Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  The church is empty except for the blind organist practicing hymns. Her muzzled dog is staring down from the choir loft. This time I got a scarf to cover my head. No one’s praying to the Virgin. I don’t even know if Father Julio’s there, but as soon as I kneel down in the confessional, I smell his aftershave. I been waiting to smell it again for weeks. If Jesus had a smell it would be sandalwood.

  Bless me Father for I have sinned. My last confession was maybe a month ago.

  You’ve been in my prayers ever since, my child, he says. I prayed you’d return, and the Lord sent you. I’m sorry I failed you. The Lord will never fail you, but his servants lack his perfection. Thank you for another chance. Tell me what you’ve come out in the cold for. I promise anything you say here is protected by the Seal of Confession.

  I can tell you anything?

  Nothing’s too secret.

  Can I ask a question?

  I’ll answer if I can.

  Is the aftershave you wear sandalwood?

  I don’t wear aftershave. What else have you come back to say?

  When I was a little girl, Father Julio, I remember the nun telling about a saint who was poor and lived in a hovel, but he had the sweetest smell. Did you ever hear that story?

  Probably she was telling about Saint Francis.

  Was he the one who had Christ’s wounds? Was it the wounds that smelled so sweet?

  There is that legend.

  Do they hurt?

  Is this what you came in the cold to talk about?

  Is it a secret? One that’s safe to share in here?

  The pain Christ suffered, he suffered out of great love for all the children of God. He suffered to give us eternal life.

  And when others have the wounds, what are they suffering for?

  The last time you were here you were having problems with your husband.

  It’s not a problem anymore. I took care of it. It’s why I came to see you again.

  I’m listening.

  To beg forgiveness. To do penance.

  Christ died that we might be forgiven. Never forget that he is a God of compassion, not of vengeance and punishment. Can you tell me what you are seeking forgiveness for?

  Remember me telling you the sumnabitch was shtupping the widow across the alley?

  Yes.

  So, I will tell you my secret. Late last night, while they were sleeping naked, I cut their throats. They woke choking on blood while I set fire to her house. Maybe you heard all the sirens from over on Twenty-second?

  I hear his breathing again through the cloth partition and this time feel his breath, a wave of sweetness. He’s crying.

  Father Julio, is it like the way there’s secrets you can’t share even in confession, there’s also certain sins you can’t forgive?

  He’s still crying when I leave.

  The organist is practicing the Ave Maria and her dog has his muzzle raised, softly howling to match some pipe in the organ. I don’t bother to light a vigil candle.

  I follow the path back to the Deuces. Not one person comes the other way. I sit drinking vodka like I’m my only customer at the bar, and wait for it to get dark. When it’s late, I dig out a padlock from Frank’s railroad junk, and a funnel, and a fuel can I fill with kerosene for his space heater. I shove a couple railroad flares into my coat pockets and step out the back.

  Last night’s footprints are drifted over. There’s tire treads from a garbage truck probably where the snowman stood. Over Pani Bozak’s fence, the szmata’s laundry is still hanging in the floating snow.

  I walk to Twenty-first, through her gate, up the stairs, and take the junk mail from her box, step inside, and close her front door quietly behind me. There’s no light. I wouldn’t flick it on if there was. I listen at the inside door, and then, all but blind in the dark, crush the advertisements and pour kerosene over them and over the floorboards, careful not to splash it on my coat. You’d never get that smell outta fur. But I haven’t eaten all day, maybe all week, and in that dark enclosed space the fumes jab right up into my brain and leave me so dizzy that before I can light the crushed papers and clamp the padlock on the door, I gotta step out and suck cold air. Finally, the dry heaves pass. I’m shaking.

