The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “Is that it?” I asked. I’d kept quiet for the duration of his speech, like a good boy. I do try sometimes.

  “I’m sorry it has to be like this,” Gustafsson said, “but yes.”

  “And Watt,” I said, “let me guess. There’s no other work for me either?”

  Watt’s scotch tan deepened a shade or two. He was nearly purple, hypoxic. “Everything’s full. As soon as something opens up, you’re at the top of the list, but . . .”

  “Right,” I said. Watt feigned surprise at a smudge on his desk and began working at it with his sleeve. Gustafsson had his hands in his pockets and was rocking slightly heel-to-toe, looking like a president who has toured the disaster area—the same dress, the same forced folksy speech—and was glad to be re-boarding Air Force One where his in-flight vodka tonic was waiting. I breathed deeply, which did nothing, and felt the tenuous membrane between anger and despair running through my insides flex and shift.

  “Someone is dead. I’ve got a concussion. And already you’re onto public relations and maintaining profit streams. Cold-hearted bastards.”

  “It’s not personal,” Gustafsson said.

  “Not for you,” I said. “You’ve got the luxury.”

  Watt whined, “Come on, Mark. You know the position I’m in.”

  “Go to hell,” I said. “And you,” I said turning to Gustafsson, “are a slick and talented motherfucker.” I jabbed a finger at him but stopped short of poking his chest. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re still fucking your mother.”

  Gustafsson put his head down and took it. When he looked up, his lips were pursed, and he wore an expression of charitable tolerance on his asinine face.

  Watt pleaded, “It’s just business. I’ll make some calls, I’ll write a letter of rec. You’ll land on your feet.”

  I had another of those moments where I get ahead of my brain. “I hope this lands on your feet,” I said and pushed a Tony Gwynn paperweight across the desk. Instead, it landed on Watt’s lap and he grimaced painfully. With my arm already across the desk, I decided to sweep it sideways, spilling a mug of pens and dragging a computer monitor to the floor where it bounced once, hard. “It’s just business, guys. You understand.” I was looking for something else to knock over when Gustafsson grabbed me by the elbows and pinned down my arms. He was strong. I couldn’t free myself.

  “I think this is over,” he said coolly. The door opened and a security guard half my age asked what was wrong. Watt had tripped the alert button under his desk, the prick.

  “Right,” I said. I tried to wrench myself free again, but Gustafsson’s gorilla palms jerked my arms back into place and gripped me tighter.

  “You’re leaving now, yes?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m leaving.”

  “And I’m not going to see you at Palms North, yes? Or anywhere else, for that matter?”

  “Well, I was thinking of doing some pro bono patrols, but on second thought, maybe I won’t.”

  “Don’t try to get smart,” Gustafsson said, sounding like a sitcom version of a father. “I can’t wait that long. I better not see you. Given this outburst, I trust you even less than I did this morning.”

  Watt stood and came around, visibly upset by what was transpiring in his office. “Just leave, Haines,” he pleaded. “Give me your keys and go. You can bring the uniform by some other time. I’m not sending you out of here in your underwear.”

  “What a noble gesture.” I barely looked his way. All my rage had taken Gustafsson as its target now, and I was studying his face for the best place to hit it, if I ever got the chance. “Silverback here needs to let me go.” Right in the goddamn left eye, I decided. The asshole already had a depth perception problem, and it seemed like a good idea to make it a physical one, too.

  Gustafsson gripped hard enough to leave bruises and then released me. “Thanks for justifying this decision,” he said with snide self-assurance. “It wasn’t an easy one to make, but I feel much better about living with it now that I’ve gotten to know you.”

  I took the ring of keys from my belt and tossed them onto Watt’s desk. They clanged and slid off onto the floor. I turned to the boy security guard behind me. The only thing he’d done to help was perspire. His endless forehead glistened like a strip of fresh flypaper. “Come on, Opie, you can walk me to my car.”

