Wages of Sin (8 page)

It was the last question he would ever have expected to hear coming out of his brother's mouth. The movie studio's big to-do had been in all the papers, true enough, but he wouldn't have thought his brother would be one to follow the high and low drama of the city's flapper set.

“Why, Father, it was all the excitement you could ask for,” Rourke said, drawling the words a little. “The booze was bountiful, the band was jazzy, and the mamas were hot.”

Paulie's eyes squinted half closed and one corner of his mouth deepened into a dimple—his version of a smile.

“What?” Rourke said, when his brother went on smiling and saying nothing.

“I was just wondering what it's like to make love with a sex goddess. I'm not asking for particulars, mind you,” he added quickly. “But apparently even the presence of the Virgin doesn't keep me from wondering.”

A laugh sprang from Rourke's chest, taking away with it some of the ache. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.

Paulie reached down and took Rourke's hand by the wrist, turning it over. An angry red burn marked his palm. “And what was that all about? Still shaking your fist in the face of God?”

Rourke pulled his hand free of his brother's grasp, curling his fingers over the burn. He saw where blood stained his cuff and yet he couldn't remember getting close enough to the body to have brushed against it. “I used to know a woman who hooked in a hot pillow joint,” he said. “She had this philosophy that the good Lord got bored on the seventh day and that's why He created sin.”

Paulie shook his head. “There wasn't any prostitute who said any such thing. I remember you trying out that blasphemous theory on Sister Mary Joseph in fourth grade. You got sent home, which was why you did it in the first place. There was some exhibition baseball game that day, out at City Park, and it spared you from having to suffer the consequences of playing hooky.”

“Hey, now, I suffered. She must've whacked me a good half dozen times on my hand with her ruler and she had a swing Babe Ruth himself could admire.”

Paulie smiled again, then the smile dissolved into a wincing twist of his mouth. “It was terrible, wasn't it? How Father Pat died. I can tell by your face.”

“Yes.”

Paulie's head fell back and he stared unseeing through the branches of the mimosa tree. White clouds tumbling across a sky the smoky blue of oyster shells. “God help me, Day. Why did I become a priest when I can't—”

He cut himself off, pressing his lips together tightly in that way he'd always done whenever he was facing something distasteful, as if the taste of it was in his mouth. “I was jealous of him, of Father Pat, only not for any reasons you're thinking. It's possible he might have been a saint, a real saint, only I would never want such a burden for myself, because sainthood is an awful burden—don't you think it's not. And I didn't mind either that he was everybody's favorite priest. Even Father Frank's and the archbishop's, in spite of all the trouble he was always getting into for disobedience, but I didn't care about that because he was my favorite, too…”

The tears were running freely down Paulie's face again, and Rourke couldn't help feeling a tinge of shame for his brother's sake. A legacy from their daddy, he supposed, who when they were boys had always laughed at them and called them sissies whenever they cried.

“Only I think I hated him sometimes, Day,” Paulie was saying. “I was just so jealous of him. Jealous of his being so in love with God and with His world, and for always being so darn
certain.
Certain of what it meant to be a priest, of getting it right, when I can't even…”

He clasped his hands together and his head fell forward in such a way that Rourke thought he was praying until he began to talk to the ground between his spread feet. “The first time I was called upon to administer the last rites, a ten-year-old boy had pointed a shotgun at his daddy's face and pulled the trigger. Someone had covered the man with a sheet and I lifted it to anoint his forehead with the holy oil and there was no forehead there to anoint. There was no head at all, and that was when I knew I was always going to make a lousy priest. I couldn't forgive that boy for doing that to his own flesh and blood, and I couldn't forgive the father for what he must have been doing to that boy, and I couldn't forgive God for allowing any of it to happen.”

He looked up at Rourke again, and his soul's pain showed on his face. “A priest is supposed to be God's instrument of forgiveness, but I can't forgive, Day. I can't forgive.”

