The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (11 page)

Father McEwen knew the advantage of his height and used it for God’s work. He
leaned heavily on the jamb, filling the doorway. He was nearing fifty and more of his bulk shifted each year from muscle to fat, but he knew how to exhibit himself. In the presence of one who had faltered in faith or deed, he became the immovable object.

“You haven’t done much with the place, Teddy,” Father McEwen said. The front room displayed only a scarred coffee table and an old sofa losing its stuffing. Across the dusty floor, a television and VCR rested on a metal filing cabinet turned on its side. The calendar put out by the refinery hung crookedly on a nail and hadn’t been changed for two months.

Teddy Allen squinted at Father McEwen’s round red face as if looking into the sun. “This is a rental,” he said. “Don’t see the point in fixing up what isn’t mine.” He had lived in the apartment two years, since graduating from high school, and the priest’s comment felt like an attack on the whole of his independent life. He wasn’t even wearing his clerical collar, as if Teddy were not worth the trouble. “You want to come in, I guess.” Teddy’s head gave a sharp sideways nod as he spoke and his neck cracked. He was little more than bone, a slash of hair across his head, a faint mustache above his pale lips.

“Thanks for the invite,” Father McEwen said, stepping in and shutting the door behind him. He liked to say that a priest, like a vampire, should never enter a home without an invitation. People liked their priests with a sense of humor.

He picked one end of the couch to give Teddy room to join him, as there was nowhere else to sit. The springs, though, were shot, and as he sank into the sofa’s pocket, he slid to the center. His knees rose up to his chest. The cushions exhaled white, fluffy filament, a raveled floss like fiberglass insulation.

Teddy Allen liked seeing the priest hunched up like a cold man before a fire. His spirits had plummeted upon recognizing the giant in his doorway. Until he moved out of his mother’s house, he had gone to mass every week of his life. He hadn’t retained much, though, and didn’t care to ever go back. Now it occurred to him that he might have some fun at the priest’s expense. Teddy had an appointment in less than an hour, and he guessed the father had come to make him miss it. But Teddy knew that no one on earth could make him miss it. Such certainty can make the worst coward willing to gamble.

“Want a drink or something?” he asked.

Father McEwen looked at his watch, though he knew the time.

“I don’t think a whiskey would hurt me,” he said. “Have you got whiskey?”

“Everybody does, so why wouldn’t I?” Teddy said and left to fetch the liquor.

McEwen worked to get himself free of the couch. He dusted the seat of his pants and strolled to the window, which was covered by a soiled vinyl shade. The stains looked to be sweat, but he knew that was impossible. The spring in the roller was busted. McEwen pushed aside the sheet of fabric.

The afternoon light had just made the turn toward dusk. Children in the playground below huddled around a dark-haired boy who held three oranges. The oranges made Father McEwen wish Teddy would hurry with the whiskey. Thirst exerted real power over him. Down below, the boy spread his arms, and the oranges one by one lifted into the air, cutting arcs above his black hair. The oranges hopped from the boy’s palms as if electrified.

The window needed washing. What was this grease that settled on glass? Human oils? We leave traces of us everywhere, Father McEwen thought. Teddy’s mother had asked him to make this visit. “He don’t talk to me,” she had said. The misalignment of verb and noun had surprised her, and she repeated the sentence to correct herself, becoming flustered by the betrayal of her own words. “That girl he goes to does some kind of spiritism,” she said. “He sees her every day of the week.”

One of the oranges struck the boy’s fingertips but bounded free. He tried to nab it, which permitted the others to escape. The first orange lost its shape on impact with the ground. While he was watching the fruit bounce about the children’s feet, Father McEwen realized that Teddy was not coming back. He dropped the shade.

“Teddy?” he called.

The refrigerator began vibrating as Father McEwen entered the kitchen, making a hum like a giant insect. The room’s rear door hung open. Except for dirty dishes stacked by the sink, the kitchen was orderly. It did not suggest that Teddy was damaged, as the bare living room did. That room shrieked of omission, of screws loose, a deck a few cards shy.

On the Formica table, a shot glass with a finger of cheap bourbon awaited him. The glass wasn’t clean. Inside the refrigerator, Father McEwen found a stick of butter cowled by its partially opened wrap, maple syrup in a plastic bottle, a head of iceberg lettuce turning a rusty brown, and two cartons of beer—good German beer—with only two bottles missing. Father McEwen decided to investigate the boy’s bedroom.

