The Crooked Heart of Mercy
Page 11
When he opens the door, the stink hits like humiliation. Ben makes a dash for the balcony and opens the sliding glass door all the way.
She takes it all in, pokes her head into the bathroom. “I’ve seen worse.”
Her eyes are worried and hard at once. Her skin is weathered into deep creases around her nose and mouth. Who does she remind him of?
At least the tins are off the floor, sour milk and cereal off the nightstand. “You wanna start with the laundry? This first bag is all towels and sheets. I’d go with the hot water setting.”
She looks in the closest green garbage bag. “And bleach,” she says.
He hands her a roll of quarters. “Ground floor, left of the elevators. Maybe I should carry—”
“I’m fine.” She shoves the quarters into her back pocket.
“Can you stay late? Until we’re done, I mean.”
She shakes her head. “I have to pick up my son at four thirty.” She hoists the laundry and soap, walks out the door.
He watches her disappear down the hall. Ben’s no good with strangers anymore. It’s different when he’s working. He’s in the driver’s seat.
Once Janet has three loads going, she pulls on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and starts in on the bathroom.
Ben faces the old man’s stripped bed and listens to Janet clunk around the tub.
He drags the mattress off and grapples it onto its side. Glancing at the box spring, he blinks: cash scattered like more trash. A quick glance over his shoulder and Ben picks up the bills: a hundred and eighty bucks. He stares at it until his eyes glaze, until he sees that knot of fingers again, against the white sheet. His fingers tingle with the sensation of tying down his old man before leaving the hospital. Should have felt good doing that. Should have felt sweet.
He folds the cash and crams it into his back pocket.
Wrestling the old man’s mattress, he drives it across the room and shoves it through the front door. Leaning it in the hall, he rests on it, catches a breath. Feels like he’s got an anvil tied to his ass. Every day it gets a little heavier. Should go down to the high school and see if some kid wants to make fifty bucks. Two guys could clear this place in half an hour.
Going back for more, he pauses at the bathroom door. Janet’s on the floor, bent over the tub, scouring. The sight of her on her hands and knees hurts his guts. He’s paying her fifteen bucks an hour, but it still looks wrong. She hops into the tub and catches him watching.
She looks at her feet. “Should I take off my shoes? They’re sneakers. I—”
“No. I was just wondering if you had a husband who might want to make a few bucks. Help me move this stuff into the hall.”
The word husband bites like teeth.
“No.” She sprays the tiles with some kind of foam and scrubs.
Ben wipes an arm across his face and goes back to the bed. Fucking Cola.
He pulls the box spring from the wall and flips it on its side. On the carpet: a blue-furred half sandwich, bits of chips and pretzels, and an open bottle of cough syrup stuck to its own green ooze. Need a rake to make a dent in this dump. He tosses bottles into a garbage bag until he discovers one with a lone blue tablet inside: clonazepam, 1 mg. Cola’s voice echoes: “Seriously, dude, get some sleeping pills.” He tilts it, watches it slide around the bottle, and then crams it into his pocket with the cash.
At four o’clock, Janet shucks her rubber gloves and starts packing up. Layers of kitchen crud have disappeared. The bathroom shines like a Tonka toy.
Ben watches her pull her sweater on. “You, ah—great job.”
“You look really tired,” she says.
Ben stares at her stiff blond bangs and his brain stews in déjà vu. “So, fifteen an hour, right? That’s ah . . .”
“We went through this when my grandpa got sick,” Janet says. “Nobody got hardly any sleep.” She looks at her hands and then at him again. “Seventy-five dollars.”
Ben glances in at the sparkling toilet and it hits him: the echo of stadium bathrooms, the cool of a porcelain sink against the back of his head, watching her scrub out toilet after urinal—Miriam’s thin blond hair.
“Right.” He reaches into his back pocket and takes out the old man’s wad. He counts off four twenties, and then hears that shadow voice like ground glass: “I don’t clean other people’s shit. That’s your line.”
