Silent Retreats (3 page)

"I don't recognize the accent," Martin told him. "It isn't quite British."

"Kind of a mix, I'd say," Skidmore said. "Sophisticated, don't you think?"

"Not really."

"You were in a religious thing last time you called. Drunk and very religious. We talked about baseball and the absence of an afterlife."

"I don't remember," Martin said.

"Drunk." Skidmore mumbled it away from the phone.

"Your letters," Martin said, "are meaner than usual lately."

"Don't start it. I'm not mean."

"I'm not the only one who thinks it."

"I know. So what else is happening?"

"How's legal services for the poor in Nebraska?"

"Terrible. I'm not such a great lawyer, I'm afraid. McFarland says I hate Indians and won't admit it."

"I expect he's right."

"Cut the crap. You don't know me anymore. Every cell's turned over since way back the hell whenever it was."

"Some things don't turn over with the cells," Martin said.

He heard a resolute sigh on the other end.

Skidmore changed the subject. "I'm living in this trailer—in my office, you know? And I've got this Indian woman around here somewhere. Fifty years old. I just saw her go by the window here a minute ago, chasing a blue jay with a god damned tomahawk." The low familiar mean laugh.

"Fifty," Martin said.

"Nothing like it. We like to rassle," Skidmore said in his best boys-will-be-boys central Illinois idiom, but with the subsequent affectations of Australia crowding in.

Martin laughed in spite of himself. The wires buzzed. Maybe this would be the last time they would ever talk. Letters were easier than phone calls. Nowhere in this world could Martin quite find the Skidmore he knew a long time ago, but the handwriting, it had never changed. Always, on the brink of making a call to Skidmore, he noticed his motivation. It was always a wave of feeling alone, wanting to be friends again. "Ken Boyer died."

"Yup," Skidmore said. Cardinal third baseman, their old common hero. "How's the wife and kid, Rod or whatever his name is?"

"His name is Jeff."

"Right. How's he? Gonna have a bunch more?"

"Everyone's fine. Thanks for asking," Martin said.

Again the phone line buzzed.

"Rough world," Martin said. Maybe he could convey something by suggestion.

"Plenty rough," Skidmore said. Silence. Then he said, "God, you're nuts."

Quiet again.

"I always think, if I could just put together the right set of words," Martin said.

"Yeah, then what? outgrow it."

Martin let the phone call die. The buzz in his ear remained, and there was nothing from Skidmore to stop it. Trying to keep his voice flat, Martin said, "There isn't any friendship anymore."

"Go home. Vegas is no place for a man in your frame of mind."

"I'm in Chicago."

"I gotta go. I'm an attorney. Time is money. Get off the sauce and go home, is my advice. Play catch with Rod." Skidmore hung up.

Martin responded to the operator by feeding in the change, and then opened the door just a little to shut the ceiling light off. Across the lobby, through the front doors, he watched a Mercedes being unloaded by two bellmen. The sun was almost down.

Nine o'clock. The hotel lobby's colors seemed faster when he was coming out of the smoky lounge than when he went in. The phone booth was still in approximately the same place. The floor sloped in a way Martin hadn't noticed earlier. For three hours he'd hung suspended in a vision of himself in a mirror, through some upside-down glasses hanging in a rack behind the bar. This time he called collect.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello."

She paused, recognizing the voice. "Well. Where might you be?"

"I'm downtown at the Drake Hotel, case someone asks. I'm okay."

"Sure you are."

"I am."

"This is getting to be a regular thing."

"I wouldn't say that," Martin muttered.

"You what?"

"I took a drive," he said. "Just ended up down here."

"You took a drive? Is that what you want me to believe?"

"You don't know shit about men," he said.

"I see."

He didn't think she did see yet. "Do you understand what I'm saying? You don't know shit." His voice banged against the wall of the phone booth, banged back into his own ears. "I've been meaning to tell you that."

"I think I've pretty much got it," she said. She didn't say anything for a moment and neither did Martin. Finally she said, "What's to understand? I missed a meeting tonight because of this and I'm in a lousy mood. Stay downtown 'til you either get it straight or sleep it off. You got somebody to drive you?"

"I'll be home in an hour or so."

"Who'll drive?" she said.

"Look, I'm alone and shall do the driving."

"Delightful."

The phone line was quiet for a while. "Do you understand me, about what I was saying?"

