by Tim Powers
Lyle stepped over Erlich’s sprawled legs and grabbed the counter-edge with his left hand to steady himself, and he blinked cold sweat out of his eyes as he peered behind the counter.
Erlich’s blood was spattered on the cash register and the street-side wall, but Donna was crouched behind a stool, blinking fearfully up at him; and he was relieved to see blood staining a hole torn in the shoulder of her blouse. Not a lot of blood, nothing arterial.
He let the revolver clank onto the counter and then knelt beside her and touched her arm. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay, honey.”
She looked into his eyes, and nodded, taking his word for it. But then she looked down and her eyes widened.
He glanced down at himself. There was a broad red stain on his shirt, visibly expanding: Erlich had shot him in the stomach. I’ll be damned, he thought, and he sat down hard on the floor, the pain moving through him now like a hot iron.
“Telephone,” Donna said to him, pushing herself up with her good arm.
And then without any jolt he was back out in the sunny desert, standing, holding two quarters in the palm of his hand as if to give them to Donna, who was gone, so that she could make the call, and he whispered, “Try these on for size.”
But Donna wasn’t here, he was talking to no one but himself, and he closed his fist on the two coins.
Had he left his car in Quartzsite? How had he got here? He could see that he was on the California side of the river again.
Apparently he had crossed the river twice that day – just as he had planned. He looked back the way he had come, remembering his car in the parking lot, the torn metal where the bullet had gone through the door, and then remembering Donna, and then Phyllis and the life they’d had together. He could still taste the enchiladas and the beer, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t ever got the third Budweiser. But then he hadn’t paid for it either, not in that way, and he hadn’t left Donna a tip, which was worse.
He was standing in the sand beside an aluminum shed with a big, faded Edison decal on the padlocked door. The black line of Interstate 10 lay a hundred feet to the north, and a blue car was approaching from the east, still far enough away to be lapped in watery mirage; Lyle took a step forward, then heard the uneven drone of the car’s engine, clearly missing a stroke.
He stepped behind the shed before the Fairlane got too close – he didn’t want to be seen, or, God help him, recognized – but he tried to project a thought to the agitated driver: Go to the Goodwill store before you eat. This is your last chance to find the book.
He’d have known the book first by its binding, then by the inscription on the flyleaf – Happy birthday, George – Love, Phyllis. Too late now. No more birthdays now.
He realized abruptly that he would head out into the desert, and he started plodding away from the shed and the highway even as the thought came into his mind. Swinger had got that right. Get off the highway. There was no point lingering, no point going on skipping backward like a stone across a lake.
He felt light, as if a burden had fallen away, and the rocks and soft sand of the desert floor were no longer any kind of problem at all. He heard the Fairlane speed past, heading toward Arizona, but he didn’t look back. He wondered whether he would run into Swinger again out here, somewhere on up ahead, and it seemed to him then that he could see the red suspenders and the black boots through the heat haze in the remote distance. He hoped so; he could use the company. Sometimes you couldn’t choose.
Through and Through
ALREADY when he walked in through the side door, there were a few people sitting here and there, separately in the Saturday afternoon dimness. The air was cool, and smelled of floor-wax.
He almost peered at the shadowed faces, irrationally hoping one might be hers, come back these seven days later to try for a different result; but most of the faces were lowered, and of course she wouldn’t be here. Two days ago, maybe – today, and ever after, no.
The funeral would be next week sometime, probably Monday. No complications about burial in consecrated soil anymore, thank God … or thank human mercy.
His shoes knocked echoingly on the glossy linoleum as he walked across the nave, pausing to bow toward the altar. In the old days he would have genuflected, and it would have been spontaneous; in recenter years the bow had become perfunctory, dutiful – today it was a twitch of self-distaste.
There were fewer people than he had first thought, he noted as he walked past the side altar and started down the wall aisle toward the confessional door, passing under the high, wooden Stations of the Cross and the awkwardly lettered banners of the Renew Committee. Maybe only three, all women; and a couple of little girls.
They never wanted to line up against the wall – a discreet couple of yards away from the door – until he actually entered the church; and then if there were six or so of them they’d be frowning at each other as they got up out of the pews and belatedly formed the line, silently but obviously disagreeing about the order in which they’d originally entered the church.
Last week there had been five, counting her. And afterward he had walked back up to the front of the church and stepped up onto the altar level and gone into the sacristy to put on the vestments for 5:30 Mass. Had he been worrying about what she had said? What sins you shall retain, they are retained. Probably he had been worrying about it.
As he opened the confessional door now, he nodded to the old woman who was first in line. The others appeared to be trying to hide behind her – he could see only a drape of skirt and a couple of shoes behind her. He didn’t recognize the old woman.
He stepped into the little room and pulled the door closed behind him. They wouldn’t begin to come in until he turned on the red light over the door, and he needed a drink.
The little room was brighter than the interior of the church, lit by a pebbled glass window high in the wall at his back. He opened the closet and shook out his surplice, a white robe that he pulled over his head. Then he undraped from a hanger the stole, a strip of cloth like a long, double-wide necktie, purple silk on one side and white on the other; and he draped it over his head and down the front of his surplice, with the purple side showing. The audience demands the costume, he thought as he bent down to snag a pint bottle of Wild Turkey from behind an old pair of shoes.
