Purgatory

by K M Stross

  “Yes,” Cross said. That, at least, was the truth.

  Cantrell set his glass down. He licked his lips, staring at the table. “He ain’t nowhere. There ain’t a God up there watching over us.”

  “Do you fear death?” Cross asked.

  Cantrell smiled. “Sometimes. When I’m sober.”

  “I had a friend who was afraid to die,” Cross said. “He was afraid he was going to Hell. He didn’t think anything he did would ever erase the sins he’d already committed. He wouldn’t even confess those sins; he was so afraid.”

  “Yeah, the threat of eternal suffering can do that to a fella. It’s a nice little trick, ain’t it? Come to church or burn in hell.”

  “Do what we say, or burn in hell.”

  Cantrell ran his thumb across the lip of his glass again. “Ain’t no Hell. Ain’t no Heaven. If there is a God, he’s probably moved on. Somewhere in another universe, there’s a bunch of happy naked people who stay away from that apple tree.”

  Cross thought back, letting his eyes stay unfocused. “My friend … he wasn’t a Christian.”

  “Few Christians are.”

  “He … would pick and choose,” Cross said. “Like he was building his own religion to suit his purposes. He didn’t like the whole part about confessing, so he just didn’t confess. He searched religious texts for loopholes. It made him dangerous.”

  “All men build their own religion,” Cantrell said.

  Cross leaned forward. “I have to know who Father Aaron was.”

  “Then you’re asking the wrong man,” Cantrell said. “I can’t tell you who Father Aaron was. But I can tell you what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a saint.”

  Cross reached for his tape recorder. Cantrell used one calloused hand to stop his finger from pressing Record.

  “I never even knew Gabriella was blind,” Cantrell said. He shook his head, scratching away a few dry flecks of skin on his cheek. “I knew her family name well enough, but I never saw her around town.”

  “What’s your point?” Cross asked.

  Cantrell shrugged. “I know this sounds fucking stupid, but have you ever seen that Val Kilmer movie? The one where he has surgery that fixes his eyes?”

  “No,” Cross said, frustrated.

  “We watch a lot of movies out here in the middle of nowhere. That video store next door does good business. Stays open late for the Mexicans who work the ranches too.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Cantrell slapped his open palm on the table. He curled his lip, so the gap where his incisor should be was visible. “Goddammit, the point is Val Kilmer spends the rest of the movie walking around like a drunken monkey. He couldn’t adjust. He couldn’t go from being blind to being able to see clearly. He couldn’t figure out depth. He couldn’t understand glass or the reflection of his own face, and when I watched it drunk, I had a damned good time laughing at the poor bastard. But I never had a chance to laugh at Gabriella.”

  “Because Gabriella adjusted quickly,” Cross finished.

  Cantrell nodded from under the brim of his hat, sighing. “Maybe the movie was wrong. Maybe it’s not that hard.”

  “Maybe not,” Cross said. He rubbed gently at his left eye. It had begun to itch, and he could feel the breeze from the overhead fan drying it out. It was probably bloodshot, he thought, probably starting to look like the type of thing to ask a question about. He didn’t want Cantrell asking any more questions. The man was looking at Cross as if he could see inside Cross’s soul.

  Cantrell leaned on his side and reached for his wallet in his back pocket. “I need another beer.”

  “What else can you tell me?” Cross asked, fighting the urge to touch his eye.

  Cantrell flagged down the waitress. “It’s been a pleasure, Father, but you should probably call it a day—the work we’re doing tomorrow morning ain’t gonna be a cakewalk.”

  “Where should I meet you?” Cross asked. “When?”

  “Nine o’clock,” Cantrell said. The moment the waitress set the glass of beer on the table, he grabbed it and poured half its contents down his throat. He set it back down and wiped his mouth with his tanned arm. “You know where, because you’ve already been there.”

  “I have?” Cross asked.

  Cantrell nodded.

  “I don’t …”

  “Think hard, Padre.”

