Purgatory

by K M Stross

  Cantrell grunted through pursed lips. “Have a seat—you’re making me fucking nervous.”

  “Thank you.” Cross took a seat opposite him and set down his glass after taking a sip. He hadn’t had a drop of alcohol for at least a month, and the beer tasted bitter and dry on his tongue. Too many weeks spent playing the good little Christian in Seattle, helping rebuild a church during the day and combing through Arizona newspapers by night.

  Cantrell looked up again and waited, his expression a mixture of two parts patient composure and one part contemptuous insistence.

  “My name is Chandler Cross. I was wondering if you would indulge me and answer a few questions about Father Aaron,” Cross said. “Specifically, the miracle you witnessed.”

  Cantrell smiled and reached for his beer. He took one long sip and wiped the foam from the corners of his mouth with one tanned bare arm that was freckled with sunspots. “Your bosses weren’t all that interested in hearing it.”

  Cross leaned back and looked around the bar. No new patrons had arrived, and the few overweight men gorging on alcohol seemed to carry little interest in the priest or his companion. “I’m a Devil’s Advocate for the beatification and canonization. That means …”

  “You’re a skeptic,” he finished.

  “It’s my job to be the skeptic, yes.”

  Cantrell looked up. “All you want to hear about is the miracle? I’ve got a lot of crazy stories I could tell you about this town that doesn't involve holy men. They’re more interesting too.”

  “Whatever you can tell me about Father Aaron would be best.”

  The older man chewed on his dry upper lip, burned bright pink and cracking in a dozen places. When he finished thinking, he licked the chapped skin clean. “What’s it to me.”

  “I have money,” Cross said. “But not much.”

  “Then you’d better earn some more.” Cantrell laughed, shifting in the chair with a groan. “You plan on sticking around for a while, Father?”

  “As long as it takes,” Cross said.

  Cantrell nodded, biting his lip again. He did it violently, pressing down hard enough to make Cross wince. “Tell you what: I could use a hand with a job tomorrow morning. Just a few hours of light work, but I can’t do it all on my own, and if I don’t get it done tomorrow, the landlord’s gonna lose out.”

  “What kind of job?” Cross asked.

  Cantrell shrugged, crossing his arms. “The landlord… he just needs some shit torn out of an old place he owns on the south end of town. Help me out, or the job will go to a Mexican.”

  Cross leaned forward. “And does that upset you?”

  “It’s fair, I suppose.” Cantrell smiled. “Lord knows I’ve taken enough of their jobs over these past few years. You want to help me out or not?”

  “All right,” Cross said. “But I need to record your story. Agreed?”

  “How about you write it down.”

  Cross stared into Cantrell’s eyes. The man was calculating, calm. “I can’t write it down.”

  Cantrell nodded. He took another sip of his beer while Cross pulled out the tape recorder and started a new audio file.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “The church service,” Cross said. “The day of the miracle.”

  Cantrell took a sip of his beer and set it down, rubbing his thumb along the sweaty glass and leaving a trail in the condensation. “It was raining, and the church basement was filled to the brim, and everyone was freezing on account of the air conditioning. It was the latest service, which meant the only people there were the hired hands from the cattle ranches. Mexicans, mostly, and then me of course because back then I was a hired hand too. There was a baptism. Then Father Aaron doused Gabriella Marcia with a handful of holy water and then she could see again.”

  Cross waited while Cantrell took another sip of his beer. When he didn’t continue, Cross paused the tape recorder. Behind him, the other patrons cheered a home run. The scent of cigars traveled courtesy of the overhead fans.

  “That’s it?” Cross asked.

  Cantrell shrugged. “That was all I needed to tell the last Padre who showed up.”

  “There’s more,” Cross said. “There has to be. What didn’t you tell the Church when it investigated?”

  “Lots.”

  “Like what?” Cross asked. “I need specifics.”

  Cantrell took a sip of his beer. The foam stuck to his upper lip. “Do me a favor. Lean over and check the Diamondbacks score for me.”

