Decatur

by Patricia Lynch

  “And he hasn’t been back since? Where’s Father Troy?” Max persisted.

  “Looking for him. He’s looking for Gar,” Mrs. Napoli said in a shaking voice, picking up her vinyl pocket book with the pressed flowers in the clear casing from the kitchen counter.

  Father Weston put his hand up in placating way, “I know it’s been an upsetting time, what with the monsignor’s death and now another funeral coming our way. You have to understand, I’m doing what’s best for the parish, Mrs. Napoli. You go home now and rest. I’ll want you back early in the morning to tell the FBI just what you’ve told us. It’s all going to be fine. God’s looking out for us,” he said, wondering what the FBI would make of Max’s theories. They wouldn’t believe them, he knew that much. Just twenty-four hours ago he didn’t believe them. But maybe they wouldn’t have to convince them. Maybe Gar could be arrested, incarcerated for the carnies’ murders and Suzanne Cleary. Because he couldn’t imagine telling anyone in law enforcement what he had begun to believe was true. Gar was not a homeless Vietnam veteran, Father Troy had just put that on him as he had invited him into their community, just as the Buddhist monks and Shakers had found what they needed in him before them. Gar was a soul-hunting vampire on the hunt for Marilyn.

  Mrs. Napoli pressed her thinning lips together; God before anything and the Catholic faith was the one true faith she repeated silently to herself. She had been taught fealty to the church since grade school, so she would obey the priest because the Church was where her loyalty lay, that and blood. Still, something wasn’t right in the parish house, too much upset. Maybe it was time for Gar to move on, hard as that was. She swallowed the choking feeling in her throat and said, “See you in the morning, then, Father.” She left with her dignity intact because she knew who she was, the parish housekeeper and not Gar’s mother, she reminded herself.

  Father Weston put the casserole in the fridge; he didn’t know when anyone would be eating here tonight. They checked Gar’s attic room: it was pin neat, with the single bed made and the duffle bag and clothes he had from Mrs. Napoli’s dead son still there. They decided to head down to the Surrey and eat dinner and wait for Marilyn to get off her shift, in case Gar had the same idea.

  “Do you think Father Troy found him?” asked Max when they got in the Olds.

  “I hope not,” answered Father W, turning the ignition key.

  Railroad crossings were as common as street lights in Decatur so when the red crossing lights began to flash and Father Weston cautiously slowed the car to a stop, Max groaned. The crossing signal bell made its peculiar and unmelodious ding-ding-ding alarm and the striped guard rail began to lower slowly over the railroad crossing. They were stuck now. They were only a few blocks away from the Surrey but it was getting on towards seven. Hadn’t the priest said God was looking out for them? It didn’t seem like it to Max as the traffic began to pile up on both sides of the crossing. In all his experience with shamans, automatic writing, psychic occurrences, he had never come this close to what he could only describe as the invisible world, the world that existed between this world and the spirits. It felt like they were going into a battle zone where humans were badly outclassed by paranormals.

  The train approached and instead of rattling by it slowed down with its steel brakes hissing. As they waited the freight with its dark red box cars came to a full stop on the tracks, blocking their way. Father W drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what’s it doing now?” he muttered. Two train men got out of the engine and began arguing; pointing fingers and getting red in the face. Max pursed his lips and looked at Father Weston: what was happening? Max got out of the passenger side of the car and looked down the line at the freight train; it looked to be a mile long. Then he saw it: a large crow had flown into the windshield of the engine. It seemed like a sign to him, the bird’s wings outspread, its beak stuck to the glass with red blood seeping down. Evil had a way of attracting evil, the thought came into his head. What forces was Gar gathering? He was about to go and speak to the train men but they were climbing back up into the engine. There wasn’t really much of a way to get it off the window but to move, it seemed to Max. Max leaned in the driver’s side and told Father Weston about the crow as they waited to see what the freight would do. Walking at this point wasn’t much of an option as their car was pinned in by other cars stopped at the crossing. Finally the freight started back up with a hitch and a squeal, blasting a whistle and picking up speed rapidly. Max saw the crow slide off the engine’s windshield and tumble off the train in a black feathered mound onto the gravel. Road kill. In what felt like slow motion the guard rail went up and Max ran around to the passenger side of the Olds and got in as traffic began moving again. They turned onto Church Street just as the carillon from the Episcopal Church was fading.