  I walk back into the alley and stand knee-deep in Pani Bozak’s drifted little yard, beside those sheets, breathing in the outer-space sky. The sheets are mother-of-pearl in the moonlight and I can see my shadow on them. I don’t feel dizzy anymore. I haven’t taken off my fox fur since it got so cold, and I feel alert like an animal, one with steamy breath that comes out at night to hunt when everyone’s sleeping. An animal with night senses. Everything’s clear, the snow satiny like the sheets. I can hear each falling flake fitting into place as it touches down on the surface of all the flakes that fell before. Whoever invented lace curtains must have spent a lot of nights watching snow. Ever wonder what it must feel like to sleep on sheets like that? I can see the candle flames nodding yes and no. I lift each sheet up from the bottom, like I’m holding the train of a bridal gown, and pour slow, so the kerosene soaks in. When I used to worry about a house fire, Frank that sumnabitch would tell me you could touch a match to a teaspoon of kerosene and it wouldn’t ignite. Well, that’s not the case if you touch it with a lit railroad flare. Flames lap from a stinking cloud of smudge, the sheets flame up, and there’s a screech from under the eaves.

  The owl opens its wings and dives like how it must swoop down on pigeons—so sudden I topple backward like in slow motion, dropping the fuel can and swiping with the flare to fend it off from raking out my eyes, and as it veers off, I stare into its ghost face, into its huge gold no-mercy pupils. I lay there in the snow, looking up. The owl, screeching like it has a stammer, circles twice above the burning laundry, then flaps away over the white roofs.

  That’s a very flattering likeness of me, Rafael.

  You not only got the boobs right, but the nipples. I see when I told you, use your imagination, you took me at my word, or can angels see through a woman’s clothes? Don’t think I’m so vain to miss that you took off a few years, and more than a few pounds. Made me voluptuous again if only for an afternoon.

  You got a God-given gift, like maybe I had once. You know someone’s got a gift if they wanna give it. What good’s a gift if not to give? Bet if Sinatra hadn’t been discovered, he’d a kept singing for nothing. Not everyone gets rich as him or Jagger. I mean there’s painters at carnivals who for five bucks in five minutes can do a portrait that makes you look like your inner movie star. I knew right off you weren’t no housepainter, Rafael. And no mural painter, either, at least not the murals around here, the spray-paint Virgins even the gangbangers don’t dare deface. I got a feeling the kinda Virgin you’d paint would be the kind that Frank that sumnabitch woulda liked slapped up on the Deuces—an apparition in red heels two stories tall and naked, in a fur coat open to the world, a giant bottle of Chopin vodka ascending beside her. That woulda got our tavern some free publicity all right, until they burned it to the ground.

  That picture deserves one more on the house. Chopin versus Señor Cuervo, round three. Tak. Thank you, Rafael. Na zdrowie!

  The Widow? She don’t live there, no one does. It’s boarded up, front and rear. Condemned. I heard she moved to Miami, but who knows.

  Frank that sumnabitch?

  Weeks after he left—day before New Year’s Eve—I get a call from the police in Libby, Montana. A freight train got derailed by a avalanche. Knocked eighteen boxcars off the track and buried them under rock and ice, and when they finally dug out the train, they found Frank in a mangled boxcar. He was frozen stiff so they don’t think the crash killed him. They think he got locked in, that he coulda been in there for weeks, maybe since the night he disappeared, just before the weather turned bitter and snow blew in. Maybe he was drunk and climbed in the boxcar to get outta the cold and lay there smelling that train smell he loved, and when he woke up, the boxcar was sealed, and nobody could hear him screaming help in his hoarse
voice. Maybe hobos knocked him over the head. I asked the cop, What was that boxcar carrying?

  How’s that, ma’am? he asks.

  You know, what was in there—guns, fur coats, cases of liquor?

  Can’t answer that, ma’am, the cop says. Mind if I ask why it matters?

  Could he have been stealing and got locked in? I ask.

  The cop goes, No need to worry, ma’am. He says the only stealing far as they’re concerned was done to my husband—his watch gone, wedding ring, his jacket. Somebody’d picked him clean and the only way they ID’d him was his wallet hid in his cowboy boots. Those boots probably didn’t look like they’d fit whoever robbed his body.

  I ask what it said on the side of the boxcar they found Frank in, and the cop says he don’t rightly know anything about that neither and he’s really sorry he can’t give me more information, cause he knows from his own times of loss how the little details about a loved one’s last hours take on sacred meaning.

  I go, Yeah, well, the reason I wanted to know was that whatever that boxcar said, they could put on his tombstone. And the cop says, You telling me you don’t want us shipping the body back to you, ma’am? And I go, Hey, he always wanted to be a cowboy, so why don’t you do the sumnabitch a last favor and bury him out there on the lone prairie?

