The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (15 page)

“I been told something, and I’m working on fixing my life,” Teddy said. He ground shampoo into his hair. “I’m quitting my job. You can have the rest of my beer. And whiskey.”

“Did you put this up here?” Father McEwen asked.

“No, sir, but it’s another one of those things I’ve been talking about.”

Father McEwen could hardly do more than stare. His mind could not get around everything.

“I think I got a message from God,” Teddy said. “Or someone like him. That thing there is another part of it.”

Father McEwen nodded. He guessed that the boy had taken a fall of some sort.

“Christ is more alive than you think,” Teddy said. “And he’s got a place somewhere in town.”

“A place of worship,” Father McEwen said. “You were just in it.”

“I mean a house or apartment, a condo. Who knows? If I was his real estate agent, I could tell you.” Teddy smiled. He had made a joke.

“Teddy, you don’t seem to be yourself.”

He agreed. “It’s a wonder, isn’t it?”

“I’ll find you some clothes. You bathe.”

Q:
Who, besides the omniscient one, was privy to this conversation between Teddy Allen and Father McEwen?

A:
The boy beneath the bed.

Patrick Corbus had sneaked into Father McEwen’s quarters as soon as he saw the priest vacate it. He had taken his time in selecting the spot to hang the Madonna. He had not expected the priest to come back so quickly. That he returned with a stinking bum was, he figured, the nature of priestly work.

Teddy got up from the tub and began drying himself with one of the church’s towels, while Father McEwen brought him clean clothing.

“These are going to fit you big,” McEwen said, hearing the awkwardness of it as he spoke. “Christ
is
present, Teddy. But he doesn’t need an apartment.”

Teddy stopped drying his hair with the towel and scooted it back to reveal his face beneath its cowl.

“He needed a manger, didn’t he? He had to stay in that chicken coop thing you see at Christmas to get born, didn’t he?”

“You’ve been away from the church a long time,” Father McEwen said. “I hope this means you’ll be returning.”

“Christ himself is wandering around this city, checking it out,” Teddy said, imagining the holy savior strolling the streets with a newspaper folded beneath his arm. “He’s got a place of his own with running water and, I bet, cable. He’d want to be up on things, wouldn’t he?” Teddy could see him in a room lit by both the television screen and his own glowing flesh. “He eats, he takes a piss, he likely has a drink now and then, although I’ve quit myself. You need a clear mind to track down a savior.”

He could not fill the priest’s shirt. The bulky roll of the pant cuffs made his slacks sway as he walked, as if he were swaggering, as if he were a sailor. Teddy liked the sensation. Hadn’t Christ himself been a sailor?

“When I find him,” Teddy said before departing, “I’ll bring him by. You’ll see.”

“Get some rest,” Father McEwen said. “Will you do that for me? Should I take you home?”

“Let me see that thing again,” Teddy said.

Father McEwen held up the Madonna, but did not let Teddy take it. He didn’t wish to reveal the obscene side.

“I can’t yet hear him,” Teddy said. He dipped his head, as if to get water out of an ear. Then he turned and trundled off.

Patrick Corbus had to remain beneath the bed while Father McEwen dialed the Hitchenses’ number. “When Patrick gets home from school, let him know I called. Tell him I’ve got something to show him.” The receiver clanked back into its holder, while Patrick’s glee circled wildly in his chest, although he did not know what to make of the next thing the father said: “Poor little fool.” The words stung like a slap across the face. Patrick thought that the priest must be thinking of the bum who had just departed. But some part of him didn’t entirely accept it, and the wound from the words ached inside him.

Wide as the ocean, goes the folk song, are the mysteries of the human heart. What sea could span the mystery of disappearance when the disappeared is a boy’s father? What gulf could be larger than the mystery of a daughter’s love for a father who made her his whore? In all the billions of stars and planets in the universe, there is no other world that supports life; only the earth has sentient beings: the people who pronounce their scant wisdom in words, the animals whose acumen lives in the musculature of their bodies, and the plant life, most articulate of all, whose turning to the sun and from the cold is never subject to question or doubt. The great expanse of the universe is not for the creation of more life, but to permit the already living to grasp the enormity of the spiritual mysteries. Once astronomers reach with their artificial eyes the universe’s ultimate end, people will begin to see the reason why they love who they love, why the innocent suffer, why desire endlessly escapes its own description, why some are tortured and others spared, why we abandon the light and pursue the cold, why we all must die.

