Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  His weekly confessions did not leave him purged and cleansed; it left him empty and hollow for within him was the unadmitted, unadmittable knowledge that what he really wanted was not to relinquish his sin, but to be held unaccountable for it.

  In the cool and burning, hard and tender, known and secret, glowing and murky, beautiful and terrible, vast and minute recesses of his soul, Brian O’Malley longed to be that pure and sinless boy he never was.

  Ultimately, he knew it was flesh that held him, possessed him, tormented, intrigued, delighted, encased and encompassed him, and in the desperate futility of his thousandth confession and millionth resolve, it was flesh which mysteriously dominated his every waking and sometimes sleeping moments.

  He knew, had been taught, truly believed, that flesh would corrode and rot and pass away and be no more and that it was within the tarnished and sin-scarred soul he would be forced to endure for all eternity.

  But having been taught and knowing and truly believing were not enough. What he regretted most of all, what he sorrowed after most of all, was the loss of the flesh of Rita Wasinski, whose flesh completed and fulfilled his own.

  He walked his tour mechanically, went through the motions of being, but he felt oddly vacant, transparent, outside of himself. He quietly observed his own actions with a feeling of detachment and disinterest.

  Brian glanced around the quiet street, dug a stick of Juicy Fruit gum from his pocket, rolled it into a tight wad, bit down on it. He folded the outer wrapping into a small pellet, aimed at a thin, long-legged cat that was perched on the rim of an uncovered garbage can. He missed his target, but the loud ping against the can made the cat jump a good six inches straight up.

  He rubbed his flat hard belly and felt hungry. Fish on Friday nights always left him feeling hungry. Well, what the hell, it was a good six hours since he’d eaten anyway; he’d get a break for a meal in about an hour.

  It was a mild night. Surprisingly so, for the day had been surprisingly raw. Ten minutes after ten. Brian checked his wristwatch against the collection of clocks in the window of Farbenstein’s jewelry store. Ten after ten; ten after ten; ten after ten. There was something in the air, some quality, some elusiveness, that taunted him, stirred him to restlessness and discontent. The sky was very black, pierced by bright stars, pin sharp. The only formation he could ever make out was the Big Dipper.

  Two elderly men walked toward him. They spoke loudly at each other, over each other’s words, not listening, too busy telling to listen. One waved his small bundle of religious items in front of him as he spoke. The other shook an index finger at his companion. Their words were incomprehensible to Brian but he was accustomed to the endless, vehement, earnest arguments and discussion of the old men on their way home from late-Friday-night services. Sometimes, as he patrolled past their synagogues, the noise was unbelievable and he wondered how they dared to carry on in such loud, angry voices in a house of God. They were peculiar, at least this special tribe, marked by their long dark clothing and flowing beards and side curls and large-brimmed hats.

  Brian touched his nightstick to his cap and cocked his head slightly at them. In response, they nodded, but never interrupted themselves or broke the force of their argument. At the corner, Brian rocked back on his heels. He fingered the Indian-nut machine absently, was surprised that the handle turned on an unused penny. Carefully, he cupped his hand under the spout and felt his palm fill with the thin-shelled tiny nuts.

  Indian nuts were a pain in the ass to eat All that delicate biting down, tongue manipulating the tiny white meat from the sharp, broken fragments of shell. For one fleeting, sweet remnant of taste.

  Brian carefully spit the shelled nuts into the palm of his hand. He’d collect a handful of nuts before eating them. But there might be one bad nut, one little morsel of black, in the collection; that would ruin the taste. He moved toward the street light, tilted the palm of his hand, then ate the mouthful of little white nuts. They were delicious. He brushed crumbs from the palm of his hand.

  The settlement house was closed and quiet from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday because the Jews observed the Sabbath then. The younger directors were trying to get the rule changed; they argued that the kids needed the house on Friday nights and Saturdays and that they didn’t want to be bound by old-country traditions. It was a good-sized building and they ran a lot of activities to keep the kids off the streets after school hours.

