by Dino Parenti
Mostly though, he sought forgiveness for himself in the peace of night, for as the further he considered the policeman’s legitimate transgressions, the more he became filled with a rejuvenating, transcendent satisfaction that under holy light should not be.
V
“How’s your strength?” the priest called back as they approached the first of the dunes.
The policeman considered his rending feet, his scourged flesh, the steel bracelets scissoring across his wrists, and in the end he just smirked.
“Just a tad parched, padre.”
“We both are,” said the priest.
They started to climb.
5
“What’s the verdict, padre? Come to any epiphanies regarding our mutual, ticklish state of affairs?”
Three days since his last visit. The priest had intended to prepare his case in advance should the policeman return, but his free time was spent appealing for their mutual souls, Nutter’s blind gaze acting as both sanction and accelerant.
“That depends. Have you ceased to visit murder upon your fellow man for all time?”
The policeman sighed long and pensive.
“My fellow man indeed,” he said, weariness tugging at each syllable. “Since our last palaver, I have abstained.”
“And do you feel relief for this?”
“I don’t feel anything at all about it. Tracking down wild pigs requires patience. All in good time.”
Something toxic fluttered in the priest’s chest, and he admonished himself for the post-breakfast cigarette he’d sworn to shun while brushing his teeth.
“But what of your oath to uphold the law?”
A bristly rasp issued from behind the screen, as if from the scratching of facial stubble.
“Aren’t our prohibitions only as valid and resilient as our capacity to enforce them?”
The priest traced the vertical of the cross beneath his vestment before swallowing a bitter lump. “Do you not accept then that the Almighty watches over us and guides our hearts and actions?”
He heard the policeman shifting about—felt the weight of his boots as they tapped a metronomic rhythm on the oak floor until he arrived at his new train, whereupon the drumming stopped.
“I came to the conclusion some time back, I can’t say when exactly, that to know the creator of all things would be an impossibility, lest it permitted its existence to be viewed at a level so inversely proportional to his presumed omniscience, that it would render our notions of status and morality as no more sacred nor significant than a crumb of cheese used to lure lab rats into a maze.”
His foot-tapping hastened as he spoke.
“How can we ever claim then that He’s indeed out there, or denned tightly within these doughy shells? Shells, I might add, equipped with the most fickle, inadequate senses?”
The priest clutched at the crucifix through his frock.
“Were you never of faith? Did you not ever feel His grace?”
The policeman uttered a sound that approached bewilderment, but dared not cross.
“Isn’t our sense of grace . . . merely representational . . . ?”
He seemed to ask the question of another within the confessional, and for the first time his usual eloquence faltered.
“Constructs our brains . . . cobble together . . . and assimilate . . . ? Who’s to say then if a man’s emotional response to an admittedly intense experience . . . holds any grander validity if it’s inferred to be . . . to be the endowment of a creator, or the . . . the by-product of garden-variety adaptation?”
A stomp rattled the confessional, and it took the priest a moment to acknowledge that it had been his own foot that had come down.
“If it’s all randomness,” he said, dabbing the sweat from his brow, “then how do you define value?”
More nattering preamble from the policeman before reining in control.
“Value isn’t just some monopolized commodity of the pious. You carve your own damn meaning from . . . ”
The priest felt him suddenly rise.
“I’ll be leaving you now, padre. I didn’t know this was an intervention for your benefit. Good luck to you, sir.”
He marched out of the booth, only this time the priest didn’t hesitate to rise up after him, and when he parted the drapes he watched as a very obvious policeman was about to plow through the church doors.
“Wait!” he called, startling the bowed heads of the sprinkling knelt in prayer.
The policeman paused to square up his hat, but didn’t turn.
“I was wrong about you, padre,” he barked back before pushing past laborers pretending to still caulk the front door.
VI
Part way up a steep dune, the policeman’s legs finally gave out and he crumpled to his knees.
Heeding the struggle, the priest halted his mare and drew her to a profile with the officer.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
At regaining his breath, the policeman adjusted his crooked hat and peered up at the priest from under its stubby brim.
“If your intent . . . is attrition . . . then you should go right ahead and kill me now, padre. I’ve only ever bent a knee . . . to propose marriage . . . or tie my shoes. What you’re hoping for . . . I ain’t wired for.”
The priest squeezed tightly on the saddle’s pommel.
“And no offense,” continued the policeman, “but nothing about you . . . bleeds to do murder. That truth . . . outshines all others in your eyes.”
“You humble me, officer.”
The policeman snorted, only to grimace the all-over agony his own sass had wrought.
“I confess then to be at a loss . . . as to your intentions this day, padre.”
The priest thought again of the officer’s victims. One in particular stood out from the others. A man named Toland. Memories of the trial have haunted him daily since. The testimony of the little boy with the red hair and the guileless eyes with the shattered spine from being tossed out a second-story window by Toland. To prove some point about determination or the like to his mother, the prosecutor said of the motive. The perpetrator remained especially glib during this recount.
When the priest read the news of the Toland’s demise via arrow a month earlier, he nodded and smiled, and took confession with renewed vigor.
