Signals

by Tim Gautreaux

  He looked over at her and smiled.

  “Doc,” she said, “you’re back in the saddle again. You can sit and listen as much as you can stand.”

  He touched the volume knob again and listened as the receiver thundered toward the end of act one, the tenor singing so hard Talis wondered how such intensity could be possible. The character he was playing was, after all, addressing a woman he had just met, no one very important on the world’s stage, a suffering soul who, at the end of the act, gives in to his pleading and sings “Io t’amo,” and it’s all over, for they are both enthralled, and the tenor, who was known to have a very bad heart, sings out over her ringing soprano as powerfully and earnestly as ever man sang, giving the last note as if determined to sacrifice his health, singing the great mystery, “Amor! Amor!”

  He clicked the set off and turned to her. “You’ve done a perfect job. Let’s celebrate and go to a really nice restaurant sometime this week.”

  She looked into the small living room at shelves filled with many thick textbooks. “No.” She shook her head. “You stay home and be a good listener.”

  He put his hand on the machine and looked it over carefully. Suddenly he began tearing out its speaker wires. He picked it up with a grunt and walked to the front door, struggling through it.

  “Hey, doc, where’re you going with that?” she called. “It’s fixed.”

  He didn’t answer but plodded down the steps to the little cement walk that lead to the street. Unsure if he could do it, Talis raised the receiver over his head, his face reddening. He turned and faced Janice, who was standing with her arms crossed just outside the door.

  “What are you doing? Are you nuts?”

  “Will you go out with me?”

  She shook her head, and her braids whipped her shoulders. “Won’t do that. We’re just too different.”

  It was then that Talis threw the receiver down to the walk, where it hit on one of its corners and broke apart in a shower of bright buttons, a flash of glass, and a splintering of wood. He raised his eyes to the porch, where Janice had covered her open mouth with a bright hand. Talis gestured operatically to the wreckage. “And now?”

  Janice watched, incredulous, as the capacitors unloaded and a crooked spirit of smoke rose from the shattered receiver. Her arms fell to her sides, palms forward. “It’ll never make another sound,” she said in a small voice.

  “I don’t care,” Talis told her.

  She raised her hands a bit, and said, “In that case, yes.”

  Good for the Soul

  Father Ledet took a scorching swallow of brandy and sat in an iron chair on the brick patio behind the rectory, hemmed in by walls of ligustrums stitched through with honeysuckle. His stomach was full from the Ladies’ Altar Society supper, where the sweet, sweet women of the parish had fed him pork roast, potato salad, and sweet peas, filling his plate and fussing over him as if he were an old spayed tomcat who kept the cellar free of rats. He was a big man, white-haired and ruddy, with gray eyes and huge spotted hands that could make a highball glass disappear. It was Thursday evening, and nothing much ever happened on Thursday evenings. The first cool front of the fall was noising through the pecan trees on the church lot, and nothing is so important in Louisiana as that first release from the sopping, buggy, overheated funk of the atmosphere. Father Ledet breathed deep in the shadow of a statue of Saint Francis. He took another long swallow, glad the assistant pastor was on a visit home to Iowa, and that the deacon wouldn’t be around until the next afternoon. Two pigeons lit on Saint Francis’s hands as if they knew who he was. Father Ledet watched the light fade and the hedges darken, and then looked a long time at the pint of brandy before deciding to pour himself another drink.

  When the phone rang in the rectory, he got up carefully and moved inside among the dark wood furnishings and dim holy light. It was a parishioner, Mrs. Clyde Arceneaux, whose husband was dying of emphysema.

  “We need you for the anointing of the sick, Father.”

  “Um, yes.” He tried to say something else, but the words were stuck back in his throat, the way dollar bills sometimes wadded up in the tubular poor box and wouldn’t drop down when he opened the bottom.

  “Father?”

  “Of course. I’ll just come right over there.”

  “I know you did it for him last week. But this time he might really be going, you know.” Mrs. Arceneaux’s voice sounded like she was holding back tears. “He wants you to hear his confession.”

