The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “Decent enough,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “That’s right.” She turned to me. Her breathing was normal again. She seemed as hermetic and self-contained as an old-world maître d’. “I’m just tired. I need to sleep. I’m very, very tired.”

  I nodded and stepped back. Whatever she was strung together with was wound tighter than I could have guessed.

  She went for the sliding glass door. The night was doing its slow vanishing trick into morning. Light from the east began touching the house, the things in the yard, our clothes and skin. Cindy waited by the door. The look on her face was new and disconsolate. Her cheeks were flushed. Light reached our feet. Color returned to all the gray things again.

  6.

  WE DIDN’T SEE EACH OTHER THAT DAY. I LEFT EARLY, AND WHEN I CAME back to get ready for work, she’d taken herself off, doing who knows what.

  By one in the morning, I was in a batting cage, taking warm-up swings. Mike Padilla came from the front desk with a wide smile and a jingling handful of steel tokens. Mike was a big man, with a bruiser’s walk and the facial features of a well-fed chipmunk.

  “Alright, man,” he said. “Best round out of five buys breakfast.”

  This was something we did every once in a while, to pass the time. It was either this or listening to Mike tell war stories of his time in the Merchant Marines in which all the skirmishes were with prostitutes or pimps in distant countries. I preferred taking swings at the machine pitches. Fewer curveballs.

  The batting cages were in the sleepy industrial complex I patrolled, the kind that seemed to have metastasized right out of the chaparral hills of inland Carlsbad. The buildings were long, low boxes of white stucco—were any industrial complex anywhere in Southern California. Only the small signs on glass doors differentiated them, and the changing of these marked out time: Max’s Tool and Die became Trudy’s Candles; Just Closets become a Vietnamese goods importer with a name I couldn’t read; ABC Reupholstery became my favorite, Jack’s Exhaust and Muffler. Father Time was a vinyl installer with a new set of letters and a putty knife. All around the complex someone had planted stunted palm trees and beach grass. When I’d started here, it looked ironic. Then maybe sad. A little desperate. But after a time, it regained a kind of beauty that testified to the lengths humans will go to in order to keep a place at the lowest threshold of livable.

  I put my palm out and Mike gave me a token. “You better focus,” he said. “I like a big breakfast, and I know how much you make an hour.”

  “Trust me,” I said, nodding toward Mike’s gut, “everyone knows you like a big breakfast.”

  Mike stepped out of the cage, clanging the door shut behind him. “Same way everyone knows you like a big cock in your mouth every now and then.”

  I ignored him and dropped the token into the box attached to the fence.

  We were about three rounds in when the radios crackled. It was Esmeralda, the night dispatch for the security firm. “Mark,” she said. “You’ve got a call.”

  I took the radio from my belt. “I’m in the middle of rounds. Can I call them back?”

  “It’s your ex-wife,” Esme said. “Sounds urgent. I say stop dicking around with Mike and go take it in the office. I’ll have her call there in five.” Mike rattled the fence behind me and dragged his thumb across his throat. I gave him the finger, but I was thinking about the voicemail I’d left my daughter a couple days back. Aracely lived in Eugene, had for the last fifteen years since things between me and her mother ended. Fifteen years of being far away, and then a little more arithmetic: six years since Aracely had begun refusing to see me at all. A dismal paternal sum. She wouldn’t even talk to me on the phone, not that I’d been the best at making those calls in the first place. I’d been trying again since she found out she was pregnant, and then again when the father found out he wasn’t the father and bolted. She’d had the kid a year ago. A boy. Gabriela, my ex, had sent me a photo of him—he looked, the way all newborns do, like a disgruntled member of the California Raisins—but even that pissed off Aracely. She didn’t want me to see him, wouldn’t even tell me his name. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been leaving her the voicemails I’d been leaving. Maybe I shouldn’t have done a lot of things.

  So I knew Gabby wasn’t calling to catch up.

  “Thanks, Esme. I’ll head over.”

  Mike opened the cage and took the bat from me. “Run along, Marky. Don’t want to keep her waiting. I’ll practice while you screw up your rhythm. I want to work up a big appetite.”

