A God in Ruins Page 4

  It would be a double slam against Siobhan, for Consuelo had had another perfect baby boy. Carlos was the beauty of the Martinez family.

  God! What of poor, dear Siobhan! How crude I’ve been not realizing that she has suffered even greater than I. He talked it over with a priest in Denver before returning to Troublesome Mesa.

  “Forget about God for the moment,” the priest said. “What did they do during your worst moments in the Corps?”

  “I always told my lads, when you’re scared shitless, you’re in such pain that death would be a pleasure, or no matter the catastrophe, the only thing you can do is “Be a Marine.””

  “Then be a Marine for that woman of yours.”

  Dan found Siobhan at the Martinez house. She was in the rocking chair, yakking with Consuelo, who was putting up a dinner for the O’Connells as well as her own family.

  He looked in, but they did not see him. “Be a Marine,” he told himself.

  Siobhan sat in the chair Consuelo used for nursing. She had handed little Carlos to Siobhan to hold while she filled the oven. Siobhan put the child’s head on her breast with a longing not to be realized. Then she saw Dan.

  Dan’s hand was never so firm, so filled with meaning, as it grasped her shoulder. “It will be all right, darling,” he said.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.” 2008

  Yes, it’s your president, Thornton Tomtree. A year ago I was considered unbeatable for a second term, but as George Bush and James Earl Carter learned, there is a fickle bent to our voters.

  At this moment we stand a week before the 2008 election. A bizarre series of events has damaged my candidacy. Lord, is there a man more dismissed than a one-term president?

  Anyone can pinpoint the time and place when the tide turned against me.

  It was the Six Shooter Canyon Massacre.

  Immediately following the disaster, my rating bottomed out, then climbed back up as I traveled the country ceaselessly and was able to placate some of the national trauma. I was successful in divorcing myself from direct responsibility for the massacre, in the eyes of most of the people.

  During those hard days, my vice president, former Texas senator Matt Hope, held in line that massive group of voters of the Christian conservatives. Taking on Hope as VP. meant I did not have to personally deal with those pompous preacher men guarding the kingdom. Vice President Hope quickly convinced the Christian constituency they had no place else to go. Certainly, Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell, a Catholic liberal, represented an unthinkable alternative.

  It is election day minus seven. Perhaps I’m grasping, but I sense that the sudden dry-up of news out of O’Connell’s headquarters means something. Although we are separated by two thousand miles, I sense a tension and quandary.

  I had given O’Connell a hell of a run. Whatever hope I had was squashed at our “great debate” at the New York City Public Library. During an intermission at the end of the first hour, I was informed of treachery that would send me packing out of office.

  Well, Thornton Tomtree, how did you get here? How did I get enmeshed in a tragedy that was not of my making? Why have I had to live to the great betrayal?

  Even back in the 1950s, I never wanted to be much more than a junkyard dog, like my daddy, Henry Tomtree, who knew every scrap of metal, every bale of newspaper, and every dead battery and doorknob in his yard, and who could carry on business without calculator or ledger because he kept everything in his head. Henry Tomtree was the greatest junkyard dog the Northeast states ever had.

  How old are your first memories? Vaguely, around kindergarten or first grade. I loved the yard so, I didn’t have many friends on the outside. Suddenly, I was in big classrooms with them, boys and girls. One day I was standing before our long hall mirror in our hallway. I remember finding it hard to look at myself. I was different from the other kids. Even looking in the mirror I wanted to defend myself from outside inspections of me.

  In my early grades I had a terrible time in school. Studies were fine and simple. It was lunch period, the cafeteria, and the playground where I was not spared perpetual taunting.

  And as they taunted, I ran to my safe place in a corner of the junkyard. It was here that I began to build my empire. I studied my daddy’s ways. I fiddled endlessly with physics problems. I became able to play both sides of a chess game in my mind.

  If you can’t crack a problem through logic, you make an end run. I developed an auxiliary to standard mathematics, my own methods. I slipped in and out of quantum math.

