You Believers (40 page)

“A couple of months ago, maybe. I was at a Unitarian place. It looked more like a New Age recreation hall than a church.”

The man nodded and looked up at the cross. Billy sat breathing his smell of soap and citrus and that old-man smell, not a stink but old and comforting, like the smell of a worn-out leather sofa that was all cracked and ripped in places but still the best thing to sit in. “My fiancée,” Billy said, “her name is Katy. She’s been missing for over three months now. It’s looking like . . .” He couldn’t say it. “It’s not looking good.”

The old man must have been trained by the priest on how to hold steady even when somebody’s world was crumbling, falling down on the ground all around. He let the silence sit there, just the way Billy needed him to. Billy needed the silence to find the words that still needed to come. “I keep hoping she’ll come back. But if she could come back, she’d be home by now.”

“The police, what do they say?”

Billy sighed. It felt good to let the words out to a stranger, to someone who’d just listen and not throw in their own version of things. “At first they thought she’d just run off. But Katy wouldn’t do that. Then they found her truck.” He bit at his lip, just the way Katy did. “But there’s new evidence. That girl in Land Fall. That man that attacked her. It’s looking like he’s the man who took Katy.”

“I’m sorry.” The man shook his head as if it were hurting him to hear the words. “That was an awful thing in Land Fall.”

“It was worse than you think.”

“It’s always worse than you think. Something like that. It’s always worse than anybody can say.”

Billy nodded. “So I came here. Katy, she always liked this church.
We live just a few blocks away, and we’d walk by here when we headed downtown. She liked the big trees outside. The old stone. She told me she liked to come inside to feel something like peace. But I don’t get it. Maybe you have to be a Catholic to feel something like peace.”

The man smiled, shook his head. “No, you don’t have to be Catholic. But it helps if you’re open to the idea, at least the possibility, of peace. That’s what Father Welly says. You can’t force grace to come, he says, no more than you can force a cool breeze to come in a stuffy house. But if you keep the doors open, in time that breeze will always come along. But nothing will come if you don’t keep the doors open.”

Billy sighed. “I’m open, man. I’ve been busted wide open to anything since Katy disappeared. She goes into a store to buy clothes—that’s the last thing we know.”

The man nodded. “I know that story. I’ve seen those pictures of her all over town. She’s a pretty girl.” He shook himself a little, sat straighter, and patted the back of Billy’s hand. “I’m so, so sorry.” Tears ran down Billy’s face. They just broke and spread like something busting through a crack in a dam. The man pressed a handkerchief into Billy’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’s clean.”

Billy couldn’t bring himself to wipe his face with it. He just squeezed the cloth in his sweaty hand. “I came here because Katy liked this place. I thought it would be old and comforting. She likes old things. I thought there would be comfort in an old church. It’s where they always go in movies, an old church. I thought there would be comfort in a place built by men’s hands, a place still standing strong after a hundred years. And I walk in, see this. It looks more like a convention center than a church. I wanted it to be the kind of church where you walk in and feel it; you feel like it’s the kind of place where God might actually hang around.”

The man laughed. “You think God just hangs around old churches? And you aren’t even Catholic?” He kept laughing in a quiet way, not shaming, just taking real pleasure in Billy sitting there next to him, giving him something to talk about. “You think God cares what a building looks like? I’d say that’s the popes. They like a nice piece of architecture.” He nudged Billy as if Billy could get the joke. Then he sat back, looked out at the cross, and shook his head. “I’m an old man. I’ve seen this world. I wasn’t always a janitor, you know. I was a soldier. Based in Germany, and let me tell you, I could show you some old, old churches, hundreds of years old. Churches built because some pope or some rich man could get cheap labor to make some kind of monument—oh, they’ll say it’s to God. But there’s always some man who takes great pride in the thing.”

“I thought they were holier back then,” Billy said.

The man took Billy’s hand, turned it to show the callused palms. “I see you are a laborer. Those men that built those old churches, they were laborers. Sure, they were working on a monument to God, but you know what got them up and out to work every morning? It was the pay at the end of the day. It was the money for bread and meat. Faith, we like to think it’s about what you believe in, but when you get my age, you’ll see that faith is in the doing things. It’s a verb, that’s what Father Welly says. It’s not a noun; it’s a verb. It’s about doing things.”

