Authors: Chuck Stepanek
2
There are those people who, being so blessed, can easily pick up on subtleties. Little nuances, things that might be just a little bit
out of place, or in the wrong order. These are the people who can glance at a fully-laden banquet hall table and say ‘hmmm, one of the salad forks is in the wrong spot. Let’s fix that. There we go.” These are the same people who will hesitate while reading a newspaper article to muse: ‘the author just dangled a participle.’
Daddy was not one of those people. On the subtlety scale, getting his attention was the equivalent of bashing his head with a two by four, dousing him with ice water or lighting a fire under his Slavic ass. So it was only by complete chance, as he stood in the hallway, a clump of little boy clothes in his arms, that he picked up on something that was ‘just a little bit out of place.’ There was blood in the boy’s underwear.
The underwear had been the last thing off, ergo they were the first thing in the pile. The pile that was now held just inches below daddy’s face. He stood and stared; stood and stared. What should have been an intellectual quandary filled with dozens of ramifications, was winnowed down to black or white, yes or no, on or off. Tell or don’t tell.
Behind him and the closed door, the boy in the bath screamed on. That would stop…eventually. In front of him the blood, well that was permanent.
The underwear could go into the clothes pile. But when laundry day came around, they would be discovered. Black and white. That settled it. He had to go to mommy and explain what had happened. Besides the underwear could be useful. Without having to resort to words he could just hold the stained skivvies out as a prop. A prop that explained everything to mommy. “Oh, I see. Those are Corky’s underwear and they’re all bloody. Father
Milliken
must have raped him. It’s not your fault, you were out scooping snow, and that explains why our son is now screaming in the bathroom. Sit down to some hot coffee and fresh kolache. They’re still warm.” Yes, the underwear could explain a lot of things that he wouldn’t have to.
It would be days later before daddy would realize that he did have other options. Washing out the bloodstain by hand for one, throwing the underwear in the garbage for another. But a cerebral man he was not. And so with a double armful of clothes and winter wear he headed toward the kitchen.
3
You would have thought she had already heard the news. Mommy was pacing back and forth in a manic state of OCD. Sink to table, table to sink, sink to table. She sees but doesn’t notice daddy with his bundle of incrimination. “The coffee’s almost…” she turns on the stove light “…believe in the holy spirit…” turns off the stove light “…how bad were the streets…” turns on the stove light “…anointed in the spirit of Juan Valdez…”
Mommy was wired.
Even a small change in the daily pattern of an OCD sufferer can be highly upsetting. OCD is all about routine, and the errand that daddy and the boy had made to the church was not part of the routine. This had thrown a wrench into mommy’s tightly wound clock springs and she had spent the evening bouncing around the house like a plinko marble: Locking and unlocking doors, washing hands, checking the stove burners, washing and checking and washing and checking and washing again. And now her attention was
not
on the man who stood before her with a wash load of sin. It was mired in a paragon of patterns and ritual.
Daddy saw this and for a moment considered taking the clothes and stuffing them in the hall closet. He had seen his wife in these manic fits before and while he didn’t have enough common sense to worry about her well being, he did have enough to worry about his own. When his wife was like this – he didn’t – well, he just didn’t like it. And what he felt he had to do now – well that was something he liked a whole lot less.
Meanwhile Corky screamed mercilessly in the bathroom.
Wordlessly, with four determined strides, daddy crossed to the kitchen table and dumped the clothes on the open end, away from the plate of kolache’s and waiting coffee cup. The clothes tumbled, rolled, then settled; the all important telltale underwear now mostly covered by a shirt tail and one dangling mitten.
This would not do. Daddy pawed at the pile and brought the key piece of evidence back atop to prominence. He then squeezed the sides of the mound together so that it may hold its position.
