The Drowning Man

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky glanced at the man beside her. She felt a little catch in her throat at the hard set of his jaw, the way he kept his eyes straight ahead, as if it was the river he was talking to. He’d practiced law in Casper for several years; he owned rental houses there. Every few weeks he had to drive the 120 miles to take care of business—broken lease, new tenant, damaged roof, plumbing that had stopped working. But this was different somehow. She could sense the difference in the silent gulf that had opened between them.

  She asked the same question she’d asked earlier: “What’s going on?”

  “It’s not important.” Adam took a moment before giving her a sideways glance. “You know there’s always something with rental property.” He shrugged, then went on. Renters up and gone, no notice, trash left behind. He’d have to have the place renovated. Too bad his properties were in Casper. He should think about selling them and investing in Lander.

  Vicky didn’t take her eyes away as he talked, conscious of the gulf widening, as if Adam Lone Eagle were receding on the opposite shore of the river. He was lying.

  Vicky got off the table and made herself walk over to the trash bin, taking her time, placing one foot in front of the other. Relax, relax, she told herself. After all, she was an expert on lies; she’d heard them all from Ben, the master of lies. Don’t wait up. Got some business to attend to tonight. Trust me, trust me. She tossed the remainder of her cone into the trash and watched the chocolate ice cream dribble into a pile of paper cups and plates.

  She could feel Adam’s eyes boring into her back. After a moment, she turned and walked back to the table. It was starting to get dark, as if a blue curtain were falling over the park. The family had left. Their picnic table had a deserted look; there were tire tracks in the dirt where the van had parked. She slid her bag off the bench. “Don’t worry,” she said, keeping her voice steady, empty of concern, as if she were addressing a stranger. “I’ll take care of the proposal.”

  “Vicky, Vicky.” Adam reached out and took her hand. “Sit down,” he said, leading her back up onto the table beside him. “I’m not going to lie to you anymore.”

  Anymore! Vicky kept her gaze on the pickups and sedans crawling along Main Street, faint headlights flickering into the dusk. She felt something hard forming inside her, like a wall growing around her heart. She gripped the edge of the table, trying to fight off the urge to jump down and walk away.

  “It’s Julie,” he said.

  Vicky didn’t say anything. Her mouth had gone dry; she was conscious of her tongue pushing against the back of her teeth. Adam’s ex-wife lived in Casper. Why hadn’t she put it together? All those trips to Casper on business, when it had been Julie.

  “She’s been having a rough time, Vicky, and…” Adam paused. She could hear the quick intakes of breath. “She doesn’t have anybody else.”

  “You’re not married to her anymore,” Vicky heard herself saying.

  “She’s the mother of my son. I can’t turn her down when she needs help. She lost her job a couple of months ago, so I moved her into one of the rental houses. She maxed out her credit cards, so I paid them off and gave her some money to carry her through until she found another job. Now the IRS is after her. Seems that she’s neglected or forgot to file her income taxes the last five years, so I have to help her get it straightened out.”

  “So all the business trips to Casper…”

  “I didn’t think you’d understand.”

  Vicky started to slide off the table. She felt the warm pressure of his hand on her arm and jerked away. “This is what I can’t understand, Adam. I can’t understand why you lied.”

  She swung around, dodging past his hand before he could take her arm again, and strode across the park. She darted through the traffic on Main and kept going past the storefronts, dodging the flowerpots and the lampposts and the occasional pedestrians strolling along, only half aware of her own image following like a shadow in the plate glass windows. A lazy line of traffic moved down the street, a tan sedan, a couple of trucks, a pickup with hip-hop blaring through the opened windows. She could make out the shape of the tan brick building on the corner ahead, the law offices of Lone Eagle and Holden on the second floor.