"Which was?"

Martin momentarily forgot.

She said, "Jeffrey finally mentioned around bedtime that you'd been to school to see him. So I called Charlotte Rudolph and she said you'd terrorized the librarian in the school hall at lunch—threatened to tear the principal's office to pieces. Do you ever think about anyone else?"

"Like who?"

"Like your son."

"He was fine. We had a nice chat. Don't use him—he was fine. Don't use him on me because you missed a sales meeting. You miss those all the time. You hate those goddamned sales meetings."

"He was embarrassed. He told me so."

"He did not. He wasn't embarrassed."

"He was," she said. "You embarrassed him." All was quiet for a few seconds. "Look," she said. "I've been worried. I need to know what's going on so I can make some plans for myself. What's going on? Is this the great midlife crisis?"

"That would be the easy conclusion, my dear," he said. "Or the pre-midlife fore-crisis. I called them about silent retreats. He asked me what I've done for the Almighty lately."

"Are there any silent retreats anymore?"

"Yes, but they ain't silent and they ain't retreats. I told him I can have an encounter any time I want one, but I can't get silence when I need it. He said silence is self-indulgent, something like that."

"What's wrong with self-indulgence, or did he say?"

"We didn't talk very long." He took a deep breath. He was buzzing, the line was buzzing, the colors in the hotel lobby were buzzing. "I'll drive with maximum carefulness and caution."

"To the extent you can differentiate," she said.

Martin hung it up. "I'm having a willful adventure here," he said to the hung-up phone. A lady in a glittering gown and jewelry buzzed across the lobby. He opened the door of the booth just enough to let the ceiling light go out and from the dark observed her. He could imagine what her aloof, urbane arms would feel like around him, what look in her self-absorbed eye there would be if they were together.

It was ten-thirty when he pulled up in front of the rectory at St. Michael's in Wheaton. The front-right tire of the car jumped the curb. Martin, accepting chaos as a way of life, left it that way. He crossed the wide amber-lighted street, walked into the shadows up the front walk, felt the chill around his ankles as he carefully climbed the shadowed front porch steps and knocked on the door. The porch light came on, yellow. A Franciscan priest cracked the door and looked out, then flipped the chain lock and opened it wide. "Yes, can I help you?" he said, his hands deep in his long brown habit, the white ropes dangling far down.

"Bless me, Father—for I am drunk."

"Funny," the priest said. "But I've heard funnier. You must be Mr. Silent Retreats himself. I recognize the voice."

"I doubt it. Every cell in my body has turned over since this morning."

The priest gestured for Martin to come in, and Martin bowed past him, walking carefully so as not to fall or break something. The priest indicated a parlorlike room off to the right, and Martin went in there.

"Looks like you've been trying to work out your own redemption."

"Are you going to keep saying things like that all the time I'm here?"

"Sorry. Have a seat."

When Martin sat down, he noticed that the priest was pulling a pistol out of his habit and setting it on the umbrella stand behind the front door.

"Sorry," the priest said. "Not very attractive, a man of the cloth bearing arms. Some joker robbed us last month—got the Bishop's Relief Fund collection. Scared hell out of the Monsignor."

"I'm serious," Martin said. "You gonna blow somebody out of his socks right on your front porch?"

"Yeah, I know—I probably won't shoot anybody."

"Don't you guys carry insurance for the Bishop's collection or whatever?" Martin rubbed his face. The beard was back. "You know, you might consider a dog. Experience tells me you can keep the poor from crowding in on you if you simply buy a large, well-trained killer dog." Martin's head was buzzing. "I think if I kept a .38 around I'd be afraid I'd use it on myself, and I'm not even celibate on purpose. I would never use a killer dog on myself, no matter how loathsome things got."

"You have a number of interesting points there," the priest said. "How about some coffee?"

"Is the gun loaded?"

"Hey—touché on the gun, okay? I'm sorry I met you at the door with a gun."

"No, no, don't apologize," Martin said. "Black and no sugar. I'll just sit here a while. Semi-upright. On this couch."

"That would be fine," the priest said. He headed for the kitchen. Martin stared at the picture of Christ on the wall. It was an ordinary picture of a man, only Martin knew it was Christ because of how the guy was holding his hands. When had they stopped painting halos so you knew who was holy?

