them. Since Billy had first come to confession, Father Capricchio had been sure to introduce himself to every stranger who appeared in the pews of Saint Victor Romano Catholic Church.

  He had still not met Billy the gambler.

  The priest was sure that if he could look Billy in the eye, he would know in an instant if he were capable of murder in cold blood.

  “How have your dreams been?” the priest asked, trying to sound breezy despite the trembling of concern in his chest. He chewed his soft candy to putty and swallowed it.

  “My dreams are—ah—tense,” Billy said. “I’ve been keeping a dream journal, and doing exercises before I sleep to give me some control over the content of my dreams.”

  “Does it work?”

  He heard Billy shifting on the kneeler behind the silk screen. “Sometimes,” he said. “When I become aware I’m in a dream, I can manipulate it—like I’m both the star and the director. It’s called ‘lucid dreaming.’ Any first-year psychology textbook will tell you all about it.”

  Father Capricchio laughed and offered his own confession: “Lucid dreams are treasured by the celibate.”

  Billy snorted.

  The priest let the lightness of the moment linger. Then he pried gently: “Are you still dreaming of committing violence?”

  The gambler hissed out a long, noisy breath. He said, “Freud argued that every dream is a wish.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Before I started doing my dream exercises, I used to think God was fucking with my head at night.”

  “Or the devil,” Father Capricchio said. “That would be his realm.”

  “There’s no such person.”

  The priest’s bushy white eyebrows rose at the certainty in Billy’s voice. “How can you know that?” he asked.

  “Who needs him? I sin fine by myself.”

  The priest sipped coffee milk and thought about the answer. This man, Billy, never stopped impressing. He was an incongruous mix of street talk and philosophy; a Socrates who had grown up with the wise guys on Federal Hill, perhaps? Billy had claimed he used to be a writer, which Father Capricchio had dismissed first as a fantasy, and then as misdirection to hide his true identity. But maybe he had been a writer.

  Who are you?

  “Why do you want to kill this man?” the priest asked.

  Billy was silent a moment. “More of a need than a want,” he said softly. “I can deny myself what I want, but I’ve never had much control of my needs.”

  Father Capricchio realized Billy was being vague because he doubted the sanctity of the confessional. That was all right; they would get to the details eventually. The priest chuckled out loud to show Billy how silly his fears were, and then assured him: “I’m sixty-two years old and I have been listening to confessions since before you were born, I suspect.”

  “Close, probably. When did you start?”

  “I entered the seminary right out of Brown University—as soon as I realized I wouldn’t be drafted into the National Football League.” He laughed. “Had I known that earlier, I’d have practiced less blocking and studied more philosophy.”

  “Did you wear leather helmets in those days?”

  “Now, I’m old,” the priest said, “but not older than plastic.” He sipped his coffee milk. “The point is, Billy, I’m an old pro at the sacrament of confession. Not by word or deed may I reveal anything I hear in the confessional. I cannot let it affect my actions in even the slightest way. I have kept every secret I’ve ever gotten.” Father Capricchio lowered his voice. “And I’ve heard some kinky shit.”

  The gambler laughed. “That’s my irreverent reverend,” he said. “That’s why I like it here—you’re different.”

  Father Capricchio felt his cheeks flush at the compliment. Maybe he was a little different. He paid little attention to the formalities of his office, to the annoyance of the bishop, who had banished Father Capricchio to this little church in a broken neighborhood on the outskirts of the diocese. He had survived his own crisis of confidence as a young seminarian by accepting that God—the concept, the person-could be pretty weird, and that there was no one right way to help a lost child find his path.

  Billy’s admission about wanting to commit murder had shaken the priest, but as Father Capricchio sipped coffee milk and spoke of the sacrament of confession, he felt his own confidence seep back. A human life was at stake—two, actually, for Billy’s life was also at risk. And then there were the ripples—the families of a victim and a would-be killer.

  Father Capricchio blessed himself and offered a silent prayer:

  Smack me when I start to screw up.

  “What makes you a slave to your needs?” Father Capricchio asked. He thought about the question and sharpened it: “What makes you gamble, for instance?”

  Billy thought for a moment, and then explained, speaking quickly, with excitement, “People who play sports say that losing feels worse than winning feels good. Gamblers see it the other way. We’re used to losing ‘cause we do so much of it, but winning— winning is more addictive than caffeinated cocaine. Losing crushes you. Winning pries the weight off for a little while, lets you breathe. I didn’t gamble for money—at least not before I lost all that I had, and fell into debt to some gentlemen who, uh, probably don’t go to confession too often. I gambled to feel the win. Losing was a side effect.”

  Father Capricchio said nothing as he processed the information. Then he urged him to say more. “Tell me how it relates to this man you want to kill.”

  Billy said, “Well, there’s this other weight crushing me.”

  “What kind of weight?”

  “I don’t, uh—”

  “Is it like the weight of losing?” Father Capricchio asked.

  Silence.

  “Is it?” the priest prodded. He waited. “Billy? What is it, Billy?”

  Billy’s fist pounded the wall in rage. The answer came strained through gritted teeth. “The son of a bitch killed my wife and got away with it.” He bolted from the confessional and slammed the door.

  Father Capricchio sat paralyzed and frightened. What had he done? His Skittles rained with tiny clicks onto the tile floor and bounced into the corners.

  six

  The hardest part about having no home was the logistics of daily life. The shelter in which Franklin D. Flagg spent most nights was in Cranston, a fifteen-minute bus r
ide from Providence. Every morning brought the same routine. The staff woke the “clients” from their cots by 7:30—to give them time to pack duffels and garbage bags with their hand-me-down clothes and their paperback romances and the tattered files they kept on the landlord who had screwed them out of a security deposit five years ago—before everyone got pushed out the doors by eight o’clock.

  The bus to Providence was called “the Goose”—after nine months riding the thing, Flagg had never learned why they called it that. Maybe because it honked.

  It dumped the riders at the Holy Gospel Church, just outside of downtown Providence, for breakfast. There, the lucky among the homeless—luck, Flagg had learned a hundred times since he had been paroled from prison, was relative—would meet up with the people who had spent the night on the street. Those folks looked like extras in a zombie movie, after a night under a bridge, or passed out stoned inside an ATM booth, or fighting for space on the heating grates behind the old civic center.

  The short stack of flapjacks on Flagg’s tin tray filled the hole in his stomach. The food was always fine, if you could stand the preaching.

  From breakfast, the homeless filed across downtown, over to the Kennedy Plaza outdoor bus depot, where panhandlers pestered bankers for change with sad lies about car troubles or that somebody had stolen their bicycle and they needed cab fare to get to a job interview right now. People got so sick of those tired stories. Flagg once asked a guy for money to buy himself a beer. The guy laughed, clapped Flagg so hard on the shoulder, it hurt, then slipped him twenty just for being original.

  Across the plaza, a dozen concrete steps brought homeless people down below the street, below the ground, like where dead people went—the day shelter.

  The day shelter was a large windowless room with six rows of cafeteria tables. The place smelled like dirty hair. Along one side, doors led to offices, where the clients could meet with nurses or social workers, or to gripe to some volunteering law student about the mysterious settlement they were supposed to get umpteen years ago for the fender bender that had hurt their back.

  The day shelter was lively, full of gabbing and laughing and the sounds of sickly people hacking wet phlegm.