Thomas M. Disch

by The Priest

  But then, just as she took the hand Ms. Stern held out to her, one of the protesters recognized her and called her name aloud: “Alison! Alison, don’t go inside! Don’t kill your baby!”

  The other protesters took it up at once: “Alison, don’t go inside!

  Alison, don’t go inside!”

  As she passed by them, she tried to keep her eyes on the cement slabs of the sidewalk, only looking, as Ms. Stern had advised, at the next step she must take. But then a voice deeper than the others pronounced her name, and even before she looked up, from seeing the hem of his cassock swaying over his black shoes, she knew who it was.

  The priest raised his right hand, and the protesters fell silent.

  “Alison,” said Father Cogling earnestly. “My dear child. Can’t we talk together for just a moment before it’s too late?”

  “Just step out of the way and leave her alone,” Ms. Stern said, tightening her grip on Alison’s hand. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Then why not let her tell me so herself?” Father Cogling said softly.

  He turned to Alison and took her free hand in both of his. “Five minutes, my dear. That’s all I ask. A chance to speak away from the crowd and the cameras.

  No one can be expected to reach a wise decision in this carnival atmosphere.”

  “I like that,” Ms. Stern said, addressing the cameraman from WCCO who stood right in front of her. “He brings in his crew of hysterical teenagers ready to riot on command and then he complains about the carnival atmosphere. As for reaching a wise decision, my friend has already made her decision, thank you very much. And now if you would, please, step out of the way?”

  “Alison?” Father Cogling asked, tightening his grip on her right hand.

  At the same moment, as though she were in some kind of telepathic linkage, Ms. Stern tightened her own grip and said, “Well, Alison?”

  It seemed almost ludicrous, as though they might begin a tug of war. As though her body was the prize in a contest, and the way to win the contest was simply to hold on and not let go.

  Father Cogling let go of her hand. “It’s up to you, Alison,” he said.

  Ms. Stern kept her grip on Alison’s hand and began to walk forward, but Alison resisted. Ms. Stern looked at her quizzically.

  “I will talk with him,” she said. “For just a minute or two.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” said the priest.

  “Do as you think best, my dear,” said Ms. Stern, letting go of her hand and, in the same instant (Alison knew), writing her off as a lost cause.

  Alison couldn’t blame her. She was exactly the kind of person that women like Ms. Stern had no use for. She was weak and passive and couldn’t stick to her guns. That’s why she was in the fix she was in now, because she hadn’t been able to say to Greg, “No, not tonight.”

  She followed Father Cogling away from the crowd and in the direction of Lake Street with a feeling that she didn’t have an ounce of willpower of her own. She hated the feeling, but at the same time there was a kind of comfort in letting someone else take charge. The way, when you’re sick and someone tucks you into bed, you’re almost grateful for being sick, because it’s brought you somewhere that’s momentarily so much kinder and warmer and motherly.

  She didn’t even have to listen to what Father Cogling was saying to know that she’d agree to have her baby. Wasn’t that what she’d really wanted to do all along? Wasn’t this the reprieve she’d been hoping for?

  15

  On Wednesday night, an hour before Father Bryce was expected at Knightriders Kustom Ink, Clay called him at the rectory. “Hey there, Damon, shouldn’t you already be on your way to Little Canada? Wolf can’t do nothing with his needle till he’s got some skin to work on.”

  “It’s all off,” Father Bryce said.

  “Now what in hell has got into you?” Clay said in just that tone of humorous indulgence that a sitcom husband uses with his wife when she gets whims.

  Father Bryce, with only a little prodding, explained about Bing Anker’s visit to St. Bernardine’s and the threats he had made on the phone.

  “You say he came to the church dressed like a woman, but then you say you never actually saw him. That doesn’t gibe.”

  “He left the confessional suddenly, and I couldn’t immediately go after him. But my assistant, Father Cogling, came into the church just then, and he remembered seeing a middle-aged woman leaving. So that had to have been him.”

