Borderlands 5 (25 page)

“Jesus,” he whispered. Listen to the acoustics! Oh, yes, the wondrous St. Mary Martyr acoustics, famous all over this side of town. Maria Gennaro once said that this was a wonderful place to sing, and she tried out for the Met in New York City.

“Jesus!” Listen to the echo! Oh, yes, the famous St. Mary Martyr echo, famous all over—

“JESUS!” The word went whonggg off into the flickering, candlestunk dark. “Jesus loves you Jesus hates you Jesus isn’t sure!”

He thought to take out his dick. He could. He was all alone. It was his frigging church. Then he thought, ‘this is madness. I’m actually going mad.’ Immediately there washed over him a gigantic regret, that his madness must be this stupid, this religious, this awkward and pitiful.

“Confetior Deo omnipotenti, Beatæ Mariæ semper Virgini, Beato Michaeli Archangelo, Beato Joanni Baptistæ, Sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo—I have given this thing my life blood and I will not feel the need to confess! I will not!”

He shouted at the stone, the marble, the candles, the wood, the little pile of bleached, sterile wafers in the tabernacle, in their golden chalice there in the dark. “What can I have been thinking, to have given my life—my whole damn life—to pieces of bread?”

Kneeling there as he was, he would have appeared the very picture of devotion, but who was watching him knew his weakness, had heard everything, and knew, now, exactly how to execute his plan.

A few moments later, Father Bob went striding across the sanctuary and into the sacristy … and into a great darkness.

The door made a puffy slam. Father Bob’s footsteps clattered away into silence. A moment later the air conditioning went off, followed by the faint boom of ductwork suddenly empty of air pressure.

Then it was silent here in St. Mary Martyr. It was truly, beautifully silent. At first, the church appeared empty, so empty that a mouse that had been waiting to eat crumbs off the altar began to move out into view.

It stopped, though, when something like a sigh whispered through the silence. An instant later, it saw movement back among the pews. It ran.

Quickly, a figure passed down the aisle, making the votive candles lit by the old and the desperate flicker uncertainly. A few moments later another door, this one small and at the rear of the church, opened. A figure slipped out, hesitated for a moment, then went out into the night.

This figure, tall, bent against the wind, clutching the collars of a thin raincoat, crossed beneath the streetlight and went on off down Morris Street, a shadow beneath the tossing trees.

Mrs. McKorkle came during the day, and it was good to have her bustle in this mausoleum of a rectory, the moaning of the Electrolux, the clatter of dishes being put away, the small humming under her breath of popular standards from fifty years ago. At five she would make him his dinner. At five thirty, he would sit in the front room with a cigar watching Dan Rather, and then at six go to the kitchen and take his food out of the warm oven. He would eat in the dining room at a table that had once troughed six priests.

Father Martin Berg had enjoyed the sort of invincible faith that you would have thought would have carried him through to eternity. But it had not carried him through. He’d lost it all in an afternoon, for no particular reason, and gone and joined Catholic Life as an agent, and called on the parish with a sheepish, awful grin on his face. They bought nothing from him.

He’d fought back by using his considerable organizational skills. He had cards printed and tacked them up on bookstore and coffee house bulletin boards. He’d even rented an office, bought a couple of suits from the Salvation Army, the works. A handsome man, he looked like he might once have been corporate poster boy, circa about 1955.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t write a million dollar policy for fifty cents on a cancerous octogenarian with an artificial heart and kidneys. Or so he’d said when he’d come up the back walk looking for a meal and his old bed, just for the night.

He had wept at this table. He’d died at fifty-six. Fallen under a bus. So many hopeful, blustery Irishmen had sat across from him at this table that they had blurred together in his mind into a single mournful presence, as heavy on his memory as Mrs. McKorkle’s scones were in his gut. Then there had been Father Lupe Zaragona, with his beloved Mount Blanc pen his father had given him, and Father Robbins, the evangelist of homosexuality, who had blown his brains out—and into—the boiler, shutting it down for two very cold weeks in December of 1997. And that inevitable dirty old man—what was his damn name?—who got shuttled from parish to parish and diocese to diocese. Bob had discovered by accident that he kept a picture of the child actor Kelly Reno in his wallet.