  I didn’t see Esmeralda on the way out, thankfully, and the young receptionist looked at me with confirmed suspicion. I walked out of the building with purpose, got in my truck, and drove away. By then I’d caught up with my brain and was reviewing the tapes, issuing harshly worded notes to the starring prima donna. Half a mile down the road I stopped and watched my hands shake and wondered, What next, what next. Then I drove the rest of the way home.

  10.

  THERE WAS A NEW MESSAGE WAITING ON THE MACHINE. IT WAS Harper, the detective, asking me to call. He had a few questions about what I’d seen before I was knocked out, so I did. Nothing I said made him go, “Aha.” When he was done, I asked if there was any new information.

  “Can’t say much at this time,” he said tersely. “There was a struggle, and there was blood at the scene that wasn’t Mike’s.” He paused and then said pointedly, “Wasn’t yours either.”

  So it wasn’t just me being paranoid: I’d been a possible suspect.

  I should have felt relieved now, but I was sore and bitter. Not at Harper so much as at myself. How I must have come across, when they found me, and then what they’d learned when they pulled my records. I imagined what was written there, the notes on drunk tank stays and disorderly conduct arrests, the investigation of complaints of domestic disturbance, and a passage that must have said something like: March 15, 1985. Man found partially conscious upon arrival. Signs of intoxication—alcohol and prescription morphine tablets. Vomit on the couch, a bottle’s worth of ibuprofen, assorted prescription drugs. Girl, approximately five, found in the bedroom, from where she’d dialed 911. I was as close to the edge of death as I’d ever been but somehow the sight of Aracely on the floor, seated next to a phone placed carefully back in its cradle, made it through my dimmed senses and was etched permanently on the deeper surfaces of my brain. The pastel rainbow pattern of her pajamas, the ruffles around the hem of her shorts. Her tousled hair. The bottom of one small foot. I remember nothing of a day or two on either side of that, except this one image, which was never far from being recollected. More than anything else, though, I tried to avoid it. As soon as I got out of the psychiatric hospital, that’s when I left for good.

  But these cops found my coworker shot, and then they’d read a dissertation about me, and for a while they considered me capable of murder. It unsettled me. I didn’t need it. Not after playing air hockey on Watt’s desk. Not after another reminder that I couldn’t be certain of what things I was capable. I didn’t like that the cops had this story for me that included killing a man. It wasn’t my story, but it built on parts of it that I couldn’t deny. A true cynic starts at home, as they say—they being me. I could let that story dominate if I wasn’t careful. I’m always careful but I don’t always succeed, and sometimes a story is stronger than a person. Especially a story someone tells about you. Especially if others agree on it.

  That was why leaving Gabby had been for the best. I couldn’t look at her without seeing myself as she saw me—or if not how she saw me, then how I saw myself through her, how I read myself as she would narrate me: the disaster, the wounder, the betrayer, the unprodigal. I couldn’t escape it, not then. And Aracely wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t see me—she had a story for me, too. I didn’t want to think about that either.

  So after talking to Harper, I went straight to the ocean and let the waves pummel me. Later, I rode a few. Some long, fast glides on a smooth surface and I felt at home in my skin again, empty in my skin, existing only at the level of my skin. As unreflective as the sea on an overcast night.

  11.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS I LOST TOUCH, DRIFTED AIMLE
SSLY FROM HOME TO beach to dive restaurant to home again. I slept a lot. I knew I should make plans. I knew that for my own sanity. But when I tried, I thought about planning to get breakfast with Mike or the long-deferred plans to see Aracely, and then I’d go get carne asada fries and eat them on one of the jetties and fish for a couple hours with no bait on the line. Mike owed me breakfast, so I skipped that meal. It felt like the least I could do. It never occurred to me at the time, but Cindy owed me a breakfast, too.

  Gabby had tried to reach me at work and someone, probably Esme, had given her the news. She caught me at home.

  “I heard you lost your job,” she said.

  “Something like that.”

  She clicked her tongue and stalled. Her voice was too gentle. I didn’t trust it. “I heard about the person you work with. Dear God.”

