The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  Patrick Corbus was a foolish boy, an attribute quite separate from lack of intelligence, and it accounted for his tireless pursuit of the very thing that oppressed him. He wanted Father McEwen to become convinced that the vanishing of Patrick’s father had to do with the church and specifically with Father McEwen and the god Father McEwen loved. Patrick’s own belief, as worn now as the knees of his jeans, was that an adult could find his father if he was sufficiently motivated, if his desire to seek out the missing were a holy mission. This child longed for his father. He believed there were things about the disappearance that were being kept from him. He had to believe that. How could a boy think otherwise without coming to hate himself and take the fall for his father’s egress?

  Before Father McEwen left his home, he hung the plaster Madonna once more over the tub, then groaned at the ring of filth left from Teddy Allen’s bath. There were, in fact, many concentric rings of brown around the porcelain tub, the flecks of foul matter against the background of white like the negative of a photo beamed home from space revealing the ultimate union and secret order of the many million disparate worlds.

  A sponge wiped it all away.

  Can a creature as bound to words as man apprehend a thing beyond words and understand without words that this commodity of the exalted has meaning?

  Teddy Allen examined the exposed neck of Lucinda the fortune-teller while her hands grasped his. How white the flesh; how resilient the cylindrical tides of movement down and up its cherished tower, arriving nowhere, not even where it had begun, a peristaltic habit of the throat’s architecture, like a pattern of uneven flight produced by a drone that neither returns to the hive nor tastes of the nectar.

  “I got a message from God,” Teddy Allen told Lucinda’s throat.

  Lucinda lifted her head upright. “Beg pardon?”

  “It was outside your window.” He began the story with such enthusiasm that he did not recognize the expression of fear on the fortune-teller’s face, did not realize the crazed gleam that inhabited his eyes, or the bizarre effect the priest’s clothes had on his appearance. “That guy on the flag was the first messenger—or really the second. I count you as the first.”

  “You threw yourself against the wall to stare into my kitchen?”

  “My whole life is topsy-turvy,” Teddy agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s first talking to you, then the flag guy, then I’m up on rooftops eyeing the streets, then I’m in the bathtub at the priest’s house and he’s got a bloodred baby on his wall, and on the way here I caught this radio station that was no radio station saying that the snake’s still in Eden, which makes me think wow, and—where you going?”

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, stepping through a door and locking it.

  Teddy walked over to the door and called through to her. “It’s like I’ve got a lot of these pieces and if I can get them to snap together, I’ll have, well, I don’t know what, but it’ll be important, like one of those tools you snap around into different shapes and you can fix most anything.” He heard her speaking to someone. “Is that Jimmy’s little sister?” He did not guess that Lucinda was calling the police. “I saw her here, too, which I kind of forgot about.” More words erupted from his mouth, a flow like lava from a source that had been building for generations. He talked about god, language, earrings. After a spell, the flow took a turn. “So it must be clear,” he said to the door, “how much I love you. Don’t let this supreme being thing I’m going through scare you off. I’m just a regular guy otherwise, like you know about me already from the way I come in here after work. Although, I quit work.”

  His confession of love had about it the awkwardness of the pelican’s land-bound stroll, and Lucinda, whose real name was Lucy Sullivan, understood that she had damaged this man. Perhaps it was good that he could speak so freely about his feelings for her, but she was certain he had not been a peeping tom before becoming her customer—her slave, she thought. What had she been thinking, letting him come every day, making him pay more than he could possibly be earning legally? I’ve ruined him, she thought, giving herself far too much credit, but believing it. She would have to quit this, she understood. She was tinkering with people’s lives in an inhumane way. She thought of the comic book edict: if only she had used her genius for good instead of evil. But how can you know the effect you will have on others? She had a genius for consolation, and just beyond her door babbled a man damaged by it.

  “Until I find out where Christ is holing up, we have to keep it plutonic,” Teddy said, shortly before a police officer stepped through the door and called out his name.