“My intentions,” the priest said, “are to transcend all we assumed insurmountable, or perish in the process. I accept now that neither flesh nor brick can contain us any longer. We’ve breached skin and mortar alike, you and I. Today, we test our allegiances one last time.”
6
Two weeks and the policeman hadn’t returned. In the intervening time, one recently exonerated rapist, found eviscerated in Mt. Washington, plus a reduced-sentence, community-serving spouse-and-child abuser, likewise disemboweled and discovered handcuffed in the trunk of his car two days after it had been set on fire in Sun Valley.
This evening, a pair of meth-heads loosed on a gang-rape charge upon witness recantation, found hog-tied and emptied of their innards in a dumpster behind their makeshift lab in Lancaster.
For the first time, the words serial killer were being tossed about.
The priest lip-read the news anchors on the silenced bar television, the only eyes in the place not draped upon the stage and the pair of topless amazons engaged in a synchronized pole dance. Not that anyone ever paid him any mind, what with him being out of his vestments after dark. Not even the barkeep who had wordlessly placed the shot of Old Crow before him had bothered to raise an eye his way.
Nutter had died in the night. He was fine the day before, alert and even spirited while attempting several fragmentary play-bows before rolling on his back and offering his belly, along with his customary blind gaze of trust while the priest engaged in his late-night prayers.
But when he opened the door this morning to feed him, Nutter’s stiff body was curled up against the screen door, several columns of ants streaming to-and-from the corpse
from beneath the doormat. The priest had to sit on the floor to gain enough leverage to push away all eighty pounds of dead dog in order to get out of his own apartment. Only then had he noticed the blood trickling from his muzzle.
“It truly gets hot out there, doesn’t it?”
The priest didn’t bother to look at the man who’d just taken the adjacent corner stool. He knew that voice like he knew his own father’s.
“Yes, I know,” the priest told the sunburnt television reporter on-the-scene. “I have an uncle in Indian Wells with a small ranch that I visit often. He’s infirmed.”
“Ah, now that’s a shame,” said the policeman. He glanced nonchalantly across both shoulders. “Not exactly where you’d expect to find a man of the cloth, wouldn’t you agree, padre?”
And for the first time the priest faced the policeman squarely.
Much like his own face, the policeman’s reflected the ordinary, neither homely nor handsome. Classically anonymous. In his mid-forties or thereabouts, with a soft, round face and hazel eyes brimming with paradoxical kindness. Not at all what he had imagined, but then neither were so many other things, and that was enough for him to toss back the drink he had intended to leave untouched, then said, “Did you find me here, I wonder?”
The policeman’s cheeks dimpled. “Missed you in the box the last couple of days. I hope you’re feeling alright.”
“I took some days to recompose,” the priest said after a pause. “So you have been following me.”
“What’s a little surveillance amongst friends?”
The priest snorted. “So you were worried then . . . ”
The policeman, dressed in jeans and a white tucked-in polo, shrugged an uncanny mixture of boredom and acquiescence before nodding at the television. “My first twofer. Wouldn’t recommend taking down pairs with a bow. I winged the skinny one in the neck as he tried to run before I put a second arrow in his back below the heart. Certainly wouldn’t advise it without a syringe or two of Fentanyl to even the odds. I’m keeping some in the car from now on. Future contingencies and so forth.”
Without the screen between them, he was far less stilted and measured, though the priest supposed that the majesty of the confessional augmented his own impressions.
“You can’t stop yourself anymore, can you?”
The policeman smiled sheepishly back.
“That’s what you’re for, padre. Or were, in any case.” He turned somber then, and even made to flag down the bartender before staying his own hand. “I’d hoped you had a point of view I hadn’t considered. I truly did. An angle on the world different from all the tired slogans pitched by politicos and life-coaches and, no offense, your ilk.” He plucked a pistachio from the bowl between them and placed it delicately on his tongue before curling it into his mouth. “My grandfather, he believed there were others privy to these angles. He was a cop too, before he was killed many years ago, not long after retiring. Some drunk driver running from a *** & E ran him off the road. I’ve wondered sometimes ever since if he still believed that in those final moments. Likely so. Stubborn, idealistic fool to the end, my grandfather. Alas, it’s not a prophet’s world. Too many opposable thumbs governed by . . . by the same crude, rote sentience . . . ”
The priest unwittingly embraced his elbows.
“Perhaps you’re right about that. But what about your parents? Can you not turn to them?”
“Oh, my folks are long gone, padre.”
“But you sully their memory doing the things you’ve done.”
The policeman shook his head. “My father was a veteran, a hunter, unsullied by societal conventions. He would’ve understood. Hell, the old son-of-a-bitch would’ve offered to help if he was still around.”
“And your mother who carried and nurtured you? What would she say to your solutions?”
Another pistachio disappeared. “Well, you got a point with her, padre. She didn’t like it all too much that my old man took me along on hunts. Hated it just as much when he’d mount the heads on the living room wall. She made him take them down though. Wouldn’t have things in the house I’d either killed or witnessed killed. But you wanna know the irony? She’s the one who taught me archery. She was a homemaker and midwife, and her father taught her the bow-and-arrow when she was a teen. Got to the stage where I started running wild at about the same age, she figured the discipline would do me the same good. As to whether or not the experiment was a success, I’ll let you be the judge of that, padre.”
