On Broken Wings

by Francis Porretto

  She shook her head. "Don't need to. Let's make it Marie."

  "Someone you knew once?"

  "Yeah."

  He wheeled the truck into his driveway, killed the engine and set the parking brake. "Christine Marie D'Alessandro. I like it. It has a lot of wear in it." He turned to her. "Say it to yourself a lot of times, Chris. You want to be used to it before you take it out into the world, okay?"

  For the first time since her arrival in his life the previous day, she produced a full-bodied smile. Louis's breath came short. Even with the multitude of scars she bore, she was stunning when she smiled.

  "This feels like a big deal. I mean, you don't choose a name for yourself every day."

  "Most people never do it at all, Chris."

  "Shouldn't there be some kind of ceremony or something?"

  "What do you have in mind?"

  She cocked her head. "Well, when a new guy joined the Butchers, all the other guys pissed into a bucket, and then they dumped it over his head."

  Louis choked and coughed it away. "Maybe not that ceremony, Chris." Realization came to him; he swallowed once. "I know a ceremony that might be nice."

  Her expression became serious. "Tell me."

  He thought a moment and shook his head. "No, let's just do it." He opened the door and sprang out of the truck in his usual fashion. He was at the door of the house when he realized that Christine was still in the truck.

  Oops. Stupid, stupid. Surprises are not things she's learned to enjoy.

  He walked back to the truck, went to the passenger side door, and opened it. Christine sat there motionless, not trying to hide her fear.

  "Sorry, Chris, that was dumb of me. It's a simple little thing. No pain or blood involved. I went through it when I was a lot younger, and I promise you, I didn't even notice. Trust me on it? Please?"

  She nodded once and leaped out of the truck, landing in his arms. Her stride as they entered the house suggested that she was having second thoughts about the whole business, and was struggling to suppress them.

  "So what do we do?" Her voice quavered.

  "Just come with me." He took a chair from the kitchen table, and gestured her toward the master bathroom. She followed. He placed the back of the chair against the vanity and bade her to sit. When she had, he leaned her head back over the sink, draped a face towel over her chest, and had her fold her hands just below her throat.

  "I'll be right back." He sprinted to his bedroom. Atop his dresser stood a silver ewer his mother had left to him, that he sometimes used as a vase. He assured himself that it was empty and clean and stood a moment, cradling it.

  It's appropriate. She's coming newborn into the world in every way but the strictly biological. She doesn't have to understand it today any more than a baby would. And it doesn't require a priest. Anyone can do it.

  When he returned to the master bath, she was still as he had left her. She was smiling tremulously, but he could tell that her fears were straining her control and would soon repossess her. He stroked her hair once.

  "Chris, I will never hurt you."

  She nodded, but said nothing. He filled the ewer from the tap.

  "Tilt your head back a little further and close your eyes."

  She did as he asked. He cradled the back of her head in his left hand, and with his right began to trickle water from the ewer over her forehead.

  "I baptize thee..."

  A surge of heat passed through him, blurring his vision and bringing him close to a faint. Probably it was just one more side effect of the morning's chemotherapy session. His voice broke, and the words caught in his throat. Tremors raced through his arms and legs, and there was a familiar swimming sensation in his eyes. She sat silent and unmoving, eyes still closed.

  "...Christine Marie D'Alessandro, child of God..."

  His voice broke again and sank to a whisper.

  "...in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

  A single large tear fell upon Christine's forehead, mingling with the last of the water from the ewer.

  ====

  Chapter 7

  Louis and Christine sat in kitchen chairs about two feet apart. His eyes were locked with hers. His hands moved through the space between them in two independent, widely separated orbits; hers lay in her lap.

  "Left!"

  Her left hand darted from her lap to grab at his right. He squeezed.

  "Very good. Again."

  Her hand returned to her lap, and his resumed their irregular weaving.

  "Right!"

  Her right hand darted for his left and closed on it. Again he squeezed.