  Brian decided to risk a cigarette. It would cut his hunger, break in on his boredom. He checked the quiet street, then went down the stone stairs which led from the street level to the basement level of the settlement house. He inhaled the damp mustiness beneath the stairs and moved away from the urine odor. He cupped his hand around his match and lit his cigarette.

  He leaned against the brick wall and tried to determine which was the North Star. The crown of his hat caught against the wall and didn’t move with his head; the peak of his hat covered his forehead and eyes momentarily.

  Brian stood absolutely motionless for a second, stopped his tongue from digging at the small piece of Indian nut wedged between his back teeth, held his breath so that he could concentrate and locate the direction of the sound.

  It came from within the settlement house; there was no doubt in his mind of that fact. From within the deserted, closed-down, empty, unused Friday-night settlement house.

  Brian pinched the glowing ember from the end of his cigarette and dropped the long butt. He shoved his hat to the back of his head, then pulled it tightly against his skull. He slid his right hand into his gun holster, felt the butt of his gun, heavy and familiar in his palm. He slid the flashlight from his belt and moved carefully, silently toward the door directly beneath the staircase. His eyes were accustomed to the dark; he could see that the door was slightly ajar. Gently, carefully, he pushed the door inward. It gave with a loud scraping crunch.

  The sudden beam of his flashlight pierced the room and went directly toward the startled voices. Accustomed to blackness, Brian could not immediately make sense of the scene caught in the beam of light: a tangle of bodies, naked legs, buttocks, startled glow of eyes. There was a low sob, a moan, a cry, some words. “Please. Oh, God. Oh, God, please.”

  Kids.

  Slowly, Brian released his breath and brusquely he told them, “Okay, get up. Come on, move.”

  He found a light switch on the wall and flicked it to produce a dim glow of illumination from the ceiling light fixture. The girl was on her knees; she clumsily hoisted up her light-pink underpants, pulled her slip and brown pleated skirt down. Her blouse was open and she shoved it into the top of her skirt. Her hair stood wildly from her head.

  In a panic, stark and complete and terrible, she crawled to Brian and her hands grasped and fumbled at his legs. He stepped back to free himself from her, but she persisted and clung to him, her fingers as sharp as claws. Her face and voice were distorted and pulled by fear.

  “Please, oh, please, mister, please don’t turn us in, don’t tell nobody, my father will kill me, my mother will die, oh, please, I’ll do anything you say, oh, please.” In a sudden inspiration, she pointed to the boy, who stood, face down, motionless, silent. “Him,” the girl shrieked. “He did it to me, he made me, he told me he was gonna kill me if I didn’t, he forced me, lock him up, it was him!”

  The boy raised his face and his dark eyes burned but everything else about him was cold and reconciled. It was Angelo DiSantini.

  He knew that he could expect nothing and so he was ready to accept whatever he had to accept. He held his lower lip between his teeth and kept silent as the girl clutched at Brian’s legs and hurled frantic accusations.

  “Quiet,” Brian said finally as the hysteria grew; she pulled at the edge of his jacket as she tried to raise herself. “Listen, take it easy, will you?”

  “Listen, shoot him, shoot him. The bastard, he raped me, I swear to God, he raped me. Tell my father that, please, mister, tell my father that he made
me.”

  Brian slipped his gun into his holster and tried to shake the girl from him. A strange anger overcame him, a strange sense of circumstance. He knew the girl had better shut up. He told her again to calm down but she continued to rave. Her desperation hid her extreme youth. Only her frantic female agitation came through to him, her desperate attempt at self-preservation and justification.

  He hit her across the face with the back of his hand. It was fast and controlled but unexpected. That increased the power of the blow and sent the stunned girl reeling to the concrete floor. She crept back toward Brian, dazed, not understanding. Brian swung his hand back again and the girl cringed and backed away from him, crept into herself like a cowering animal.

  “How old are you, you little bitch?” Brian asked her.

  “Please. Please, honest, he done it. He made me, I swear to God.”

  There was a terrible wild abandon in the girl’s posture, made more terrible by the quiet composure of Angelo DiSantini, who stood, silent, watching.

