The Temptations of St. Frank

by Anthony Bruno

  Father Ugo stood absolutely still, waiting for pigeons to return, his rifle trained on the roof, his body concealed in the branches. After a few minutes a pair of pigeons fluttered down onto the gutter. A couple, Frank thought. Husband and wife.

  Phoop!

  Both pigeons flapped their wings like crazy. One flew away, but the other one did a header onto the concrete. It hit so hard, Frank winced. He had no doubt that it was dead. He wondered if the dead bird was the boy pigeon or the girl pigeon. He also wondered if Father Ugo was really using rock salt.

  The priest smiled with grit teeth, pleased with himself. “Maybe we eat,” he said, nodding toward his victims.

  Frank didn’t know if he meant the priests would be eating pigeon that night or Father Ugo was going to cook up some pigeon, special, just for the two of them. Yuck!

  “Sssshhh!” The priest held his finger to his lips.

  About a dozen pigeons sailed through the sky between the convent and the church. They circled in formation, then gained altitude and one by one landed on the edge of the roof.

  “Sssshhh!”

  Father Ugo pumped his rifle, raised it to his face, took aim, and held his position. The birds were restless, flapping their wings and walking along the edge. He was waiting for them to settle down.

  Frank heard laughter, raucous kid laughter, silly belly laughs. He looked down the length of the driveway. Two little black kids—ten, maybe eleven years old—were walking by, horsing around, laughing their asses off. They each had half of a double-stick orange Popsicle, licking and sucking and laughing all at the same time, laughing so hard they hardly made any progress as they walked.

  Frank looked up at the roof of the church. The birds were still there, still settling down. He looked at Father Ugo, face to his rifle, gritting his teeth with that funny grin of his.

  One of the black kids stopped walking and doubled over he was laughing so hard.

  “Ssshhh!”

  Phoop!

  The kid who was doubled over screamed. He dropped his Popsicle and slapped his hand over his face. He howled like a cat, scared and hurt and panicked, a cat with bagpipe lungs. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooooooooo!!!!”

  “Go on!” Father Ugo shouted, coming out from behind the branches. “Get out! Go!”

  Blood seeped through the boy’s fingers. Blood on black skin.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooo!!!” The boy’s eyes were squeezed shut he was in so much pain. The salt must’ve stung like hell.

  “Go on, I say! Go!”

  The other boy spotted the rifle in the priest’s hand. He grabbed his friend by the arm and pulled him along, making him run.

  Frank couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “You shot that kid, Father! What did you do that for?”

  “They do not belong here. God does not want them here.”

  “What, are you fucking crazy?”

  “Watch your filthy mouth.” The priest jabbed a finger in Frank’s face.

  “My filthy mouth? How does that compare to you shooting a kid? You shot him just because he’s black.”

  “It’s just salt. Now he will remember not to come here.”

  “You could have blinded him. We have to call an ambulance.”

  Frank ran down the driveway to see where the kids were, but they were long gone. Not surprising with Father Lee Harvey Oswald on the loose.

  Father Ugo walked toward him, the rifle propped under his armpit hunter-style, muzzle pointed at the ground. His eyes were hard little pinpoints. “When you go to confession last time? Long time, I bet. Your mouth so filthy.”

  Fuck you! Frank thought.

  “Come. I hear your confession.”

  Frank started to give him the finger, but an idea flew into his head and he stopped himself. “Okay,” he said.

  “Come,” the priest pointing toward the church, indicating that Frank should go first.

  Frank started walking, hoping that someone would see them, a crazy priest forcing him into church at gunpoint. Maybe the cops would come and shoot the racist son of a bitch. Of course a lot of cops were racist, too. Frank and Father Ugo crossed the lawn and passed the dead pigeons in the driveway, taking a short flight of steps to the rectory entrance.

  The hallway inside was dim and narrow. Frank knew it well from his altar boy days. It smelled of candle wax and incense.

  “I meet you in the confession box,” Father Ugo said as he opened the door to the sacristy.

  Frank couldn’t believe he was taking his gun into the room where the priests put on their holy vestments for Mass. Was it possible that he kept his guns in there? He supposedly had a collection of guns. Christ! The sacristy led directly to the altar. Maybe he intended to come out from behind the altar with guns blazing and ambush Frank the Sinner right in church, his bloody corpse lying in the center aisle like a dead pigeon. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost painted on the ceiling would look down at his lifeless body, his eyes open and glassy. Fuck!

  Frank thought about just leaving, but the hallway called to him. He was like a character in a horror movie who knows he shouldn’t go into the cave, but he has to do it because he has to save the heroine. If he doesn’t go into the cave, there won’t be a movie. Frank felt like Beowulf. He had to go take care of a monster.

  The hallway led to the church through a side entrance. Walking into that cavernous space was the part of the movie where the hero finds a grotto in the cave, a perfect space for a showdown. The air was cold on his bare arms as he crossed the marble floor and stared up at the tall stained-glass windows, the colors bright on the west side of the church and dark on the east because of the setting sun.