  All this I had in me, but I could barely hold up my hand in class or engage in conversation or, God forbid, approach a girl. I was interesting, but nobody knew the things I was interested in.

  I was storing so much data and so many formulae that I had to have a place to hold it all. So I created a fantasy place. It was called Bulldog City, although it was really a nation, in an isolated place with mountains encircling it and mountaintop guard posts and missile emplacements. I invented a super laser to knock out incoming missiles and spy planes. I could even hit a satellite when it spied on Bulldog City. Boy, nothing could get in and out, and I commanded the armed forces and quarter backed the football team and sang concerts and all the stuff I couldn’t do.

  My daddy’s partner was a Negro named Moses Jefferson. Moses was a spiritual gentleman who did odd jobs until he proved his true worth. Moses entered a secret bid to demolish the old Williams Hotel. His bid was lower than Henry Tomtree’s.

  Moses didn’t have the money for a crew and equipment, but subcontracted everything and put them on a profit-sharing plan. He ended up with an enormous cache of sinks, pipes, toilets, bricks, fine old turn-of-the-century urinals, chandeliers, railings, and everything a petit grand hotel could yield.

  Henry Tomtree had been skinned, but he got the message. Moses Jefferson possessed the keen mind of a junk dealer. As messy as the yard might appear, a good dealer had it organized in his head, down to a button. Hell, better to have Moses in as a partner than as a competitor.

  Sorry, that’s my phone. “Yes?”

  “We’ve hit up everybody, Mr. President, but we can’t find out what the hell’s going on with O’Connell.”

  Tomtree mumbled “Shit” under his breath. “It’s two A.M. here, what’s that mean in, what the hell you call it, Mountain Time?”

  “I think I’d want to keep some people here to cover the monitors and phones and the rest of us pack it in,” Darnell said. “The instant O’Connell calls for a news conference, we assemble top staff, watch the conference together, and immediately whack out a counterattack.”

  “No inkling of what the Democrats are up to?”

  “None.”

  “Right,” the President said, disappointed. “Darnell, bunk in tonight here at the White House. I, uh, need you to be close by.”

  PAW TUCKET RHODE ISLAND

  LATE 1950s TO LATE 1960s

  Henry Tomtree’s junkyard occupied a full block in a semi derelict industrial zone. Long past its heyday. Stacks of crushed autos and chopped-up tires mingled with the new pop harvests of soft drink and beer bottles, broken glass bins, plastic, and the junk dealer’s mainstay—baled-up old newspapers and magazines.

  “A cacophony of smells,” Henry would note, breathing in the fumes from the fuel trucks, smoke from a nearby landfill, and oil from the grease pits. Every night the garbage truck fleet parked in a nearby lot, the sky maddened with the mean wings and frenzied yowls of seagulls.

  When Henry discovered Mo’s true worth, the two entered a life-long relationship which was to be carried on by their sons, Thornton Tomtree and Darnell Jefferson.

  Moses and his family lived in Pawtucket, a very decent lower-middle-class city. It had a little less of everything, except for the Pawtucket Red Sox.

  Henry Tomtree lived a few blocks from Mo in Providence, which was considered to be middle-middle. Providence was a good-sized little city, lovely to look at as it rippled up and down the hills to the sea.

  Houses seem
ed newly painted, and the town was filled with educational facilities and boasted a strong cultural life, so as to be a kitchen community for both New York and Boston.

  Twenty miles down the bay preened Newport, which ranged from tourist all the way to upper-upper. Setting aside the beach town aspects, and other summer garnishments, Newport was a world-class port of yacht racing. Here, the main thoroughfare was named America’s Cup Way after the trophy won by Yankee sailors for over a century.

  Moses Jefferson’s American ancestry went back further than Henry’s and even further than many of the mansion owners of Newport.

  Mo’s family originally came from a Portuguese colony in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. They were never completely slaves but made their livelihood servicing the hundreds of ships plying the Atlantic routes. Mo’s wife, Ruby, continued to clean houses for a few years after he began to work for Tomtree. Oftentimes, she had to leave little Darnell with his daddy at the yard.

