Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  At some point she glanced up and there he was, a gaunt, awkward young priest in a cassock that could have fit two of him, bending over to peer in the window and smiling crookedly at her. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said, ‘but I’m curious – you’re the young woman with the chimpanzee, aren’t you?’ And then, catching sight of Sam in the back seat, ‘And this would be him then, wouldn’t it?’

  She didn’t know what to say. She was in shock – and not just because he was a priest and the sight of him flooded her with guilt and shame, but because he knew who she was and who Sam was, and how could that be? If he knew – this priest, this utter stranger – then who else knew?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to take you by surprise.’ He handed her a card. ‘I’m Father Curran. Gary and Brenda are parishioners of mine?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, acknowledging the connection. The only thing she could think was that Brenda must have been gossiping about her, which she really didn’t appreciate.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in church,’ he said, holding her with his eyes. ‘You are Catholic, aren’t you?’

  She could have denied it, but he’d caught her out, and what went through her felt almost like relief. ‘I don’t—’ she began, and broke off, ‘I mean it’s been hard, what with Sam – he keeps me occupied pretty much twenty-four/seven, and I know that’s no excuse…’

  ‘David Greybeard,’ he said. ‘Of all Goodall’s chimps, he was the one who was most human, the one who bridged the gap. Tell me, is that the way it is with’ – he gestured to the back seat – ‘your companion? What was his name?’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘I’m told he’s able to talk.’

  She was a fugitive. She talked to no one but Brenda and then only when Brenda managed to catch her going to the laundry room or unloading groceries from the car. Guy was dead to her and her mother was a nagging voice over a long-distance connection. She wanted to confide in him, wanted to confess. ‘Yes,’ she said, and then she told him about it, told him at length while Sam snored in the back seat, and the priest’s eyes kept flicking between him and her, and when she’d told him everything, the lessons, the drills, the TV shows, the way Sam responded and how creative he was with his signing, how much he knew, she caught herself because this wasn’t the confessional and the question of how she’d come to be here with Sam, to possess him, was something she couldn’t even begin to reveal.

  ‘That’s fascinating,’ he said. ‘Amazing, really. To think that he can express himself, that he can talk – it changes everything, doesn’t it? The church teaches us that animals don’t have souls, or not immortal souls, in any case, but when you consider Sam or an individual like David Greybeard, allowances have to be made, don’t you think?’

  ‘Sam has a soul,’ she said, ‘I’m sure of it.’

  He straightened up, arched his back, then leaned forward again, his hands clasped as if in prayer, even as the wind flapped the sleeves of his cassock and whipped his hair. ‘I wonder if I could stop by sometime, maybe next time I pay a visit to Gary and Brenda? I’d really like to talk to him.’ He ducked his head, tugged at his sleeves, which, she saw now, were too short by several inches, as if the cassock had been made for somebody else. He smiled. Brushed the hair out of his eyes. ‘And you, of course. You too.’

  She knew what Guy would have said about it, but she didn’t really care what he thought, not any more. In fact, Father Curran stopped by two days later and a whole new process began. Sam took to him right away, though he kept lifting the priest’s cassock to inspect his legs and socks and old-fashioned garters as if they were props in a magic act, which, to Father Curran’s credit, didn’t seem to bother him at all – in fact he was amused by it and at one point asked Sam what he thought of the arrangement. Sam said he didn’t know. The priest laughed, then asked if he’d ever seen a priest before and Sam signed no and she felt a flush of embarrassment. Then he asked Sam about Jesus – did he know Jesus? Another no, another flush of embarrassment.

  ‘Not to worry,’ he said, ‘David Greybeard didn’t know Jesus either, not as far as anybody’s reported, anyway – but he could have. What do you think, Sam, do you want to know Jesus?’

  Sam might not have had the proper noun in his vocabulary or understood what it signified beyond the name itself, but he was a master interpreter of body language and vocal inflection, and he knew just what to do – bob his fist in an enthusiastic yes, the sort of yes that could lead to treats now and treats down the road after the priest had left, when she might be particularly disposed to show her gratitude.