There’s a wisp of fear in her face. I don’t clean other people’s . . . Did he think that or did he say it? Heat rushes up his neck. Feels as if his head is being squeezed. Like a crown of razor wire, tighter and tighter.
He pushes the whole hundred and eighty at her. Just take it.
She looks at the cash. “That’s too much.”
He shows her the door. “Go pick up your son. Before he falls and hurts himself.”
She gathers up her supplies, fumbling with the mop and pail.
He puts his hand on her back and the sense of her—her motherness—rushes up his arm. Don’t go. Please don’t go. Like he’s going to grasp at her coattails, and sob at her feet.
No. She’s the one who should cry. Not Ben.
Get out. And out and out. Here’s five bucks. Go get yourself a burger.
Janet’s mouth trembles.
Good. Cry. I’m scared. Be scared, the two of you. Two peas, two of a kind. Don’t need you. Don’t need anybody. He shoves her into the hall, walls lined with the old man’s furniture. Go be in charge of someone else’s misery. He slams the door.
Facing the half-empty room, he squeezes his eyes shut. What did he just say? What did he think and what did he say?
A knock at the door. He turns. She called the cops?
The knob turns. Ben snatches the door open: Cola. Vera right behind him.
“Whoa!” Cola says. He puts his hands up. “Don’t shoot. Ha-ha!”
Ben looks at them until the fog clears. “Look who’s here. Day late and a dollar short.”
“Least we’re here,” Cola says. He’s chipper. “Vera got to leave early today cuz she works late tomorrow.”
Vera muscles in a little closer and puts her hands on her hips. “We’re here to help. How about a little civility?”
“It’s okay,” Cola says.
“No. It’s not.” She keeps her guard dog glare on Ben. “Cola is not your whipping boy.”
“Let it go, Vera.” Cola puts his hand on her arm.
She shrugs him off. “You’re an asshole, Ben—and yet Cola keeps on loving you.” She snorts at the absurdity.
Creeping in the back of Ben’s brain are FuckYou and GoToHell, but they’re too far away and too much effort to get out.
He looks at Cola. “You wanna give me a hand with the dresser?”
The two of them hump it toward the front door while Vera pokes around the apartment, assessing.
“Sorry about today,” Cola whispers, once they have the dresser in the hall. “I went with Vera to work. They have these ‘shadow days’ where people can come and follow the vets and techs around.”
Ben grunts with the effort of keeping the dresser moving.
“Vera’s clinic is the central branch. She’s in charge of ordering for all four clinics.” He scoots around to push from Ben’s side. “Vera’s a big deal down there.” He turns his lost eyes on Ben. “I know you don’t like her, but she likes me.”
WHEN BEN GETS home, he pulls the old man’s pill bottle from his pocket. He shakes it, listens to the harsh rattle of one lone pill against plastic. Take as needed, the label says.
He stares at the old man’s name and thinks about Mrs. Cecily G. Riley.
When’s the last time he called the old girl? She should be kept informed, shouldn’t she? He finds her number, hits REDIAL, and hangs up before the first ring.
He chucks the vial at the garbage, misses, and watches it roll across the carpet right back to him. Like it wants him. Wants to be wanted. It rolls under the couch and hunches there, waiting.
EIGHT
Maggie
It is 9:27 A.M. when my intercom sounds. I’m awake. I’ve been awake most of the night.
“Maggie?” It’s Francis. His voice is pitched high and anxious. “Will you let me in? I, ah, I lost my key.” I press the release to the house door, flip the lock on the suite door, then sit on the couch. My brother’s heavy feet echo up the wooden staircase.
Francis slips inside and closes the door quickly, as though he’s being chased. He blinks around the room. Catching his breath, he looks at the floor. He’s wearing the shirt that he left in last night, but no jacket. “Sorry. I just, ah, I lost my keys and my cell phone and, ah, ah . . .” He closes his hand, winces, and opens it again to look at the cigarette burn in the center of his palm.
I don’t nod, shake my head, or speak. Just sit there and let him spin.