  “What a perverted thing to do,” Clay said with conviction. “Going into a church in drag! That takes the cake.”

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t know about this. Some of the things he said on the phone were exactly the same as things I’ve heard you say.”

  “Such as?”

  “He said he wasn’t interested in money, that he didn’t want to blackmail me, that he had me on a hook, which was an expression you’ve used, and that I would have to make a list like the list you had me make, with the names of all the kids I’ve ever fooled around with. Then he was going to have me contact everyone on the list and make amends.”

  “Shit,” said Clay, “he might as well ask you to commit suicide. So, what’s the guy got on you? Are there pictures? Did you write letters to him?”

  “He’s only got his word. But he seemed very… determined. And confident. He seems to feel no shame about the idea of a public scandal. He’s probably openly homosexual.”

  “If he’s a transvestite, shame is probably a turn-on for him. You said his name was Bing? What’s his full name?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know. I’m sure this is just your way of turning the screw on me.”

  “Quit fucking around—tell me his name.”

  “Bing Anker. With a k.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “In St. Paul. Calumet Avenue.”

  “Okay, you leave it with us to deal with Bing Anker, with a k, and get your ass out to Knightriders. Now.”

  Father Bryce did not at once reply.

  “Did you hear?”

  “I heard.”

  “Because you are on our hook, and no one else’s. So you do what we

  say, and you do it like you were getting your orders from Jesus Christ. What we are doing is, we are taking charge of your soul. You may not believe we can do that. But you just wait, and do what we say, and the belief will come.

  We will own you. Not all of you, all at once. But piece by piece, in increments. And the more of you that we take possession of, the more you

  will enjoy surrendering the properties you’ve still got left. It is a fascinating process.”

  “My damnation.”

  “You can call it that, if that makes it sound like more fun. Enough chitchat. Go get more ink.”

  In some ways Clay figured he knew more about the priest than the priest knew about himself. He knew what Father Bryce was afraid of and what turned him on and the way the two things connected. For instance, his panic attack when Wolf’s latest dragon lady came into the back room of Knightriders just as Wolf had moved into high gear and Father Bryce’s midriff was all slicked with sweat and blood. “Hey there, Delilah,” Wolf said, not even looking up or bothering to perform introductions. “How’s tricks?”

  Delilah just nodded in her usual luded-out, lazy way and let her jaw drop preparatory to words that never got spoken. When her mouth was open you could see her dental problems, which were major. She went over to stand beside Wolf and watch the work-in-progress, blocking Clay’s view of Father Bryce. But Clay didn’t need to see the priest to know he’d be freaking. This was probably the first time in his life any woman had seen him with a hard-on, much less handled it. For Delilah’s first slurred words were “You like that?” And then, to Wolf, “I think he likes that.”

  “Easy with those fingernails,” Wolf told her.

  “Sure,” she said. “If you let me have the needle a minute instead.”

  “That’s my job, beautiful.”


  “Aw, come on. I’ll just put a little heart right here on the end of it.

  Come on.”

  “She’s got a real sense of humor, don’t she?” the tattooist said to Father Bryce.

  The priest replied with a noncommittal grunt, and the tattooing continued, complicated now by Delilah’s inputs. Wolf regarded her casual tweaks and squeezes with an indulgent half-attention, the way a parent keeps half an eye on an infant crawling about on a rug. How Father Bryce regarded her, Clay could only imagine. Wolf had done a lot of work on her, great sweeping curves of flowers and serpents twining up her bare legs and wreathing around her midriff and over her shoulders. There were even tendrils of the design encroaching past the leafy collar circling her neck, like a vine that is always exploring, testing, reaching out. Delilah’s hands were like her own tattoos in that way, restless with a slow-motion inquisitiveness.

  Father Bryce endured it without protest until she began to scratch at the hairs of his false mustache with one of her false fingernails, at which point he lifted his hand, signaling a break, and Wolf took his foot off the tattoo gun’s on/off switch. “I think I’ll have some of that whiskey after all.”