  I headed over to the office, thinking about how I had tried once to get Gabriela to lobby on my behalf. I’ll come up, I said, just to see the kid who’d made me a grandfather before the age of fifty. I wanted to, I said, but “want” wasn’t the exact right word. I felt some obligation, felt I should want to, that this was something I might wake up to—in ten years or fifty—and regret having let pass. It set me on edge, that confusion. I didn’t like thinking about it. Besides, Gabby only had to list a handful of the reasons Aracely was against seeing me, the things I’d done and said over the years, and I lost it. It was bait and I knew it was bait, a test to see if I could behave, to see if I could be something other than the asshole I was, but it didn’t stop me, and I failed, like I always fail, like I always knew I’d fail.

  The office was essentially a closet in an odd, unused corner of one of the buildings. There was a desk, a mini-fridge, a microwave, and a john in there. Above the desk was an array of video monitors; someone off-site monitored them semiconstantly, but when Mike and I weren’t making rounds or wasting time, one of us was in here. It was a good, quiet place to read.

  I sat in the chair and waited for the phone to ring, whistling to keep the silence at bay. I tried to remember being married. I know I’d made Gabby tea every morning, that we would make love on weekend afternoons before Aracely was born. Though the memories were in my mind, they weren’t mine, I wasn’t in them. They were someone else’s. It was as if the blackout years had divided me into two men, and one had died while the other—the weaker, smaller, cruder man—survived. I’d been a youth pastor once, a role model, a husband, a father. Now I didn’t even like cutting my own grass.

  But I felt no preference for the person in those memories, no desire to get back to that place. I felt little preference for anything. Gabby had mourned me like I had died, and that was good and right. But we had found our way back to something like affection—not love, exactly, but a mutual care. And that was good, too. Different, but good.

  Then the phone rang, and I answered, and Gabby began by asking if I was trying to make sure Aracely hated me for good. Her voice was low, with a Mexican accent that had blended further and further over the years into the clear, cool water of West Coast Americanese.

  My blood came up quickly, but I tried to keep calm. Sometimes I do try. “Hi, Gabby,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

  “She’s going to cut you out forever. That hasn’t happened yet, as much as you may think it has, but keep it up. Keep pushing.”

  “I just wanted to call and wish little what’s-his-name happy birthday. Can’t a grandpa wish his favorite little anonymous grandson another good year of whatever the hell he’s into besides rubber nipples and having his ass cleaned?” That ended my trying phase. I felt my limbic system ripple at the deep pleasure of anger as it rose up in me. It was better than drinking, was what I went to drinking for anyway. Now that I didn’t do that anymore, it was like taking a vacation from sobriety.

  “You’re an idiot, you know that?” she said.

  “Sure, of course I know that. Better than being a sadist. I’ve been asking to come up for how long? I’ve been trying to be interested. But she’s a stone wall. I think she likes hurting me.”

  “How could you say that?” Her performance of anger gave way to a more genuine kind, I could tell. That made me happy. Now we were getting somewhere. “She’s your daughter, you ass. She’s no sadist. And your version of trying is wo
rse than not trying at all, which makes me wonder sometimes.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Wonder what it is you actually want.” She was no fool.

  “Well, I wonder what she is, if she isn’t a sadist. A tease?”

  Gabby’s sigh overloaded the mic on her phone and made the speaker at my ear crackle. “Stop talking,” she said. I heard her take a breath. “If you say a word, you won’t hear from me again for a long, long time.” She let the silence linger. She was calming herself, or she was testing me. Maybe both. I managed to keep my mouth shut. “We’re going to pretend I hung up on you. For being completely out of line. We’ll pretend I did that, and that after a time you knew you were just getting defensive because you were hurt, and you’re not much more than a dumb animal. Actually, you’re a bit less than that.”

  I started to say something, but she cut me off. “Not a word, Mark. I mean it. We’re going to pretend I hung up on you, and I thought about it, and you thought about it, and when I called back you apologized, right out of the gates. Okay? Let’s save the time. And after all that, that’s when I’d tell you that Aracely isn’t a sadist, or any other thing you want to call her. She’s terrified. And confused. She’s got a baby and no father for that baby. She’s a parent now. And her dad, one of the two people who could have taught her what it meant to be a parent, he went crazy on her when she was little.”

