The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  My eyes sizzled back to the optical nerve for a second time. I blinked against the pain and protective tears, wanting to see again as quickly as possible. I wasn’t sure what this guy’s next move would be, or what I could do about it, but I didn’t want to be rubbing my eyes like a tired baby when it came.

  But he was just standing at the end of the room, watching me. He had on blue shorts and a white V-neck shirt. A flannel shirt was tied over half his face like an oversized bandit’s handkerchief. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. A damn kid.

  The second person stepped onto the top rung of the ladder. I wondered if it would be Gustafsson, in one of his tailored suits. I wanted it to be. Or, if not him, then Sammy, grinning and acne scarred and inconsolable. I didn’t have much hope in either case, but I wanted it to be one of them. My brain hungered after the closure either of their faces would represent, while the rest of me hoped there was just some way to make it out of this alive.

  But it was another kid, a youngish guy by the clothes. He wore a short-sleeved button-up and oversized sneakers. To hide his face, he’d put on one of the welding masks from the machine shop. He climbed down and stood next to his pal, and they both looked down the chamber to me. Only the one in the welding mask was intimidating, tilting his static metal face to scrutinize me like a sentient but cold-hearted automaton.

  The kid in flip-flops nudged the other one, tried to press something into his hands. The one in the welding mask shook his head. Flip-flops tried again, and this time his pal took whatever it was and whispered to the kid to fuck off. Then they walked my way. You could see them puffing themselves up as they got closer, until they almost looked like a unit—seasoned, familiar with this kind of confrontation.

  The one in the welding mask came within a few feet of me and knelt down. What he held was a pistol, low, in his right hand. It wasn’t a surprise, but my heart stuttered. There was a lump in my throat.

  “How’d you get in here?” he asked. He sounded a bit more like an adult than his pal. Maybe he could grow a beatnik beard under that mask, if he let the fuzz on his face metastasize long enough and did a pubic hair transplant. I wondered if I should tell him that and get this over with. Then, sick to death of my mind’s habits, I wondered if I really was that much of a fucking moron and tried a different tack.

  “I’m pals with Ed, the guy who owns the shop,” I said. “I came in to borrow some shit last night. Started moving stuff around and came across this. Then while I’m down here, someone shuts me in. I don’t even know how long I’ve been down here.”

  “Yeah,” said the kid in sandals. “You tripped the alarm.” The other guy didn’t react, didn’t move.

  “Sure, but look,” I said, “I don’t know what any of this is, and I don’t—”

  “Come on, you know it’s drugs,” said the sandal kid unhelpfully. “For real?”

  “I don’t care what it is,” I said, trying to salvage this attempt to give them a way to let me go. “I just want to get out of here. I won’t say anything to anyone. I don’t have anything to say. It’s none of my business. I smoke a little grass. I’m not one to judge. I shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

  The older one tilted his head to one side. A reflection of the burning bulb overhead shifted across the dull black of the mask’s single rectangular lens. His voice ventriloquized through the welding mask, sounding colder, flatter, darker. “Eh,” he said noncommittally. “Not sure that works for us.”

  Maybe feigning a little fear and trembling would tug at their heartstrings, I thought. “I’m pretty sure I almost died,” I said, trying to let the fear come through in my voice. But it got stuck somewhere farther down, while the actor in me had to ham it up for the desired effect. “I think that hatch is airtight. I started running out of oxygen—I think that’s why I passed out. Being this close to kicking the bucket is enough to scare me straight, I promise.”

  The sandal kid whined, “Shit.” He punched his friend in the shoulder like I wasn’t even there. “I didn’t even think about that.”

  The older one didn’t move. “It’s fine,” he said.

  “No, man. No, it’s not fine.” Nervous energy poured off the sandal kid. He started rubbing his hands together like a doctor before the surgery. “Not after what happened.”

  “It’s fine. Let it go.”

  The kid in sandals paced, bobbing his upper body slightly. He was threatening to revert to a prior, more birdlike form—skittish—and fly away. I knew I was seeing something that was as revealing, but of something different. “I should have called you sooner,” he said.

