“My brain has been operated on several times.”
“But in spite of that, you knew that Mr. Alvarez was an indicted felon?”
“I guess so. He stole a shotgun, after all.”
He looked at the agent’s face and saw that he was experiencing some kind of incomprehensible happiness.
—
Father Jim was put in a cell where he had an extended conversation with a toothless meth addict recently blinded in a lab explosion. Father Jim explained how he could get him into a program that would provide false teeth and recommended an eye surgeon in Raleigh who sometimes did free work on accident victims.
The next day the priest was allowed to call his father, who drove over from Charlotte with a lawyer friend. After a long discussion with the sheriff and the ATF agent, the sheriff was willing to let the priest go. The agent, however, insisted on proceeding toward a federal indictment.
The lawyer, a distinguished gentleman whose flowing white hair trembled when he looked at the ATF man, told him, “Surely you have more dangerous individuals to pursue.”
“He broke a federal statute,” the agent said.
The lawyer shook his head. “As usual, you’re going after low-hanging fruit and leaving alone the serious perpetrators who are harder to find.” He raised his chin and added, “Or more dangerous.”
A mean little smile slid across the agent’s lips. “Everybody who breaks the law is a target.”
The priest’s old father, still straight in the back, said, “Yes, especially those who won’t use you as one.”
Father Jim then remembered the lawyer, Mr. Randoll, head legal counsel for the archdiocese and a partner in one of the largest firms in the Carolinas. He even recalled one of his famous suits, when his team crucified an IRS agent for dragging an old widow into court. He was amazed that he could call up these details, delighted not only with the memory of the incident, but also with the fact that his brain had reached back into its history and plucked something out of its fragmented darkness. Maybe, as his neurologist had suggested, stress had a beneficial effect on rejuvenation.
After his father arranged for an enormous bail, he drove Father Jim back to his house. While the priest took a shower, he confiscated the wife-beater T-shirt and hid it in the trunk of his car. His father, a former airline pilot, was the size of his son, balding, muscular, smooth faced, and placid. He was sitting on the bed when the priest came back from the shower wearing a set of black pajamas. “How are you feeling, Jimmy?”
At first his son thought this was a puzzling query about his sense of touch. Then he said, “I feel fine.” He sat next to his father and the mattress rose up on the other side.
“I’m wondering if you ought to ask the bishop for more leave time. I mean, not totally. But for now, maybe you ought not to drive so much.”
Father Jim nodded. “I can get Nestor to drive me.”
His father looked away for a moment, then back. “Is he a good man, Jimmy?”
“I think he is.”
His father stood up and walked into the little kitchen. “I’m going to fix us some coffee. You want some?”
Father Jim was still thinking about Nestor. “He’s just down on his luck.”
“You always thought everybody was as good as everybody else,” his father said from the kitchen. “Thinking that way can be dangerous.”
Father Jim frowned. Something happened inside his head like a cloud drifting clear of the sun. He thought about Jesus palling around with Judas. Sharing food with him. Teaching him things about life. How to get through it. He thought about this a long time.
The next week the bishop, a kindly seventy-five-year-old Irishman, called and had a long conversation with him. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was pressing for an indictment, and the bishop said it would be a good idea if Father Jim would take himself off the Mass and confession availability list, so to speak. And stop driving. However, he could perform other duties, if a pastor needed him.
Father Jim apologized for all the trouble he had caused. “I just stumbled into a world of regulations I didn’t know were there,” he told him. “It’s like getting blamed for walking into a spiderweb at night.”
“I know, James,” the bishop commiserated. “Sometimes Washington thinks it’s the Vatican.”
A few days after their talk, Father Jim was still worried but also heartened by his distress, feeling that his brain was reknitting itself because of the pressure of facing jail time. He heard a knock at the door, and it was Nestor, who had been dropped off with a borrowed push mower and some pruning snips.
“Hola, Nestor.”
