"Any man who bow-hunts deer wouldn't be deterred by sudden death."
"How could he? Bambi-killer!"
"Some hunters eat the deer they kill."
"Cannibals!"
"They can't be that, unless they eat their own."
"Don't we all, Lieutenant, every day?"
A pause.
Applause.
Behind Temple, a thousand hands clapped as another author reached for the intangible award of professional recognition. Some things money can't buy. Freedom is another.
No one in the ballroom knew Sharon Rose's true award this night: Best Dressed Accessory to Murder. Tomorrow, the newspapers.
Tonight, the simple things.
Temple slipped back to the table and into her chair without undue notice. Her absence looked like a ladies' room run.
Kit had returned her napkin to her lap, and was bright-eyed again. "At last. The interminable published author awards are over. All the dolphins have mated and the ozone layer is saved for posterity. Would that our ears were redeemed. Savannah Ashleigh is about to announce the Love's Leading Amateur Awards."
"Third place is Valerie Menendez ... I mean, Mendez, for Heartbreak. "
Applause. Ecstatic would-be author at the mike.
"Second place is for ... for A Man for All Reasons. Carolyn R. Podesta!"
More applause. More breathless gushing between awardee and awarder.
"And in first place, Elizabeth Lard for--" She squinted at the list to decode the title.
Applause.
No scurrying author.
Silence. Whispers.
Savannah Ashleigh strained to read the list. "Not Elizabeth, but ... Electricity Loss. No, El... Cee Trisha--"
Kit stood up. Kit projected her voice to the ceiling light fixtures. "Electra Lark, you ninny!" Kit roared like a lion in winter.
The audience roared back.
Temple stood up beside Kit and applauded.
"San Andreas Sunflower," Savannah shouted out the winning title.
Electra found her way to the podium and captured a plaque with her name, spelled correctly, on it. The applause never died until she left the stage, so she never said thank you. But her face said it.
She settled back in her chair, breathless, putting the award where the centerpiece should be, for all to see and admire. "San Antonio Sunflower," she muttered when the room was quiet.
"And," a chastened Savannah Ashleigh was saying very slowly and very softly, "a last, special Honorable Mention. For an... unit ... unique entry. A most clever parity--"
Kit stood up again and bellowed, "Parody!"
Savannah Ashleigh looked like she faced a firing squad. "Par-roty," she repeated meekly. "Parroty of the Clichy... water?" She looked around helplessly, a broken woman.
A woman rushed up to the mike, covered it and whispered forcefully to Savannah.
"Cliched stereotype"--Savannah announced by rote, looking to either side and shrugging her shoulders--"of a romance novel. To Tempest Tower ..." She grinned in relief at simple two-syllable words. "Author of Savahge Surrender! Come and get it, Tempest!"
Electra was looking expectantly at Temple.
"I didn't do it!" she swore.
No one came and got it. The audience stirred, bereft.
A camera operator from Hot Heads zeroed in on the podium. Nada. Savannah stood alone, like all cheesy things.
Then someone was walking forward. The audience stirred. Un-certain applause began as a slight figure in a pale suit joined Savannah at the podium.
"I'd like to thank the G.R.O.W.L. committee, and the esteemed judges, and all who recognize literary merit," Crawford Buchanan's deep baritone boomed over the mike. "I never could have done it without all of you published writers as an example. And to my mother . . . keep the tuna casseroles coming, Mom! They're brain food."
He flourished his trophy and strutted back to a distant table, the Hot Heads camera dogging his every step.
"Gross," said someone near Temple.
She turned. Quincey, with a Fontana brother, was sitting only a table away.
Electra was looking disappointed, and looking at Temple. "I thought for sure that you--"
"Not guilty," Temple pled with perfect confidence.
She would never write a romance novel until she had plotted out her own lovelife, and that might take a while.
"By the way, who won the Incredible Hunk title last night?" she asked as people began rising and filing out of the ballroom.
"Troy Tucker got the popular vote of the convention at large."
