Little Children (22 page)

Father Banoogi certainly seemed to think so. He kept touching her arm and nodding with such an emphatic downward motion that you would have thought it was her tits talking to him instead of her mouth. Then they started laughing about something, their mirth so prolonged and exaggerated Larry could hear it clearly from thirty yards away. He couldn’t help getting irritated. What could be so goddam funny at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning? Weren’t there millions of kids starving in Africa? He was all set to walk over there and break up the little lovefest when they did it themselves. Joanie and Father Nooganbi hugged on the sidewalk with such uncalled for intensity that Larry flashed on the scandal from his own distant past.

Jesus Christ
, he thought,
she’s the next Mrs. Michalek. In a day or two, they’ll be opening a video store
.

This whole time the twins had been standing obediently at their mother’s side, somber little angels in short-sleeved white shirts and clip-on ties, but as soon as the priest turned his back they started shoving each other and airing some sort of grievance that Joanie refused to acknowledge. With her usual unflappable efficiency, she took each of the boys by a hand and tugged them along with her as she started down the path that led smack into Larry.

The boys whooped when they saw him, breaking free of their mother and charging into his arms. Only a day had gone by since he’d seen them—Joanie was letting him take the kids on Saturday—but Larry still felt starved for their company, the mere sight of them. It had been like this ever since they’d started preschool last September, and he’d been forced to muddle through the empty weekdays without their raucous company. He gathered them up, one twin under each arm, and calmly walked toward Joanie. It felt good, the whole family together on a sunny morning in a wholesome environment. If it hadn’t been for the worshiping God part, he would have happily attended church on a regular basis.

“Well, well,” said Joanie. “If it isn’t the prodigal son.”

Larry presented his cheek for a hello kiss, but she just brushed right past him and continued toward the parking lot, forcing him to pivot and hurry after her, which wasn’t that easy, given that she was a fast walker, even in high heels, and he was weighed down by an unbalanced seventy-pound load of squirming twin boys. By the time he caught up, she had already popped the automatic locks on her Camry.

“Aren’t people supposed to be happy to see the prodigal son?” he asked, loosening his arms so his sons could escape.

Joanie opened the back door.

“Inside, guys.”

The boys clambered in, but not before Gregory asked if Daddy was joining them for lunch. Larry shrugged hopefully.

“Not today,” said Joanie.

She shut the door on the twins’ disappointed groans, shaking her head in mock admiration.

“Not bad,” she told him. “Communion and everything.”

“You look great,” he told her. “Why don’t we go out for a drink some night, talk things over?”

Her mouth hardened. “Don’t do this to me, Larry.”

“I miss you. Is that a crime?”

The thing about Joanie was that she could be tough, but not for very long. All of a sudden, she looked like she wanted to cry.

“You should have treated me better when you had the chance.”

“I’m trying, baby. Can’t you see that?”

“I see it, Lar. It’s just too little, too late, that’s all.”

She circled around to the driver’s side, putting the bulk of the car between them, as if she feared for her safety.

“I bet that priest’s kicking himself,” Larry said.

Joanie opened her door, but didn’t get in. She sighed, to let him know she was losing interest.

“Why’s that?”

“I saw the way he was looking at you.” Larry grinned, daring her to deny it. “That vow of celibacy must be a real bitch.”

This was only Larry’s third week at St. Rita’s, but already he felt like a regular. Slipping into what was rapidly becoming his usual spot—right side, fourth row from the back, seat closest to the aisle—he nodded a friendly good morning to the neighbors. The whole gang was there: the sloppy guy with the problem dandruff and the barbershop quartet baritone, the nervous middle-aged lady who wore an asthma inhaler on a chain around her neck, the straight-backed senior citizen with the military brush cut who, if the past two weeks were any guide, would weep quietly throughout the entire mass, pausing only to blow another majestic honk into his dirty handkerchief.

He’d chosen this particular spot less out of solidarity with the misfits and loners who favored the back of the church—not that he was ashamed to count himself among them—than for the clear angle it afforded on Joanie and the boys, who made it a habit to sit on the left side of the aisle, about a dozen rows from the front, in the section of the church favored by families with young children. He liked the feeling of power it gave him, being able to see without being seen, knowing that she probably wanted to turn around and get a fix on where he was sitting but that her pride and stubborness wouldn’t allow it. Luckily, the boys had no such scruples. One or the other of them would check on Larry every few minutes, flashing him a shy smile or a quick wave that he’d acknowledge with an equally discreet thumbs-up of his own.

The processional began, and Larry rose along with the rest of the audience. He was pleasantly surprised to see that Joanie was wearing pants, the tight black ones with no pockets to spoil the rear view, and her miracle underwear that functioned exactly as promised on the package, making “unsightly panty lines vanish!” (If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought she’d dispensed with the underwear altogether.) In any case, her ass was on full display in all its ample glory, and he’d have lots of opportunity in the next forty-five minutes to give it his rapt and reverent attention. This was probably not the kind of Sunday worship the Pope would have approved of, but Larry had a feeling His Holiness was not an Ass Man.

Larry’s enthusiasm for his wife’s tits had waned a little over the years—pregnancy and breast-feeding had changed them, both physically and conceptually—but his admiration for her ass had remained constant, even as the inevitable middle-aged spread had begun to set in. As Joanie would have been the first to admit, her ass had expanded, but it had done so in a nice, welcoming way, becoming ever rounder and softer without losing its essential shapeliness. And for all that she fretted about it, she never tried to hide her ass the way lots of women her age did. Her pants were tight, her skirts short, her shorts even shorter. Even at church, she was happy to give the world an eyeful. And don’t think the world—or at least Larry Moon—wasn’t grateful.