  Teddy turned to him, delighted. How could this man he had never before seen know his name? Another miracle was in the offing.

  “Come with me, Teddy,” the uniformed man said with such kindness that Teddy felt his eyes well with tears. He turned back to the door.

  “I have to go, honey,” he yelled, words that called to his mind a sense of television without providing an actual image. He felt his life had become a thing of clarity, the perfect reception of cable after ages with rabbit ears. It made him smile.

  Father McEwen had requested only Patrick, but Aluela showed up as well. They had on new clothing, he noted. Mary Hitchens had provided it, no doubt. His heart inflated anew with appreciation of her. They were in the neighborhood grassy spot known as Berry Park by the locals because of the wild blackberries that used to appear in one remote corner each spring. There were no longer blackberries. Some park official had hacked them out, or the nature of spring had changed.

  Aluela took a seat next to Father McEwen on the park bench without saying hello. She leaned her head against his shoulder. Patrick sat on the other side of her.

  “What have you got for us?” the boy asked.

  Father McEwen shifted to make Aluela sit upright.

  “I can’t stay long,” he said. “I have to visit someone in trouble.”

  The voice on the answering machine had sounded ecstatic. “Come join me,” Teddy Allen had said of jail. The police officer had sounded less enthusiastic. “He needs a rubber room, Father, and soundproof, too, if you’ve got one handy.”

  “I’m wearing underwear,” Aluela announced. “Mrs. Hitchens bought us clothes.”

  Father McEwen produced the cough of the uncomfortable, although, this day, the girl and the image of her naked bottom carried not a glimmer of sexual power, something Patrick had already picked up on. McEwen didn’t know about the shredded panties, and so found the remark disconcerting only for its strangeness.

  McEwen had not brought the painted Madonna, having guessed after the first moment of surprise that Patrick had invented his father’s parting gifts. He could not guess why the boy had created this fabrication, but he had decided to investigate the father’s flight anyway. He had spoken with the news reporter who had covered the story, a man with a self-important air about him and a beard like a sea animal on his chin.

  To Aluela and Patrick, McEwen said, “I am not a fool. I’ll not play the games expected of a fool.”

  Aluela slumped back against the bench. Patrick felt the grip of a man’s fist at his throat, a sensation that meant he was on the verge of tears.

  “But I have looked into your father’s disappearance.”

  Patrick and Aluela became instantly more erect in carriage, their senses tuned in and alert. This moment of attentive anticipation pierced Father McEwen with sadness. How could a man leave these children? McEwen took a deep breath and began.

  “A body was found in Canada that matches the description of your father. He’d taken an apartment, and found a job under an assumed name. I can’t quite recall what it was.”

  He pretended to concentrate. The children stared at him with sickly deliberation. Was this cruel? he wondered. He did not feel the ugly, elated rush he felt when spanking them, which led him to believe his motives were pure. He threw his head back, as if engrossed in a mental process that demanded he exclude the outside world. He di
d not know that this was the same posture that the fortune-teller used for the same reason. He might have loved Lucinda had he known her. She might have loved him. But neither could divine the other.

  “His alias was… Alluvial Sludge,” he said at last, eyeing the kids again. “Or something like that.”

  He stared several seconds, long enough for them to know he was creating the story as he went. The reporter had known nothing, had hardly remembered the story, had stroked his beard with the urgency of sexual gratification, and McEwen had been forced to mentally toil against a growing hatred for the man. Without facts or leads, what was this priest to do? He had prayed, and in prayer a strategy had come to him.

  “Auto accident,” he told the Corbus children. “Last rites were administered. Body cremated.” He paused once more, studied their faces. These children knew he was making it up. He needed to see that in their eyes and in their posture, and at the same time, he needed to see that they were nonetheless paying attention. “His apartment, you might want to know about. He lived alone, but he had three bedrooms. A bed in each. Like he was maybe expecting guests, or people to come live with him.”

