by A. R. Moxon
Past the nave, the room opens up onto the arms of the cruciform, leading to the bathrooms on the left and, on the right, a massive modern kitchen, where bread and biscuits are cooked in the morning and side dishes for the barbecue are prepared in the afternoon, and where immense freezers hold the meat. Beyond this intersection, the choir holds a scattering of unmatched comfy chairs surrounding a large jukebox, whose base glows from the slowly bubbling golden liquid within. Still farther, against the back wall, presides the square and bulky wooden presence of Monseigneur Ex—but Julius, as disinterested in confession as he is interested in finding a plate of meat, barely spares Monseigneur Ex a glance.
The Sunday barbecue’s a tradition at the Neon: Brothers Brock and Jack light the two massive cookers and bring the meat out of the deep freeze. One barrel they crowd with weenies and patties, the other they load with ribs and beef tips and brisket. The residents of Checkertown gather to smell the meat cooking: kids first—some of them urchins damp with filth, others well-scrubbed and accompanied by parents—and then other dwellers from Domino City: workers from Slanty’s or scavengers from the blasted factories, cloaked in the sweat and the stench of the day’s work, a pimp or two along the margin, strutting with his girls, girls without their pimps, even the gangsters or the occasional shiny-suit boss; they come, the ever-hungry and the always-fed, the heavily armed and the defenseless, strong or weak they come, lured by the smell of cooking meat marinating in a sweet sauce whose secret composition Brother Jack swears never to reveal, they come lured by promise of company within a safe space…for those who come armed have learned to keep their heaters tucked, or face the humiliation of a showdown with the fearless priest of the Neon Chapel. They congregate on the large grassy empty lot upon which the Neon Chapel has been built, paper plates floppy with meat juice, stomachs full. Somebody drives a vehicle onto the grass, blasting music. There’s dancing, the spectacle of the young posturing for the young, the squeals of children chasing one another across the grass. A bottle is passed around, knots of conversation begin and continue and melt into one another. Some congregate for hours, resting in the sacred temporal ether of a good meal, tarrying long after Julius and the other brothers and sisters have retired within or gone off to other errands, while Brock and Jack scrub the steamers clean and store them dry and gleaming, ready for their meaty work the following Sunday.
Donk never shows. His presence wouldn’t match the narrative he’s built about himself. Still, the barbecue’s allowed to exist because of Donk, who managed, at what Julius assumes involved some significant level of personal risk, to get Ralph Mayor on the right side of it. It hadn’t been a sure thing. Offering free food is an act of civil disobedience on Loony Island, after all, where Ralph provides. In the end, Donk sold the event to Ralph as a sort of team-building event for the gangs, with overall stability and brand management as side benefits. Other concessions to Ralph regarding food delivery and trash pickup had been made to smooth the road, concessions that Julius doesn’t like to think about, much less talk about, but the priest had balked at calling it “The Mayor’s Dinner,” Ralph’s original request. How the hell Donk convinced Ralph to back off from that point of contention, Julius has no idea. Knowing what he now knows, the priest sometimes experiences the gripping feeling you get in the guts when you remember a near miss, thinking of the confidence with which he “negotiated” with Donk about the barbecue, completely unaware of how little leverage he held, how narrow was the road upon which he walked, how far the drop, and just how much Donk had done to keep him from tipping over into it.
Julius walks barefoot though the crowd, greeting friends he recognizes and many others who recognize him, and, as he takes his place in line for a plate, he notices, scattered around the usual throng, a noticeable quantity of terrycloth. The loonies are meant to return to the Wales at night—they’ve been given strict instruction to return during this trial balloon, or so the newspapers report—but some have found the weekly meal instead. And, once again, winding through the crowd, immune to hostile glance, a man in red, his wood sword swinging, swinging…
Brother Jack raises his eyebrows. “Done early, ain’t you,” he mutters.
Jack’s understated as always; really, the priest’s shockingly early for a man who holds such precise a schedule. Unsure even how to begin explaining, Julius simply nods. “Seen Nettles?”
Brother Jack points the tongs. “Expect you’d find her inside.”
It’s welcome news. Most nights Julius would relish mixing with the crowd, but after everything he’s seen today, he needs common sense and calm; he needs Nettles. The Neon’s early joiner, Nettles, the calm at the center of their storms, the brick holding down the rest of their unsecured lids; Nettles will have some ideas about the flickering man, and even if she doesn’t, she’ll be able to lend some perspective. Balancing his plate one-handed, Julius slips back inside.