  “Thanks for talking with me.” Cross left the bar and walked back to his motel room as quickly as he could. His skin itched from the dry weather, causing him to scratch at his arm hair with his chewed nails. Back at the motel, he jumped into a cold shower to clear away the sun from under his skin.

  “Skepticism,” he muttered, opening his mouth to the stream of water and letting it wash between his teeth. The bitter water tasted good.

  “I need more time,” he whispered, opening his eyes and letting the cool water irrigate his tear ducts. He imagined the water was turning back the disease, the curse, giving him more time to finally finish things.

  He stepped out of the shower, not bothering to dry off or clothe himself, and walked out of the bathroom. Movement caught his right eye, and he immediately fell back against the frame of the door, grabbing the towel on the rack, his heart nearly breaking through his rib cage.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus!” For a moment, he thought his left eye was simply playing a trick on him, but then he heard Sheriff Taylor’s voice coming from the other room.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you, Father.”

  Cross wrapped the towel tightly around his waist and stepped out of the bathroom. Sheriff Taylor was sitting in the chair by the window, his hat in his lap and his head aimed down at the floor. The two-inch hairs on his head sat flattened against his head, shiny and gray under the overhead light. Behind him, a few dim rays of orange sunlight streamed through the curtains.

  “That’s an understatement, sheriff.”

  “I just need to confess some things,” the sheriff said. His tongue slipped over the words, and as Cross walked toward his bed, he could pick up the strong scent of whiskey in the air. “That priest in the next town over doesn’t… he just ain’t the kind of guy you can talk to.”

  “I… understand.” Cross sat down on the bed, unsure of how to proceed. He had never heard a confession before.

  “It’s been so goddamned long,” Taylor said. He exhaled through his mouth. His fingers bounced against his legs. His pants had a clean crease but were wrinkled around his thighs from where they’d bunched up while he sat in his patrol car. “Lots of shit’s happened.”

  “Like what?” Cross asked.

  Taylor shrugged. His eyes refused to tear away from the ground. “It’s… there’s so much… sometimes, I gotta let people go. I gotta let them go, or the town will go broke. The ranchers need the cheap labor. But people still want me to arrest the illegals. Round them up. Some want me to do worse or at least look the other way.”

  Cross felt lightheaded. The cold air of the fan was blowing onto his bare chest, freezing his skin and tightening his nipples.

  “It’s like I’m a fucking diplomat… I make the wrong decisions sometimes,” the sheriff said. He wiped at the sweat on his forehead. “Sometimes, I get called a spic lover. Sometimes, I get called a racist. The town runs best when I’m either both or…” He shook his head again.

  “I don’t envy you,” Cross said. He was trying to imagine what the sheriff wanted him to say. Trying to imagine what he could say that would end this without him losing face. His breath had a noxious hint of strong alcohol to it.

  “I get calls,” the sheriff said, “and they’re always from these boys who don’t have any jobs. They’re out there on the border drinking beer and riling each other up, and then they call me to tell me they got one. And I go out there, and it’s a guy or sometimes a gal, and sometimes they’re roughed up.”

  “Sheriff…”

  “They’re good boys,” he said, pounding his fist on his leg. His chest jerked as he suppressed a
hiccup. “God damn it, they’re good boys. Just pissed because they got nothing to do no more. So I take those illegals into the county jail, and I wait till the bruises are gone, and then I call the Border Patrol. But sometimes I just let them go.”

  Cross swallowed, thinking hard back to his time with the parish in Seattle. The priest had been vibrant and passionate, had always given good sermons. He’d also been a drunk, said he’d quit, but that didn’t stop him. He’d confessed to Cross even though Cross wasn’t a priest. “There are times… when you’re confronted with choices that don’t seem very fair. Maybe none of them sound good. But God understands. All God asks is for you to keep him close to your heart.”

  Sheriff Taylor’s eyes got glassy, but he still wouldn’t look up. “I like that, Father. I really, really, like that.”

  Cross smiled. “I’m glad, sheriff.”

  “Just please tell me,” the sheriff said. “I gotta hear it, just so I know.”