  “Whatever you say, Damon.” Wolf handed him the uncapped but still untasted pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and Father Bryce tilted his head forward to meet the neck of the bottle. Even so, some of the liquor spilled down the side of his mouth. He took a second swallow and then, with a sigh, relaxed.

  The tattooing continued for a few more minutes, and then Wolf handed the tattoo gun to Delilah, stood up, and turned to face the peephole through which Clay was watching. “He’s out. And down for the count. No need for you to be holed up in the can.”

  Clay got down from the plank he’d been standing on, which was spread across the cracked tank of a defunct toilet. As soon as he was out of the closet-sized bathroom, he lit a cigarette. He’d had one smoke in there just as the tattooing session had started, almost an hour ago, and the air had got so smoky he’d almost had a coughing fit.

  He went over to the barber chair that served Wolf as a drafting table and took a closer look at Father Bryce’s tattoo. The outline had been completed at the first session, and now Wolf was darkening the wreathing clouds of smoke that defined the recesses of the Satanic face, the eye sockets, cheekbones, and open mouth.

  “It’s starting to look three-D,” Clay commented.

  “It’s gettin’ there,” Wolf agreed. “I’m surprised the flicker lasted as long as he did tonight. When the work is concentrated in a single area, the pain is more intense than when the outline is laid in. I thought he might go through the whole session without asking for a drink.”

  “You going to let me use the needle on him or not?” Delilah wanted to know.

  “What difference does it make if he’s out cold?”

  Delilah gave an impatient shake of her tangled black hair, as though Wolf’s words had been a fly bothering her. “I just want to put my mark on him.

  The same as you. Okay?”

  Wolf turned to Clay. “You mind?”

  “On his cock?” Clay asked her.

  She grinned, offering a full view of her dental problems.

  “Sure, why not. As long as that won’t wake him up.”

  “No problem,” said Wolf. “Just with what he’s got in him now, he probably won’t come around till early morning. And if you need longer, I’ll just administer some more of the same medicine.”

  Clay went over to the chair where the priest’s clothes lay in a heap. He got a ring of keys from the right-hand pocket.

  “I should be back inside of three hours. Don’t let Delilah get carried away, okay? And, urn, what I was asking about earlier?”

  Wolf went to a decrepit filing cabinet, unlocked the top drawer, took out a brown paper bag, and handed it to Clay.

  Clay hefted the bag with satisfaction. There was something in just the weight of a gun that was like shooting up. You could feel it moving through your bloodstream, effecting changes. It was like walking through an empty house and turning on the lights each time you entered another room.

  “The clip’s already in it?”

  Wolf nodded.

  “Well, see you later.”

  The priest’s car was parked along the curb a block north of Knightriders Kustom Ink.

  On the floor of the car behind the driver’s seat was the priest’s suit coat, folded up on top of an Adidas bag. His pants and a shirt with a built-in Roman collar were inside the bag. He must have had to drive to the tattoo parlor directly from some official business that had required him to be in uniform.

  Just for the hell of it, Clay tried on the whole getup. The pants were a little baggy, but the jacket was a good fit. He checked out the effect of the collar in the rearview mirror. He looked genuinely holy. The gun fit comfortably into the inside breast pocket of the jacket.

  Finding Calumet Avenue wasn’t that easy, even having checked the map in advance. He took the wrong exit off 35W and had to detour several blocks to find an overpass that would let him get to the other side of the thruway.

  The house he was looking for turned out to be on the corner. A garage with a driveway connecting to the side street. One car was already parked in the driveway, but there was room for Clay to park beside it.

  No lights on anywhere in the house, and the back door unlocked. Could anything be easier?

