The Good Luck of Right Now (6 page)

I just looked at him.

“You really don’t know, do you?” he said, tilting his head sideways and squinting at me through his bushy white circle of beard and hair. “God hasn’t spoken to you lately?”

“I have no idea.”

“None at all? Not even a suspicion? An inclination? A feeling?
Nothing?
”

I shook my head and felt embarrassed.

“You’ve heard no calling?”

“Sorry,” I said, because I hadn’t heard anything remotely like a calling.

“Then I guess we wait,” he said. “And I will pray. God may no longer speak to me, but maybe He’s still listening.”

“Forgive me, Father, but are you serious about all of this? This isn’t a joke?”

“No joke,” Father McNamee said.

“Are you really leaving the Catholic Church?”

“I have officially defrocked myself. I’m not leaving—
I’ve left
.”

“Can I still confess my sins to you?”

“Technically, no. Not as a Catholic. But as a man, certainly.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I drank my whiskey.

It burned.

Father McNamee drank half the bottle before he passed out on the couch. I sat in the armchair and studied him. His forearms were thick and he had a great belly, but he was solid all over and not jiggly like a fat man. He was like a potato with a head, arms, and legs. His beard made him look like Santa Claus. And his skin was rough and pocked and used-up raw—like he had lived a hard full life of service, gardening in the vast soil of men, harvesting souls.

Potato skin.

A giant potato.

“Irish,” Mom had often called him. “Father Irish.”

I placed a blanket over Father McNamee, and he began to snore loudly.

Upstairs I wrote as much as I could remember in my notebook, and I wondered if Father McNamee really believed that God had a plan for me now that Mom was gone, or was he only drunk. I stayed up most of the night thinking and wondering.

In the morning I found Father McNamee kneeling in the living room, praying. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I put on coffee and fried eggs in butter and hot sauce. I also sliced and fried a few pieces of scrapple, because it’s good for hangovers. Father McNamee always ate scrapple after a night of drinking Irish whiskey. I know because he had spent many nights on our couch. Mom used to cook scrapple for him.

“Morning, Bartholomew,” he said when he took his place at the kitchen table. “You don’t have to cook for me, you know. But thanks.”

I served breakfast.

We drank our coffee.

The winter birds sang to us.

“Good eggs,” he said.

I nodded.

I wanted to ask him about God’s plan for me, but something held me back.

“So what exactly do you do all day around here, Bartholomew?”

“I often go to the library.”

“What else?”

“I write in my notebook.”

“That’s good. What else?”

“I listen to the birds.”

“And?”

“I used to take care of my mother.”

“Your mother is no longer with us.”

“I know that.”

“So what will you do
now
? What will we do
today
?”

I hadn’t a clue, so I just looked at him, hoping he would tell me. But he only focused on his food, and by the time he was done, his white beard was striped like a candy cane with hot sauce.

“God still hasn’t spoken to you yet, has He?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“God can be a bastard like that.”

Father McNamee went into the living room and got down on his knees. He stayed that way for hours. I started to worry that maybe he was dead, because he was still as a rock.

I listened for God’s voice, but all I heard were the birds.

I wondered if maybe I should tell Father McNamee about you, Richard Gere, but for some reason I didn’t—and I’m not going to either.

You are my confidant, Richard Gere, and I’m not about to share my pretending with anyone, because pretending often ends when you allow nonpretenders access to the better, safer worlds you create for yourself.

I’d like for us to be secret friends, Richard Gere.

I think I can learn from both you and Father McNamee, and I’d like to keep those two worlds separate for now. Like church and state. I learned that back in high school in the history class Tara Wilson was also in. Separation of church and state. Not that you are my state, because you are not. And evidently Father McNamee is no longer my church either.

Your admiring fan,

Bartholomew Neil

5

CHARLES J. GUITEAU’S DISSECTED BRAIN

Dear Mr. Richard Gere,

I had the strangest dream last night:

Standing on the Ocean City boardwalk, I watched the sun come up. It was warm, so it must have been summer, but there was no one around for miles and miles, which made me think it wasn’t. The sun heated my face to just the right temperature as waves crashed in the distance and seagulls cried up above and even the metal railing I was leaning against was as warm as a woman’s arm.

