“Bullshit.”
A panicked smile twitched across his face like a child caught in a lie. “Eh, I may be able to convince her to take fifty for everything.”
I nonchalantly handed him the cash under the table. As his grubby paw snatched it up I clamped a hand around his wrist. “Don’t even think about taking this and slipping out the back, Brunner. You’ve got five minutes to get me my information.”
He blanched. “I thought we were beyond such unfounded reservations. With all due respect, here I am doing my best to provide you with superior service and you—”
“Clock’s ticking,” I said, tapping the face of my watch.
Without another word he powered down his entire beer in one try then tottered off after the waitress. I watched them both disappear down a dark hallway near the back of the room.
Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds later Brunner excitedly scurried back over to the table. “Complete success, sir!”
“You get my information or a happy ending?”
He helped himself to a cigarette from my pack on the table and rolled it into the corner of his mouth with a devilish grin. “Both.”
* * *
After several blocks, Brunner and I had left the busy streets behind and crossed onto a short road that was quiet, nearly empty and more than a little ominous. A large church loomed at one end, a rundown grocery store at the other. In between were several dark and empty buildings with a little cement park in the center. Three wooden benches sat unoccupied. A dull light shone through the grocery store’s open entrance into the street, forming a small pool on the sidewalk. It seemed to be the only thing alive here. At the end of the street, on the other side of a cracked sidewalk, pavement turned to grass burned brown and dead. Beyond was an old cemetery, the stones and crosses aged and worn.
At the corner Brunner stopped outside a dilapidated two-story building with a Spanish roof that appeared to be either an apartment or boarding house. He pointed to an open narrow staircase in the center of the building. “Here it is,” he said. “Damita said it’s the first door on the left at the top of the stairs.”
I drew a deep breath and watched the building awhile. It was impossible to imagine the Jamie Wheeler I’d known here. All those years before—before the scarred man—growing up and living our sheltered small-town lives back in New Bethany, could we have ever in our wildest nightmares imagined that one day we’d both wind up on this squalid backstreet in Tijuana? A vision of us playing as children flickered through my mind like a film running through a rickety projector. The three of us at the boulder on a sunny day—and there, by the road—our bicycles tipped over and left in the grass as we’d eagerly dumped them and stormed across the field, soldiers traversing a bloody battlefield under attack. Martin with his plastic M-16 that made shooting sounds when you pulled the trigger, me with my toy handgun and Jamie with a real WWII helmet he’d gotten as a present from the Army Surplus store. It had a big red cross on the front, so Jamie always played the medic. He never even carried a gun when we played war. So unlike Martin and me, struggling even at that tender age for dominance, two alpha males fighting over the same kill, with our guns and our little-boy heroics, shouting orders and killing Germans or Japanese (depending on who we decided to fight that day) and searching for answers and knowledge and perhaps our redemption even then in a greater violence. And all the while Jamie would pretend to administer to fallen soldiers, applying make-believe tourniquets and stabbing their legs with morphine like we’d seen in so many of the war movies on Action Theater, a local UHF channel that ran movies all day on Saturday and Sunday. And I remembered, as I laid down cover fire, Martin trying to pull him away from the invisible dying soldier, screaming for him to follow because the battlefield had become too dangerous. “There’s nothing else you can do for him!” Martin screamed. “Leave him or you’ll die here too!” Working furiously to stop the bleeding, Jamie replied, “Then I die here too!” And then Martin made a shooting sound and rapped his knuckle against Jamie’s medic helmet, signifying a bullet had suddenly struck him. Jamie looked up at him, disappointed but willing, as always, to submit. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he fell into the grass and died. “Let’s go,” Martin said to me, a strange look on his face I hadn’t realized then was an odd sort of pleasure in being God that afternoon, the one with the power to decide who lived and who died. No explanations, no arguments or debates. He simply pointed his finger and down you went. “We’ve got to get across this field!” He ran by me, firing as he went.
And I followed.
“Is everything all right?” Brunner asked.
