The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (14 page)

“He left Aluela money,” Patrick said. “He left me a riddle.”

“A riddle?”

“Where does a man,” Patrick took a breath, “a good man, who loves his children, where does he disappear to, even though he knows his wife will mistreat the kids he loves?”

The telephone line offered a steady
shh
like an ocean with a single long wave or like some all-hearing thing asking eternally for silence. Father McEwen felt himself come fully awake as he tried to think how to talk to this boy.

“He did love you and your brother and sister,” McEwen said at last. “You’re right about that. He was a loving man.”

“Why do you talk about him as if he’s dead? He’s not dead.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest that he’s dead. He’s not here, is all. Not around. I’m sure he’s alive, and he still loves you. But I don’t know where he is.” McEwen glanced around his own dark bedroom, as if the man might be concealed there. “I don’t have clue one.”

“I just gave you one,” Patrick said.

Father McEwen thought he heard exasperation in the boy’s voice. “Sorry, son, but you’ll have to repeat it.”

“He loves us and knows that without him we’ll be mistreated.”

“And yet, Patrick…” Father McEwen felt a sadness descend into his gut. “He did leave.”

“He’s waiting for us to figure it out,” Patrick said. “He left my mother something, too. And you. He left you something, as well. I need you to think about it.”

“He didn’t leave me a thing,” McEwen said and stifled a yawn. “I’m not much good at this. I’m not a Sherlock. What did he leave your mother?”

“A crucifix. I took it away. She doesn’t know.”

“How can you be certain he left it for her?”

“It was under her pillow, just like the money under my sister’s pillow, and the thing on the crucifix—the towel that covers Christ’s, you know, his dick? It’s red. Painted with fingernail polish.”

“It was under her pillow?” Father McEwen’s head hurt. Why did he love drink so much? “Come again. What did you say he left you? A riddle? How can you leave a riddle under a pillow?”

“Think about what he might have left you. We could make a deal.”

“Patrick, you’re not making sense. We should talk in the daylight.”

“You find the clue, and I’ll get you Aluela.”

Father McEwen took a long breath and did not let it out, which made his speech shallow. “What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Patrick hung up the phone.

Father McEwen heard the click but still spoke. “That’s a sinful lie,” he said as he could not have said with the boy listening, his voice turning thick in his throat, dirty water becoming sludge.

He thought he again heard a siren, but it was just the sound of a car alarm somewhere far off. He staggered to his bed and lay in the dark. Had he ever found anything in all his life beneath his pillow? A nickel for a lost tooth. He lifted his head and then the pillow. Not a thing underneath. How could Patrick Corbus know he had imagined his sister’s naked legs and pimpled ass this very evening? Was he so obvious?

At the same time he understood something else. The girl had no real power over him. Arousal for a man did not necessarily connect to the deeper instincts. He was a man, after all. All priests were men. Father McEwen was a priest. Therefore, Father McEwen was a man.

The boy wanted to find his father. That was the real issue. Father McEwen took that palliative to bed with him and it permitted him slumber.

Teddy Allen roamed the rooftops of the city in search of the savior. He reasoned that the most efficient way to find Christ would be to climb to the top of a building and look for a person with a kind of glow. Christ would have some kind of glow, wouldn’t he? Teddy tramped across the connected roofs of Division Street, coming upon a couple fornicating in the cold, the boy saying, “Get the fuck going with you,” and Teddy obeyed, stumbling later to his knees against the asphalt tile from his failure to eat or sleep. At daybreak he took to the streets, staring in windows, knocking on doors.

“I’m looking for someone,” he said to the middle-aged black woman whose visage appeared behind the little square portal on the big wooden door.

“Who you looking for?” she asked him.

A metal grate separated their faces.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“He ain’t here,” she said. “Used to be he live down that way.” She pointed but Teddy couldn’t tell in which direction. “But Baptists don’t know to pay their bills, and that church is as cold as the bottom of the ocean. You wait.”