Billy smiled. “Katy would like that. She likes doing things.”

“There you go,” the man said. “I could show you churches in Berlin, Venice, Rome. All those tourists rush to see Notre Dame like it’s the grandest, most holy thing in France. And in truth it’s not nearly as big as those postcards would have you believe. People go looking for some kind of holy. And when they come back all they talk about are the flying buttresses, the gargoyles, and that stained-glass rose window. You ask me, you can find more of God in a real rose.”

“Katy would like that,” Billy said.

The man went on. “It’s just stuff. Old stuff. I’ve seen those people standing in line just to look at the relic of some of dead pope’s hand. It’s pretty creepy, if you ask me. Holiness in some dead man’s hand—even if he was a pope.” The old man paused to get his breath. He nudged Billy. “You just remember when you think about those big holy churches, it was men that laid those stones. We can tell ourselves they did it for God, but any man knows a man works for his pay. It’s the work for pay that gets him through his days.”

Billy nodded. And they both sat back, grinning at that cross like a plane above the altar. “Thank you,” Billy said.

The man stood. “And speaking of work, it’s time for me to get back to mine.”

Billy watched him gather his bucket, then pause. He wasn’t in a great rush. “Thank you for your time. Your words. You were a help to me. I guess I didn’t really need to see a priest.”

“Oh, there’s times we all need a priest. But most days you can do just fine talking to God yourself. And sometimes, just a man will do.”

Billy nodded, wanted to say
thank you
again, but he’d said enough of that. He looked at his hands folded in his lap the way a little boy would do, holding his own hands to keep them out of trouble. The man spoke, but Billy didn’t hear the words. He looked up. “What?”

The man was out in the aisle now, heading up to the front of the church. He stopped. “If you believed in God,” the man said. He shook his head. “You strike me more as an I-wish-it-could-be-true kind of man than a man who can really make that leap to believe.”

“I believed in Katy. I still believe in Katy,” Billy said.

The man took a few steps away and looked back. “So how long you gonna sit here and stare up at that cross like it’s gonna do something for you? You’ve been sitting in this church for more than an
hour, and the only thing that happened to you was me.” The man smiled.

Billy laughed. “And that’s a good thing. A very good thing.”

“So go out there and find you another good thing on this lovely day.”

Billy looked up at the altar. Not even in movies did God actually speak to someone while they were sitting in a church. In a comedy, maybe, but never anything serious.

The man sat in a pew a few rows up and looked back at Billy. “So you believe in Katy. You believe, I’m guessing, in the love of Katy.”

Billy nodded.

“And what would your Katy like to see you doing instead of sitting here feeling sad and lonely in a church?”

Billy smiled. “She’d like me to go home and weed and water her garden. It’s been so dry, you can’t water it enough.” He sat thinking about the garden. The tomatoes were so fat and ripe. He liked the sharp scent that flew in the air when he helped her pick yellow leaves from the tomato plants, and he loved that warm weight of the tomato in his hand. And the peppers, he liked to watch them go to red from green. Her peppers, they were red now. They’d be sweet. And the green beans, they were growing fast. They’d be too tough to cook if he didn’t pick them soon. Katy would probably really like it if he took some beans and tomatoes to her mom.

He looked at the man, who was watching him the way some old men just like to sit and watch the clouds move across the horizon and guess what the weather will bring. “Her garden,” Billy said, “it’s thick with weeds. Even in a drought, they never stop. Weeds, they can always find a way to grow.”

“So get to it,” the man said.

Billy stood, finally knowing a good thing he could do with his day. “I’ll bring you some of her tomatoes. She would like that. Katy
always liked to give people things. We could never eat everything she grew in that garden.”

The man smiled. “I’ll be here.”

Billy turned to leave. Stopped. “I didn’t ask your name. I’m Billy.”

The man seemed to stand taller now. Maybe he’d needed to talk to Billy as much as Billy had needed him. “Rufus, and don’t laugh.” He smiled. “It was some classic Roman name. They gave me hell back in school.”

“It’s a good name,” Billy said. “Takes a good man to carry that name. Katy always said we needed to know each other’s names, even the names of strangers. She liked to think if you had a name, it would be just a little harder for that stranger to disappear.”

