Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  As to where they were headed or what the priest had in mind, he couldn’t say, and only a lingering hope for meaning to this ordeal helped offset some the ubiquitous agony.

  Buttes loomed in a tight archipelago, perhaps a mile out if the sun wasn’t bending the distance. The priest pulled him steadily towards them, his makeshift headband drawn wind-sock horizontal. He hadn’t looked back once since they’d started, never moving faster than a brisk walk as the horse seemed disinclined or incapable of producing greater velocity.

  The policeman found encouragement in this. Lack of hesitation suggested the coveted purpose to this errand, and if the padre needed to avoid contact, then he would react in kind in advance of this revelation.

  2

  A week later, and the same voice filtered through the confessional screen again, hoarse but composed: “You didn’t call the cops.”

  In the days following that first visit, the priest pondered the pros-and-cons of going to the authorities despite not knowing the officer’s name, or what he looked like. But beyond the fact that he would’ve been in breach of his sacramental oaths, he had no idea how or even if a policeman could be turned over to other policemen. If there existed a formal, public channel by which to undertake this, he didn’t know of it, especially within a department floundering through its latest rounds of corruption and abuse scandals.

  “You didn’t turn yourself in, my son,” the priest said. “I assume this to mean you seek guidance or absolution.”

  A pause, then: “You’re obligated under the law, padre.”

  The priest marveled at his own lack of anxiety, experiencing instead a sharp bolstering of nerves not unlike a boxer’s to being punched. “As are you, my son.”

  The policeman’s cavernous breaths dueled with the adamant second hand of the priest’s watch until the former willed out.

  “Seems we have ourselves a quandary. I don’t suppose you’ve got suggestions as to how we might extricate ourselves from this pickle?”

  The priest chuckled. “Regrettably, my vision is limited. But I can offer ministry. Perhaps a different perspective?”

  The reply chortle dripped with acid.

  “I’ve heard it said that however ingrained, or sacred, or seemingly irrefutable our constructs are, there’s no virtue in keeping to them once they’ve been rendered as fallacy by the best of us. And even less if bested by our worst. You of all people should know this.”

  In considering the statement—words long thought-out and rooted in an ideology that echoed his own burgeoning misgivings and bewilderments of late—the priest’s mouth lost all moisture, and the rest of their communion was spent in dark silence.

  III

  At a knobble of slumped, staggered boulders, the priest yoked his mount southward where they commenced up a series of tight switchbacks until they summited the rise an hour later.

  The policeman’s legs and feet roasted as much from within as without, though he found he could bear it so long as they kept moving. He didn’t even break stride when his foot came down inches from a procession of armored, thuggish scorpions, hoisting their pincers and cocking back the sickle of their tails at the sudden upheaval.

  When he tried to spit on them, he found the moisture from his mouth had been siphoned by his pores where it perpetually ejected as a viscous, all-encompassing shroud. Even the pair of dragonflies buzzing him for the past hour were loathed to attempt landing on his body, shooting away instantly upon contact.

  The priest drew his horse to the edge of the rise’s drop, and only then did he finally turn to his quarry, motioning him with a wide sweep of his arm to step up to the rim.

  So this is it, thought the policeman. He felt no fear. Certainly not in the mortal sense of it. His dread was one of deficiency—of leaving a thing half-finished. To no small extent, his entire existence fell under this heading, especially his career, and specifically the last few months of it.

  “Tell me something, officer,” said the priest, his voice buffeting in the wind. “Do you think this world holds the means to forgive our lapses? An honorable aesthetic beyond our imagining, yearning for discovery?”

  The policeman gazed at the sepia expanse beneath him. Dunes combed towards the horizon in tight ribbons until they broke upon the dark, distant swell of foothills. The wind blew with steady anger, the surface creep below a kind of endless peristalsis inferring life to a dead land, and though he ached all over and knew himself to be broken beyond repair, he reveled in the thought that this boundless, unbearable beauty would outlive him and all others.