“ ’Sup,” Nestor said. He seemed a little drunk, and Father Jim was thankful he hadn’t been driving. “Father, I hear you’re in a lot of trouble because of me. Some scary government men came by where I stay and tried to say I asked you to buy me a weapon. When they left, my wife was crying. I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Me neither,” the priest admitted. “Come in, I just made coffee.”
The two of them sat down at a shaky table in the kitchen, and Nestor described how the ATF had notified Immigration about his presence in the country, and now he and his wife were in danger of being deported.
“You want me to go see someone at that office?” Father Jim asked.
Nestor put up his hands. “No, no, Father. My uncle now feels sorry for me and has asked a man who helps Mexicans with immigration problems to help. Please, don’t do anything yourself.” The yard man looked distressed.
“Está seguro?”
“Father, I can speak English. Lately, better than you,” he said, smiling. But then the smile faded, and Nestor looked down at his hands. “You know, none of this would have happened if I didn’t steal.”
Father Jim poured him a cup of coffee at the stove and sweetened it the way his friend liked, bringing it to the table along with his own. “Well, you’ve had your shame, and your regret as well, so now it’s time to move on.”
“I can do that. But what if, you know, they put you in jail?”
The priest experienced a little jolt of alarm and took a long swallow of coffee, hoping it would flow straight to his brain to speed his thoughts. “Don’t worry about it. John the Baptist was locked up in jail. Daniel, Saint Paul, Jeremiah—the Bible’s full of jailbirds.” They sat drinking their coffee in silence, the priest looking through his kitchen window to a storm-damaged tree loaded down with apples. He realized his vision was improving. He closed his good eye and saw a blur of fruit.
—
Nestor was sent back to Nogales with his wife, and Father Jim’s case went to trial. In a three-day ordeal the federal authorities, with the testimony of the gun store clerks, who grudgingly gave their evidence, proved beyond a doubt that he had acted as a proxy gun buyer. His defense lawyer did what he could, but the judge was very rigid in his instructions to the jury, and the next day the group of twelve cranky retirees and habitually unemployed individuals found him guilty.
Father Jim sat in court wearing his Roman collar and for a long moment didn’t understand why his father was hugging him and a deputy was carefully putting him in handcuffs. After a moment of panic he realized what was happening to him and said, “I’m glad Nestor isn’t here to see the outcome of all this.” The statement made sense, and his father studied his son’s face a moment, nodding to no one in particular.
Father Jim was sent to jail in a special West Virginia prison filled with politicians, tycoons, confidence men, hedge fund managers, gamblers, and finance company executives, every one of them his least favorite kind of person. The local bishop arranged for him to give services in the cramped chapel, but only two Italian gentlemen regularly showed up, wearing sunglasses in the windowless room. The prison itself was a former county jail with a central hall bordered by rows of barred cells, though the doors were never slid closed unless the occupants wanted them to be. The bunks were wide and held thick mattresses, two to a cell, thou
gh some prisoners had the cages to themselves. There was a lounge with books and a television, a small gym, and a large grassy yard with basketball courts painted with fresh green enamel. Father Jim kept working out, getting a bit leaner on prison food.
During the year he was jailed, his mind began to come back to him like a book dropped in the ocean and washed up on shore, all there, but slightly warped. A little hair began to sprout from his tortured scalp. When the two Italian gentlemen went to confession, Father Jim wished he were a judge so he could add years to their sentences. But, still, he transferred forgiveness to them, and all that year they were loyal to him, sweeping the chapel, sharing sausage sent from home, and passing along little hand signals that he never understood when they slid by him in the hall.
