The Artifact (18 page)

They went down to dinner in the hotel restaurant, tired and silent during the meal, both preoccupied with their private thoughts. On their return, they decided to nap for a few hours before their early morning excursion, and set the alarm for 2:00 a.m. Andy managed to undress in the bathroom seated in the wheelchair, after which Sammy helped her into bed wearing her usual sleeping attire, a faded, extra large NNC tee shirt. Sammy leaned over and kissed her forehead before turning out the lamp and getting into his own bed.

Andrea’s voice sounded maudlin in the darkness. “I can’t remember the last time anybody tucked me in with a platonic kiss. Someone who didn’t have some ulterior motive.”

“Think hard,” he said. “I’m sure all male heterosexuals aren’t unconscionable beasts.”

“No, just chauvinistic opportunists.”

Andy’s tone took on a reflective note as she related her first sexual experience at the age of twelve, seduced by her mother’s brother. “Not a nice story,” she added. “But when you’re living it, that young and naïve, it just seems natural, like one step after another.”

Neither of them spoke for quite a while. Sammy did not know how to respond to her awkward confession, and she seemed embarrassed at having revealed one of her deepest secrets.

He finally broke the silence. “Realizing I was gay was a shocker. I was thirteen, but this was the 1980’s, everybody was coming out. Well, not everybody. Barney Frank in Congress, Rock Hudson supposedly, Robert Preston. I didn’t even get it at first. Guys ogling the first girls in class to grow tits, constantly talking about getting laid, passing
Playboy
around to get off on. What was all the excitement? Until a bunch of us had a circle jerk in the woods behind the football field. Christ, I couldn’t take my eyes off those cocks. Confused? Scared and lonely, ashamed, guilty... you name it, I felt it. Mainly denial. When the other kids started dating, bragging about getting a feel, telling me I should ask Julie Whatsis out, ‘cause she’d let you finger her pussy. Man, I thought about tossing a rope over a pipe in the cellar.”

He took a deep breath, not having intended to swap deep personal secrets, but now became caught up in his own history and the surprising emotional release that came with it. “So I dated the nice girls. The ones who refrained from sex, allowing little more than a good night kiss or a few minutes of heavy necking after a movie. I had no interest in kissing girls or feeling their firm, sometimes not-so-little breasts against my chest. I guess they sensed my lack of interest, if not the reason for it, because few of them accepted my invitations to date a third or fourth time.”

“Geeze, Sammy, a hunk like you? I’d have gone down on you like a runaway elevator!”

Sammy laughed. “Well, that’s what happened. I wasn’t exactly unpopular. Played football, basketball. MASCO was a big regional high school north of Boston, so there were lots of opportunities. Girls in class, the hallway, cafeteria. This really stacked blonde from Boxford actually asked me to a party, gave me my first blow job in a bedroom closet.”

Andy looked across at his profile in the dim glow filtering through the curtains from the lights in the parking area three stories below. “But no conversion.”

“Oh, I enjoyed the hell out of it. But all I could think was, ‘I’m queer, I’m queer!”

“Because you liked getting head?”

“Because my mind was filled with the image of Tom Johnson’s lanky body in the showers, soaping his balls, a big grin on his face, pointing his long, half-tumescent cock right at me. My own growing erection was confirmation and I hated myself for it. I never had a serious lover ‘til college. My parents were kind of half-baked Catholics, church once a month, Christmas, Easter. Dad went ballistic when I told them I wanted to be a priest. He still works as a manufacturer’s rep for a line of industrial pumps, made pretty good bucks over the years. Argued that nobody cared that much about religion any more, and I’d be wasting my life trying to change everyone’s bad habits. People go to church on Sunday, then cheat, steal, screw the world the rest of the week.

“I could tell Mom didn’t like the idea either, but didn’t say much because of the parochial school myth that the mother of a priest went directly to heaven, automatically passing ‘go,’ purgatory and hell.”

“What did you hope to gain by hiding out in the priesthood?”

“Anonymity, a rationale for my not dating, getting married, celibacy. Getting away from the temptations posed by my ‘sickness,’ as Jerry Farwell calls it. Not succumbing to the degrading, illicit sexual acts performed between two men.”

“Oh, Sammy.”

“The heavy hand of moral society. So, I went into a junior seminary right after high school. Dad was so pissed he didn’t come to graduation. Mom drove me to St. Paul’s campus the next week, bawling her eyes out, me standing beside the car with my suitcase looking up at that forbidding massive structure of chiseled blocks of red stone capped by a mansard roof and turrets.”

“God didn’t have anything to do with it, except making me gay in the first place. I was trying to escape from what I was but I brought it right along with me, of course.”

“With your macho Marine Corps history, I never suspected you were so religious. Catholic, no less, with all those ancient rituals.”

“The Marines was another escape. A confused kid still in denial, thinking that joining the tough guys would ‘cure’ me.”

“Like the priesthood.”

“The opposite for me. The Corps made me see that I couldn’t change, realized I’d go balmy if I tried. Flying combat missions in Kuwait proved that being gay didn’t preclude being a good jarhead, either.”

“Couple of times. I started nights at CCNY after my discharge and uh, wasn’t dating anyone regular, so... I used to hit the gay bars, all male workout clubs, the so-called public baths, massage parlors. Until I met Brian. He got beat up pretty badly once.”