  Cross glanced up at the TV screen at the other end of the room. He couldn’t see the small graphic in the upper right-hand corner clearly enough to make out the score, but it looked like sixes or zeroes. “It’s tied,” he said. “Now, what did you leave out?”

  Cantrell stared at Cross for a moment, then took another long sip of his beer. The only sound came from the announcers on television, proclaiming another Diamondbacks run. “Things I’ve seen and heard at the church. The shit no one talks about, but everyone knows about. The shit even Father Aaron’s devoted bitches know but never talk about to anyone.”

  Cross turned the tape recorder back on. “Tell me everything.”

  “What do you think happened?” Cantrell asked, leaning forward. He smiled. He was missing his left upper incisor; the rest of his teeth were shiny white.

  “I’m supposed to be skeptical. Beyond that, I have an open mind. I think that’s the best way to get the most details out of everyone.”

  Cantrell snorted and grabbed his beer again, refraining from taking another sip, instead letting it rest under his lower lip. “That makes two of us. But this ain’t any of your business. Purgatory wants to keep its secret. All the journalists and tourists stopped coming here because they never found shit, and neither will you.”

  “The town is afraid of its secret,” Cross said. He felt unnerved by Cantrell, caught off-guard. “I can feel it.”

  Cantrell flashed a look of surprise, then immediately drowned it with another sip of beer. “Maybe this town is afraid of what’ll happen if the secret gets out.” He set his empty mug on the table, hard enough to knock the tape recorder over. “Maybe you should get out of here and forget about Purgatory altogether. Tell your bosses that there was nothing here and leave it at that. You don’t want to dig up an unmarked grave.”

  Cross reached for his wallet and pulled out a handful of dollars, flagging down the solitary waitress with it. She hobbled over, carrying the excess weight in her stomach and thighs with obvious discontent. “We’ll take two more Millers.”

  Cantrell smiled, watching her leave with a hint of desire in his eyes. “This ain’t the first time you’ve pried information from someone, is it?”

  Cross waited for the waitress to come back with two fresh beers and leave again before speaking. “I prefer to call it ‘a mutual exchange of goods’ rather than any sort of bribe. I’m a man of the cloth, Mister Cantrell.”

  “So you say,” Cantrell said, sipping gingerly at the foam spilling over his mug. It gathered on the rough black and white whiskers above his thin lips. “God, it tastes so much better when it’s free.”

  “Tell me everything,” Cross said. He could feel adrenaline beginning to numb his body as if his body knew the risk it was taking sitting here with this man. His right leg bounced under the table. His left eye had begun to itch; he rubbed it fiercely. “Tell me everything about Father Aaron that you can. The good and the bad.”

  Cantrell closed his eyes. His hand guided the glass to his lips with muscle memory precision. “I’m not really sure where to start.”

  “Just start at the beginning.”

  Cantrell snorted. “That’s a long time ago, Father. Tell you what: I can sum up Father Aaron with the events of that very day in question, and I’ll leave it up to you what to make of it.”

  “That sounds like a good start,” Cross said.

  “Just don’t question me.” Cantrell finished the rest of his beer, leaving the foam on his upper
lip. “You may be skeptical, but everything I’ll tell you is the “Honest-To-God” truth. None of it’ll sound believable, but I won’t lie to you.”

  “Fair enough,” Cross said. “Let’s hear it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Like I said, the basement was filled all the way to the back.”

  “Why were you in the basement?” Cross asked.

  Cantrell shrugged. “Politics. Lots of Mexicans at that service, maybe enough to fill up the chapel. But the chapel was for the white townsfolk. Father Aaron wasn’t about to piss off the holier-than-thou townsfolk.

  “The rain was pretty bad, so there wasn’t much light coming in through the little windows and the lights overhead didn’t help for shit. The basement smelled more like a bar than a sanctified holy ground, and the air conditioning was running full blast. Father Aaron always kept it ice-cold inside the church. Always.

  “I was sitting in one of the seats in the back because I liked to take the communion and get the hell out during the last song, before the mass exodus at the end of the service. I figured if God did exist, taking the body and blood of Christ was good enough and God didn’t really care if I stuck around to shake the priest’s hand.

