“Forget about that. What’s this with the woman?”
“Is this how to do it?” Julian said. He flicked his left into the man’s face. Then again.
“You’re trying to fuck with me? Why you looking at me like that? You want to get serious here?”
“Hit me.”
“You got a crucifixion complex?”
“Is the woman in an asylum?”
“You fucking with me? Big mistake, Father.”
The man forgot his own admonition and led with his right, then discovered he had just swung at empty space. Julian’s blows were a blur, landing with such force and ferocity that the larger man couldn’t raise his arms. He went down on the floor mat, but Julian went down on one knee with him, beating his face as though hammering a nail. “Don’t you ever harm a woman again,” he said through his teeth. “You got that? Shake your head if you hear me!”
But neither the man nor his friends could speak or move. Julian pulled off his gloves and slung them aside and got his gym bag out of his locker. He walked outside without showering or changing clothes. Then he put his vehicle into reverse and bounced over the curb into a fireplug.
* * *
NOW, AS HE pounded down Old Jeanerette Road in the sweetness of the morning in his cheap running shoes, past plantation homes strung with fog from the bayou, he wondered if he was a failure both as a priest and as a man, one who had lied to himself about his secret obsessions and his constant unfulfilled sexual yearning.
He had become a priest after reading Ammon Hennacy’s Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist, then had lived at the Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, New York, and been a missionary in El Salvador, jailed five times in civil protests.
In reality, who was he? Perhaps a closet sybarite. The idea was not untenable. He could not deny that he was attracted to women. Actually, “attracted” was not an adequate word. They were the most beautiful and intelligent creatures in God’s holy creation, and so superior to their male counterparts that the comparison was laughable. He literally burned for them, not just in his sleep but throughout the day. His desires were oral, penile, glandular, olfactory, auditory, infantile, protective, lustful, spiritual, and ultimately, torturous when he woke early in the morning and sat throbbing in his underwear on the side of his bed, asking God for an exemption to let him have a woman’s love and the love of the children that would come from their union. Then he despised himself for his self-pity.
As he jogged down the road, he could not keep his mind off the three or four women who, as always, would be at Saturday afternoon Mass, a distraction he could not get out of his head until Mass was over and they were gone. One had thick blond hair and a complexion that looked as smooth as an orchid’s petal; another one was buxom and jolly with a small Irish mouth and mischievous eyes and freshly air-blown red hair and perfume strong enough to get drunk on; another was tall and part black/part Indian and wore purple and scarlet dresses she must have gotten into with a shoehorn; and number four always managed to have the top of her blouse unbuttoned, a gold chain and cross hanging inside her cleavage, her hand warm and fleshy when she squeezed his.
Now he was the subject of a homicide investigation. Hallucinogens had been planted in his refrigerator, and stamps from his collection stolen and glued on the shoe of the murder victim. His name was sullied by charges of child molestation, the one sin Jesus denounced so vehemently that he warned the perpetrators they would be better off not born or fastening millstones about their necks and casting themselves into the sea.
When he got back from his run, sweating and out of breath, he went straight to the kitchen and took a bottle of brandy from the cupboard and poured three inches into a jelly glass. Then he poured the brandy back into the bottle and stared listlessly out the window, wondering if a day of deliverance would ever be his.
* * *
THAT EVENING, AT sunset, he locked the church and returned to his small house and tried to keep his mind clear of negative thoughts. Fifteen minutes later, hail began bouncing like mothballs on the roof and the lawn, followed by a steady rain and a wind that thrashed the trees and bamboo along the bayou. A bolt of lightning struck the water just beyond the drawbridge, and he thought he saw a man running along the road with a raincoat over his head. When he looked again, the man was gone.
He fixed a fried-egg sandwich and a slice of chocolate cake and poured a glass of milk, then sat down at the table and began to eat. He would work on his stamp collection that night and go to bed early, then rise in the morning with gratitude for the life and the opportunities that had been given him. Or at least he would try to do these things, he told himself, knowing the weakness that seemed to live in his soul.
A car came around a bend in the road, its headlights on, and Julian saw the man with the raincoat standing among the crypts by the bayou. He put down his sandwich and opened the back door. A mist blew through the screen, touching his skin. “Can I help you?” he called.
“My dog jumped out of my car!” the man said over the sound of the rain on the roof. “You seen a yellow Lab? He’s just a pup.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I saw him run into the graveyard.”
“Come in,” Julian said. “I’ll get an umbrella and a flashlight.”
“That’s mighty kind of you.”
The man approached the kitchen door, hunched under the raincoat, his face turned up toward the light, as twisted as a squash. Then he was inside the kitchen, dripping on the linoleum.
“What’s that in your hand?” Julian said.
“This?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“I’ll show you.” The man stuck a stun gun into the side of Julian’s neck and knocked him across the kitchen, then stunned him twice more and pressed him to the floor with a pointy-toed, spit-shined cowboy boot. With his free hand, he clicked off the overhead lights.