Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (37 page)

 
          
 
Banner would make a joke and they'd all be
thrown out of the clinic.

 
          
 
They could place anonymous calls to the TV
stations and feed the reporters their suspicions.

 
          
 
The reporters would check out the rumors, find
them baseless and ignore them.

 
          
 
They had to make Banner destroy himself.

 
          
 
And they couldn't.

 
          
 
Nobody could.

 
          
 
Except maybe Chuck.

 
          
 
And he had disappeared.

 
          
 
Preston
was
distracted by a light breeze on the back of his neck. The outside door had
opened. He half-turned in his seat and looked at the door.

 
          
 
Marcia.

 
          
 
She saw him, and she gave him a tiny nod, and
what struck him was that she didn't smile or wave or look the slightest bit
surprised to see him.

 
          
 
It was as if she had known he would be there,
as if she had come to the meeting to speak to him.

 
          
 
How could he speak to her? He couldn't just
get up and walk back there and sit beside her. Gwen of the Gestapo would knock
him down and stomp him to death. Maybe he could hang back after the meeting,
pretend he had to go to the John, meet her in a hallway or upstairs in the
apse. (He wasn't sure what an apse was, it was a crossword-puzzle word, but he
had always fancied meeting somebody in one.)

 
          
 
No. Just Mel would be on toilet detail, would
follow everybody into the John, probably check specimens for controlled
substances.

 
          
 
He had to talk to her.

 
          
 
Ferlin had concluded his story, counting off
ten days, twenty-two hours and seventeen minutes of continuous sobriety, and
now someone else was telling how he had convinced himself that booze was God's
elixir since if Christ's blood had been turned into wine, why then all he had
been doing all his life was taking nonstop communion.

 
          
 
The guy finished, to laughter and applause,
and suddenly Preston—without knowing what he was going to say but positive that
this was his only chance to make contact with Marcia—jumped to his feet and
heard himself say, *'rm Scott and I'm an alcoholic."

 
          
 
“Hi, Scott!"

 
          
 
Duke looked at him as if he had rabies.

 
          
 
Lupone was so startled that he bounced on one
of his chairs and splayed its legs.

 
          
 
Gwen smiled at him like a proud mother at a
potty-trained child.

 
          
 
I said it!
Preston
felt that his brain was unspooling, like a
videotape on fast-forward. I said it in public and nobody laughed! What have I
been scared of? Sonofa-bitch.'

 
          
 
He almost said it again, to see if it felt as
good in reruns. But that wasn't why he was on his feet.

 
          
 
“I was born . . ." he began, and stopped.
Born where? Poor and black in
Mississippi
? Born on a farm in
Nebraska
? Born to lose? He wanted to send a signal
to Marcia, but he couldn't deviate too far from the truth or Gwen would manacle
him and bundle him off to a rubber room.

 
          
 
'That's a start, Scott," Walter said, and
people laughed.

 
          
 
''I was born into a family where problems
weren't discussed. Standards were set, and you were expected to toe the line,
and if you didn't there was a lot of silent disappointment, but nobody ever
actually said anything."

 
          
 
Good. Close enough to the truth. Now: throw in
a ringer to get her attention.

 
          
 
“There were three of us—my sister . . ." name.
Think of a name! "... Penelope, my brother, Charles—we called him Chuck ..."
Yes. That should do it. "Chuck ought to sit her up straight. If she
remembers that I'm an only child. "... and me. We idolized our father. He
could do no wrong. Of course, if he had done anything wrong, nobody would have
talked about it."

 
          
 
Enough back story. Get some drinking in here.
Now!

 
          
 
"Anyway, I started drinking when I was
about fourteen, but nobody said anything. It was almost as if they didn't want
to notice.”

 
          
 
He glanced down and saw Twist looking at him
with a worried frown on his face, as if he was debating whether it would be a
kindness to subdue
Preston
and give him a shot.

 
          
 
Preston
gave Twist what he thought was a reassuring smile.

 
          
 
“Over the years. Chuck drifted away, and I
haven't been able to find him, and I need to find him now . . . because I've
just learned something pretty terrible and I feel I have to share it with
him."

