46

The young man in his bed did not hear the click of the lamp, or feel the light on his eyes under their lids, but went on sleeping as before, openmouthed and dreaming of God knew what. He slept on his side, facing lampward, hair spilled across his eyes, curled upon himself with one loose fist exposed above the hem of the blanket near his chin. The air smelled of ash and sour breath and the rank humid interiors of leather boots. And he would’ve gone on sleeping but for a noise in the room, a true noise heard and felt, like a blow to the headboard, which jerked him blinking into the light—“What?”—raising his head and squinting at the lamp, squinting into the room.

A figure sat there in the weak light, having pulled the little chair bedside to sit upright and formally, as a doctor would, or a priest.

“What the hell you doing, Pops?” he said thickly, and the figure leaned forward, elbows to knees, hands clasped, and the face clarified and Billy beheld him groggily. Beyond him the door stood open.

The alarm clock showed 3:35.

Billy uncurled and stretched himself, yawning. He smacked his lips and said, “How long you been sitting there?”

Grant looked at him closely. The greasy, fallen hair, the hooded eyes, that mouth.

“Not long.”

“That’s good to hear.” Billy drew himself up and rested his head against the headboard, the pillow mounded under his neck. This new position, the angle of his neck, gave him the look of a man who was helpless to make himself more comfortable.

He regarded his visitor and said, “What’s on your mind, Grant?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“You couldn’t sleep.”

“I was lying over there, trying to sleep, but I couldn’t. So I got up and came over here. I thought maybe I could talk it out of me.”

Billy looked at him. He sniffed the air for alcohol and smelled none.

Grant sat studying his own fingers.

“You couldn’t find anybody else to talk it out with?” Billy said. “That old man across the hall don’t even sleep. You could talk to him till the cows come home.”

“It doesn’t concern him.”

“It doesn’t.”

“No.”

“It concerns me?”

“Yes.”

Billy grinned and wagged a finger and said, “I bet it concerns that boy of yours too. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“So why don’t you talk to him?”

“I did talk to him, earlier. But they sedated him at the hospital and he’s sleeping.”

“They sedated him at the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“That’s what they do for a broken wrist.”

“He broke his wrist?”

Grant stared at him. Billy stared back from his strange position. “And you think I had something to do with it,” Billy said.

“I do.”

“Because that’s what he told you.”

“No. He told me the horse threw him.”

“Yeah, they do that.”

“The girl had a different story.”

“What girl was that?”

Grant reached up and scratched his jaw. Billy watched his hand until it came down again.

“You know what girl,” Grant said. He could hear the younger man’s breathing and Billy could hear his.

“And now here you are,” Billy said. “Come into a man’s room while he’s still in bed. Well, do what you gotta do, Grant. But before you begin I think you ought to know something that maybe nobody else has mentioned.”

“What’s that.”

“It was a fair fight. A fair fight. And if your boy got his wrist broke it was only because he didn’t know when to quit. He’s no fighter, sorry to say, but he’s got no fear either.”

“A fair fight,” said Grant. “What does a shit like you know about a fair fight?”

Billy’s eyes had been glazed, then faintly lit as he warmed to the conversation. Now they turned hard and bright.

“I’m sorry junior can’t handle himself better in a scrap,” Billy said. “But I’m done talking to you.” He reached and clicked out the light and then rolled away and slugged the pillow. “Shut that door on your way out.”

Grant sat as before, like a man at vigil, his eyes adjusting to the dark. A moon had come into the west-facing window, white as the eye of a blind man. Light enough to see by. There was the tock tock of the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs.

“How are you fixed with God, Billy?” he said, but Billy did not stir—until finally he exhaled with a sound of exhaustion and said, “Worse than a woman,” and he rolled again to face Grant. Faint moonlight in his eyes. “What do you want from me? An apology?”

“Want you to answer my question.”

Billy stared at him. He shook his head and propped himself again on the headboard and grabbed his cigarettes and lighter from where they lay by the lamp. He struck the flint wheel and his face lit up garishly with the flame, then darkened again.

“How am I fixed with God? Was that the question?” The eye of the cigarette flared and dimmed. The exhaled smoke rolled overhead in a blue squall.

“I’m not fixed with him one way or another, Grant. We mostly leave each other alone. Does that answer your question?”

Grant nodded, frowning.

“I used to be the same,” he said. “It was a challenge for my wife, who was raised Catholic.” He opened his hands and observed the two white pools that were his palms. Then he told Billy the story he’d told the boy: of the two sixteen-year-old girls, Angela and Faith, twins, and their baby sister on the dock. Told him of the splash and the dive and the mouth-to-mouth while Faith didn’t come up, and she didn’t come up.

Billy tapped ash into a glass ashtray. “Your wife lost her Faith,” he said, and Grant said, “Yes, but it brought her closer to God. Now she understood him better. Understood that he saw to all things in the world, the beautiful and the ugly. The joyful and the heinous. There was nothing he didn’t touch. No beautiful summer day on the lake without him nor dead twin sister on that same day. He was whimsical and violent and hard but this was better, much better, than a godless world that was whimsical and violent and hard. Because you could not talk to the world. You could not pray to it or love it or damn it to hell. With the world there could be no discussion, and with no discussion there could be no terms, and with no terms there could be no grace.”

“Or damnation,” Billy said, and Grant said, “No, that was damnation. You mind if I smoke one of these?”

Billy told him to help himself, and he did.

They were silent, smoking. The moon sat in the very corner of the glass as if lodged there. The grandfather clock tocked away.

“I didn’t understand any of this until my daughter was taken from me,” Grant said. “I never talked to God, not even to ask him to watch over my children. I believed that the terrible things that happened in this world every day could not happen to me, to my family. I suppose every man believes that. Until shown otherwise, he believes no evil can touch the people he protects with his love. Then, one day, another man takes his daughter from him. Simply grabs her and takes her. He has no name and no face, this man, and he vanishes back into the darkness and he takes the man’s daughter there with him. What can he do, this father, in the face of such cruelty, but ask the God he never believed in to bring her back? And if he won’t bring her back, or show him how to find her, then some other deal must be made. Some other terms. I never believed in God like I never really believed in the truly bad man. In his power to touch me.”

The cigarette ash flared, then dimmed.

“Now I ask of this God, that if he will not give me my daughter back, at least give me my bad man. At least give me that. I spend my nights dreaming of nothing else. Of getting this man in my hands. I wake up with the taste of his blood in my mouth, only to find I’ve ground some tooth until my gums have bled, or I’ve bitten through my lip.”

He paused. He drew on his cigarette. He seemed almost to smile.