  The Surrey was locked when they got to it and Max banged on the door. Scott, the manager, lifted up the blinds and waved them away, mouthing “closed.” They waited for Marilyn to come out as they leaned against the car with the spring evening beautiful and still light. It seemed like a mockery, thought Max. Such ordinary things, a crow flying into a train, a bicycle errand to a dry-cleaners, but it all was being twisted by a force stronger than either one of them had experienced. You could hear the freight train still moving through downtown as the line ran along the backs of the buildings. It had a lonely sound. “She’s not coming, Max,” Father Weston said, “We’ve missed her.”

  Max shook his head. “Let’s wait, she has her side work, if it was busy she’s still there.” Scott finally did come out and when they asked him he said she had left nearly a half an hour ago.

  Father Weston bit his lip to keep from saying to Max that they had wasted precious minutes waiting for Marilyn when she was already gone. He should have gunned the Olds and made it past the crossing guard rail before it had lowered all the way down and they wouldn’t have had to wait for the damn train. A crow in the engine’s windshield, another freakish accident, the darkness was coming at them, thought Father Weston. “Come on, we’ll go to her house,” he said.

  They had been so distracted that Max hadn’t been doing his reflexive looking over his shoulder, so when a black man in a suit got out of a Ford sedan and flashed his badge at them they were both caught off guard. “Agent Tooley,” the man said. “You got a minute?”

  “I thought Mrs. Napoli said you were coming to see me tomorrow? We’re kind of in a hurry,” said Father Weston.

  “Agent House is coming to see you tomorrow along with Agent Colby. You must be Max Rosenbaum, the professor,” Agent Tooley ran his hand over his close-cropped hair and bit his lip, “Look, I’m going to tell you something, Father. I met your colleague Father Troy. I attended his mass with the guitar and it seemed okay to me. So, it could be that I gave him and the man called Gar too much of an easy pass. You see, I just came from the local law enforcement and I know about Suzanne Cleary’s traffic accident. I took the first tip line call about your parish guest from her but I never filed the report because he had gone to ‘Nam, understand? And that makes him exempt from certain things in my mind. Because I class people into two categories, those that were in the big shit hole and those that weren’t. But when Suzanne Cleary called the second time I had to get House and Colby involved. And now she’s dead and no one can find whoever she hit on the bike before she lost control of the car. That’s makes me worried, deeply worried. So what can you tell me?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Looking for Gar

  Father Troy was having a hard time concentrating but he made himself look at the list of things that had to be done before the visitation. So far Father Weston had done most of the heavy lifting on the funeral planning for the Monsignor but now with poor Mrs. Cleary in the morgue he was going to have to get cracking or the Bishop would not be pleased. For Gar’s sake Father Troy knew he needed the Bishop to be happy. So he made the phone calls to the altar boy’s homes and discussed the schedule with the mothers and
how they would need to be on best behavior. He went in the vestry and went through the altar boys’ wooden wardrobe, making sure they had six pristine-looking white dress surplices and crimson skirts still hanging in their dry-cleaning bags. They did. He shut the door quickly, not wanting to linger on the Cleary Dry Cleaners printed on the plastic bags. Still, once he got started on the project with all of Father Mahoney’s instructions, he was glad to be kept busy so he didn’t have to think about how empty the house seemed with only Mrs. Napoli polishing the furniture. As the afternoon wore on following a cold bologna sandwich -- Mrs. Napoli wasn’t putting out the same lunch spreads he noticed -- he began to wonder in earnest where Gar was.

  It was almost four thirty when the phone rang in the parish office but he was struggling with the incense burners that he had brought over from the church so Mrs. Napoli could get them burnished before Wednesday’s mass. “Could you get that?” he called out to her as she was already in the office working on dusting the bookshelves. Mrs. Napoli picked up and Father Troy went ahead and took the incense burners upstairs so she could lay them out on the kitchen counter and give them a good polish.