“Yeah,” I said as the film dissolved and burned away. “Wait here.”
“Actually, if you don’t mind, if we could resolve the matter of my payment, I have an appointment elsewhere that I’d—”
“You don’t get paid until we find him.” For all I knew this was one big con, and Brunner wanted his money so he could sneak off before I realized I’d taken a flight of stairs to nowhere. “Hang tight.”
As I crossed the street and headed toward the building, leaving Brunner on the sidewalk, movement from the corner of my eye distracted me. A lone figure had emerged from the grocery store at the end of the street. Carrying a bag against his chest, the figure moved slowly closer.
Through the shadows, a face, a man.
I backed away as if I’d seen a ghost, and in some ways, that’s exactly what it was. It took several seconds for me to be certain, but it was him. He’d aged horribly, but the eyes were the same. I took a roll of cash from my pocket, peeled off two twenties and a ten and handed them to Brunner. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure, I wish you good luck, sir.”
I nodded absently in response but he’d already hurried off.
Jamie stopped a few feet short of the entrance to his building and looked over at me suspiciously. He held a brown bag of groceries in one hand and a key in the other. His face had become heavily lined and his once dark hair was speckled with gray and damp with perspiration. He needed a shave and looked exhausted and deathly pale. No more than five-six or seven, he still had a slight build and was as thin as he’d been in his youth, but his posture had become slumped. He stood as if he were transporting something heavy across the back of his shoulders. Though I’d been told he was no longer a priest he was dressed in a worn and wrinkled black suit, a black shirt and black shoes—everything but the collar—and even at only a few feet away, it was difficult to tell where the night ended and he began.
I took a cautious step closer. “Jamie.”
Once it dawned on him who I was, he stared at me awhile longer as if to convince himself he had it right. One side of his thin-lipped mouth curled up into a sad, resigned sort of smile, and in a voice deeper than I remembered he said, “I knew you’d come.”
TEN
Even though it had its own bathroom, Jamie’s place somehow managed to trump my hotel room. The battered door opened into a small single room with a low ceiling and a scarred wood floor. The paint on the walls was cracked and stained, and a mattress I wouldn’t sit on, much less sleep on, was against one wall. He switched on a cheap lamp on the floor next to it but the main source of light came from a bare bulb at the end of a cord dangling from the ceiling in the center of the room. Although there was no kitchen, I noticed a hotplate sitting atop an overturned crate and a battered plastic cooler in the corner. Clothes, empty food containers and spent bottles of beer and soda were strewn about, and although the lone window faced the street, a tattered shade had been pulled down over it, making the room even more tomblike.
I closed the door behind us and stayed just a few feet inside, unsure of what to do next.
Jamie put the bag of groceries on a small table under the window then removed a few items that needed refrigeration and placed them in the cooler. He removed his suit jacket to reveal a long-sleeved black shirt, which was at best odd in such warm temperatures. As he turned back, he slowly but purposefully c
rossed the room until he’d eliminated the gap between us. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he stood so close to me I thought for a moment he might hit me. Instead, he leaned in, wrapped his arms around my shoulders and gently hugged me. I hadn’t expected it but should have. It was pure Jamie. “It’s good to see you, Phil.”
I hugged him back. He was all skin and bones. “You too, man.”
“It’s been a long time. Seems like another lifetime, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
He let go and drifted back toward the center of the room. “I knew it’d only be a matter of time before you came, I—” Grimacing, he placed a hand flat against his stomach and leaned forward to ease the obvious pain he’d been struck with. “Sorry, I…”
“You all right?” I asked.
He nodded, coughed, and after a moment straightened back up. Though it appeared the pain had left him, he still looked weak, and he’d begun to pour sweat. “Stomach spasms,” he explained. “I get them something awful, I—sorry, excuse me a minute.”
I watched him hurry to the bathroom. Without turning on the light he bounced a shoulder off the doorframe then pitched forward into the darkness and out of view, violently retching as he went. He vomited twice then all I could hear was his labored breath and a quiet moan. The toilet flushed and eventually he emerged from the darkened room. He wiped his mouth and chin with a small hand towel then tossed it aside onto the floor. I had a feeling I already knew what his problem was, but it seemed impossible to comprehend. Not Jamie.