  “Let it fucking go,” the older kid said louder now, turning from me to glare at his pal.

  After what happened, he’d said. This was the person. This nervous fucking kid flopping around in sandals who didn’t want to be the one to hold the gun. He was the person who’d killed Mike. But he didn’t seem like a killer. He sounded doubtful, conflicted, a little shrill. There was hesitation and anxiety in how he handled himself, and fear and remorse. It was strange to glean a sense of his spirit through only a few minutes of presence, a few phrases, and to be convinced of his crime from them—a coming-together of convictions.

  “You’re the one,” I said to him, without forethought. It had to be said, it seemed, and so I’d said it. If I’d wheedled or lied my way out of this, it would have only been to save my own skin, and I wasn’t sure it was worth that.

  “What?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “You. In that shop up there,” I said, pointing above our heads. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  The kid backed away. His face crumpled, like a page of notes balled up and ready to be discarded. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “You shot him in the heart,” I said, more firmly now. “You put a bullet in Mike Padilla’s heart. Maybe your friend rolled him into the corner, maybe you did that. I don’t know. But you’re the one.”

  “Don’t talk,” the kid said, retreating farther back in the chamber. His friend in the welding mask still knelt on his heels a few feet from me, watching the exchange like it was between a mouse and a lizard and he was a boy with a magnifying glass on a hot day. He’d be paring his fingernails like an indifferent God, if God only had fingernails and this kid wasn’t a filthy animal who couldn’t give two shits about hygiene. “Shut your fucking mouth, man. If you don’t—”

  “What?” I said, glad to be feeling this anger again, like I was home, if home was a piss-drunk, blackout rage. “What are you going to do? That you weren’t already going to do?” There wasn’t a way these guys would allow me to live. Still, it was odd to call out Mike’s killer when I was the one trapped and vulnerable—odd but exalting. If death was coming for me, I could at least hail it on its approach. “If I don’t shut up you’ll what? Why pussyfoot? Get it over with.”

  “Stop,” the kid said, his voice cracking. “I can’t listen to this. Jeff, I can’t—this isn’t what I signed up for.”

  Jeff, of the welding mask, muttered, “Fuck me.” Then he walked over and clubbed the sandal kid with the butt of his gun, cracked him right in the ear. The kid cried out and bled red on his white shirt. At least I knew he wasn’t a Dodgers fan.

  “Go back to your fucking corner,” Jeff said, pointing toward the ladder.

  The sandal kid did as he was told. As he slunk off into his corner, he muttered to himself. He didn’t seem mad at Jeff for coldcocking him. He was mad at himself.

  Then Jeff walked back over to me. He passed the gun from one hand to the other, to reorient it from the pistol-whip grip he’d just used to the more traditional one. Then he passed it back to his right hand, with the business end pointed my way.

  The ruse was up. No sense hiding behind, well, anything. The lies weren’t working, and we were past lying now. “Where’s Sammy?” I asked. “He’s your boss, right? I’ve known Sammy since before you were a sperm going for a swim. Get him down her
e. Let me talk to him.”

  Jeff shook his head. “I don’t know any Sammy.” I could hear his breath hitting the inside of his mask, could almost taste the humid reek he must be rebreathing in there. He was close enough I could see a design on his shirt over the breast: a skull in a Nazi helmet, biting into a crucifix. Above it were a few words: HARD CORPS RANGERS.

  “Sam Gans,” I said. “Sammy Ray Gans. He’s got a place just like this under the floor of his garage. He’s part of how you guys get this stuff moved around. All you Hard Corps Rangers guys are part of it, right? I know. Youth-group kids, dirt bikers. The lifted trucks. And Gustafsson, he’s behind all this, too—Tom Gustafsson. He knows me. He’ll want to talk to me.”

  Jeff didn’t move, didn’t say anything for a minute. I felt myself hope—felt that skyward swoop in the chest—and hated it. I knew viscerally what that feeling had represented, what it had always represented to me: prelude to suffering, a sign of overdue and imminent readjustment to reality.