  “It’s too late to start that prayer.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Gabby said, “and you know it. And besides, you know it never is.” Another pause. Her uncertainty made me want to hang up now. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m always okay, Gabby. Like a rock.”

  I could hear her smirk when she said, “Like a lump.” It was a relief, that.

  “Like a whatever. Lumpier every year.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

  I thought about it, which is to say I waited a moment before telling her no. Then I added, “But thanks for asking. That’s not nothing.”

  After we hung up, I thought about how kind she’d been, and the tenor of our last conversation. There was a while after I had stopped believing when her kindness had been mean: organizing groups to pray for my soul, for God to inspire me with shame and humility. She’d sworn it was all in my best interest, but it had another’s at heart; it was about me, but I was the third party. Her sanctity meant no step to where I’d moved, no sympathy. That had been part of the decline, the drinking, the despair: the sudden loneliness of being without God and, in losing that, losing everyone else who mattered. But time had changed Gabby. She admitted that she still prayed for me and hoped I’d find my way back into the fold, but she was open to me as I was. It baffled me to think of how affection and care and hope and commitment could work independently, and so often at odds with one another.

  On the third day, I went down to South Jetty. A lifted Ford truck with a few teenagers standing in the bed blitzed across the speed bumps near me in the parking lot, kids bucking and trying to hold on. It looked like a gag from an old On the Road movie, if Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were shirtless teenagers in matching long black shorts, dark and enormous glasses, and flat-billed hats. A sticker across the back window featured a Gothic sketch of a skeletal Jesus on a cross, flesh peeling away from His bones, and above it, the words HARD CORPS RANGERS.

  When I came in from the surf session, the air had been let out of my tires, and I blamed those kids, though the only reason I had was that they looked like assholes.

  While I waited for a tow truck to come—a long wait in summer, busy as they are with junkers overheating on the highways—I went for something to eat. Tucked along the inside of the harbor was a row of restaurants and shops near a small lighthouse. It was a tourist lighthouse, there to sell jewelry made from old coins and spoons, too small and poorly placed to serve as any kind of useful warning.

  I skipped the crab shack with the dancing waiters and the rockabilly lobsters-and-tacos spectacle and got fish and chips from the tiny shop that might as well have been called the Fish and Chips Place. I took it back to the jetty and ate sitting on the rail that divided the parking lot from the steep decline into the river mouth of the San Luis Rey, where it fed into the sea.

  The surf was transitioning from the low tide, glossy waves of the morning to the wind-chopped, high-tide shore break of the afternoon. It was one of the best versions of the break on the north side of the jetty: punchy, quick, unpredictable. I considered going back out after the meal, but then I might miss the tow truck, and I didn’t want fish and chips for dinner, too.

  A line of pelicans rode above the surface of a small band of swell and disappeared behind the rocks of the jetty. When I found them again on the other side, I spotted a group of men climbing down the rocks, struggling to balance with surfboards in their arms. One was my bald-headed friend from the pier with the BARREL tattoo. Another was the guy with the orange afro, the goiter-headed kid. They paddled out on the south side of the jetty, where the waves were mellower but altogether worse, and I walked onto the rocks to watch them. They surfed terribly. Every time one of them stood up, his feet were in a different position: wide apart in the pose of a stretching PE teacher, both together at the tail, too far to the right side of the board or to the left. How many times I watched one foot slip from the board entirely I can’t even say. They seemed like they were having fun, but they looked high enough to make having a vasectomy fun. I was being reductive; they depressed me on an existential level. But being reductive wasn’t something I had a problem with. And it wasn’t clear to me yet, but that wasn’t why I was watching them.

  The tow truck came. The driver, a thin woman with a thin mouth ringed in tiny smoker’s wrinkles, maybe sixty years old, saw the tires and asked, “Whose wife you fuck, honey?”

  I paid her, she inflated the tires, and I waited for the guys to come in from the ocean.