My expression must’ve given me away. He looked at me with crippling shame and hurriedly rolled up one of his sleeves. “I’m sorry, but I—I need to take care of something, I…” Rather than complete the thought he moved past me, locked the door then dropped to his knees and pulled a loose floorboard free. He reached into the opening and removed a plastic bag then hurried over to the table, grabbed a folding chair from the corner and sat down. He emptied the contents of the bag onto the tabletop. Three little tied off black balloons about as big around as nickels…a spoon…several packs of matches…a small length of thin rubber tubing…a syringe and needle. Once he’d spread everything out he leaned over, flipped open the cooler and pulled out a bottle of water.
I stood quiet and paralyzed.
Jamie adroitly worked his way through the process of fixing his need. First he cleaned the needle by pulling water through it then shooting it free, watching as the stream arced across the room. He next tore open one of the balloons and shook the powder inside onto the spoon. There were a few remaining drops of water in the needle. He added them to the powder then grabbed the matches, lit the entire book at once and worked the flame under the spoon. As the powder became fluid the room filled with the smell of heroin and lingering sulphur. With his free hand, Jamie grabbed the rubber tubing, slung it over his arm then bit down on the end and pulled it tight with his teeth. Leaning closer to the table, he put his arm down flat and into the swath of light from the nearby lamp, and I saw him clench his hand into a fist then release it. He repeated the action again and again until the veins in his arm became distended. There were several small bruises along his arm, and two scabs, one not far from his wrist and another closer to the bend, which signaled he’d been doing this for some time.
He released the tubing and it fell free of his mouth as he pushed the needle deep. Blood backed up into the syringe and the heroin was gone and into him, coursing through his body and leveling him out almost instantly. Jamie let out a long sigh of relief and just sat there a minute, his head lolled back, eyes closed, mouth open.
“Jamie?”
“It’s OK,” he said softly. “It’s OK—I—I’m OK.”
He sat up slowly, blissfully, removed the tubing from his arm then got to his feet and disappeared into the bathroom again. This time he briefly ran the water as he washed off the spoon, then returned, put everything back into the baggy—sans spent balloon and matchbook—and hid it beneath the floor where he’d found it. Apparently he’d taken enough to calm him but was still coherent and able to function. In fact, he functioned better than before he’d fixed.
“I’m sorry,” he told me.
I nodded, unable to think of anything to say.
“Are you still writing?”
Hadn’t expected that just then. “Yeah.”
“Last time I was home, several years ago now, you’d just released your first novel. My mother got it for me as a Christmas present.”
“How’s your family doing?”
“All right, far as I know. Haven’t been home in a long time.” He smiled fondly but with a faraway look. The pain was still there, he just wouldn’t be able to feel it for awhile. “So are you married?”
“Divorced.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So am I. That about cover the small-talk, you think?”
Noise from several blocks away spilled over into the street below. “How much do you know?” he asked.
“About what?”
“Me. My past.”
“I know you were a priest, but you’re not anymore.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
He tossed the balloon and matchbook remains into a small wastebasket next to the table. “I made some mistakes. I never went to prison, but I had to spend several months in jail. County jail, it was—it’s not as bad as prison but it was still awful, I—I was still a priest then, at least technically, but it didn’t much matter in there. This stuff was everywhere. I know it’s hard to believe, me of all people, right?” He let out a sad rush of laughter. “I can’t believe it myself most days. Me, I mean, I was always afraid of needles, remember? I…I was sort of pushed into it. Horrible things happen to a person like me in there, I—it helped me forget and I—I never thought I’d need it on the outside but by the time I got out I was already too deep into it. I needed it. I’m going to stop soon, I—I need to stop and I will, I—it’s just that it helps make the pain go away for a little while, you know?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, even then wishing for a drink. “I do, actually.”
