“Woman?” the man said. “What woman?”
“The one who was sexually abused.”
“I was talking about something that happened in a case.”
“You said circle to the left? Or lead with the left?”
“Forget about that. What’s this with the woman?”
“Is this how to do it?” Julian said. He flicked his left into the man’s face. Then again.
“You’re trying to fuck with me? Why you looking at me like that? You want to get serious here?”
“Hit me.”
“You got a crucifixion complex?”
“Is the woman in an asylum?”
“You fucking with me? Big mistake, Father.”
The man forgot his own admonition and led with his right, then discovered he had just swung at empty space. Julian’s blows were a blur, landing with such force and ferocity that the larger man couldn’t raise his arms. He went down on the floor mat, but Julian went down on one knee with him, beating his face as though hammering a nail. “Don’t you ever harm a woman again,” he said through his teeth. “You got that? Shake your head if you hear me!”
But neither the man nor his friends could speak or move. Julian pulled off his gloves and slung them aside and got his gym bag out of his locker. He walked outside without showering or changing clothes. Then he put his vehicle into reverse and bounced over the curb into a fireplug.
* * *
NOW, AS HE pounded down Old Jeanerette Road in the sweetness of the morning in his cheap running shoes, past plantation homes strung with fog from the bayou, he wondered if he was a failure both as a priest and as a man, one who had lied to himself about his secret obsessions and his constant unfulfilled sexual yearning.
He had become a priest after reading Ammon Hennacy’s Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist, then had lived at the Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, New York, and been a missionary in El Salvador, jailed five times in civil protests.
In reality, who was he? Perhaps a closet sybarite. The idea was not untenable. He could not deny that he was attracted to women. Actually, “attracted” was not an adequate word. They were the most beautiful and intelligent creatures in God’s holy creation, and so superior to their male counterparts that the comparison was laughable. He literally burned for them, not just in his sleep but throughout the day. His desires were oral, penile, glandular, olfactory, auditory, infantile, protective, lustful, spiritual, and ultimately, torturous when he woke early in the morning and sat throbbing in his underwear on the side of his bed, asking God for an exemption to let him have a woman’s love and the love of the children that would come from their union. Then he despised himself for his self-pity.
As he jogged down the road, he could not keep his mind off the three or four women who, as always, would be at Saturday afternoon Mass, a distraction he could not get out of his head until Mass was over and they were gone. One had thick blond hair and a complexion that looked as smooth as an orchid’s petal; another one was buxom and jolly with a small Irish mouth and mischievous eyes and freshly air-blown red hair and perfume strong enough to get drunk on; another was tall and part black/part Indian and wore purple and scarlet dresses she must have gotten into with a shoehorn; and number four always managed to have the top of her blouse unbuttoned, a gold chain and cross hanging inside her cleavage, her hand warm and fleshy when she squeezed his.
Now he was the subject of a homicide investigation. Hallucinogens had been planted in his refrigerator, and stamps from his collection stolen and glued on the shoe of the murder victim. His name was sullied by charges of child molestation, the one sin Jesus denounced so vehemently that he warned the perpetrators they would be better off not born or fastening millstones about their necks and casting themselves into the sea.
When he got back from his run, sweating and out of breath, he went straight to the kitchen and took a bottle of brandy from the cupboard and poured three inches into a jelly glass. Then he poured the brandy back into the bottle and stared listlessly out the window, wondering if a day of deliverance would ever be his.
* * *
THAT EVENING, AT sunset, he locked the church and returned to his small house and tried to keep his mind clear of negative thoughts. Fifteen minutes later, hail began bouncing like mothballs on the roof and the lawn, followed by a steady rain and a wind that thrashed the trees and bamboo along the bayou. A bolt of lightning struck the water just beyond the drawbridge, and he thought he saw a man running along the road with a raincoat over his head. When he looked again, the man was gone.
He fixed a fried-egg sandwich and a slice of chocolate cake and poured a glass of milk, then sat down at the table and began to eat. He would work on his stamp collection that night and go to bed early, then rise in the morning with gratitude for the life and the opportunities that had been given him. Or at least he would try to do these things, he told himself, knowing the weakness that seemed to live in his soul.
A car came around a bend in the road, its headlights on, and Julian saw the man with the raincoat standing among the crypts by the bayou. He put down his sandwich and opened the back door. A mist blew through the screen, touching his skin. “Can I help you?” he called.
“My dog jumped out of my car!” the man said over the sound of the rain on the roof. “You seen a yellow Lab? He’s just a pup.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I saw him run into the graveyard.”
“Come in,” Julian said. “I’ll get an umbrella and a flashlight.”
“That’s mighty kind of you.”
The man approached the kitchen door, hunched under the raincoat, his face turned up toward the light, as twisted as a squash. Then he was inside the kitchen, dripping on the linoleum.
“What’s that in your hand?” Julian said.
“This?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“I’ll show you.” The man stuck a stun gun into the side of Julian’s neck and knocked him across the kitchen, then stunned him twice more and pressed him to the floor with a pointy-toed, spit-shined cowboy boot. With his free hand, he clicked off the overhead lights.