  “Um.” The priest had known Clyde Arceneaux for fifteen years. The old man dressed up on Sunday and came to church, but stayed out on the steps, smoking with three other men as reverent as himself. As far as he knew, he’d never been to confession.

  —

  Father Ledet locked the rectory door and went into the garage to start the parish car, a venerable black Lincoln. He backed out onto the street, and when the car stopped, he still floated along in a drifting crescent, and he realized that he’d had maybe an ounce too much brandy. It occurred to him that he should call the housekeeper to drive him to the hospital. It would take only five minutes for her to come over, but then the old Baptist woman was always figuring him out, and he would have to endure Mrs. Scott’s roundabout questions and sniffs of the air in the car. Father Ledet felt his old mossy human side take over, and he began to navigate the streets of the little town on his own, stopping the car too far into the intersection at Jackman Avenue, clipping a curb on a turn into Bourgeois Street. The car had its logical movement, but his head had a motion of its own.

  —

  Patrolman Vic Garafola was parked in front of the post office talking to the dispatcher about a cow eating string beans out of Mrs. LeBlanc’s garden when he heard a crash in the intersection behind him. In his rearview he saw that a long black sedan had battered the side of a powder-blue Ford. He backed his cruiser up fifty feet and turned on his flashers. When he got out and saw his own parish priest sitting wide-eyed behind the steering wheel, he ran to the window.

  “You all right, Father?”

  The priest had a little red mark on his high forehead, but he smiled dumbly and nodded. Patrolman Garafola looked over to the smashed passenger-side door of a faded Crown Victoria. A pretty older woman sat in the middle of the bench seat holding her elbow. He opened the door and saw that Mrs. Mamie Barrilleaux’s right arm was obviously broken and her mouth was twitching with pain. Vic’s face reddened because it made him angry to see nice people get hurt when it wasn’t their fault.

  “Mrs. Mamie, you hurtin’ a lot?” he asked. Behind him, the priest walked up and put his hand on his shoulder. When the woman saw Father Ledet, her face was transfigured.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, just a little bump. Father, did I cause the accident?”

  The patrolman looked at the priest for an answer.

  “Mamie, your arm.” He let his hand fall and stepped back, and Vic could tell that the priest was shocked. He knew that Father Ledet was called out to give last rites to strangers at gory highway wrecks all the time, but this woman was the vice president of the Ladies’ Altar Society, which dusted the old church, put flowers on the altar, and knitted afghans for him to put on his lap in the drafty wooden rectory.

  “Father, Mrs. Mamie had the right of way.” Vic pointed to the stop sign behind the priest’s steaming car.

  “I am dreadfully sorry,” Father Ledet said. “I was going to the hospital to give the anointing of the sick, and I guess my mind was on that.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Barrilleaux cried. “Who’s that ill?”

  “Mrs. Arceneaux’s husband.”

  Another cruiser pulled up, its lights sparking up the evening. Mrs. Mamie nodded toward it. “Vic, can you take Father to the hospital and let this other policeman write up the report? I know Mrs. Arceneaux’s husband, and he needs a priest bad.”

  Vic looked down at his shoe. He wasn’t supposed to do anything like that. “You want to go on to the hospital and then I can bring you back here
, Father?”

  “Mamie’s the one who should go to the hospital.”

  “Shoo.” She waved her good hand at him. “I can hear the ambulance coming now. Go on, I’m not dying.”

  Vic could see a slight trembling in Mamie’s iron-gray curls. He put a hand on the priest’s arm. “Okay, Father?”

  “Yes, that would be fine.”

  They got into the cruiser and immediately Vic smelled the priest’s breath. He drove under the tunnel of oak trees that was Nadine Avenue and actually bit his tongue to keep from asking the inevitable question. But once they were in sight of the hospital, he could no longer stop himself. “Father, did you have anything to drink today?”

  The priest looked at him and blanched. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s on your breath. Whiskey.”

  “Brandy,” the priest corrected him. “Yes, I had some brandy after supper.”