  “I thought our sins were already paid for, padre,” he replied.

  The priest considered the statement before ultimately shaking his head.

  “The final iniquity of his martyrdom. Your sins are your own. No being, not even the Heavenly Father, has a right to absolve them. To deprive you of the privilege to evolve from your shortcomings.”

  The policeman chortled before declaring to the horizon: “Behold, boys and girls—a new man for a new god!”

  “I’m a man first and foremost, officer.” He reined the horse left and clicked his tongue to get her moving. “We still have some distance to cover.”

  3

  In the ensuing weeks, the policeman would turn up at random in the confessional, mostly to drop offhand comments and engage in brief dialogues regarding the failure of systems and the cyclical crumble of all civilizations.

  Despite the priest’s subtle proddings throughout, there were no further confessions of slaughter.

  Amidst dense, interspersed pockets of silence—which they shared often and in mutual accord—they listened to workmen toil and gripe on the church’s chronically leaking roof. The priest rued the scant endowments of late, which had allowed for only the most rudimentary of cosmetic repairs, and this by the most slothful of laborers who seemed intent on letting the walls continue to peel and crack while the floor maintained its gradual, precipitous slump to the west.

  As if to maximize inscrutability, the policeman appeared specifically during those peak hours of labor, or very late at night when the church was all but empty.

  The thought of premeditation disquieted the priest greatly, as he realized the policeman likely knew not only what his schedule was, but what he looked like and possibly even where he lived. His unease had prompted him to go so far as to ask some of his clerical brothers if they’d ever held confession with a man with a deep, raspy voice and a plethora of bloody sins to declare, but none claimed to have offered counsel to such a person.

  Then one Friday, in the middle of a scalding afternoon, the man took his customary place in the shriving pew, only he didn’t speak.

  The priest recognized him at once by the scrape of his shoes and the pensive rhythm of his breaths, and the silence dragged heavy for over ten minutes—long enough for the dread to settle in his bones like permafrost. Even the workers on the roof seemed to pause their work in anticipation of who would break the silence first.

  This time it was the priest, who asked at length, “Have you done something?”

  The soft creak-and-groan of the adjoining bench shedding its load, then: “Watch the news tonight, padre. I hear the Dodgers are faring well this year.”

  And once more, he was gone.

  IV

  Upon descending into a dry riverbed, the horse arched its corded neck and snorted prehistoric gratitude at no longer having its steps sharply veered by the vast stretch of pumice stone that awaited them at the foot of the mesa.

  During that petrous leg of their trek, the priest offset the imbalance and blistering heat by brooding over the policeman’s victims. He had tracked down every newspaper article and followed every newscast, and after bearing witness to all the testimonies and details of torture that, unbeknownst to the public, were inflicted upon them by the hands of a sworn officer of the law, the priest felt none of the usual wrenchings of the heart for this broken soul. Rather, he found himself sympathizing in frightening and even profound wa
ys, as if comprehending suddenly all the nuances of a language that only at first vaguely resembled English.

  Glancing back at the policeman, the priest noted the initial signs of break-down—the wobbly legs, the occasional full-body tremors that threatened to topple him. And yet the man held fast and determined, his eyes moored to the patch of sand beneath his feet to avoid planting them on jagged rock.

  There was a chance then, thought the priest. If the officer could make it as far as he has, having done all that he had on top of this day’s ordeal, then it might work. The only concern left for the priest hinged on whether or not he possessed the mettle to fulfill his own part in this plan.

  4

  It was the third news story following election coverage and a moderate earthquake in Indonesia: Man found gutted near Dodger stadium.

  ID confirmed him as one Stanley Ulrich, 38, of Placentia, recently exculpated via procedural technicalities of numerous assault charges, including the sexual abuse of a minor.

  No suspects as of yet. Exact cause of death pending, though a witness described the body as “field-dressed like an elk.”

  “Arrow through the heart,” muttered the priest. If they find the heart.

