Then, like a wish, the lights came on, and there was a guard outside the bars looking down at him, grinning. The guard was black.
“Hey, Father Rat,” the guard said, “I got a joke for you.”
“Fuck off.” Clay reacted with knee-jerk automatism.
“Hey, what kind of language is that? Anyhow, I want to tell you the joke. How do you get a nun pregnant?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“You dress her up as an altar boy.”
Clay, who’d got up on his feet again, had no more ready invective. He just scowled.
“I guess you heard that one before, huh? Anyhow, I got good news for you, Father Rat. All your commotion about how it’s cruel and unusual for you to be locked up all on your lonesome has made a dent. You are to have a roommate, and you won’t be so lonely anymore. Congratulations.”
“Have you got a cigarette?” Clay asked. “I need a cigarette.”
“Since when did you start smoking?”
“You want me to say please, I’ll say please. I need a fucking cigarette. I don’t feel good.”
“Sure thing,” said the guard. He took a pack of Kools from his pocket, lighted one, and handed it through the bars.
Clay inhaled gratefully. For one brief shining moment he felt okay. Then he felt sick again.
“You know, Father Rat, this shouldn’t be for me to say, but you aren’t looking very well. I don’t think you’re taking care of yourself. Maybe you need more exercise. Maybe it’s your diet. But you don’t look well.”
Clay tried to concentrate on the cigarette and ignore the guard.
Another guard appeared, also black, with a prisoner in handcuffs and manacles. While the guard who’d been harassing Clay unlocked the cell door, the other guard took off the new prisoner’s cuffs and manacles and pushed him into the cell.
“Enjoy yourselves, boys,” said the first guard, and then they both went off, before Clay could think to bum another cigarette.
The new prisoner plopped down on the lower of the two bunks with a sigh. He was a big dude, about Clay’s age, with a dago mustache and a build that looked like he’d already served a few years and spent all his time in the weight room. He looked up at Clay, and their eyes locked. It was like arm wrestling, and Clay lost the first match.
“I read about you,” the guy said.
“Yeah? What’d you read?”
“What I read made me think we got a few things in common. That may be why they put us together. Birds of a feather?”
“You got a cigarette, buddy?”
“You got one in your mouth. Cocksucker.”
Clay went onto red alert. “Hey, you watch your mouth.”
The guy just smiled, almost in a lazy way. “No offense intended. I guess you like to be addressed… how? As Father? That’s okay with me.”
There was a silence. Clay smoked. The guy went on looking.
When Clay threw the butt of the cigarette into the toilet bowl, the guy held out his hand and said, “Let me introduce myself.” There was a pentagram tattooed across the back of his hand. “Crispo. Donald Crispo. Does it ring a bell?”
Clay didn’t offer his own hand. “Should it?”
“Well, I’d like to think so. I’m not going to have any more opportunities anytime soon to reach the attention of the media. And neither will you, right? Life without parole is one of the things we got in common.”
It hit him like a sledgehammer. “Life without parole?”
“So I guess we’ll have to learn to be friends. But I figure we can.”
Another long silence. Then Crispo said, “I’ll tell you something funny, Father.”
“What’s that?”
“I got psychic powers. No—really. Like, when I was going after the next one? I could tell. I could tell if he really wanted it. ‘Cause some of them do, you know. Even the kids. Some of them have such shitty lives they really deep-down would rather be dead. And those ones I just left alone. ‘Cause what would be the satisfaction? It’s like eating an animal that died of natural causes. But with you, the minute I saw you, I knew: This guy is ready. This guy needs me. You know how I knew?”
“No. I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know my own fucking name.”
“I knew,” Crispo went on, “‘cause I could see the tattoo.”
“The tattoo?”
“On your chest. The mark of Satan. I can see it.”
Only now did it dawn on Clay what had happened. He’d been switched. Boscage had set him up! All the training he’d undergone in the transmentation process had been a scam. Boscage had taken over Clay’s younger, abler body and shunted Clay’s psyche into the sinking, stinking vessel that he’d intended to receive it all along.
Clay didn’t have to look into a mirror now. He knew now who he was. Who the guards and Crispo and all the rest of the world would think he was.
“I could see it,” Crispo went on, “right through your fucking T-shirt. It said in the papers how you thought you had this tattoo that wasn’t there. But it is there. It’s Satan’s face, escaped from hell. And I can see it. And you know why I can do that, Father? ‘Cause it’s on me, too.”
Crispo fell silent for a spell, and a sad look came over his face. “You never read about me? Or seen anything on TV?”
Clay shook his head.
Crispo sighed. “Well, that’s fame for you. Fifteen fucking minutes.”
“What did you do?” Clay asked.
“You honestly never heard?”
Clay shook his head.
“I was Crispo, the Mad Dentist.”
Clay made no response.
Crispo smiled. “But I also tattoo.”
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 35