  She was running now, across the pavement of the parking lot next to the building, weaving around the few vehicles still in the lot, toward her Jeep parked in a puddle of light from the street lamp. Another moment and she was driving out of the lot, barely conscious of the squealing tires and the honking horn as she pulled in front of a pickup, her own thoughts beating like a drum in her head: She did not need Adam Lone Eagle.

  FATHER JOHN WEDGED the pickup between Father Ian’s blue sedan and a sleek, black sedan with Wisconsin license plates that stood in front of the residence. He hurried up the sidewalk and let himself in the front door. Walks-On was there to meet him as always. He patted the dog’s head, trying to ignore the hard knot twisting in his stomach. Headquarters of the Wisconsin Province of the Society of Jesus were in Milwaukee, and St. Francis Mission fell within the province, which meant that the visitor was from the provincial’s office. And he knew—maybe he’d always known—that the day the provincial decided to assign him somewhere else, he would send a messenger to deliver the news.

  Father John glanced through the doorway to the living room on the right, expecting to find Father Ian and the visitor. No one was there. The hot odors of grease and fried meat—chicken or hamburgers—wafted down the hallway from the kitchen. There was the noise of a running faucet, the sound of metal clanking against metal. He could see the stout figure of Elena, white apron tied over a blue dress, bustling past the doorway. No one knew how old the housekeeper was. Every time the subject had come up, she’d told him that she was sixty-eight. It always made him smile. The woman had been sixty-eight for nine years.

  He walked around the foot of the stairs and knocked on the closed door to his study, certain now that Ian had ushered the visitor out of the housekeeper’s earshot. No sense in sending the news over the moccasin telegraph before the pastor had been told. Walks-On brushed against the leg of his jeans.

  He knocked again, then pushed the door open into the small room. It was vacant, everything in place. Desk with papers sprawled over the top, bookcases along the walls, slants of late-afternoon sun spilling through the half-opened blinds.

  He closed the door and went down the hall to the kitchen, Walks-On at his heels. “I see we have a visitor,” he said trying for a matter-of-fact tone, as if visitors from Wisconsin routinely showed up at St. Francis Mission.

  Elena turned away from the sink, brown hands smoothing the front of her apron. She tilted her chin up and gave him an exasperated look. She was a mixed blood, with tightly curled gray hair that framed the smooth, round face of the Cheyenne and accentuated the dark, knowing eyes of the Arapaho. “Just waitin’ for the pastor to show up for dinner. I got the table set in the dining room. Been tryin’ to keep everything hot…”

  “You know I was racing to get back.” He cut in, smiling at the old woman. They’d been over this before. She reminded him of his mother, always admonishing him to be home in time for dinner, and he, always assuring her of his good intentions. They both knew he was usually late. “Broke all the speed records,” he said.

  “Don’t give me your Irish blarney.” She brushed at the space between them with one hand. A smile wrinkled the corners of her mouth.

  It was all so familiar, he was thinking. Familiar and comfortable, his life at St. Francis. He shook some dry food into the dog’s dish and set it on the floor. This was the place where he could be the priest he wanted to be. The knot in his stomach pulled tighter. He would miss all of this: the mission, the people, all the little routines that had filled up the days.

  “Where have you hidden our visitor?” he said.

  Elena gestured with her head toward the door that led to the back porch. “Out on the patio. You want some iced tea?”

  Father John waved away the offer and headed fo
r the door. He crossed the porch, opened the outside door, and started down the wooden steps toward the two men seated on the webbed, metal chairs, facing the foothills that glowed gold in the distance, gripping half-full glasses of iced tea.

