Borderlands 5 Read online

  The door made a puffy slam. Father Bob’s footsteps clattered away into silence. A moment later the air conditioning went off, followed by the faint boom of ductwork suddenly empty of air pressure.

  Then it was silent here in St. Mary Martyr. It was truly, beautifully silent. At first, the church appeared empty, so empty that a mouse that had been waiting to eat crumbs off the altar began to move out into view.

  It stopped, though, when something like a sigh whispered through the silence. An instant later, it saw movement back among the pews. It ran.

  Quickly, a figure passed down the aisle, making the votive candles lit by the old and the desperate flicker uncertainly. A few moments later another door, this one small and at the rear of the church, opened. A figure slipped out, hesitated for a moment, then went out into the night.

  This figure, tall, bent against the wind, clutching the collars of a thin raincoat, crossed beneath the streetlight and went on off down Morris Street, a shadow beneath the tossing trees.

  Mrs. McKorkle came during the day, and it was good to have her bustle in this mausoleum of a rectory, the moaning of the Electrolux, the clatter of dishes being put away, the small humming under her breath of popular standards from fifty years ago. At five she would make him his dinner. At five thirty, he would sit in the front room with a cigar watching Dan Rather, and then at six go to the kitchen and take his food out of the warm oven. He would eat in the dining room at a table that had once troughed six priests.

  Father Martin Berg had enjoyed the sort of invincible faith that you would have thought would have carried him through to eternity. But it had not carried him through. He’d lost it all in an afternoon, for no particular reason, and gone and joined Catholic Life as an agent, and called on the parish with a sheepish, awful grin on his face. They bought nothing from him.

  He’d fought back by using his considerable organizational skills. He had cards printed and tacked them up on bookstore and coffee house bulletin boards. He’d even rented an office, bought a couple of suits from the Salvation Army, the works. A handsome man, he looked like he might once have been corporate poster boy, circa about 1955.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t write a million dollar policy for fifty cents on a cancerous octogenarian with an artificial heart and kidneys. Or so he’d said when he’d come up the back walk looking for a meal and his old bed, just for the night.

  He had wept at this table. He’d died at fifty-six. Fallen under a bus. So many hopeful, blustery Irishmen had sat across from him at this table that they had blurred together in his mind into a single mournful presence, as heavy on his memory as Mrs. McKorkle’s scones were in his gut. Then there had been Father Lupe Zaragona, with his beloved Mount Blanc pen his father had given him, and Father Robbins, the evangelist of homosexuality, who had blown his brains out—and into—the boiler, shutting it down for two very cold weeks in December of 1997. And that inevitable dirty old man—what was his damn name?—who got shuttled from parish to parish and diocese to diocese. Bob had discovered by accident that he kept a picture of the child actor Kelly Reno in his wallet.

  The phone rang.

  He stopped chewing the roast beef flavored string he’d been given. Money problems. Actual starvation, here and there, these days—priests being cheerful about fasting.

  It rang again, and kept ringing.

  Mr. or Mrs. Dying was dying, perhaps, wanting a little grease for the forehead and the loins and a quidquid delquisti toodle-oo.

  He would have answered it, but he knew that it would soon ring again if it was urgent. He got his black death case ready, small and frayed, with its red plush interior with room for the host carrier, the holy oil, and a cross.

  The case had been bought from the Paulist Priest Supply back when he’d just been ordained.

  A priest! Me! Oh my god o my god o my god. And that night, feeling as if his soul had been transformed into some kind of a crystal set tuned to Christ, he had masturbated four times, each time after going down beside his narrow bed and saying a rosary, then back up and here came Mr. Hand again, groping and punching him up, and bip bap boom until there was nothing left in his crotch bag but rust.