Nettles lives in the ground-level cell on the right, farthest from the entrance, and she’s home as expected; Julius sees the light glowing from within on the sides of her curtain. He makes for this haven, but before he can reach it, he’s interrupted by a voice coming up from behind:
“There you are, Captain!”
Julius stops, closes his eyes—Oh, shit. Turning, he can see that yes, it’s the stuttering loony from this morning, glasses slightly askew on his face, grinning like a long dog who just got some meat—which, Julius reflects, is probably what he just got, since he’s holding an empty, but greasy, plate.
“Eye eye I found the place, just like you said I would!”
“Glad you did,” Julius says, as graciously as he can manage, given this frustration of his intentions. “You’re welcome here.” Look at him. He’s a spectacle in spectacles: a stork-like figure in tatty bathrobe and greasy hair, a single bird from a flock set loose upon a far harsher world than any of them should have been expected to deal with. The loony, having achieved his objective—contact with a familiar face—now seems unfurnished with any further plan or recourse. He stands. He sways. It’s getting awkward. It’s enough to make a street priest wish he were anywhere else; even in some board meeting with his proxy and his multi-tabbed spreadsheets and a bunch of conservative haircuts perched atop a series of very serious business suits.
“Listen…Sterling. It’s certainly nice to make your acquaintance—”
“Whoa, now. Who gave you my name?” The loony takes a step backward. Julius points to the HELLO MY NAME IS sticker, still visible on the musty shirt secreted beneath the city-issue bathrobe; he’s wearing it unbelted and open. The skinny loon looks down, sees his name, and closes the robe, hands clutched to his chest, in a gawky pantomime of virginal modesty.
“Don’t call me Sterling Shirker, Captain—call me what the rest of them call me. Call me Tennessee,” he says. “Just Tennessee. Just Tennessee. Just Tennessee. To ream ream remind me I’m not ever going back there never going back never going back there. There’s bad folks in Pigeon Forge, and I don’t want anything more to do with them or their boxes or their fountain.”
“No problem…Tennessee,” Julius says, walking to the nearest chair in the choir—an overstuffed armchair with a floral chintz pattern the color of mustard. “But you’re not wearing your last name on your clothes, you know, so telling it to me was an unnecessary goddamn giveaway.” He says it kindly, but with what he hopes is finality, kneels for a brief blessing, then sits with his plate, figuring—If you’ve got to listen to this guy, at least make yourself comfortable while you do it, and eat your grub before it gets ice cold….
Tennessee, following behind, seems not to have heard. “I understand this is a place that hel, that hel, that hel hel helps people out,” he says. He sits in the nearest chair—a leather loveseat with broken springs. His ass sinks halfway to the floor, putting his skinny knees up near his ears, making him resemble a bespectacled grasshopper. “A say say safe place.”
“That’s right,�
�� Julius says, cautiously. “Pretty sure you got that understanding from me.”
“Okay, then, that’s good,” Tennessee exhales dramatically. “I need a safe play play place. I’ve got trouble after me.”
“Great,” said Julius after a long pause, perhaps less enthused about the notion of bad trouble on the way than Tennessee had hoped.
“So. What do I have to do?” Tennessee asks.
“Do?”
“To join up. Stay here with your gang. Huddle up under your roof.”
“The same thing everybody else who’s joined had to do,” Julius says. “Which is to want to join, and then to do it.”
“I don’t follow.”
Julius smiles. “Few do.”
“I have to do something, Captain. I have to show my value. I know how I’m perceived.”
“How are you perceived?”
“And I’m afraid.”
“Right. ‘Bad trouble after you.’ I know.”
“But no, but what if they’re, what if they’re ry ry right?”
“About…?”
“When they say I’m crazy. What if I am crazy?”
Julius stifles a sigh, thinks—I guess it’s going to be a conversation, then. If you don’t mind watching me eat while I talk, buddy, I don’t mind talking while I eat. He’s somebody, clearly. He’s in need, clearly. Since when have you required a person to present any other qualifications, in order to get your time and attention? To Tennessee he says: “Does it make you afraid, the idea of being crazy?”
The loony pulls a face. “Who wants to be crazy, Captain?”
“OK. So what makes you worry about your sanity?”
