He heard the scuff of shoes and a woman came in, knelt behind the screen, and confessed that she’d missed Mass twice. Father Jim grew dizzy. He remarked that it was good that she missed Mass.
After a long silence, she whispered, “No, Father, I don’t miss Mass, I missed it. I didn’t show up.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then why don’t you miss Mass? You sound pretty devout and it seems like you would feel incomplete if you let a Sunday go by without attending Mass.”
“I don’t think I understand,” she said.
He thought about this. “That’s probably true,” he said. “For your penance, you should try to learn to miss Mass.”
Five minutes went by and then a man came in confessing a variety of sins. He admitted he had a problem with watching pornography and had visited many sites. Father Jim was struck with fear. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. While he knew he should know what the man was talking about, he didn’t. He mentally strained, and the effort made him think of building a church in Rwanda, which he had done as a new priest, physically lifting roof beams in the jungle heat.
“You mean, you visited the sites of pornography, the studios where they film the stuff?”
There was a long pause on the other side of the screen. “Uh, no, Father. I just turned on the computer.”
Again, the priest’s mind didn’t register the words. His imagination had been set in motion in one direction and began to gain momentum. “You know, you really should go to those buildings and try to get on the set,” he began. “You’d see how young most of the girls are. How a lot of creepy people are standing around working lights and sound, looking bored because they make this stuff every day.”
“Father?”
The more he talked, the more he thought he’d stumbled onto a new idea. “The girls are kind of desperate for money to go to college. Maybe they’re immigrants forced to work like slaves. They could be your next-door neighbor. Maybe your teenage niece.”
The man on the other side of the screen said, in an offended voice, “My niece would never do anything like that.”
“Oh, she has enough money to pay for college?”
“Well, no,” the man admitted. “She is old enough to work, though.”
“Oh yeah? Where does she work?”
“The Burger King down the mountain.”
There was some sort of mental impact involving stars behind his eyes. He gave himself over to a thought forming like the tail of a comet. “For your penance, I want you to go watch your niece.”
“What?”
“Sure, that’s it. Show up and order a meal. Sit behind those plastic ferns where you can see her work. For two hours. Watch the dignity of her work, her service, her efficiency, her mistakes and her successes, how she grows tired but still tries to help people. Compare that to what you see on those sites.”
“Aw, can’t you just give me a rosary to say or like ten Hail Marys?”
“Nope.”
“All right. But this is weird.” And the man began saying a grouchy Act of Contrition.
—
Father Jim sat back in his hard chair and fell asleep. It could happen at any time. Once, after one of his tiny sermons, he fell asleep standing at the pulpit, and an altar boy had to tug at his vestments.
There was the sound of steps, and he opened his eyes. In front of him in the chair sat his gardener, Nestor, a compact, sturdy young man who kept Father Jim’s small lawn as neat as a golf course. “Did you remember to weed-eat alongside the front steps?” the priest asked.
“Sí, Padre. But I have come for confession.”
“Did I remember to pay the last time you did the lawn?”
“You paid twice, and I kept the money. That is one thing I have to confess.”
“Oh. Well, just do it next time for free.”
“Está bien. Now for my other sin, for which I am very ashamed. I wanted some new spinners for my Oldsmobile, but I didn’t have the money. I stole my uncle’s shotgun and sold it outside the gun show.”
For a moment the priest tried to imagine what a shotgun was. Then he remembered he used to rabbit-hunt himself. Yes, his father had several shotguns. Did he still have a father? He would have to check when he returned to his house. “How much did you get?”
“Five hundred dollars. My uncle found out what happened and he has shamed me to the whole family. He calls me ratero, the thief. He even phoned the police. I didn’t think he’d miss it. He never hunts anything.”
“Would finding him another shotgun settle things?”
“He said I have to buy him a new one just like it. At least a used one in ninety-five percent condition.” Here Nestor began to weep. “Nobody in my family will speak to me, Padre. I can’t sleep at night. I’d sell my car, but the police have taken it away because of insurance.”
