You Believers

by Jane Bradley

  But sitting there, looking at those clean lines that lifted his eyes up toward someplace like heaven, Billy felt cheated. He just saw a ceiling and some old rusty water stains in the corner, where there must have been a leak when it rained. Then he felt guilty. He was sure God wouldn’t be happy with some pot-smoking bricklayer criticizing his church. I’m sorry, God, Billy thought. It’s just sometimes I can’t help myself. He sighed and looked up at the cross. If God really did know everything a man did and thought, then he’d know Billy was some kind of sinner who didn’t have the sense to admire God’s church. He’d never really thought of himself as a sinner; he’d laughed at the idea of needing to be saved. He just couldn’t buy those sincere looks of Christians when they’d tried to save him on street corners by pushing cartoon pamphlets about hell and damnation into his hand. He’d just keep walking, saying something like, “I’m all right; I’ve got my own religion.” And most days he did feel all right. Living was his religion, just living a good life and being a nice guy. Wasn’t that enough to please a God with any kind of compassion?

  I’m not a sinner, Billy thought. But maybe God thought he was. He sat there trying to think of anything he’d done wrong. Too much pot and beer. He’d never cheated on Katy. But there had been those years when he hadn’t been the most honest guy with the girls. Only the silent kind of lying, where you just let them think what they needed to think and kept the truth to yourself. But everybody did that. Didn’t they? He’d never stolen anything. He had even once told his boss when he’d paid Billy overtime on a job he hadn’t done. The boss had been so surprised at Billy’s honesty that he’d laughed and given him a beer out of that little refrigerator he kept in the office. Billy had thought he’d let him keep the extra money, but the next week, sure enough, it was docked from his pay. Katy laughed at Billy’s honesty. She said that was one of the things she loved about him—he didn’t even think to lie when most men would have taken the money and laughed. He knew she was thinking about Frank, who lived on lies and laughter, but he let her keep that thought to herself. He let her keep lots of her thoughts to herself. And now he sat wondering whether he might be a little closer to knowing where she was now if he’d pushed a little harder to know what she kept in her mind. He wondered what she’d think of him sitting in her favorite church, a church they couldn’t get married in, but still her favorite. She’d probably laugh at the sight of him sitting there, trying to conjure up a prayer.

  Since she’d disappeared, he liked to think that somehow she could see him, know what he was doing, could see that he was still loving her and trying to be good. She’d like the way he did the dishes and the laundry. And she’d like the way he’d been good to her mom even when they all knew her mom didn’t think much of him. As much as she didn’t want her mom to think of her as just a bartender, she would have liked him inviting Livy to the bar, where she could meet Pete, who’d be sure to lift her spirits because that was just what Pete did. Livy had liked Pete. Livy had been pleased to see that Katy was working at a nice Irish bar and not some dive. He looked up at the cross, thought, Please let us find Katy. Alive. Please let her be alive somewhere.

  He remembered that bartender chick. Allison, that was her name. He’d made her cry that night, even though she wouldn’t show it. He knew he’d made her cry inside with that smart-ass shit about her being nothing but corn. What the fuck was the matter with him, talking like that? I’m sorry, God, he thought. I’m sorry, Katy. The girl hadn’t come near him since that night. Whenever he walked in, Pete jumped up and got him his beer, or somebody without a word just brought him a drink. The girl, Allison, wouldn’t even look at him. He looked up at the cross, which was looking more and more like a futuristic spaceship with the brighter light of day coming through the windows. He said the words: “Okay, God, I’m sorry. Next time I go to the bar, I’ll go right up to the girl and apologize. And even if she smacks me in the face, I’ll say that’s all right.”

  The confession-booth door opened, and the cleaning man came out. He must have felt Billy staring at him. He gave a nod and a quick little smile. Billy realized he’d probably heard him talking out loud. He was probably used to people coming in there and talking to themselves, or to God, whomever it was you were really talking to when you sat in a church. Billy thought, See me, Katy? I’m here. He thought about the girl from Land Fall. She’d said someone had been talking to her that night. She’d said she thought it was Katy, but if it was Katy, that would mean Katy was dead. That old knot of tears clenched in his throat, and he swallowed it down. He thought, If you can hear me, Katy, please talk to me. Please don’t leave me alone with so much quiet. I don’t want to be alone.