  Then Jeff laughed bitterly, cut it short, and said, “I don’t know anyone like that.” My chest became my chest again, just a cage to keep a few pounds of organic slop from falling on the pavement. “These things,” Jeff said, pointing to the skull on his shirt, “are on fucking T-shirts you can buy anywhere. I drive a Hyundai, and you don’t know shit about how the world works.”

  The sandal kid was groaning down by the ladder, and I was lost. “But, Sammy,” I said. “He’s got something just like this place.”

  Jeff took a step closer. “Like I said, I don’t know any Sammy. Now shut the fuck up about it.” I tried to scramble out from under the rack again. I felt a little stronger now, could feel it rocking a bit as I moved. Jeff raised the gun. I pictured an invisible tube of potentially disrupted air that ran from the barrel to my head, then through it. “Don’t do that,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Dawn patrol working stiffs are going to be coming around the complex pretty soon. I don’t want to shoot you. Too risky. Someone might hear. I don’t really want to deal with cleaning you up either. But I can deal with it, if I need to.”

  I stopped. My eyes had closed without me realizing I was doing it.

  “No, I think we’ll close you back in,” Jeff said. “Help me out and scream a bit after we’re done, so I can make sure the sound doesn’t get through. Never has before. We come back in a week. Not that it’ll really matter to you.”

  I’d wanted to be alive. Now it looked like my life was going to be taken away again. I’d never consented to being born, but I couldn’t consent to this. Not now. Not with what I needed Aracely to know.

  “You can’t,” I said stupidly. “I’ve got a kid. There are people . . .” Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to say that there were people who needed me.

  Jeff crouched and waved the gun toward the pills on the ground. “Want a little mercy before I go? Make the swim for the big light a little more peaceful,” he said, getting off on the whole situation.

  “Not that kind,” I said. Maybe when it was my choice I’d come close, but there wasn’t anything I wanted from this kid, mercy included. “Go fuck yourself, you goddamn monster.” I spat at his face, slick smearing across the mask’s lens.

  He took off the mask like a slo-mo catcher looking for a pop-up foul ball. It turned out he did have a couple days of patchy beard under there, a narrow and recessive jaw, a smudged nose, beady eyes. He didn’t look like a monster. His wasn’t the face of evil. It was the face of a kid I might have counseled, talking him through his parents’ divorce and how inscrutable God’s plans for us can be. An angry kid, not that different from me.

  But he wasn’t that church kid. He wasn’t telling me his secrets. I wasn’t being paid to turn them toward adhering him to the faith. I had failed Emily, and I was going to fail to reach Aracely. The sandal kid might have killed Mike, but what good was knowing that? The reasons were nonsense and going down with me in this smuggler’s den they were turning into a tomb.

  Jeff made a clicking sound with his mouth and left the mask on the floor. He stood and walked away slowly, self-consciously.

  I started tearing myself out from under the fallen rack. My muscles felt like they’d been chewed up, but I found I could push with my legs. While I inched out, Jeff reached the sandal kid, who’d been holding his ear and watching us like a struck dog. Jeff pointed up and pushed him toward the ladder. Before he followed, he reached behind the first rack and flicked the switch, sending most of the room back into shadow. Then he climbed up in the column of light coming from above: the shit ascension of a motherfucker.

  I was still only partway free. I knew what that meant. Before I could get to my feet, get to the ladder, get out—before any of that, they would have this place closed up. I didn’t have a chance.

  Then came the sound of scuffing metal while they settled the hatch back in place. Planes of light snuck through the cracks, flickering, before the seal was complete. Then I was back in full dark. I didn’t want it. I could have jumped out of my own body just to escape it if there’d been anything of a self to leave the body in the first place. Instead, I hit my head against the floor a few times. I was glad for a little sharp hurt, for the flash of pain so bright and red that I could see, for a moment, every time my forehead made contact.