  “Father Aaron was standing in front of the big vat of water or whatever you call it, that podium with the holy water in it for baptizing babies. He dipped his chalice in it, not the one they used for communion but something else. It was decorated fancy and twinkled like a goddamn platinum necklace. Gabriella Marcia was kneeling in front of him on the hard ground, and she was looking in his direction, but not exactly at him, the way a blind person can sense someone’s presence but can’t really center on it.

  “‘My dear,’ he said in his deep voice, ‘you have suffered long enough. Let God welcome your soul blah blah blah.’ And then he rubbed his fingers around Gabriella Marcia’s eyes and stepped behind her.

  “She opened her eyes and looked around like a goddamned newborn baby. ‘I can see! My God, my eyes work again!’ It wasn’t quite like that; my Spanish wasn’t too good back then, and she was praising a lot of saints I never heard of. But it’s close enough.

  “She spun around and grabbed Father Aaron and hugged him so tight half the crowd was pretty sure his eyeballs were going to pop out. He was laughing, and everyone was clapping, and some of her friends couldn’t stop crying. She kept thanking him and wouldn’t let him go, so he wrapped shit up with her crying at his feet. I swear if I hadn’t been so hung-over, I probably would have been smiling and feeling pretty jolly about the whole situation myself. It was all festive and infectious and wonderful and all that shit you see on primetime TV.

  “‘Go now, this Eucharist is complete. Enjoy your Sunday afternoon!’ he said. Like nothing amazing had even happened. Like Gabriella Marcia was just another illegal immigrant who had never gotten a proper baptism and had always enjoyed twenty-twenty vision and just happened to be clinging to him like a flea.

  “I watched her friends and her sister swarm around her, jokingly testing her vision and thanking Father Aaron in broken English. Everyone wanted to shake his hand before filing out. They were all stunned. No one could quite figure it out, but he ushered them out anyway like it was just another service. Since there was no communion, I decided to sit back and wait for all the stunned people to file out. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with any pushing, what with my head pounding like a freight train and goddamn if another swallow of that church wine didn’t sound great right about then. Hair of the dog, right?

  “The fucker caught me before I had a chance to leave.

  “ ‘David, could I talk to you for a moment?’ Father Aaron said as I stood up. He was standing at the back of the church, shaking hands with the last few stragglers but he kept his eyes fixed right on me.

  “I watched the last of Gabriella’s family escort her out of the church while she kept on looking at everything in amazement. Father Aaron walked them to the staircase, helping her up the first few steps.

  “‘You seem somewhat apprehensive of the gift God has given to our dear Gabriella,’ he told me. I can remember every fucking word because they were all penetrating my skull like a jackhammer. He talked so smooth, and every word just wormed its way into my brain, cutting right into my hang-over.

  “I shrugged and put my hat back on. I didn’t like the way he was staring at me—I hate being stared at. ‘Dunno, Father. I’ve never seen something like that before, not in real life. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from one of them preacher shows on TV where the guy with slicked-back hair helps the cripples walk. I guess I’m just a little shell-shocked that’s all.’

  “Father Aaron got closer to me and leaned one hand on the back of the chair. He smelled like alcohol aftershave, minty and all that. He gave me a casual look, not the uptight kind I was used to from old Father Damien, our other priest. Father Aaron knew he was hot shit and didn’t mind showing it a little bit. I didn’t expect that from a priest.

  “‘I’d like to think there’s a difference between my church and the churches you see on TV, Mister Cantrell. Don’t you think so?’

  “I shrugged. ‘Suppose so, Father.’

  “Aaron tore away from the chairs and stepped into the middle of the aisle, stretching his body out in the open space the way he did when he was delivering the homily. ‘Why is it so many people have such a hard time believing that which they see with their own two eyes?’ He clutched both his hands into fists. He had these big, smooth hands that could grab the open space around him when he really got going into one of his tirades. ‘Why such skepticism even when faced with insurmountable evidence that God exists?’

  “Every word hit my head. Just like this. It was driving me nuts.