  Since Livy had moved out to the beach, he saw her only once a week. She’d invite him to dinner, make his favorite things, like steak, pork chops. He’d only given up eating meat for Katy. I’m sorry, Katy, he thought. He knew she’d laugh, and he could feel the warmth inside he always felt when he got Katy to laughing. She’d be nothing but tickled that her mother was cooking for him, giving him meat.

  Billy watched the cleaning guy walk up to the front of the church. He wanted to call to him, but it seemed rude to yell across a church. He thought of waving the guy over, but that seemed even more rude, would be like bossing the cleaning guy around the way some people told a bartender to hurry up and bring another beer. The man stopped in front of the altar, bowed his head, and quickly crossed himself. Billy smiled. Finally something he’d seen in the movies. Even when a church was empty, people stopped in front of the altar and crossed themselves. Most times they did a quick little drop to their knees. But this man lowered his head in a firm way, as if he really meant it and wasn’t just going through the motions. With the way he stood, bowed, he seemed old. Billy figured that the old man might have trouble standing again if he went to his knees. The man gave a little nod to the altar and headed for the alcove where the votive candles glowed. There would be a lot of dust there, all that metal, glass, and wax. Billy decided to go light another candle for Katy so maybe he’d get a chance to talk to the man.

  He walked quietly, even though no one was in the place but the cleaning man. Or maybe the priest was hidden somewhere behind a curtain where he could watch what his congregation did when they thought he wasn’t around. When Billy turned into the alcove, he saw the old man crouched, using a putty knife to scrape at the floor. He jumped, struggled up. “Excuse me, please,” he said. He grabbed his bucket of cleaning supplies and turned to go.

  “It’s all right,” Billy said. “I already lit a candle. I came to talk to you.”

  “Me?” The man looked confused. He wore gold wire glasses, and his head was balding, looked to be in his seventies. He had the kind of face that looked like it had gone gentle instead of hardened with age. Billy thought he looked like the old man in Pinocchio, the man who had made a wooden boy because he was lonely and just wanted a boy of his own. Katy loved that movie. It was her favorite Disney movie, and Billy thought that was odd since she was a girl.

  The man rushed to arrange the cleaning supplies in his bucket, and his putty knife clattered to the floor. Billy bent to pick it up, saw the hardened pool of wax. He looked at the old man. “How does so much wax get spilled on the floor?” He looked at the little candles in the box, the ones arranged and flickering neatly in the red votives. Anybody with sense would put the candle into the holder, then light it. You’d have to really work at it to get so much wax on the floor.

  “Kids,” the man said. “You know kids, looking for any kind of trouble these days.” He reached for the putty knife. “Now I’ll get out of your way.”

  Billy kept the putty knife at his side. “I’ll finish cleaning this for you.”

  The man shifted his glasses higher on his nose and looked at Billy with a mix of doubt and patience. He’d probably seen and heard just about everything in that church. Billy crouched and jabbed at the wax, which came up in bigger, smoother chunks than the old man had been able to scrape up. “I’m
sorry about the kids,” Billy said.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,” the man said. Then he went on to tell Billy that he didn’t really need to clean the mess, that he probably should just get on with his prayers and whatever else he needed to do that day.

  Billy said he really didn’t have anything better to do with his day and kept scraping. He pushed the wax into a little pile, then scooped it into his palm. He stood, not knowing what to do with it.

  The man offered his bucket. “Just dump it here.”