The phone rang.

He stopped chewing the roast beef flavored string he’d been given. Money problems. Actual starvation, here and there, these days—priests being cheerful about fasting.

It rang again, and kept ringing.

Mr. or Mrs. Dying was dying, perhaps, wanting a little grease for the forehead and the loins and a quidquid delquisti toodle-oo.

He would have answered it, but he knew that it would soon ring again if it was urgent. He got his black death case ready, small and frayed, with its red plush interior with room for the host carrier, the holy oil, and a cross.

The case had been bought from the Paulist Priest Supply back when he’d just been ordained.

A priest! Me! Oh my god o my god o my god. And that night, feeling as if his soul had been transformed into some kind of a crystal set tuned to Christ, he had masturbated four times, each time after going down beside his narrow bed and saying a rosary, then back up and here came Mr. Hand again, groping and punching him up, and bip bap boom until there was nothing left in his crotch bag but rust.

He had been plunged into St. Michaels, then his first turn at St. Mary Martyr when there was a choir the size of an infantry brigade and two hours of confession and six masses, then St. Christopher’s under Monsignor Calabrese who had been a hand smeller (whatever sort of fetish that was God literally only knew). You would wake up and there kneeling beside your bed in the duff with an erection like an evil lantern would be the pastor, bent over and smelling, not kissing, your hand. You’d lie there praying for him for yourself for the parish the people the church the pope the saints and sinners while snufff, snufff on and on it went, and finally you would fake a little snore and turn to the wall. Then he’d go to the next boy priest, sniffing his mad way across more damp night skin.

Priests shot through that parish like meteors. He’d died in a fire, that one, smoking in bed so they said and when Detective Reilly Mann had pointed out that he didn’t smoke, the Chancellor said as smooth as eelskin, “he’d just taken it up. He was clumsy with it, poor devil.” The archbishop called them in and spoke of how it is that tolerance is part of piety. But then he added boys will be boys, and threw them a sumptuous dinner, pot roast and old wine.

The truth is that the inner history of the church—the real history—is a history of sex gone all contorted from compression and disuse and ignorance. Above all, the sexuality of the church is an ignorant one. Not innocent, though, no.

It is the story of the urgent effort of semen to escape from generations of human prisons, made in the name of God by a pope ironically named Innocent, who Father Bob suspected of having been a rough-skinned demon under his fabulous vestments.

And then there was the matter—the awful matter—of the relief of priests by altar boys, a tradition that went back to Roman times, when the local pontifex could neither marry nor be seen with a whore.

It had always been part of the institution, a service performed by somebody whose smoothness echoed that of a woman enough to pass, and whose knowledge of the organ meant that he could be quick and even sometimes splendid.

Before mass in the sacristy with the smart right hand. After mass in the rectory with the clumsy, surprising left.

Part of the institution, of no consequence to anybody, not in a past when child servants had routinely amused guests at dinners by diddling them under the table. No, it was the discovery of childhood itself, and its sanctification in the nineteenth century, that had oh so gradually surrounded the church and its ancient habits, until what was routine became scandalous, the ordinary transmogrified into the horrible. Boys who once would not even have bothered to laugh the matter off now took priestly need to be evil, and the satisfaction of it a guilty and awful sin. They became the hollow-eyed men in the courtrooms, who sent the priests off to a life of frenetic, devastating buggery under prison sheets, their consecrated hands locked in steel.

The phone rang again. Okay, that was it. He had to answer. “St. Mary Martyr.”

“Father?”

“This is Father Randall.”

Breathing. He knew the sound of grief. He waited. A gulp, again: “Father?”