Rourke wanted to say something to make it right, but there were no words. His brother carried a grief against himself for what had been done to them when they were kids. Rourke knew it, for he shared it. Only for Paulie the grief had driven him into a life of celibacy and obedience and prayer, a life that had welcomed him, perhaps, but not saved him. For Rourke, whenever the craziness took hold of him, he had gone looking for those sweet, seductive paths of self-destruction. And sometimes—most of the time—he found them.

“Tell me what happened with you last night, Paulie.”

His brother was holding himself stiff now, as if he feared that he would fly into pieces. “I'm not going to tell you that priests don't commit sins,” he said. “Even the sin of murder. But no one at this rectory would ever have hurt Father Pat. We loved him.”

Rourke said nothing.

Paulie pressed his lips so tightly together that a muscle spasmed in his cheek. “I'm your brother,” he said.

“Tell me where you were last night.”

The taut silence stretched on between them, until it was filled with the chatter of the mockingbirds and, out on the street, the roar of a car with a hole in its muffler.

“I can't,” his brother finally said, so softly Rourke barely heard him.

“I'll find it out. Eventually.”

“God,” Paulie said with a torn laugh. “Do you have any idea what you look like when you smile like that? You'd
scare
the truth out of a body if there was any truth to be had.”

“I've always been able to scare you, Paulie. After a while it got to where it wasn't even fun anymore.”

“And you always have to win. Every game we ever played, you always won.”

Rourke searched his brother's face a moment longer and then he looked away, and the other man breathed a sigh as if he'd been given a reprieve. They sat together for a small while in silence, both lost in memories that were oddly comforting in spite of all their pain, perhaps because they were shared.

“Remember,” Paulie finally said, “how our daddy used to always say, ‘This is such a sad and sinful world’?”

“Yeah. And he sure enough contributed his share of both sadness and sin.”

“Did…” The word caught in his throat as if he'd swallowed a large bubble of air. “Did you hate him?”

“Sometimes.”

Rourke waited for the rest of it, waited for his brother to ask if he forgave their father. And their mother. Paulie had never even been able to speak aloud about their mother and what her leaving had done to them.

Rourke wasn't sure what his answer would be and it didn't matter anyway, because his brother didn't ask.

Father Paul Rourke watched his brother walk away with that hard, confident way of his. It had never struck him before this moment how much Day had grown up to be the image of their daddy. The sun-tipped hair, the startling dark blue eyes, the wide mouth with its promise of cruelty. Tall and lean, but not thin, with a boxer's shoulders and a boxer's way of carrying himself, on the balls of his feet, as if spoiling for a fight.

Always so sure of himself. Always so tough.

Mike Rourke had tried to raise both his sons to be tough, and then he'd worked hard at showing them that no matter how tough they ever got their old man would always be tougher. The toughest Rourke of them all. He had made his point easily with Paulie, who had always felt powerless before his father. Day, though, just wouldn't stay down. No matter how hard or often he was hit, he kept getting up and coming back for more.

Only two years separated them, but Paul Rourke had never understood his little brother, never known where Day got his snarling courage, although he'd always felt that one of life's great mysteries would be solved if he could. All those shared hours of their boyhood, they had fought and dreamed and sinned together, and he had never really
known
his brother.

But then, how well can you ever really know someone? he wondered now. How much can you ever know of that place deep inside a man's guts where he lives? Certainly, Paulie thought, he had never really known himself.

Above the door to the seminary that he had run away to as a boy were inscribed the words of Jesus Christ:
Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
When he walked through that door he had thought he could lose all memory of where he had come from, and he had truly believed that all he had to do was take up the cross and joy would come. Only he had been wrong. He loved the Church, with all its holy mysteries and ceremonies, but he hadn't forgotten and the joy hadn't come, and he had hidden this shameful lack from himself and from the world like a sin concealed in the confessional.

And now, because of what had happened, because of what he had done, what he was
doing,
his sin would be found out.

He had heard the slam of the kitchen's screen door and footsteps on the flagstone path, and still he jumped when his pastor laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“What are we going to do now, Paul?” Father Ghilotti said.