One day an over-the-hill professional football player, an ex-kicker, was put into the cell with him. The man liked to wash his hair every day, then blow-dry it for an hour while talking loudly about himself and all the important people he had known in his life. Every day he spoke at length about his significant friends. For many days Father Jim patiently listened to him brag about the things these people owned, how much everything was worth, how smart and influential they were. The third week, Father Jim politely asked him to be quiet so he could concentrate on his prayers. The man, who went by the last name of Sledge, ignored him and began to recount all the objects he had bought in his life, things no one in the building—no one in the whole West Virginia prison system—could appreciate, and then came a litany of fine cars, cigarette boats, yachts, private rail cars, ritzy watches, diamonds for his many women, swimming pools, horses, engraved machine guns, airplanes. The priest would sometimes walk down the hall, stand by the cell of the old embezzlers, and lean against the wall to read his prayer book.
Eventually, his cellmate began to follow him, decanting his life. One time, Father Jim looked up and told the man to just be quiet. Sledge pulled a comb from his pocket and raised his arms high, combing his well-trained hair in long sweeps. “You make me be quiet,” he said.
The priest’s brain began to boil like a kettle. His vision cleared. He didn’t know how to fight, but something was rising through his neck, some power. “You’ll be quiet enough in the grave,” he told him, an appropriate thing to say, Father Jim figured, to a person who valued the trinkets of the present life too much. The over-the-hill football player didn’t see it that way, and knocked Father Jim down with one punch to the face. When the priest couldn’t get back up, Sledge straddled his belly and punched him again, opening up one of the old scars above his eye, which began streaming tears and blood.
As soon as the other prisoners saw that the big priest was not going to get up and defend himself, that he was patiently taking punches, holding his prayer book to his heart, the two Italian gentlemen and a Polish acquaintance pulled the Sledge off and dragged him into the cell with the embezzlers, two cousins who once had worked in New York City government. The priest heard his cellmate holler, then shriek. Next, he called for his mama. The guards bounded in, amazed because they hadn’t broken up a fight in many months. They dragged Father Jim down to his cell, where they helped him patch himself up with Band-Aids. Two hours later, Sledge shambled down from the dispensary and showed himself at the cell door, one leg buckled inward, all the buttons ripped off his shirt, and blood seeping through his pants at his knees and crotch.
“Can I go to bed?” he croaked.
Father Jim looked up from his prayers. “Will you try to hurt me again?”
The former kicker blinked through his tumbled hair. “Look what they did to me. Are you crazy?”
Father Jim chuckled. “Used to be,” he said. “But come in and lie down.”
—
After his release from prison, the bishop told him it would be a few months, depending, before he would be allowed to handle a large Mass or a complex Lenten observance, though he could fill in for vacationing parish secretaries, bring Communion to the sick, or participate in children’s church. Father Jim was disappointed. He wanted to be assigned full duties in a busy church and thought he had come a long way since the accident. At night, after the TV news and one beer, he’d meditate on his unlikely survival. The car he’d driven had been crushed to the size of a motorcycle. The only reason he’d lived was he’d been thrown out of the vehicle because he’d not worn his seatbelt. What made him forget to fasten it? Why was he still here?
One Friday Father Jim was in Charlotte for a doctor’s appointment and got a call on his new cell phone from a friend who pastored a large city parish and needed help on the weekend. He said that Father Jim could stay at the rectory, pay a few hospital visits, hear confessions on Saturday afternoon, and then handle the youngest children on Sunday. Father Jim said he’d be happy to help.
On Sunday he found the annex where the children would gather after being excused from the main service. The tall lady in charge couldn’t hide her surprise at the sight of him, even though he was wearing a black golf hat to hide as much scarring as he could. She introduced herself and reminded him of what to do. “Father Ralph gives pretty long homilies, so we usually have a brief snack time after you read them a book.” And then the children came in. The six- and seven-year-olds regarded him warily, but most of the other children were younger and ran past the legs of this big anonymous adult into the corner of the large room they knew as the story place. He remembered that they were people of the blissful lower regions of life and that nothing above a grown-up’s knees was worthy of their concern. Father Jim walked into the carpeted area, looked around for a big person’s chair, and, seeing none, sat on the floor Indian-style. In his lap he spread open a large illustrated book containing the parable of the Good Samaritan.