"No surprise there," commented Kit, collecting her entwined dolphins.
"A nice guy," Temple approved.
"And Kyle Warren got the big award," Electra said, picking up her plaque.
"Kyle Warren? Which one was he?"
"Tall. Long dark hair. Muscles. One earring, two wrist cuffs."
Temple shook her head. "I couldn't tell him from Adam. Would Cheyenne have won, do you think?"
"Maybe, hon." Electra's face fell. "Say, you're the only one of us three who didn't get an award."
Temple smiled. "Don't be too sure about that."
Chapter 37
Confess
The brass vigil light hung from the high ceiling, glowing faintly in the daylight, striking the face of the madonna with a fever blister of bright red.
God bless Our Lady of Guadalupe, Matt thought, with its old fashioned atmosphere of eternal Catholic verities: the vigil light and the Virgin.
He sat on the polished wooden pew, absorbing the peace and the piety. Statues of Mary and Joseph still kept guard on either side of the aisle. Stained-glass windows cast kaleidoscopic patterns on the stone floor varied enough to soothe the restless attention of the most fidgety child, at least for a few precious moments.
The pews were made from golden oak and waxed to piano polish, hard but supportive, as all sturdy things are. The kneelers were padded in brown vinyl, a thirty-year-old concession to weak-kneed modern worshipers and unnecessary now that the modernized mass avoided long, trying stretches of kneeling. Matt remembered the bony knees of boyhood protesting hours on vinyl tiled floors when special-occasion masses had been celebrated in the high school auditorium.
Now he sat. Now he thought rather than prayed. Now he worried about other issues, which were the same old issues in fresh form.
A door cracked somewhere in the church. Not the big thunderously echoing double doors at the front, but a smaller, discreet door beyond the altar. Perhaps the door to the sacristy, or a side door to the nearby school or rectory.
Was a janitor coming or going? The Ladies' Altar Society coming to dust? A church stood empty most of the time, a monument to scheduled sanctity. He liked this time of waiting best, the church itself as entity, the holy place in wait for a glimmer of random, unexpected spirituality, for a lost soul blundering in, snared by its ancient trap of shelter and sanctuary.
A man wearing a short-sleeved black shirt came around the communion rail, now also an outmoded symbol of a far more formal ritual. Communion was not taken kneeling on hard stone steps along an ornate guardrail anymore, with vulnerable closed lids and open mouth, but standing at center aisle with cupped hand and wide-open eyes. It was self-administered these days, like the sacrament of Penance, now called Reconciliation.
For all the softening of ancient habit, when it came to dogma, the church remained a hard mistress.
Father Rafael Hernandez recognized Matt, smiled and came forward.
"May I join you?"
"Certainly, Father."
The older man sat in the same pew and faced the same way, studying the elaborate carved plaster altarpiece, a rococo tribute as ornate as a Bach fugue.
"Even in the early sixties," he noted, "the parishioners wanted their florid folk art. I like it."
"Me too," Matt said with the ungrammatical ease of a schoolboy. "We Poles have our Black Madonna and our gilded Infant Jesus. Gilt doilies for the Lord, valentines for h
oly days."
"It is good to think of those Eastern European churches free of the shadow of the Kremlin these days, of people free to practice their faith with all the old traditions."
Father Hernandez's autocratic profile was tilted up toward the church's blue-painted nave, in the ancient pose of prophets and saints. Matt was surprised to see rays of good humor radiating from the corners of his eyes and mouth.
The priest sighed, his hands clasped simply on his lap. "My recent. . . difficulties have been the proverbial blessing in disguise. I had taken my priesthood for granted; I had too much pride of position and too little faith. It's a temptation. You've done parish work," he went on, assuming rightly. "Each parish is a little kingdom, and the priests are its princes. And the pastor, he is king. I took myself too seriously. I allowed myself to alienate an old woman from the church only days before her sudden death, and all over a matter of animals in heaven! No, that wasn't the issue. It was my authority. It was my being right, even about minutiae. And the blackmail, the notion of my being thought badly of, that was what unhinged me. Our Lord was falsely accused and made it into a means of redemption for all mankind, but I, Rafael Hernandez, could not survive a pointing finger. I had my pride. That is the root of all evil, not money. Pride."