“That reporter you ran into, Katie something?—she buzzed when you were out yesterday and I told her to get lost. She must have left and come back because she was out there again last night. I told her about rehab and . . . maybe other things.” He looks at the blistered mess on his palm again. “She said she wanted to talk to me when I was sober, which is ridiculous because I was fine last night. Mostly. She wants to tell my story. Maybe it could help other people. I gave her my number and now I can’t find my phone. Or my keys.”
His hands are trembling and his face is covered in a sweaty sheen. He gulps more air and clamps his lips together.
Eventually he lifts his eyes to mine. “I’m sorry. Maggie, I’m really sorry.”
It’s hard to keep my voice low and even, but I do it. “Where did you go last night?”
“Um, well, I went to a bar looking for some ice.” He turns his blistered palm to me. “And who do I see, but Tyler—the lying little shit—and we, ah, got into it a bit and then I left with some guys I met. We went to another bar so I could get some more ice for my hand and then, ah, home. To their place. Someone’s place. I wish I had a cigarette.” He looks around as if one might magically appear.
He pauses and his eyes turn red and watery. “I heard from Father Michael and the lawyer yesterday. I’m supposed to check in to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Rehab Center at the end of the week. For six months. Won’t know about jail time until the trial. Which is ten days after I get out.”
My voice comes in a croak. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”
Francis chews his lips and blinks back tears. “I have a disease. I’m—”
“Oh shut up, Francis. And by the way, I have never come down on you for being gay. A shit fit? I was sixteen. As far as I was concerned, you stole my boyfriend, and yes, I’m perfectly aware that that was a fantasy on my part, but the fact still remains: If you’d come clean about who you were to start with, you could’ve saved us both a lot of pain.”
He doesn’t answer so I keep going. “Sixteen years later and nothing’s changed except now you’re an alcoholic priest. You’re a priest! You break half your goddamn vows every day. It’s your ‘vocation’? Is that a disease too?”
“You think I don’t wake up every day and recommit myself? Today it stops,” he shouts then lowers his voice. “But I—I can’t stop. I don’t know how. I love God, but I love sex and men too. And booze.”
I flop back against the couch and close my eyes. My cell phone vibrates on the coffee table. Reaching over, I check the call display. “Oh look, it’s you.” I answer.
“Is that Maggie? This is Katie Wilks from the Herald. We met a couple of days ago. I’ve got your brother’s cell phone here.”
“Clearly,” I say, hit the speaker, and hold out the phone so that her voice fills the room.
“Has she got my wallet?” Francis whispers.
“I tried to call him this morning and some homeless guy answered. Apparently, he found Father Luke’s phone sitting on a mailbox at Elm and First. I’ve also got a jacket, his wallet, and some keys. I gave the guy ten bucks and he turned it all over.”
“Hi, Katie, it’s me, Father Luke.” Francis takes the phone from me. “Thank you so much! I don’t know how to repay you.”
“Sure you do!” She laughs brightly. “I’m actually downstairs right now. If you want to buzz me in, I can bring your stuff up.”
Francis glances at me. “Actually, maybe I better just meet you out front.”
BY THE TIME he comes back, I’ve got coffee going. My guts are still churning as I try to formulate a succinct question, something precise enough to open the box—the emotional tabernacle my brother is living in.
The two of us sit on the couch, clutching mugs of caffeine.
“She’s going to ask you the same things I am, you know: You can’t stop drinking and you can’t stop fucking and yet your calling card says Celibate Priest. Why?”
Francis bites off a corner of buttered toast and ruminates. “I guess it’s the old Oscar Wilde thing, I can resist everything except temptation.”
“Not that. Why the priesthood? Seems like it’s you who feels shitty about you being gay, not me. Did you imagine that becoming a priest would make it go away?”
“No.” My brother gives me a slightly exasperated look as though I should know better. “I wanted to be a priest long before I knew I was gay. And nobody ever said that sexual desire would go away. My vocational directors were pretty clear about that. I remember some eighty-year-old Jesuit saying, ‘It’ll go away when you’re six feet under.’ I’m just weak is all.”
“So is Tyler your boyfriend? Is he even legal?”