“There may still be a chance,” said the priest. “I don’t suppose you’d care to return to the church with me to discuss . . . options?”
The policeman chuckled. “You sound like my shift commander whenever he’s sweeping his shit under the rug. Pardon my French.”
The priest sighed. “Yours is a different level of scandal.”
“Is it really? Yours or mine? When you get down to it, we’re both just the skim-off in a grand dilution of competing interests. The things we’ve sworn to? Bought out from under us, and righteousness always gets kicked to the curb. Like a deadbeat renter.”
The priest took stock of every wayward, bored face in the room before pinching the bridge of his nose and hoisting his red eyes back to the television.
“Is that what you were thinking when you . . . ?”
The policeman squinted at the map on the screen that indicated where the Lancaster bodies were found in relation to downtown.
“To be honest, padre, I was too concerned minding my bearings to be hindered by the grand questions of being. Ever try to dead reckon your way someplace? An old navigational method where you extrapolate a future course based on the direction and time it took to get to your current one. My father, he didn’t like maps. Thought that destinations were just smudges interrupting an otherwise immaculate network of red and blue arteries. He loved how they intertwined on the page, you know? Like a schematic of human circulation.”
“Sounds like a method fraught with error,” the priest said after mulling over his words. “Risk of drift is high, yes?”
“Yeah, but straying’s part of the adventure, yes? Creating your own tracks?” He watched the priest reach over and pluck a few pistachios of his own. “In any case, my father didn’t teach me dead reckoning so much as I’d embezzled it. Had this thing he liked to say though. On our drives to go hunt. Mumbled it, like me and my brothers weren’t even in the car with him: ‘Every man is born to a base map of earth-bound topography, roads and highways to be plotted in real time, asphalted with real heart, real pain, real fear. This is the price exacted for the privilege of existence: the necessary, self-taught plowing of roads and byways with unsure hands.’ Anyway, if you ever wondered from where my self-righteousness stems . . . ”
“Are we to leave it on the curb then?” asked the priest.
“Leave what?”
“Righteousness. Pass it by, hoping it evolves legs on its own?”
Something dark and unbridled gleamed in the policeman’s eyes, only to cloud over just as quickly. He reached across the counter and gave the priest’s shoulder a congenial squeeze.
“You’re a decent man, padre, and I truly wish you well. As for me . . . ? Well. Whatever happens now, you’ll likely never see me again, except for on the boob-tube. Certainly if this is to end along predictable lines.”
The priest regarded him through weighty lids.
“You’d be surprised, my son, how things can sometimes still turn. The Heavenly Father can sometimes still amaze us.”
The policeman grinned as he rose from his stool.
“I’ve known many fathers, and there was precious little heavenly in the lot. My own? He sowed his wild oats all over creation. Kept making siblings I’ll never know of, till someone beat his face off in a Kentucky bar.”
“Are you a married man, officer? Any children that need a protector?”
The policeman rubbed at his chin and stared pensively in the direction of the stage, mostly at the redhead, the one s
porting the state of Texas pasties and arching her back till her auburn pate met the floor.
“Never ended up marrying. As to any whelps of my own, none that I’m officially privy to. I guess that ended up working out in my favor after all. Goodbye, padre.” He started for the back door.
The moment he was gone from view, the priest slipped off his stool and, fighting off the inevitable assault of second-thoughts, followed him out.
7
After scrubbing Nutter’s blood from the balcony floor, the priest draped a towel over the dog’s body and then entered Eddie’s apartment.
The man had made no effort to conceal his doings. Two open cans of dog food and a container of rat poison sat on the kitchen counter.
The gun was in the same middle drawer as it always was, and it took the priest a moment to figure out how to eject the cylinder. All six chambers were filled. He shook out five and gave it a generous spin before palming it back into place the way he’d seen in The Deer Hunter.
He’d heard Eddie come home late. Heard him berate Nutter on the balcony. Heard him through the wall on the phone afterwards laughing, then crying, then laughing again with the same inebriated fullness.
Now from the hall he could hear his grizzly-bear snores, punctuated by whimpered mumbles.
The priest parted the beaded curtain into the bedroom. Eddie had only managed to shuck off one shoe before passing out on the bed in his night clothes—clothes the priest realized were a size too large for his frame. His head had rolled almost fully off his pillow, with only a string of drool still mooring him to it.
Around his mouth orbited the speckled remnants of his last meal.
The cocking hammer clicked louder than anticipated, but Eddie only smacked his lips and resumed snoring. The priest held the gun by his head, close enough that the rising from his breathing caused his forehead to brush intermittently against the muzzle. The man smelled faintly of something familiar, but the priest figured that Eddie was an infrequent bather at best.
For the next ten minutes they remained trapped in this photograph until something in Eddie’s dream tripped or punched back, whereupon he shuddered awake with a start.