“Please don’t cry.” The one thing Father Jim could not stand, even before the accident, was the tears of other people. He told Nestor to pray for a solution. For his penance he was tempted to ask him to pull the monkey grass out of the flowerbed, but decided on ten Our Fathers instead.
Later, in the vestry, he put his alb on backwards, but Anthony, the altar boy, pointed this out to him. Father Jim was terrified to say Mass. He carried his own big missal with the readings numbered with stick-on notes, 1, 2, 3, 4, for the order of the parts. The congregation, many of whom had heard him say Mass before, watched him very carefully during the ceremony, the way a parent watches someone else’s child walk a porch rail.
He made it to the Gospel, read it aloud as best he could, and then everyone sat down for the homily. Father Jim had a special fear of this Gospel passage. It was the one about John the Baptist being beheaded. When he read it to the congregation, it was as if he’d never heard it before, and he was amazed, his good eye roving the page, his blind one fixed on the front pew.
He began haltingly, already sweating, “King Herod must have been knocked out by this dancing girl, right?” He scanned the congregation and saw two people nod, so he was relieved to know he was not speaking Spanish. He had nightmares about waking up in the mornings able to pray only in Spanish, which he didn’t understand very well. “Plus, the dancing girl was Herod’s stepdaughter, and you always want to support your kids, no matter what. Well, Herod was throwing a big party for the important people in his realm, and he made a promise to this dancing girl daughter of his to grant her a wish if she did a good job. I guess Herod was just desperate to show off for his friends. We all know people like that, don’t we?” Father Jim looked out over the many wrinkled brows. He was tempted to just give up, sit down, and maybe wave to the ushers to go after the collection. Looking off to the side, he saw the altar boy give him the “roll on” signal with his fingers, so he said, “Well, she asked him to chop off John the Baptist’s head, and he didn’t want to do that at all. Herod kind of liked to hear John preach, though he admitted he didn’t understand what he said.” Father Jim took an enormous breath, his face staining red. “Maybe Herod wasn’t a totally bad sort, but, you know, he felt he would lose face if he didn’t go through with his promise, so—whack!” Father Jim brought the side of his hand down on the pulpit like an axe, and the women in the front pew sat up stiffly. “And that was it for old John.” Father Jim took another tortured breath, closed his eyes a moment, and waited for words to spark a light in his brain. After a while, he said, “I’m not sure what this Gospel means, but then I’ve known people who do weird things at parties, just to show off. Then they get egged on by their friends. Judging by confessions I’ve heard, lots of alcohol and marijuana are involved. Country boys like to say things like, ‘Hey, watch this,’ just before their friends bring them to the hospital. A drunken middle-aged husband will try to fly like a bird if a barmaid asks him to. So I guess you should keep things under control. Think for yourself, or someone else will think for you.” He half turned away from the pulpit, but was worried that he hadn’t driven the message home. Turning back, he said, “Don’t w
hack people who don’t deserve it.”
He sat down in a plush walnut chair, and the congregation was as motionless as an unlit candle.
With the help of Anthony, who gave him many cues, he got through the Nicene Creed and the rest of the service. Soon he felt himself reappear in his recliner, nervously watching a National Geographic program about endangered lizards in Mexico. The next thing he remembered, he was getting out of bed and banging his ankle on the barbell. Sometimes transpositions happened. He would be one place and then instantly he would be somewhere else the next day. The neurologist at the hospital said these episodes might fade as his brain tried to regenerate. The fact that he was aware of the gaps at all was a good sign, the doctor said. This statement gave him hope; it suggested his brain was like the tail of a porch lizard that had been pulled off by a child and would grow back.
About seven he went to get the newspaper in the driveway and saw Nestor sliding out of his cousin’s car, pulling a sling blade after him. “Hola,” Father Jim said. “Dónde está su weed-eater?” Nestor stood in the gravel and stared after his cousin as he peeled off down the road.