  Billy looked into the neatly arranged bottles, brushes, carefully folded rags. “That’s too clean for dirt,” Billy said and shoved the wax into his front pocket, telling himself to be sure to empty his pockets before throwing the jeans in the wash. Katy had trained him to do that. The man kept looking from the floor to Billy and back to the floor again, as if some miracle had occurred. Billy spotted the citrus cleanser in the bucket. “Perfect,” he said. “This is just what you need to get the trace wax up. I thought I’d need to go get some from my truck, but you’ve got it right here.” He gave the man the putty knife, grabbed the cleanser and a rag. He bent to clean the floor. He liked that citrus smell.

  Billy scrubbed harder than he needed to, felt the tightening in his face, the tears trying to rise. His throat ached. He remembered what Livy had told him: There had to be a million blue trucks in the world. He rubbed the floor harder, heard his breath going in and out, the sound of a man running or fighting, struggling to bear weight, too much noise for a man just cleaning wax off a floor.

  “You all right, fella?” the man said.

  Billy sat on the floor, looked up at the man, who really did look like that man who made Pinocchio. Billy shook his head.

  The man looked around the church as if he could find help. “Father Welly isn’t here today. You probably came for Father Welly. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Welly?” Billy smiled. “You have a priest named Welly? Heals the sick and . . .” he thought to say raises the dead, but wouldn’t say that. He looked up at the old man juggling his bucket on his hip and thought to say, And I guess they call you Mr. Clean. But that would be a smart-ass who’d talk like that. It was easy to be a smart-ass when you couldn’t say what you really wanted to say, when you wanted to cry and just say to someone, Could you bring my Katy home?

  The man was looking down at him, worried now. “We have a deacon I could call if it’s an emergency.”

  Billy stood and looked at the cleaning rag in his hand. He gave the bottle of cleanser to the man and then folded the rag into a neat square, just like the other rags in the bucket. “It’s not an emergency,” he said. He wiped the tears that had slipped from his eyes with the back of his hand.

  The man took the rag, put it into his bucket. Then he lightly touched Billy’s elbow and led him to sit in a pew. “I’d say it’s something.”

  Billy sat, looked up at the cross. Now it looked like a new kind of space shuttle frozen in flight. “When did crosses start looking so modern, like futuristic airplanes?”

  The man followed his gaze, gave a little shrug. “How long’s it been since you were in a church?”

  “You mean a real church?”

  “Any kind of church,” he said. “I suppose they’re all real to somebody.”

  “A couple of months ago, maybe. I was at a Unitarian place. It looked more like a New Age recreation hall than a church.”

  The man nodded and looked up at the cross. Billy sat breathing his smell of soap and citrus and that old-man smell, not a stink but old and comforting, like the smell of a worn-out leather sofa that was all cracked and ripped in places but still the best thing to sit in. “My fiancée,” Billy said, “her name is Katy. She’s been missing for over three months now. It’s looking like . . .” He couldn’t say it. “It’s not looking good.”

  The old man must have been trained by the priest on how to hold steady even when somebody’s world was crumbling, falling down on the ground all around. He let the silence sit there, just the way Billy needed him to. Billy needed the silence to find the words that still needed to come. “I keep hoping she’ll come back. But if she could come back, she’d be home by now.”

  “The police, what do they say?”

  Billy sighed. It felt good to let the words out to a stranger, to someone who’d just listen and not throw in their own version of things. “At first they thought she’d just run off. But Katy wouldn’t do that. Then they found her truck.” He bit at his lip, just the way Katy did. “But there’s new evidence. That girl in Land Fall. That man that attacked her. It’s looking like he’s the man who took Katy.”

  “I’m sorry.” The man shook his head as if it were hurting him to hear the words. “That was an awful thing in Land Fall.”

  “It was worse than you think.”

  “It’s always worse than you think. Something like that. It’s always worse than anybody can say.”

  Billy nodded. “So I came here. Katy, she always liked this church. We live just a few blocks away, and we’d walk by here when we headed downtown. She liked the big trees outside. The old stone. She told me she liked to come inside to feel something like peace. But I don’t get it. Maybe you have to be a Catholic to feel something like peace.”

