The clerical collar and suit did their job impeccably, Ricky noted. No one asked him for identification, no one seemed to think he was out of place in the slightest. As he entered the unit, he spotted a nursing station, and he approached the desk. The nurse on duty, a large, black woman, looked up and said, “Ah, father, they called me and told me you were coming down. Room 300 for Mr. Tyson. First bed by the door…”
“Thank you,” Ricky said. “I wonder if you could tell me what he’s suffering from…”
The nurse dutifully handed Ricky a medical chart. Lung cancer. Not much time and most of it painful. He felt little sympathy.
Under the guise of being helpful, Ricky thought, hospitals do much to degrade. That was certainly the case for Calvin Tyson, who was hooked up to a number of machines, and rested uncomfortably on the bed, propped up, staring at an old television set hung between his bed and his neighbor’s. The set was tuned to a soap opera, but the sound was off. The picture was fuzzy, as well.
Tyson was emaciated, almost skeletal. He wore an oxygen mask that hung from his neck, occasionally lifting it to help him breathe. His nose was tinged with the unmistakable blue of emphysema, and his scrawny, naked legs stretched out on the bed like sticks and branches knocked from a tree by a storm, littering the roadway. The man in the bed next to him was much the same, and the two men wheezed in a duet of agony. Tyson turned as Ricky entered, just shifting his head.
“I don’t want to talk to no priest,” he choked out.
Ricky smiled. Not pleasantly. “But this priest wants to speak to you.”
“I want to be left alone,” Tyson said.
Ricky surveyed the man lying on the bed. “From the looks of things,” he said briskly, “you’re going to be all alone for eternity in not too long.”
Tyson struggled to shake his head. “Don’t need no religion, not anymore.”
“And I’m not going to try any,” Ricky replied. “At least not like what you think.”
Ricky paused, making certain that the door was shut behind him. He saw that there was a set of earphones dangling over the bed corner, for listening to the television. He walked around the end of the bed, and stared at Tyson’s roommate. The man seemed just as badly off, but looked at Ricky with a detached expectancy. Ricky pointed at the headphones by his bed. “You want to put those on, so I can speak with your neighbor privately?” he asked, but in reality demanded. The man shrugged, and slipped them onto his ears with some difficulty.
“Good,” Ricky said, turning back to Tyson. “You know who sent me?” he asked.
“Got no idea,” Tyson croaked. “Ain’t nobody left that cares about me.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Ricky answered back. “Dead wrong.”
Ricky moved in close, bending over the dying man, and whispered coldly, “So, old man, tell me the truth: How many times did you fuck your daughter before she ran away for good?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The old man’s eyes widened in surprise and he shifted about in his bed. He put up a bony hand, waving it in the small space between Ricky and his sunken chest, as if he could thrust the question away, but was far too weak to do so. He coughed and choked and swallowed hard, before responding, “What sort of priest are you?”
“A priest of memory,” Ricky answered.
“What you mean by that?” The man’s words were rushed and panicked. His eyes darted about the room, as if searching for someone to help him.
Ricky paused, before he answered. He looked down at Calvin Tyson, squirming in his bed, suddenly terrified, and tried to guess whether Tyson was scared of Ricky, or of the history that Ricky seemed to know about. He suspected that the man had spent years alone with the knowledge of what he’d done, and even if it had been suspected by school authorities, neighbors, and his wife, still he’d probably deluded himself into imagining it was a secret only he and his dead daughter shared.
Ricky, with his provocative question, must have seemed to him to be some sort of deathly apparition. He saw the man’s hand start to reach for a button on a wire hanging over the headboard, and he knew that was the nurse call button. He bent over Tyson and pushed the device out of his grasp. “We’re not going to need that,” he said. “This is going to be a private conversation.” The old man’s hand dropped to the bed and he grasped at the oxygen mask, sucking in deep draughts of enriched air, his eyes still wide in fear. The mask was old-fashioned, green, and covered the nose and mouth with an opaque plastic. In a more modern facility, Tyson would have been given a smaller unit that clipped beneath his nostrils. But the VA hospital was the sort of place where old equipment was sent to be used up before being discarded, more or less like many of the men occupying the beds. Ricky pulled the oxygen mask away from Tyson’s face.
“Who you be?” the man demanded, fearful. He had a voice filled with the locutions of the South. Ricky thought there was something childlike in the terror that filled his eyes.
“I’m a man with some questions,” Ricky said. “I’m a man searching for some answers. Now, this can go hard or easy, depending on you, old man.”
To his surprise, he found threatening a decrepit, aged man who had molested his only daughter and then turned his back upon her orphaned children, came easy.
“You ain’t no preacher,” the man said. “You don’t work with God.”
“You’re mistaken there,” Ricky said. “And considering as how you’re going to be facing Him any day now, maybe you’d best err on the side of belief.”
This argument seemed to make some sense to the old man, who shifted about, then nodded.
“Your daughter,” Ricky started, only to be cut off.
“My daughter’s dead. She was no good. Never was.”
“You think you maybe had something to do with that?”
Calvin Tyson shook his head. “You don’t know nothing. Nobody know nothing. Whatever happened be history. Ancient history.”
Ricky paused, staring into the man’s eyes. He saw them hardening, like concrete setting up quick in the harsh sun. He calculated quickly, a measurement of psychology. Tyson was a remorseless pedophile, Ricky thought. Unrepentant and incapable of understanding the evil that he’d loosed in his child. And he was lying in his death bed and probably more scared of what awaited him, than what had gone past. He thought he would try that chord, see where it took him.
“I can give you forgiveness…,” Ricky said.
The old man snorted and sneered. “Ain’t no preacher that powerful. I’m just gonna take my chances.”
Ricky paused, then said, “Your daughter Claire had three children…”
“She was a whore, ran away with that wildcatter boy, then run on up to New York City. That’s what killed her. Not me.”
“When she died,” Ricky continued, “you were contacted. You were her closest living relative. Someone in New York City called you up and wanted to know if you would take the children…”
“What did I want with those bastards? She never married. I didn’t want them.”
Ricky stared at Calvin Tyson and thought this must have been a difficult decision for him. On the one hand, he didn’t want the financial burden of raising his daughter’s three orphans. But, on the other, it would have provided him with several new sources for his perverted sexual urges. Ricky thought that would have been a compelling, almost overwhelming seduction. A pedophile in the grips of desire is a potent unstoppable force. What made him turn down a new and ready source of pleasure? Ricky continued to eye the old man, and then, in an instant, he knew. Calvin Tyson had other outlets. The neighbors’ children? Down the street? Around the corner? In a playground? Ricky didn’t know, but he did understand that the answer was close by.
“So you signed some papers, giving them up for adoption, right?”
“Yes. Why you want to know this?”