“I like that,” the man said. “Billy, you go do what Katy would want you to do this day.”

“Tomorrow I’ll bring you tomatoes from the garden,” Billy said.

“I’ll be waiting,” Rufus said.

Billy walked back down the aisle, pushed open the door, and stood at the top of the steps, just breathing the breeze stirring in the air.
Katy would like this
, Billy thought. And for the first time in a long time, he was happy to be heading home.

Pain Is a Passing Thing

Jesse lay in his bunk and stared up at the ceiling. He moved his eyes along the top row of the cinder-block wall, his gaze drifting from left to right, back to the next row down, again left to right, next row down again, as if this were doing something. Nothing to do but stare at the walls and pick at the tobacco tar stuck under his nails and try not to make noise until he was sure Fat Mack in the bunk below was asleep.
Fucking luck
, Jesse thought,
to get locked up with a freak
. But it could be worse. And at least at the work farm he could get out in the air, even if it was just to go down the rows of tobacco and pull the leaves.
Fuck this
, he thought,
fuck, fuck, fuck
. He squeezed his eyes shut, remembered he’d get nowhere with that way of thinking. He had to have a plan.

He opened his eyes and waited for Fat Mack to slip into those snoring sounds he made when he wasn’t faking sleep. Fat Mack was one mean man. They said one second he was just a fat man with a lazy eye and pissed off about something, and the next second a knife punched a man between the ribs, and the man fell to the floor, and Fat Mack, he was gone. The best thing to do with Fat Mack was stay out of his way.

That was what the guards told him that first day, said, “We’re locking you up with the meanest motherfucker we’ve got. Fat Mack hates a cellmate. We don’t know what he does to them, but they always crying and begging to get switched out.” They said they figured Jesse for a fighter, not a crier. They were taking bets on who’d win this one and told Jesse the money sure wasn’t riding on him to win. The guard had laughed as he shoved him into his cell. The door clanged shut, and Jesse had stood there, his eyes on the heap of a fat man squeezed into the lower bunk, the slick, balding head mottled like a cantaloupe. The pasty fat face lay still on the gray pillow, the puffy eyes closed. Jesse knew fat people slept hard. They slept deep, were slow to rise. But then they said Fat Mack moved like a rhino when he wanted to. Jesse stood there watching.

Once he was sure the man was asleep, Jesse started pacing quietly, not making a sound. Back in juvy they’d called him ghost boy for the way he could sneak up. He had paced the cell until he was feeling steady and thinking everything would work his way, and when he stopped to get up on his bunk, he turned and saw Fat Mack’s eyes open and dull and gray, staring just the way a gator in the shallows looks out, waiting for the prey in sight to move a little closer. Jesse didn’t flinch. He just stood there smelling sweat and piss and something a little sweet and rancid, like fruit cocktail going rotten somewhere in a corner of the room. It was the smell of bodies locked up a long time, the smell of bodies leaching into the concrete, the mattresses, the paint. He just stood still and met the fat man’s gaze.

They stared like that, Fat Mack still as a mountain and Jesse standing there. Jesse didn’t have a choice but to be the first to move. “Fuck this,” he said, and with one smooth leap he was up in his bunk. Then he heard Fat Mack laughing this low, chuckling sound that shifted to hard and breathless laughing. Fat Mack coughed and laughed. Then he spat. Jesse heard the splat of it right there on the
floor. “They call me Fat Mack,” he finally said. “And I don’t mind being called Fat Mack.” He stopped talking, was just breathing like he was working up the words. Then he punched at the bottom of Jesse’s bunk. Jesse didn’t know if he’d used his fist or his foot. Fat Mack said, “Don’t ever underestimate a fat man, boy.” There was that breathing sound, and then that punch to the bunk again. Fat Mack said, “You.” Jesse lay there a few seconds trying to figure what was next. “What they call you, asshole?”

“Jesse.” He spoke the name to the ceiling, hoped he hadn’t already pissed the fat man off. “They call me Jesse.”

“Well, all right, then,” Fat Mack said. That was pretty much all they said that day. But it had been three weeks now. Three weeks of watching, waiting, holding back.