 
          
 
Twist whispered something to Duke, and Duke
whispered back, and they were both about to come out of their seats when Lupone
put one of his giant hands on Duke's thigh and pressed him down into his chair.

 
          
 
Thank God. Puff has got it.

 
          
 
“What I've learned is that all along our
sainted father has been abusing people—maybe Penelope, too—and it's critical to
my recovery that I tell Chuck and see if we can work it out together. . . .
That's all I have. Thanks for listening."

 
          
 
Preston
sat
down.

 
          
 
Walter said, "The Program isn't in the
lost-and-found business, Scott, but never mind. We know what kind of courage it
takes to stand up for the first time, and we're with you!" He clapped, and
a bunch of other people clapped along with him.

 
          
 
Walter then called on a handsome woman in
jeans, riding boots and a sweatshirt, who said her kids wanted her to go
white-water rafting with them but she was happy staying here and raising her
mastiffs, and though she didn't want to tick off her kids, because she enjoyed
their company, or at least their attention, there was no way she was going to
be able to spend a week sitting in a raft without a little liquid comfort to
get her through the rapids of their bickering. And that led to a roundtable
discussion of what was more important, sobriety or family, leading to the
inevitable conclusion that without sobriety there was no family.

 
          
 
When the meeting was over, the contingent from
banner was instructed to stay in their seats until the room had cleared.

 
          
 
"What are we," Duke asked Gwen,
"contagious?"

 
          
 
"There are dangerous people here,"
she said.

 
          
 
"There are?"

 
          
 
"Like that . . . Ferlin. People who
haven't been sober as long as you have. How do I know he's not carrying or
using or even dealing?"

 
          
 
"He looked okay to me."

 
          
 
"The devil has a large wardrobe, Duke.
Always remember that."

 
          
 
As they lined up to board the bus,
Preston
murmured to Lupone, "Think Marcia got
it?"

 
          
 
"The spade lady? She was there?"

 
          
 
"You didn't see her?"

 
          
 
"Hell, no."

 
          
 
"What'd you think I was doing?"

 
          
 
"Pulling their chains. What else?"

 
          
 
On the ride back to the clinic, Gwen held
forth from the front of the bus and explained the different abuse patterns
reflected in all the different stories they had heard. She praised Preston for
having spoken and said she could see that God had made a little crack in his
armor, and if he kept opening that crack a bit more every day, there was still
a chance he would receive his medallion, after all.

 
          
 
Something woke
Preston
. He looked at the luminous dial on his
watch: two-thirty. He heard Twist making sounds like a bear with asthma, and he
vowed (as he did every time Twist's snoring woke him) that this morning he
would ask Guy Larkin to requisition a pair of nose clips for Twist.

 
          
 
He threw off the covers and stood up and was
about to bend down and clamp off Twist's nose—which usually forced Twist to
grumble and change position and bury his face in his pillow, which usually
stopped the snoring for a while—when he heard a faint scratching on the window.

 
          
 
It might have been a branch blowing against
the windowpane, but there were no trees beside the window and he had never
known a breeze to blow here at night.

 
          
 
He padded softly to the window. He saw
nothing, so he opened the window and stuck his head out.

 
          
 
Something touched his arm. He lurched backward
and struck his head on the window frame.

 
          
 
It was Marcia, flattened against the wall. She
pointed to the far end of the building, where a cigarette glowed. They
waited—Marcia against the wall,
Preston
leaning on the windowsill—until the tiny orange light vanished around the comer
of the building.

 
          
 
She gestured for him to follow her, so he
pulled on his trousers, climbed out the window and tailed her across the sand.

 
          
 
Her car was hidden in a hollow a hundred yards
from the building. Its tires were almost flat, for she had driven across the
desert and had let most of the air out so she could maintain traction on the
shifting granular ground.

 
          
 
“You did good," she whispered when they
were far from the clinic. "No wonder all you Yalies went into the
CIA."

 
          
 
Before he could say anything, she opened the
back door and gestured inside the car and said, "Got a present for
you."

 
          
 
Someone lay on the back seat, breathing deeper
than sleep. Unconscious. Or comatose.
Preston
leaned in and looked.

 
          
 
Chuck.