Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  Suspecting Dante was obscene.

  Suspecting Nicolai might have saved Laura’s son.

  It was confusing to entrust your soul to and suspect child rape of the same person, the same collar, the same Holy Catholic Church. Bev was confused. The statistics and the priests and wine wound around in her head.

  She asked, “The pedophiles, do you think they’re real priests? Or do you think they faked hearing the Call and are just using the Church?”

  Father Dante shrugged. “It seems to me that people use God or the Mystery to rationalize whatever they were going to do anyway. We rationalized the Crusades. The Islamists rationalize terrorism. That poor woman in Texas heard God tell her to drown her own children to save them from the Devil. People pray to God, but they hear their own desire or hate or insanity answer.”

  “But,” Bev said, “maybe the Devil answered those prayers.” An awful fear puffed smoke into her lungs. She grabbed his arm around his biceps, round, lean meat. He jerked, but she didn’t let go. “How are we supposed to know if it’s God or the Devil answering?”

  He stared at her hand, at her fingers wrapped around his soft black shirt. “Mrs. Sloan.”

  “If we think God or the Virgin Mary is speaking to us, telling us to do something, how do we know that it isn’t the Devil or our own desire or insanity? Really? How do we know?”

  Father Dante examined her face, and she felt prodded. He asked, “Why?”

  “I felt something, once.” Her own voice ached to scream, How are we supposed to know?

  Dante lifted her hand from his bicep and held it between both of his own hot palms. “The Devil tempts us to sin, to do something that is ultimately evil.” His hands were folded around her hand, like that first evening when she had found that horrible lingerie, when she had run screaming to confession. Dante’s hands were tan. Dante had been kind that night and now, holding her hand. Kindness was expected in a priest. It didn’t mean anything, to have a young priest who looked like a da Vinci painting of Archangel Michael, beautiful and ending the world with a flaming sword, holding her hand. It meant nothing.

  He asked, “What happened?”

  She inserted her other hand between his. “There was a man. He wanted me to marry him. I didn’t know what to do. I prayed for guidance.” And she had received guidance, and it had changed everything. If she had been wrong, if she had been tempted by the Devil instead of visited by the Holy Virgin, then her whole life was a lie and she shouldn’t be here, and Conroy shouldn’t be here, and her girls shouldn’t be here, and she couldn’t escape now because she had married Conroy and the girls had been born and she wouldn’t leave them now. Not for anything. “And I didn’t marry him.”

  “Ah,” Dante said. “This was the not-Catholic. And you felt something?”

  “No,” she lied.

  “What happened to him?”

  She shrugged. “He went back to Israel.”

  One of Dante’s eyebrows lifted. “He was Jewish?”

  “Israeli, and a Jew.” She chuckled, and her hand jiggled with reverberations, but his hands encompassing hers were steady. “Malachi hated that word, Jew-ish. He said it was equivocating, because no one is Russian-ish or Catholic-y. He was ‘a Jew, through and through.’”

  “And you weren’t.”

  “He wanted me to convert, but I couldn’t see myself as anything other than Catholic, and he couldn’t see himself not being a Jew.” Her eyes were unexpectedly bitter, sand dry. Dante was still holding her hand, and his warm, brown skin comforted her. “How do you tell if it’s the small, still Voice of God or if you’re hearing voices?”

  Dante’s fingers slid around hers, locking down. “Bev, you aren’t crazy.”

  Her eyes burned, and the inside of her nose stung as if she was breathing in burning desert air. “How do you know I’m not crazy?”

  “People who are schizophrenic hear voices and are aggrandized, believe that they are God or one of the chosen, or a prophet, or the Devil. But some people experience something else, and it humbles them. Their humility connects them to other people. They are sanctified by it.”

  His luminous eyes reflected the stacked lamp behind Bev, the ceiling flooded with light as if by floating fire, and the candles on the marble mantle doubled in the mirror.

  Dante said, “The first type of people, the raving mad, are easy to discern, and they suffer so, from the delusions and from the treatment. The others are perfectly stable, but they may have touched the Divine.”