  Brian turned to the boy decisively. “Tell her to get out of here. Right now.”

  The boy nodded, just once, reached quickly for the girl and pulled her to her feet. “Get going, Carmen. Get lost.”

  His voice was a hiss; the girl struggled to her feet, ran backwards into the wall, then found the doorway. They heard her stumble and rush up the outside staircase.

  Angelo DiSantini reached inside the pocket of his bright shiny jacket and took out a pack of Camels. Wordlessly, he extended the cigarettes to Brian, then held the trembling match. Finally, he blew at the flame and dropped the dead match to the floor.

  “How old is she?” Brian asked softly.

  DiSantini shrugged, closed his eyes for a moment, then whispered, “Jailbait. Oh, God. Jailbait.”

  Brian said to him wonderingly, “You could get maybe three, five years on a statutory rape for screwing that little whore.” He stopped speaking abruptly, signaled with his eyes toward the window over their heads. He reached for the light switch and turned the dim light off. In the darkness, each cupped the lit cigarette against any visible glow. The footsteps along the sidewalk grew louder, then receded.

  Their unstated conspiracy puzzled Brian more than it did Angelo DiSantini, who accepted salvation wherever he might find it, regardless of how unexpected the source.

  “You could have loused up your whole life because of that little bitch,” Brian said softly. “I figured you for a smarter kid than that.”

  Carefully, Angelo said, “I figured you for a different kind of Joe, too. Maybe we was both wrong.”

  The boy was not as untouched as he appeared. There was a sharp, heavy reek of perspiration emanating from him; it was the sharp odor of fear. In the darkness, Brian felt lightheaded and slightly irrational. It would have been a good collar: he caught them in the act. The distraught girl would have signed a complaint even though that wasn’t even necessary.

  The DiSantini boy meant nothing to him. He even felt a vague dislike for the dark muscularity of the boy. But his feelings toward the girl were clear and strong and undeniable. He had, for one tightly controlled instant, resisted the tremendous urge to smash her head to a pulp with his nightstick. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

  Brian said softly, “Okay, DiSantini. You get the hell out of here. I catch you again, at anything, anything at all, you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

  Whatever reaction he might have anticipated was not forthcoming. Angelo DiSantini pressed the cigarette against the wall, stepped on the sparks that flew toward his shoe, and pocketed the stubbed cigarette.

  Almost as an afterthought, he said to Brian, “I won’t forget this.” His voice was totally neutral, his inflection normal.

  He made no sound as he went up the iron-tipped stairs and the silence in the basement closed around Brian with a heavy mustiness. He could almost believe that he had just stepped down into this chilly empty room for a smoke, that he had encountered no one, made no serious decision.

  When he left the basement, Brian made sure the lock was set and the premises secure. He felt an incomprehensible sense of well-being and the rest of his tour went quickly.

  By the time Father Sebastian was finished with them, there wasn’t a man among the Holy Name Society retreatants who didn’t feel scourged and raw with shame, self-repulsion, guilt and the renewed awareness of the irrevocable fate of unrepentant sinners.

  Father Sebastian was a tall, hollow-cheeked, spare-fleshed Jesuit who mesmerized them with his clearly articulated visions of the wrath of God on the one hand and the unfathomable mercy of the Savior, Jesus Christ, on the other.

  “Who among you,” he asked them in a beautiful, theatrical, hushed, carefully modulated voice, “who among you, sinners all, sinners, who among you deserves forgiveness for the agony you have inflicted on our Innocent Savior? Willingly, He took up the Cross; willingly, He accepted punishment for your sins, your salvation. And how have you served Him? By inflicting the weight of your sins on His suffering and crucified body.”

  Father Sebastian’s knowing blue eyes candidly sought them out and found among them, as they had guessed, not one, none of them, worthy of the sacrifices made on their behalf. He drew in a sad, pained breath, leaned on the lectern for a moment, dropped his fine prematurely silvered head to his arms.