The “spiritism” Teddy’s mother had described concerned a storefront fortune-teller on Division Street, a business that had appeared the month after Browne’s Shoe Repair closed. The big window facing Division was now painted black with stenciled lettering advertising the woman’s craft. Father McEwen had never met her, but he couldn’t believe this kind of bother was serious. The bedroom door swung noisily open, its hinges complaining of abuse and neglect. A mattress lay on the floor at an angle to the walls. The sheets piled upon it gave off a sour smell. A heap of blankets lay like a dog at the foot of the makeshift bed. Peeking from beneath the blankets were the round toes of women’s shoes. These feminine togs relieved Father McEwen. Sex out of wedlock was a sin, but he felt better knowing Teddy was not entirely alone. The smell, more than anything else, discouraged him from investigating further.

Even cheap whiskey burned the throat in that familiar, pleasurable manner. He put the shot glass on top of the stack of dirty plates. Of the ten beers in the refrigerator, Father McEwen took only one, a tithing he slipped into the pocket of his coat.

Teddy Allen celebrated his deception of the priest with a piss in the open mouth of a neighbor’s trash can. The alley behind his building would take him to the corner of 34th and Palmer, where he could cross the street and wait for the Division Street bus. Normally he walked to Lucinda’s, but he didn’t like the idea of Father McEwen motoring up beside him, lowering the window of that old boat he drove, and beginning in on whatever sin Teddy had committed by running off as he had. He hadn’t lied, really, having poured the man a drink just as he said he would. He’d only committed the sin of leaving things out, of telling half the truth. A partial sin, at best.

Since he’d begun studying Lucinda’s trances, Teddy Allen’s life had turned upside down, which made the trips to her parlor irresistible. He no longer hung out with his pals, and they had quickly discarded him. His bank account had dwindled to nothing, and he’d had to sell his furniture. He’d even stolen a backpack from an unlocked car, the opportunity too sweet to ignore.

He first took note of Lucinda one day at the supermarket and followed her about as she filled the little basket she carried. Something in her appearance began gnawing at him, her free hand groping a grapefruit, handling limes, snapping two green bananas from a bunch. Teddy wound up buying a lot of useless fruit that rotted in his refrigerator. Then one of the guys at the refinery mentioned that he had paid her ten dollars to hear his future. He claimed she’d held his hands and slid into a hypnotic state that made her rock up and back until her blouse loosened and revealed her breasts.

The day Teddy got up the courage to go into her place, she had worn a blouse whose buttons reached her collarbone, each one snug in its buttonhole. Men lied about women all the time, Teddy knew. The guy had needed an excuse to explain blowing ten bucks on a fortune-teller. Teddy had needed a similar excuse to convince himself he was there out of manly lust and not human loneliness. Her window read:

What man alone in the world wouldn’t want to enter a building bearing such a sign? Especially when the Lucinda in question had eyes the faint blue of ice and a mouth that never quite closed, the endearing gap between her painted lips a dark, slippery shape like the reflection of a crow on moving water.

They sat opposite each other in her rattan chairs that first time, their knees touching.

“You’re nervous,” she said after taking his hands in hers.

That impressed him, although any fool could have felt his hands tremble. He managed to nod.

“A little,” he said, his voice cracking.

Her lids slid over her eyes, which still roved about, their movement shifting the contours of their delicate hoods. Her body began to sway and her head tilted back. Although her breasts were wholly concealed, Teddy found that her bare neck, revealed so completely by this posture, became a sexual organ. The vertical furrows formed by the backward slant seemed so private and erotic that he could not quite catch his breath.

What she had to say to him does not matter. Lucinda had no power to reveal the future, and about this she had no delusions. Neither was she an out-and-out charlatan, as she did believe herself to be sensitive to the needs of others and a help in their lives. She had taken two counseling courses at a community college in the suburbs. She had read books on how the body and mind might be healed. She also knew instinctively that vague suggestions had more power than direct predictions.

With Teddy, she spoke a lot about his past: “There is someone important, a woman or girl, I think, who has never really understood you.” She touched on the present: “You’re not entirely appreciated by your employer, and you’re not really fulfilled there.” About the future, she hedged. “Someone is waiting for you to call. Only you haven’t met her yet—or maybe you have met her but didn’t realize how important she would become to you. She doesn’t even know she’s waiting. Poor girl.”