  The man smiled, shook his head. “No, you don’t have to be Catholic. But it helps if you’re open to the idea, at least the possibility, of peace. That’s what Father Welly says. You can’t force grace to come, he says, no more than you can force a cool breeze to come in a stuffy house. But if you keep the doors open, in time that breeze will always come along. But nothing will come if you don’t keep the doors open.”

  Billy sighed. “I’m open, man. I’ve been busted wide open to anything since Katy disappeared. She goes into a store to buy clothes—that’s the last thing we know.”

  The man nodded. “I know that story. I’ve seen those pictures of her all over town. She’s a pretty girl.” He shook himself a little, sat straighter, and patted the back of Billy’s hand. “I’m so, so sorry.” Tears ran down Billy’s face. They just broke and spread like something busting through a crack in a dam. The man pressed a handkerchief into Billy’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’s clean.”

  Billy couldn’t bring himself to wipe his face with it. He just squeezed the cloth in his sweaty hand. “I came here because Katy liked this place. I thought it would be old and comforting. She likes old things. I thought there would be comfort in an old church. It’s where they always go in movies, an old church. I thought there would be comfort in a place built by men’s hands, a place still standing strong after a hundred years. And I walk in, see this. It looks more like a convention center than a church. I wanted it to be the kind of church where you walk in and feel it; you feel like it’s the kind of place where God might actually hang around.”

  The man laughed. “You think God just hangs around old churches? And you aren’t even Catholic?” He kept laughing in a quiet way, not shaming, just taking real pleasure in Billy sitting there next to him, giving him something to talk about. “You think God cares what a building looks like? I’d say that’s the popes. They like a nice piece of architecture.” He nudged Billy as if Billy could get the joke. Then he sat back, looked out at the cross, and shook his head. “I’m an old man. I’ve seen this world. I wasn’t always a janitor, you know. I was a soldier. Based in Germany, and let me tell you, I could show you some old, old churches, hundreds of years old. Churches built because some pope or some rich man could get cheap labor to make some kind of monument—oh, they’ll say it’s to God. But there’s always some man who takes great pride in the thing.”

  “I thought they were holier back then,” Billy said.

  The man took Billy’s hand, turned it to show the callused palms. “I see you are a laborer. Those men that built those old churches, they were laborers. Sure, they were working on a monument to God, but you know what got them up and out to work every morning? It was the pay at the end of the day. It was the money for bread and meat.
Faith, we like to think it’s about what you believe in, but when you get my age, you’ll see that faith is in the doing things. It’s a verb, that’s what Father Welly says. It’s not a noun; it’s a verb. It’s about doing things.”

  Billy smiled. “Katy would like that. She likes doing things.”

  “There you go,” the man said. “I could show you churches in Berlin, Venice, Rome. All those tourists rush to see Notre Dame like it’s the grandest, most holy thing in France. And in truth it’s not nearly as big as those postcards would have you believe. People go looking for some kind of holy. And when they come back all they talk about are the flying buttresses, the gargoyles, and that stained-glass rose window. You ask me, you can find more of God in a real rose.”

  “Katy would like that,” Billy said.

  The man went on. “It’s just stuff. Old stuff. I’ve seen those people standing in line just to look at the relic of some of dead pope’s hand. It’s pretty creepy, if you ask me. Holiness in some dead man’s hand—even if he was a pope.” The old man paused to get his breath. He nudged Billy. “You just remember when you think about those big holy churches, it was men that laid those stones. We can tell ourselves they did it for God, but any man knows a man works for his pay. It’s the work for pay that gets him through his days.”

  Billy nodded. And they both sat back, grinning at that cross like a plane above the altar. “Thank you,” Billy said.

  The man stood. “And speaking of work, it’s time for me to get back to mine.”

  Billy watched him gather his bucket, then pause. He wasn’t in a great rush. “Thank you for your time. Your words. You were a help to me. I guess I didn’t really need to see a priest.”

  “Oh, there’s times we all need a priest. But most days you can do just fine talking to God yourself. And sometimes, just a man will do.”