She shut the little door and left Teddy shivering on the stoop, his eyes watering from the morning chill. It occurred to him that what he was doing did not fit into his life, that it was a crazy thing to do. He had this realization on a redbrick stoop while a sullen boy delivering papers bicycled past on the asphalt’s black ice, the boy’s face bundled in cloths of many colors. This moment of insight might have been enough to send Teddy home and to bed, but wind moved through the bare branches of the single tree of any size on that city block. The oak limbs creaked their wooden misery, which became in Teddy’s mind the baleful mourn of a man on a cross.

The big door opened and the woman appeared with a steaming bundle and a tattered down vest.

“You put this on,” she said to him. “No,
under
your coat. Use your head now.” She helped him dress in his vestment of rags. “Eat this here. Get to a church got heat in it.” The package she gave him was wrapped in aluminum foil and warm to the touch. “You shouldn’t see no preacher’s breath when he’s ministering,” she went on. “Christ don’t want his flock frozen.”

Teddy nodded to all of it, aware now of his hunger. He tore open the bundle as he started off again down the street. He needed to get hold of Father McEwen, he understood, whose church, no doubt, would have heat. Biscuits and brownies, crumbling curls of bacon, quarters of apple, he ate from the silver parcel. The food formed a knot in his stomach. Teddy did not know where he was, having wandered into a part of town he had never visited before. He walked and ate, the knot in his stomach slowly coming alive, growing limbs, a head and tail.

A man stopped him on the street, speaking gibberish as far as Teddy could make out, a tall man with a dark mustache whose ends drooped past his chin. He touched Teddy’s ear with his hand, and the ear began to sting as if the man had bit it. Then the man crowed something else and walked on. What miraculous interaction had taken place, Teddy could not say. The thing inside him grunted and squealed.

Snow filled the air before him, dusted his shoulders and hair. When he had emptied the package of its precious food, Teddy began to chew on the aluminum foil. The beast in his stomach snorted its approval. What did it mean to have a pig in your innards? It kicked at him and wallowed in his belly, causing a dark and dull pain. And yet he felt he must accept this swine. After all, it breathed the air that he inhaled. He felt he must embrace its pink stinking buttocks, the scant black hair that curled like wire and scoured the lining of his stomach. He decided he would love even the corkscrew tail that Teddy could feel as he trudged through the cold, poking through his anus.

Father McEwen found Teddy Allen passed out on the church steps, his clothes smelling of feces, his forehead stippled with blood, a fine layer of snow coating it all.

“God forgive,” Father McEwen said tersely and put his fingers to the boy’s neck to check for a pulse.

Teddy’s heart still sent steady messages to the distant arteries. Father McEwen slipped his hands in the boy’s armpits and lifted him up. He chucked him a little higher, until he rested over one shoulder like a sack of flour. He did not weigh enough to contain life within him, McEwen thought.

Where Teddy had lain, a patch of ice in the shape of his body glistened in the faint sun. It made no sense that ice would form beneath a warm body. McEwen tapped it with his foot and the transparent mantle cracked.

He carried Teddy inside the church and laid him on a wooden pew. Ice lined the seams of his pants. McEwen ran to fetch a blanket. The modest cathedral had been built at the turn of the century and the cold leaked in at every join of brick. He slid the tiny lever on the thermostat forward, pushed the door through which they’d entered shut, and took a heavy blanket from the stack by the portal. The radiators began their ancient rattle and hiss as he hurried back to the frozen boy. He must call an ambulance, he thought. He might need to administer last rites.

“Is there anybody here?” McEwen called out as he ran, but the only answer was his own diminished voice, the half echo of a gaping room.

He found Teddy pushing himself upright.

“Praise God,” McEwen said automatically, crossing himself and dropping the blanket in the process.

“How did I get in here?” Teddy asked. His voice was hoarse, and he touched his throat as he spoke.

“I carried you,” the father replied, retrieving the blanket. He spread it over Teddy and spanked snow from the boy’s hair.

“From where?”

“The yard just there. You picked a patch of ice to sleep in.”

“My memory is fuzzy,” he said. “My throat is dry.”

“Just wait,” McEwen ordered.

He hurried through the nave and past the crossing, where a red dolly held the cardboard cartons wine was shipped in and a stack of cellophane-wrapped boxes on top. He took a box of communion wafers and the corked bottle of consecrated wine left over from mass. He did not think to bring the chalice or to look for the ready sack of plastic cups.

