by J. J. Martin
Melody walked with great speed and purpose as we struggled to keep up. She led us to her pale Highlander SUV on a low floor. I got in the front passenger seat.
“I’m going to take you boys to your hotel. Then let’s go for early suppertime so we can make plans,” she said.
“We’re at Motel 6 in Reseda.”
“I know. I live in Simi Valley. It’s on the way for me. Griff Kelsey’s church is in Thousand Oaks.”
“Is that where Father Sweet is?” asked Danny.
“I understand you both have a history,” said Melody, cautiously. “With him.”
“Sure do!” Danny said, upbeat and strange.
I turned to look at him. “I’m not so jubilant,” I said.
We drove into an urban landscape carved more out of asphalt and concrete than soil.
“There’s palm trees,” Danny said. They lined the roads like straws a hundred feet tall, tasselled with single, Seuss-like pom-poms of fronds. Heat distortion wafted over the highway.
“Urban sprawl,” I said.
“It’s like that Joni Mitchell song,” Melody said. “They paved paradise.”
“She’s Canadian,” Danny said.
“Is that a fact?” Melody said. “I thought she was from California.”
“No, it’s true,” I said. “Somehow, all Canadians know every famous or semi-famous Canadian in the world. I don’t know how, but we do.”
Melody chuckled. “First time you all have been in California?”
It was.
“Your friend Padre is an interesting fellow. You know he’s the first priest ever to reach out to SNAP to help? Usually they just try to block us, but he seems awfully keen to bring this Father Sweet of yours to justice.”
“He’s not mine,” I said.
“Guess I’ll take him, then,” Danny said. I turned in my seat to look at Danny who returned my gaze, almost as a challenge.
“My husband passed away a number of years ago. It’s for him I do this work,” said Melody. “I’m not even Catholic.”
“Neither am I,” I said.
“I am,” said Danny. “I’m a parish priest.”
“Mm-hm. I heard that,” Melody said. “This here’s an interesting project, I’ll say. Padre told me he hopes you boys will testify against Benjamin Sweet.”
The comment startled me. “Dunno why he’d say that,” I said. “I never suggested I would.”
“You know other victims?”
I lowered my head. I must have appeared beaten down because I sensed she changed her tone and became so gentle it gave me chills.
“I’m sorry to be so forward, sugar. Nothing surprises me anymore, but I know for you this is all new.”
I regained some composure. After a few blocks of driving, I asked, “How did you get into this?”
“I was an investigator with the County Police. Long ago. My husband was an altar boy. I volunteer to keep him close to me.”
“So, SNAP. What is it?”
“A survivor’s network. For people like my husband. We meet with survivors — doesn’t matter how long ago it was, by the way — we run a helpline, do support groups, and sometimes we advocate with the law when we can. That’s my specialty. It’s been growing. Ever since Boston last year, people feel safer coming forward, but we’re just scratching the surface.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“His priest got onto him when he was about eight or nine.”
I glanced at Danny in the backseat. He stared out the window as shops zipped by.
“I mean, how did your husband pass away?”
“Oh,” she said. “He had a terrible psychological depression, you understand. We could not get enough help. Or prayers. I didn’t know if there were enough in the world. See here, this is life-or-death we’re dealing with. The Lord Jesus blesses our work, but sometimes I wonder if he isn’t paying attention.”
“Melody,” said Danny, “can you stop at that liquor store up there?”
“Of course, sugar,” she said calmly.
She pulled the car into a BevMo parking lot.
“Mind if I wait in the car?” she said. “Not much of a drinker, myself.”
“Hey,” Danny said, tapping my shoulder, “can I have some money?”
“Only because I’ll drink it, too,” I said. I gave him fifty dollars and he jumped out.
Melody turned on the radio.
“Sorry about your husband,” I said.
“I do appreciate that. But it was nearly ten years ago. He watches over me. My angel’s got my back.”
