“Bingo,” Neuman said. “I’ve got a buddy over at Methodist. He can get me Donica’s Social Security number. With that, it’ll be easy. Give me twenty minutes.”
I bought lunch at a drive-through White Castle on South Street, thinking as I paid of all the free food I was missing at the office pitch-ins. Before I’d finished my last burger, my mobile rang.
“Got him,” Neuman said. “He’s receiving disability payments from Social Security. But I hope he’s not trying to live on what they’re sending him.”
I asked where in Nevada the checks were being delivered, though I was secretly hoping that his address was nearer to home.
“He’s back in Indiana. In Greenfield, of all places. Maybe he’s a James Whitcomb Riley fan.”
That Hoosier poet’s hometown was a thirty-minute drive east of Indianapolis. A short drive, in other words, but long enough for me to sketch out the rest of my Christmas story. I was seeing Donica as the mystery donor of the Saturn. How he’d managed it on his disability checks, I had no idea. Maybe he’d had some money left from an insurance settlement. I also didn’t know why he was pretending to be dead. The reasons I considered included Donica’s ongoing remorse over having deserted his wife and child and the possibility that he had been horribly disfigured in the accident. I was pulling for the remorse angle because the fairy-tale ending I saw for the story was a holiday reconciliation of Tony and Marguerite, brought about by the divine intercession of the Star Republic.
The address Neuman had given me belonged to an old building not far from Greenfield’s courthouse square. The structure resembled a two-story army barracks, though it had been covered in some kind of composite material intended by its manufacturer to look like shake shingles. Extremely large and extremely flat shake shingles. The building had a fire escape on each end and other indications that it was an apartment building, but no sign giving its name. The names of the tenants appeared on a row of rural mailboxes wired to a wooden fence. Tony Donica occupied apartment 1B.
Donica was in, but not receiving visitors. When I knocked on his door, it opened only as wide as its security chain would permit, which, luckily for me, wasn’t as wide as the muzzle of the Rott-weiler that tried to bull its way out. Behind the door, in the shadows, I could just see Donica, his face a little lower than my chest, the height of a man in a wheelchair.
“What the hell do you want?” he demanded, the words so slurred I knew he was as drunk as the revelers back at the Star Republic.
I identified myself and told him I wanted to talk about his daughter. He then offered to sell me an interview. Twenty dollars for five minutes. I passed the money in.
We talked in Donica’s combination living room, dining room, and bedroom, a dank, dirty place that made me glad I hadn’t sprung for the ten-minute interview. Donica had lost both legs above the knee, and the only clear spaces in the apartment were the pathways he used to wheel his chair from his unmade bed to his cluttered table or out to his bathroom or kitchenette.
“What about Tina?” he asked to get the clock running. “Something happen to her?”
I could see a trace of the good looks that had won the hearts of Marguerite and the ill-fated, unnamed blonde, though his chin was unshaved and his hair both unwashed and uncombed.
I told him I’d come about the car Tina had prayed for and gotten for Christmas. Donica’s expression conveyed as much comprehension as that of the dog seated beside him.
“Why would a little brat need a car?”
I told him it had been a present for her mother.
“That bitch,” Donica said. “What kind of car?” And, when I’d told him, “A piece of crap. I had a Trans Am.”
He pointed to a framed photo of a gleaming black car. I looked around for a picture of Tina, but didn’t spot one.
I started to tell him about the roof Tina was praying for.
Donica cut in with, “What do you care about some church in Milwaukee?”
It was my turn to look blank.
“Milwaukee,” Donica repeated, sounding out the word as though for a child. “Where that fireman Marguerite married took her and the brat. My mother told me all about it, so don’t think I don’t know.”
By then, I was starting to realize the extent of what Donica didn’t know. He didn’t know that Tina and Marguerite were still in Indianapolis. He didn’t know about last year’s Christmas miracle or this year’s. That didn’t seem possible after all the airtime the Indianapolis television stations had devoted to the story. Their signals carried to Greenfield easily. I gave the apartment a closer examination. There was no television in sight.
When I asked Donica about that, he said, “I hate television. People on television have legs.” He added, a little defensively, “I’ve got a great stereo. With satellite radio. No commercials.”
No local news, either. That left the original newspaper story about Tina, the one that had produced the car. The Star Republic sold a suburban edition in Greenfield. I asked Donica if he ever saw the paper.
“Waste of good beer money,” he said.
When I’d first heard that Donica had chosen to settle in little Greenfield, I’d thought it was part of his plan to pass himself off as dead. Now it seemed that the remote location had to be part of someone else’s plan. Donica confirmed that when I asked him about his apartment.
“My mom got me this place cheap. One of her old hen friends owns the building. If I had the money, I’d have a place in Indy. On South Meridian, where all the bars are. There isn’t a bar in this town worth wheeling myself to.”
So the same woman who had lied to her son about Marguerite marrying and moving north had tucked Donica away at a safe distance. That was to protect the lie she’d told him and the one she’d told Marguerite, namely that her son had died in Las Vegas. Without a television or a newspaper or a neighborhood bar, he was as isolated as he would have been on the moon. His mother could let her granddaughter have a week of celebrity without worrying too much about Donica finding out.
I was wondering how to break the truth to him when he said, “You never answered me. Why does your paper care about some church in Milwaukee? You said the brat’s praying for a roof. The little bitch. She’s a chip off the old bitch block, I bet. If she’s got an in with God, she should be praying for new legs for her old man. I’d shake them out of her if I could get my hands on her.
“You said you came here because of the car she prayed for. Why? You expect me to cry for you because I didn’t get one?”
My theory seemed ridiculous now, but I’d spent twenty bucks to confirm it, so I ran it by him.
Donica laughed himself into a hacking fit. “You think I bought that car for Marguerite? You think if I had the money for a car I’d waste it on that bitch? Is she here taking care of me like a woman’s supposed to? Hell no. She’s in Milwaukee, screwing some goddamn fireman. If only I’d married her like she begged me to. Me and Zeus would have that bitch walking around here on her knees.” He rubbed the dog’s head vigorously. “Wouldn’t we, boy?”
So much for my bright idea about the Saturn. That left the Christmas miracle I’d been contemplating, the reuniting of Tina and her mother with Donica. The thought that I’d almost done that, had almost blurted out to Donica that Marguerite believed him dead, literally made me dizzy. I felt as though I were standing on the edge of a cliff with one foot in the air.
Donica snapped me out of it by saying, “Your time’s up. Get out of here or I’ll have Zeus chase you out.”
I drove back downtown, intending to join the Star Republic’s Christmas parties, now well under way. But when I got off the interstate, I drove to St. Mary’s. I still wanted to find the person who had donated the car. More than that, I wanted to hear the person say that a vision of the Virgin or a surplus of Dickensian Christmas spirit had motivated the gift. I no longer cared what the motive was, as long as it was positive. I needed something to counteract the darkness I’d found in Greenfield. But to locate the mystery donor, I had to do something dark myself.