Rabid (48 page)

Leila sidled to the bar, keeping Joe between her and the priest, and leaned around Joe to look at the priest.

Father Dante was exceedingly drunk. His blood-veined eyes wavered. “’Allo.” He twitched a fragment of a smile. He recognized Leila and leaned on the bar, asking, “Do you have the cigarette, eh?”

Joe said, “I didn’t think he had that much of an accent.”

Leila felt for the crinkled pack in her purse and tapped one out. “You okay there, Padre?”

“Me?
Si. Bene.
” His hand wavered in the air as he plucked the cigarette from the pack.
“Ha un fiammifero?”

“Is he so drunk that he’s forgotten English?” Joe asked.

“I’d be looking for a light about now.” Leila held the flaming lighter close to the end of the cigarette, and the priest puffed. She turned and waggled her fingers at Monty and he wandered over, still flipping the television channels with the remote. “How long has he been here?”

Monty frowned and flicked the television to a basketball game. “Three hours. Slowed him down the last hour. Been making him drink water.”

Monty had done the same for Leila on a few nights. “You’re a kind soul, Monty.”

Monty bobbed his head and frowned. “Calls down the wrath of the Almighty when a priest gets sick in the bar. Not that I know what I’m going to do with him. It’s only eleven.”

Leila sighed. “I’ll take care of him.”

Joe cocked an eyebrow at Leila. “What is it with you and this guy?”

“Nothing.”
Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
“And you’re helping me with him.”

Joe whispered near her shoulder, “You knew all about him when he was at the Dublin before, and he knew who you were from
church
. He came to the lab this afternoon, looking for you. And since when do you go to church?”

She had no desire at all to unpack her feelings about priests. “It’s nothing, Joe. Please drop it.”

Joe’s expression resembled the time he had hunted down a cracked methyl ether bottle by its fruity scent in the back of a cabinet by sheer bloodhound persistence. “Now you’re looking out for him. Are you related to him? Long lost cousin?”

“He’s Italian.” She leaned over to his ear and a memory of mouthing Joe’s bare shoulder rose in her mind. She whispered, “I’m half
Egyptian
.”

Monsignor Dante’s collar lay open on his chest, a shade more bronze than Leila’s half-breed skin, and his forlorn white collar flopped when he shrugged, mumbling to his demons.

Leila pointed to the dark brown liquid in Dante’s glass. “What’s he drinking?”

“Now? Diet Coke.” Monty clicked the television.

Joe patted the Monsignor on the back. “How you doing there, Father?”

“Fine. Jus’ fine.” He inhaled on the cigarette and smiled. “I gave-ah these up when I took the Holy Orders. Some idea about dedicating my body to God. Idiot, eh?” He sucked another long drag off the cigarette, and his plume of smoke boiled out of him across the bar and through the air like a deep-ocean volcanic vent. “I miss-ah the taste of the smoke.”

Joe whispered to Leila, “Do you think we can have a beer before we roust him out?”

Leila leaned near Joe’s shoulder. He smelled like phenol and cologne. “He might sober up a little if we wait a while.”

Joe nodded. “Hey, Father, you want to join us in a booth?”

The priest nodded at the bartender. “I was just saying to this good man, Monty, here, that I think I’ve had enough. I do not remember why I came here, so it must be the time to go home.”

Monty raised an eyebrow and clicked the television.

Joe held the priest’s elbow and lifted it up. The priest’s body followed his rising elbow. “Come on, Father. Monty, another one of those for our friend here.”

Joe led the priest to a booth near the back, and Leila followed, bringing their drinks like a serving wench, raising the drinks with both hands above laughing groups and avoiding the pool table where a guy who looked like Attila the Hun rammed the yellow one-ball and sent it cruising over the rip in the pool table’s felt, plummeting into a corner pocket while his Mongol Horde yee-hawed.

When she got to the booth, holding two pints of beer and one soda, Joe sat on one bench and the sloppy priest sat on the opposite one. The drinks rested on cigarette burns and carved initials in the polished oak.

Leila scooted in beside Joe.

Fine, if she had to be here, if she had to talk to Jesuit Just-ah Dante, this was a good time to drag those silly secrets out of him. “So you’ve forgotten why you’re drinking, Father?”

“No,” the priest whispered, “but I could not say.”

“Oh. All right,” Leila said. The conversation would wend its way back there later. “So why did you close your lab again?”

“Ah, you want me to do the talk about the Vatican.” the priest said and tapped his cigarette with exaggerated caution into the ashtray. He might be seeing two ashtrays. Ash crud tumbled off the end. He raised his bleary eyes to Heaven, or at least to the cigarette smog that clung with gecko feet to the wood plank ceiling. “I do not know why the Vatican and the Curia and the priests fascinate people so much.”

Joe shrugged and sipped his beer. “It’s a secret society with that whole mystical bent, like the Freemasons.”

Dante nodded. “
Si
, I noticed your handshake.”

Leila turned to Joe, with whom she had worked for three years, with whom she had had a sweet little affair, and who didn’t have a shred of Masonic paraphernalia in his apartment. “Oh?”

Joe’s frowning eyes dropped to his beer.