“We’ve got a great story today,” he announced. At once, the three- to five-year-olds flocked to him. A pair sat on each thigh, three taller children leaned against his back, straining to look over his shoulders at the colorful drawings, and the rest formed a tight semicircle facing him, their bright faces baptizing him with light. Father Jim began to read in an expressive voice, pointing out details in the pictures. He explained that some Jewish people did not especially like Samaritans, and they would not expect a Samaritan to help the Jewish man beaten up by robbers. He looked around him slowly, into each child’s morning-clear eyes. He usually thought up a question at this point.
“So who can get this big question right? Here it is. This is a big deal.” But he didn’t know what the question was. He looked in their eyes for at least five seconds, stalling. Then something popped into his head like an e-mail. “Why did God let the Jewish man get beaten up?” There was silence for a heartbeat or two, then a babble of answers, many answers. One four-year-old girl with blinding blonde hair said the Jewish man got beat up because he was mean to the Samaritans. From her perch on his left knee, a three-year-old with a face like a jewel said maybe the man stole a Samaritan’s cookie. That she wanted a cookie. A five-year-old with a missing tooth said maybe the Jewish guy was bragging and made somebody mad. A six-year-old, who was in the wrong group, a dour country boy wearing a pearl-button shirt, raised his hand and said, “My name is Bill. God wanted to teach the Jewish guy a lesson.”
“Teach him a lesson?” Father Jim’s mind still occasionally hit a bump in the road, and the comment jostled his thinking. “I don’t know, Bill. That sounds mean.”
“I think it’s the point,” the dour boy said. “I bet the guy who got beat up liked Samaritans and everybody else after he got better. He got a attitude adjustment.”
And then the baby girl on his left knee, who had never really ceased talking, asked, “Did you get beat up?” She stood on his thigh in her hard Sunday shoes, reached over the child next to her and touched the worst scar on his cheek with her feathery fingers.
“Well, sort of. I was run over by a train.”
The children all fell silent, and a treasury of small faces stared at him. “Did somebody come and help you?” a voice behind him asked.
&nb
sp; Father Jim frowned. “The ambulance crew. I guess they were like Samaritans on salary.”
The children didn’t understand the joke, and by the movement of their eyes he saw them study his face and hands.
“Did it hurt real bad?” dour Bill asked.
“Oh, no. Not at first, anyway. They brought me to the hospital and took good care of me.”
“Did they give you a cookie?” the baby girl on his left knee asked.
“I don’t think so.” Other questions followed, and gradually he began to feel like the Jewish fellow on the side of the road must have felt. The children were worried about him, and their concern was like medicine. Even so, his burdened legs were cramping, a thousand needles shooting through them. He started to get up, but the tiny blonde girl on his right thigh keened, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Who got the big question right?”
Father Jim settled back and realized that no one could know the reason for pain, unless it was that getting hurt was rewarded by visitations like the one around him. He grinned a little. “I’m thinking all of you are right.”
The baby girl jumped, landed a hand in his shirt pocket, and smiled in his face. “Snack time,” she yelled.
Sorry Blood
The old man walked out of Walmart and stopped dead, recognizing nothing he saw in the steaming Louisiana morning. He tried to step off the curb, but his feet locked up and his chest flashed with a burst of panic. The blacktop parking lot spread away from him, glittering with the enameled tops of a thousand automobiles. One of them was his, and he struggled to form a picture, but could not remember which of the family’s cars he had taken out that morning. He backstepped into the shade of the store’s overhang and sat on a displayed riding lawn mower. Putting his hands down on his khaki pants, he closed his eyes and fought to remember, but one by one things began to fall away from the morning, and then the day before, and the life before. When he looked up again, all the cars seemed too small, too bright and glossy, more like fishing lures. His right arm trembled, and he regarded the spots on the back of his hand with a light-headed embarrassment. He stared down at his Red Wing brogans, the shoes of a stranger. For half an hour, he sat on the mower seat, dizziness subsiding like a summer storm.
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