Silent Joe (21 page)

"Son," he finally said. "Look at me, because I'm looking at you."

So I did, and into the wisest, kindest, most handsome and sad humorous face I'd ever seen in my life. I'd never thought about it before but when I saw that man I understood what a man should be.
Him.
It
was as clear to me as it was clear to Shag that he had to get away into Yellowstone.

"It's only a scar," he said. "Everyone's got 'em. Yours is just on the outside."

I'd looked away by then, of course, but I found the courage to answer in a whisper: "Shag's got scars on his sides, from the bear."

"See? They're nothing to be ashamed of."

I really don't know what gave me the impossible courage to say what I said next. But I did. "Where are yours?"

"I'll answer when you look at me again."

I did.

He hit his chest lightly with his fist. "I'm Will Trona," he said.

Then he stood up and left.

I didn't see him again until the next Saturday. I was in the library again. He gave me a package wrapped in Sunday comics. Inside was a brand-new copy of
Shag: Last of the Plains Buffalo.

"I thought you might like to have your own," he said.

"Thank you, sir."

"Mind if I sit?"

"No, sir."

"I've been talking with some of the people here about you. They tell me you're quite a boy."

I said nothing. I looked away and felt the hot scream beginning in my cheek.

"Joe, I was wondering if you'd like to blow this joint for a while, maybe go get ice cream or goof around on the pier down in Newport. It's a nice day. There's fishermen and skateboarders and pretty girls and all sorts of stuff to look at. I got these keepers of yours to cut you loose for two hours. What do you say?"

I knew what I wanted to say, but it was hard to say it. So few decisions had been mine to make, I wasn't sure how to answer for myself. The institutions had always answered for me: the courts, the hospitals, the state, the county, the homes.

At that moment I experienced the first flutter of liberty, and the first pain of freedom. I felt like I was standing on a high dive the width of a shoe box, wind blowing hard around me, trying to make my mind up whether to dive in, head back to the ladder, or just stand there and tremble.

Will Trona said nothing. He didn't prod me or hurry me or ask me again or drum his fingers or sigh.

Instead, he put his hands behind his head, leaned back and looked at me very calmly, almost sleepily. Like he was imagining a way to make me better.

"Okay, sir. Yes."

"Excellent, young man. Let's get out of this dive. I got a red 1980TransAm with the big V-8 and a five-speed.
Guaranteed
to blow your hair back, Joe."

After an hour of sitting outside John Gaylen's house, nothing had happened, so I turned on the radio.

After another hour nothing had happened, so I turned it off. I thought some more about Will.

After another hour it was pushing two-thirty and nothing at all had changed at Gaylen's house, except maybe the moths. I sat up, started the car and drove home.

E
arly the next morning I went to see Reverend Daniel Alter. I had questions for him, some things that weren't sitting right about Will and Savannah. And there was something else I wanted to ask him.

Daniel had been my pastor for almost ten years, though there was a year-long gap when I didn't see much of him. During that one year— beginning around my seventeenth birthday—I went through a craze that took me to almost twenty different baptisms. Most were mass baptisms, where an extra guy wouldn't be a burden. My face stirred the pity of more than one skeptical minister. Some Sundays I drove seventy miles each way.

The full immersions were best. There's something about being lowered and raised, something about the blessed water drenching my face and hard tissue, cooling, running off, cleansing away the heat, the sin, the hatred. Afterwards I'd be enormously hungry.

But that was years ago, when I was young. Now I'm content to listen to Daniel. He baptized me once and that will have to do. Sometimes I get the urge for more, but I control myself. I watch the others go forward and smile quietly as I imagine the holy water running down the violent furrows of my face. I'm also quite happy to have my face rained on. I like winter. The Reverend Daniel's secretary buzzed me into the office elevator in the Chapel of Light. Seven stories up, a glass elevator, views across the county to the mountains. I walked across the royal blue carpet with the tiny oranges with green leaves on it as Daniel swiveled around to greet me.

He always dressed the same: chinos, black loafers, white polo shirt, his habitual Angels baseball cap. He told his congregation that the cap was persuade the Father to get the Angels a division championship or at least some better hitting down the stretch.

"Oh, Joe. Joe
Trona. "

"Good morning, Reverend. I'm sorry to barge in, but I wanted to talk: to you."

"That door is never locked on you. You know that. Please, sit."

We sat. Orange leather sofas, blue cushions, the county spread out below in a blanket of summer haze and smog.

"I love it early on Saturdays here," he said. "No programs. No business. Nobody here, really, except me and the church mice. Joe, how can help you?"

"Can I ask you a direct question?"

He smiled. "My favorite kind."

"Well, when you and Dad were talking in the Grove booth that night, the night he died, you two were talking about Savannah Blazak. One part of the conversation went exactly like this. Will said,
I know where she. But I'm not so sure I trust those people with her
. And you said back,
Will, what could you mean by that? "

Daniel's eyes widened, magnified by his thick glasses.

"Joe, that's called eavesdropping!"

"I know, Reverend. It was always part of my job."

A big smile from Daniel, then, "What a memory you've got, Joe."

"It's a gift."

He watched me with his big eyes.

"Reverend, my father knew the Blazaks socially. Would he have a reason not to trust them?"

"Why, none that I know, Joe. I can tell you that Will and Jack Blazak crossed swords in the world. As you know, they had different views. Jack, was very bullish on growth for the county. Will, believing that not all growth was good. They were not close friends. But I have no idea what Will didn't trust about Jack or Lorna. Or Bo."