“Your head is bleeding,” Father McEwen said as he passed Teddy the bottle of wine. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the red smears. As he tore open the cellophane package, he saw caked blood on the boy’s left earlobe. “Did you have an earring?”

Teddy nodded and tipped the wine bottle up.

“You don’t have one now,” Father McEwen said. “Let’s get you some dry clothes.” He passed him a stack of wafers.

Teddy chewed on one of the dry crackers and shook his head. “I’m fine, but I don’t know why I’m here.” Bits of the wafer flew from his mouth as he spoke. He took another drink from the bottle.

“You stink of excrement, son.” Father McEwen waited, but the boy didn’t seem to catch his drift. “Let’s clean you up a bit. Really. I insist.”

Teddy shrugged. He corked the bottle again and returned the wafers. “I can’t eat this.”

Teddy followed the father outside and to the rectory, nothing more than a cottage on the church grounds. On their way Teddy witnessed trees limned with snow. He did not know what kind of trees they were, or what kind of snow. Were there kinds of snow? A tree with gray limbs and white snow, he thought. All he knew was that snow on tree limbs held a kind of attraction for him, something like the face of a pretty girl he knew he would never get to meet. The sensation was captivating, but what could he do with it? He did not yet know. He had only recently become interested.

Father McEwen’s place struck Teddy as being a lot like his, only smaller, the one room and a bath, as far as he could see. He did not know the father had taken a vow of poverty and refused better accommodations. Teddy was not ready to conceive of such a thing. He sat on the commode and stripped off his clothes as the father directed. A tub filled with water. There was no shower. Cheap, Teddy thought. He recalled then that he had been on the tops of buildings. He had searched for the living Christ. He remembered that he’d had a vision. He realized he had made a mess in his drawers.

“Don’t know how this happened,” he said.

Father McEwen shut off the rushing water. “I can’t be too hard on drinkers.”

“I haven’t drunk nothing,” Teddy said.

He didn’t reek of alcohol, but Father McEwen assumed the smell of shit had overwhelmed it. “Not drugs again, son?”

Teddy shook his head.

Father McEwen eyed him carefully. He seemed to be telling the truth. Moreover, he did not seem to be the same boy McEwen had recently visited.

“I’ll step out while you wash yourself.”

“Something happened to me,” Teddy said.

“A fight then?”

Teddy shook his head and pulled down his soiled pants.

“Sorry,” he said.

Father McEwen carefully picked up the boy’s clothes, which left a puddle on the tile. The odor of feces almost made him gag. He carried the soiled clothing to the front door, and tossed it out into the snow. A volunteer did his laundry on Tuesdays. He would rinse the garments later in the toilet. He returned to find Teddy in the tub, turned round the wrong way, his back against the metal faucet. The backward pose spoke volumes about the lad, McEwen thought. He stepped to the sink and examined himself in the mirror, dampening a washcloth to wipe traces of the boy from his own clothing.

“What happened to you then if it wasn’t a fight?”

“I seen something,” he said. “And heard it, too.”

“What was it?”

Teddy submerged in the water. He did not immediately come back up, and Father McEwen thought the boy might be in some kind of shock. He leaned over the tub. Teddy’s eyes were open beneath the water. He slowly surfaced, then pointed.

“Where’d you get that?”

Father McEwen followed the aim of Teddy’s finger. Above the tub, a small plaster Madonna and child hung on a nail. The child had been painted red with fingernail polish.

“It’s not possible,” Father McEwen said.

The late night conversation with Patrick Corbus came back to him. He reached for the Madonna but didn’t yet dare to touch it. Could it have been left by Patrick and Aluela’s father years ago?

Father McEwen reasoned that he might never have looked at that spot on the wall, given that he sat the other way around in the tub. But he didn’t believe he was quite that blind. He lifted the Madonna from the wall. It weighed almost nothing. On the back three tiny squares cut from a photograph were glued to the plaster. He could not make out what they were at first, finally realizing they were breasts and a triangle of pubic hair. A woman’s naked genitals glued to the back of this Madonna at the anatomically correct places, but on the flat side of the miniature.