Touch (1987) (21 page)

He said, "That's who it was."

" ' . . . but it has also in some way refined you. So what you experience this month may be no more than a total and final truth session.' Neat? 'You also enter a completely different phase in your career now and over the next few months.' Really, I'm not making it up, that's what it says." There were also references to "matters of a partnership nature" and deciding "whether or not the bonds are strong enough to hold a relationship together."

"Are they?"

"They're awful strong," he said.

That was good because Lynn, a Libra, wasn't going to "have much time for friendships and close involvements," she'd be "preoccupied with your career."

"What do they know?" Lynn said. "But wait. 'The New Moon on the fourteenth'--that was last Sunday--'heralds an entirely new chapter and one in which you will want and certainly be required to present quite a different face to the world.' Now that part's true, isn't it?" Lynn said. "I just read it for fun, I don't believe in it. But every once in a while it comes pretty close; like a new beginning on the fourteenth, that's certainly true. Town & Country and Cosmopolitan are the best. The ones in the paper, I think they make them up." She paused. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Are you sad?"

"Maybe; I don't know."

"It's all right to be sad," Lynn said. "There are sad things." She waited a moment, lying on the messed-up twin bed with the magazine, Juvenal on the made-up twin after popping open cans of beer and lying down there to listen to their horoscopes.

"Are you thinking about the little boy on the beach?"

"I was."

The boy, about six years old, with withered stick legs, had been with his family, his two sisters, his mother and father, at a campsite of beach chairs, blanket, picnic basket, rubber rafts. His father had carried him down to the water and held him while the boy waved his arms, screaming happily, and splashed and pretended to swim . . . Juvenal sitting on his towel watching them.

"You can't just . . . heal everybody, can you?"

"I don't know."

"Did anybody ask Padre Pio, you mentioned, or any of the saints that healed people?"

"Ask them what?"

"If they could heal everybody."

"Not that I know of."

"What you said before--doesn't the person have to feel something? Like want to be healed?"

"I don't know. I thought so, but I'm not sure."

"Did you want to? I mean with the boy today."

"Yes. But I was afraid it wouldn't happen, I wouldn't be able to."

"Have you been afraid before?"

"No. In the times before I never thought about it. It just happened," Juvenal said. "Except in church last Sunday I was beginning to think about it--I remember now--and be afraid, with the children coming up the aisle. What was gonna happen? What was I supposed to do? But then the boy ran up to me."

Lynn waited again. "You're not responsible for everybody."

He didn't say anything.

"Do you think you are?"

"No. I mean I don't know. Tell me what I am responsible for."

She said, "It isn't something you can think about, is it? Or you can't say, if I'm this . . . if I'm a house painter I should paint houses, it's what I'm supposed to do. It isn't like that, is it?"

"No," he said, "it isn't clear. It seems to be, but it isn't." He was silent a moment. "I grope, feel my way along."

"Who's being dramatic now?" Lynn said.

He looked over at her and seemed to smile; but it was like someone trying to hide grief or pain. "A time comes every so often, I say to myself, why me?"

"Like the little boy on the beach will say to himself one day," Lynn said.

He kept looking at her with the expression of concealed grief until she came over to his bed to lie close to him and hold him.

"I need you," Juvenal said.

Howard Hart spoke to a man from Garden City who had been a few years older than Elvis when they were both growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi. The man said Elvis was always following the older boys around and they'd have to yell at him to go on home. "He was just a snot-nosed regular boy," the man from Garden City said.

Howard was told by an educator from Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina, that Elvis was "morally debauched" and contributed to the ruin of America's moral fiber and the breakdown of the family unit. Howard asked the educator if he'd say that on the air.

He read in the paper about Elvis pulling a gun and shooting out his TV set the time Robert Goulet was singing, as described by one of Elvis's bodyguards. Howard told his secretary to see if she could reach the bodyguard by phone.

He spoke to a girl who said her name was Peggy Chavez and claimed to be Elvis's real girl friend and not that Ginger somebody who was supposed to have found him dead. Peggy said, "Sure, I was with him plenty times in Vegas and L.A." Howard wondered if it was the same girl who once claimed to have been with Ozzie Nelson plenty times in Bakersfield.

It didn't matter. He invited the boyhood friend from Garden City, the educator, and the girl friend--he couldn't reach the bodyguard--to be on the program this Saturday, Howard Hart's Elvis Presley Memorial Show, and had his secretary go out and tell the "miracle crowd" waiting in the lobby he'd get back to them in a couple of weeks.

The psychiatrist said, "Don't call us, we'll call you, uh? What's he got, some hermaphrodites? Forget it." He walked out. The hematologist and the theologian sat there not knowing what to do, the theologian lighting another cigarette. Bill Hill said, well, they could go over to the Perfect Blend and have a two-for-one happy hour drink. Antoinette Baker said fine with her. August Murray, tense, said he was going to "get some straight answers out of Howard Hart if he had to break the man's arm, or worse."

Bill Hill and Antoinette were on their second round of dry Manhattans, four for the price of two, when August walked in, sat down with them in the empty side of the booth, and ordered a ginger ale.

Bill Hill said, "No luck?"

"They tried to keep me out," August said. "I went in his office, looked around the studio; he wasn't there."

"I meant to ask you," Bill Hill said, "what you did to your head."

"I bumped it."

"That's a mean-looking bruise."

"Poor Richie," Antoinette Baker said. "Everybody's calling him fuzz-head now, the other kids. I told him"--pouting as she said it--"don't you pay any attention to the little shitbirds."