"Money motivated Peter Burns to kill his great-aunt," Matt pointed out. "But pride did, too. He felt . .
. shamed from birth and was never given leave to feel anything else, for a sin that was not his. He compared himself to Jesus, do you know? Asked who had given him room in the inn when he was an infant in need of shelter."
"You've talked to him recently?"
Matt nodded. "In jail a couple of weeks ago."
"Why? The man is poison, and he cannot blame the world for all the wrongs he did."
"I wanted to understand his hatred."
"You are not a priest anymore. You don't have to listen to confessions."
"No." Matt found himself glancing at the set of confessional booths on the nearest side aisle. "They look like something from Alice in Wonderland, strange, decorative doors to exitless closets, where you feel shrunken or inflated, depending on your sins that day, or your penance."
"I still use them." Father Hernandez shrugged at Matt's surprised glance, for confessions nowadays were face to face in faceless rectories or churches or schoolrooms. "The old timers can't countenance--
excuse the expression--a cosy daylit conference with the parish priest. They must have their kneelers and their darkness, their pleated white linen curtain and the whispers in the dark, the slow slide of the priest's little door from side to side. I admit I enjoy the suspense, the anonymity, the drama, the guessing in the dark. So much about the church has changed. I wonder that anyone wishes to become priests anymore."
Matt smiled. "A lot of women do."
"Women! Don't start me on that, Matt. Next Miss Tyler's cats will find heaven not enough, and demand ordination. I'm too old for so much change."
"And yet church doctrine remains unswerving."
"For the most part."
"Do you never doubt?" Matt asked suddenly.
Father Hernandez's Spanish-olive eyes turned to him, all brine and bewilderment. "Doubt? Only myself, as you saw all too well. What should I doubt?"
"The boundaries of sin, I suppose. They seem . . . fuzzier out-side the priesthood."
"Ah, well, my sins are of the self, an exclusive circle, you will admit. A social man must confront sin in plural situations. A priest is set aside from society, and therefore from some sins."
"Some priests have managed to sin grievously against society."
"And more grievously than ever for being priests," Father Hernandez added tartly. "Why do you meditate on sin, Matthias? It is nothing new."
"Some of it is, to me. Think about Peter Burns. If the church had not encouraged thinking of an unwed mother as an outcast, her son would not have been isolated and alienated."
"The church no longer shames unwed mothers."
"Not as much, and not if we want to oppose abortion; then we can't approve of situations that drive women to that extreme. But our new moderation seems self-serving, almost politically correct. Deep in our hearts, do we really accept the sinner? Or do we prefer that she not commit a graver sin that offends us more?"
"You are speaking of sexual sin and whether it is grave, or merely sensational."
Matt nodded, enjoying this theological debate. He missed these "wrestling with angels" sessions, in which nothing was answered but much was asked.
"We consider the slaying of the body the gravest sin," he began.
"Murder," Father Hernandez agreed. "Cain versus Abel."
"Slaying of the soul is harder to single out." Matt found him-self speaking before he thought. "Father, I think I ... need . .. would like to celebrate an old-fashioned sacrament called Confession."
"In there?" Father Hernandez eyed the facade of doors with their tightly decorative grills that let in air, if little light.
"Why not?"
"Why not indeed. I'll get my stole."
Matt watched him walk away, each footstep sharply echoing on the unforgiving stone floor. It was impossible to be furtive in a church.
Matt didn't wait for his return, but slipped into the confessional on the right. As a child, how many anxious moments had he stood in line, dreading and requiring this moment? When he could sink in the dark onto the kneeler and rest his folded hands on the small wooden shelf.