  When the policeman revealed the grisly details of his process that first day in the confessional, he explained how, after taking them down with arrows, he would dump his victims’ organs into a hog-pen in Riverside for “unequivocal” disposal.

  The priest turned off the TV and tossed the half-eaten Weight-Watcher’s chili con carne with beans, point value of five, into the trash. His apartment, which he sublet from a Peace Corp volunteer, was a roomy but Spartan affair with only a single loveseat and vegetable crate repurposed into a coffee table. A tatami mat served as his bed. None of the light fixtures and neither of the two lamps he owned had shades. On the south wall hung a dogwood cross he’d bought in Israel ten years prior from a vendor, and adjacent to it on the east wall were taped a series of frameless 4x6s. Each depicted him in ascending age, in a different city with whatever couple at the time he called Mom and Dad. They ranged in age from seven-to-seventeen, and with each snapshot, the smile steadily wilted until the last showed a pair of flat, colorless lips fighting for dominance.

  At the corner window of the living room, he side-saddled the sill and lit a cigarette. The ocean breeze backwashed the belched steam from the Long Beach refinery, gusting it inland and canting the gas fires northward to the brink of extinguishing.

  So he had done it again. The policeman had taken another life, and then came to the church and all but copped to it in the confessional.

  The priest dragged slow and deep, holding the smoke as long as he could bear it until tears bubbled and spilled, and the muscles in his neck threatened to burst—a trick he’d learned long ago to choke-hold demons and urges.

  All his reason screamed that he should run at once to the authorities, though nothing remotely similar hailed from his heart. Some purpose beyond guilt or want of validation seemed to beat at the man’s confessions of sin, and this purpose demanded discovery and release.

  Nutter was barking again next door. His owner, Eddie, hadn’t been home for three days going.

  One night, just days after Eddie had moved in the previous fall, the priest found himself trapped on the balcony by the tiger-striped pit bull. The beast had gotten out and had perched itself at the top of the stairs where it cocked its chiseled, boxy head before hoisting it to sniff at this new interloper.

  The priest considered making a run back into his apartment, but stood his ground instead, at which point the dog yawned before trundling over and plopping himself down into a clumsy sit on the priest’s feet.

  Eddie stepped out of his door a moment later, a tall, pasty sloucher who dragged expensive soles against the balcony surface with the slow pull of a timber saw.

  What he saw widened his usually droopy eyes into poker chips.

  “Well, well,” he said. “It’s obvious Nutter’s taken a fancy to you, and that’s a rare fuckin’ occurrence, believe you me.”

  “So it seems,” said the priest. He tried extricating his feet, but the dense animal was firmly nested, leathery scrotum warming his toes across the thongs of his sandals. Seeing no other recourse, he reached down tentatively to pet the dog, and upon contact, Nutter rolled back his head and gazed up with his one cataract eyeball, his tongue lolling to the side in a half-toothless pooch-grin.

  Eddie watched it all through a tart, sidelong squint while scratching at a well-groomed but patchy beard.

  “Hey, you’re a priest, right?”

  The priest, losing badly at a futile game of keep-away from Nutter’s eager tongue, nodded.

  “I thought so,” Eddie muttered, and some new inspiration had him twitching about suddenly like a squirrel.

  “Are you alright, son?”

  Eddie raised a finger to respond before scrubbing his initial answer from the air.

  “Say, would you mind feeding him when you can?”

  Nutter kept gazing cloud-nine at the priest.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  “Sweet!” clapped Eddie. “Okay, so the door’s always unlocked and his food’s in the big trash can by the fridge. Just a scoop or two every other day’ll do him fine. Gotta burn, man. Thanks a ton.”

  And that was it. In the subsequent months he would only see Eddie a handful of times, and each day he went to replenish Nutter’s dish, it was always empty. He had even taken it upon himself to walk the dog during the day, and before retiring for the night, sparing some play-time regardless of the sticky bands of slobber he’d have to all but shower off afterwards.

