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I’m dead already, he thought. Her father came to me, but the book says he may do that for a daughter. And for me, the dead person, this is the only way left to have a vital connection with other people’s lives, even if they are strangers.
“And you’ll come away with me,” said the man’s voice.
“No,” said Amelia, “he won’t. He brings me rum and candy.”
The living girl who had been Amelia would have been at least somewhat concerned about the kidnapped girl. We each owe God our mind, Torrez thought, and he that gives it up today is paid off for tomorrow.
“Yes,” said Torrez. He lifted the coffee cup; his hand was shaky, but he carefully poured the rum over the cloth head of the doll; the rum soaked into its fabric and puddled on the counter.
“How much is the ransom?” he asked.
“Only a reasonable amount,” the voice assured him blandly.
Torrez was relieved; he was sure a reasonable amount was all that was left, and the kidnapper was likely to take it all anyway. He flicked his lighter over the doll, and then the doll was in a teardrop-shaped blue glare on the counter. Torrez stepped back, ready to wipe a wet towel over the cabinets if they should start to smolder. The doll turned black and began to come apart.
Amelia’s voice didn’t speak from the answering machine, though he thought he might have heard a long sigh—of release, he hoped.
“I want something,” Torrez said. “A condition.”
“What?”
“Do you have a Bible? Not a repaired one, a whole one?”
“I can get one.”
“Yes, get one. And bring it for me.”
“Okay. So we have a deal?”
The rum had burned out and the doll was a black pile, still glowing red here and there. He filled the cup with water from the tap and poured it over the ashes, and then there was no more red glow.
Torrez sighed, seeming to empty his lungs. “Yes. Where do we meet?”
Father Dear
Al Sarrantonio
He never beat me, but told me stories about what would happen to me if I did certain things.
“The crusts of bread,” he told me, cutting the crusts off his own bread instructively and throwing them into the waste bin, “gather inside you. If you eat bread with the crusts still on, you will digest the bread but your body will not digest the crusts. They will build up inside you until…” Here he made an exploding gesture with his hands, close by my face. He smiled. I smiled. I was four years old, and cut the crusts off of my bread.
“The yellow pulpy material left after an orange is peeled,” he told me another day, a bright sunny one as I remember, with thick slats of sunshine falling on the white kitchen table between us; I recall the sound of a cockatoo which flitted by outside, and the vague visual hint of green and the smell of spring that came in through the bottom of the window, which he had opened a crack (I believe now that he opened it that crack for effect, to accentuate the brightness of spring outside with the stuffy dreariness of our indoor habitation—he told me other things about dust and about the indoors), “will make your teeth yellow if you ingest it. With the eating of oranges, which, by the way, you must eat, Alfred, for your condition, any specks of this pulp will be caught in a receptacle just to the back of your throat, just out of sight, and will creep up like an army of ants at night to stain your teeth. In time, your teeth will become the deep shade of a ripe banana; perhaps, someday, that of a bright lemon just picked.” How I remember the hours I spent whisking those orange fruits clean of pulp, examining my fingernails afterward to make sure no bits had adhered to them; O, how many other hours did I lay awake at night in my bedroom, hating him and at the same time believing him (no, that’s not right; the hate came later, much later; there was only love then, and if not that at least a respect for his knowledge, for the things he was so gently trying to save me from—no, it was Love after all) and waiting, with a dry ticking at the back of my tongue where the saliva had dried as I lay fearfully waiting for those tiny insect bits of pulp to march up my mouth, dousing my gums and teeth with yellow spray from their bucket-like tails; O! How many hours did I spend in front of a mirror, trying to see, my mouth as wide as my jaw would allow it, that “receptacle” where those lemon-ants waited!
I hate him now; came to hate him slowly, inexorably, and, in time, I have come to love that hate, to relish and enjoy it since it is the only thing I have in this world that I am not afraid of.
He taught me nothing of value. He taught me to hate books, to hate what was in them and the men who wrote them; taught me to, above all, hate the world, everyone in it; everything it stood for. “It is a corrupt place, Alfred,” he lectured endlessly, “filled with useless people possessed of artificial sensibilities, people who respect and cherish nothing. They live like animals, all of them, huddled into cities chockablock one on top of the other; they are of different colors, and speak different languages until all their words mix in one jumbled whirr and none of them understand what any of the others are saying. I know, I come from that world, Alfred. They don’t know what life is. They don’t know what’s safe. But you know what’s safe, don’t you?”
I remember grinning eagerly up at him at times like this, like a puppy; he always bent down over me, his hands behind his straight tall back, and I remember at times reaching up to him with my tiny hands, begging him, “Pick me up, pick me up, swing me, please!”
“Swinging you will make your stomach move in your body,” he answered, smiling wanly, “and once moved, at
your delicate age, it will stay in that new spot, perhaps where your lungs or pancreas should be, and will make you sick for the rest of your life. It may even turn you into a hunchback, or make you slur your words if it moves, on the high arc of your swing, into your vocal cavity. You do understand, don’t you?”
My arms lowered slowly, tentatively, to my sides.
I was not allowed to play on the swings on the grounds, either, but would stare at them for hours through my bedroom window.
The grounds, naturally, were beautiful, wooded and sprawling. No one, I heard it whispered among the servants, had grounds like this anymore; no one, I once heard a Chinese servant say, deserved to have such grounds. The world, he whispered to mute Mandy, my sometimes guardian (when He was away), was still far too crowded for this type of thing to crop up again; there were too many other problems to be solved without one man shutting himself up in such a way. I am sure that Mandy went straight to my father after this bit of sacrilege had been imparted, and the man, if I remember correctly, was gone the following day. Another servant, of course, was in place instantly.