  Thornton Tomtree was a shy lad. Hanging out at the yard was his main form of recreation. As Darnell grew to waddle around on his own, Henry was in an endless checkers war with Mo. No one knows the exact number of boards they went through until Ruby gave her husband a wooden one for his birthday.

  Throughout grammar school Thornton’s attraction to the yard increased. He’d pillage everything before it went to the crusher or was shipped out: instrument panels, washing machine motors, boat props, lawn mowers, and more used fan belts than GM would need in a year.

  In the inner-inner area of the yard stood a warehouse where the good stuff was stored: stained-glass windows from derelict mansions, statuary, copper hardware, scrolled woods, once gleaming banister rails.

  Inch by inch Thornton and his little helper, Darnell,

  pushed things around in this warehouse, so he was able to establish a work bench.

  When Thornton was eleven and Darnell merely nine, Moses and Henry put up a basketball hoop. In the beginning the two daddies had a notion they were more skilled than their sons. The notion was quickly dispelled by Darnell, and there was a swift return to their checkers.

  An unmentionable thing drew Darnell to the yard: stacks of old Playboy magazines. Darnell got a whooping when Ruby found one under her son’s mattress, but that didn’t deter him. He thought there was something strange about the magazine-strange as well as invigorating. All the women in the photographs were white women, and none of them had pubic hair. Darnell long believed that this was normal. Years later at a midnight skinny-dipping party, he realized that all women, black and white, had pubic hair. That was about the time the magazine took a courageous position and flat-out showed it.

  Darnell Jefferson was a born point guard and remained one: quick, graceful, deceptive, and cool, momma, cool. He had a face full of sunshine and was blessed with a silk tongue.

  Thornton Tomtree grew gangly like his father, with a permanent aura of nerdiness about him, although he was wiry and very strong from slinging bales of newsprint and handling scrap metal. It seemed early that shaping Thornton’s personality—or lack of it—would become a lifetime mission for Darnell.

  They went their separate ways to school and were pushed into different social circles, but always they rushed to return to the yard where their joint kingdom lay.

  Then came the training of Thornton Tomtree, unlikely basketball player. Darnell ran hours of films, depicting how the great centers of the game operated as a hub.

  Darnell snapped the ball to him a hundred times a day until his reflexes and coordination were brought to their limits.

  “Catch the ball! Pass to the open man!”

  “How about me getting some shooting time?”

  “You ain’t no shooter, Thornton. Them that can, does. You are a trench warrior. You’re a white maypole with guys hanging all over you. But you are junkyard strong. Plant your ass under the basket and disembowel anyone who tries to get your rebound.”

  Thornton Tomtree was awkward, not dumb. Once he understood the niche Darnell was creating for him, he studied the complexity and possibilities of the game and his particular value.

  Darnell invited kids into the yard for pickup games which were nonstop verbal assaults on his student, to move his feet, leap, dunk.

  By the end of the summer Darnell had created a player out of bits and pieces. His strength was under the basket, elbow and knee land. Only one problem. The two were going to different high schools.

  Thornton changed his address from his home to the junkyard, which allowed him to transfer to Pawtucket High.

  There were only two white boys trying out for the team, and they became the target of bad intent. At six foot three, Thorn ton was a nice-sized center for a small school. He closed his ears to the jiving. His physical strength tested and proved, Thornton became a legitimate second-string player. Darnell Jefferson’s “Frankenstein.”

  Competence on the basketball court was a hard-earned grace. Less difficult was Thornton’s quick mastery of all the school’s curriculum in math and science.

  Darnell drilled him in social skills, particularly girls. In time he joined Darnell in reading old Playboys in the yard.

  “How come white women don’t have pussies?” Darnell wondered.

  “I never saw a pussy,” Thornton said. “Do your women?”

  “Oh, hell yes, but they’ve never had a picture of a black lady in Playboy.”