Patrick Corbus was a foolish boy, an attribute quite separate from lack of intelligence, and it accounted for his tireless pursuit of the very thing that oppressed him. He wanted Father McEwen to become convinced that the vanishing of Patrick’s father had to do with the church and specifically with Father McEwen and the god Father McEwen loved. Patrick’s own belief, as worn now as the knees of his jeans, was that an adult could find his father if he was sufficiently motivated, if his desire to seek out the missing were a holy mission. This child longed for his father. He believed there were things about the disappearance that were being kept from him. He had to believe that. How could a boy think otherwise without coming to hate himself and take the fall for his father’s egress?

Before Father McEwen left his home, he hung the plaster Madonna once more over the tub, then groaned at the ring of filth left from Teddy Allen’s bath. There were, in fact, many concentric rings of brown around the porcelain tub, the flecks of foul matter against the background of white like the negative of a photo beamed home from space revealing the ultimate union and secret order of the many million disparate worlds.

A sponge wiped it all away.

Can a creature as bound to words as man apprehend a thing beyond words and understand without words that this commodity of the exalted has meaning?

Teddy Allen examined the exposed neck of Lucinda the fortune-teller while her hands grasped his. How white the flesh; how resilient the cylindrical tides of movement down and up its cherished tower, arriving nowhere, not even where it had begun, a peristaltic habit of the throat’s architecture, like a pattern of uneven flight produced by a drone that neither returns to the hive nor tastes of the nectar.

“I got a message from God,” Teddy Allen told Lucinda’s throat.

Lucinda lifted her head upright. “Beg pardon?”

“It was outside your window.” He began the story with such enthusiasm that he did not recognize the expression of fear on the fortune-teller’s face, did not realize the crazed gleam that inhabited his eyes, or the bizarre effect the priest’s clothes had on his appearance. “That guy on the flag was the first messenger—or really the second. I count you as the first.”

“You threw yourself against the wall to stare into my kitchen?”

“My whole life is topsy-turvy,” Teddy agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s first talking to you, then the flag guy, then I’m up on rooftops eyeing the streets, then I’m in the bathtub at the priest’s house and he’s got a bloodred baby on his wall, and on the way here I caught this radio station that was no radio station saying that the snake’s still in Eden, which makes me think
wow
, and—where you going?”

“I’ll be right back,” she said, stepping through a door and locking it.

Teddy walked over to the door and called through to her. “It’s like I’ve got a lot of these pieces and if I can get them to snap together, I’ll have, well, I don’t know what, but it’ll be important, like one of those tools you snap around into different shapes and you can fix most anything.” He heard her speaking to someone. “Is that Jimmy’s little sister?” He did not guess that Lucinda was calling the police. “I saw her here, too, which I kind of forgot about.” More words erupted from his mouth, a flow like lava from a source that had been building for generations. He talked about god, language, earrings. After a spell, the flow took a turn. “So it must be clear,” he said to the door, “how much I love you. Don’t let this supreme being thing I’m going through scare you off. I’m just a regular guy otherwise, like you know about me already from the way I come in here after work. Although, I quit work.”

His confession of love had about it the awkwardness of the pelican’s land-bound stroll, and Lucinda, whose real name was Lucy Sullivan, understood that she had damaged this man. Perhaps it was good that he could speak so freely about his feelings for her, but she was certain he had not been a peeping tom before becoming her customer—her slave, she thought. What had she been thinking, letting him come every day, making him pay more than he could possibly be earning legally?
I’ve ruined him
, she thought, giving herself far too much credit, but believing it. She would have to quit this, she understood. She was tinkering with people’s lives in an inhumane way. She thought of the comic book edict:
if only she had used her genius for good instead of evil
. But how can you know the effect you will have on others? She had a genius for consolation, and just beyond her door babbled a man damaged by it.

