Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  Coincidentally, Jake’s father moved to town the very year Our Lady reopened to parishioners. Jake was barely out of diapers back then, and it would be several years before Ronald Clarkson enrolled him in Catholic school and only after his ninth birthday the previous July that he’d been eligible to become one of Father Molanez’s servers. Of the four altar boys, he was the youngest, with the most senior being Pablo Rodriguez, who was almost thirteen. But the father had been quick to notice Jake’s voice the first time he’d sung the Kyrie and the Gloria during services.

  “Was there an angel on your shoulder, Jakey?” he’d said after the mass. “Because if that was you I heard, and not one that took flight while my back was turned, I think you might want to join the choir.”

  Although Jake had appreciated the compliment and had already realized he enjoyed singing, he’d wanted to continue as an altar boy. He liked being around Father Molanez and the other boys and had to admit, at least to himself, that he also liked getting out of class for eight o’clock weekday mass. When he’d gotten his first tip serving at a wedding last September, it had sealed things for him. He was adamant to the father about his preference, but the priest was equally insistent that his voice, which the choral teacher later described as a high alto verging on soprano, was “too good to waste while you make me look fit for my job.”

  After visiting with Jake and his dad at home to discuss the subject, Father Molanez had proposed a happy compromise. He would be proud and delighted to have Jake remain an acolyte, but if the boy so chose, he could attend choir rehearsals, train with its members, and discreetly ascend to the choir loft at certain times during the service to participate in the hymns and praises.

  The father’s solution had seemed just right, and Jake had readily embraced his unique dual roles, although his attempts at being inconspicuous hadn’t prevented his dashes for the loft from becoming highlights to which the congregation looked forward with eagerness.

  Of the servers at the church, Pablo was the crew head. He’d been an altar boy back in Mexico, where he and his family had come from not too long ago, and Father Molanez had entrusted him with the biggest responsibilities. He had the key to the tall maple cabinet in the sacristy where the vessels and linens were stored, and Jake would occasionally assist him in setting up the chancel. Although Pablo spoke very little English, he was always in a cheerful mood and managed to kid around a lot with Jake despite the language barrier. But he was very serious about his duties and about checking to see that the other boys on his crew were no less diligent.

  Jake’s regular job before mass was to make sure the water and wine cruets were filled and properly aligned on the credence. If Pablo arrived early enough, he would have everything ready for him on a small table in the hall, so Jake would only have to carry them out on a tray. And since Jake had spilled wine from the flagon more than once, he always appreciated it. But this morning, Pablo had showed up around the same time as Jake and hurried off to take care of his own tasks.

  Well, not altogether—Jake noticed that the older boy had put the empty cruets on the hallway table. He turned toward the unlocked cabinet, where the wine and water pitcher sat in a cubby down near the floor, below the shelf that held the sacred vessels. His first order of business would be to bring the pitcher over to the sink at the far end of the sacristy.

  He was crouching in front of the cabinet when someone came up from behind and grabbed him under the arms.

  “Grrrraoooooaoww!”

  Startled, Jake felt his spine bolt up straight at the sound of that roar. But he was already recovering as he snapped his head around to see Pablo there behind him, laughing hard.

  “Definitely unfunny,” he said, and wished he could have kept from grinning himself.

  “Sí… funny, poquito!” Pablo removed his hands from Jake’s sides to hook them into claws. “I am wine monster.”

  “Unfunny and lame,” Jake said.

  Pablo gave a furtive wink. “Wine monster, he catch you drinking wine.”

  Jake’s smile faded. A couple of the boys claimed they’d been swigging from the flagon during wedding and funeral ceremonies. But it had never happened when he was with them. Besides, he couldn’t stand how the stuff tasted and wouldn’t have risked getting into trouble over something like that. “I was not—”

  Pablo laughed again, his brown face crinkled with amusement, his fingers still clawing at the air. Jake realized he’d been doubly zinged.

  “You stink,” he said, then pinched his nostrils shut to ensure that he hadn’t been misunderstood. “You are stinko. Catch me?”

  The boys were both cracking up now. After a moment, Pablo took a playful swat at Jake’s hair. “Come.” He gestured toward the cruets. “Señor Stinko help you.”

  Jake watched as Pablo came around him, bent, and reached into the cabinet for the wine flagon. “I guess you don’t totally reek,” he said, letting go of his nose with a magnanimous smile.

  He had left Las Vegas before midnight Saturday for the now-familiar trip to Miriam, driving smoothly through the darkness on the long, empty band of northbound interstate. Although his body still felt some soreness from his suspension, he’d made a quick recovery afterward, taking in fluids and eating small high-protein meals throughout the day Saturday. With his contoured foam seat cushions reducing pressure on his back and shoulders, whatever discomfort he felt was acceptable.

  Reaching the outskirts of town at eight-thirty, he parked his car at the tourist rail depot where black steam locomotives had once clanked in from the mines with their piles of raw silver ore. A log-cabin trading post stood beside the motel opposite the station, banners for hunting supplies in the window, a sign in the door indicating that it would open at noon.