  "Again."

  They continued for several minutes. He did his best to keep the patterns of sides and motions random. Always, without moving her eyes from his, she was able to clasp the hand on the side he called in less than a half second. After the twentieth repetition, he heaved a sigh and nodded in satisfaction.

  "You're okay, Chris. There's no doubt about it."

  She frowned. "How can you be so sure?"

  "There are four ways brain damage from toxic drugs can be detected." Louis rose and stretched. Talking to Christine made him feel like a lecturer in front of a class, albeit an unusually small and attentive one. "Loss of concentration, loss of memory, loss of balance, and loss of coordination. What was the first thing we did?"

  "The numbers trick."

  Louis nodded. He had recited skeins of random digits to her, then had started to repeat them and stopped in the middle. She had finished each one without losing a beat, and with perfect accuracy.

  "That tests for concentration and memory simultaneously. You went through fifty sequences, and I didn't catch one single error. I've seen professional memory experts do worse. Next was -- ?"

  "The hopping back and forth on the strip of newspaper."

  He nodded again. "Do you realize that you spent ten straight minutes standing on the toes of one foot? You never even wobbled. Your balance is as good as mine."

  "And this last bit was for what?"

  "Perception and coordination. Your visual field is as wide and accurate as anyone could want, and your eye to hand coordination is perfect. Whatever else they did to you, those creeps did not mess up your brain."

  I'd like to know how they managed not to. Between the physical abuse and the drugs, you have every excuse to be a limp, drooling idiot. But you could play goal for any team in the NHL. Where did those reflexes come from? And all that strength?

  She said nothing.

  "So where do we go from here?" He paced the little kitchen in his habitual, irregular fashion. "You can read and write just fine. You have enough command of arithmetic to be a bookkeeper. You could stand to learn some history and current events stuff, but it'll be all right. I don't think there's much point in putting you in a conventional school."

  Especially since they hardly even pretend to teach, these days.

  "We have a lot to do before you can get by on your own. Most of the hard work will be yours, I'm afraid, but you're well enough to begin it. I'm going to put you on a reading program, start teaching you how to drive, start exposing you to normal society in small doses. If it goes well, six months from now you should be ready to...to..."

  To what? Even if I fabricate a convincing background to cover up what happened to you, where do you plug in?

  He checked his pacing when he realized that she was sitting silent and motionless, facing rigidly forward, as he talked to himself about how to arrange her future. Embarrassed, he slipped back into the chair in front of her.

  "Chris, what would you like to do?"

  After a moment's silence, she reached for his hand. He let her lead him up the stairs to his office, where his computer was running the Bohr atom screen saver that had fascinated her. Her face held both solemnity and hope.

  "You said you would teach me."

  Louis swallowed hard. A thousand objections rose to his lips. He bit all of them back. She wai
ted in silence.

  "All right, Chris. I'll try."

  ***

  The back streets of Onteora were hardly safe places for the solitary pedestrian in full daylight. Even so, it was Malcolm Loughlin's occasional practice to stroll them, after midnight, alone.

  He sauntered through the city. Like most of the small cities in central New York, Onteora was irregularly seedy. More than half of the two and three story tenements that had been built a century ago to house the immigrant workers that had flooded the state were abandoned now, doors padlocked and windows boarded up. Many storefronts off Grand Avenue, Onteora's remaining locus of activity and prosperity, had also been abandoned, as well as a few on the Avenue itself. The city government asserted ownership of all abandoned structures within the city limits, but for years it had not tried to sell them, nor to do anything with them. The majority were unused even by the lowest strata of derelicts and squatters.

  Many residents used the less-populated streets as dumping grounds. Perversely, those nearest to Grand Avenue were the most heavily littered. The prevalence of old, soiled and damaged furniture, scattered here and there on the sidewalks and the greenswards, was a sure sign that the Avenue was only a block or two away.