Tennessee gives a sleeve-flapping gesture toward the unseen crowd on the other side of the chapel doors. “They say my story sounds crazy.”
“What else?”
“No no no no no nobody believes me, Captain. Sometimes I don’t even believe mice mice mice mice myself.”
Julius smiles, sadly and knowingly. “That’s a lonesome meal for sure, buddy,” he says, beginning to suspect he’s talking to himself as much as Tennessee. “But having people agree with a delusion doesn’t make it less a delusion. And having nobody agree with a truth doesn’t make it any less a truth.”
“So you think I’m not crazy?”
“The question for me about you isn’t one of crazy or not. It’s this: Do I think you’re crazier than the baseline usual crazy the rest of us live in?”
“Well?”
Julius, having reached the limitations of fork and knife, picks up the ribs. “That’s a toughie, Tennessee. I won’t lie to you; you’re stranger than most. But strange isn’t crazy, and normal isn’t sane. What I’ve heard of your story strikes me as unlikely, but look—let’s think of something else unlikely. For example, if you said to me, I think I can eat two dozen potatoes in an hour, I’d find that unlikely, but we could test it and you might surprise me. But even if you failed, well, we’d only know you weren’t able to eat twenty-four potatoes that particular time. So that would suggest only probabilities. It wouldn’t prove you couldn’t do it. For your situation, I don’t see the scientific remedy, short of going to Pigeon Fork and poking around for evidence.”
“Pigeon Forge, and I’m not never going back there, there’s bad trouble there.”
“Well then, there’s your answer. You have all the proof you’ll ever get, and maybe all you’ll ever need. Just stay away from that part of the earth, and live as happy as you can.”
“What, then? You believe me?”
Julius tosses shinyclean rib bones to his plate, sucks smackingly upon sauce-soiled fingers, dabs with his napkin. “I don’t go that far. But I don’t disbelieve you, either. And I will say this: Your story isn’t the strangest one I haven’t disbelieved. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve failed to disbelieve. And you wouldn’t believe what I’m about to ask somebody else to believe. So stick around. And, if you find you can’t live a sane life, be encouraged. I haven’t managed that trick yet myself, nor have any of your new roommates—” What the hell, thinks Julius, I suppose we have a new Neon Brother—“nor did Elvis Presley ever manage it, nor Napoleon, nor Cleopatra nor Marilyn Monroe, either, and neither have any of the kings or peasants who crawled and fought and died on the earth since lungs were first invented by an over-ambitious mudfish—which is also science, I think.” Seized by an urge he can’t explain, he reaches out and places a benedictory hand on Tennessee’s head. “Go. Live a peaceful life. Let sanity worry about sanity.” He sees the loony’s eyes go wide with…what? Wonder? Confusion? He seems on the verge of something unpredictable: speaking in tongues, screaming, weeping, yodeling, confessing the hidden truths of the universe, barking like a dog, purring like a—
“And get yourself back inside Monseigneur Ex,” Sister Nettles calls, unseen, from her cell nearby, breaking the spell. “No more bothering Jules with your story when there’s a perfectly good confessor around to hear it.” To Julius’s surprise, this interjection doesn’t make the jitterbug jump. Instead he just calls: “Yes, ma’am!” and scoots over to Monseigneur Ex, closing the door behind.
“I guess you’ve met Tennessee already, then,” Julius says to the open air.
“I guess I have, Jules,” comes the mellow voice from behind him.
“I think I just recruited him,” Julius says.
“I’m certainly glad you realized it,” she says. “Because he recruited himself hours ago. Come over and sit awhile.”
Nettles has her curtain pinned back on the choir side; an open invitation to visitors. Julius wanders over to her elegant cell and sits in the chair appointed near the opening. She nods hello without looking up. Short, sunburnt, hair in a kerchief, wearing a blue brocaded caftan, perched on a stool, knitting. Julius watches her. She’s the eldest of their number, as the gray of her hair and the crease of her face will attest, but she holds a vitality that puts the rest of them to shame. It’s something beyond physical prowess, it’s…presence, Julius supposes. An undefeatable consistency, a diamond sharpness to her particular way of being, which is direct but cheerful, pragmatic, almost hard-nosed, but optimistic. Her eyes are flint chips. Her machine-mangled hands remain unhidden, and she uses them expressively when she talks without a thought to shame. Not that she lacks physical skills. She requires almost no sleep, as far as Julius can tell. The last to bed, the first to rise, and it’s impossible to catch her napping. She begins work in her garden in the deep of night before the light comes, then on through the sunrise and all the way until noon, when she rests. Amazingly quick with those knitting needles, too; before the accident she could have gutted a live sardine swimming underwater; given her limitations, what she’s doing with yarn is damn near miraculous. Look at her go—even diminished, she could have kept her factory job.