She heard the catch in his voice when he mentioned his former lover. Their silence lasted several minutes. Then Andy spoke softly. “You really loved that man, didn’t you?”

Sammy did not reply for so long that Andy thought she had intruded too far into his personal life. Finally, he said, “Yeah, I did. Though my feelings seem to have evolved a bit since....”

“What do you mean?”

She heard a deep breath from the double bed beside her. “He was an addict, immature. Cheated. We’d argue, he’d plead and promise, then go right out and pick up some one-nighter next week. I threw him out half a dozen times. He’d come back with some god-awful ridiculous present, like some contrite puppy, laughing and joking. But the last time he did it I was adamant. Until he confessed he had AIDs. We were always careful, so thank God he didn’t give it to me.”

“Then you took leave from NNC to help him through his last months.”

“I never want to go through anything like that again. I think some piece inside me died right along with him.”

CHAPTER TEN

Albuquerque, NM

October 2004

Sammy extracted the master key from the lock and stood behind Andrea’s wheelchair, a few feet inside the threshold of the tiny room, as the stout door with glassed rectangular viewing port closed behind them. Plain gray curtains had been drawn across a single window, a silhouette of vertical bars evident behind the thin cloth. On the left wall, a familiar color print of the bearded Jesus hung over a narrow cot on which a brown wool blanket had been made up with military precision. Beyond the bed a floor lamp emitting the only light stood next to an armchair covered in olive corduroy with matching ottoman. Directly opposite them a small desk with reading lamp and straight-back chair occupied the rear wall next to a bookcase crammed with faded, hardback spines, framed holy pictures tacked to the wall above it. The right wall contained a bathroom with no door, a bureau, clothes closet and
prie dieu
beneath a wooden crucifix.

In the center of the room, a frail man with eyes closed and arms stretched to the ceiling was standing behind a card table covered by a white cloth with purple stains that held a paper cup, a loaf of pita bread on a paper plate, an unlit candle and a thick tome opened to a page marked by a red ribbon. He wore a white, mock turtleneck under an ankle-length black cassock buttoned down the front, threadbare at hem, collar and elbows, the belt of a red terrycloth bathrobe around his neck, which gave the impression of the vestments of a Catholic or Episcopal priest.

David had assured him that Mitchell was no danger to anyone but himself. The intruders exchanged questioning looks as they assessed the calm, purposeful manner of the man whose likeness was indisputably that in the photo Sam had procured online of George Mitchell.

The ex-airborne lieutenant continued reading from the book, mumbling unintelligibly as they stood waiting for him to acknowledge them. Finally, he looked up. “You are late.” If they hadn’t known he was still in his early thirties, they would have guessed his age at fifty or sixty. A red scar ran down the left side of his skull from crown to jaw where neither his thick head of unruly gray hair, nor full beard would grow. The right side of his face a mass of healed third-degree burns that had taken his ear and right eyelid. The backs of his hands clasped before him were similarly scarred.

He shifted his gaze suddenly to address Sammy: “My regular acolyte has not shown up again, so you will have to assist me.” He closed his eyes, and raised his face to the ceiling. “
Dominus vobiscum.”

Sammy answered automatically. “
Et cum spiritu tuo
.”

“
Requiescant in pace
.

“Amen.”

“
Placeat tibi sancta Trinitas, obsequium servitutis meae....”

Sammy moved to the side of the table while Mitchell continued speaking with arms outstretched, “
Initium sancti Evangelii secundum Hannah
.”

“
Gloria tibi, Domine
,” Sammy replied.

Mitchell read the gospel from the book in English while Andrea drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair until Sammy scowled at her.

“...
gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre, plenum gratiae et veritatis
.”

“
Deo gratias
,” Sammy responded.

Andrea waited until Mitchell had organized his paraphernalia on the card table, took the belt of the robe from around his neck, kissed it and hung it in the closet.

“If this is a scam,” she whispered to Sammy, “it’s a damned good one.”

Mitchell sat on the edge of his cot as Sammy turned the wooden chair at the desk around to straddle it backwards.

The ex-paratrooper looked from one to the other, an unconscious but gruesome smile on his disfigured countenance. “Now, my children, how may I help you?”

“Lieutenant Mitchell...,” Andrea began

“Please,” Mitchell interrupted. “Just ‘Father’ will be fine.”

“Father,” she continued, “you’ve been staying in hospitals like this for several months with the help of Major Geoff and General Callaghan, isn’t that correct?”

Mitchell frowned, trying to remember. “Army people? I don’t deserve a medal for that.”

Andrea took off the black-rimmed glasses and beret, shaking her hair out from under it, running her fingers through the gray streak. “Do you watch the news on television? Do you know who I am?”

“The Lord Jesus cares little about who you are or your past transgressions. He embraces all sinners as He will me.”

“You served in the 82
^nd
Airborne Falcon Division during the Iraq War, didn’t you?”

Andrea shifted her weight in the chair. “You led a reconnaissance patrol out into the desert to intercept Saddam Hussein and found a cache of ancient treasure that you and several others smuggled back into the United States, isn’t that true, Lieutenant Mitchell? Father?”