  Patrick began to weep. Aluela turned her head and took a deep breath, disappointed and unmoved.

  Father McEwen stood. “I’ve got to be going. Have you heard from your mother?”

  Aluela nodded. “She wants us to come home.” The girl began shaking her head. “Neither of us wants to go back there.”

  Patrick covered his face. His tears would not subside. How was it that this story he knew to be a lie could affect him so? Why was it that this man had figured out Patrick’s tricks and then made up a lie that mattered to him? Worlds tumbled through the boy’s head, whizzing by so fast a pressure gripped his skull. Why had this deception moved him? He needed to know.

  Wiping his eyes, he looked up into the sun—the round flaming face of Father McEwen, who stood before him, eager to leave but waiting, Patrick could see, to be certain Patrick was all right. His face was not, of course, the sun, but the heavenly object that, this moment, blocked the sun, which lit his head as if his hair were on fire. These helio-optics unnerved Patrick and permitted him a new perspective: Father McEwen had offered Patrick that which supported McEwen himself, a story to have faith in even if he could not entirely believe it.

  Patrick looked away and considered this revelation. He thought that every relationship of long standing had an element of this—husband and wife believing in marriage despite the ratio of bad days to good, a child loving his parents despite their malignant behavior, a priest keeping his faith despite questions about that old, unlikely story.

  In these scant seconds, Patrick began his dedication to this question of truth and lies, of story and consequences, of faith and failure. He would figure it out, he pledged to himself, the only solid thought he could fix against the torrent of sorrow and relief flooding his mind. At long last, he had a new mystery to explore, one no less large and no less strange than the one it forced him to abandon.

  Teddy Allen was lodged not in a holding pen but in an actual cell. He sat upright in the lower of two bunks, still in Father McEwen’s ungainly clothes, talking softly to himself. On Teddy, the shirt looked more like a gown.

  The boy’s shrinking, McEwen thought.

  Upon seeing the priest, Teddy leapt up and charged the bars, the heavily cuffed pants swinging wildly.

  “I’ve done it,” he said. “I found him.”

  Father McEwen guessed that more than a nod was in order, but he had nothing more to offer. Telling the tale he’d invented to the Corbus children had left him feeling flaccid and slightly scaly. He felt the fatigue of a man who has come to understand there will be no end to his duties. This weight made him slump.

  “I’m talking Jesus Christ,” Teddy said. “The real one. God told me he was in town, then he led me to him.”

  “I can take you home, Teddy,” Father McEwen said softly. “Your mother would like you to stay with her awhile. She’s lonesome, you know.”

  Teddy shook his head. “I got to stay here. It’s my, you know, the thing I got to do. You understand. It’s why you can’t have a woman, isn’t it? You got a call from God, and he said for you to lay off the pussy, right?”

  The boy was utterly earnest, which made Father McEwen’s fatigue deepen. He had to engage him, work him down from this high, get him to come along. No one wanted to press charges. He only had to agree to stay away from the fortune-teller and not look into the windows of others.

  “Chastity is part of becoming a priest,” Father McEwen began. “It’s not what I chose, exactly, but what—”

  “Right, and so I’m here with the same kind of wake-up call like you got from the Almighty. He already told me lots of things I don’t understand.” Teddy gripped the bars and rocked from side to side, the sway of the cuffs an instant behind the movement of the body, as if a second life shared the slacks. “He said it wasn’t God who created man. God didn’t do it. It’s in the Bible that way by mistake, like a translation screwup.”

  “Have you eaten?” McEwen asked him. “We could stop at Mallory’s on the way home. I’ll buy you a cold beer and a hot sandwich.”

  “Hunger doesn’t know me,” he said, and for an instant it seemed to Father McEwen that the boy might be a prophet after all. McEwen’s red face turned a brighter and more burnished shade.