  “But you didn’t hear a voice,” she said. Their hands tangled together. If Bev extracted one hand now, it would seem she was turning away from him. It seemed uncaring, especially after he had reassured her that she was not crazy, so she waited, her hands among his hot hands, and all of their jumbled skin lying on her chintz couch in the lamplight, while her children, upstairs, thumped across the ceiling.

  “I heard nothing,” he said, “but it’s a place within a hierarchy. They need me, especially now. It’s also a self-serving, self-righteous, agoraphobic, hypocritical bureaucracy that strangles me, every day, in my every thought. Sometimes it makes me want to run.”

  “You aren’t thinking about…not being a priest.”

  Dante shrugged. “I imagine it is how the whales evolved. The ancestors of whales were land animals once, long ago, with legs and feet, but they went back to the sea. Once you’re far enough out to sea, you lose the sight of the land. And so you swim, and the sea has its own charms.” He smiled a bit, wryly. “I’ve been working on that for a while. And what would I do as a lay person?”

  “You’re a psychiatrist.”

  “I’m too accustomed to being a priest, safe, harmless. Can you imagine me dating? I would not wish a man such as myself upon a woman.”

  Bev turned her hand over so their hands were palm to palm. His hands were strong.

  Running footsteps crossed the ceiling above them like poltergeists.

  Dante looked over to the clock on the bookcase. While his eyes were away, Bev detangled her hands from his and, embarrassed, they drew their hands back to their own laps.

  “I should go,” he said and stood.

  The front door was just off her living room, a few steps, and they walked onto the tile of the foyer.

  He took her hand and held it again, hanging between them like a two-twined pendulum, and he paused, breath drawn in.

  Breath lodged in Bev’s chest. She should back away. She shouldn’t hold a priest’s hand like this (a priest was owned by God and she was a married woman, joined at the soul, shriven by a sacrament) so close, too close, and a priest shouldn’t look at her lips and her eyes, and his hands shouldn’t be so warm around her palm and wrist, and she shouldn’t turn her hand over, like that, so her fingers were caught and if he wanted he could pull her toward him with a quick flip of his hand, and catch her.

  He hesitated, as if he might tug on her hand, and seconds stretched into breaths.

  Dante dropped her hand and backed up. “Thank you for dinner.” He opened the door.

