A Private Cathedral

Chapter Thirty-two

The trees were still dripping, but the skies had cleared and the wind was cool and flowers were blooming in the yards along East Main. I showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes and checked in with Helen at the department and ate lunch at Victor’s, then returned home and called Alafair at Reed College in Portland.

It’s hard to tell your child that you’re lonely and the child’s absence is a large part of the problem. In fact, I believe the inculcation of guilt in a child is a terrible thing. So I said nothing about my state of mind or the murders out on the highway, or the likelihood that either Clete or I would pay a price for our involvement in the feud between the Shondell and Balangie families.

I had pulled Alafair from a downed plane out on the salt when she was five years old. Technically, she was an illegal, a refugee flown with her mother out of El Sal by a Maryknoll priest who died with the mother in the crash. I nicknamed her Baby Squanto for the Baby Squanto Indian books she read, and I watched her grow into a beautiful young woman who earned an academic scholarship to Reed but whose dreams still took her back to the day an army patrol came into her village and decided to create an example.

I was about to end our conversation when she said, “Is everything okay, Dave? You sound funny.”

“We had a double homicide out on the four-lane last night,” I said. “The shooter may have been after Clete.”

“You need me there? I can get a flight this afternoon.”

“We’re fine here.”

“No, there’s something else wrong, isn’t there?”

How do you tell your daughter about multiple encounters with a time traveler who was an executioner in the year 1600 and perhaps an adherent of Mussolini in the 1920s?

“Dave, you tell me the truth or I’m coming home,” she said.

“I’ve met someone,” I said to avoid opening a subject I would not be able to shut down.

“Good. Who?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“Who, Dave?”

“The wife of Adonis Balangie, although she says she’s not his wife.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I asked her to marry me. She didn’t seem in the mood. So I said adios.”

“You’re making this up.”

“You miss Paris?”

“I was only there a week. Don’t change the subject.”

“We’ve got some bad stuff going on here, Alf,” I said. “I think it may involve evil entities. It’s hard to explain. I think Mark Shondell wants to kill Clete. I believe Shondell might be in league with the devil.”

I don’t think I ever heard a longer silence in my life.

Father Julian woke almost every morning before dawn and jogged three miles along Ole Jeanerette Road, which paralleled Bayou Teche and traversed the emerald-green pastures of the LSU experimental farm. He had been an only child, and solitude had been a natural way of life for him long before his ordination. But rather than simplifying his life, ordination brought him complexities he had never envisioned. Early on he realized he would always be addressed by others as a condition, a cutout, an asexual waxwork standing at the church entrance, hands folded in piety as he welcomed his parishioners to morning Mass.

He also learned that offending the hierarchy could get him buried in western Kansas. Among his superiors, compliance and sycophancy were often lauded, and mediocrity was rewarded. Father Julian Hebert was known as a “Vatican Two priest,” a liberal left over from the tenure of Pope John XXIII, which for many in his culture was like being known as Martin Luther.

But he couldn’t blame all his problems on the authoritarian nature of the institution he served. In his private hours or in the middle of the night, he had to concede that many of the passions burning in him were not those of a spiritual man: the flashes of anger that left his face mottled; the bitterness he felt when he accepted injury or insult; the twitch in his right hand when he saw a child abused or heard a racist remark or watched a chain-saw crew mow down an oak grove in order to build another Walmart. Sometimes his efforts at self-control were not successful. Two years ago he had lost it.

A large, sweaty off-duty policeman at a Lafayette health club was punching the heavy bag while he told a story to two other cops. Julian was hitting the speed bag and at first paid no attention to the story, then realized what he was hearing. “He took his dick out and rubbed it all over her,” the man said, steadying the bag, laughing so hard he was wheezing. “From top to bottom, I mean it, in her hair, everywhere.”

Julian let his hands hang at his sides and stared at the floor. Finally, in the silence, the teller of the story looked at him and smiled crookedly. “Hey,” he said.

“You’re a police officer?” Julian said.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“I’m Father Hebert. I’m okay at the speed bag. But I don’t have the moves for the ring. You look like you do.”

“You’re a padre?”

“I was when I woke up this morning.”

“Sorry about the language.”

“Can you show me?”

“The moves?”

“Yes,” Julian said. He opened his mouth to clear his eardrums; they were creaking, as though he were sinking to the bottom of a deep pool.

“Rotate in a circle, see,” the man said. “Never lead with your right except in a body attack, then hook your opponent under the heart. Catch him with your left, then chop him with a right cross. It’s easy. Where’d you learn the speed bag?”

Julian didn’t answer.

“You hearing me?” the policeman said.

“Yes,” Julian said.

The policeman’s forearms were thick and wrapped with black hair, a fog of body odor wafting off his skin. “You really want me to show you?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t deck me, now, Father,” the man said, grinning.

Julian slipped on a pair of padded ring gloves, his eyes veiled.

“Good. Let’s dance,” the man said.

Julian had to breathe through his nose to slow down his heart. His skull felt as though it were in a vise. “Who was the woman?”

“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 not 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.