  He had been plunged into St. Michaels, then his first turn at St. Mary Martyr when there was a choir the size of an infantry brigade and two hours of confession and six masses, then St. Christopher’s under Monsignor Calabrese who had been a hand smeller (whatever sort of fetish that was God literally only knew). You would wake up and there kneeling beside your bed in the duff with an erection like an evil lantern would be the pastor, bent over and smelling, not kissing, your hand. You’d lie there praying for him for yourself for the parish the people the church the pope the saints and sinners while snufff, snufff on and on it went, and finally you would fake a little snore and turn to the wall. Then he’d go to the next boy priest, sniffing his mad way across more damp night skin.

  Priests shot through that parish like meteors. He’d died in a fire, that one, smoking in bed so they said and when Detective Reilly Mann had pointed out that he didn’t smoke, the Chancellor said as smooth as eelskin, “he’d just taken it up. He was clumsy with it, poor devil.” The archbishop called them in and spoke of how it is that tolerance is part of piety. But then he added boys will be boys, and threw them a sumptuous dinner, pot roast and old wine.

  The truth is that the inner history of the church—the real history—is a history of sex gone all contorted from compression and disuse and ignorance. Above all, the sexuality of the church is an ignorant one. Not innocent, though, no.

  It is the story of the urgent effort of semen to escape from generations of human prisons, made in the name of God by a pope ironically named Innocent, who Father Bob suspected of having been a rough-skinned demon under his fabulous vestments.

  And then there was the matter—the awful matter—of the relief of priests by altar boys, a tradition that went back to Roman times, when the local pontifex could neither marry nor be seen with a whore.

  It had always been part of the institution, a service performed by somebody whose smoothness echoed that of a woman enough to pass, and whose knowledge of the organ meant that he could be quick and even sometimes splendid.

  Before mass in the sacristy with the smart right hand. After mass in the rectory with the clumsy, surprising left.

  Part of the institution, of no consequence to anybody, not in a past when child servants had routinely amused guests at dinners by diddling them under the table. No, it was the discovery of childhood itself, and its sanctification in the nineteenth century, that had oh so gradually surrounded the church and its ancient habits, until what was routine became scandalous, the ordinary transmogrified into the horrible. Boys who once would not even have bothered to laugh the matter off now took priestly need to be evil, and the satisfaction of it a guilty and awful sin. They became the hollow-eyed men in the courtrooms, who sent the priests off to a life of frenetic, devastating buggery under prison sheets, their consecrated hands locked in steel.

  The phone rang again. Okay, that was it. He had to answer. “St. Mary Martyr.”

  “Father?”

  “This is Father Randall.”

  Breathing. He knew the sound of grief. He waited. A gulp, again: “Father?”

  It was a child. “Are you in trouble?”

  Silence. Then a click, something changing in the telephone system.

  Then the dial tone.

  The moment he hung up, the phone rang again. It was the same caller. He went through the same drill, then dashed into his office to look at the caller ID. He was astonished to find that the number calling was the principal’s office over at the school.

  He didn’t waste an instant. A child was in the school, which meant vandalism, which meant a disaster tomorrow morning, and more students not coming back after Christmas. He remembered when only the best could make it into St. Mary Martyr. The rest must go to General Grant, poor things. Now the dopes and misanthropes went to St. Mary Martyr. The real kid
s—normal, loud, strong—played for Give Me G, a Big Big G, Go Grant, Go Grant, Go G-R-A-N-T!

  Go Saint Mary Martyr! Hey, we’re here! We have balls, too! Yeah, basketballs with all the bounce dribbled out.

  He left the rectory, which looked at night like the haunted house that it was, and hurried along the short street to the school.

  The night had turned cold, tangy with autumn smoke, the air as clear as God’s own eye. The moon shone down, that parched desert in the sky, that appalled face, and a reef of leaves raced along the sidewalk. Oh, dear God, how beautiful is thine world, that is thine.

  You must exist. Sure, life might have arisen out of mud and lightning or whatever, but where did the esthetics come from?

  The school building was dark, absolutely dark, a forbidding old hulk that frightened him always, because it was four stories of woodframe construction that would go up like a Walpurgisnacht bonfire if ever anything in the basement went alight.