  Despite the darkness, alleviated slightly by a crescent moon and a few unbroken streetlights, Loughlin walked around the scattered obstacles with little effort. He had been here many times. He knew the area well, and was confident that if he stayed at it long enough, someone would bring him what he sought.

  He had been walking for twenty minutes when three tall, dark figures converged on him at an intersection: one from before him, the others at the opposed limits of his peripheral vision. No one else was in sight.

  "Yo, Pops, drop your wallet and walk away."

  Loughlin scanned the area for other watchers, then put on the most insolent grin he could manage and shook his head. "Nope. Keep fishing, fool."

  The silence was broken by an audible click. The one before him had bared a blade. It glinted in the dark, held low for slashing across the belly.

  "You the fool, Pops. You want to live, you drop your dough and run."

  Loughlin cackled. "Run from you? You think you're going to cut me? With that? How long did you save your lunch money for that nail file? What if you drop it? Never find it again. Not you, anyway. Probably takes you ten minutes just to find your dick."

  The thug shouted and charged, still holding the knife low and ready to swing. His accomplices converged more cautiously.

  Loughlin stepped forward and to his left. As he moved, the sideboys froze in position. Before the thug could slash at him, Loughlin had caught his wrist and whirled around him. He forced the arm back and upward, knife point aimed at the sky, and squeezed his fingertips into the wrist tendons with all his strength. The thug roared in surprise and pain as the knife came free and clattered against the concrete.

  Though both of the others carried bludgeons of some sort, neither approached the action. Loughlin twisted his assailant's arm with savage force. A low ripping sound announced the parting of the thug's shoulder muscles. The mugger's high, shrill scream echoed from the surrounding buildings. Loughlin released his wrist, and he dropped onto his face on the sidewalk.

  Loughlin stepped back from the writhing fruit of his labors, wiped his hands theatrically, and addressed the two henchmen who stood witnessing the end of their leader's career.

  "Who's next?"

  Seconds later Loughlin and the disabled mugger were alone on the street, the pounding of the sideboys' feet fading into the night. Loughlin picked up the switchblade from where it had fallen. Its former owner was too consumed by his agony to notice.

  Loughlin squatted beside the crippled thug and turned him over. He appeared no more than twenty years old. His clothing was flashily expensive, and a thick gold chain circled his neck. His face was doughy, brutish. If the pain were erased from it, there would be nothing else there.

  "Hear me, scumbag?"

  Loughlin held the open switchblade loosely, point down over the gasping felon's face. The thug's eyes were halfway open. He seemed to nod. Good enough.

  "What did you think you were going to do with this, hey? Pick your nose with it? You go waving this thing at somebody, he's going to think you mean to use it on him. Most guys take that badly. And if he's like me, he might decide to punch your ticket for you."

  The thug continued to gasp for breath, but said nothing. His eyes were tracking the switchblade.

  "You met the Angel of Death tonight, boy. Your asshole buddies got a good look at what happens when the Angel folds his wings and lights on someone. You're lucky I'm feeling merciful. If I were to plant this in your eye, no one in this town would feel anything but gratitude."

  Loughlin's grip on the knife tightened. He thrust the blade into the concrete of the sidewalk a bare inch from his assailant's left ear. The knife bowed, then broke with a whipcrack sound. A flying shard of steel nicked the boy's cheek, and a thin trickle of blood ran down it. He didn't move.

  "Crawl back into your hole. Tell the other rats what happened to you. And be sure to tell them that the Angel can look like anything he wants."

  Moments later, the ex-mugger was shambling off, whimpering and clutching his ruined shoulder. Loughlin watched him recede. When he was certain he was alone and unobserved in the darkness, he turned and began walking home.

  ***

  Father Heinrich Schliemann of the Society of St. Dominic, pastor of Onteora parish, sat motionless at his desk, clad in bathrobe and slippers, a room temperature cup of coffee before him. A single lamp repelled the darkness.

  All clergymen have occasional white nights. Schliemann was no exception.