“Father, you don’t know how to speak Spanish.”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
Nestor put the tool on his shoulder. He was strong looking, straight in the back. Normally, he would sing under his breath as he worked; he was a man who smiled easily, but today his eyes seemed worried. “I pawned my weed-eater to start building a shotgun fund. I’m just going to pull grass by hand today and knock the brush down at the edge of the backyard.”
Father Jim remembered the stolen shotgun, and the returning thought heartened him. He imagined four or five of his new brain cells lifting weights behind his forehead. “What kind of gun was it?”
“A Browning Auto-Five light twelve of Japanese manufacture,” Nestor said. “Nearly a new gun. My uncle wants to beat me up. He called the police on me again. Every time I’m around him he raises his arm like there’s a hatchet in it.”
Father Jim went inside and wrote down the information about the gun. He felt really sorry for his yard man, who was his friend, who would sit on the back steps on hot days and drink lemonade with him and tell of his parents back in Mexico who lavished praise on him for every cent he sent down across the border. Father Jim sat in his recliner and studied the gun’s description in his shaking hand. He remembered very little about firearms. That part of his memory was lying somewhere out beside a mountain railroad. Taking the phone book into his lap, he looked up a local gun shop, wrote down the address and directions from the ad, and went into his room to dress. He thought it would be improper to purchase a firearm dressed as a Catholic priest. Before the accident, he’d owned no casual clothes, wanting to be the type of cleric who wore his collar and black shirt everywhere he went. He stood before his closet and looked in vain for something that seemed secular. Then he ran through his chest of drawers and couldn’t even find a white T-shirt to wear. In a box under the bed he found black pants, some black socks, and a joke item his brother had sent him years ago, a black wife-beater undershirt. He put this on and looked in the mirror at his hairy shoulders. He seemed to remember seeing similar attire somewhere. His glossy black lace-up shoes contradicted his clothes, so he removed them along with his socks.
He left Nestor in the yard and drove off toward the gun shop, which was fourteen miles away at a crossroads, far away from the nearest town. The shop bore the name Lead Twilight Guns and Ammo and was perched at the side of the road, cantilevered over a cliff. He got out of his black car and was surprised when his feet pained him as he hobbled over to a heavy door crisscrossed with iron straps.
The six people in the building glanced up when he entered, and they did not look away. The wrinkled clerk behind the counter seemed as if he had met his share of bizarre weapons seekers in his time, but when he saw the scarred, barefoot, three-hundred-pound man wearing a coal-black wife-beater undershirt standing in his door, his mouth began to twitch.
Father Jim walked toward a counter showcase holding Beretta pistols and put his hands palms down on the glass. “I’m looking for a gun,” he said, rather too loudly, as his hearing had been damaged in the accident.
The old man swallowed. “I bet you air.” His eyes focused on the priest’s high, ruined forehead.
“An automatic shotgun.”
“What you aimin’ to do with that shotgun?” the man asked, taking a step back.
The question seemed odd to the priest, and he thought the salesman wanted the most basic answer. So he intoned, in a priestly voice, “Kill.”
The other clerk in the store, a skinny boy dressed in camouflage, slipped in behind the old man and asked, “You ain’t lookin’ to visit them what messed you up, is you? You know, the feds been watching us gun dealers like red-tail hawks.”
The priest looked down at the stainless-steel pistols in the case. The clerk’s question began to make sense. And then he forgot it. “I need a Browning Auto-5 in nice condition.”
The clerks looked at each other, slightly relieved at the request for a hunting gun. “We got one in nice shape. You want to see it?”
Father Jim took the shotgun they handed him and looked it over as though it were a stick he’d picked up off his lawn, comprehending nothing about it, except that it was shiny and unworn. He gave it back. “How much is it?”
“Seven hundred,” the old man said. “Plus tax.”
“Okay,” Father Jim said.
The young clerk put the shotgun back in the rack, but kept a hand on it. “You mean you want it?”
