by Layla Wolfe
My ire was raised along with my native Northside Dublin accent. “Name-calling is for pussies. Biakeddy, you come with me. I can’t trust you alone with these guys.”
Biakeddy turned sullen and quiet as I strapped the scope to my bitch seat. All he’d tell me was this bilagáana had come tearing up to St. John’s in the Desert in some rental car. He’d practically ripped Biakeddy’s shirt buttons off demanding to see a priest, pastor, vicar, anyone, anyone. He had something he needed to get off his chest.
“Obviously a great weight,” said Biakeddy, pounding his own chest.
He galloped his paint admirably alongside my Harley for a couple miles, then veered around, going back to the eclipse viewing. He no doubt wanted to harass Bloodgood about his physical deformities. The fingers on Bloodgood’s right hand were fused together and he walked with difficulty, his toes turned in, all due to uranium poisoning on the rez. “Navajo neuropathy” granted victims liver damage, dim vision, and digits that fused and tensed into hooks. Many were dead by age ten. The EPA had no funding for a cleanup, so the Diné just dealt with not knowing where the uranium hid. Was it in their water, in their sheep, cattle? Did the horses eat radioactive grass? No one was certain, and it seemed even less certain we’d ever find out.
Some folk confused my church with a Roman Catholic church and looked for the confessional booth. People just saw a cross on the roof atop a lovely wooden spire and didn’t bother reading the sign. Two round stained-glass rosette windows also seemed to read “Catholic,” although I can’t fault anyone for thinking that. It’s what they saw on TV that drew a picture of their expectations.
Yes, there was a bland rental car out front. I couldn’t resist peeking in as I walked past. A long wand like a metal detector was slung across the back seat, and in the passenger seat was a box with meters.
My dream. Bloodgood’s sticks.
Instruments.
Entering the nave quietly, I saw the hunched back of a solo man in a front pew. I let my boots fall harder now as a warning as I approached. The man gasped and turned to face me with a look of molten terror. Just as quickly, he whipped his head back to eyes front! “Don’t look at me,” he whispered loudly, tremulously, like a horror movie character.
My split-second view was enough to tell me this is the man from my dream. Not as dark as I’d thought—maybe the darkness was a shadow of the doom apparently hanging over his head—he was a clean-cut chestnut-haired man with a superbly-formed hook nose turned down at the tip. His full lips were bowed, as though an angel had pressed his finger there. It was hard to tell if he was conservative or a bleeding heart, but I could picture him in tinted glasses flashing a peace sign.
I jumped to conclusions. Priests are forced to do that. A liberal Jew.
That was why he’d grabbed the first church he’d seen. In desperation, everything looks the same.
I edged into the pew behind him, giving him his privacy. The sleeves of his button-down shirt were rolled to the elbows, exposing strong, veined, tanned forearms. The clean-shaven back of his neck was enticing. His hair looked so downy soft my lips trembled.
“You are troubled.”
“Yes,” he choked. “I need to confess, and I was told you have no confession booth.”
“It’s all right. I’m trained in the sacrament of reconciliation with God.”
“And what’s your name,” he demanded, dully.
“Father Moloney.”
“Irish,” he said, with some odd bitterness.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said lightly, tossing out a small laugh.
He sighed and crouched over, forearms on knees. His jeans were soaked with rust red desert dust. A man of science. “I don’t want you to know who I am, then. I’m here strictly to report what I’ve seen in confidence. Get that? In confidence.”
I looked around the chapel. Nobody was there. I had no assistant priest or vicar to help me, if you didn’t count Galileo, who’d been staying with me in the rectory. It was a Tuesday, a day I normally went to people’s hogans to pray with and counsel parishioners. “In total confidence, my friend. You can reconcile yourself to God with me.”
He exploded, “I just want to confess my sins, all right? None of this ‘reconcile yourself to God’ shit. I work for a horrible, immoral, criminal asshole, and I’m a fucking lackey of his. Because I’m weak, I get sent all over the world doing his dirty work.” He scoffed, painfully. “Shit. ‘Dirty work’ is right. I’m a geologist working for a mining company.”
