brain and floated away. She’s in an institution now, ten years later. She doesn’t talk. She just stares out into space. Twenty-three years old now, and she looks forty.” I lowered myself to my haunches in front of Cody. “So, this guy? Ever since, he hears about a rapist, he gathers this, I dunno, posse, I guess you’d call it, and they…Well, you ever hear the story about that guy a few years back in the D Street projects-they found him bleeding from every orifice with his own dick cut off and stuck in his mouth?”
Cody ground the back of his head into the fridge and gagged.
“So you’re familiar with that story,” I said. “That’s not urban legend, that’s fact, Cody. That was my buddy and his crew.”
Cody’s voice was a whisper. “Please.”
“Please?” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s good. Try that with this guy and his friends.”
“Please,” he said again. “Don’t.”
“Keep working at it, Cody,” I said. “You almost got the hang of it.”
“No,” Cody moaned.
I pulled a foot of electrical tape from the roll, snapped it off in my teeth. “See, I figure with Karen, maybe half of it was a mistake. You did get those notes and you are dumb, so…” I shrugged.
“Please,” he said. “Please, please, please.”
“But there have been a lot of other women, haven’t there, Cody? Ones who never
Cody tried to drop his eyes before I could see the truth there.
“Wait,” he whispered. “I have money.”
“Spend it on a therapist. After my buddy and his friends get through with you, you’re going to need one.”
I slapped the electrical tape over his mouth and his eyes bulged.
He screamed and the sound was muffled and helpless behind the tape.
“Bon voyage, Cody.” I walked to the glass doors. “Bon voyage.”
12
The priest who presided over the noon mass at Saint Dominick of the Sacred Heart Church acted like he had tickets for the Sox game at one. Father McKendrick strode up the front aisle at the stroke of twelve with two altar boys who had to jog to keep pace. He riffled through the greeting, penitential rite, and opening prayer like his Bible was afire. He zipped through Paul’s Letter to the Romans as if Paul drank too much coffee. By the time he slammed through the Gospel According to Luke and waved the parishioners to sit, it was seven past noon and most of the people in the pews looked wiped.
He gripped the lectern in both hands, stared down into the pews with a coldness bordering on disdain. “Paul wrote: ‘We must wake from darkness and clothe ourselves in the armor of light.’ What does that mean, you think-to wake from darkness, to wear armor of light?”
In the days when I went with any regularity, I’d always liked this part of the mass least. The priest would attempt to explain deeply symbolic language penned almost two thousand years ago and then apply his explanation to the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, Roe v. Wade, the Bruins’ Stanley Cup chances. He’d wear you out with his grasping.
“Well, it means what it says,” Father McKendrick said as if he were talking to a room full of first-graders who’d ridden in on the short bus. “It means get out of bed. Leave the darkness of your venal desires, your petty bickerings, your hating of your neighbors and distrust of your spouse and allowing your children to be raised and corrupted by TV. Get outside, Paul says, out in the fresh air! Into the light! God is the moon and the stars and He is most definitely the sun. Feel the sun’s warmth. Pass that warmth on. Do good things. Give extra to the collection boxes today. Feel the Lord working in you. Donate the clothes you
I looked around the pews. Several people nodded. No one looked like he had the first clue as to what Father McKendrick was talking about.
“Well then,” he said. “Good. All rise.”
We stood back up. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes flat. The fastest sermon I’d ever witnessed. Father McKendrick definitely had Red Sox tickets.
The parishioners looked dazed, but happy. The only thing good Catholics love more than God is a short service. Keep your organ music, your choir, keep your incense and processionals. Give us a priest with one eye on the Bible and the other on the clock, and we’ll pack the place like it’s a turkey raffle the week before Thanksgiving.
As the ushers worked backward through the pews with wicker donation baskets, Father McKendrick ripped through the offering of the gifts and the blessing of the host with a look on his face that told the two eleven-year- olds assisting him that this wasn’t JV, this was varsity, so step up your game, boys, and make it snappy.
Roughly three and a half minutes later, just after bolting through the Our Father, the Reverend McKendrick had us offer the sign of peace. He didn’t look too happy about it, but there were rules, I guess. I shook the hands of the husband and wife beside me, as well of those of the three old men in the pew behind me and the two old women in the pew ahead.
I managed to catch Angie’s eye as I did. She was up front, nine rows from the altar, and as she turned to shake the hand of the pudgy teenage boy behind her, she saw me. Something maybe a little surprised, a little happy, and a little hurt passed over her face, and then she dipped her chin slightly in recognition. I hadn’t seen her in six months, but I manfully resisted the urge to wave and let out a loud whoop. We were in church, after all, where loud displays of affection are frowned on. Further, we were in Father McKendrick’s church, and I had the feeling that if I whooped, he’d send me to hell.
Another seven minutes, and we were out of there. If it was all up to McKendrick, we would have hit the street in four, but several older parishioners slowed the line during Holy Communion and Father McKendrick watched them struggle to approach him on their walkers with a face that said, God might have all day, but I don’t.
On the sidewalk outside the church, I watched Angie exit and stop at the top of the stairs to speak to an older gentleman in a seersucker suit. She shook his trembling hand with both of hers, stooped as he said something to her, smiled broadly when he finished. I caught the pudgy thirteen-year-old craning his head out from behind his mother’s arm to peer at Angie’s cleavage while she was stooped over the man in the seersucker. The kid felt my eyes on him and turned to look at me, his face blooming red with good old-fashioned Catholic guilt around a minefield of acne. I shook a stern finger at him, and the kid blessed himself hurriedly and looked down at his shoes. Next Saturday, he’d be in the confessional, owning up to feelings of lust. At his age, probably a thousand counts of it.
That’ll be six hundred Hail Marys, my son.
Yes, Faddah.
You’ll go blind, son.
Yes, Faddah.
Angie worked her way down through the crowd milling on the stone steps. She used the backs of her fingers to move the bangs out of her eyes, though she could have solved the problem simply by raising her head. She kept it down, though, as she approached me, fearful perhaps that I’d see something in her face that would either make my day or break my heart.
She’d cut her hair. Cut it short. All those abundant tangles of rich cocoa, streaked with auburn during late spring and summer, rope-thick tresses that had flowed to her lower back and splayed completely across her pillow and onto mine, that could take an hour to brush if she were dressing up for the night-were gone, replaced by a chin-skimming bob that dropped in sweeps over her cheekbones and ended hard at the nape of her neck.
Bubba would weep if he knew. Well, maybe not weep. Shoot someone. Her hairdresser, for starters.
“Don’t say a word about the hair,” she said when she raised her head.
“What hair?”
“Thank you.”
“No, I meant it-what hair?”