She was a stylish woman and she smelled nice, had on turquoise Navajo earrings and a low V to her white dress, giving Bill Hill a glimpse of healthy breasts with little blue veins. She wore her nails long, polished a deep red, and a big turquoise ring, the hand holding a cigarette and tapping off the ash every few seconds. She had told them Richie was back "on the ward" again, but just for observation. That's why she hadn't brought him. He was healed, she knew it; and he'd be fine on the TV program if they ever went on the air. She said she had told Richie to just act natural and say yes, sir, and no, sir, which he would because he was a little gentleman. But it sure pissed him off when the kids called him fuzz-head.

Antoinette talked a lot, but was not hard to steer, Bill Hill found. He had been suggesting he could contact the National Enquirer for her. Maybe she'd like to sell them a copyrighted interview as the working mother of a boy miraculously healed. But he didn't want to talk about it in front of August, who sat hunched over the table holding onto his glass of ginger ale--in case anyone were to come up and try to grab it away from him. Dumb shit. He was going to get round-shouldered. Down there stewing, smoldering, instead of holding his head up, alert to opportunity; yes, and all kinds of young happy hour secretaries coming into the place now, eyeing the young hotshots in their three-piece business suits.

He said to August, "There's a lot of talent around, if you're interested."

August looked past his shoulder at the secretaries; he didn't say anything.

Antoinette said, "I was really surprised to read about Juvenal and his girl friend. That kinda surprised the hell out of me. I mean a holy person--you don't, you know, think of them making out or even being interested in girls. He was very nice and Richie liked him a lot--"

"I guess he would," Bill Hill said.

"--but he didn't strike me as being that way, you know, even though you read about priests all the time now running off with nuns"--flicking ashes-- "which is fine, I mean I'm not gonna judge or condemn anybody as long as they're not hurting other people."

Bill Hill let her talk, because he wasn't sure if he wanted to discuss Lynn and Juvenal. If he decided he didn't, he'd switch Antoinette onto something else, like herself, which was a foolproof way to switch a person.

What did Bill Hill think of the new Lynn and Juvenal, as reported by Kathy Worthington? Well, at first he hit a ceiling inside his head and wanted to storm over to Somerset and shake Lynn and tell her, "Look, for God sake, at what you're doing to a holy instrument of the Lord." Or, "Well, what's it like knowing you've fucked up a young man's entire life?" On the other hand, after calming down and looking at it again, he could say to her, grinning, "You son of a gun. You . . . son . . . of . . . a . . . gun." Bill Hill could go either way. And the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he should ride with it. Ride with it? Hell, drive it home. Face the realities of life with neither fear nor loathing and you'll come out ahead. Nothing was ever as bad as it seemed. You could go to a man like Howard Hart, after he came out of hiding in the toilet from August, and say, "Well, how do you like the setup now? You get not only a miracle-working faith healer, but one that's in love and living with a popular young Detroit record promoter. Now then, how'd you also like to have on your show--"

"What's her name?" Antoinette said. "Lynn something?"

"--Lynn Marie Faulkner," Bill Hill said. "Sweet little girl used to work for me. We've been close friends eleven and a half years."

"I think it's real cute," Antoinette said. "A man like that should, you know, get out more and find out what life's all about. I'm a Catholic, went to Catholic schools and all--"

"You mean you were a Catholic," August said. "Maybe when you were little."

"I still am. I was baptized one."

"You go to mass on Sunday?"

"Sometimes."

"You make your Easter duty?"

"God, I haven't heard that in years."

"You dance naked in a beer garden and you say you're a Catholic?"

"Beer garden?" Antoinette said.

"That's one I haven't heard in years," Bill Hill said. "I believe they're all lounges now."

August said, "You say you're a friend of hers, but you didn't speak to her?" When Bill Hill looked at him he said, "I'm talking about Lynn, or whatever her name is." Like August didn't want to say the name aloud or even think it. "Where is she?"

Bill Hill said, "What do you mean, where is she?"

"She isn't home. She must've gone somewhere with Juvenal."

"I think that's nice," Antoinette said. "Get off by themselves. I was going to say, being a Catholic--"

"You're not a Catholic," August said. He couldn't let it go.

"Being a Catholic," Antoinette said, "I've always thought that priests, that people would listen to priests more if they had a little experience instead of talking about sex and marriage and things and not knowing a goddamn thing about it--"

August said, "You don't have to jump in mud to know it gets you dirty."

"I knew you were gonna say that," Antoinette said. "That's exactly the kind of reasoning they use on you; fucking priests, you know why they join up? Because they're afraid of women."

"And you're gonna tell me you're a Catholic?"

Bill Hill let them argue, thinking about Lynn and Juvenal. If they had gone off together, this was the first he'd heard of it. It was a job managing people, trying to keep them from messing up or wasting their talent; hoping Lynn wasn't right now nibbling on Juvie's ear and telling him he shouldn't be on TV. He wished there were more Antoinettes and fewer Augusts getting in the way, August sitting there with a fiery cross up his ass. What did anybody need August for?

The man was easy to dislike. You wanted to pick at him, gang up on him. Probably he'd had the same effect on other kids when he was little, being a born asshole, so that ducking rocks and getting depantsed and his face washed with dirty snow had turned him into the beauty he was today, with his tight ass and all his pencils.

Bill Hill said, "August, excuse me. What do you do for fun?"

"I work," August said. "What do you think I do?"

"I just wondered," Bill Hill said. "I'd like to watch you demonstrate sometime. You got any good demonstrations coming up?"

"When we demonstrate," August said, "you'll hear about it."

He was hard to antagonize because he was so dumb and didn't have a sense of humor. Bill Hill said to him, "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"What?" Sullen and guarded.