  He was forever having the fire department over on inspection, the boilermen, the alarm company, the sprinkler company. He threw money at safety, demanded a fire drill every week even though they all, from the fire marshal to Mr. Saenz the alarm man, assured him that it was completely and absolutely safe.

  Then he would walk up the creaking linoleum stairs and hold the ancient mahogany banister, and see the children in their prim blue uniforms marching in their trusting line, their faces full of the assurance and hope of childhood, that I may be a car dealer or I a ballerina, and he would get all the checking done again.

  Now he fumbled out his fistful of keys and took the long, strange one that fit the elaborate lock that had replaced the old, easy one after Mrs. Kiel had come in and found a pile of defecation on the floor. That discovery had been the beginning of a tour through devastation so unspeakable that it seemed to belong to some other reality. Somebody had urinated in the biology lab drawers, poured the fish out and chewed them up, then spit them against the blackboards. They had ripped the lizards and the snakes in half, and slashed into the ceilings of half the classrooms with what must have been a scimitar. There were spatters of dry sperm all over Mrs. Kiel’s Virgin Mary Martyr statue.

  But the main thing was the shit. He’d never seen so much defecation. How could anybody shit that much? The police had said that it was a gang. They had dusted for prints and found many—surprise, surprise—in a school. In his dreading heart, he wondered if perhaps the whole student body had not participated?

  From a distance, a child appears to be a complicated, valid creature, some of them even beautiful, some of them curiously sensual. In fact, the casual, unformed nature of that sensuality—the wriggling movements, the sparking eyes, the moisture of the smile—could make it actually a little arousing…sometimes.

  But up close, they were fragile things, all soft skin and big eyes and so touchingly eager to be held. He found it almost impossible to believe that those gentle, polite slips had come in here en masse and done this, somehow each escaping from his or her home at an appointed hour.

  He unlocked the door. The alarm was full on, its red ‘armed’ light glowing. At once, it began to squeal. He put in the code, turning it off. Then he closed the door and turned it on again. A flip of switches brought light to the hall. No sound, though. He’d expected something—a gasp, the patter of small feet. Nothing came, though, just the contemplative quiet of an academic place in repose.

  He moved along the hall. “Hello?”

  His voice echoed in the waxed silence. Stopping, he listened. All he could hear was his own breathing. He went upstairs, heading toward Mrs. Kielbasa’s office. The door was dark mahogany, and as he put his hand on the knob, he found himself unwilling to turn it.

  He was deep in the building, all alone, and he thought perhaps somebody had lured him here. The idea of getting a cop had never entered his mind. He’d been too intent on protecting his beloved school. But now he thought that he’d been a fool. He laughed a little. It wasn’t surprising, was it? He could be a damn fool. One of his skills.

  Distantly, there was a thud, like a deep underground explosion or a faraway bomb blast. In that second the lights went out. He started to yell, but the words stopped in his suddenly very dry throat. He could see literally not a single thing. The hallway opened onto doors, and all the doors were closed. He might as well have been in a cave.

  He flapped his hands around his head, felt for the wall. Then he heard something—a click, very faint. The air moved just a little.

  Then he knew that Mrs. Kielbasa’s door had been opened. He stepped back once, then again. And suddenly his feet were slipping out from under him. He’d backed all the way to the top of the stairs. He almost overbalanced, but he regained his footing. Had he gone down those stairs, he would now be lying in the landing, broken or dead. He caught his breath. Reaching back, he felt for the top of the banister, then turned and went down.

  There was more light in the broad foyer, which opened out to the street in front and the playground behind. He wished to hell that he’d brought his cellphone. Well, whoever was in here, they were going to get a taste of the cops just as soon as he got back to the rectory. Damn bastards and their bastard games, he could’ve been killed.

  He was unlocking the front door when he felt something. There was a sensation between his legs. Before he had a chance to move, his genitals had been gripped. For a moment, it felt like somebody was goosing him from behind and he started to get furious. Then he realized, by the vibration, that it was not a hand.