“Until I find out where Christ is holing up, we have to keep it plutonic,” Teddy said, shortly before a police officer stepped through the door and called out his name.

Teddy turned to him, delighted. How could this man he had never before seen know his name? Another miracle was in the offing.

“Come with me, Teddy,” the uniformed man said with such kindness that Teddy felt his eyes well with tears. He turned back to the door.

“I have to go, honey,” he yelled, words that called to his mind a sense of television without providing an actual image. He felt his life had become a thing of clarity, the perfect reception of cable after ages with rabbit ears. It made him smile.

Father McEwen had requested only Patrick, but Aluela showed up as well. They had on new clothing, he noted. Mary Hitchens had provided it, no doubt. His heart inflated anew with appreciation of her. They were in the neighborhood grassy spot known as Berry Park by the locals because of the wild blackberries that used to appear in one remote corner each spring. There were no longer blackberries. Some park official had hacked them out, or the nature of spring had changed.

Aluela took a seat next to Father McEwen on the park bench without saying hello. She leaned her head against his shoulder. Patrick sat on the other side of her.

“What have you got for us?” the boy asked.

Father McEwen shifted to make Aluela sit upright.

“I can’t stay long,” he said. “I have to visit someone in trouble.”

The voice on the answering machine had sounded ecstatic. “Come join me,” Teddy Allen had said of jail. The police officer had sounded less enthusiastic. “He needs a rubber room, Father, and soundproof, too, if you’ve got one handy.”

“I’m wearing underwear,” Aluela announced. “Mrs. Hitchens bought us clothes.”

Father McEwen produced the cough of the uncomfortable, although, this day, the girl and the image of her naked bottom carried not a glimmer of sexual power, something Patrick had already picked up on. McEwen didn’t know about the shredded panties, and so found the remark disconcerting only for its strangeness.

McEwen had not brought the painted Madonna, having guessed after the first moment of surprise that Patrick had invented his father’s parting gifts. He could not guess why the boy had created this fabrication, but he had decided to investigate the father’s flight anyway. He had spoken with the news reporter who had covered the story, a man with a self-important air about him and a beard like a sea animal on his chin.

To Aluela and Patrick, McEwen said, “I am not a fool. I’ll not play the games expected of a fool.”

Aluela slumped back against the bench. Patrick felt the grip of a man’s fist at his throat, a sensation that meant he was on the verge of tears.

“But I
have
looked into your father’s disappearance.”

Patrick and Aluela became instantly more erect in carriage, their senses tuned in and alert. This moment of attentive anticipation pierced Father McEwen with sadness. How could a man leave these children? McEwen took a deep breath and began.

“A body was found in Canada that matches the description of your father. He’d taken an apartment, and found a job under an assumed name. I can’t quite recall what it was.”

He pretended to concentrate. The children stared at him with sickly deliberation. Was this cruel? he wondered. He did not feel the ugly, elated rush he felt when spanking them, which led him to believe his motives were pure. He threw his head back, as if engrossed in a mental process that demanded he exclude the outside world. He did not know that this was the same posture that the fortune-teller used for the same reason. He might have loved Lucinda had he known her. She might have loved him. But neither could divine the other.

“His alias was… Alluvial Sludge,” he said at last, eyeing the kids again. “Or something like that.”

He stared several seconds, long enough for them to know he was creating the story as he went. The reporter had known nothing, had hardly remembered the story, had stroked his beard with the urgency of sexual gratification, and McEwen had been forced to mentally toil against a growing hatred for the man. Without facts or leads, what was this priest to do? He had prayed, and in prayer a strategy had come to him.

“Auto accident,” he told the Corbus children. “Last rites were administered. Body cremated.” He paused once more, studied their faces. These children knew he was making it up. He needed to see that in their eyes and in their posture, and at the same time, he needed to see that they were nonetheless paying attention. “His apartment, you might want to know about. He lived alone, but he had three bedrooms. A bed in each. Like he was maybe expecting guests, or people to come live with him.”