The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (13 page)

At the fortune-teller’s Aluela had sat in the kitchen eating soup while Lucinda kept appointments with her clients. “These are my regulars,” she’d said. “My bread and butter.” One, she claimed, came to her every day. “He must spend half his paycheck on me,” she boasted. Aluela had been surprised to hear that it was Teddy Allen, who was a friend of her brother James’s. He didn’t seem the type to embrace the future.

The next day, just as Lucinda predicted, Teddy came again. When Lucinda left to read Teddy’s future, Aluela put a glass to the wall and listened through it—a trick she had seen in a movie—but it did no good.

“What did he talk about?” she asked after the appointment was over and Lucinda had returned to the kitchen.

“Privileged information,” Lucinda said and then laughed. “His mother is harassing him to quit coming here. She sent a priest to talk to him.”

“Father McEwen,” Aluela said. “Mother calls him in to paddle us when we’ve been bad.” It was no coincidence that she thought of this. She knew she’d have a beating coming. “Mother doesn’t have the strength to hit us as hard as she thinks we deserve.”

“He does that?” Lucinda seemed astonished.

The priest’s paddling had not seemed the least bit strange to Aluela until she witnessed this reaction.

“He barely taps us,” Aluela said shyly. “He’s the only one who has a chance of talking her down. Patrick used to could, but since the shoplifting thing, she won’t listen to him.”

Lucinda fetched them beer from her refrigerator and seemed to really listen as Aluela described her life, which, as she spoke of it, became astonishingly exotic. She’d had no idea her life was so colorful. She hadn’t talked to people about it before, and even now she had not told Lucinda about screwing her father. She saved that, saying only that he had disappeared without a trace.

Then she said, “Can you really see the future?”

They had switched from beer to hot tea by that time, and Lucinda set her cup on the table to concentrate. She cocked her head and stared off at the wall for a while, and then eyed Aluela, leaned forward, and kissed her hair.

“I can see that you have better times ahead of you,” she said, as if it were a bold prediction and, at the same time, making fun of the whole enterprise. It had served as a cue for Aluela to gather herself and head home.

Patrick entered the living room with a single suitcase he had packed for them both. Father McEwen extended his hand to help Aluela up. His palms were sweaty. He had written a message to their mother, which he pinned to the couch with one of the needles their mother used to pierce herself. He ushered them out to his big black car. The walk was icy, and Aluela hoped Patrick had thought to pack mittens. Snow lighted against her face and in her hair. She was surprised to find the car warm inside. The father had gone out and warmed it up for them. For
her
, she thought and looked to her brother, who was having the same thought. Her sideways glance at the priest and Patrick’s purse of his lips conveyed it all, each to the other. Father McEwen’s interest in Aluela was more than priestly. Although, as she saw it, not more than fatherly.

Masturbation humiliated Father McEwen, but it was a compromise he’d worked out with himself decades ago. The girl was barely pubescent, he told himself. This was the kind of exaggeration that suited people who needed to argue with themselves but did not wish to win; its exaggeration permitted the libidinous side of him to dismiss it, while the priestly side held tight to the indignation. Meanwhile, the actual Father McEwen pulled out his penis and began to rub it between his thumb and forefingers. The cleft in the girl’s behind appeared first to him, and then he had a recollection in his fingers of the soft resiliency of those feminine cheeks. He had bandaged her quickly, but he’d had to press the tape down, and he could not miss the pucker of her anus and the tuft of hair below.

Father McEwen, some years past, had entered into an amorous affair with a married woman. She was not of his parish, not even a Catholic—not that such facts excused anything. He had known that it was a significant sin, and he had also known that this fact contributed to his pleasure. The woman had not loved him. From the very beginning of the affair, he had seen that she relished the thought of seducing a priest. Later, he realized that she had been promiscuous throughout her marriage.

He had confessed this affair to no one but God, and he did not believe God had forgiven him.