  He studied the signs a moment and bought his usual coffee at the motel diner. Then he went on foot toward the church spearing up between the hilltops, its tower bells clanging out their invitation to Sunday morning services.

  Mass was at ten o’clock, and he felt no need to rush as he followed the steep, winding two-lane mountain road from the railway station into town. He experienced little pain for most of the walk there, and the one time he felt tightness in his chest, he was able to manage it with patterned breathing.

  Across the street from the church, he paused to watch its congregants streaming through the tall paneled doors under the entrance arch. It was the third week of Lent, and the flock was thick. He had worn tinted lenses, but the sunlight was directly in his eyes as he looked eastward, and for a brief glare-shot moment, he imagined the people coming to worship were disembodied souls passing from the world’s corruption and viciousness into golden transparency.

  Blinking rapidly, he crossed to the church and went inside, removing his sunglasses as he passed through the inner set of doors to the nave.

  The boy’s father was seated toward the front of the church. He spotted him there while filing in with the congregants, and something inside him wound tight. As the torrent of memories, grief, and rage swept over him, he momentarily broke stride. It took all his will to force his legs to move and then slide himself into a rear pew off the aisle.

  Minutes later, he thought he saw the father take a chance look back in his direction. But he was confident he wouldn’t be recognized. His head was shaved, and he no longer wore a beard. He had lost weight, more than fifty pounds. And although the cancer had begun feeding on his muscle and sinews, his physical type was a far cry from what it had been eight years ago. He had changed in so many different ways.

  He watched the processional from his spot at the end of the pew, the servers appearing with the crucifix and candles, the boy carrying the incense as the priest emerged from the sacristy to the harmonious singing of the choir. The ritual gave him powerful feelings. It was as if he had his own singular role to play as he answered the introductory prayers and allowed himself to be sprinkled with holy water. Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… may almighty God cleanse us of our sins… amen, am
en, amen.

  His sense of immersion in the mass grew stronger as it continued, mingling with a kind of excitement. Eyes on the boy, he was stirred by the psalms and antiphons, the ringing of the altar bells. In partial kinship with the men and women around him, he joined in the Kyrie, shared the plea of all humanity while regretting that it wasn’t nearly enough: Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy on us, Christe eleison, Christ have mercy on us…

  And when God’s mercy fails, the visitor added silently at the hymn’s conclusion, I will give you something to replace it.

  He had anticipated the gray-haired priest’s seasonal homily would relate to the coming of Easter, but it stunned him with its connection to his vision in the Mirror Chamber and the affirmation of the plan it had inspired. The priest spoke first of God commanding Abraham to kill his only son as a test of his love and faith in him. Incredibly, as if communicating to the visitor in words meant directly for his ears, he spoke of Abraham building an altar, laying out the wood for his burnt offering, then binding Isaac with rope and holding the knife over his throat. Of God staying his hand at the last moment, delivering a lamb for him to slaughter in his son’s place, a ritual atonement that future generations of Hebrews would perform at Passover. The priest told how the story of Abraham and Isaac foreshadowed God’s designs for his own son many centuries later—how for love of humanity, a love greater than he held for himself, he would make the very sacrifice he had not demanded of Abraham. Finally, the priest told of Jesus as the Lamb of God, redeeming mankind from sin by his death, and in his closing words reminded the congregants that through the Eucharistic blessings the sacraments were converted into Christ’s real and substantial presence, transformed into his very body and blood, citing his words to the apostles at the Last Supper: “Take, eat, this is my body. Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood.”

  In accepting the consecrated bread and wine, the faithful shared in the Lamb’s sacrifice, pledged to carry out his divine work, and dedicated themselves to making amends for the serious sins and crimes of the world.

  As he listened, thrills running up and down his limbs, long-cold embers of emotion igniting as galaxies within him, the visitor was convinced beyond a shred of doubt that the priest had been a messenger, imparting God’s approval to him through his sermon.

  He left a generous donation when the collection basket was passed into his hands.

  There were more prayers, and then a man beside the visitor offered him his hand, and a woman in front of him turned to do the same. The gestures bothered him even as he returned them. It had been an eternity since he’d had that sort of contact with people, and it occurred to him that this might have been the reason. But he also didn’t want his attention sidetracked from the boy.

  Up at the altar, the priest was getting ready for communion. The smiles and handshakes over with, the choir singing, the visitor watched the boy assist the other celebrants with their preparations.

  And then, as the priest busied himself breaking the wafer, the boy suddenly turned and left the altar area.

  The visitor was careful not to betray the extent of his curiosity. This was unexpected. His white robe swishing around his knees, the boy raced down the aisle to smiles and rippling murmurs from the pews, sweeping past the visitor before he pushed out through the double doors into the narthex. Heads turned as they swung shut behind him, then tilted back toward the choir loft.

  “Father Molanez’s angel,” someone said to him. It was the man who’d shaken his hand. “He has a beautiful voice… you’ve heard it before, yes?”