“My father just passed away,” I said, regretting the words as soon as they left me. I didn’t want her to feel like I was angling for sympathy. I had merely been making conversation. “We weren’t close,” I added quickly.
“Isn’t that a shame. I imagine you have some powerful feelings. Especially with your past.”
“No, no. I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”
“Sure you are, sugar. Of course you are,” she said, looking at me with her enormous, kind eyes. “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t hurt.”
“No, no. I’m good.”
“You don’t like to be touched, do you? I could tell when I hugged you.”
“Ha! Guilty.”
“You want to talk, you know, I’m an awful good listener,” she said quietly. Melody had a slow and benevolent voice unlike any I had heard before and I wanted to oblige her.
“Thank you,” I replied. Barely.
Danny burst through the BevMo doors carrying a bag of bottles. He lifted a gallon-sized Jack Daniel’s and made a show of its volume for me. He returned to the back seat.
“I love America!” he cried. “Everything’s so cheap and easy!”
“You can say that again,” said Melody.
17
I was footing the bill for everything so far, and though Dad had left me plenty of money, I did not feel comfortable paying for two rooms at a hundred dollars each. Therefore, my inner cheapskate won over my better instincts, and decided that Danny and I would share a room in the Motel 6. Danny was penniless and — I learned — so clueless about money as to seem like a child.
After settling our bags onto the twin beds, Melody drove us to dinner at a nearby Bob’s Big Boy.
The diner was low-ceilinged and buzzing with families and servers. We all admitted to being starving. The vinyl-seated booth squeaked and farted as we scooted in on our butts. It wasn’t a classy spot, but the view was nice, sort of. A pretty sunset reflected on a colourful hood over the sparkle of cars that began clogging up the road at rush hour. Danny and I ordered American cheeseburgers, which were massive. Melody chose a salad the size of a turkey platter.
“You boys familiar with Griff Kelsey’s church?” she asked.
We shook our heads. I said I’d read the article in Tinsel Circus.
“It’s a Traditionalist Catholic church. Paid for by Kelsey himself, but it’s his father who’s really the driving force. Do you all have conspiracy theorists in Canada?”
“Oh yah,” I said.
“Then you probably know some of what they go on about. The world is an obvious place,” said Melody. “God reveals himself in many ways, and it’s up to us to take those cues. But people like Kelsey Senior look for a bigger, more convoluted meaning than what’s really there. Why make things so complicated?”
Danny took his Coke down between his legs and poured Jack Daniel’s furtively into the cup. He offered it to me, but I shook my head.
“You think you’ll be here long enough to join me for a hike?” asked Melody.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Myself, I like to spend time in the hills around Simi Valley,” said Melody. “That’s my favourite kind of church. I go hiking. Nature’s where you can feel God holding life and death together. Very simple.”
Danny raised his glass to her in a toast.
She turned to me. “Canada’s a beautiful place, I hear. Do you all like nature?”
/>
“I don’t think about it,” I said, hoping she’d drop the subject
“Weren’t you one of those bush rats in the greenbelt?” asked Danny. “You and your brother?”
I loudly sighed, and they took the hint.
“You don’t feel like talking,” said Melody. “Just business?”
“Sorry,” I said quietly.
“Padre said you wanted to talk with the boy’s parents. The boy from the Tinsel Circus article. Antony.”
I shoved fries in my mouth and nodded. “Both parents. The mother and father.”
“I’ve done my homework. I met Mrs. Paquime. That’s Antony’s mother. She is one of the ladies who cleans the church.”
I stopped chewing. “What’d you tell her?” I asked.
“What a good job she was doing, and I needed a cleaning lady. That’s true, by the way. I do need a cleaning lady. Not sure if she can come to Simi Valley.”
“A simple ruse.”
“It’s the truth,” she said. “And some small talk.… They attend Mass every Sunday.”
“So, they’ll be there tomorrow.”