“He’s twenty-two. He’s—we’re not exclusive.”
“Great. Good to know you’re not tying yourself down to anyone. I noticed he called you Frankie.”
“I guess I found it comforting.”
I wish I hadn’t brought that up. I want the focus to stay on Francis. I want him to answer for himself.
“I thought the rest of the world called you Father Luke. Or do you compartmentalize? I’m trying to understand, Francis, I really am.” I watch him set his blistered palm on the side of his hot mug and then gasp and pull it away. “Why do you have to be a priest?”
“I’ve explained this to you. Many times. I want to help people. I wanted to be close to God. Since I was small . . .” He stares into his cup for a couple of moments. “Church always felt like the safest place to be. Those kids used to torment the shit out of me when I was little and the sisters would bring me inside and I loved it there. I loved them. You were too young. You don’t remember.”
“I do too.” I remember.
Francis has a gentle nature, our mother used to say. She meant that he preferred soccer, which, in our neighborhood, was the girly alternative to football. She meant that he was very tidy and he was obsessed with his hair being just right before he would leave the house. And she meant that even though he was big for his age, the boys still managed to beat the crap out of him.
They called him faggot, homo, gayboy, poofter, queer, fudgepacker—I didn’t know what the words meant, but I knew they were bad. I knew that a homo was the ultimate object of ridicule.
They pushed his face into dog shit. That I remember. I was in grade two, seven or eight years old. Francis would have been eleven or twelve. The three o’clock bell had rung a while back and I was late coming outside, straggling onto the blacktop out back of the school. Francis usually waited there for me, but he was gone and I was anxious.
I heard shouting in the distance, ran to the sidewalk, and saw them, half a block down: four boys shoving him up against the chain-link fence.
Sprinting toward them, I paused to snatch my brother’s lunch box from where it lay on the sidewalk, just as Keith Boyle grabbed Francis by the back of the neck and forced him down to the ground. “Come on, say it, you little faggot, say ‘I’m a shit-stabber.’” The ground was wet and Keith was pushing my brother’s face toward a melting lump of dog dirt. “You must eat shit all the time, right, shit-stabber?”
I ran at them hard, swinging the lunchbox. Pete Duffy caught my arm and tossed me to the pavement.
A chorus of giggles.
“Whoa! Big talk.” Duffy laughed.
Keith Boyle jammed his knee against my brother’s back. “Do you practice on your sister? Is that why she’s got such a dirty mouth?”
Scanning the street for a grown-up, I finally realized Good Shepherd was just on the other side of the road. I got up, bolted across the road, and up the stairs, slamming in through the front doors.
The smell of incense and the gentle quiet of the church silenced me for a moment. Sister Clare looked back from the front pew.
“Sister? They’re going to kill him. You have to come.”
We didn’t go to church often, but Sister Clare knew Francis. She knew the neighborhood too; she jumped up and charged down the aisle, her twiggy legs pumping hard.
I chased after her and stopped on the bottom step of the church as she ran across the road toward the group of boys.
“You get away from him.” She shook her fist as she went.
The boys stepped back. All except Keith Boyle, who stayed right where he was, pinning Francis to the ground. He shoved him by the neck and punched him in the back of the head.
“You stop it now, Keith Boyle. I mean it, you knock it off or so help me God, I’ll shove your teeth down your throat.” She grabbed Boyle by the hair and tried to pull him off.
I dashed across the road to get a better look.
“Don’t touch me!” Boyle flailed and jumped up off the ground, panting and red-faced, and then slammed his fist into Sister Clare’s stomach.
She doubled over. I gasped.
Silence. The other boys took another step back, their mouths open, waiting.
Keith Boyle stared at her. His eyes seemed to tremble in his head. He looked at Francis and wiped his hands on his jeans. My brother stayed where he was, facedown, curled into a ball.
Sister Clare took a breath and straightened up. Then she squared her wiry little body over her feet and delivered a punch that sent Boyle sprawling on his ass. He didn’t move or speak at first. Then he lay back in the grass and stared up at the gray sky. Tears slid out the corners of his eyes.