Julius and Nettles sit in the comfortable near-silence. Now he’s here, the priest finds he’s wary of speaking; he needs some time to order his thoughts, and it’s good to sit with a full belly and think, or not think, in her presence. From across the transept, the juke is playing; Ella Fitzgerald sings the Porgy and Bess songbook in tones like cask-aged single malt…Methuselah lived nine hundred years…and, from the confessional, Tennessee can now be heard. Even without trying, Julius can still catch some rather predictable words: “pigeon” and “forge” and “Tennessee” and “Tennessee” and “Tennessee”…oh he made his home in that fish’s ab-do-men…“never go go going back, ever, not never,” the reedy voice of Tennessee rising until you couldn’t help but hear…but Julius stops himself. He knows with superstitious certainty any breach of previously-established trust—eavesdropping, say, even upon an unaware subject—might work strange alchemy on the Neon Fellowship’s relational structure, kill the trust binding these disparate cells into a unified organism, break down their inexplicable atomy, make their relational gluons less gluey. Tennessee’s confession holds n
o variance from the usual incomprehensible patter he’s freely spewed today on the street—but no matter; probity must prevail. Father Julius holds the concept of confession at arm’s length, considering it presumptive for any to dare hold the keys of penance or reconciliation, even—perhaps especially—a priest. This from hard experience. Back in his lean-to days, the failed and lonely days when he was still building the Neon singlehanded, when he still felt compelled by the pressure to do traditionally priestly things, he’d installed a real confessional, and had posted hours for any who wished to seek absolution. He sat each day on the hard bench awaiting customers in vain, passing time by scribbling his memoirs for no audience other than himself, lonely as Gandhi’s barbecue fork.
After a month of this, Julius left the booth for the last time and left the Neon’s worksite, jogging at random until he chanced upon a hardware store. There he purchased an axe with a heavy head and a sturdy pine handle, returned, hacked the confessional into staves and in the afternoon burned the pieces out on the street, his pamphlets the kindling, and on the blaze he roasted weenies and toasted marshmallows purchased at Ralph’s. The kids had come first, and then some of the parents, and then the junkies, day-sober, driven mad by the smell of burning pig snout and lips. They were followed by the gangs, the boxcar-bangers, the factory workers coming off shift, assorted riff-raff. The bluebirds rolled by in their squad car, just once, and Julius had thought the party was over, but the cops apparently decided a bonfire in the middle of a city street wasn’t worth cracking the car door over, not in Loony Island, anyway. He’d burned every one of his fingers on skewers and learned more about those around them and the state of their souls than he’d ever gotten from wearing a groove in the confessional bench. The other extraordinary thing: Members of all the gangs were represented, yet that night no guns were drawn, no fights broke out, and nobody got the old sharpened aluminum “howdy” between the ribs. Donk’s doing. Sensing opportunity, Donk had surreptitiously sent over some kegs, extending the party into the night. Julius eventually got into his first organized fight down at the gutted factories. Lured into it by Donk, whose acquaintance he’d just made. The priest’s opponent was a mean bright-eyed tough named Felix with a snaggletooth and jet-black hair, a nasty fighter with a pot belly of solid muscle and big mitts you could tell would feel like a couple of cement watermelons on your jawbone and eye sockets. He had limbs like steel rope knotted into extravagant and painful shapes, and most of the wagers were placed in his favor, but Julius made him circle and dance, and, when at last Felix’s leather lungs could no longer pay the cardiovascular tax levied against them, the priest had closed in and started working those bright eyes. He bested Felix late in round five. The boxcar-bangers—a group of old toughs (and alleged firebugs) who lived nearby in a few old boxcars left behind on a stretch of long-abandoned track—crowned him a hero, carried him around on their shoulders down to their clubhouse, where they plied him with grain whiskey and taught him disgusting and wonderful songs. The accidental beginning of the Neon Order, because that night Brock, one of the bangers, crashed in the chapel. Julius never asked him to leave.