“Due to my upbringing, I never cottoned to the ministry,” he said. “By the way, my name is Delmer Pickins. I give you my name ’cause you won’t be passing it on.”
He lit a cigar and puffed it alight, then blew off the ash until the tip glowed like a hot coal. “Time to get on it, boy.”
* * *
JULIAN COULD NOT tell what the man named Pickins did to him. An eye mask had rendered him blind, and his wrists had been pulled behind him and cinched with ligatures. He knew he had passed out at least once. The greatest pain was in his fingers and feet and his genitals. He could control the nausea and his sphincter but not his fear, because he had no way of knowing where the next blow or mutilation would come from. He tried to call upon Joan of Arc for her strength, she who at nineteen was burned at the stake, a peasant girl who couldn’t read or write yet had accepted death by fire rather than renounce the voices she believed came from God.
Julian thought of the three Catholic nuns Maura Clarke and Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel and the lay missionary Jean Donovan, who were beaten and raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers at the orders of higher-ups and deserted by their own government. He thought of Saints Perpetua and Felicity and their agony as they awaited decapitation in the Carthaginian arena as part of a birthday celebration for the emperor Geta, brother of Caracalla. And he thought of Jesus, mocked and flagellated and left to slow suffocation on the cross. How did they get through it? How could anyone be so alone and so defenseless and so betrayed and yet be so brave?
Julian tried to think of green pastures and a hole in the sky through which he could escape the fate that had been imposed on him. But he knew no angel was about to descend through the roof and carry him into the coolness of a starry night; nor would there be a friend to bind his wounds, no maternal figure to hold his hand and dispel his fears.
Hell was n
ot a furnace in the afterlife. It was right here and, in this instance, controlled by a degenerate whose tools were fire and a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.
Then he heard the kitchen door open and felt the rain and wind crawl across the floor and press against the walls and windows.
“Who are you?” Pickins said.
“I’m Mr. Richetti. How do you do, sir?” said a voice that sounded like it rose from a stone well.
“You walked in on a private situation. This here is a child molester.”
“Liar.”
“How’d you like a bullet in the mouth? Who the fuck are you, anyway? Take that hood off your head.”
“Gladly. Get on your knees.”
“What happened to your nose? What are you?”
“You have approximately one minute to live.”
Julian rubbed the side of his face against the floor until the eye mask slipped partially onto his forehead. He could see a large figure silhouetted against the window. The figure’s shoulders were square, his chest flat, the thickness of his upper arms pushed out from his torso.
“Do you wish to say anything by way of apology?” the figure said.
Pickins squeezed the trigger four times on a snub-nosed, chrome-plated .357 Magnum, the sparks streaking into the darkness. Then he lowered the revolver and stared dumbfounded at the silhouette. He raised the revolver and fired the two remaining rounds. “What the fuck.”
“Now you will come with me,” the figure said. “Some of your old companions await you.”
“I ain’t going nowhere.”
The figure walked to Julian and leaned over and pulled the eye mask gently from his head, then melted the ligatures with one touch of his finger. “Stay here, Father. What is about to happen has nothing to do with you; hence, you should not be witness to it. I admire you, sir.”
Julian pushed himself against the wall on the heels of his hands. The figure lifted Pickins by his throat and carried him out to the two-lane as though he were as light as straw. Julian wished he had not limped into the living room and watched through the window the scene taking place on the two-lane while nests of electricity bloomed silently in the clouds and the wind ripped limbs from the trees.
Chapter Thirty-three
HELEN SOILEAU PICKED me up at my house in a cruiser, and the two of us rolled down Old Jeanerette Road in the rain. Julian had called in the 911. A fire truck and an ambulance and paramedics were already at the scene. A short, square-bodied fireman in a yellow slicker and a fire helmet who wore a handlebar mustache met us by the roadside. “Daigle” was painted in black letters on the back of his slicker. Emergency flares were burning along the edges of the road.
“Is that what I think it is?” Helen said.
“Watch where you step,” Daigle said. “One of the medics puked.”
“Where’s Father Julian?” I said.
“They’re packing him up,” Daigle said.
“What do you mean, pack—” I began.
“Bad choice of words,” Daigle said. “His fingers and privates got worked over pretty bad. There were pliers and a metal file on the floor. The file had scorch marks on it. The burner on the stove was lit. Whoever done that is a real piece of shit.”
“He’s going to make it, right?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “If somebody can clean what happened out of his head.”
I clicked on my flashlight and walked down the roadside. There were no skid marks on the asphalt or tire indentations by the rain ditches. A human arm lay in the middle of the two-lane, and a leg farther on, the foot sheathed in a pointy-nose Tony Lama. Farther on I saw the torso of a man, most of the clothes gone, one arm and one leg attached, the knee snapped backward. I shined my flashlight on the rain ditch. The head of a man with silver hair bobbed among the cattails.
“Mother of God,” Helen said.