“Yes.”
The boy furrowed his brow and looked closely at the priest, at the still eye, then the roving one, at the trembling fingers. “You ain’t never like been in the nuthouse or nothing, has you?”
“Not that I remember.”
“We sell to somebody been in the institution,” he said more respectfully, “the feds’ll send us to Leavenworth for ten years.”
“That’s a long time, isn’t it?” the priest sang.
“You got to fill out a form 4473, then we do a background check on you. You ain’t done nothing can keep us from selling you a gun, has you?”
When he heard that, Father Jim became anxious, wondering if there was a statute against clergymen purchasing firearms. “No, no.”
The old man narrowed his eyes. “You kind of scary lookin’, fella. You ain’t planning nothing bad, I hope. We sell you a gun and you do something bad, they’ll put us in the same cell with you.”
“No, no. I was buying the gun to give to a friend of mine who’s in trouble.”
The two clerks just stared at him, and one of the customers tugged on the bill of his ball cap and said, “Oh, Lordy,” and headed for the door.
The clerks asked him to sit in a chair by the entrance and fill out a form while they set up a phone call for the background check. “You don’t know my name,” he told them.
“Just you work on the form there, feller,” the old clerk said. “We got things under control.”
He waited for half an hour, studying the shop, watching other people look at ammunition, bows and arrows. Finally the younger clerk came out from a back room, took the form out of the priest’s hand, and told him he’d failed the background check. That he’d have to leave.
“Well, all right,” he said, and got to his feet. Then he remembered to ask, “But what failed me?”
The clerk was walking backward. “Uh, we can’t sell a gun to somebody who ain’t got no shoes.”
Father Jim stepped out into the parking lot and was immediately arrested by two sheriff’s deputies almost as large as he was, handcuffed, and placed in a cruiser. They told him they were holding him for a federal gun violation. He was taken to Sap Valley, the county seat, where he was sent to a room to meet with an ATF agent who happened to be in the district on other matters.
The agent was a severe little man of about forty, thin as a teenage girl. “So, you are Mr. James Bowman?”
Father Jim smiled. “That’s me.”
“And you attempted to purchase a Browning semi-automatic shotgun at the Lead Twilight gun store?”
“I sure did.”
Here the agent paused and looked at him blankly. “For what purpose?”
For the first time Father Jim felt a little buzz of fear. The feeling was like hearing a distant train whistle when he was about to cross the tracks. The fact that he had been arrested and handcuffed and brought to a dingy room made of dented Sheetrock affected him not in the least. But the little man’s voice contained a trace of governmental demon, a connection to knotted regulations more difficult to understand than religious mystery, which at least could be believed through faith, as many arbitrary governmental strictures could not. “I wanted to give it to a friend.”
The agent straightened his back. “Why couldn’t your friend buy it for himself?”
“Well, he’s poor.”
“What’s your friend’s name?” The agent spoke his words so quickly it took a few seconds for Father Jim to comprehend them.
“Nestor Alvarez. He lives about ten miles from here.”
The agent’s face became a rock. He left the room without a word, and Father Jim began to pray silently, without knowing exactly what to pray for. He had no idea why he had been arrested. For an hour he sat in the room, which was severely air-conditioned. His bare feet stuck to the tile floor.
Finally, the door swung open and the agent held up a handful of papers. “Mr. Bowman, you’re under arrest on federal charges.”
The priest’s still eye tried to move. “Charges? You mean, like a bill? How much is it?”
“Being a straw buyer for an undocumented alien who is also an indicted felon is nothing to joke about. Your young Mr. Alvarez is awaiting trial for felony theft and is out on bail.”
Father Jim nodded. “Yes. He’ll come by next week to cut my grass. It grows like crazy this time of year.” Circuits in the priest’s brain were firing like an accident at a fireworks stand.
The agent studied Father Jim’s eyes. The left one was starting to roam like a bubble in a spirit level. “Hey, have you ever been diagnosed with mental problems?”
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