  An old Italian lady dressed completely in black knelt in a pew toward the front of the church, a set of black rosary beads in her gnarled fingers, the cross swinging slightly as she moved from bead to bead. Her lips moved as she prayed, her eyes shut tight.

  Frank frowned at her. Some witness you’ll be if Father Ugo plugs me in the confessional, he thought.

  He walked toward the main aisle of the church and thought about disregarding the genuflection rule, but at the last second he genuflected anyway but without touching his knee to the floor.

  Three confessional boxes were tucked away in the shadows against the far wall, like medieval port-a-potties. Each one had a carved wood door over the middle compartment where the priest sat, and heavy plum-colored velvet curtains on either side where the penitents knelt and confessed their sins. Father Ugo came out from behind the altar and genuflected as he crossed the tabernacle. His leather shoes clicked on the marble floor as he walked to the polished wood gate that surrounded the altar and let himself out. He went directly to his box, breezing past Frank without even looking at him. His box was the one on the far right, the one that all the kids tried to avoid when he had been a student at Perpetual Sorrow. Father Ugo flashed a look of displeasure and condemnation as he stepped into his box and pulled the door closed, which just turned up the flame on Frank’s anger. He went to the Confessional, parted the curtain, and knelt down on the padded kneeler. The only light came from under the curtain, and there wasn’t much of it. The old familiar musty smell dredged up memories of embarrassing confessions he’d rather forget. Confessions that were really interrogations.

  He heard the screen panel slide open.

  “You can begin, Mr. Grimaldi, ” Father Ugo saying his name with heavy sarcasm.

  “Isn’t that against the rules?” Frank said.

  “What?”

  “Confession is supposed to be anonymous. No names, no blame.”

  “Start,” the priest barked.

  Frank rattled off the preamble by rote: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been—I don’t know—two, three years since my last confession—”

  The priest interrupted.
“Do you practice self-abuse?” His voice was brittle with disgust.

  “What do you mean?” But Frank knew exactly what he meant. What he couldn’t figure out was why priests were so hung up about jerking off. They never asked about stealing or killing or shooting people.

  “Do you abuse yourself?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Father?”

  “Do you touch yourself in an inappropriate manner?”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Do you make the nocturnal emission?”

  “What do you mean? Like pollution?”

  “Listen to me. Do you have the wet dreams?”

  “Wet dreams? I don’t know what you’re saying, Father?”

  “I’m saying, DO YOU MASTURBATE?”

  “You don’t have to yell, Father. You’ll give that poor old lady out there a heart attack.”

  He lowered his voice to a testy hiss. “Do you masturbate?”

  “No, Father. Hardly ever.”

  “Then you do masturbate?”

  “Very rarely.”

  “Are you sure very rarely?”

  “I swear, father.”

  “I think you are lying.”

  “No. I’m not. I almost never whack off.”

  “You are lying.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Well, I have this girlfriend, see, and we have sex all the time.”

  “What!”

  “Yeah. Almost every night.”

  “You must stop this immediately and cleanse your soul.”

  “But, Father, we’re gonna get married.”

  “Holy Matrimony is a sacrament. You are just a boy. You do not know what Holy Matrimony means.”

  “No, seriously. We’re gonna get married. We have to.”

  Suspicious silence seeped through the screen like orange heat from a toaster. “Why must you get married?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “You must do a great penance.”

  “Why? We love each other and we want to have a baby. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Everything is wrong with that. This is a child born of lust, not commitment.”

  “Well, yeah, when it happened it was lust, but things changed. I want to marry her.”

  “And what do your parents say about this? You have disrespected them. Do you know that? You must confess to that sin as well.”

  “Well, they’re coming around. I mean, they’re having a little problem with the black thing.”

  “The ‘black thing’? What is that?”

  “My fiancée is black.”

  Silence.

  “I guess that means our kid will be half-black. Probably be a good-looking kid.”

  More silence. Father Hugo was fuming. Frank could feel angry vibes radiating through the partition.

  “You must do penance. You must make a full confession and make you soul clean once again.” He sounded like Charleton Heston, high and mighty, doing his parting-of-the-waters routine.

  Frank was grinning in the dark.

  “Can I ask you something, Father?”

  “What?”

  “What I tell you here is confidential, right? You can’t spread it around. Even to the other priests.”

  “You confess your sins to God. What you say here is between you and God. I am simply his conduit. My vows prohibit me from revealing what is said in the confessional. You know that.”

  “That’s what I thought. I just wanted to make sure.”

  “Why do you want to make sure?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want my situation to become public gossip. See, Geraldine’s family doesn’t know about us yet.” Geraldine was the first name that popped into his head, the female character that comedian Flip Wilson played on TV in a dress and a wig.