A couple of little girls out there, he thought. Chinese-restaurant-style confessions, those will be, one from column A and two from column B: I quarreled with my brothers, I disobeyed my parents. They look to be a little young yet for impure thoughts.
He unscrewed the plastic cap and took a mouthful of the warm bourbon, letting the vapors fill his head before he swallowed. And for their penances I’ll tell them, Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys.
No use in being imaginative. Once he had told a young boy, For your penance, I want you to tell your mother and father that you love them. Later he’d learned that the boy had found this flatly impossible – apparently in the boy’s family the declaration would have been taken as a symptom of insanity – and the boy had lived in silent fear of Hell for two weeks before his family had finally gone to Confession again, at which point the boy had taken the same old sins to another priest, one who would reliably give the conventional sort of penance.
Confession is good for the soul. I still believe that’s true, he thought. It can make life easier to bear, after all, letting in the fresh air, sharing your secrets with another. But not when it’s so tied in with the dread of Hell. That woman last week –
He took another sip of the bourbon to take the edge off the memory. And it hadn’t been his fault – how could he have known how strangled she was with scruples and legalisms? She didn’t need – hadn’t needed – a sympathetic human being to talk to; what would have served her best would have been an 800 number – If your sin has to do with the 6th Commandment, press 6 now.
In his early years as a priest, he had seemed to feel heavier after hearing confessions, especially the maratho
n sessions before Easter, as if some residue of the absolved sins clung to him; and he had whimsically speculated that clouds of evicted sins polluted the air afterward, interfering with TV reception and making cars hard to start. Now he just felt tired afterward, as if he had spent the afternoon helping a lot of people to get their checking accounts unscrambled.
The woman last week hadn’t wanted any help, not from him. She had sat her thin frame down in the chair across from his, awkwardly, tucking in her skirt and glancing around, clearly uneasy about the face-to-face style of Confession. She’d have been happier with the old booth arrangement, he thought, whispering through a screen so that priest and penitent saw each other only as dim silhouettes; though she had hardly looked more than thirty years old.
He took one more mouthful of the liquor now, and then screwed the cap back on and put the bottle away.
She had made the sign of the cross and then started right in, exhaling as she spoke: “Bless me, Father, I have sinned.” Her voice was shaky. “My last Confession was … at least five years ago, before ‘96. I’ve meant to come – it’s scary, though, a big speed bump to get over – last week I went to a wedding –” He noted that her left ring finger didn’t have a ring on it; “ – and there were family people there, people I hadn’t seen since college. I took Communion. At the Mass.”
He had nodded, and when she didn’t go on he raised his eyebrows.
“I took Communion while in a state of mortal sin,” she said.
“The Eucharist provides forgiveness of sins,” he told her. He had preferred Eucharist to Communion ever since Whitley Strieber’s book about space aliens had taken the latter term as its title.
“Father,” she had said uncertainly, “not mortal sins. Which I’ll get to a lot of, here, I hope. If you’re not in a state of grace, Communion is like sugar to a diabetic – uh, damaging?” She spread her hands as if to catch a ball.
He had smiled at her, and he hoped now that his smile had not been patronizing. “God understands –” he began.
“But it’s God, literally coming into us, right?” she interrupted. “If there’s oily rags and newspapers around, you’ll catch fire from the heat of Him, your soul gets scorched, right?” She laughed nervously. “And I’ve got a lot of oily rags in my soul. I don’t like the idea that I’ve …” She shook her head and closed her mouth.
“Sin,” he had said expansively. “What do we mean by it? Isn’t the only real sin cruelty, to others – or to yourself?”
For a moment neither of them spoke, and he hoped this wouldn’t take too long. How many more people were waiting out there?
“I came a long way to get here,” she had said finally. “I didn’t really think I’d get this far. I don’t need to talk about ‘What’s sin?’ with some guy. I’ve done some terrible things, and right now I think I can say them out loud; I think. I want absolution.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m not going to absolve you for something that isn’t a sin.”
Her mouth was open in evident disbelief. “As a favor to me,” she said.
“No, it’s ridiculous.” He noticed her bony hands clutched together, and it occurred to him that she might be an addict – amphetamines, probably. “Don’t trouble yourself over these – ”
“‘What sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven,”’ she said, her voice getting brittle, “I remember that part. And ‘What sins you shall retain, they are retained.’ You’re telling me you’re retaining this one.” Her smile made her cheekbones prominent. “I bet you’d retain them all, if you heard them. I bet none of them are sins anymore … according to you.”
“I’m not retaining anything! So far I haven’t heard anything you’ve done wrong. Tell me – ”
“No.” She had stood up. “This was a mistake.”
And she had walked out.
And on Thursday morning she had been found dead in a back pew of the church. Dead of an overdose of drugs – a speedball, he’d been told, cocaine and heroin. Her parents were long-time parishioners, and her funeral would be in this church. Luckily she had not left a note.