  “Any time,” she said and regretted it. She was silly middle-aged woman, a little tipsy and a little stupid, standing in the foyer with a priest like that, waiting, when there was nothing that she should be waiting for.

  ~~~~~

  Leila closed her cell phone. “Damn. Danna’s not coming. She has a headache again.”

  They sat in a booth near the back of the Irish pub, sipping stout and smoking. Joe sat beside her. His leg vibrated against hers. Malcolm, across the booth, drank Guinness.

  The boys continued their bombast.

  “Sheep,” Malcolm said. “Anthrax is a ruddy sheep disease.”

  Joe countered, “Rabies. Rabies in the mail would scare people.”

  “Lyssavirus, too bloody slow. People would have months or years to get vaccinated. No deaths a’tall. Dengue fever, now that’ll scare people!”

  Past Malcolm’s wiry, black hair and through the mist of secondhand smoke drifting over the booths, th
at priest from Conroy’s church came down the stairs and peeled his black coat away from his open-necked black shirt.

  Leila said, “Holy shit. Don’t look.” She gestured at the door with her glowing cigarette.

  “What?” “Wot?” The guys swiveled like bobblehead dolls, looking.

  The priest surveyed the crowd from the second step, elbowed through the mostly grad-age crowd, and seated himself at the bar.

  “What about him?” Joe asked.

  “He’s a priest,” Leila said.

  Joe smirked. “Someone from your past?”

  Malcolm said, “I don’t see no dog collar.”

  Leila stared down at the table, letting her long hair curtain her face. Glimpses of the bar scene wove between her hanks of hair. The bar noise swelled and choked her. “Dr. S. knows him. He’s from Rome, a Monsignor, a neuroscientist. You might have read his papers.” Her shaking fingers jiggled her cigarette, and the cherry fell into the ashtray.

  Joe prairie-dogged to peer over the people around the bar. “And he likes the good stuff.”

  Leila peeked around the edge of her hair. Above the line of folks seated at the bar, Monty the bartender reached into the top shelf for a dusty green bottle.

  Leila tossed her hair behind her shoulders and straightened. “None of our business, anyway.”

  “Kind of weird,” Joe said. “A priest, drinking, in a bar.”

  Malcolm shrugged. “Wouldn’t be odd for one of our Scots priests to be in a bar. Like a drop with the best of ‘em. And he’s a Roman priest, eh? Och,” he said, “Hardcore.” He twisted in his seat and struggled to the edge of the booth. “I believe I need another beer.”

  “Christ, Malcolm,” Leila said. “Don’t bother the man.”

  “Hang on.” Joe slid the remainder of his beer down his gullet. “I need one, too.” He flapped his hand for Leila to vacate.

  She said, “I’m going with, and if you get out of line, I swear, I’ll take Dante’s side.”

  “Oo-ew,” Malcolm said. “Don-tay. On a first name basis, are we?”

  Leila hated bar talk. If she had gone to her gay bar, she could have had a drink with the nice pre-op trannies in peace.

  The three of them threaded themselves through the crowd, up to the long bar crowded with people like ants on a stick of gum.

  Malcolm edged up next to the priest and ordered a Guinness from Monty. Monty poured it slowly. He had attended the company’s model bar in Dublin to learn the proper method.

  “So,” Malcolm said to the priest. “What’s a nice priest like you doing in a bar like this?”

  Dante smiled but didn’t look away from Monty, who watched Malcolm warily. Monty didn’t like his high-end customers harassed.

  “Come on, Malcolm,” Leila said. “Monty’ll bring us the beer.”

  Joe leaned over to Monty and ordered another Murphy’s. Monty nodded and continued to lazily pour Malcolm’s Guinness.

  Dante noticed Leila and raised his eyebrows. “Do I know you?”

  “You use that line on all the girls?” Malcolm asked.

  The priest wilted, not that the guys noticed squat. Leila felt sorry for him.

  Joe and Malcolm laughed and Joe pulled out his wallet to pay Monty. “You want anything, Leila?”

  “No, thanks,” she said, but the priest’s eyes widened at her name. Damn.

  “Yes,” the priest said, “Leila, the Coptic Catholic who attended Mass.”

  “Leila, at Mass?” Malcolm leered at her. “Explains that lightening storm Sunday, eh?”

  “Shut up, Malcolm.”

  Malcolm clapped Dante on the shoulder. “What’re you drinking there?”

  “Macallen,” Dante said and gazed into his glass.

  “Well, any man who knows a good Scotch knows that I’m one, too. Why don’t ya join us there, eh, Father?”

  Dante smiled. “Why not, indeed?”

  Leila considered leaving, either for home and her dog or for the company of nonjudgmental drag queens, but Joe steered her back to the cigarette-burned wooden booth, and Malcolm and Dante sat across from them.

  Introductions ensued. The priest shook her hand perfunctorily, no more contact than with the guys, and called himself “Dante, just Dante,” no Father, no Monsignor.

  Maybe Leila could sic the priest on Malcolm so they both would leave her alone.

  Conroy would have a conniption if he knew Leila was drinking with his priest, of whom he evidently felt proprietary, but it was an opportunity to pimp the priest to figure out how he was a priest and a shrink and a scientist, and it was an opportunity to prove to herself that she could survive this.

  She plastered a calm smile over her trembling jaw.

  ~~~~~

  Monty finished pouring the Guinness with a froth of head like whipped cream above the deep beer. Malcolm appreciated Monty’s art. He slapped Joe’s Murphy in a glass.

  Leila liked lighter beers, though last Friday, when she had been there with her other friends—some of them girls but all of them dressed like women—she had been drinking scotch like a man. Monty had joined them at the other bar for dancing ‘til dawn. He had been careful to dance with the girls, not with the he-shes. He held nothing against them, but he wasn’t going to hold them against himself.

  Nathanial, at the end of the bar sipping an expertly poured Guinness, had rechristened himself Natalie last weekend, just for fun, to fit in with Leila’s funny boys. She had drawn eyeliner on his lids in the women’s bathroom, straddling his skirted lap, and told him how beautiful he was. He had popped a chubby, but she had been polite and not mentioned it.

  That night, Nathanial, with his curly blond hair, huge blue eyes, and full lips, had been twice hit on by straight guys.