  The priest snuffed out his half-drawn smoke and stepped out into the lukewarm evening and entered Eddie’s apartment. Nutter’s barking ceased at once and he padded over to rub his grated face cat-like against the priest’s leg, leaving fresh strings of drool for good measure.

  Eddie had yet again neglected to refill the trashcan with dog food. He’d been home the night before and the priest assumed Eddie would’ve taken care of it, but he must’ve lost a bundle at the tables or the race track judging by his erratic, heavy pacing on their shared balcony, and falsetto wails at Nutter who doubtlessly cowered against the rail, unable to stop his nubbin of a tail from wagging despite the castigation.

  The refrigerator was empty except for club sodas and a half-eaten loaf of Wonder Bread, and upon searching through all the cabinets the priest came up with only two cans of ravioli.

  Nutter panted persistently throughout, every now and then goosing the priest in the rear with his wet snout.

  A pile of unopened mail sat on the small butcher-block island. Bills mostly, scattered amongst racing forms gouged through in pencil. The only opened piece of correspondence was from the welfare department, the check already torn from the statement.

  When he opened the island’s middle drawer for a can opener, he found a .357 Magnum sitting by itself atop the flowered liner. He didn’t dwell on it much beyond assuming that Eddie’s line carried with it a corresponding risk of bodily harm. It did compel him to consider going to the police again, but it pertained solely to his friendly, neighborhood killer-cop-confessor.

  He eased shut the drawer and dug around further until he found the can opener, then plopped a tower of slumping pasta into Nutter’s bowl before returning to his apartment.

  From his screen door he watched the last of the sun’s umbra draining into the Pacific. A 747 leaving LAX banked hard above the western tower of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, and he thought of the souls aboard and wondered if their fates were mapped and where all the routes might lead, or if the roads just ran in ever reducing concentric circles into black, unimaginable compression. His heart ached to consider it, but the schism between faith and something far more nebulous had been widening over the decades—an accumulation of too many years of lapses and relapses, of nagging questions and deficient answers, with seldom a successfully broken cycle to show for it all.

  H
e drew the crucifix from under his tank-top and held it to his lips. He’d purchased the iron Saxon cross in the north coast of France many years back, mostly for its weight and barbed ends. The seller claimed it to be tenth century, but when the priest had it appraised a few years later by a German theologian, he was told that it more likely hailed from the sixteen-hundreds. That was fine. It cost him little, and for a while it served its purpose as daily reminder of the sacrifice, though these days he was hardly aware of it anymore. The scar tissue on his chest had grown thick, and only its heft would assert its presence now and again, usually while on a knee offering rote prayer before the altar.

  A few minutes later Nutter head-butted open the screen door of Eddie’s apartment and padded with utmost inelegance to the priest’s doormat where he half-sat himself. He licked his chops of stray Ragu before fixing his white marble eye up at the priest and grunting his dog-smile.

  “All full?” he asked Nutter, who replied with a sound that lived transiently between a chuckle and a howl.

  A further reason lingered for why he hadn’t initially gone to the police, and it came upon him suddenly as did revelation, insomuch as its aftertaste would gurgle back up now and again. The policeman’s victims, as relayed by the man himself the week prior, were the most vile and repellant sorts. Child abusers and rapists. Multiple violators who had gambled on the infirmity of the legal system and won.

  Each night the priest prayed for the fortitude to forgive this executioner, as well as his victims. He did this out on the balcony well after the apartment was asleep, sometimes smothered under a marine-layer fleece, sometimes under the cocked smile of a crescent moon goring through the sky near Orion’s sword. Always with Nutter at his feet, as the dog afforded not only a congregation bereft of cynicism and doubt, but one not groveling for the absolution of every reasonably sufferable tribulation.

  Nutter reminded him of his decency. That it wasn’t a thing to bootlick for, or requiring of uncanny constructs, but rather the piston that fired naturally within his heart.