That sort of rubbish. The traditional enticing murk.

From the moment that her sinuous neck caused him an erection, Teddy Allen was hooked. He was the sort of man who could not grasp for long any idea that was not tied directly to a physical object, and so each time he returned to talk with her, her ideas seemed new and fresh, enlarged by his inability to hold on to them. The initial visit had cost a mere ten dollars. He now paid from thirty to fifty dollars, depending on the intricacy of the session. He owed rent. He had hocked his stereo system. He had begun eating just once a day. The backpack he had taken from an unlocked Lincoln had provided a wristwatch he had sold for ninety dollars. A pair of women’s shoes had taken up most of the bag, but he hadn’t yet sold them to the thrift shop. They would not bring much, despite their obvious elegance and relative newness. They did not quite smell new. Better than new somehow. He kept them near his bed.

Lucinda opened the door before his hand could reach the knob. He knew she could see out through the dark glass, despite his inability to see in. He knew this, but he also credited her for fathoming his approach, the swinging door further evidence of her powers.

“My,” she said, tilting her face to study his. “You have some kind of story to tell me, don’t you?”

He thought, perhaps, she could see that he loved her. Then he remembered the priest and nodded.

“Someone’s been to my apartment bothering me.”

He hadn’t even gotten to eat because of the priest’s interference. Should he talk to her of his hunger? It seemed to him unnecessary to explain.

Lucinda took his hands, sending an electric tingle through his limbs as she led him to their chaste and conjugal chairs.

Because Mrs. Corbus had no Mr. Corbus, his disappearance an event of much local notoriety, and because Mrs. Corbus had become so arthritic at the age of forty that she could not do it herself, it had fallen to Father McEwen to be responsible for the thrashing of her children. Her requests rarely came more than once a month, and in five cases of six, Father McEwen could negotiate a settlement between mother and child—additional chores to be taken on, a period of time without friends over, a ban on telephone calls. But twice or thrice a year, he had to beat one of her kids. He knew she was not entirely stable in the head, and yet she provided for them. They owed her their help and respect.

His own father had preferred fresh-cut birch limbs the thickness of a large man’s finger at the grip, narrowing to pencil width on the impact end. They had to be fresh cut or the limbs would break after the first laceration. Father McEwen had two permanent scars from such switchings. Mrs. Corbus, who taught seventh-grade history, supplied him with a paddle that a shop teacher had fashioned for her. The paddle had a handle with an indentation for each finger, and on the business end, five drilled holes each large enough to hold a cigar.

Father McEwen worked very hard to avoid paddling any of the Corbus lot, but when it came time to administer the swats, he rediscovered, each time, the pleasure that comes from having power over another. He did not like to see their fear as they undid their belts and lowered their pants, but he nonetheless enjoyed it. He did not like to hear them yelp, but gratification crept into his body anyway. This, of course, was not the whole story. He felt morally obliged to apologize after each swing, and despite the directions of Mrs. Corbus, he required that they keep their underpants on. That he found furtive satisfaction in this ugly act made him work all the harder to achieve a compromise between mother and child, which was what redeemed him. No one could entirely resist the pleasure of such dominion over another, but the good recognized the debasement of others as something to be resisted, while the evil and weak sought it out.

This evening in the dim light of the Corbus kitchen, Father McEwen attempted to negotiate between Mrs. Corbus and her daughter, Aluela, who had commemorated her seventeenth birthday by celebrating the night through, getting home at dusk the following day just after a policeman standing on her stoop had explained to Mrs. Corbus for the third time why they were unwilling just yet to file a missing person report. Aluela’s arrival humiliated as well as angered Mrs. Corbus, her arthritic clubs flailing at the girl with such vehemence that the policeman had restrained her and advised Aluela to lock herself in her room until her mother calmed down. Once released, Mrs. Corbus called Father McEwen’s number and left a message on his machine. He had not wanted to come. The whiskey he’d had at Teddy Allen’s and the purloined beer he’d sipped in the rectory had encouraged him to visit Mallory’s Room, a bar he often frequented with parishioners, the pretense of listening permitting him to drink, the drinking permitting him to listen. A boxing match on the tube became his excuse for coming. A few of the boys from the refinery had insisted he join them, and no one would let him pay for a whiskey or beer. He wanted sleep and the forgiveness of Christ. He had no desire to hear of the Corbus children’s latest transgressions.