  Tonight, he had been hitting on chicks all night with no luck.

  If he was more attractive as a woman than as a man, what did that mean?

  ~~~~~

  Dante had needed a drink after he had left Bev standing in her house, face turned up, eyes dreamy. At the rectory, Father Sam maintained that there was no alcohol secreted anywhere. Sam had been vigilant about alcohol, because alcohol could be a problem with priests, the coglione.

  Dante had driven around the college town of New Hamilton, strangling the steering wheel and kicking the pedals, until he had finally found the bar-lined main street. The sports bars were full of ebullient frat boys, not the atmosphere for liquor and remorse. The medical student hangout held the well-dressed crowd sipping martinis and smoking cigars. The Irish pub, a canopy above stairs leading down, a tattered pool table behind the jukebox playing rock, blond wood railings and an empty spot at the bar, seemed the place for whisky and soliloquy.

  Damn it, no priest held onto a woman like that, projected his own skin onto hers, felt her warmth and smelled her pheromones and perfume until his own mammalian body responded. Even if she was lonely, he could only harm her and, presumably, damn his own soul.

  Part of his recent vulnerability was loneliness, he knew. At the Vatican, he and his friends gathered at each others’ apartments or the Jesuit residence and played poker late into the night, or partook of culture, or drank and pressed books into each other’s hands. Dante’s sister also took him in, like a good priest’s sister, and he had platonic lady friends, Roman matrons, who were used to platonic priests.

  Here, he was either judging or counseling everyone he knew.

  But he shouldn’t punish Bev for his temptations.

  While this thought might have edged into rationalization in many priests’ heads, Dante had inhabited the unfriendly territory of exacting celibacy and needy woman for a long time.

  And so Dante drank and tried to hone his soul to a fine, sharp, rigid blade.

  When a few regulars had challenged him, he had held his peace. No use getting in a bar fight merely to release pent-up aggression.

  But the Coptic Orthodox girl had been there, and she had picked him out of the crowd and told the men about him. The small collegiate town was roped by
gossip vines, and now he was ensconced at their table and had been introduced as “just Dante.” He smiled at the requisite Inferno jokes and asked, “What else do you know about me, Leila?”

  She blew cigarette smoke out the corner of her mouth into a part in the crowd and smiled. Dim lamplight silver-lined her as if she was a bronze cloud at sunset. Ah, before he had taken Holy Orders, when women smiled at him like that, his heart rate had doubled and his skin warmed and tightened with the hunt.

  His body responded to Leila’s smile out of ingrained habit. His lips filled with blood. The gold-shaded lights in the bar brightened. Cool air brushed Dante’s throat through his open collar and drained down his chest.

  Dante said, “At Mass, you knew my name.”

  Leila said, “I searched for your name on the Internet. Found your lab.”

  “And how did you know to do that?”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders, and her dark red blouse slithered and clung to her. Dante still liked to watch the silky movement of women’s clothes on the litheness of their bodies and breasts. This type of woman, slender, beautiful, una bella figura, had haunted Roma for him like legions of ghosts. They paced the stones of the streets, lingered at the fountains, and smiled coyly at him because he was a harnessed, muzzled priest.

  The bartender brought the beers and slid them across the table.

  Leila said, “Dr. S. wanted information on you.”

  “And who is that?” Dante sipped his smooth, sweet scotch. He had needed a strong drink since he had arrived in America. The liquor lapped at his mind and soothed it, like being petted.

  She said, “Conroy Sloan.”

  The scotch lumped in his throat but Dante swallowed it down. “Sloan?”

  “Joe and I,” she jerked her thumb at the beige man next to her, “are in the Sloan Lab at the university. Malcolm is with Lugar Lab down the hall. We study some pretty similar things to your lab.”

  Joe raised his beer at Dante and asked Leila, “So who is this guy?”

  Leila smiled at Joe, and they seemed chummy. She said, “He’s modest, this ‘just-ah-Dante,’ but he is, and I’m not sure of the order of the titles, Monsignor Professor Doctor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi, Society of Jesus, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the University of Rome, and the Vatican. His lab studies schizophrenia, molecules to anatomy, soup to nuts.”