I was feeling so at peace in my dream until I heard Mom’s voice yelling, “Richard! Richard, help me! Help me, Richard! I’m going to fall! Help!”

I looked around, but I couldn’t see Mom anywhere—or anyone else either.

“Richard!” she cried. “Help me, please! I can’t hang on! It hurts! It BURNS!”

Finally, I understood she was under the boardwalk.

I looked for stairs to the beach, but I couldn’t find any.

When I looked over the railing, all I saw was the ocean—little bits of sun refracting here and there like a twinkling galaxy.

The beach was gone.

“Richard! Richard! Help me!” she cried.

Even though she was using your name in the dream, I knew she meant me, because of all the pretending we had done before she died.

I dropped to my knees and peered through the cracks in the boardwalk and saw Mom hanging on to a live electrical wire that was sparking and shocking her; beneath her was a large black endless pit. She was young, how she looked when I was a boy—she had long black hair and her face was still smooth and unwrinkled—maybe in my dream she was the same age as I am now.

It didn’t make any sense.

Where was the sand?

Where was the ocean?

“Mom!” I yelled as our eyes locked.

For a brief second I could tell she saw me through the cracks between the boards—her pupils focused and a strange, almost horrified look bloomed on her face.

She let go of the wire and began to fall, shrinking farther and farther away. The whole time she was aging too: I could see her hair turning white and getting shorter, the wrinkles sprouting from her eyes, tunneling through her face, shriveling her hands and arms.

In my dream I screamed, “
Mom!
”

“Bartholomew?” I heard a man whisper.

When I opened my eyes, Father McNamee was sitting on the edge of my bed, just like Mom used to do when I was a boy.

I blinked at him.

Only the hall light behind him was on—the lights in my room were still out—so his body was silhouetted. It took a second for me to realize I was no longer dreaming.

“You were yelling in your sleep,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I was having a dream,” I said. I wanted to tell him what I was dreaming about, but it sounded too insane at the time, and it takes me a little bit to remember my dreams after I wake up, so I didn’t say anything.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Father McNamee said. “You want a sandwich?”

“No, thank you,” I said, because I wasn’t hungry.

“Okay, suit yourself. But maybe you’d want to keep me company while I eat mine?”

“Okay,” I said, and then followed Father McNamee down to the kitchen.

I sat at the table as he made himself a ham and Swiss on rye.

“Do you know anything about the twentieth president of the United States?” he said when he sat down. “James A. Garfield?”

I just stared at his chewing face, trying to wake up fully.

He had yellow flecks of mustard in his beard.

“I’m reading this book about him,” he said. “It’s upstairs on the nightstand.”

I nodded.

He gestured with his sandwich, shaking it at me for emphasis, the lettuce hanging on for dear life. “James A. Garfield was indeed the twentieth president of our great country. He seemed like he was a good, noble man. Wanted to advance the civil rights movement. Provide universal education. Make sure all children—black and white—could read.”

I wondered why Father McNamee was saying all this to me in the middle of the night, but I didn’t ask. I was very sleepy, and the experience was starting to feel more and more like yet another bizarre dream.

“Do you know who Charles J. Guiteau is, Bartholomew?”

I shook my head no.

Father finished chewing a bite, swallowed, and then said, “He shot President Garfield and claimed God made him do it. What’s even more eerie is that when Garfield was shot in a Washington train station, supposedly he said, ‘My God, what is this?’ As if he were questioning God’s will. Garfield didn’t expect to be shot that day. He thought he was putting good into the world, doing God’s work perhaps. But two bullets made him question God. ‘What is this?’ he said to God.”

It was like one of Father McNamee’s homilies. He had often made historical allusions in his homilies. But why was he telling me this in the middle of the night? Was it the whiskey?