  “How much?”

  “Not too much. Well, here we are.” Father Ledet got out before the patrol car had completely stopped. Vic radioed his location, parked, and went into the modern lobby to find a soft chair.

  —

  The priest knew the way to Clyde Arceneaux’s room. When he pushed open the door, he saw the old man in his bed, a few strands of smoky hair swept back, his false teeth out, his tobacco-parched tongue wiggling in his mouth like a parrot’s. Up close, Father Ledet could hear the hiss of the oxygen through the nasal cannula strapped to his face. He felt his deepest sorrow for the respiratory patients.

  “Clyde?”

  Mr. Arceneaux opened one eye and looked at the priest’s shirt. “The buzzards is circlin’,” he rasped.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Ah, Padre, I got a elephant standing on my chest.” He spoke slowly, more like an air leak than a voice. “Doris, she stepped out a minute to eat.” Clyde motioned with his eyes toward the door, and Father Ledet looked at his hands, which were bound with dark veins flowing under skin as thin as cigarette paper.

  “Is there something you’d like to talk about?” The priest heard the faint sound of a siren and wondered if gentle Mrs. Barrilleaux was being brought in to have her arm set.

  “I don’t need the holy oil no more. You can’t grease me so I can slide into heaven.” Clyde ate a bite of air. “I got to go to confession.”

  The priest nodded, removed a broad, ribbon-like vestment from his pocket, kissed it, and hung it around his neck. Mr. Arceneaux told the priest he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to confession, but he knew that Kennedy was president then, because it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he thought for sure a nuclear strike was coming. He began telling his sins, starting with missing Mass “damn near seven hundred fifty times.” Father Ledet was happy that Claude Arceneaux was coming to God for forgiveness, and in a very detailed way, which showed, after all, a healthy conscience. At one point the old man stopped and began to store up air for what the priest thought would be a new push through his errors, but when he began speaking again it was to ask a question.

  “Sure enough, you think there’s a hell?”

  Father Ledet knew he had to be careful. Saving a soul sometimes was like catching a dragonfly. You couldn’t blunder up to it and trap it with a swipe of the hand. “There’s a lot of talk of it in the Bible,” he said.

  “It’s for punishment?”

  “That’s what it’s for.”

  “But what good would the punishment do?”

  The priest sat down. The room did a quarter turn to the left and then stopped. “I don’t think hell is about rehabilitation. It’s about what someone might deserve.” He put his hand over his eyes and rubbed them for a moment. “But you shouldn’t worry about that, Clyde, because you’re getting the forgiveness you need.”

  Mr. Arceneaux looked at the ceiling, the corners of his flaccid mouth turning down. “I don’t know. There’s one thing I ain’t told you yet.”

  “Well, it’s now or never.” The priest was instantly sorry for saying this, and Clyde gave him a questioning look before glancing down at his purple feet.

  “I can’t hold just one thing back? I’d hate like hell to tell anybody this.”

  “Clyde, it’s God listening, not me.”

  “Can I just think it to God? I mean, I told you the other stuff. Even about the midget woman.”

  “If it’s a serious sin, you’ve got to tell me about it. You can generalize a bit.”

  “This is some of that punishment we were talkin’ about earlier. It’s what I deserve.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “I stole Nelson Lodrigue’s car.”

  Something clicked in the priest’s brain. He remembered bits of this event himself. Nelson Lodrigue owned an old Toronado that he parked next to the ditch in front of his house. The car had no mufflers and a huge eight-cylinder engine, and every morning at six o’clock sharp Nelson would crank the thing up and race the engine, waking most of his neighbors and all the dogs for blocks around. He did this for over a year, to keep the battery charged, he’d said. When it disappeared, Nelson put a big ad in the local paper offering a $50 reward for information, but no one came forward. The men in the Knights of Columbus talked about it for weeks.

  “That was around ten years ago, wasn’t it? And isn’t Nelson a friend of yours?” Nelson was another Sunday morning lingerer on the church steps.