  When she came back upstairs he noticed she was a little short of breath and her cheeks were flushed. “I told them I would take a message,” she said closing her mouth with a little grimace.

  “Told who?” asked Father Troy.

  “They’re coming here tomorrow morning around nine, and asking if you and Gar and Father W could meet with them,” Mrs. Napoli said with a worried look in her brown eyes. Father Troy noticed she looked tired and worn now, not the plump little woman he usually saw but someone carrying a burden.

  “Who, Mrs. Napoli? Who is coming?” he said anxiously.

  “The FBI,” she said softly, “Again.”

  It was too much for Father Troy: Bishop Quincy, the ride home in the car with Father W, and now this. “What is wrong with the world? I want to know, I really do, Mrs. Napoli. Why in the heck are they bothering us at a time like this? The establishment gets rattled and they start looking for fall guys. Well, Gar is not going to be anyone’s fall guy, I can tell you that. If I have to go to St. Peter himself, I am not going to let some pigs in suits take their own incompetence in solving some drug murders that have nothing whatsoever to do with us out on Gar. And where is he anyway? I bet he got wind of this somehow, wind of how a few narrow minds are conspiring to make him out to be some kind of monster. I can’t believe it! I’m going out, Mrs. Napoli and I am going to find him and bring him home!” Father Troy was magnificent, thought Mrs. Napoli; in that moment he looked like one of the saints, one the fiery saints taking on heretics or the devil.

  Father Troy knew that Gar must have his bike as he had basically given it to him since he had arrived. Gar liked it and it was no trouble for Father Troy to ride the bus. But standing on the corner of Eldorado Street he felt suddenly vulnerable and self-conscious as he scanned the wide main artery. Gar could be anywhere. Normally he would be home, working in the garden or helping get ready for Wednesday’s high mass. He wouldn’t have left, would he? Hopped a train, hitch-hiked out of town? Father Troy began sprinting down the street in his sandals, roman collar, black tunic and trousers. Five or six blocks later after winding through the mix of shops and residential streets west of downtown, sweating and out of breath, he stopped, feeling foolish. What was happening to him? This was crazy. He couldn’t run all over Decatur, but the idea of taking buses and looking out the window for Gar seemed just as hopeless.

  The old public library, a Carnegie library, stood abandoned before him, with a big elm in the yard. The new library, a low slung affair, had just opened on the east side of town and for now the old grey stone building with the rounded cap and big pillars lay empty. Father Troy sighed and sat down under the elm, it was shady and cool. He was beyond exhausted, from the morning trip, from throwing up and all the running around he had done this afternoon. He would just shut his eyes for a minute, the grass was soft, and he found a way to wedge himself between a couple of big roots that had surfaced, so he wasn’t even visible from the street unless you were really looking.