How long will it take, he wondered as he reached for the switch that would turn on the red light over the door outside, before people are ready to abandon the crude supernatural templates that obscure God’s love? When will they see that God is in all of us, and that what we most need is to forgive ourselves?
The knob turned, and the door swung inward and a little girl in blue jeans and a green sweater stepped in, Reeboks scuffing the carpet. She appeared to be about eight years old, with short-cropped dark hair.
He wondered if she had shoved in ahead of the old woman he’d seen at the front of the line. The girl’s face was narrow, with horizontal wrinkles in the lower eyelids already.
“Do sit down,” he told her.
He had forgotten to put a stick of Doublemint gum in his mouth, but she didn’t appear to notice any smell of liquor, and he’d remember to do it before the old woman came in.
She climbed into the chair, and her shoes didn’t touch the carpet.
“Bless me, Father,” she said, “I have sinned. My last Confession was too long ago to remember. These are my sins – I killed myself on Thursday.” She looked at him mournfully. “I know that’s very bad.”
He was aware of cold air on his face – his forehead was suddenly dewed with sweat.
“That’s not funny,” he said, “a woman did – was found dead – ”
“I want absolution,” the little girl said. “I want the sacrament. I came a long way to get here. I didn’t really think I’d get this far.”
Abruptly he remembered that the door to the confessional opened outward.
He turned to look at it – it was closed now, and its frame didn’t appear to have been tampered with any time lately – and when he turned back, it was a white-haired old woman who sat opposite him.
He jumped violently in his chair, inhaling in a whispered screech. High blood pressure made a ringing wail in his head, and his peripheral vision had narrowed to nearly nothing.
He blinked several times, and exhaled. “Who are you?” he asked in a rusty voice. His fingers were tingling, gripping the arms of his chair.
“And before that,” quavered the old woman, “I took Communion while in a state of mortal sin.” She had been looking down at her bony old hands, and now she looked up at him; and her eyes were empty holes in the wrinkled parchment of her face.
Through the holes he could see the fabric of the chair, bright in the afternoon light from the window at his back. She wasn’t even casting a shadow.
It’s a ghost, he told himself as he made himself breathe deeply. It’s the ghost of that woman who was here a week ago. Priests have seen ghosts before.
He flexed his legs under the surplice. He didn’t want to find that his legs had gone to sleep when he made a bolt for the door. He would say there’d been an electrical short, he smelled gas, felt faint, and if they found the Wild Turkey blame it on the Vietnamese priest.
But the old woman had reached out one papery hand as slow as drifting smoke, and now touched his knee; he shouldn’t even have been able to feel the touch, through the fabric of the surplice and his slacks, but the impact punched another shrill wheeze out of him, and numbed his whole leg. His heart beat several times very fast, then seemed to stop; and he began panting in relief when his pulse began beating regularly again, though it was still fast.
“And before that,” she said, in the same frail voice, “you took Communion in a state of mortal sin.”
He remembered a Tennyson line: The dead shall look me through and through. It was probably true – he had not been to another priest for Confession in … months … and he took Communion many times a week, at every Mass he said.
She might kill him if she touched him again. Would it be deliberate, did she mean to hurt him?
He was dizzy, and he became aware that he could feel the late afternoon light on his face – but he was sure he hadn’t turn
ed his chair around in the spasm of her touching him. He blinked, but he couldn’t see anything except a gray fog. Quickly he darted a hand to his right eye, and his dry fingers found only a hole in a numb, crackling surface.
“Bless me, Father,” came his own voice from a few feet away, “I have sinned. My last Confession was a thousand years ago. I want absolution.”
He jumped with all his will, but not physically – and then his hands were gripping the arms of his own chair, and the window was at his back and he could see again, and it was the little girl in the chair across from him now.
“Don’t – do that again,” he whispered. His heart was hammering again.
“I firmly resolve to sin no more,” the little girl said, “and to avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen.”
She can’t do anything deliberately, he thought. She can’t sin anymore, she’s dead. She might kill me, but with no more moral responsibility than a sick dog would have.
She was waiting.
His sister baptized dogs and cats – just a lick of spit on a fingertip to make a cross on the furry forehead, a whispered I baptize thee … Why couldn’t he just say the words here, give this lost revenant what it wanted? Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis … but those were the old Latin phrases; these days it was I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
But this thing can’t have contrition, he thought, it can’t repent. Its living soul is with God – this is just a suffering cast-off shell.
But it is suffering, as dogs and cats do, and they don’t have souls either.
Why was she appearing as a girl and an old woman? Why was she so widely avoiding the appearance she’d had when she’d come to Confession last week, the appearance she’d had when she’d died? Was it too traumatic?
And suddenly, with something like the intimacy of sore muscles, he knew that he was responsible for the form she took; when she walked in, she had been an uncollapsed wave of possible appearances, all the appearances she’d ever had; it was his guilt that had collapsed all the percentages of possibilities down to this small “one.” A few moments ago he had even forced on her the appearance of an old woman, which was just a sheet of old skin because she would never actually live to that age.