His world had shrunk to the thin line of light under the closed door--which always swung shut behind him without a sound, as if sealed by the Holy Ghost. Before him was the pale window of white linen, barely luminescent in what little light squeezed through the grill in the door.
How many anguished minutes had he shifted his weight from one hard-pressed knee to the other, as some old Polish babushka recited her endlessly trivial list of sins. They always took so long, the old.
Were they confessing the sins of an entire lifetime while he waited, needing to go to the bathroom?
Ah, another fault to confess. Impatience, Father, with the elderly. Add it to the venial shopping list carried in the head from week to week. Like disrespect, or the vaguely thrilling "bad thoughts," or, even better, the delightfully mysterious "concupiscence." Six "Hail Marys" and ten "Our Fathers" and he would be off lightly.
He heard the approaching footsteps, pictured the purple stole of Penance around Father Hernandez's neck, wondered why he was doing this. Then his heart began to quicken and his bladder began to burn, like Pavlov's priest as a boy. Was he omitting any fault? Hiding anything? From Father or himself?
Hell, yes! the adult Matt admitted with an appropriately apt exclamation. He had hidden everything under a camouflaging cloak of petty misdemeanors, as he had hidden behind a collar for so long.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been forever since my last, true confession. I have been disrespectful to my mother six times and to Sister Esperanza two times. I have been thoughtless of others four times, and I have wanted to kill my stepfather twelve times.
Matt shut his eyes as he heard the wooden window slide open. No more light entered the booth.
Oops, wrong side, Father Hernandez. Perhaps priests weren't as prescient as the young Matt thought.
The sliding sound came closer, like a nightmare monster's sucking footsteps. A glow illuminated the linen curtain, but let no shadow of a man fall on the neat, pleated folds.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been"--already he wanted to evade the truth--"eight months since my last confession." Eight months since he had visited a church, except for Our Lady of Guadalupe. He sounded like a fallen away priest; perhaps he was.
Father Hernandez made no comment. Confession was far more voluntary, and thus far less frequent these days. It was not like the weekly doom visited on impressionable children many decades before. He was here of his own free will. How many times had they debated free will in seminary?
Free w
ill wasn't theoretical outside the seminary or the collar's discipline, he had discovered. Every act, every minute could require an ethical decision. His entanglement with Temple had raised dubious desires, ghosts and guilt. And now he had tapped a new source of anger against another powerful male figure, Max Kinsella, supermagician. Concupiscence was no longer Greek to him, nor was envy and rivalry. .. .
He spoke in generalities to a whispering voice beyond the milky veil, to the spiritual tradition and power beyond the unseen priest. He questioned himself, the past, the church. He didn't get answers, but he got more specific questions. And he found understanding, as a seasoned priest reduced Matt's feared mortal sins to venial offenses.
Then Father Hernandez cleared his throat before beginning the absolution. For a panicky, self-defeating moment Matt wondered if he would be told that he was beyond forgiveness, anyway.
The priest's hoarse whisper finally came again. "Bless you, my son, for your trust and courage. By revealing yourself to me, you have healed me of my shame and wounded pride for my failings that you witnessed through no fault of your own. By this sacrament, we are both absolved."
And he began the ritual words of absolution, in Latin. Matt finally felt a sense of closure with one father, at least.
Chapter 38
Checkmate
I wish that I could say that my lovelife works as well as a romance novel. You know the routine: boy meets girl, boy gets girl in the sack (and for my species, sacks are a real attraction), boy goes hunting and girl . . . does whatever girls do when they are with kits.
However, these are modern times, as I am soon reminded. While romance convention attendees are congratulating each other in the upstairs ballroom, I have padded (and I am one of the few dudes who can authentically "pad," since I have pads and not toes on my feet) downstairs to peruse the vicinity of the Divine Yvette.
A good thing, too.
Who do you suppose I find slinking around the Divine Yvette's door? You will assume the upstart Maurice.
No. It is an upstart of my own relationship, Midnight Louise.
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