  I felt myself react, but there was no anger now. It was the feeling the truth can sometimes inflict, of making you feel immediately and powerfully shorter.

  “Her dad had a breakdown and then wasn’t around anymore. And she’s wondering if she could do the same thing, if she’s got that inside her or something else. I know she won’t, but she doesn’t, and the thought of you coming around scares her. She’s afraid, and she’s sure as hell afraid of you. For being that father. For being a big unknown to her, a total mystery. And you’ve got to accept that, accept what you mean to her. You’re everything bad she’s afraid she’s capable of. Do you understand me?”

  She continued without much of a pause. “No, don’t answer that question. If you don’t understand me, think about it some more. Think about it until you get it. And stop pushing, Mark. Be easy on her. Let me talk to her, and for God’s sake, stop making it worse with these messages.”

  For a long time, I didn’t know if I was breathing. A movement on the security monitors caught my eye, but when I turned to study them the various interiors were full of nothing, a big emptiness. I felt doubtful, paranoid, twitchy. Sometimes I would get ahead of myself, ahead of the actual me that in another era I might have called a soul. My brain, starved and sick of its own company, steeped in hormonal tides—flows of epinephrine and norepinephrine and cortisol, ebbing waves of serotonin—would act up, emotional hardwiring would overheat, and I’d find myself acting in ways I knew I shouldn’t. A different version of an older craving, a deeper want. The message on the kid’s birthday was on one of those days. Gabby was giving me a chance to overtake it.

  This wasn’t the Gabby I’d married. She’d been sweet and nurturing and joyful with the promise of what I seemed to present to her—a gift without a hint of anything her future daughter would fear becoming. No, Gabby had seen in me a life in joyful service to our God, and she’d trusted me as she’d trusted Him: to do what was best, what was good for her. Misplaced faith.

  That simple idea of service was gone in her now, replaced by a willfulness about providing for herself and protecting her child. I admired that about her, even when it was directed at me.

  “I think you’re right,” I finally said.

  “I didn’t say you could talk yet.”

  I swore something moved on one of the monitors again, the one at top right for the fabrication shop, but there was nothing there.

  “I’m still angry,” Gabby said, “so I’m going to hang up soon. You be patient, okay? Stop leaving voicemails. And ask yourself: Why do you want to see this baby? Is it for his sake? For Aracely’s? Or for you?”

  I was distracted now, watching the screen, but I still thought to ask, “Can you at least tell me the kid’s name?”

  “No,” she said, and the line went dead.

  I sat there a few minutes, trying to let my mind go limp and to look instead at the screens with no thought about them. I hadn’t seen anything else move. My mind was probably playing tricks on me, that old pattern hound, but I needed to do something, so I radioed Mike and told him I was going to pass through the shop on my way back to the batting cages.

  7.

  OUTSIDE THE OFFICE, THE FLAT-FACED BUILDINGS AND CORRUGATED METAL doors looked earthy in the sodium light, like adobe. The night air was quiet and dry. When I reached the fabrication shop, I shook out the right key and held my heavy flashlight in the other hand.

  I’d never gotten a firearm permit—not interested in guns, in any shortcut to power—and so I always had these lower-paying gigs where the owners didn’t care enough or have enough money to spring for more expensive security. If there was trouble, I could call the police or swing at it with the rear end of my Maglite. My shoes were decent for running.

  I opened the door and stepped inside. It was still, as quiet as the bottom of the ocean, but something told me to leave the lights off. I walked softly, past the dim chaos of the reception desk, through a door, and toward the shop itself. My eyes began to adjust to the darkness. I’d been in the place before, part of normal rounds. One wall was lined with toolboxes and hand-labeled cabinets. There was space by the back roll-up door to bring in Harleys. The bulk of the floor was packed with heavy iron and steel machinery, things for grinding, for filing, for lathing aluminum, for welding.