“Guiteau yelled, ‘Arthur is president now!’” A piece of lettuce flew out of Father McNamee’s sandwich and onto the table, leaving a mustard smear. “Arthur being the vice president at the time. And then Guiteau demanded to be arrested. He would later claim that God had used him to determine history.”

Father McNamee took another huge bite, chewed, and swallowed.

“Are you drunk?” I asked, because this late-night lecture was intense, even for Father McNamee.

“Irish ex-priests don’t succumb to drunkenness, we just become more talkative on whiskey,” he said, winked, and then continued. “Because they didn’t know much about bacteria back then, people stuck their unwashed fingers in the wounds, President Garfield’s bullet holes became infected, and he died a long, slow, painful death. They moved him to the Jersey Shore at the end.”

This mention of the beach made me think about my dream, seeing Mom disappear into the great hole under the boardwalk.

Synchronicity? I thought.

“And when he finally passed, Garfield’s wife supposedly yelled, ‘Oh! Why am I made to suffer this cruel wrong?’”

Father McNamee paused to finish the first half of his ham on rye.

He licked mustard off his thumb and said, “During the trial Guiteau cursed at the judges and jury and seemed oblivious to the fact that he was going to be executed. In fact, he thought himself a hero and was sure the new president would grant him a pardon. The lawyers argued whether or not he was sane enough to stand trial. He was clearly insane, but they tried and executed him, anyway.”

I nodded, because I understood that this was the end of the story, but I was too tired to say anything.

Father McNamee said, “You don’t want to talk, do you?”

I looked at the clock on the microwave and said, “It’s three a.m.”

He nodded and ate the second half of his sandwich quickly.

I felt like it was rude to leave, so I didn’t.

When he finished, he stood, patted my shoulder twice, and said, “Sleep well, Bartholomew.”

I listened to him climb the steps, and then I went upstairs too and soon was back in my bed.

I lay there thinking about President Garfield and his assassin, my mother falling into a great pit and aging as she descended, and wondering if there was any connection at all.

When first light poked through my window, I felt the tiredness weighing down my head because I had spent the whole night pondering.

I showered and dressed and made breakfast.

Father McNamee was reluctant to eat the food I prepared, saying he didn’t want me waiting on him all the time, and he should be cooking for himself, but I said, “I used to cook for Mom, so I might as well cook for you too—plus cooking makes me miss her less,” and he got a very sad look on his face.

“I really appreciate your letting me stay here, Bartholomew.”

Then Father McNamee and I ate in silence and the tough (or lazy) morning birds performed their symphony in the cold outside.

I wanted to ask him if our middle-of-the-night conversation about the twentieth president wasn’t a bit insane, but I didn’t. Maybe I was afraid I was going mad like Mom and Charles J. Guiteau had. I didn’t think I could go through another battle with madness. I also worried that I was going to have to start pretending for Father McNamee now that he was living with me, because he was acting a little peculiar himself.

I don’t think I could pretend for someone else’s benefit again, because now I need to pretend for me—so that I can keep living post-Mom. But I also worried that Father McNamee was trying to tell me something, and I was too much of a moron to understand.

Don’t be Tara’s retard again!
the angry man in my stomach screamed.
Don’t trust anyone, and keep to yourself always!

When we finished washing and drying the breakfast dishes, Father McNamee said, “Get your coat. I want to show you something.”

Without saying a word, we walked for a long time through the winter morning sunshine and traffic toward the center of Philadelphia, ending up on South Twenty-Second Street.

“Here it is,” Father McNamee said, and then I followed him through gray columns and heavy wooden doors into a brick building that turned out to be the Mütter Museum.

Inside were various body parts and organs preserved in glass cases, deformed skeletons, surgical tools, and so many other curiosities. I could tell right away that it was a medical museum, but it also felt a bit like stepping into a horror movie.

We stopped in front of a display and Father McNamee said, “Look at that.”

It was an old-fashioned jar—the kind that maybe people used to preserve fruit. It was sealed at the top by a metal bar and some wax. Inside was a yellow fluid and what looked like artichokes.