  Cross had to think a moment before he realized what the sheriff wanted. “I absolve you of your sins,” he whispered.

  Taylor stood up, setting the hat back on his head. He finally looked up from the floor, looked Cross right in the eyes. He looked angry, frowning and tightening his jaw. “It must be nice to have that kind of power.”

  “I was thinking the same thing about you,” Cross said with a smile.

  “Ain’t nice,” Sheriff Taylor said. “Used to be nice, back when everything was easy. Now it ain’t nice. I ain’t a sheriff no more. I’m a politician.”

  Cross licked his lips, standing up. “You know what? I knew a man in the seminary who never confessed, not a single time.”

  “Really?” Sheriff Taylor asked, following Cross to the front door. He exhaled, bringing with it a quiet belch that smelled like booze and cooked meat.

  “Honest to God,” Cross said. He opened the door, but Sheriff Taylor didn’t move.

  “Never once? Didn’t think you could even do that.”

  Cross shook his head. “He never made it. Lost control. Ended up killing a man in cold blood.”

  “I shouldn’t envy you,” Sheriff Taylor said. His body swayed gently back and forth as he walked to the door. “Thanks for talking,” he mumbled, stepping into the hallway.

  Cross shut the door, leaning against it and thinking about the seminary, about sitting in his room with his friend, about laughing at things, wishing he still found those things funny. He threw the towel onto the bathroom floor and walked over to the nightstand and turned on the light, then dropped onto the bed. He closed his left eye and checked the clock sitting on the nightstand: eight o’clock. Already he could fall asleep.

  “It’s the beer,” he muttered, pushing his face into the hard motel pillow. “Maybe the meds.”

  He’d let the story about his friend slip, and the sheriff hadn’t even noticed. His friend, the killer… Cross had confessed knowledge of it, and he knew why: because he wanted to tell someone about it. He wanted forgiveness just as badly as the sheriff. Forgiveness for his role in the murder.

  “End this curse.”

  The words were lost to his ears, a secret between his mouth and the pillow. He tried to remember how old he was, how long he had spent on the road. He must be twenty-eight—no, twenty-nine.

  Six years of searching. Six years of jumping from town to town, preying on the hospitality of Catholics who believed he was something he wasn’t, always overstaying his welcome in a desperate attempt to find the scent of Gabriel Morrissey’s trail.

  “Morrissey,” he whispered, feeling hot tears welling in his eyes and immediately soaking into the pillowcase. His left eye burned. “Goddamn, you.”

  He dreamt about the church from his hometown, its windows painted white and the steeple towering for miles into the sky, cutting through the gray clouds above. People wearing shiny gray suits and soft blue dresses were walking into the narrow chapel. Cross could not see the name of the church, two salty syllables on the tip of his tongue.

  A priest walked between two elderly couples, standing out with his black robe. He disappeared through the church’s bright red doors. Among the parishioners, a thin, tall man who looked like Cross walked inside holding a knife.

  He woke with the same grogginess as the morning prior, the alarm on his nightstand buzzing quietly underneath the steady hum of the air conditioner. He reached over the bottles of pills, tapping the snooze button and laying on his back, staring at the ceiling and watching the overhead fan’s rotating glossy plastic white blades reflect beams of sunlight at a moderate tempo. His eyes were unfocused. His mind traveled back to the ceiling fan hanging in the guest room of his grandmother’s old house. Every room seemed to emanate a muggy, damp atmosphere in that place. He remembered waking up as a child in the middle of the night in cold sweats, his upper lip damp and the darkness suffocating him. The only thing that kept him from crying out were the stars on the ceiling, arranged by his grandmother with the kind of preciseness that only comes from careful consideration. Constellations.

  The alarm buzzed again. Cross got slowly to his feet, dressing in a fresh pair of jeans and pissing out the beer from his bladder before leaving the motel. He stood on the sidewalk and lit a cigarette, all but forgetting about the sheriff, thinking hard about Cantrell’s last comment from the night before. Where would he meet? The ranch? No, it was thriving, and no one had mentioned anything about the type of extensive renovation that Cantrell had hinted at.