  The vibration spread like fire down his legs and up into his solar plexus. The pleasure was so intense that it actually surprised him. Before he could so much as draw another surprised breath, it became more intense still. He was aware that he’d gotten a tremendous erection.

  The vibration deepened, sending gusts of white heat all the way up to his face, flushing him, causing wild, savage desire to burst forth in him. He threw his head back, he cried out, he couldn’t do anything else, it felt so good that the deepest part of him, the savage part that sleeps beneath the heart, was awakened and did not cry out or scream, but roared as the apes who spawned us must have roared when they found pleasure.

  He was agonized, tormented, exalted. The vibration would lessen and he would bend forward gagging, gasping, trying to ask for respite. Then it would go deep again, touching him in sexual places he didn’t even know existed—behind his balls, in his anus, along the rigid shaft—and he would howl again, throwing back his head, every muscle tensing, the spittle flying, the sweat pouring out of him.

  It kept on like that, not for seconds but for minutes, until he was screaming and babbling, gushing sweat, his guts churning, his balls aching between bouts of hideous delectation. In his mind’s eye he saw women dancing in heavenly light, and he almost went mad with desire, wanting not only the pleasure but the flesh, to kiss, to lick, to enter it. He had never felt himself in a woman but he wanted to now, he had to, oh, God, he had to!

  The vibration rose higher and higher and went deeper and deeper. His penis became impossibly rigid, tensing against the fabric of his pants, and it pumped and pumped and pumped and pumped, and he felt all over him hot semen, running down inside his pants, greasing his legs.

  Then it stopped. The instrument—and he felt now for certain that it was not a hand, but a cage of stiff wires that caught on the weave of his trousers—was withdrawn. He choked, toppling forward, seeing a flash as his forehead hit the door.

  He still had the key in the lock. Gathering what presence of mind remaining to him, he turned it and stumbled out onto the front steps. Somebody came out right behind him, he heard them—heard a buzzing, crackling sound, anyway. It reminded him of the throaty sputtering of a grackle. He whirled around, just in time to glimpse a shape about four feet tall go rushing into the bushes that grew beside the entrance.

  “Hey—hey!” He dashed forward and clawed into the bushes, trying to part them. Deep among the branches, he saw a black disappearing gleam.


  Silence, but for the night wind and a distant radio. “The song of love is a sad song…” a voice crooned. Across the street was an old house. He knew the occupants enough to smile and say hello. They weren’t parishioners. He would go there, knock on the door, use their phone.

  As he crossed the street, he became aware that his gut was aching down deep, that his penis felt as if it had been sanded, and that he was wobbling on his feet and had semen dripping down his inner thighs. He couldn’t be seen, dared not risk something being visible, a wet spot or some such. He bypassed the house and went straight on along the block, past the bulk of St. Mary Martyr with its thick, square steeple with the electronic bell concealed in it, and the black windows reflecting scenes from the life of the Virgin, ending with the martyrdom of her heart at the feet of Jesus’s cross.

  He reached the rectory, threw himself at the front door, fumbled for his keys and fought with them, finally got the door open. He ran down the deep central hall, past the life-sized statue of Mary that stood beside the circular staircase and up the stairs.

  He went into his bathroom with its old clawfooted tub and worn porcelain sink. He turned on the light, went to the mirror.

  He looked at the apparition in the glass without understanding, staring at the horrible, hollow eyes that stared back, and the skin dripping its curtain of red. His face, his hair—he was soaked with blood. He tore at his collar, ripped it off and tossed it aside, then tore open his shirt.

  Blood, blood, blood! He screamed, then immediately stopped. Heaving, gagging, he held onto the sink. Big drops of blood dripped down, spattering against the dim white of the porcelain.

  “Oh, God…oh, God…”

  He raised his hands to his face, wiped them through the sheet of blood. There were no cuts, there was no pain…but it was—and then it hit him. He was sweating blood. He was.

  “I’ve got something…oh, Jesus help me, help your son…”

  A sound? Was that somebody downstairs, just coming in, that faint creak sounding ominously like the back door when you close it.