‘Yes… ’
‘But you want her,’ the voice insisted. ‘Is it not so?’
‘Oh yes… ’
‘You shall have her. I am sure of it.’ There was something… pleasant about this. Far away he seemed to hear sweet voices singing foul words. Silver chimes… white faces… Ruthie Crockett’s voice. He could almost see her, hands cupping her titties, making them bulge into the V of her cardigan sweater in ripe white half-globes, whispering:
It was like drowning. Drowning in the old man’s red-rimmed eyes.
As the stranger came closer, Dud understood everything and welcomed it, and when the pain came, it was as sweet as silver, as green as still water at dark fathoms.
9
His hand was unsteady and instead of gripping the bottle the fingers knocked it off the desk and to the carpet with a heavy thump, where it lay gurgling good scotch into the green nap.
‘Shit!’ said Father Donald Callahan, and reached down to pick it up before all was lost. There was, in fact, not much to lose. He set what was left on the desk again (well back from the edge) and wandered into the kitchen to look for a rag under the sink and a bottle of cleaning fluid. It would never do to let Mrs Curless find a patch of spilled scotch by the leg of his study desk. Her kind, pitying looks were too hard to take on the long, grainy mornings when you were feeling a little low -
Yes, hung over, very good. Let’s have a little truth around here, by all means. Know the truth and it will set you free. Bully for the truth.
He found a bottle of something called E-Vap, which was not too far from the sound of violent regurgitation (‘E- Vap!’ croaked the old drunk, simultaneously crapping himself and blowing lunch), and took it back to the study. He was not weaving at all. Hardly at all. Watch this, Ossifer, I’m going to walk right up this white line to the stop light.
Callahan was an imposing fifty-three. His hair was silvery, his eyes a direct blue (now threaded with tiny snaps of red) surrounded by Irish laugh wrinkles, his mouth firm, his slightly cleft chin firmer still. Some mornings, looking at himself in the mirror, he thought that when he reached sixty he would throw over the priesthood, go to Hollywood, and get a job playing Spencer Tracy.
‘Father Flanagan, where are you when we need you?’ be muttered, and hunkered down by the stain. He squinted, read the instructions on the label of the bottle, and poured two capfuls of E-Vap onto the stain. The patch immediately turned white and began to bubble. Callahan viewed this with some alarm, and consulted the label again.
‘For really tough stains,’ he read aloud in the rich, rolling voice that had made him so welcome in this Parish after the long, denture-clicking peregrinations of poor old Father Hume, ‘allow to set for seven to ten minutes.’
He went over to the study window, which fronted on Elm Street and St Andrew’s on the far side.
Well, well, he thought. Here I am, Sunday night and drunk again.
If you went slow and if you continued to work (on his long, solitary evenings, Father Callahan worked on his Notes. He had been working on the Notes for nearly seven years, supposedly for a book on the Catholic Church in New England, but he suspected now and then that the book would never be written. In point of fact, the Notes and his drinking problem had begun at the same time. Genesis I: I-’In the beginning there was scotch, and Father Callahan said, Let there be Notes.’), you were hardly aware of the slow growth of drunkenness. You could educate your hand not to be aware of the bottle’s lessening weight.
It was eleven-thirty, and looking out the window he saw uniform darkness, broken only by the spotlight circle of the streetlight in front of the church. At any moment Fred Astaire would dance into it, wearing a top hat, tails, spats, and white shoes, twirling a cane. He is met by Ginger Rogers. They waltz to the tune of ‘I Got Dem 0l’ Kozmic E-Vap Blues Again.’
He leaned his forehead against the glass, allowing the handsome face that had been, in some measure at least, his curse sag into drawn lines of distracted weariness.
With his eyes closed he could see the darkness of the confessional booth, could feel his fingers sliding back the window and rolling up the shade on all the secrets of the human heart, could smell varnish and old velvet from the kneeling benches and the sweat of old men; could taste alkali traces in his saliva.
(I broke my brother’s wagon, I hit my wife, I peeked in Mrs Sawyer’s window when she was undressing, I lied, I cheated, I have had lustful thoughts, I, I, I)
He opened his eyes and Fred Astaire had not appeared yet. On the stroke of midnight, perhaps. His town was asleep. Except -
He glanced up. Yes, the lights were on up
He thought of the Bowie girl-no, McDougall, her name was McDougall now-saying in her breathy little voice that she had hit her baby and when he asked how often, he could sense (could almost hear) the wheels turning in her mind, making a dozen times five, or a hundred a dozen. Sad excuse for a human being. He had baptized the baby. Randall Fratus McDougall. Conceived in the back seat of Royce McDougall’s car, probably during the second feature of a drive-in double bill. Tiny screaming little thing. He wondered if she knew or guessed that he would like to reach