  For his epitaph, I went with Cool Bunny by a Nose.

  Tak. Salute! I warned you, tequila gets me rowdy. Tell you what, Rafael, I got a gift for you. Do me a favor and close the door. We don’t want someone getting the wrong idea if they walk in. And play “Wild Horses” on the jukebox—A7.

  You can feel them for luck, Rafael. Buena suerte. Hot nips, just like you drew them. Let’s see that racing form. I’m gonna close my eyes and run my finger along the races, and where I point, you play that horse. I don’t care if it’s a loser at fifty to one. You put everything you got on it, tonight.

  The Caller

  Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else.

  —Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul

  The phone is ringing in the crummy downstairs flat where Rafael lives, ringing and ringing, but Rafael isn’t home. It rang this morning at five and on and off all day through the hot afternoon. Now it’s after midnight, still sweltering as if the satin nickel moon is throwing heat, and this time the ringing doesn’t sound as if it’s going to stop. Someone really wants to talk to Rafael, someone who obviously hasn’t heard he’s disappeared.

  That’s the word on the street: Rafael’s gone—as thoroughly as people disappeared in Argentina, removed as efficiently as if he’s been ethnically cleansed, or maybe one of the death squads from Central America went out of their way one night to stop by the southwest side of Chicago and pay Rafael a visit.

  He’s joined the disappeared, but in the barrio incongruously called Pilsen, a hood famed for its graffiti art, there won’t be mothers with the mournful Madonna look, bringing down the government by holding blowups of Rafael’s picture—the self-portrait with respirator and nighthawk wings—pasted to placards that read MISSING. At St. Paul’s on Hoyne Avenue, or St. Procopius on Alport, or St. Ann’s on Leavitt, where Rafael was baptized, there won’t be radical padres risking martyrdom by protesting from their pulpits that Rafael must not be forgotten.

  A stooped, veiled figure lights a candle for a soul. It’s Sister Two Teresas, who chose her name in honor of both the Little Flower of Lisieux and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Her life has been lived by the words of Saint Teresa of Ávila: Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul. She once oversaw the altar boys when St. Ann’s still had a grade school and now, in her dotage, arranges the altar flowers. She can’t remember yesterday, and yet recalls how twenty-three years ago Lance Corporal Milo Porter, the most devout boy she’d ever coached, stood in his dress blues as if they were a surplice, cradling the son he’d named after an angel, while Father Stanislaus dribbled the water of eternal life over the wailing infant’s head. And she remembers how two years later when Lance Corporal Porter, missing in action, couldn’t attend his own requiem mass, she wept and prayed: Oh, how everything that is suffered with love is healed again.

  In the years after the requiem, first Rafael’s mother deserted—paid off by the alderman whose bastard she was carrying, or so the rumor went—then one by one the extended family scattered into oblivion, until only Rafael was left in the care of Tia Marijane, his “beatnik aunt,” an exotic dancer half blinded by lasers, who spent her days painting watercolors of the cosmos and her nights praying the rosary to the opera station. Rafael liked to say he was raised by the spray-painted streets of Pilsen in the way that kids in fairy tales are raised by wolves. And now he’s MIA like the father he never knew. Those superpatriots Sly Stallone and Chuck Norris won’t be dispatched to liberate him. He’ll be lucky to make the Eleventh District’s list of missing persons. It runs in the family to disappear.

  The vigil candle at St. Ann’s will melt into smoke, though at this moment, after midnight, its tiny flame has the locked church to itself and in the darkness emits a numinous green light that has the stained-glass windows facing the L tracks on Leavitt glowing from the inside out. If a soul flitted mothlike, lost in a once-familiar neighborhood, the light might attract it. An empty L, lit by a similar glow, rattles by like massive links on the chain of a ghost. Blocks away the ring of a phone echoes in a musty airshaft, and all along the street graffitied pay phones, most of them out of order and all of them obsolete and scheduled to be torn out, begin ringing. And then the steeple bells of three churches toll.