The man of science. That all-encompassing shiver gripped my spine, sent gooseflesh spreading down my thighs, the back of my skull, sinking tentacles into my occipital lobe, stimulating my vision and perception of the scientist. The back of his head appeared pixilated sharply, and my nostrils flared to inhale the natural, manly scent emanating from him.
Out of fear, I stuck to the script. “The Lord be in your heart and upon your lips that you may truly and humbly confess your sins. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
“Amen,” he whispered. But emotion got the better of him, and he hissed, “I’ve surveyed some contaminated places in my time. But your uranium mines are the worst, most slovenly, highly contaminated I’ve ever seen! The two-by-fours at the mine portals are rotten, dissolving. Wood tends to do that when it was hammered up in the days of doo-wop and Edsels!”
Our uranium mines were in deplorable shape, I knew. The government had made a token attempt to keep people away from the old mines during the fifties, and no attempt had been made since. “Why are they suddenly surveying?”
He spat, “Have you noticed the price of uranium lately? Twenty, twenty-five dollars a pound! My company renewed its license to get at your deposits under the Salomé Valley. We’ve got a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to oversee the new water process in our licensed territory.”
So, he felt guilty about contributing to some acts of general sleazery. Men had done much worse through the ages in the name of making a living, providing for a family. But instead, I found myself saying, “When God appears to be letting you down, you can see him speaking through artists. Musicians, filmmakers, ordinary people of belief and purity.”
“Like you?”
“I suppose like me. I’m here to offer comfort, yes. God spoke through Rimbaud’s poetry, through Van Gogh’s paintings, and personally I like the films of Stanley Kubrick.”
The scientist did a spit take, maybe at the idea a priest would watch Clockwork Orange. But he soon became depressed again. “A lot of the old regulatory oversight has been decommissioned or underfunded lately. Nobody gives a shit that my boss proposes to go in and stir up a lot of poisoned groundwater. I hardly think that binging The Shining is going to give me faith.”
“God spoke through men like the second century Greek scholar Origen, who taught we had a premortal existence in the presence of God, a God who experienced our pain as his, who loved us so infinitely that he’d embrace all of humanity. And Julian of Norwich, he showed sin was necessary, that Adam and Eve’s decision was a brave step into mortality, not a disastrous fall from grace.”
He sighed. “All right. So, we are all mere mortals. And sex isn’t bad.”
I smiled. I liked his cynicism. Who was he? “Here, we don’t claim to know all about salvation. Christianity has that cachet of superiority. I become extremely cynical to think a body of a few million on a planet of seven billion can really be God’s only chosen ones, the only successors to salvation. Mainly because they aren’t. “
He sat up straight. “Are you saying it’s not my job to stand up to this tyrant? Just take blind faith that everything will turn out well?”
“Not really. This trial is a test for you, a summons to faith. It can display to you who you are, what you love, what you desire. Just the act of believing can be the most liberating and open demonstration of what resides in your heart. Like the poet describing a church bell that only peals dramatically when struck,
or a hummingbird that only shows shimmering beauty when in flight—so do the secrets of the human heart lie idle until it receives a call to action.”
He chuckled without humor. “You’re saying I might be called to stand up to this dictator.”
“Could be, my friend. When you freely choose faith, it tells something intrinsic about you. If you wallow in indecision, you won’t decay or wither. You’ll just miss the chance to act with certainty in the face of uncertainty, to take a leap in the dark, to show that your terror of making a mistake is bigger than your love for the truth.”
This seemed a good place for me to pause, to let this gorgeous, stricken man ponder my words. He laced his long, agile fingers together at the back of his neck, stretching his legs. “Well,” he said flatly. “Then the answer is obvious. Father, I’ve been seeing radon levels a hundred times higher than our control groups. It rained a lot last month. Uranium levels in new lakes that’ve appeared there are a hundred times the EPA threshold.”
I froze. “Which lake? Where?”