  I listened for the sound of the mill being moved back over the hatch. It was quiet. I must have been far enough down even that sound was muffled to nonexistent. The thought left me shaking. I took a deep breath and shouted a few curses. It didn’t help much. I thought about the finite number of breaths left in this room and took another deep breath. I did it again. Fuck this air, I decided, taking big, luminous breaths, flooding my system with this oxygen until I was on the edge of hyperventilating. It was a clean kind of panic, and my face welled like it was a single, giant eyeball without a lid.

  Then there was a sound. It was the mill finally being moved. No, it sounded different. It started and stopped. The pitch of it shifted as the noise vibrated through a few feet of earth and concrete. A moment later the hatch opened roughly. Light returned, that small shaft at the far end of the room. Tears came to my eyes—not tears only. Sobbing, I stared at this light, not knowing if it meant these kids were coming back to shoot me or if they didn’t have the heart to let me die, not knowing if I was saved or lost—having no way of knowing what this light meant and not caring because it had returned. It had returned, when I thought it was gone for good.

  Then something dropped down the column of light. It was about the size of a bar of wax. When it hit the ground, there was a new light—brilliant and immediate, like the flash of revelation, the illumination of conversion. With this flash came an explosive rush of sound, which hit my head like the seafloor after a bad drop, and a cloud of inwardly illuminated smoke that left me gasping for breath.

  37.

  THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS THE REVELATION THE PROPHETS DESCRIBE—the voice in the burning bush, the angel in the parted clouds, the sudden clarity of vision and purpose. Revelations are a slow build, the dull and time-consuming development of feelings, convictions, and prejudices. The other kind are a magician’s reveal, reserved for the conversion of the actor in the Christian Broadcasting Network crowd.

  Mine was followed by an aggressive greeting from some SWAT officers and then another good seat in the back of an ambulance. I had spots in my vision from the flash grenade, and its fumes in the enclosed space left me feeling woozy. Other than that, and nearly being murdered, I was fine.

  I guess I wasn’t all fine. I was cuffed to the gurney and driven to the hospital. There I got bad, wet hamburgers and Pedialyte. Whenever a nurse came in or out, I could see a cop stationed in the hallway.

  After a couple hours of watching QVC like it was alien communication, I was interrupted by the detective who spoke to me after Mike’s murder—Harper, the one who did some moonlighting as the L.L.Bean centerfold. He seemed like an alien, too, or at least like he was two-dimensional and behind glass. I faintly heard his quest
ions, foggily gave my answers. How had I gotten involved with Sammy? How long had I been part of this distribution operation? To what extent was I an accomplice to Mike’s murder? I didn’t feel unmoored by being considered a suspect again. None of this felt real. I did. Some of the darkness of the bunker hadn’t left me—some of what I’d seen in the dark but had passed unnoticed in the light.

  I explained how I’d found Sammy again, how I’d learned what he was doing. I told him how I’d called Tuitele about the bunker, and how I’d started to wonder if there was one in the machine shop. I left out Daniella, left out Emily. If the idea was to keep Emily safe, nothing I’d learned about the two of them would help in the hands of the cops. Emily didn’t want to be found. I could respect that. And I’d assaulted Lambert in his home. I wanted to say someone else had, some past self, not me, but they were all me, and the scope of how far ahead of myself I’d gotten mortified me worse than Junípero Serra burning himself with candles, whipping himself with spiked chains, pounding his chest with stone—and still he’d felt justified in treating Indians as little more than slaves, showed who knows how many the enlightened way to an early grave, and found his name enshrined not only among the saints as the apostle of California but as a freeway exit in San Juan Capistrano. I’d settle for two days’ sleep.

  Harper listened, asked more questions, wrote on his notepad.

  “Thank you guys for finding me,” I said when it looked like we were done.

  “Thank the night dispatch for security. She called it in, said you’d gone missing after poking around there. We were keeping an eye on the place, thinking you might show back up.”

  So I owed Esme another thank-you. And an apology—of course, an apology. She’d been so scared after Mike died. She must have thought the same thing had happened to me. To Harper, I just nodded and tried not to cry too visibly. I’d rate myself a five out of ten on that count.