True Believers

PROLOGUE

THE OUTWARD AND VISIBLE SIGN …





1

It was still full dark when Marty Kelly left home, so dark that there were halos around all the streetlights, as if the lights had metamorphosed into miniature blue moons. For a while, it seemed odd to him that he should be standing out here in the night like this. He’d done enough of this kind of thing in his life, in spite of the fact that he was only twenty-six, but all the other times he’d been anything but stone-cold sober.

“Alcoholics,” Bernadette had told him, the first time he’d brought her to this place. “Alcoholics and druggies. This place is full of them.”

At the moment, this place was full of nothing. Marty could see with perfect clarity down the long alley between the trailers, and there wasn’t so much as a light on in one of the living-room windows. Even Marty’s own mother seemed to be asleep. Marty shifted from one leg to the other, put his hands in his pockets, tried to think. If Bernadette found out that Geena’s trailer was dark, she’d want him to go down and check. It was Friday night. Geena worked on Friday nights, if she was able—and for some reason she still got work, almost as much of it as she’d gotten when Marty was small and her face had looked less like a piece of onionskin that had been crumpled into a ball and thrown into a wastepaper basket. In those days, the men had come in the afternoons as well as at night, and when they did Geena would shove Marty into the back bedroom and fix the door so he couldn’t get out. If the man was fast, it didn’t matter. If he wasn’t, Marty would find himself sitting on the bedroom floor for hours, hungry, bored, ready to explode. When he had to relieve himself, he would get an empty beer bottle out from under the bed and go in that, praying like crazy that he didn’t have to relieve himself in the other way. When the fights started, he would wedge himself into the small closet and shut the door, hoping like hell that nobody would find out he was there. Every once in a while, the fights got bad enough to make somebody notice. Something would crash through the living-room window. Something would spill out into the alley where other people could see. Then the police would come, and he would have to hide even more carefully. He would have to practically stop breathing. If the police found him, they would call the childprotection people, and that was the very worst thing of all.

“She might be sick,” Bernadette would say, if she were standing out here next to him. “One of those men who visit her might have done something to her. You can’t just leave her alone. You have to go see.”

Marty turned back to look at the truck. Bernadette was sitting upright in the passenger seat, her seat belt already on, her eyes closed. Her sense of duty was one of the things he loved most about her, mostly because he’d never met anybody else who had it. Bernadette believed that wives cleaned house and got dinner for their husbands. Their trailer was always spotless, and if she had to work late and couldn’t be there when he got back from the station, she left a covered dish in the refrigerator with instructions for him to heat it in the microwave. Bernadette believed that good people went to church on Sunday and that they did more for their church than sit at Mass looking holy. She volunteered for two different missions, and helped out at the Episcopalian church across the street when they had need of it. She hadn’t even seemed to mind that most of the people at the church across the street were gay. Bernadette was holy, but she wasn’t one of those people who had her nose stuck in the air.

Marty had learned to nurse a single beer all Saturday night so that he’d be in shape when the alarm went off at six on Sunday morning. Sometimes, he stopped cold in the middle of installing a carburetor or changing the oil on some car that hadn’t had it changed in the last six years and felt a kind of shock. He was still living where he had always lived, but he might as well have been living on a different planet. He didn’t know anybody else whose trailer looked like his or who had a savings account, either. It was incredible what happened when you kept your drinking to a six-pack a week and didn’t do drugs at all. In the beginning, he had only gone along because he was in love, and because he couldn’t believe that Bernadette loved him back. In the end, he had had to admit that she was right about everything.

“Used to have a savings account,” he said now. He was looking at his mother’s dark living-room window again. It was the first of February and very cold. In any other year, there would have been snow. He turned back to look at Bernadette. She hadn’t moved.

“Listen,” Bernadette had told him, when they were first going out. “It’s not luck. It’s not that you have to get lucky. It’s that you have to have a plan. If you have a plan, you can do anything. Don’t you see?”