  They did eventually, walking to the free parking lot on the other side of the train tracks. I followed at a distance and then went and futzed with my truck and watched. They changed into street clothes, and I debated just walking up to Goiter and asking if he’d seen Cindy. Instead, I waited a little longer.

  Soon they locked up their cars and walked back under the train tracks. They went over to the shops by the harbor and crowded into Jimbo’s Bar and Grill.

  Jimbo’s was more a bar than a grill. Though, to be fair, it was also less bar than liquor store that let you drink on the premises. It had originally been a tchotchke shop about the size of a dining room, hawking T-shirts with airbrushed bikini bodies on them, but that had failed—not enough tourists. Booze for the boat-dwelling and beach-loitering crowd was unsurprisingly better suited. There were two small tables on the sidewalk out front, boxed in by a thin wrought-iron fence and laced with chain looping them together and to the wall at all hours; people in Oceanside don’t wait until the middle of the night to make off with things like patio furniture. There were always three or four salty-looking men or women sitting out there, smoking Pall Malls, pinching them off half-smoked and tucking them behind their ears—people who lived on boats that never left their moorings and who often weren’t as lucky as their boats.

  As I walked up, I recognized one of the boat dwellers from the bait dock. Last time I’d been there I overheard him talking about his wife’s lung disease. A dirty yellow mustache hung from his sun-ravaged brown face, a cigarette jammed in his mouth like it was the only twig jutting out of a cliff—a twig he was dangling from. No wife with him today. None for the rest of his days either, most likely. There was a dark weight always waiting to sink you in that grief, no resolution, like sailing a dinghy in a storm with an anchor tied to your back. I felt it pull, then put it out of my mind.

  Then there was a shout from down the sidewalk, and it was her, in bathing suit and sarong, yelling to him, “Where’d you put the motherfucking dock key?” and smoking with a carton of Marlboro reds tucked under one goosefleshy but very alive armpit.

  Inside Jimbo’s the air was cooled by large fans. The floor was linoleum in the style of oak. The ceiling was standard-issue industrial. A handful of dollar store grass skirts had been cut apart and pinned around the walls about the height of a chair rail. Glasses were racked in their sea-foam plastic cubes behind the bar. Because they had only one rack, empties went back in next to clean ones until the rack got filled, and sometimes you got a glass with fresh lipstick on it. A few mirrored beer ads were nailed up carelessly. The rest of the room comprised four small tables, sixteen cheap wood chairs, a paintin
g of a slutty hula girl, and a karaoke machine on a stool in the back corner. It smelled like dish soap and fish guts. The harbor cleaning station was just around the corner.

  The guys from the water took up two of the tables. There was a pitcher of thin beer at the center of each table and, miraculously, since they’d come in only a few minutes before I did, there were already greasy burgers on plates before them. Happy hour. Regulars.

  I took the last empty stool at the bar and ordered a soda and some fries, even though I wasn’t hungry and don’t like sweet drinks. When the food came, I set about dispatching it as slowly as possible, avoiding a conversation with the bartender who danced around behind the counter like he was hungry for one. I was waiting for the guys to get a bit more of that beer in them. About thirty minutes later, the bartender was telling me that global warming was horseshit.

  “Well,” I said, “livestock methane is the bigger problem, so it’s more cow shit than horseshit.”

  “My dad was a scientist, and he knew this was all a racket to scare people into buying into a whole heap of nonsense.”

  “What kind of scientist?” I asked.

  “Geologist.”

  “Probably petroleum geologist, then, or friends with them. Your dad was a sucker, a back-pocket guy.”

  The bartender threw his dishrag on the ground. He looked like he might tackle me from across the bar, and a few long seconds passed away. “I’m a businessman,” he said, like it was a mantra. “For both of our sakes, we should talk about something else.”

  “You’re a what?” I asked, giving the room a wave. Besides the guys from the water, who were trying to turn on the karaoke machine, there was only one woman in the place, reading tea leaves in the bottom of her glass of Southern Comfort. While I mock-presented the room, the guy with the BARREL tattoo made eye contact with me and shook his head in an exaggerated warning.