The priest was back with a huge mug of coffee and two aspirin. "For the hangover," he said. "I don't know your name still. I'm Thomas Simon." He seemed to have a regular chair, and he relaxed in it and let Martin sip at the scalding coffee. The floors of the whole house were bare gleaming hardwood, dark. The warm glow of the low light bent down on them and made the hour seem very late. The priest watched him, and Martin was aware he was watching. Martin had a flash of the woman that morning, leaning over toward him, shouting through the window that she'd help. He tried to think about her. Stopping, that was a nice thing she did. Then she was completely gone. He wanted to run an ad in the paper that might find her. What would the ad say?

"You don't have to tell me your name if you don't want to," the priest said.

"Are we gonna start sharing now?" Martin replied. The furniture was spare, the floor dark and clean, the lights dimmer and dimmer, and the house was completely still.

Skidmore had a woman named Fiona, a strange woman who looked like she hated everything because of how she painted her eyes. There's a picture of Yank and Fiona, before Yank left, taken at a farmhouse south of Long Pine in 1980. Yank is toasting the camera with a silver can of malt liquor, and he's trying to smile but he can't quite pull it off. His beard is shaved crooked, and, to hold back his long hippie hair, he's wearing the elastic waistband from his jockey shorts around his head. Fiona is standing straight, even under the weight of Yank's left arm, which she seems to have shouldered in order to hold him up. There is a blur through Fiona's face, like a question she didn't know she had. The picture was taken on the front porch of the farmhouse, and far off in the distance behind them is the road sign pointing toward the strange little ravine town of Long Pine, located a mile and a half south of the hardroad. The sign is really a painting of a pine tree, tall and narrow and slanting off at an angle—quasi-Indian art. It looks phallic, or like a giant green corndog waiting to be launched.

Yank served in Vietnam, and he had a great stereo to show for it. It was Yank who actually selected the dreary three rooms above a bar in downtown Fort Robinson, this after they'd hurriedly abandoned the Long Pine farm when things suddenly went bad and Yank couldn't swing his end of the rent. They'd lived in Long Pine five months, and had hoped to stay there through the harvest, Yank working at the elevator, Fiona singing in The Gulley and cooking at the hotel. But there'd been a fight of some kind—Fiona would never know all there was to know about Yank—and someone was cut with a razor, and there'd been some bad money exchanged for something, Fiona wasn't sure what. Anyway, it had suddenly come to Yank that it was time to leave. They had wearily slouched into Fort Robinson in the middle of a July night, courtesy of a lonesome trucker hauling used cars to Cheyenne. Yank carried the stereo, and Fiona carried the clothes and her banged-up guitar. It was a new beginning.

Yank painted the apartment a uniform glossy white. He built a great platform bed in the bedroom, which faced west and caught a full blast of summer sun beginning in the middle of each afternoon. And when all this work was done, he settled in for the long haul, went out looking for a job. He had his rich brown hippie hair cut at an actual barbershop for the first time since the army, to show he was serious. Using a little of the money Fiona's ex-husband was then sending along to help her out, he bought a new pair of wheat-colored Levi's and a fancy shirt; and, as always, he made friends with the local cowboys, joining them in the mornings for red beer in the bar down below the apartment. Fiona noticed that he seemed real happy, and for about six days it looked like he was completely stabilized. Then one afternoon the stereo turned up missing and Fiona found out he had traded an Indian even for a Yamaha 750 and hit the road without notice. She ceremoniously hung the Long Pine farmhouse picture on the glossy white wall over the platform bed.

That was in 1980. Yank had been a fine lover, but Fiona seemed to understand his departure, and she liked to think that she could do very well alone. In 1979 she'd hitchhiked penniless out of Valdosta following her divorce. She claimed to be a singer and a writer, and she'd told her ex-husband that when she got out west she was going to write something great. He sent checks to provide a base for her to do just that. From the Long Pine farm, she'd sent a story or two to show him she was "producing," and the boys at The Gulley took a picture of her singing on the barroom stage so she could send that, too. There was never a sign from her husband that he'd received these items, but he kept sending along money and Fiona figured that must mean something. Yank had really liked Fiona's singing, but he didn't give a damn what she was writing, or how she wrote. He was, however, real impressed that she was smart enough to be a writer and still liked him. He raved and raved when she bought an old Olympia portable typewriter and he saw how fast she could go on it.