  Sleep had come hard to him in recent years. He knew that part of that was the deterioration of his body. A seventy-four year old man will be awakened by pain that a younger man's sleeping body would absorb without broaching the threshold of consciousness. Despite the care he took of himself and the best medical care the parish could afford, the arthritis in his knees, hips and shoulders was bursting its bonds. When he turned over in bed, the pain from those joints woke him and forced him to spend many minutes regaining somnolence.

  Another part of it was his reluctance to lay down his responsibilities as an older priest supposedly should. Despite advancing age, Schliemann spurned all notions of retirement. He had a flock to tend, and by God, he would tend it.

  He had come to this parish after his ordination. He had baptized most of his parishioners, and had buried a comparable number, including several of his brothers in the cloth. The great majority of the Catholics of Onteora had known no other pastor in their lives. He would not surrender their care to any other man, no matter how capable, until he was forced to do so. He had even turned down elevation to monsignor, with a strong hint that a bishop's miter would be within his reach, to avoid a transfer out of Onteora.

  Occasionally his clerical colleagues would cluck their disapproval at him, hinting that his grip on his position smelled more of vanity than dedication. But they always dropped the subject when he scowled at them.

  Schliemann took his duties seriously. His vision of those duties was clear, and quite at odds with the notions of most newer priests. He had little patience for the social-activist clergymen, whatever their denomination. They seemed to want to make their churches into gathering places for the envious and self-pitying. They were infinitely willing to use politics to impose their visions of good upon others. Father Heinrich Schliemann led no marches, signed no petitions, and never talked politics. While the prelates of the American Church tacitly permitted the social-activist priests to convert the legacy of Saint Peter into a stained-glass staging area for the crusades of special interest groups, the pastor of Onteora parish remained exclusively a man of God.

  What Louis Redmond had done troubled him, and he was struggling to learn why. Historically, procedurally, and doctrinally, the young man's arguments were sound, but the vehemence with which he had re
jected a course of formal religious instruction for his new charge had shocked the old priest nonetheless.

  "What has the typical response to indoctrination been, Father? What percentage of the children that have passed through parochial schools remain communicants as adults? Do we really need any other explanation for why the schools are closing down at such a rate?"

  The priest grinned without humor. "Don't you think the property tax situation might have had something to do with it, Louis? To say nothing of the problems the Church has had with zoning boards all over the country?"

  Louis shook his head. "That's nothing new. The American Church has faced those forces for three centuries. It's only in the last fifty years that our numbers have diminished this way. And we're mostly to blame for it."

  He scowled. "It was always a mistake, you know. Religion isn't for children, and to impose it on them by force has never been to anyone's greater good. As society has secularized, the resentments over that practice have been free to come out into the open. Is the Church better off for all these claims of the physical and emotional abuse of children by priests and nuns, even if every last one of them were eventually disproved? Are Catholics better off?"

  Schliemann kept his composure with an effort. One such accusation had even been leveled at him, a decade ago. It had been his great good fortune that no one had believed it.

  "Why did you baptize her, Louis?"

  The younger man sat up ramrod straight at that. "Because I was supposed to. Because you would have done the same. It's the first duty of a member of the faith toward a newborn, especially if that newborn's life is in danger."

  Schliemann nodded. "A duty of a member of the faith, yes. But what about you?"

  Louis's face went slack. "What?"

  "It's not a week ago that you sat in that very chair and told me that you thought your faith had deserted you, that you could no longer feel it in your bones the way you always had. You pleaded with me to do whatever I could for you, remember? What validity did that baptism have, coming from you?"

  The younger man's words rang like the strokes of a cathedral bell, harsh and regular. "Exactly the same as if you had done it. Non-Catholics have baptized children many times. The point is to declare the child's name to God and ask God to free her from the burden of original sin. It's done, and God knows her now. And I'll thank you not to suggest a second time that I've left the faith, Father."