  They gazed uneasily at the short-cropped hair; it was as though he could penetrate them through the top of his skull. Resolutely, with great effort, the tall, black-clad figure pulled upright, the long-jawed face confronted them, the blazing stare accused them. But the voice changed subtly to a tone of sadness, edged with concern and regret. And the beginning of understanding.

  “Am I too harsh? Am I too harsh? For you are, after all, men. Just men, though fashioned in God’s image. Perhaps I aspire for your perfection when we are all of us, after all, imperfect by virtue of our mortality.

  “Imperfectly we were conceived in original sin, salvaged through God’s mercy by the act of baptism. But are we then cast adrift in the terrifying, abysmal world of unmitigated sin, without hope of ever regaining that fleeting, momentary state of grace given us at the instant of our baptism?”

  The question was asked with a rising pitch of hopelessness and despair, his thick silver brows pulled up, puzzled, as though betrayed. His face froze; his hands held in the rigid position, palms up, of asking an unanswerable question.

  For the time he let the question hang in the air, every man in the room, young, old, single, married, father, son, every man held his breath, fervently waiting for the next words which would provide them with the mysterious and wonderful, unbelievable yet true means by which they could return to the state of grace they had each of them lost.

  “How terrible that would be,” Father Sebastian told them. “How unbelievably terrible that would be: a momentary state of true grace, and then everlasting sinfulness and condemnation.

  “But we know, you and I, all of us present here in this chapel, we know that our Lord and Savior did not desert us, did not turn from our imperfections. He provided us with the means for a return to grace.”

  Father Sebastian spoke very softly; his voice went lower and lower and they all leaned forward slightly, unconsciously, to hear the message which they all knew, had known from childhood, but needed to have reaffirmed at this moment.

  “Not just one opportunity for a return, not just a second chance but a third and a fourth chance and an endless number of chances, for our Savior’s love and mercy are beyond all understanding.”

  Father Sebastian stood straight and rigid and his head tilted back slightly and his eyes, bright long slits, raked the room from side to side and front to back. He held his long arms upward and his fingers stretched and spread. “We have been given the means for our salvation through the grace and love and charity and suffering of our Lord and Savior, through the medium of our Holy Mother Church, through the suffering and intercession of all the Holy Saints and Martyrs.”

  Slowly, deliberately, wi
th a hypnotic economy of motion, the long arms were pressed to the thin body and the long white hands were clasped on the lectern.

  “Christ gave authority to the Apostles to forgive the sins of the repentant in His name. You know that. You have all been taught how to examine your conscience, how to root out your sins. Each of you knows the obligation to confess and denounce and repent your mortal sins, fully, completely. I charge you with this obligation as Christ charged his Apostles to grant absolution through the sacrament of penance. I charge you with the examination of conscience now, during the next hour which you will spend alone in the cells to which you have been assigned.

  “I charge you now,” Father Sebastian told them from beneath his brows, “to fulfill your obligations to your Savior as He fulfilled God’s obligation to take upon Himself your salvation from the horrors of everlasting hell, from which there is no escape, in which there is no hope, no help, no second chance.

  “I will pray for you during this hour,” Father Sebastian said, “I will pray that you make a good confession and that the fruits of your confession will lead you closer to the perfection for which our Lord and Savior, in His imponderable wisdom, created us all.”

  They filed, wordless, silent, thoughtful, appalled, from the chapel without glancing at the priest, who had turned and knelt before the crucifix directly behind the lectern to pray for them.

  Brian turned into the small whitewashed, immaculate cell to which he’d been assigned. He sat on the backless stool and held the paper-covered missal which had been presented to him by a young seminarian who had a terrible raw, scabby infection from the corner of his mouth to his chin. As though he’d read Brian’s thoughts, the seminarian blinked quickly, ducked his head down.

  Who was it had told them that? It wasn’t true. Brian knew it wasn’t true. Brian knew it because he’d always had a good, clean, clear skin. His sinfulness never showed on his face. He felt sympathy for the poor young seminarian; everybody who looked at the poor kid probably thought the same thing. There was always a priest somewhere, in the ninth or tenth grade, who made every kid with erupted skin feel unclean and vile. Probably on the general assumption that most of them were anyhow.