Liam and Mary Hitchens had taken in the Corbus children as if there were nothing unusual in it, as if the kids were merely there for a sleepover. Liam had almost no talents of consequence except this ability to embrace others, but it had served him well. His wife was, to Father McEwen, the most remarkable person in his acquaintance. If he had met her in his youth and she had been amenable, he would have given up the cloth for her. He liked to believe as much, anyway. He liked to think of himself swept away by his passions. The image of Mary Hitchens mixed in his mind with the image of Aluela’s young bottom.

His affair could have proved that he was a passionate man. He had, after all, risked a great deal to pursue it. But he knew that his desire had been all but generic. She had been available, attractive, and out of the Catholic loop. Lucky for him, she no longer lived in his city. He did not like to recall her in detail, would not picture her when his body demanded its sexual urge be placated. He tried not to permit her name to be uttered by the voices that tirelessly went on and on in his head, the many-layered soliloquies of a typical adult mind. Diana. Like the pagan goddess. The mole on her inner thigh would press against his tongue like a button.

He didn’t take long to come, catching his unholy seed in his meaty fist. What pathetic creatures were men alone, he thought, rinsing his hands in the dark bathroom. A siren sounded outside, startling him, so loud and near that he stepped to the narrow window and pushed aside the terry-cloth curtain. It scared him, that judgmental noise, as if it were an omen, a sign that his mortal sins were worse than he imagined, as if the world—as well as God—had caught on to him.

He let the curtain go and ran himself a bath. Father McEwen felt dirty.

Teddy Allen often peeped into Lucinda’s window. She made it easy for him. The green flag she used as a curtain in the kitchen had a gap at the top. All he had to do was push a garbage can in the alley close to the city dumpster, climb up onto the dumpster, set his feet on the metal rail the garbage truck used to lift the giant metal box, then lean forward until he could catch himself against the brick wall of her building. This position provided him a good view of the entire kitchen. The bedroom window would have been better, but she had actual curtains there and no available dumpster. The green flag had an image of a man on it, and the words “Redemption Songs.” It had to do with recycling, he figured. She looked the environmentalist type.

Was Teddy, human lean-to in an unlit alley just to glimpse this woman he saw every day, merely a fool, or was he something more dangerous? He had violence in him, but it was deeply buried, cushioned by strata of fear, self-loathing, sloth, and a thin slice of humanity. He had never hit anyone in his adult life, nor had he taken advantage of a girl. Which was not the same as saying he was a good man or even one of average ethical standards. Prying in this acrobatic fashion caused him not a second’s pause. He worried only that a police cruiser might decide to check the alley, and he could get arrested. Questioning the morality of his actions didn’t occur to him.

He had not expected to see Jimmy’s little sister there, and he wished that she would leave. There had been one time when Lucinda had come into her kitchen in panties and a blouse—just to flick off the light, but still. It didn’t seem likely he’d get to witness that again with Jimmy’s sister present. An angry, urgent sensation clutched him at the thought of this interference. The feeling had more to do with his empty stomach than annoyance with Jimmy’s sister, but he didn’t know that.

He couldn’t think of the girl’s name at first. She and Lucinda talked and drank beer. He’d love a beer. And a sandwich. Good beer pleased him. It was the one thing in his life about which he was a snob. He would not drink American beer even if it were offered to him free of charge. He would eat most anything, though. He cursed the priest for making him miss his meal. Teddy did not have the kind of body that could go long without food.

The girl’s mother had run off, Teddy recalled—incorrectly, as it had been the father of Aluela who had disappeared. Teddy remembered that there was something wrong with their mother, as well. MS, he thought. No wonder she ran away. Probably offed herself. This made him think of the suicide of Lot’s wife and prostitutes shinnying up the cross to sponge blood off the holy feet of Christ.

While the ingestion of certain drugs had caused many a temporary disarray in Teddy’s mind, the current and ongoing confusion was not the product of chemical experiments but of infrequent mental exercise. He thought of himself as an outlaw but acted like any other person whose passions were shaped largely by television. Lethargy was his byword, or would have been had he the vocabulary and the self-knowledge to name his creed. His desire for the fortune-teller had become the first exceptional event in a life so tawdry and yet so ordinary as to have no texture whatsoever.

All that was about to change.