  “Here’s John now.” Father Ian jumped up, a tall, slightly built man with sandy hair and the nervous energy of a runner tensed for the starting pistol. He set his glass down hard on the table. The brown liquid shimmered in the light. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  Bill Rutherford, the provincial himself, was getting to his feet, a slow unfolding upward, one hand depositing the glass on the table, the other gripping the back of the chair. They’d been in the seminary together, and Rutherford would have been voted the man most likely to succeed, if such a survey had been taken. Energetic and witty, the center of attention in every room he entered. They’d taught at the same prep school for two years, until their careers had diverged. A doctorate for Rutherford, a teaching position at Marquette, and finally the fast track into the top echelons of the Society, administering one of the largest Jesuit provinces, while Father John had stalled out, muffling the noise of loneliness in whiskey in the evening and blurring his way through classes in the day, on the fast track to rehab. It had been three or four years since he’d seen Bill Rutherford. The man looked thirty pounds heavier, with puffy eyes and a tiredness in the slope of his shoulders, as if he were carrying a heavy burden that he’d like to put down.

  “John, how are you?” The provincial held out a fleshy hand. His grip was quick and routine. Father John was struck by the way the energy of the seminary student had leaked out of the man.

  “This is a surprise.” Father John swung a metal chair from its perch against the back of the house and sat down at an angle to the other men, who had already resumed their own seats. So Rutherford himself, his old classmate, had come to deliver the bad news. He was aware of the oddest things: the sunlight stippling the grass, the breeze ruffling the leaves of the old cottonwood at the corner of the house, the cool air in the shade of the patio.

  “What brings you to our neck of the woods?” He pushed on, as if he didn’t know, and he wondered who he was kidding. Not the provincial, and certainly not Father Ian, who was perfectly capable of assuming the job of pastor. Which, he realized, was why he could be reassigned. The provincial had been waiting for a capable man to put in his place.

  “Just a road trip,” Rutherford said. He did a half turn on his seat, lifted his glass, and sipped at the tea a moment. “Frankly, I needed time away from the office. Drove out to Denver to see how things are going, and decided on a side trip to the reservation. Haven’t been here in a while, you know.”

  Father John nodded. He was wondering when the provincial had last visited St. Francis Mission—not since he’d been here. They’d talked on the telephone, and once or twice Rutherford had sent one of his assistants to check on how things were going, usually after Father John’s photo had been plastered over the television and newspapers in connection with some crime that had occurred on the reservation. The assistants had warned him about getting involved in unsavory matters, and he had told them he had no intention of turning away someone who needed help, no matter where it might lead. They’d both known where he stood. They’d also known that it was only a matter of time before he would be reassigned.

  “Stay in the guesthouse for a while,” Father John said. “You can get a little rest.”

  Father Ian shifted forward and stared past the provincial. “I’ve been telling him the same thing. Give him the chance to see what a great place this is, meet some of the people.” He slapped the palm of his hand against his thigh and turned to Rutherford. “Never know. You might decide to take an assignment here yourself.”

  The provincial emitted a strangled laugh. “Tell you the truth, sometimes the idea of serving at an Indian mission sounds pretty good. Peaceful. Quiet. Surrounded by miles and miles of nothing. Yes, there are times, John”—he gave Father John a sideways look—“when I’ve thought about changing jobs with you. Put you in charge back in Milwaukee and I’ll come out here and say Mass, teach religion classes, and organize volunteers to do the rest.”

  Father John caught Ian’s eye. So that’s what the powers-that-be thought they did. No wonder a procession of assistants had left after a few months. Mission work had not been what they’d been led to believe. Except for Ian, who was like him, arriving at St. Francis fresh out of rehab and finding something unexpected to be sure, but something that had made him want to stay.

  “Dinner’s on.” Elena’s voice burst over the sound of the door cracking open at the top of the stairs. Then the door slammed shut.

  FATHER RUTHERFORD CARRIED a mug of coffee into the living room and dropped his bulky weight onto the worn upholstered chair across from the sofa. He leaned back, emitted a long sigh, then crossed his legs and swung a polished black shoe toward the coffee table. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. He’d had no idea the priests at St. Francis were living so well. “Excellent cook. Excellent food.”