Paulie wanted to laugh, but he was afraid that if he unclenched his throat he'd start to bawl like a child. “Pray?” he finally said, his voice breaking on the word.

“We're going to have those detectives snooping around us for a while, and we know what-all they could find. If something isn't done.”

Paulie shook his head, and this time he did laugh, although it was more of a gasping noise. “What
something
are you suggesting that we do, Father? One thing you ought to know about my little brother—our daddy used to beat on him with a bicycle chain and he could never break him. Day won't back down before anyone or anything.”

Father Ghilotti's words were nearly overcome by the rush of the wind through the mimosa branches above their heads. “We've got to trust, then,” he said, “that God will give us the grace for every possible circumstance. Foreseen or unforeseen.”

“With God's grace,” Paulie repeated obediently, but he didn't believe it. There would be no grace, no expiation for him now. No forgiveness.

Chapter Seven

T
he crack of billiard balls and the strum of a banjo leaked out the rotting shutters of the speakeasy on the corner as Daman Rourke passed by on his way home from the garage where he parked the Bearcat. He lived in a Creole cottage on Conti Street in the Faubourg Tremé, an old New Orleans neighborhood where white plantation owners had once kept their colored mistresses.

This early in the morning the street was cool beneath the scrolled iron colonnade, and the wet sheets hanging over the iron balcony of the brothel next door flapped in the wind. As Rourke walked along the brick banquette, he thought about his brother…His brother, who seemed more than happy to break bread with the families of his church, had never accepted any of Rourke's supper invitations.

Paulie had refused even to set a foot inside the cottage because it was the place where their mother had come to live after she had deserted them. Where she had come to live in sin for thirty years with her married lover. Their mother was gone now and the cottage was Rourke's, and he supposed that meant he must have found a way to forgive her. Not that she'd ever asked for his forgiveness. In one of the last conversations they'd had together, she told him she regretted nothing.

The colored woman who lived across the street and dabbled in voodoo was scrubbing down her front stoop with powdered brick and water. “You goin' to spend all night long at the
bourré
tables, you,” she called out to Rourke, “you better be buyin' some of my good-luck
gris-gris.
”

“How do you know I didn't pass the night with a lady?” Rourke called back.

“I got somethin' for that, too. Make that bone o' yours stand up tall and salute the flag.”

Rourke laughed and blew her a kiss as he pushed open the cottage's lacy iron gate. He walked down a domed brick carriageway and entered into the courtyard, where Remy Lelourie was showing a little girl in a blue jumper and a Pelicans baseball hat how to make a yo-yo walk the dog.

Rourke paused within the purple shadows of a bougainvillea vine to watch. Sunshine splashed yellow puddles on the cobblestones around them, and their laughter made melody with the rattle of the banana leaves and the water ringing in the iron fountain.

The little girl saw him first. Her full mouth burst open wide, and her smile, as it blew through his chest, was devastating.

“Daddy!”

She ran at him full tilt and he scooped her up into his arms, hugging his daughter, Katie. Hugging her tight. She smelled sweet, like crushed strawberries.

Remy Lelourie came, too, more slowly. She looked bright as a sunrise, in an orange and red patterned pullover and something that looked like men's trousers. Only they'd been cut to cup her slender hips and bottom like a man's hands, and they were sexy as hell.

“Hey,” he said.

She lifted her chin and tilted her head to the side in that way she had. A red beret was perched on her shingled hair at a rakish slant. “Hey, yourself,” she said.

Katie twisted around in his arms. “I told you, Miss Remy. I told you he would be coming home soon.”

“Why, so you did, honey,” Remy said, drawling the words, having fun. “And now here he is, just like you said, and grinning like a possum eating a yellow jacket.”

Rourke laughed. As he set Katie back on her feet, he knocked off the grimy Pels cap that she wore everywhere, including to bed. He caught it before it hit the ground and he went to put it back on her head, and that was when he saw that her braids—her beautiful thick brown braids that hung all the way to her waist—were gone.