He ran his hands through his sweaty hair in an attempt to straighten it, and then ran a hand across the stubble on his face. “All anybody in there knew was that I was in for morals charges with someone underage,” he said. “They treated me like some kind of child molester or something and I—I’m nothing like those people, they—I just—I made a mistake, Phil. There was a girl. She was fifteen and—I mean—that’s not the same thing. I know, I—OK, clearly I should’ve shown better judgment but I didn’t molest some eight or nine-year-old, I had a relationship with a young woman, a—not a child—she was fifteen.”
“You were a priest.”
“I’d already decided to leave the priesthood by then, I just never got the chance because by the time I got out of jail the process had already been set in motion to remove me. They were so sanctimonious, all of them—I—all I ever wanted was to serve God. You know that. From the time I was a little boy I had the calling, I knew what I was meant to be.”
I tried to find some trace of that little boy, but he was gone.
“I made a terrible mistake, I—this isn’t some little kid we’re talking about,” he said again, as if that were the point. “She was fifteen.”
“I have a daughter that’s fifteen.”
He offered his best attempt at a smirk. “Well it wasn’t her, right?”
“Careful.”
He frowned. “I’m just saying, I—all right, you know what? I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“I never asked you to.”
Jamie conceded with a weary nod. “I’m sorry.” He moved to the window and raised the shade. “Why did we do it? Why didn’t we just run that night?”
I tried to remember things about our pasts and our lives as children in the hopes it might make me feel closer to him. I desperately needed some sort of reference point, a common ground beyond our
shared torment and decaying memories of small-town yesterdays spent playing in the sunshine. But this man was no longer my childhood pal. He was a stranger.
“I knew you’d come but I still can’t believe you’re really here,” he said. “I’d begun to think we’d never see each other again.”
“That probably would’ve been best.”
He didn’t disagree, just stayed quiet awhile. “It all unraveled long ago anyway. That night, that man or whatever he was, I…do you know how many hours I spent absolutely terrified, waiting for the police to come and get me, thinking you or Martin had told what we’d done? Do you know how many nights I thought about telling someone myself? Do you have any idea how many hours I prayed, begged God to deliver us from that night, to move the clock back, to start time again and let us live that night one more time, just—just once more so we could do things differently?”
“What do you think?”
He continued staring out the window, perhaps no longer able to look me in the eye. “I’ve spent my entire life looking over my shoulder. It ruined us, that night. It destroyed all three of us.”
“Yes.”
“I never wanted to be anything but a priest. But I always felt like a fraud. How could I bring people to God and minister to their spiritual needs when I was so far from grace myself? I did some good. I did, I—I helped some people I know I did. But I also knew what I was. A murderer, a weak, lonely and frightened man, a—a man with demons and desires for…” He coughed again. “The scarred man, he—he bound us together forever, to our sins, to each other.”
“And to him,” I added.
“For years I tried so hard to convince myself—and God—that I was a good man and a good priest.” He gazed at the darkness. “And I almost pulled it off. I thought I did anyway. Then a young boy from my parish was horribly burned in a house fire. I got a call from the hospital telling me he was dying and that his family had requested I administer the Last Rites. He was eight-years-old, just a child, and he was frightened. I sat with him on the bed and held these bandaged stumps that had once been his little hands, and he looked at me and said, ‘What are we all doing here, father?’ I’d been trained to answer questions like that, of course, and I had my company-line explanations and pat replies all ready to go. But I just couldn’t do it. There was something in that boy’s eyes, peering up at me through all that agonizing pain. He was looking to me because he’d been taught I could somehow save him and give him the tools he needed as he crossed from this world to the next. I have inside information, right?” Jamie pawed at his eyes. “The last thing that boy saw was my face searching for an answer worthy of his question. The last words he heard were mine, whispering, ‘I don’t know.’ I knew then I couldn’t be a priest anymore. I was a liar and a con, an imposter. I tried. Lord knows I did. But I wasn’t worthy of calling myself a servant of God. I never had been.”
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