Melody prodded at her salad. “I’ll pick up you boys early and we’ll go to the first Mass at eight thirty. If the Paquimes aren’t there for first Mass, we’ll go to the ten o’clock, and the noon. We’ll find them.”
“Father Sweet there, too?” Danny asked, packing cheeseburger into his cheek.
Melody’s eyes darted to mine.
To find Antony’s parents, probably, I could not avoid Sweet. Is that why Danny had to come as part of the deal? So he could connect with Sweet? Dread washed over me. This cataclysmic appearance would be tomorrow. I looked at Danny, who was trying to read my face. Tomorrow I will probably see Father Sweet, I thought.
Suddenly, I felt the diner fade away to silence, and the air become depressurized. My balance skewed. Instinctively, I tried to shake it off like a dog. Things had become muffled and queer.
Melody put her hand on top of mine and squeezed. I raised my eyes to her and saw a halo of darkness around her face.
I fainted.
When I awoke, I was on my back on the floor of the Big Boy, with Danny and Melody crouching over me. A crowd of people hunched over them. A circle of faces.
“There he is,” Melody said, smiling. “See? Just a little pass-out.”
“I feel terrible,” I said.
“You had too much of a big day with the travel and all.”
Danny reached into my pants and took out my wallet.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of the cheque.”
18
Back at the motel, Danny and I lay on our beds drinking whisky from plastic cups while the TV lit the room. The Nets were playing a home game against the Pacers and roundly defeating them.
The whisky tasted good. I was two cups in. Danny was half the bottle.
“That Melody is something, eh?” I said.
“Yah. Good lady.”
“If he’s there tomorrow, you know I don’t want to go anywhere near him. I don’t want to see him or talk to him.”
“I know.”
“That’s your job,” I said. “That’s why you’re here. To run interference.”
Danny sighed. “Glad I’m good for something,” he muttered.
I ignored his self-pity.
“You remember that old altar boy prayer,” Danny said, “we did in the sacristy? The jokey one, back in the old days?”
“Which?”
Danny raised his cup and blurted out, “‘Arse father, who farts in heaven. Shallow’ed be inhaled. Thy stinky bum, thy finger scum, under pricks as they are leavened.’ No?”
“No.”
He took a deep, raggedy breath. He looked darkly out the window and tilted the cup into his lips. “Well, we did.”
I had a pit-of-the-stomach feeling. Nothing as benign as butterflies. More like a writhing, cannibalistic battle. I wanted to go home and climb into a hole. I thought of my apartment sitting dark and stale. My parents’ house half-empty and cluttered by my indoor campsite. Everything halfway done, and poorly at that.
I drank to push it down, and I dug at my nails.
“You’re a real strange guy, Danny,” I said. “You turned out … odd.”
“Right back at you, brother.”
“What are you going to do,” I said, “with your life, now?”
He scoffed and shook his head. “I’m trapped. The bishop wants me to go to a retreat centre run by the Servants of the Paraclete.”
“Parakeets? What’s that mean?”
“It’s where they put guys … you know, like me for a while, before they put me back in rotation.”
I grabbed the bottle of whisky from the table between us and poured some into my cup. “You should not be ‘in rotation.’”
He grumbled.
“You need help.”
“I just want to get away.”
“Why did you do this? Go priest?”
His head swayed to show he was uneager to narrate this tale, but he spoke all the same. “After Ben …”
I noticed Danny used Father Sweet’s first name, but I didn’t want to comment because I felt uncomfortable with the familiarity. I hoped he would not do it again.
“After he was gone, he wrote me letters, you know. Then as I got older he said I should go to the seminary. Nobody gave me any better ideas. I went.”
“That’s it? Because that old creep told you?”
“Later, I saw him. Before I was ordained. It was at a party, in the library at St Paul’s. I couldn’t believe it. Here he was. I was shaking like a leaf. So excited to see him. He took a long look at me and … got this disgusted look on his face,” Danny said, staring to the right of the television, as if Father Sweet stood there, glaring. “He said I had grown up ugly.”