I shone the light up and down the road. Blood was splattered all over the asphalt. But there were no drag marks, no spot that showed impact with a vehicle, no tire print in the blood, no streaks of grease or rust or tissue of the victim.
Helen was breathing audibly through her nose, her hands on her hips. “How do you read this shit?”
“Gideon Richetti.”
“Goddamm it, don’t say that.”
“Let’s talk to Julian.”
“You know what will happen around here if this gets out? ‘Sheriff’s department opens investigation into ghost from the seventeenth century.’ ”
“Gideon is a revelator.”
She stuck her fingers in both ears. “I’m not going to listen to this. This is a hit-and-run, probably by a big truck. The body got snagged in the undercarriage. Does bwana copy?”
“That’s crap and you know it,” I said. I clicked off my light.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she said at my back.
“The medics drove away with Julian while we were jacking off. I’ll be at Iberia General. I’ll bum a ride.”
She grabbed me by the arm and spun me around. “Outside of Clete Purcel, I’m the best friend you ever had, Dave. Don’t talk like that to me again.”
“Wake up, Helen. We’re dealing with the supernatural. We just can’t tell anybody. Sometimes the truth isn’t an easy burden to bear.”
* * *
SHE TOLD ME to take the cruiser while she waited for the coroner. On the way to the hospital, I called Clete and told him Julian was being admitted and asked him to meet me there. “I think Delmer Pickins tortured him.” I said. “There’re body parts scattered all over the road in front of Julian’s house. I suspect they belong to Pickins.”
“I had a few drinks before I went to bed,” Clete said. “I’m having a little trouble following this.”
“It’s Gideon.”
“I knew that was coming.”
“In or out?” I said.
“Let me brush my teeth. We ROA at the ER.”
He was there in fifteen minutes. His face looked poached. I could still smell liquor on him. I put a roll of mints in his hand.
“My liver feels like an anvil,” he said. “Where’s Father Julian?”
“Behind the curtain,” I said.
Clete had seen the worst of the worst in free-fire zones. But this was different. The wounds were inflicted systemically, engineered to draw the maximum in pain and humiliation. Clete’s face was bloodless and as tight as a drumhead, his green eyes shiny. “Hey, Father,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I thought I’d better come down here and make sure you didn’t run off with one of the nurses. Like the Blue Nun running off with the Christian Brothers or something. That was in a poem I read by a Catholic nun.”
“Call me Julian.”
“We’re going to get you well,” Clete said. “Dave and me and the docs and the nurses. We’ll be going out on the salt and catching us some white trout.”
“I have to say something,” Julian said. His voice was weak, the corner of his mouth puffed, three inches of stitches in one cheek, one eye swollen shut, both hands wrapped with bandages.
“Go ahead,” Clete said.
“I watched my tormentor die. I took pleasure in his suffering.”
“You got it all wrong,” Clete said. “What you were watching was justice being done. You paid the cost for getting this guy off the planet. The pain you suffered made sure this cocksucker will never hurt anyone again. End of story.”
I had to hand it to Cletus. I had never thought of it that way, and I suspect Julian hadn’t, either.
“It was Gideon who ripped Pickins apart?” Clete said.
“Who?” Julian said.
“Delmer Pickins. The guy who tortured you. Gideon tore him up?”
“Yes,” Julian said.
“Who would send a guy like that after you?” Clete said.
Julian fixed his unclosed eye on the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not being on the square, Father,” Clete said. “Mark Shondell put a hit on both of us and, I suspect, on Da
ve, too. He’s going to send somebody else after us.”
“Don’t do what you’re thinking,” Julian said, his voice barely audible.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Clete said. “See, my own thoughts scare me, so I don’t allow myself to think. That’s how I keep control of myself.”
Under other circumstances, we would have laughed. But there was a great evil in our midst, and it was of our own creation and had nothing to do with a time traveler from the year 1600. The evil I’m talking about was incarnate in a Sorbonne-educated man whose family had lived among us for generations. He had vowed to destroy Hollywood and the Jews in it and was probably a molester and had ordered the murder of his enemies. We feared his power and his name, and lied to ourselves and doffed our hats and pretended we were simply adhering to a genteel culture passed on to us from an earlier time. In the meantime Mark Shondell was kindling the fires of racism and the resurgence of nativism and division, all of it inside his headquarters on the banks of Bayou Teche, the place I loved more than any other on earth.
Clete and I left the hospital together. The rain had stopped, and the constellations were cold and bright, and great plumes of white smoke were rising from the lighted stacks of the sugar mill. Clete had not spoken since we had left the ER. An unlit cigarette hung from his mouth. He opened the door of his Caddy; the interior light reflected on his face. His eyes were pools of darkness. I pulled the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it over my shoulder.
“Don’t try to stop me, Streak.”
I shoved him in the chest.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
I shoved him again. Hard.
“Cut it out, big mon.”
“You’re not going to do this, Clete.”
“I’ve done worse and you didn’t say anything about it. Now get away from me.”
“You’ll end up in Angola and give the high ground to Shondell.”
“The only ground he’s going to get is a shovel full of dirt in the face.”
A Private Cathedral Page 28