  * * *

  When a phone rings long enough it acquires a voice of its own. You hear it despite the pillow squashed over your ears or the boom box turned up until the guy next door starts hammering the wall. With your eyes closed each ring is a spray of color—karma-violet, clandestine-red, revolving-dome light blue—the auras of a voice that’s as beyond words as the night cries of urban animals—nighthawks wheeling above mercury-vapor lights, chained watchdogs that won’t stop barking, a rat tossing in the trap that’s managed only to break its back.

  Come on, man, fucking pick up.

  The call seemed merely impatient at first, like Rafael’s gangbanger homey Milton who suspects that Rafael is skimming on their petty dope deals. They’d agreed on 50/50, Rafael supplying the supposedly aphrodisiac, hallucinogenic gummies called liana smuggled from a research study at the U of C, and Milton doing the pushing. I’d rather huff fumes like a punk than drop that shit, man, Milton said after he tried liana. Crazy fucking colors, closing your eyes just makes it worse, jungle cats jumping out of doorways, ese, you call that a love potion? He thought he’d mess with Rafael’s head in return by leaving a warning that the Devil’s Disciples were looking to express their displeasure with the recent apparitions of bare-assed girlfriends—phantom reflections on the cracked windshields of junkers and the soaped plate glass of deserted storefronts—that Rafael, masked like a surgeon, had spray-painted along Eighteenth, a street otherwise made sacred by its murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yo, van Gogh of the Krylon can, when you gonna get that piece-of-shit answering machine fixed? I got a message might save your sorry ass. Why you can’t paint nothing but chicas? Do you always have to paint with your dick?

  By late afternoon desperation has crept into the jangle of the Good Humor Man’s bells and into the gut of the plain-looking woman who’s been feeding a pay phone that rings and rings, then chucks back her loose change as if ejecting a cartridge. Cindy, the “older woman”—she’s thirty-two—who cleans condos on the Gold Coast, is calling from the Blue Island Laundromat, where, between the boil of washing machines and cyclone of dryers, it’s hot enough to faint. Rafael has immortalized the cracked walls in his flat with a portrait of her dressed in glass platform heels and a transparent gown that makes the wall phosphorescent in the dark as if painted with a spray distilled from a hatch of fireflies. Actually, it’s Cindy’s body showing through the gown that’s
luminous.

  Where’d you come up with that beautiful gown for me, babe?

  It’s a web, he told her, spider silk stronger than steel. Once, I found a field of it.

  He’d been tripping one Friday night, on his way to Motown in a hot-wired Buick to see the murals Diego Rivera had painted for Henry Ford. Radio playing whatever was hymning in the CD changer, and not a coin in his pocket, Rafael blew through tollgates and kept going until lost somewhere in Michigan, the Buick rolled to a stop, out of gas along a deserted road. Rafael stood wasted, knee-deep in mist, taking a leak, and suddenly, like a lens focusing, he could see how every weed and wildflower beyond the barbed-wire fence was connected as far as the horizon. Dawn shimmered through dew-beaded webs as if a goddess had tossed her gown over the gone-to-seed field. The spiders must have spun a new gown each night. He imagined all the silk that had been spun since the origin of spiders, unspooling into a single thread with the tensile strength to connect the cosmos. The murals in Motown could wait; he needed to hitch back to Pilsen while that thread still connected his mind.

  If she could just talk to Rafael, Cindy would stop touching her tongue to her front teeth. She’s calling to tell him that her hotheaded, jealous old man, Darrell, is on to them. Jade, the stepdaughter who never accepted her, snitched to Darrell that when she got home early from school because of cramps, she caught Cindy passed out, and Rafael, high in the shower, flashed his thing before slamming the door. Cindy wants to say she knows that flashing part’s a lie, right? Ever since Cindy dropped some weight and started to fix herself up and feel alive again, Jade’s been competing with her. Her stepdaughter’s got a dirty mouth and each morning is a battle to keep her from going to school dressed like a slut. Darrell called them both whores, smacked them around, and punched Cindy in the stomach so she still can’t breathe. So Jade has run away from home and Cindy’s calling from the lavanderia on Blue Island because she’s got nowhere else to go. Her front teeth are chipped and her lip split where it collided with his wedding band. She hasn’t worked up the courage to look in the mirror, and oh, babe, Darrell slammed the clip into his army .45 and is looking for you.