  She served Father Curran tea and tuna on rye and put Sam through his paces while they sat at the table eating, really drawing the priest out, because she had a motive in mind, an idea actually, that had come to her not five minutes into their conversation in the parking lot at Dunkin’ Donuts. Azazel was dead. He’d lived a relentlessly cruel life, chained for eight years to a post outside the bunkhouse of a ranch in Texas after some cowboy had bought him on a whim from a circus in Mexico. He’d had no stimulus of any kind beyond what the ranch hands gave him when they remembered he was there, food tossed randomly at him, people gathering to watch him scratch his fleas or snap open a pop-top beer and see how he reacted when he was drunk; the sun eternal, a doghouse his only refuge. Then Moncrief heard about him, flew down to Texas and brought him back to a cage in Iowa, where he never again saw the sky or the sun that had scorched him through all those punishing years. He ate. He shat. He slept. He bred when Moncrief wanted him to. And then he got a rope.

  What was the point of his life? What was the point of Sam’s? What was the point of anything? She’d given herself over to something she couldn’t explain, a deep connection with another soul, whether it be human or not. And she wanted guarantees. She wanted a reason. A back-up plan. Salvation.

  Sam had been showing Father Curran his drawings, including the one he’d done the day before that depicted an elongated figure in a black dress – cassock? – staring straight out at you, when she said, ‘Please don’t say this is crazy, but I was thinking I’d like to have Sam baptised. I mean, if that’s possible at all—’

  He was watching Sam make adjustments to the drawing with a black crayon, the cassock swelling now to take up the entire bottom half of the composition and a new figure appearing in the upper portion that was like a black ball with arms and legs radiating from it – and ears, big scalloped ears framing the smaller ball he deftly sketched atop it. ‘Nice, Sam,’ he said, ‘very nice. Is that me – and you?’

  Sam paused to sign, YES and then went back to the drawing, adding what looked to be a tree rising in the background.

  ‘Truly?’ the priest said, glancing up at her. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been asked to bless just about everything you can think of, from a Harley Sportster to a hiker’s shelter on the Appalachian Trail, but this is something else altogether, this is a sacrament we’re talking about.’

  She was going to remind him of what he’d said in the parking lot about how allowances had to be made, but she didn’t have to. He broke into a grin and she saw that he was wearing a retainer, which somehow made her feel better – he was the instrument of God, but he was human too, with the same frailties and imperfections as anybody else. There was nothing to be shy about. It was OK. Everything was OK.

  ‘The only question,’ he said, ‘is do we perform the ceremony here or do we bring him to church?’

  She opted to have the ceremony at home, out back of the trailer, where it was as private as it got in Desert Haven – every once in a while a dog would careen through the yard or one of the other residents would drift past (one skeletal old man in particular, who liked to levitate a metal detector over the dead blasted dirt in the hope of uncovering something of value, which in itself was an act of faith), but mostly she had the lot to herself. At first, she thought she’d like to see Sam baptised in church, but then she wondered if she’d be expected to contribute, which would have been awkward, not that she c
ouldn’t spare the money, whatever it was, a token payment for services rendered, but just that she wouldn’t know how to go about asking. Plus, there would be other people there, strangers, and she had no desire to engage in chit-chat or accept congratulations or hear what they had to say about Sam, whether it was positive or not. And there was no telling how Sam might have reacted in a strange environment. So she bought a redwood picnic table at K Mart, which came with two benches, one for either side, and she put out a bowl of potato chips and some dip, and filled a cooler with ice, beer and Coke, and invited Brenda and Gary to stand as witnesses and celebrate along with Sam and her.

  They planned the ceremony for just after Sam woke from his afternoon nap, when he tended to be at his mellowest, the sleep draining off him and his eyes still in soft focus, and that was all to the good. Sam knew the priest and liked him and he knew Brenda and Gary too, the only people in the court he’d had any contact with to this point, so when they gathered around the table and Father Curran began intoning the words of the sacrament, he was as patient as could be expected. And he looked the part too, all innocence in the new T-shirt and white overalls she’d bought for the occasion.