The priest asked, “What is the level?”

“Thirty-seventh. Not something I advertise, by the way.”

“Then you should change-ah your handshake.” The priest tugged at his collar. “Not that I am accorded anything so subtle as a handshake. I am branded with the Holy Orders for all to see, an ontological change. It burns my soul.”

Shuddering recognition scraped her spine. “Damn that James Joyce. Screwed it up for everybody,” Leila said and watched Dante to see if he had meant the allusion.

“Yes,” Dante nodded. “He commandeered a sacrament and-ah made it a metaphor, decimated its relevance until it was inferior to the epiphany of the stork-girl on one leg, and yet imbued it with inaccurate physical reaction, like D.H. Lawrence confiscating the women’s sexuality.”

The priest was verbose when he was falling-down wasted. “And how would you know that?”

Dante smiled and sipped his soda. “I should not drink,” he said. “I wax too eloquent.”

“Not at all,” Leila said and leaned on the table. She dredged up her best line: “Go on. I’m just fascinated.”

“You see,” Dante said to Joe with that modest pride of a man who’s knowingly being led by a bull nose-ring. “It’s-ah the priest thing. It is like I am harmless, or a eunuch, or caged.” He leaned toward her, holding his soda. His ethanolic breath intoxicated her. “Look at this girl, her lovely eyes looking at me like I could not reach across the table for her.” His empty hand flickered through the air at Leila like a lightening flash.

Leila snapped back and her spine and skull banged the tall wooden booth. His hand had slipped around the back of her neck. He could have dragged her across the table to him. Her hands shook.

Joe toyed with the liberal head on his beer. “Yeah, Masons don’t get that.”

“It is not that good, when you are a priest.” He half-smiled, like it might be good.

Joe sucked the foam off his finger and said, “Must be the celibate thing, then.”

Leila calmed herself down. They were in a public place. He hadn’t dragged her across the table. She clutched her purse. Her pepper spray was on her key chain in it.

“It is more than that.” Dante regarded his soda. “Leila, you are experienced in being a woman,” and how she was supposed to take that, she didn’t know. “Why do women, ordinary women, sweet kind mothers of children and good wives, throw themselves at priests?”

And that must be why the Monsignor was drinking tonight. Somewhere, either a woman had screwed herself a priest tonight and he was numbing the guilt, or else she hadn’t scruffed him and he was imbibing anesthesia for blue balls.

She asked, “Anybody in particular we’re talking about?”

The priest’s expression fell to wariness. “Just the women in general. Why priests? Why the
sex
?”

He had started the game of religious allusions. Maybe Leila would play, too.

“Maybe it’s carnal lust which, as we all know, in women is insatiable.” He might be too drunk to recognize the allusion to the
Malleus Maleficarum
, the
Hammer of the Witches
, a medieval Catholic document that dictated witchcraft stemmed from carnal lust.

He toyed with his glass, pressing rings of condensation onto the waxed oak table. “It’s witchcraft, then, why women chase the priests. Do you know much about the Inquisition?” 

“Not much.” And he had recognized the quote.
Frightening.

Leila cupped her hands around the cool beer to cool herself off. Panic still ran hot on her skin, even though she was trying everything to calm herself down. The Dublin was too warm for February, when most people wore sweaters and had hung them on the ends of the booths, rows of oversized knitwear for an alcoholic Santa to fill with kegs of beer.

The priest’s drunken gaze sharpened. A few of his neurons had managed to fire through the whisky sludge, or he hadn’t had as much as he had suggested, or his liver was the size of a side of beef. “Tell us why the women flock to priests.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, “
Father
.”

“It is just-ah Dante.”

He was Just-ah Dante when he was incognito, when he was aping normal men, when the arrogant holy Monsignor was walking among the patronized masses, thinking all the chicks dug him. No wonder priests landed in so much sexual trouble, walking around thinking all the women (or little boys) were moist for them.

The priest said again, “Tell us why the women are so wild for the priests, eh?”

“
I don’t know.
” The beer hadn’t muddled her, yet she didn’t shut up. “
I don’t know
why a woman would want a man who traded his sexuality to a supernatural, imaginary Agency for unearned power.”

The priest sat back, and his wary black eyes appraised her.

“
I don’t know
why men would make a Faustian bargain, giving away everything important in their lives—women, logic, pleasure, family, destiny, free will—to gain nothing.” Words, long shoved down, came out of her. “
Nothing
but the stunted life of emotionally immature men congregated for nonsensical reasons, making up arbitrary rules and mythological systems for everyone else to abide by, when they don’t even believe their own shit.”

Attila the pool player glanced at the scene she was making over his black-leathered shoulder.

Leila, half-standing, her thighs pressed against petrified gum under the table, lowered herself back into the booth and studied the trailing effervescences in her thick, brown beer.

She finished lamely, “And the monochromatic wardrobe is boring.”

Just-ah Dante’s Italian visage retracted around his sorrowing eyes. His smooth, tan hands surrounded the soda on the wood table.

Joe touched her shoulder. “You all right?”

She sucked in bar air, creamy with secondhand smoke. “Fine.”