  “What can I say?” Father John took the end cushion on the sofa and sipped at his own coffee. “We eat like this every day,” he said after a moment. They’d had fried hamburger, mashed potatoes, and peas, and Elena had made a delicious rhubarb cobbler, and the coffee was strong and good. There was comfort in the old house, settling into evening. The faintest daylight glowed in the front window, the clock on the mantle ticked in the quiet. Elena had left an hour ago, her grandson honking for her in front, and Father Ian had gulped down a serving of cobbler and left for the religious education meeting.

  “So you took a little side trip, Bill?” Father John reached around and flipped on the table lamp. A circle of yellow light flooded over the sofa and coffee table and lapped at the edge of the provincial’s chair. “What, about four hundred miles out of the way?” Four hundred miles out of the way, he was thinking, to deliver the news that the pastor would be leaving for a new assignment.

  Rutherford gave him a half smile over the top of his coffee mug. “How’s Ian working out?”

  Ian McCauley was working out fine, Father John told the man. It was the truth. He didn’t take his eyes away from the provincial’s. The mission and his new assistant were a good fit, the first assistant who seemed to belong, who wanted to stay.

  “The drinking?”

  “He’s staying on the wagon.”

  The provincial planted his polished shoes on the carpet, leaned forward, and set his mug on the coffee table. It made a dull thud. “You’ve been a good mentor for the man, John, a good superior. No doubt you’ve set a fine example.”

  “The man made his own choice.”

  Rutherford nodded. “As we all must. Tell me, have you thought about going back to teaching?”

  There it was, the windup for the curveball. But he’d seen it coming, hadn’t he? He’d had time to adjust his stance. “Have you?” Father John asked.

  The other priest drew back into his chair and recrossed his legs. “Every day problems arise that I have no solution for. Problems I never anticipated and couldn’t even imagine.” He shrugged. “I have positions I can’t fill. Priests getting older, retiring, and there aren’t enough young men to take their place. Sometimes I think the Society’s dying out, John, after five hundred years. To be honest, there are days when I wish I had nothing to worry about except preparing the next lecture for a philosophy class.” He shifted toward Father John. “What about you? Don’t tell me there aren’t days you wish you were in front of a class again. You had a real gift for teaching, John. We all have an obligation to use the unique gifts God gave us, for the good of everyone else.”

  “Where’s this going, Bill?”

  “Not where you might think.” The provincial turned away. He placed his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands between his knees. “I’ve left you here longer than usual.” Three years longer, Father John thought. “There are four or five other positions that I could place you in, but for
the time being, I’d like you to stay here. I wouldn’t want to put Ian in charge until I’m sure he’s going to stay steady, and there’s no one else at the moment begging for an assignment here.”

  Father John could feel the tension inside him draining away. The future opened up ahead, the future he envisioned for himself at the mission. The hardest part for you, son, is going to be that vow of obedience. He could hear his father’s voice in his head when he’d told his parents he intended to become a priest. It’s gonna be the killer. You think you’re up to it? He was up to it, he’d said. Of course, he was up to it. He wanted to be a priest, and obedience came with the territory. He would do whatever he was asked. But that was before St. Francis, before he’d come home. And now, sometimes in the middle of the night, he wondered how he’d ever be able to obey the order to leave.

  “You won’t be here forever,” Rutherford said, as if the man had seen into his thoughts.

  “You drove four hundred miles to remind me?”

  “To ask you a favor.” The massive head bobbed up and down, the puffy eyes slitted. “There’s an elderly priest at the retirement house in Denver that I’d like to send here for a while. A couple of months, maybe. He can make a retreat here. I figure he could stay at the guesthouse.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “He’s not in good health, John. Eighty-two years old. Two, three heart attacks in the last couple of years, several surgeries. They’ve taken their toll. Bottom line is, the man’s dying. Nevertheless, he manages to get around. He needs a lot of rest, but he’s not an invalid. Perhaps he could even help out a little. I imagine you could find a few easy tasks to keep him busy.”