  “‘I don’t know, Father,’ I said, anxious to get the hell out. ‘I suppose it’s just the way humans are. We’re a skeptical group, nowadays at least.’

  “Aaron shook his head and stepped closer. He walked behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. I could feel his hot breath on my neck, but for some reason, every inch of my body was telling me not to move, just to play dead and hope the bear would move on.

  “‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Cantrell, this is the way you are. I can smell it on you like stench on shit: your skepticism of faith. Your very lack of faith that draws you to this church every Sunday in an attempt to find a greater meaning in life. But your logical side refuses to accept that which it cannot explain with science. The theories and laws of the universe have corrupted your mind to the point that everything must be explained with a mathematical formula. I know your kind.’

  “I turned my head a little bit. All I could think about was the church wine and how I wished I had about a quart of it in my stomach to calm my nerves and my headache. It was like he was practicing a speech in front of a mirror, didn’t really even need me there at all.

  “ ‘I never liked math, Father,’ I told him.

  “And then he grabbed me. I could feel the strength surging through his hands, and so I didn’t struggle when he pushed me against the wall, right between two of the little basement windows overlooking an old neglected rose bed. I let him keep me there while he moved his head closer so he could whisper to me. His breath smelled like the church wine.

  “Everything I’ve said so far is pretty close to the mark, maybe a little paraphrased I guess. But I’ll never forget what he said next, and I’m damned sure it went exactly like this:

  “‘What has science done for you, Cantrell? What have all of life’s laws and theories done to better your life? Will science save your home? Will science save your job? Science is the crutch of those who can’t come to grips with their insignificant place in reality. Skepticism, David, will not be tolerated in my church.’

  “‘Right,’ I said. ‘Got it.’ I’m such a fucking coward sometimes.

  “He let go of me and stepped back. ‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t wear your hat in my church from here on out.’

  “My hat fell to the floor even though I
didn’t touch it. I picked it up and kept it tightly in my hands. I stared up at Father Aaron and found him wearing that same warm smile he always had when greeting his grateful congregation. I turned to leave and only looked back once, and I saw him still with that same smile. But his eyes were black as night, I swear to God. Swear to God.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “So he had a temper,” Cross said, turning off the tape recorder. The bar counter had been filled with more white men dressed in white shirts and jean shorts, their exposed sunburned legs and arms caked in dirt. They drank sweaty bottles of beer and talked quietly with other white men who’d been there since Cross arrived, the ones with clean shirts and shorts. The clean men drank more slowly from their beers, savoring the taste in the way only an out-of-work farmhand on a tight budget could.

  “Bit of an understatement, if you ask me,” Cantrell muttered.

  “Offended, then. That you weren’t amazed by his miracle.”

  Cantrell offered a small nod of acknowledgment. His chin dipped lower into his neck, so the brim of his hat hid his eyes. His dry thumb rubbed against the rim of the glass. “You had a chance yet to question why you’re here?”

  “No,” Cross said. He felt comfortable answering Cantrell’s questions truthfully. The lies took their toll. He told himself they were all important because being here was important, but still the lies piled up and felt like a heavy weight.

  Cantrell looked up. “Why you.”

  Cross leaned back to further the distance between himself and Cantrell’s eyes. He couldn’t truthfully answer this one. Pressure had begun to return to his left eye, blanketing his peripheral vision in darkness. “I’m the only one qualified for this job.”

  “Give me a better reason, Father.”

  “What do you want to hear?” Cross asked. He could feel his palms beginning to moisten. The slow-moving overhead fans sent cool air over his wet flesh, igniting a furious shiver down his spine.

  “I wanna hear some truth because I haven’t in a long time,” Cantrell said. “I wanna know why some random priest is walking around town digging up old bones that no one wants to be dug up. Why just months after Father Aaron went missing, some dick from the Catholic Church came through for a couple of days to investigate Aaron’s sainthood and asked all the wrong questions. And now another priest shows up sounding like a fucking seasoned detective.” He paused to finish off his beer, tossing it down his throat with a violent jerk and wiping the trickle away from his chin. “You really here to do the work of God?”