He stood with his back to me. “Father. My self-hatred hasn’t stopped me from seeing my shortcomings. I signed up to do the bidding of a man who hates the environment, equality, women, minorities, the middle class. His only goal is to plunder to line his own pockets. Greed. Selfishness. Rapacity. And when I do his bidding, I show my true self as being similar.”
“No. You’re just working for him.”
“But my work enables him to plunder.”
“Not if you report the high levels of contaminants. Where did you say this lake—”
“I’m outta here.”
He picked up a backpack, slung it over one shoulder, and true to his word, was outta there.
I found myself dumbly admiring his round ass under the tight 501s. I cried out, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, who offered himself to be sacrificed for us to the Father, and who conferred power on his Church to forgive sins, absolve you through my ministry by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and restore you in the perfect peace of the Church. Amen!”
He flashed me the peace symbol as he strode out the door, using the far aisle to reach the foyer. “Amen!” he hollered.
Quietly, I murmured, “The Lord has put away all your sins. Abide in peace, and pray for me, a sinner.”
I headed toward the sacristy, taking the door to my office. From here, I knew I had a clear view to the parking lot, where my mystery scientist was angrily chucking his backpack into the rental car. His handsome face should be smiling. He peeled out, churning up a dust cloud of sand, and headed south on 95, which made sense. The Salomé Range. The recent deluges had created many new lakes, so he could be going anywhere. I jumped a foot when a sudden voice jolted me.
“See what I mean, Father?”
“Oh, God!” I said, betraying that I hadn’t been aware. I’d been lost in thought.
Klah Biakeddy leaned ominously against the doorjamb. “He was full of some kind of desperation. I don’t like seeing people dat upset.”
Fine words coming from the current bully of the playground. Of course, I could see a lot of my younger self in Klah. We were drawn to each other yet repelled by each other. “Do you know . . . anything about him, Klah?”
He smiled darkly. “I could find out.”
I shrugged. “Oh, don’t do that. Just . . . you know. Let me know if you happen to hear anything.”
“Sure,” Klah said, as though he perceived my real intention.
He galloped off on his paint as I walked through the chapel garden, a serene oasis of palms, prickly fishhook barrel cactus, and spindly ocotillo, their tips flaming like fire trucks this time of year. With long strides, I gained the hundred yards to the rectory in record time.
I locked all doors against Galileo or errant parishioners. Flinging myself on my mattress, I scrabbled to move aside my cassock. My eager hand went right to my erect penis, straining against my boxer briefs. Unzipping my cargo shorts, I whipped the damned thing out.
I couldn’t bear the temptation any longer. I had bet that the virtuous, pure existence of a priest would be a hard row to hoe. But running into the good scientist made me uncomfortably hot. I relieved the pressure in eight or ten long, lusty strokes. Globs of semen splashed me in the face, and it seemed like I came forever, though it was probably only a full minute.
My balls still quivered for a long time, and the image of the back of his neck would never leave me.
CHAPTER TWO
FREMONT
I wouldn’t classify myself as a dewy-eyed idealist.
I’d worked for U-238 Resources for the better part of six years as mining engineer, surveying abandoned mines or new discoveries for their viability. Before that, I was with the EPA for seven years after graduating MIT.
So I do know my shit. You’d think I’d know better than to accept this mission direct from the top, from ol’ Oswald Avery himself.
You always get what you want, what you need at that exact moment in time, you know? I wanted a fresh, important mission, and for all the wreck that my life had become, they gave me one. Handed it right over to me on a platter. It was the cream of the crop of missions. But when it ended, I never wanted another one.
I was there to look at the old uranium pit mines, dug in the forties in a frantic sweep for material for Fat Man and Little Boy. Uranium used to be thought of as a nuisance, offal produced when vanadium mills ground ore into dust. Back in the day, U-238 tried marketing uranium as a paint additive for ceramics. But uranium was unstable, radiating energy as it decomposed into other elements, some not decaying for a thousand years. In 1939 scientists figured out how to crack the unsteady atom—to split it. Atoms struck each other in a wild pinball game, creating chain reactions, explosions of energy that would become man’s greatest weapon.