  As I came into the main room, I heard the soft steps of rubber soles in the dark.

  What I did next was exactly how I’d always imagined I’d respond to a break-in: I hid. I dropped behind a rolling toolbox and turned down the volume of my radio. I heard what sounded like a few sets of feet. To go by the step-slap pattern they made, someone was wearing sandals. Sandals on a burglary didn’t make sense. Maybe the shop owner was doing some late-night work. He hadn’t called it in. And had forgotten to turn on the lights, too. I tried to tell myself that, but it wasn’t convincing. The silence was shattered by the heavy screech of iron on concrete. There was audible breathing as they pushed something in the dark.

  It was time to run away. One flashlight against three or more people wasn’t something I was ready for. I crouched and backed my way out in the dark toward the door to reception. My shoes scuffed on something grainy on the concrete, some sand or abrasive powder, but with all the noise I didn’t think they’d hear.

  I got the door open, backed into reception, shut it as noiselessly as possible, and turned around into a lanky figure in a trucker cap swinging something hard at my head. Then I went down and got a front-row look at his enormous white sneakers shuffling toward me like twin Zambonis before things went dark.

  I had dreams of being an airline pilot and trysting with flight attendants in the cockpit. The sleep was deep. That the dreams were punning was always a sign of that. I woke to the sound of giggling. It was my own. It took me a minute to tell myself to knock it off. At first I didn’t listen, but then I did.

  It began to dawn on me that I was in an office. There were office things, it seemed to me. Oh, that’s a crumbling, veneered particleboard desk, I thought to myself. A computer that looked like it might still take 5¼-inch floppy disks. A calendar on the wall with a Gil Elvgren pinup girl above the dates, looking for all the world like she wanted to have sex with her vacuum cleaner as much as the vacuum wanted to have sex with her. No wonder I was confused.

  I got up to try the door. The inside of my head crackled like someone was frying a pan of bacon in there, globules of hot fat splattering the insides of my eyes with bright flashes. The door handle turned, but when I pulled there was the sound of chain jingling taut and it gave only a half inch.

  Dimly I remembered getting hit, falling to
the floor, the shoes, the hat. I pressed the side of my head where the bat had connected. It was tender about a palm’s length behind my temple and swollen. Luckily the guy didn’t get as much batting cage practice as I did: a few inches forward could have done a lot more damage.

  I felt for my radio, but it was gone. Of course. I still had my wallet, though. It was too bad I’d never owned a cell phone. That would have been handy. I cracked the door and began shouting. Hopefully Mike wasn’t still in the cages, swinging away at that groaning automaton that threw him pitches where he couldn’t hear me.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that I was found. I’d given up on the shouting, suddenly exhausted, and went to sleep on the floor. I woke to the sound of the roll-up door being opened. There were muffled voices for a while, no words I could discern, but they were alarmed. I woke myself up the rest of the way and yelled through the cracked door for someone to get me out. Things got quiet, and it was another five minutes before anyone came. It wasn’t one of the machinists, though, or the owner of the shop. It was a police officer. He peered at me from a distance through the cracked door, went away to radio something, and came back with two other cops.

  Eventually they got me out. Then came all the questions. First it was one cop, while I sat in the back of an ambulance getting my head examined not for the first time in my life. Then it was a man and woman taking turns with questions. They took me to the security office, showed me the tape of myself going into the machine shop. I was disappointed to see how ungainly I moved, a man well on his way to old.

  Every time I tried to ask a question, they stonewalled me. When I got passed off to a fourth person, a detective this time, I asked where Mike was. “Why didn’t he find me before you guys?”

  The detective, midthirties maybe, in a blue dress shirt with the cuffs turned up, khaki pants, and work boots—he could have been in a Dockers ad—looked me in the eye. “You really don’t know why this whole thing is up and running?” I looked around: Ten or fifteen officers and others in official-looking civilian clothes walked this way and that, talking to one another quietly. None of the other shops I could see were open. The only cars were police vehicles, an evidence truck, others I didn’t recognize. “All this doesn’t happen for a simple B&E, and besides, the owner says nothing’s missing.”