  “Why do you want to keep this girl a secret? Are you ashamed?”

  “No, not at all. We’re just waiting for her father to get out of prison.”

  “Prison? Why is he in prison?”

  “He shot someone.”

  Father Ugo was silent.

  “I don’t really know the details, Father. But he did shoot someone.”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “No, Father. I wouldn’t mock you.”

  But shoot you with rock salt? That I might do.

  “Hey, Father, do you know what time it is?”

  “What does that matter? You are in confession.” He really sounded pissed.

  “Well, I gotta get going.”

  “Going where?”

  “I gotta go home and masturbate.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t be seeing Geraldine tonight, so you know how it is, I gotta take care of business.”

  “You should be punished!” he yelled. “You are full of evil!”

  “Yeah, well, you can shoot me in the face next time you see me. That should take care of my penance. Teach me a lesson, right?”

  “You are going to hell for your sins!”

  “If heaven is full of shitty hypocrites like you, Father, I’ll take hell.”

  The priest sputtered something about “sacrilege” and “blasphemy,” but Frank had already thrown back the curtain and left the confessional. The old Italian lady was staring at Frank. She must have heard Father Ugo’s fit. Frank pressed his lips into a smile and gave her a little salute as he picked up his pace and headed for the vestibule and the front doors.

  As he pushed through one of the heavy wooden doors, he turned back and looked at Christ on the cross over the altar. He thought about the little black kid Father Ugo had shot, and his chest heaved with anger.

  If I’m wrong, strike me down with a lightning bolt, God.

  Frank waited for a moment to give Him a chance. Nothing happened.

  Chapter 14

  Frank pried back the broken piece of cyclone fence and did a sideways limbo, slipping from the hospital parking lot to his backyard. He was careful not to break any of the grapevines that curled around the upper portions of the fence. His grandfather grew those grapes and gave them to one of his paisans who made the rot-gut red wine that was always around the house for the holidays but nobody ever seemed to drink. Frank still wanted to beat off because he was horny and he needed to clear his head. Too many people were jammed up in his brain, all of them talking over one another: Annette, his father, his mother, Father Ugo, Mrs. Trombetta, Mr. Trombetta. Jerking off was always good for flushing this kind of crap away.

  “Frank!”

  Shit, he thought. He looked up and there was his mother at the open second-story window, hanging wet laundry on the clothesline that extended from the house to the huge maple tree that shaded the entire yard. She was wearing a robin’s egg blue housedress, her hair rolled tight in bobby pins. The room she was in, the laundry room, was right next to his room. In fact to get to Frank’s room, you had to walk through the laundry room. Shit! There wouldn’t be any salami slamming with his mother doing laundry. Fuck!

  “I heard you met a girl today,” his mother called out with a hopeful smile. She was like a saint hovering in the clouds up there.

  Frank just shrugged.

  “Your father told me.”

  What a surprise, Frank thought.

  “So did you ask her to the prom?”

  “What?”

  “The prom. Did you ask her?”

  “I just met her.”

  “But you are going to the prom, aren’t you?”

  “Why don’t you go for me?”

  “Me? Don’t be silly. Why would I want to go to your prom?”

  “Because you’re so worried about it. Yo
u ask me about it all the time.”

  “Well, it’s important.”

  “The prom is important?”

  “It’s the only high-school prom you’ll ever get to go to.” His mother was from a small town in New Hampshire, and sometimes she acted like it.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ma.”

  “I do worry.”

  “Why?”

  Because you think I’m queer, he thought.

  “Because,” she said.

  “Because why?”

  “Just because.” She pinned a pair of his father’s work pants to the line.

  “Be careful. You’re gonna fall out,” he said. His mother was a heavy woman. He worried about her.

  “I’m not gonna fall out. I do this every day.”

  Yeah, I know. You don’t go out very much because you’re always doing housework. Which makes jerking off very difficult. At home Frank often felt like a prisoner of war secretly digging a tunnel when the guards weren’t watching.

  “So come upstairs and tell me about this girl.”

  Her painfully hopeful smile took up the whole sky. It was bigger than a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. It was like movie monster from outer space, threatening to crush him and eat him.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” he said. “I just met her. That’s all.”

  “Oh, come on. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  Well, yeah, there is, but if I told you, you’d have a fit.

  “Come upstairs,” she said. “You must be hungry.”

  Bribery with food. A common tactic in his house.

  “It’s Mrs. Trombetta’s daughter,” he said, hoping to end the conversation. His mother despised the woman even though they’d never met.

  “That’s all right. Is she nice?”

  That’s all right? What the hell was she talking about? She hated the Trombettas. Mr. Trombetta was a criminal, for chrissake. And Mrs. Trombetta was a demanding rich bitch who kept his father at her beck and call. How could his mother ever approve of a Trombetta for her only son? Was she that desperate for him to have a date for the prom? Did she think he was a lost cause and should take any girl he could get? Jesus!