  Father Curran, spindly and slope-shouldered in his vestments and with his hair combed stiffly back, leaned over Sam, where she held him in her lap. He sprinkled the holy water three times and each time chanted, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. He now anoints you with the chrism of salvation.’

  Sam seemed to accept this with equanimity, though he shook his head and blinked his eyes over and over as if to say he hoped everyone present knew he was doing them an enormous favour in sitting still for whatever they might have thought this was. He was aware that potato chips were coming his way and a cake he’d helped her bake that morning, chocolate fudge with vanilla icing, and if the cost of that was to sit in her lap and endure a few sprinkles of water, a smear of oil and a speech he couldn’t fully comprehend, despite the fact that she’d gone over the details in a picture book designed for the purpose, then it was all right with him. She’d once wondered if he knew God and if he could communicate as much or at least acknowledge it, but he gave no indication. All he did was sign back to her as she read aloud to him and they both traced the figures in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with their forefingers, which wound up concentrating his focus because Adam was nude with his penis exposed and God was supported by a host of naked angels.

  ‘God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into His holy people,’ Father Curran recited as Gary lit a white candle and handed it to him. ‘Samuel, receive the light of Christ,’ the priest said, and then, raising his eyes to address her, as the parent, or the nearest thing to it, he went on, ‘Your son, Samuel, has been enlightened by Christ and he is to walk always as a child of the light.’

  There was the sound of a car backfiring, which stoked Sam’s attention, and then somebody in the trailer across the way turned up the volume on their radio and as if by divine intervention ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was thumping out over the lot until it abruptly cut off and Mick Jagger was croaking, ‘I’m a fleabit peanut monkey/And all my friends are junkies.’ The irony was too much. For a moment – just that moment – everybody paused, probably thinking the same thing, and why hadn’t she thought to provide her own music, one of Bach’s masses or Handel or Palestrina? She was embarrassed. She felt her face flush. But then – she couldn’t help herself – she burst into laughter and Brenda gave her a quizzical look even as Sam snatched the candle out of Father Curran’s hand and blew out the flame, as if this were his birthday, which in a way it was. She said, ‘Not yet, Sam,’ but it was too late because the candle was out and Sam was already gnawing experimentally on the still-smoking tip of it, and if she projected, if she put herself in Sam’s place, she had to admit the wax looked just like the slick vanilla icing of the cake that was waiting in the wings.

  Then it was over and she was offering drinks all around, Gary and Brenda opting for beer, she and Father Curran for red wine (the same pricey California Pinot Noir she and Guy used to drink gratis at the ranch, the only label she really knew), while Sam expertly applied the bottle opener to his first Coke. The radio next door never let up, one tune after another, but the pedestrian sounds of the court seeped back in, and nobody seemed to pay much attention to it. Brenda commented on the dip – sour cream with dill, minced onion, garlic salt and parsley folded in – and Father Curran had a second glass of wine and relaxed into the spirit of the day. Sam was perfect, once he’d spat out the candle wax, that is – he just sat there on the bench, drinking Coke, which he was allowed only on special occasions, biding his time till the cake was served. And when it was, he showed tremendous restraint while she guided his hand in cutting individual slices for the guests, though he couldn’t help serving himself the first piece, all questions of decorum aside, and he did manage to decorate his baptismal outfit with a broad smear of chocolate, which by some mysterious process wound up communicating itself to the priest’s robes as well. Still, whether Sam fully comprehended what all this meant and no matter what Guy and the rest of the scientific community might have had to say about it, she felt a sense of relief. The individual, the person, she loved best on this earth was possessed of a soul – demonstrably, in the eyes of the church – and now, no matter what came next, that soul was saved.