  The visitor ignored him, his eyes fixed on the loft as the choir began the Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, the boy’s voice sweetening its melodic and solemn strains, its imploring gentleness:

  Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

  Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

  Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

  The flutelike delicacy of the boy’s petition, rising above the duskier voices, almost broke the visitor’s heart. He could barely stave off tears. He smelled the sagebrush again or perhaps saw it rolling beneath an endless blue sky—he could not tell. It was as if the voices had evoked a merging of his senses. Yellow perfumed sparks of sagebrush were in his eyes, in his nose, at the back of his tongue. And among them on a hill, the Lamb lying on a pyre of branches, crowned with a nimbus of golden light.

  The communicants had risen from their seats to move toward the rail. Joining them in the aisle, the visitor looked back up at the boy in the loft more than once as he approached the front of the line. He felt doubled somehow, inside and outside his body, at once a participant and an observer.

  When his turn came to receive the host and wine, he expressed his gratitude to the priest for his sermon, adding truthfully that it had overwhelmed him with emotion. The priest looked pleased and joked that he was just trying to stay gainfully employed.

  As the service neared its conclusion, the visitor slipped from the nave before the others and took a minute or two to gather his composure in the narthex. He made note of a plain polished oak door to his right. Then he glanced over his opposite shoulder and saw a second door ornamented with elaborate metalwork seraphs and frosted glass. The embellishments were a likely indication that it opened on a baptismal area—in a church of this vintage, the fountain would be in a separate chapel. Which would mean that the door on the right led to the stairs running up to the choir loft.

  He would have liked a chance to test both doors to be positive. But within moments, the congregation would be pushing into the vestibule. As an unfamiliar face in town, he didn’t want to attract attention. It would have to wait until his return.

  He put his sunglasses back on and strode down the stairs of the church to the street, turning back to the railway depot where he’d left his car. He could still see the image of the Lamb on the hill, lying near a pyre of branches in its heartbreaking innocence.

  And he could still smell sagebrush.

  “Archie, how’re you doing?” Ray Langston asked.

  The tech looked guardedly around from his bank of computer display panels, where he’d been mulling Nick’s idea of putting together a ten-year-old street-view map from ancient security video footage. Criminalists didn’t care how lab rats were doing. Ever. When one asked, it usually prefaced a request that would lead to hours of work on top of work.

  “I’m a little busy with something right now, Dr. Ray,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m all ri—”

  “I wonder if you could help me out,” Langston said. “Advise me on something.”

  Archie was thinking his retort of choice would be to suggest that he drop a handful of quarters into the meter and wait in line. “With regard to… ?”

  “Getting information about an Internet subscriber account,” Langston said.

  “From a service provider?”

  “No,” Langston said. “A website.”

  Archie semirelaxed, thinking that this did not look like an issue that would require any cyber-wizardry from him.

  “Sometimes you just have to request it from the site,” he said. “Practically all of them have you agree to terms of usage when you sign up. If people actually bothered reading the fine print, they’d know some state outright that they’ll share info with law-enforcement and other agencies on request.”

  “This site won’t comply voluntarily,” Langston said. “I’m talking about Flash Ink.”

  “The tat-freak ’zine?”

  “I’m not sure I’d characterize it that way… but yes,” Langston said. “Its policies emphasize user privacy.”

  “Then you’ll need a subpoena,” Archie said. “I’m probably not the most qualified person around here to give you the skinny on how that works. You might want to ask one of the detectives next door. One thing I’d recommend is that you don’t wait on the request to contact the magazine. Depending on what type of info you need, sites will only keep it for finite periods.”


  “For instance…”

  “F’rinstance, log-on and log-off times might be stored for half a year. Since it eats up memory, mail could be wiped after thirty days. And IM—instant messaging—log data in two or three days. It all varies according to system capacities.”

  “Do you know how we’d find out about Flash Ink’s system?”

  “You’ll want to speak with the site’s custodian of records,” Archie said. “Word to the wise, expect those types to be protective.”

  “Even if we stipulate the information’s wanted for a criminal investigation?”

  “Sometimes especially if that’s the situation,” Archie said with a nod. “It gets to be a civil-liberties issue.”

  Langston looked thoughtful. “Greg’s been trying to contact somebody at the website, but Sunday isn’t the best time to pick,” he said. “Let’s assume there’s an objection to providing us with the records. Would you think they’d retain them once they know we’ll be applying for warrants?”

  “Yeah, since it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll have to share everything with you… and since they will want to avoid trouble with the courts,” Archie said. “I think you’d need to give them a user name and stipulate the information you need. Screen aliases, profiles, friend lists, message-board postings—”

  “We don’t have anything like that.”

  “Oh,” Archie said. “Well, then, I’m assuming you’ve got an IP address associated with somebody’s computer. In that case, you’d request whatever info you’d want for a particular date and time, or range of dates, that the person was at the computer and logged on to the site. It gets sticky when users use proxy servers—middlemen between their computers and the Web. You can trace backward to the user from the proxy’s IP address, but that’s another reason you have to move fast. Websites don’t store proxies too long—”