I peered through the TV light at Danny, his face carved-out and fatless, with wispy facial hair clinging to his acne-scarred cheeks. His tinted glasses made it impossible to get a good look at his eyes. He sniffled.
“I went back to my room that night and I thought seriously about running away. Or jumping off the Alexandra Bridge. I was so ashamed.” Danny picked at a stain on his shirt. “I don’t know why I stayed.”
Danny wore a Blackburn Stingers T-shirt. In everything he wore, I saw echoes of our childhood in Blackburn Hamlet. Though we weren’t exactly friends, we had lived parallel lives there. Both of us now forty-ish, stretched thin trying to claw our way out of the pit, as the past pulled us mightily backward, and down.
“I haven’t seen a Stingers shirt in years,” I said. “You were wearing the Funfair sweatshirt the other day. I’m half expecting to see you wearing a Hornet’s Nest hoodie tomorrow.”
“Just crap I got from the St. Vincent de Paul bin,” he said. “I haven’t got many non-clerical shirts.”
“What did your parents think about … you know?”
“My parents? Nothing. They never talked about it.”
“Did they know? Were they angry? Did they hate you for it? Themselves for letting it happen?”
He contemplated the questions. After a while he shrugged. “Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing? Nothing what?”
“You know why Ben was sent away from our parish? No?” His neck tilted back, and he talked at the spackled ceiling. “It was because of me. In the sacristy one afternoon, I kissed him on the mouth in front of Mrs. Gain. I’m sure she told on us. My parents never spoke to me about it, ever. It’s all my fault.”
“Is that bad?” I said, confused.
Danny’s long and weathered face and Dahmer-esque glasses made him sinister to me. And yet, I could not help feeling a twinge of something new. Almost like, but not quite, empathy.
“Nobody else ever …” His voice trailed off.
I heard the rest of his sentence in my head. Loved me.
“When you went into the seminary,” I said, hating that word. “Surely, your parents had something to say.”
“My mother went to her grave never saying a meaningful word to me. About anything, really. And my dad moved back to Îles de la Madeleine after she died. My sister invites him to Christmas, but I never join them.”
The Pacers made a three-pointer and the game turned. I took a sip and wondered what his parents could have said, at the time, that would have made any difference. I started to think of Blackburn Hamlet in the late seventies. The Formica countertops and wood-panelled dens. I pictured Mother, feeding Jamie and me warm Weetabix with honey and milk, then leaning back, lighting up a smoke and staring through us with a zookeeper’s faraway gaze. What was she thinking? I grew cold at the thought of all the secrets under the cheery surface of those dark homes.
“Would you tell me what happened? With him? You and him.” I heard my voice as if it came from someone else. I could not believe I had asked. Maybe I was able to hear this, after all. Perhaps Melody had inspired me.
Danny spoke in a monotone, but his voice seemed to perk a bit.
“We would hold hands and walk in Centre Park, keeping to the trees and out of sight. One time he took me to see Bad News Bears and we snuck sips of beer in the dark. He liked that movie,” said Danny.
“No, no, I mean …”
“You mean the good times?” He took a breath. “No, you mean the so-called abuse.”
I nodded.
“The thing you don’t understand is Ben was the first person to make me feel … I dunno … special. He told me he loved me. I can’t even remember my mother saying my name unless I was in trouble. It was different for me. You had parents who loved you.”
I kept silent. There was no point telling Danny that no, he wasn’t right about my parents. I couldn’t tell him how I felt. I didn’t know whether their sense of proprietorship over me was close enough to love to call it that. I didn’t tell him because I had Jamie, which was all I needed, truly. I felt lucky to have such a great brother. I had someone, so I had no right to complain. Danny, it seemed, only had Father Sweet.
“You don’t really want to know,” he said. “And I don’t really want to talk about it.”