  The days fell in place, one after the other. Nothing happened, nothing changed. She didn’t hear from Guy, not that she’d expected to, and that was just fine with her. That was over. Permanently. She supposed it was like a divorce, a bad divorce, but she’d got the only asset that really mattered, and now it was time to move on. Sam was her rock. He was older now, more mature – and more relaxed than she’d seen him since the days at the ranch. Every afternoon they went up on the mesa to play hide and seek or, if it was warm enough, to spread a blanket and just lie back and watch the clouds wheel overhead. In the evenings, they sipped gin and tonic, made whatever they felt like for dinner and more often than not wound up eating in front of the TV. She wasn’t getting her degree. She wasn’t studying anything. She’d have to look to the future, her mother was right about that, but not now – now she was here, in her own bought-and-paid-for trailer, answerable to nobody.

  Father Curran stopped by three or four times that fall to spend some time with her – or with Sam, actually. Sam learned to make the sign of the cross, and Father Curran started picking up some basic signs so he could communicate directly with Sam on matters religious and secular both. He wanted to know what Sam knew, no different from her or Guy or any other researcher. What went on in that brain? What basic truths could it reveal? When Jane Goodall observed the chimps at Gombe dancing at the waterfall or cavorting in the rain, were they displaying a sense of awe at forces greater than themselves? And when they engaged in ritualistic behaviour, like piling stones at the base of a particular tree, was this a form of worship?

  If Sam knew, he wasn’t forthcoming. From his point of view, the man in the black robe had once been the occasion for the production of chocolate cake, and that seemed enough of a reason in itself to pay attention to him. They drank tea together at the kitchen table, ate the oatmeal cookies Father Curran never failed to bring along with him. One afternoon, after an exchange about the weather, the lizards, the rock slabs of the mesa, the cactus spines and other evidentiary features of the material world, Father Curran asked, ‘Who is God?’ and Sam signed, ‘God,’ which she thought was a pretty good answer since God is ineffable. Father Curran tried again. ‘Where is God?’ he asked, and Sam, after giving her a knowing look, pointed one long determinate finger at the sky.

  And then it was Halloween, a holiday Sam had loved at the ranch, when everyone would dress in costume and the treats just kept on coming – candy bars, apples, dried apricots and gum, which he seemed to like best of all, more for the concept than the taste: you chewe
d and chewed and didn’t swallow, which he found hilarious, as if it were a charade, a delusion, food that wasn’t food. She bought a pumpkin at the supermarket and let Sam help her carve a face in it, feeding him the extracted pieces, the triangles of the eyes and nose and the long, jagged wedge of the mouth. Since there were no children in the court, she didn’t expect any trick or treaters, but she bought a bag each of candy corn and Snickers bars just in case – and for Sam, who as soon as he saw the pumpkin began begging for treats.

  After dinner, they settled into the couch with gin and tonics, and she turned on the TV, thinking to watch one of the corny old black-and-white horror films she and Guy used to find so hilarious, especially after they’d shared a joint. She was flicking through the channels when Boris Karloff ’s freakishly white face appeared on the screen, his black-lipped mouth contorted in a grimace, his hair jaggedly chopped as if someone had taken a hedge trimmer to it, the telltale bolt thrust through his neck. The shadows moved, the screen flickered, the music raced. She wanted to laugh as the familiar scenes played out, the monster lurching across the colourless landscape or bursting into the blind man’s shack, but then she looked at Sam. His face was set, his limbs trembling. The monster was acting like a chimp, that was what it was – and when suddenly he roared out his rage and confusion, Sam roared along with him. The villagers closed in with their torches, dogs barking, voices clamouring, and Sam sprang out of the chair to hump round the room, pounding the pillows and showing his teeth, in full hyper mode, and she kept saying, ‘It’s OK, Sam, it’s only a movie,’ but he wouldn’t stop, so she picked up the remote and shut it off right at the climax.

  Sam signed, WHY? and she didn’t know if he was asking why she’d turned off the TV or why they were attacking the man with the white face. Before she could answer, he snatched the remote out of her hand and flicked the movie back on at the very moment everything collapsed in flames. She was just getting up to scold him and take it back from him, when there was a knock at the door.