  These sessions ended more quickly than Darnell wished.

  Thornton would always end with a sigh and a shake of his head and make for his workbench.

  Without saying it aloud, or even knowing it, Darnell was becoming an intricate part of Thornton’s ability to function in the outside world. Darnell preferred shooting baskets, Playboy, fishing and pussy-speak, but Thornton’s enormous devotion to the workbench lured Darnell in. An electronic ding-dong of some sort was explained as a Rube Goldberg-type invention. As he learned enough just through proximity and contact, his large vocabulary became punctuated with scientific terms.

  A new day of science wizardry was arriving, and Thornton Tomtree was at home with it. Thornton’s ding-dong invention was a kind of computer which he called the Bulldog. He never shared the secret of Bulldog City with Darnell, or anyone.

  Thornton tweaked the curiosity of the technical colleges that loomed large in the region. He established contact with MIT and played complex physics games. Whatever the Bulldog could do, it seemed to mop up the opposition of renowned institutions.

  When Thornton Tomtree graduated Pawtucket High, they named a science medal after him. But it was a bad day for the odd couple. Thornton would leave for college, and Darnell had two more years to go at Pawtucket High.

  For a time it was feared he would be drafted for Vietnam, but he was given an exemption as an only son.

  On a late summer’s night in Newport, a thousand and one tourists strolled up the street looking at curios, and another thousand and one across the road strolled down the street looking at curios. Macho sailors, who manned the yachts of the rich, partied. Petitioners looked over Brown University, which had an open night for applicants. In the drawing rooms of the great mansions, string quartets played for charity at a thousand dollars a pop.

  Thornton parked the junkyard pickup truck in Darnell’s driveway and waited on the porch swing for him to come home from a date.

  “Darnell.”

  “Yo, Thornton?”

  “Yeah, how’d you make out?”

  “Not too bad, I guess but those Jamaican girls have an agenda that has something to do with American passports. So, what’s going on?”

  “You haven’t been in the shop most of the summer,” Thorn ton said.

  “All right,” Darnell said, seating himself opposite on a rocker. “I mean, you’re going your own way. I hear my daddy talk about all the schools after you. MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Tech. How many scholarships have you been offered? They’ve got you mistaken for a quarterback.”

  “Well, what’s that got to do with o
ur friendship?”

  “Everything,” Darnell said. “Man, you’re in solo land. A couple of years of college and we’ll need a translator to be able to speak to each other. Hey, man, you’re going to take off like a rocket. You and I just ran out of time and space. I mean, we can always be friends. Good friends, but you’re going north and south and I’m heading east and west.”

  “I’ve made a decision,” Thornton said. “I’m not taking a scholarship. I’m not going to college. Why should I spend four years learning something I already know? My time would be better spent continuing to develop the Bulldog.”

  “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “I’m not going to college.”

  “Your daddy know?”

  “My daddy’s smart,” Thornton said. “He looked me over like he was bidding on ten tons of metal and asked me if I knew what I was doing. He trusts my judgment.”

  “Because Henry didn’t need a college education to run a junkyard,” Darnell shot back.

  He needed more. He was born with stuff you don’t learn in school. Don’t you get it, Darnell? You’ll be at Pawtucket for two more years and I’ll be at the yard.”

  “I’m not married to you, man.”

  “No, but you’re the only person in the world I want helping me. The Bulldog is going to do some awesome things, once I figure it all out.”

  Darnell stopped the rocking chair.

  “I thought you would be really happy about this,” Thornton muttered.

  “It seems to be about you and what you want,” Darnell answered. “What about me? So, let’s go a couple years down the road. I’ll be heading for college. Columbia Law School. They have encouraged me to come to them first for a basketball scholarship. Like man, we’re talking New York City.”

  “I hate stupidity,” Thornton said in disgust. “I mean, I truly hate stupidity. Look at me. Four left feet. I can still catch the ball and pass the open man. How come you can’t smell shit in a cow barn?”