Daniel looked pensively out the window.

"Sir, Will wouldn't find a kidnapped girl, then keep her away from her family unless he had a very good reason."

"Agreed."

"Reverend, what did you give him that night?"

"When?"

"In the booth at the Grove. When you said
here's this."

Again the widened eyes—it was a trademark expression from his TV performances, indicating amazement at the mercy, wisdom and good humor of God. He laughed quietly.

"Joe, this memory of yours. I never knew it was so, uh . . ."

"They call it eidetic, Reverend."

"It could be a miracle, or a curse, couldn't it?"

"Not forgetting is both."

"So you
never
forget anything?"

"I don't know yet. I'm only twenty-four."

He smiled then, and sat back. Daniel's smile brought the lines of his face into their happy old alignment. And his eyes lit up like they always seemed to.

"Joe, you could count the cards in a blackjack game! Bet on a rich deck, beat the house."

Whenever Daniel's mind takes a sinful tack, it often comes to gambling. He mentions it in his performances, using it as an example of the kind of sin that's glittery and tempting. I've heard him talk about sports bets with Will. He knows a lot about sports, every kind. He surprises me sometimes, like that last night with Will when he walked past my table and called the shot and spin my ball needed. As if his seminary days were spent in casinos, pool halls and sports parks. Maybe the idea of gambling thrills him, because Daniel is a tightwad. His Chapel of Light ministries take in untold millions of dollars every year—much of it never taxed—but Daniel himself lives in a modest home in Irvine. Drives a Taurus. His wife, Rosemary, is another story. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like her, and he did not keep apartments Newport Beach, Majorca and Cabo San Lucas.

"Well, Joe, all I gave Will that night was payment for a small, friend wager we made on the Freeway Series. The Angel relievers failed."

He shrugged and smiled, looking half ashamed of himself for wagering, half irritated with the Angel bullpen.

"We had a deal that all winning bets went to a charity—winner's choice. You know Will, always trying to help someone."

As a couple, my mother and father had donated $235,000 to charities the first six months of the year, not including the $50,000 memorial to the family of Sammy Nguyen's victim. This was reported in one of the articles that ran last week around the funeral. Over his lifetime the total was $2.75 million.

Most of it had to come from my mother, who had multiplied her share of the family fortune several times over, according to Will. That fortune had begun here in the county in the early nineteenth century, and evolved with the times—ranching to citrus to land to real estate.

"How much was the wager, Reverend?"

"One hundred dollars." Daniel looked down, then turned away from me to look out the window to the county that had made so many people rich.

"Do you pray regularly, Joe?"

"No, sir."

"You should. He listens."

I looked out again at the county spread before us. Almost three million souls. A lot for Him to listen to, but I believed Reverend Daniel anyway. If there's one thing in life I've learned, it's this: there's a lot I don't understand.

"Sir, do you believe that Alex Blazak kidnapped his sister and threatened to kill her?"

He looked confused. "Why, absolutely, Joe. Alex Blazak is certifiably insane, and a criminal. That's all a matter of record. He pulled a knife on me right here in this study one day, and threatened to throw me out the window. He was fourteen. It was just for fun—he laughed afterwards. Told his friends that I urinated through my robe, which I did not. I
absolutely
believe he would kidnap his sister. I believe he would kill her, too, if he didn't get what he wanted. The stories about him that I've heard from his parents are very frightening. He's a disturbed young man—just twenty-one years old. But very, very disturbed."

It wasn't hard to believe Daniel, even knowing that his business is making you believe him.

"My father wasn't going to take Savannah back to her parents. He was going to deliver her to Hillview."

The Reverend's eyes got large again.
"Why?"

"He didn't tell me. I thought maybe he told you."

"Oh, no. No. I don't see any reason why he would do something like that."

"Dad used to say he could smell Blazak's soul rotting from ten feet away."

"That's graphic."

"It sounds like more than a disagreement about toll roads or airports."

"Well, yes, when you put it in those terms." Daniel nodded. "I can't see Will interfering with a good family simply to fuel political fires."

"I can't either. So it must have been something else."

I stood and thanked him. I thought again about the 10:17 Coast Starlight arriving in Santa Ana that night, and felt that chill in my fingers again. Daniel studied me, his expression patient and curious.

"Is there something else bothering you, Joe?"

"Yes. My father—you know, Thor, the real one—is coming into town tonight. He wants to see me. I don't know what to do."

I told Daniel about the letter, about Thor's plan for getting into heaven, about his need for my forgiveness.

"Oh, my," said Daniel. "This is a difficult situation."

"When I think of the Amtrak station at ten-seventeen tonight, my heart speeds up and my face hurts and I feel cold."

"As well you should, Joe." Daniel leaned back and studied me. "Is it fear?"

"Yes."

"But not of what he could do to you?"

"Do? No, he can't do anything to me now."

"Fear of what, then?"

"Of failing to hate him."

"You'll have to explain that, Joe."

"I always have hated him. It's been simple and safe and understandable. When Will died, it left me not as strong. I don't feel love or hate feel like everything's about the same as everything else and none of matters. So, I wonder if I should see Thor. Talk to him. A month ago I wouldn't have considered."

"Did you wish to harm him?"

"I used to imagine that a lot, when I was learning a martial art practicing with weapons. With pleasure. Now, there's no pleasure in it.'

"What do you want to tell him, Joe? What does your heart want say?"

I had to think about that. "Nothing, sir. I don't want to tell him one single thing."