  His thoughts began to drift as he slouched against the smooth dappled bark of the elm. The leaves were the size of handkerchiefs dangling delicately on the little stems. He let his mind go to a forbidden place where he and Gar were together in the parish house alone. Father Weston was gone. And the big room that used to be his with the double bed with the white coverlet was now Father Troy’s and Gar’s room. Father Troy’s favorite poster of a dove with an olive branch was over the bed. He felt so light and free. He pictured Gar sitting on the edge of the bed with goose bumps. Gar was smiling and pushing a lock of his sun streaked hair out of his eyes. It was so perfect. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted Gar in his life. Then he forced himself to open his eyes, feeling exposed for even thinking that he and Gar might be alone together in the parish house, but traffic was light, no one was even parked near here. He closed his eyes again but he heard Father Weston’s voice in his head saying, “Gar isn’t who he appears to be.” A bitterness came over him as he thought about how people were trying to get Gar out of St. Patrick’s. He had pushed down so many feelings and done so many things to disguise the urges and desires he had felt ever since he could remember. Becoming a priest had offered him a way out. Seminary school had been a revelation in some ways as he saw that other men craved what he craved, but it walled him up even further as the guilt and shame began to multiply as he tried to become the best priest he could be. Now he wasn’t even so sure he cared. If he couldn’t have Gar he didn’t know if he could handle living in the rectory. Things that had made him happy about his life at St. Patrick’s were souring like milk left out in the heat. He was bored with playing guitar at the nursing home, they all wanted something or someone different, not him playing songs by people they never heard of. He didn’t even have the same enthusiasm for the folk mass he wanted to implement. If Gar wasn’t there to help him hang the banners and pick out the music what fun would it be? Living a life without love was untenable to him any more now that he knew how it made the world so much sweeter. Love, he whispered in a drowsy way, just saying the word gave him a rush of excitement. He had never allowed himself to feel this way before. He realized most of his day was now spent doing things so he could be left alone to think about Gar; about how much he needed to be alone with the one person who made him feel alive, really alive. He couldn’t ignore his feelings anymore. He wondered if Gar could help him get rid of Father Weston in some way, then they could be alone. If Father Weston got reassigned…. Maybe he could say something to the Bishop about the waitress friend of Father Weston’s, but would it be enough? And besides, with the deliberate glacial pace of the Church, even if he was successful in getting Bishop Quincy to cooperate it might take months, if not years, he thought. No, he couldn’t wait that long. What if he and Gar worked together and did something that would make him go sooner? Father Weston liked his cocktails, maybe they could… the thought had been running deep underneath his consciousness for days and it circled up through his half-sleeping state like a dozy fat black housefly. Maybe they could kill him, there it was, black with scissored wings, hairy tiny legs, big fly eyes, the murderous thought was locked onto Father Troy’s brain. It could look like an accident. What if they got him a little drunk and Gar hit him on the head and they put him at the wheel of the Olds in the closed garage with the engine running? Like he passed out and then the carbon monoxide killed him. They would appear so shocked and shaken. Father Troy would take over the parish. Gar would be his helper, they would move into the big room with the double bed. It was all so simple. He began to breathe deeply, a feeling of contentment stealing over him after letting his thoughts finally flow freely without the constant self-censorship and negative internal chatter. He fell asleep then, letting the world fall away from him, underneath the elm.

  The dream seeped into his brain like a polluted stream; slowly the toxic images began to f
orm. He was standing on the playground of the school with his invisible shields up all around him but now you could see them. But he was afraid the shields wouldn’t be able to protect him. There were crowds of parishioners coming out of the church, they mustn’t see him standing there, he thought, it didn’t look right. Gar was coming out of the church too but he was holding hands with a woman, a dark haired woman with a waitress uniform on. He was leading the parishioners right up to Father Troy and they surrounded him with wide, shocked eyes. The woman was leaning on Gar like they were lovers, Father Troy felt himself shrinking behind his barriers that didn’t stop anything. Father Weston came up then and gave him a blessing, no it wasn’t just a blessing, it was the sacrament of extreme unction. He was dying behind the shields and no one cared except for Father Weston who was looking at him through a crack saying, “in the name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit”.

  Father Troy woke up in a cold sweat. He was stiff from lying on the ground and got up in a shaky way. The dream had been awful and he felt an overwhelming rush of guilt about his murderous fantasies of Gar and Father Weston. He couldn’t help himself; he was like a drug addict. He wanted to quit this insane attachment to the homeless vet but the idea of going cold turkey made his mouth go dry and he felt twitchy all over. He would volunteer at a half-way house, he decided, because now he knew what it was like to want desperately to be rid of something and yet to need with every fiber of your being to hold it close to you.

  He looked at his watch; he had been asleep for over two hours. It was after seven, but the long days of late spring meant it was still light and warm out. He should go back to the parish but his gut told him Gar hadn’t returned and if he wasn’t there Father Troy knew he would just go out looking for him again. Think, he told himself. The nightmarish dream floated back up and he latched onto the image of Gar holding the woman’s hand, the waitress. Father W’s friend, the one Gar said he knew from before, the one he slyly pulled information about out of Father Troy just last night when they had enjoyed the wonderful spaghetti dinner together. What was her name, Marilyn, Marilyn what, she was not the most faithful member of the parish but a longtime one, as he recalled. Marilyn Newcomb, yes that was it. He wondered where she lived, maybe Gar had gone there.