In a funny way—a sadly ironic way, really—Larry wanted her more now that they were separated than he had during the last two years of their marriage. Ever since he’d fired the shots that had killed poor Antoine Harris, he’d lost his taste for sex, among other pleasures. Joanie was always the one trying to initiate things, and Larry had been frequently unable to perform. It got to the point where she started bugging him about going on Viagra, which, in retrospect, was probably a good idea but seemed like an insult at the time. After a while he started resenting her sexuality, and even feeling a little threatened by it, which is probably why he freaked out so much when she dressed like a slut. At the same time, though, he’d taken a certain amount of pride in having such an overtly sexy wife, knowing that he’d once been man enough to win her, even if he didn’t quite know what to do about her anymore.

Now that she had left him, though, and he could no longer take her body for granted—he didn’t see her getting dressed in the morning, or peeling off her rumpled uniform at night—he found himself hungering for her again, in the same simple way he’d hungered for her back when he was a bouncer at Kahlua’s, or a bridegroom in a tuxedo, or a rookie cop on lunch break, with his gun belt around his ankles. Viagra would not be necessary, he was pretty damn sure of that. But it was all moot, because she was slipping away from him, and there was nothing he could do but watch her from a distance and wish things were otherwise.

Thus preoccupied, he didn’t notice when Ronald James McGorvey and his mother entered the holy sanctuary. They arrived late, maybe ten minutes after mass had begun, and must have walked right past him.

Why they didn’t just take a seat in the rear was a mystery he wondered about later. If they’d just slipped quietly into the back row, maybe nothing would have happened. But instead they marched straight down the center aisle, where everyone could see them, and squeezed into a pew a couple of rows behind the one where Joanie and the twins were kneeling.

Larry registered the disturbance they created without understanding its cause. It started as a kind of collective whisper that increased in volume until it all but drowned out Father Mugabe—Larry had finally figured out his last name—who actually pressed a finger to his lips and shushed the congregation, as if they were a bunch of unruly schoolchildren. But the hubbub only intensified, the angry buzz of voices accompanied by an abrupt surge of movement, whole families fleeing their pews as if someone had released a stink bomb, indignantly clogging the center aisle.

“What happened?” Larry asked his neighbor.

“Dunno,” said the sloppy guy. Dandruff frosted the shoulders of his navy suit like a light snowfall. “Heart attack, maybe.”

The weepy senior citizen turned around.

“Someone probably threw up,” he speculated with a sniffle. “Saturday night at the gin mill.”

Larry leaned into the aisle to get a better view. The displaced worshipers were migrating across the aisle, their counterparts on the right side skooching over to make room. This process had left an odd hole on the left side of the church, three rows more or less vacant now, except for an old woman and a bald guy who was partially obstructing his view of Joanie.

“Nobody threw up,” said the lady with the inhaler. “It’s that disgusting man from Blueberry Court. He’s probably playing with himself.”

As if to assist in confirming this ID, McGorvey turned like a perp taking his mug shot, displaying his profile for Larry’s benefit. He was wearing a hideous suit, a beige polyester monstrosity with big lapels and the kind of stitching you usually saw on blue jeans. As McGorvey pivoted back to the front of the church—Father Mugabe was continuing the mass as though nothing had happened—Larry’s son Phillip turned around and waved, revealing his beautiful, innocent face to the pervert.

Instead of flashing his customary thumbs-up, Larry gestured angrily for the boy to turn around. Phil seemed confused at first, then a little hurt, but he did what his father wanted. He whispered something to Gregory, who appealed to Larry with a quizzical expression on his broad, flat face. Barely four years old, and he already seemed so much less vulnerable than his brother, so much better able to take care of himself. Larry shook his head, waving both arms as if signaling to an airplane.

“Something wrong?” asked the sloppy guy.

“My kids are up there. Just two feet away from that shitbag.”

“Excuse me?” said the asthmatic woman. “Did you just say what I thought you did?”

“Sorry,” said Larry.

What he couldn’t understand was why Joanie hadn’t moved with the others. Why stay behind, letting a convicted sex offender feast his eyes on your children—
my children!
Larry thought—so he could think about them later when he went home and jerked off to some hideous fantasy. It was like she was doing it to spite him, to remind him of the fact that she’d never approved of what she called his “obsession” with Ronnie McGorvey.

“You’ve got to let go of it,” she’d told him. “It’s not healthy.”

“I’m just trying to protect our kids.”

“Are you sure? Because it seems like this is more about you than it is about them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, Lar. Maybe if you had a little less time on your hands—”

“Maybe I should do a little more yard work,” he proposed. “That way our lawn would look really nice while our kids are being raped and murdered.”

“Forget it,” she told him. “Forget I even mentioned it.”

He managed to keep his cool all the way into the homily, telling himself that he wasn’t going to make a scene, not in church, not in front of his kids. But then the priest started talking about Jesus, how He loved absolutely everyone, even the lowest of the low, the lepers and prostitutes and convicted criminals, the reviled and despised, the forsaken and friendless. The way Father Mugabe talked, you would have thought Ronnie McGorvey was a character from the Bible, a pal of Barabbas and a neighbor of Mary Magdalene.

What about Holly Colapinto?
he wanted to shout.
Jesus sure had a funny way of showing His love for her
.

He tried to distract himself by examining the stained-glass windows, but his eyes strayed to one of the stations of the cross, Jesus bent double under the weight of His terrible burden, being jeered by the soldiers.
That’s the problem with these people
, he thought.
They worship suffering. They want the worst to happen
.