It was a child. “Are you in trouble?”

Silence. Then a click, something changing in the telephone system.

Then the dial tone.

The moment he hung up, the phone rang again. It was the same caller. He went through the same drill, then dashed into his office to look at the caller ID. He was astonished to find that the number calling was the principal’s office over at the school.

He didn’t waste an instant. A child was in the school, which meant vandalism, which meant a disaster tomorrow morning, and more students not coming back after Christmas. He remembered when only the best could make it into St. Mary Martyr. The rest must go to General Grant, poor things. Now the dopes and misanthropes went to St. Mary Martyr. The real kids—normal, loud, strong—played for Give Me G, a Big Big G, Go Grant, Go Grant, Go G-R-A-N-T!

Go Saint Mary Martyr! Hey, we’re here! We have balls, too! Yeah, basketballs with all the bounce dribbled out.

He left the rectory, which looked at night like the haunted house that it was, and hurried along the short street to the school.

The night had turned cold, tangy with autumn smoke, the air as clear as God’s own eye. The moon shone down, that parched desert in the sky, that appalled face, and a reef of leaves raced along the sidewalk. Oh, dear God, how beautiful is thine world, that is thine.

You must exist. Sure, life might have arisen out of mud and lightning or whatever, but where did the esthetics come from?

The school building was dark, absolutely dark, a forbidding old hulk that frightened him always, because it was four stories of woodframe construction that would go up like a Walpurgisnacht bonfire if ever anything in the basement went alight.

He was forever having the fire department over on inspection, the boilermen, the alarm company, the sprinkler company. He threw money at safety, demanded a fire drill every week even though they all, from the fire marshal to Mr. Saenz the alarm man, assured him that it was completely and absolutely safe.

Then he would walk up the creaking linoleum stairs and hold the ancient mahogany banister, and see the children in their prim blue uniforms marching in their trusting line, their faces full of the assurance and hope of childhood, that I may be a car dealer or I a ballerina, and he would get all the checking done again.

Now he fumbled out his fistful of keys and took the long, strange one that fit the elaborate lock that had replaced the old, easy one after Mrs. Kiel had come in and found a pile of defecation on the floor. That discovery had been the beginning of a tour through devastation so unspeakable that it seemed to belong to some other reality. Somebody had urinated in the biology lab drawers, poured the fish out and chewed them up, then spit them against the blackboards. They had ripped the lizards and the snakes in half, and slashed into the ceilings of half the classrooms with what must have been a scimitar. There were spatters of dry sperm all over Mrs. Kiel’s Virgin Mary Martyr statue.

But the main thing was the shit. He’d never seen so much defecation. How could anybody shit that much? The police had said that it was a gang. They had dusted for prints and found many—surprise, surprise—in a school. In his dreading heart, he wondered if perhaps the whole student body had not participated?

From a distance, a child appears to be a complicated, valid creature, some of them even beautiful, some of them curiously sensual. In fact, the casual, unformed nature of that sensuality—the wriggling movements, the sparking eyes, the moisture of the smile—could make it actually a little arousing…sometimes.

But up close, they were fragile things, all soft skin and big eyes and so touchingly eager to be held. He found it almost impossible to believe that those gentle, polite slips had come in here en masse and done this, somehow each escaping from his or her home at an appointed hour.

He unlocked the door. The alarm was full on, its red ‘armed’ light glowing. At once, it began to squeal. He put in the code, turning it off. Then he closed the door and turned it on again. A flip of switches brought light to the hall. No sound, though. He’d expected something—a gasp, the patter of small feet. Nothing came, though, just the contemplative quiet of an academic place in repose.

He moved along the hall. “Hello?”

His voice echoed in the waxed silence. Stopping, he listened. All he could hear was his own breathing. He went upstairs, heading toward Mrs. Kielbasa’s office. The door was dark mahogany, and as he put his hand on the knob, he found himself unwilling to turn it.