Some of these mines were a mile wide. Water swelled up from the aquifer, recent rains had added to it, and now cattle and sheep drank deeply from the new lakes.
As in Blythe to the west in California, Congress had only told the Energy department to decontaminate the mills in the fifties—not a word about the mines. Now, when I first drove out in my energy-saving car toward the ragged, volcanic formations of the Salomé Range, I saw children playing in those boarded-up tunnels. A family was using the first tunnel I inspected as a sheep corral. With a mystified grandma watching me sharply, my first Geiger counter test had my yellow box sputtering and beeping like crazy. Just in this sheep corral, radon—a product of uranium’s decay—was fifty times higher than the acceptable limit. Up in the Cleopatra mine, where Ozzie Avery had especially asked me to investigate, radon was pinging about sixty times the EPA limit.
Knowing Avery would ask me to be loyal to him and suppress this information, I blew off his phone calls and went back to my hotel room in Quartzsite. I had to call my sister Ariella, also a scientist in her own right. She was my voice of reason, my conscience, currently working on a global warming project in Alaska.
“Are you drinking scotch?” was the first thing Ariella said.
No sense in pretending I wasn’t. “Yup.” I slurped it extra-loud and clinked ice just to piss her off. She was so high and mighty, down on anyone with a bad habit, yet she couldn’t go eight hours without puffing weed. “So, I’m finding background levels of radon sixty times above the acceptable threshold. And you know what Avery’s going to say.”
Ariella sighed deeply. She was probably smoking weed as we spoke. She had a much better room than I did up in Prudhoe Bay, a Quonset hut with a chef who made them crab omelets. “Yes. He’s going to ask you to be loyal and doctor your reports.”
“Yes. I found a tailings pile rich in radium, thorium, lead, selenium arsenic, all carcinogens. Makes me curious if there’s a higher rate of cancer on the rez.”
Ariella posed the theoretical question. “What’re you gonna do?”
“Well, I avoided him today. But you know tomorrow he’s going to be texting like a bastard, sending a hit man to check on me.”
“Hit man?
You mean security guy. Human resources guy. Tailor for your rumpled clothes.”
“No, I mean a hit man, Ariella. You’re the only one I’ve told about this.”
“It’s on the down-low, bro.”
“He has this guy, a major bruiser, a thug, a Russian thug named Dragan, I kid you not. He’s like a bad guy straight out of a James Bond flick. Usually the guy is his bodyguard. But once, when I was surveying for platinum in Stillwater, Montana, he sent Dragan out. I had told Avery I could find very little. Suddenly Dragan appears, shadowing me everywhere. He kept repeating ‘find platinum. Find platinum,’ like some kind of goon. He made me so jittery, and the Saturday Night Special in his pocket didn’t help.”
“Listen to you. What a conspiracy theorist.”
“It’s true! He had a little .25 caliber pistol that fit in his palm.”
“Did he have a gold grill?”
“No, but he had brass knuckles.” She burst into laughter, so I said, “I kid you the fuck not! You can imagine how relieved I was when I found a platinum deposit. Listen, Ariella. They’ve left mountains of tailings behind. I saw one today covering ten acres—another was bigger. These should’ve been closed off to the public. Indians have dug caves into the tailings pile, and one grandfather told me he used to sled down them. They like to stand on top of the piles, so they can oversee their sheep herds.”
“You’ve got to do something, bro. You’re a good guy with a good conscience. Hey, listen. I wasn’t sure whether to tell you this, so I’ve been pondering.”
“And of course, you’re telling me.” I got my lazy ass off the bed to refill my glass with scotch and ice.
“Right. It’s Kelly. She emailed me asking if I wanted your sword collection.”
I did a spit take. “My katana swords!”
“Right. Of course, she didn’t want to give them back to you, since you’re basically homeless, so she thought I could at least store them awhile. She’s running out of room—”
“My swords!” I cried again, like a baby. I had curated those swords like a professional and had even fought with some of them. They’d been on my wall in my office in my ex-house, and now my ex-wife was trying to pawn them off on someone.