  “Main Street,” Cross whispered through a cloud of smoke. He turned and headed west, back in the direction of the run-down apartments on the south side of town, a stark contrast to the square two-story brick buildings on the east end, which all looked renovated—new red overhangs on the grocery store, a small one-story red-bricked extension on the hardware store—while the small white duplexes and three-unit apartment buildings on the southwest end looked as if their exteriors had been untouched for years.

  At the old apartment, Cantrell stood in front of the door, leaning heavily on the frame with his thin arms crossed over his chest, smoking a thin cigarette. In the light, he looked much older, the way a weightlifter looked after reaching thirty when the skin began to hang more loosely from the muscles. The constellations of dark freckles along his bare arms seemed to have multiplied overnight. Cantrell still wore his hat, letting his stringy blond hair hang over broad shoulders that were disproportionately large compared to the rest of his lanky body.

  “Didn’t think you’d show,” he said, his lips fumbling around the cigarette. He kicked absently at one of the large black chunks of old gum stuck to the blistered concrete. A rusty, box-shaped yellow taxi sat parked next to the curb.

  Cross stopped next to him, hugging the building tightly so he could hide under the thin swatch of shade created by the small second-story awning where plants had once been kept atop. “I keep my promises, Mister Cantrell.”

  Cantrell threw down the cigarette, exhaling a cloud of smoke and then grabbing the doorknob, pushing the door open rather than turning the useless knob. Cross followed him, immediately stepping back at the stench. He felt his stomach seize up, his shoulders collapsing against the building’s wall.

  “Yeah,” Cantrell said, stepping inside. “I caught a whiff of it before I lit up.”

  “What is it?” Cross asked between gasps. His words came out in intervals, between violent dry heaves attempting to expunge the scent from every corner of his lungs.

  Cantrell walked into the next room. Cross opened his mouth and sucked in as much air as he possibly could before stepping inside again. He followed Cantrell into the empty living room, stopped, and immediately turned away.

  “There you go,” Cantrell muttered. He hooked his thumbs into his pockets, pulling out a half-empty pack of cigarettes. He lit one and exhaled, blowing the smoke in every direction and it temporarily masked the stench.

  Cross felt his eyes sting. The way the two bodies looked, their images tunneled by the glaucoma in his left eye… he felt drawn to
their deaths. Everything else around the mother and her child was dark, all of his left eye’s remaining vigor centered on the little girl’s head cradled tightly against her mother’s chest. He turned away, and dry heaves came again, and he coughed out, “Call the police.”

  “I think they’re beyond the sheriff’s help,” Cantrell said, picking up enough of the dry syllables to understand. “They need a priest at this point. Know any good priests?”

  Cross forced himself to turn back to the bodies. The woman and the girl were resting against the far corner, hugging each other tightly under the thin blue blanket, sitting on the bed and looking away from anyone who might come walking in through the front door, as if they already anticipated any visitors’ indifference.

  “If you’re gonna pray,” Cantrell said, “do it fast. We’re working on a tight time window.”

  Cross walked closer on wobbly legs, kneeling in front of the bed and trying his best to ignore the stench, to not associate the smell of shit and piss with these two women—one woman, Cross corrected himself; one very young girl.

  “Mary,” he whispered, “Mother of Grace, Mother of mercy, shield me from my enemies, and receive me at the hour of my death. Amen.” Behind him, he heard the flick of Cantrell’s lighter.

  “Very fucking touching,” he said, re-lighting his cigarette. “Nothing like a good war prayer to send a child to Heaven.”

  Cross stood up and moved closer, keeping his eyes away from their faces, using one blind hand to reach for the blanket and cover the bodies completely. Behind him, Cantrell brought the cigarette to his lips and quietly drew in a fresh cloud of nicotine, blowing it out in a thin stream. Cross closed his eyes, breathing in through his nose. Tobacco. Shit. Rusted metal pipes. Piss. Mold-infested drywall.