  Mr. Arceneaux swallowed hard several times and waited a moment, storing up air. “Father, honest to God I ain’t never stole nothin’ before. My daddy told me thievin’ is the worst thing a man can do. I hated to take Nelson’s hot rod, but I was fixin’ to have a nervous breakdown from lack of sleep.”

  The priest nodded. “It’s good to get these things off your chest. Is there anything else?”

  Mr. Arceneaux shook his head. “I think we hit the high points. Man, I’m ashamed of that last one.”

  The priest gave him absolution and a small penance.

  Clyde tried to smile, his dark tongue tasting the air. “Ten Hail Marys? That’s a bargain, Father.”

  “If you want to do more, you could call Nelson and tell him what you did.”

  The old man thought for just a second. “I’ll stick with them little prayers for now.” Father Ledet got out his Missal and read a prayer over Mr. Arceneaux until his words were interrupted by a gentle snoring.

  —

  Vic sat in the lobby waiting for the priest to come down. It had been twenty minutes, and he knew the priest’s blood-alcohol level was ready to peak. He took off his uniform hat and began twirling it in front of him. He wondered what good it would do to charge the priest with drunk driving. Priests had to drink wine every day, and they liked the taste in the evening, too. A ticket wouldn’t change his mind about drinking for long. On the other hand, Father Ledet had ruined Mrs. Barrilleaux’s sedan that she had maintained as if it were a child for twenty years.

  A few minutes earlier, Vic had walked down the corridor and peeked into the room where they were treating her. He hadn’t let her see him, and he studied her face. Now he sat and twirled his hat, thinking. It would be painful for the priest to have his name in the paper attached to a DWI charge, but it would make him understand the seriousness of what he had done. Patrolman Garafola dealt with too many people who never understood the seriousness of what they were doing.

  The priest came into the lobby and the young policeman stood up. “Father, we’ll have to take a ride to the station.”

  “What?”

  “I want to run a Breathalyzer test on you.”

  Father Ledet straightened up, stepped close, and put an arm around the man’s shoulders. “Oh, come on. What good would that do?”

  Vic started to speak, but then motioned for the priest to follow him. “Let me show you something.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want you to see this.” They walked down the hall and through double doors to a triage area for emergency cases. There was a narrow window in a wall, and the po
liceman told the priest to look through it. An oxygen bottle and gauges partially blocked the view. Inside, Mrs. Barrilleaux sat on an examining table, a blue knot swelling in her upper arm. One doctor was pulling back on her shoulder while another twisted her elbow. On the table was a large, menacing syringe, and Mrs. Barrilleaux was crying, without expression, great patient tears. “Take a long look,” Vic said, “and when you get enough, come on with me.” The priest turned away from the glass and followed.

  “You didn’t have to show me that.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “That is the nicest woman, the best cook, the best—”

  “Come on, Father,” Vic said, pushing open the door to the parking lot. “I’ve got a lot of writing to do.”

  —

  Father Ledet’s blood-alcohol level was twice what the patrolman needed to write him up for DWI, to which he added running a stop sign and causing an accident with bodily injury. The traffic court suspended his license, and since he’d banged up the Lincoln before, his insurance company dropped his coverage as soon as their computers picked up the offenses.

  A week after the accident, he came into the rectory hall drinking a glass of tap water, which beaded on his tongue like a nasty oil. The phone rang and the glass jumped in his fingers. It was Mrs. Arceneaux again, who told him she’d been arguing with her husband, who wanted to tell her brother, Nelson Lodrigue, that he’d stolen his car ten years before. “Why’d you ask him to talk to Nelson about the stealing business? It’s got him all upset.”

  The priest didn’t understand. “What would be the harm in him telling Nelson the truth?”

  “Aw, no, Father. Clyde’s got so little oxygen in his brain he’s not thinking straight. He can’t tell Nelson what he did. I don’t want him to die with everyone in the neighborhood thinking he’s a thief. And Nelson, well, I love my brother, but if he found out my husband stole his old bomb, he’d make Clyde’s last days hell. He’s just like that, you know?”