  There were ways in which walking through a dark house you had no right to be in was more exciting than armed robbery or even rape. In those situations you had to be able to react so fast there was no chance to savor what you were up to. But this was like being in a movie. Each dark, indefinite shape posed a separate riddle. From the back door there was a short flight of steps up to the kitchen, which had a vague cabbagey stink of home cooking.

  Then a right turn into the dining room, with its ceremonial Sunday-dinner table, and on the table a centerpiece of dried flowers, all gray and ghostly in the light that seeped though sheer lacy curtains from the streetlamp at the corner. For a faggot, this Bing Anker seemed to have some very traditional family values. If you thought about it, Clay would have done better getting rid of the priest, who was a total shithead, instead of this Anker guy, who sounded pretty harmless. But it was not Clay’s job to think about such things.

  His job was to do what his handler told him.

  He figured the guy must be asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms, so when he went through the living room, heading straight for the stairway, he almost didn’t notice the body slumped sideways on the couch. But the moment he did notice it, he realized that someone had done his job for him.

  Clay turned on one of a pair of end table lamps, and then thought to draw the drapes. As he turned away from the living room window, he saw himself in the mirror mounted over the sofa: a priest who’d arrived to deliver the last rites. He made a little sign of the cross at the mirror and furrowed his brow. Very priestly, he thought. The uniform suited him.

  Then he checked out the corpse. There’d been two shots, one a little above the heart, the other through the gut. The gut shot had soaked the guy’s jeans and the cushion of the sofa. He must have died right away, because all the blood was concentrated right where he was sitting. The blood on his jeans was dry, but the cushion was still slightly damp. Clay was no forensic expert, but he figured the guy had been shot three or four hours ago.

  Surprise: Father Bryce was not entirely the dink he had thought. Because who else could it have been? He must have come here on his way to Knightriders.

  Maybe it was the tattoo. Maybe it was changing him.

  Clay would have to phone his handler to acquaint him with the altered situation, but not from the phone here in the house. He switched off the lamp and retraced his steps to the back door. Just as he was about to get into Father Bryce’s car, a dog walker appeared in the alley behind the garage.

  “Good evening, Father,” said the dog walker.

  “Good evening,” Clay answered as he got into
the car. Inside the car, he almost had to laugh out loud at the weird good luck that had led him to put on the priest’s uniform. It was dark by the garage. The woman walking the dog had seen a man in a Roman collar getting into a black Lincoln. If the woman thought to tell the police about it, that’s all she’d be able to tell them.

  It really was as though God were looking after him. There was no reason he’d changed into the priest’s clothes. He just liked trying on different kinds of costumes, and this was one kind he’d never tried on before.

  Just to be on the safe side, he changed back into his own clothes before he returned to the thruway. No one saw him. Everything was going to be okay.

  Even so, as he drove back to Little Canada, he felt edgier and more strung out than he would have been if he’d made the hit himself.

  XVI

  The whirring he had thought, as he woke, to be the sound of the tattoo gun was, in fact, the buzzing of many bees. He was outdoors, on his back, looking up through branches of white blossoms at an overcast sky. When he tried to shoo away the bees that hovered inches above his face, he found his arm encumbered by a kind of thick blanket or cloak. And on the middle finger of his right hand was a ring with a preposterously large green stone.

  He thought: It’s happened again. The pain of the tattooing had tipped him back into this other world.

  A garden this time. Fruit trees in blossom, but the day so cloudy the petals seemed to have no radiance. Nor perfume, for the air was rank with the smell of composted waste. Father Bryce had stood in for a convalescing pastor, briefly, in a town near the Iowa border that suffered, when the wind was from the wrong direction, from a similar stench, which had been generated by a fertilizer factory. The garden abutted a meagerly windowed building built of massive blocks of cut stone, and it was enclosed on the other three sides by a high wall of the same cyclopean stonework. A large, lichen-crusted calvary formed the centerpiece of the garden. The figure of the crucified Christ was almost ludicrously primitive, goggle-eyed and eagle-beaked, like some African ceremonial mask.