His arms grew weary, and he felt faint. He had to push himself back with enough force to right himself, but not so powerfully that he fell into the dumpster or onto the alley floor. He executed this push successfully, then settled down against the metal roof that covered half the dumpster, and let his arms take a rest.

Visions have come to less likely characters than Teddy Allen. Drunkards commonly see God, and drug addicts are known for their quixotic whatnot. Prostitutes have witnessed wallpaper moving in a rhythm countercurrent to a john’s meaningless thrusts and understood that their lives had to change. Judges have observed their reflections in the gold cuff links of prosecutors and suddenly apprehended what it actually meant to be judged. Pilots have seen clouds take the shape of Christ’s holy countenance; they have seen the blue become transparent as glass, revealing brilliant bricks of gold and gorgeous bare feet separated by clusters of wing tips. Even priests have had moments in the dark, holding their aching cocks, thinking of girls whose blistered buttocks they earlier tended, when they discover themselves concentrating on the girl’s pleasure, as if this imagined scene, to be made real enough to satisfy the body’s desire, demanded of them not only arousal but compassion and something like love.

Teddy Allen leaned against the dumpster’s metal roof, hunger no longer a sensation in his stomach but a constellation of deficiencies in his head, pinpoints of loss, the brain’s craving for nutrition making these modest stars of desire to prickle the gray matter. Teddy stared intently at the mouth of light above the green flag, when suddenly the image of the man on the flag began to move. Teddy could not know that the heater in Lucinda’s kitchen had kicked on, causing the flag to flutter. Visions often need a little help to get started. The dark man on the flag turned his head to stare at Teddy, his lips pursed, and he began to whistle. Did it sound like a teapot’s trilling? What whistle does not? Teddy couldn’t see Lucinda putting tea bags into porcelain cups. He could see nothing but the dark whistling man on the flag. His narrow chest tightened and he held his breath.

The man’s initial speech was unintelligible, a rumble of words that had begun before Teddy realized it, the sentences running together like the rattle and buzz of traffic. But as he listened, meaningful language began to reach his ears—words, random at first. “Interior,” he heard quite clearly. “Afterburner… hopeless… indigestion.”

Synapses fire so rapidly in even the dullest of brains that one suggestion can free a mountain of hallucination; what else, after all, could account for seeing that which cannot be seen and hearing that which cannot be heard? The voices of angels are in all our heads, down there next to that Alka-Seltzer jingle we can’t seem to forget, the one that played on television decades ago and showed all those bellies.

Teddy Allen heard at last a straightforward sentence come from the black man’s lips: “Christ lives in your city.”

The price of natural gas being what it was, Lucinda had the thermostat on low. The heat cut off. The vision ended. Teddy Allen slid down to the edge of the dumpster and hopped off. He stared again at the green flag. He made a mental note to look up
redemption
when he got to somewhere that might have a dictionary.

His legs wobbled as he walked on the unsteady ground of his new life.

Patrick Corbus rose from the sofa where the Hitchenses had made him a bed and slipped into the narrow hallway where he had earlier spotted a telephone. The house was quiet except for the snoring of Mr. Hitchens. Patrick imagined that flap of hair that Mr. H. swept over his head during his waking hours: Did it lie on the pillow beside the man’s bare dome? Did his wife touch this thin book of tresses, page through it in the connubial dark? Patrick thought she might. Unlike Father McEwen, Patrick could see why the lovely Mary loved this unlovely man. She required the weight to keep her from ascending directly to the clouds.

Patrick took the lamp and phone book from the little table and put the lamp on the floor to restrict the spread of the light. He looked up the number, killed the lamp, and dialed.

By the sound of the priest’s voice in the receiver, Patrick guessed that the call had wakened Father McEwen.

“Who is this?” the priest asked, adding too late the compensatory “please.”

“Patrick Corbus,” Patrick whispered. “I need to know something. It can’t wait.”

“She hasn’t called,” Father McEwen said. “I made the note to her very clear. I thought she would have called by now.”

“She doesn’t want us back,” Patrick said. “Anyone with half a brain…” He caught himself. “I need to know where my father is.”

“Why are you asking me that?” Father McEwen wanted to know. “At one—almost two—in the morning? And him gone three years. How should I know?”