  Then Teddy added, “Except I did have a taco in the police car. That cop with the woman partner was a nice guy. Gave me part of his very own lunch.”

  “Your mother would like you—”

  “Are you ready, Father?” The eyes of the boy flamed with a bright radiance. “Are you ready?” He had about him the frenetic charge of madness, but how else could a man look who had met Jesus Christ?

  It occurred to Father McEwen that he was ready, ready for the next failure in his life, ready for the next foolish condition of being, ready for fresh blood to fill his boots, for spring to come and fill the recesses of his heart with wild berries. It was possible, too, that he was ready for something he could not anticipate, ready for the thing for which one could never ready oneself, for which only the circumstances of the world and the will of the all-knowing could make one ready.

  To Teddy Allen, McEwen said, “Yes, sir. I’m that. I am ready.”

  Teddy turned, pointing. “That’s him,” he said.

  A man slept in the top bunk of the cell. Father McEwen had not noticed him until now. The man faced the wall. His legs were bent. A coarse blanket covered him.

  “That’s Jesus Christ,” Teddy said.

  As Teddy spoke, a drop of saliva slipped from his mouth and fell to the jail room floor. The striking of the concrete made a noise, and that noise made an echo in the harsh, vacant room.

  Father McEwen eyed the sleeping man. A tuft of dark hair was the only feature he could make out.

  “What makes you think this man is Jesus Christ?”

  “I put my hand in his wounds,” he said, and he stuck the hand through the bars.

  Father McEwen saw nothing on the hand, but he could smell, once again, the odor of feces.

  “Oh, Teddy, please, son, let me take you home.”

  He felt himself losing his composure. His chest shook, but he contained himself. Whatever it was that wanted to escape him, he could not let it out just now.

  “Eve did it,” Teddy said.

  Father McEwen shook his head. He did not understand and did not want to speak.

  “What God created wasn’t men and women. They was something else, like nobody we know or could ever run into. Jesus himself told me this. Eve created human beings. She did it when she bit that fruit. We owe it all to her. All this.” His arms spread wide, up and down the bars. “Without her, we’d be nothing but horses and cows on two legs.”

  Father McEwen wept. The weeping took hold of him, multiplied his fatigue, and cast him down onto his knees. Fallen man was the only one this world had ever known. Love for mankind had to mean the love o
f Eve’s children. Father McEwen knew these sentiments well enough, but it had not occurred to him that heaven would not be populated with people, but with cows and horses on two legs. It had not occurred to him that such was not life after death but the undead pretending to live. McEwen understood that there could be no afterlife for him as a human. In heaven he would become a sinless creature; which is to say, he would not exist.

  “He’s told me lots of things,” Teddy went on. He reached through the bars to put his hand on the priest’s head. “Some stuff, I’m sorry, you won’t want to hear. Like a hundred years from now there won’t be priests of any kind.” Teddy made a confused gesture. He meant to ruffle McEwen’s hair, not rattle his head. “I hate to be the one to break it to you.”

  One hundred years would pass as the blink of an eternal eye, Father McEwen thought. Everyone alive would be dead. Most of the buildings he knew would be decimated. New buildings he could not imagine would stand in their place. These things he could comprehend, but there came to him knowledge he had no means of apprehending; it settled in his mind with a sigh, as if weary from a long journey: one hundred years hence, the human world would still beat in its human ways; the far end of the universe would remain beyond the comprehension of woman or man; boys would still weep for fathers lost; girls would yet be seduced by men who knew better; women and men would love and fail, fail and love; what they could not grasp would remain the thing they most desired; what they could not see would remain the thing they daily strained to bring into focus; angels would still sing in every soul, yet none would hear the words and only a handful would move in time to the melody; but no priests would survive this future. Father McEwen understood this fact was beyond question. Beasts that cannot reproduce themselves are doomed to extinction. This insight, he saw now, came not from that heretic Darwin but from the fruit of shame, fruit of nakedness and genitalia, the fruit of humankind.