Yet, just like before, he was seen but not noticed. Sink to cupboard, cupboard to sink was the current perpetual loop in motion. He would have to talk. At the very least start to talk. Once he got started the bloody underwear could speak for itself. He looked at the heap of fabric and searched for just the right word. It came easier than he expected, he took a breath and rolled it out of his mouth in two well practiced syllables: “Coffee.”
The reaction was epic.
“Oh the coffee, I didn’t pour! Forgive us our sins…the cup is on the table, if I can find…blessed Saint Jude patron saint of lost…” And that was where the words stopped.
In an act of raw concentration mommy held her breath as she poured the steaming cup of Joe. Eyes never leaving their mark—disregarding the abomination of bloody clothing three feet away from her. All was silent in the house save for a gentle gurgle as the bottom of the cup filled, then abated as the level of the liquid rose to absorb the sound of pouring. That – and of course the screaming.
The few seconds of concentration to fill the cup were enough to put the OCD thoughts and actions on temporary restraint. It was just enough time for mommy to broaden her perception beyond
the nonstop amusement park of her mind and kitchen. She saw the clothes. She saw the blood.
“Clothes. Blood…. Nailed to the cross to die for our…” Again she stopped. And even without the aid of pouring coffee she held her breath and concentrated. There was something else. It was screaming. Screaming coming from the bathroom. From Corky.
She was far from alarmed. The blood could be washed out with cold water, several times if need be. Heaven knew she was up to doing a task more than once. The screaming was no more than a nuisance. It would end in time. But thanks to her overactive albeit misguided mind she allowed her old friend paranoia to reignite the OCD party. Somewhere she made a connection between bloody clothes and shrieking child. Her brain kicked into alarmed overdrive.
“Corky! Did he break something at the church…blessed are the poor in spirit…he didn’t smear blood in the rectory…that’s sacrilege – Jesus help us!” She wheeled to her shrines, each in turn, the coffee pot, the sink, the cupboard, the door latch, none could give her the answer she craved. She wheeled on daddy. “What did he do!” It wasn’t ‘what happened to him’, ‘is he alright’, not even a ‘is he still bleeding.’ Just an implied statement of judgment disguised as a question.
It was the wrong question; but it mattered not. Daddy had been formulating an answer just the same. The answer came out easily and with the power of a wrecking ball. He looked at his wife and without the slightest hesitation or stutter said: “He fucked him.”
Two things struck mommy. The first was shock. Shock at the use of the most forbidden word. The wrecking ball had landed a direct hit, and as it swung free from the rubble a second feeling surfaced: confusion. The statement didn’t make sense. Corky fu- Corky did that to him? The boy did that to the priest? No, it was all wrong. Unless… unless it meant that the boy had used
his middle finger against the priest. Yes, she knew about the middle finger, the one that the kids she
grew up with called their ‘fu--
’ uh, ‘that’ finger. But where could he have learned such a thing and why oh why would he have used it on a priest!
Plus there was the matter of the bloody underwear. But if you thought about it for a moment, it made sense. The boy had been strapped and strapped but good likely by both the priest and daddy for having flipped the bird.
The shock and confusion, as hard as they may have been on the surface, provided a short-lived underlying benefit. They knocked mommy’s obsessive compulsive behavior off its tracks. In a strained but lucid voice she asked: “Why? Why would Corky give the middle finger to the priest? Where did he learn that? What did Father
Milliken
say? What’s going to happen?”
It was far too many questions for daddy to handle. So he repeated his original statement although this time inserting names for the pronouns: “Father
Milliken
– fucked – Corky.”
A nomad dying of thirst in the desert will see his mirages. An addict jonesing for a far too tardy hit on the pipe, his phantoms. A near drowning victim, his decades of life in a still frame. And the mind of a woman being told that her son was fucked by a priest, well you may as well be looking at a trash-littered vacant lot in the heart of an upscale neighborhood. It just didn’t make sense.
Again the kitchen went silent.
4
Corky had accepted his immersion in the bathwater unquestioningly. To any uninformed observer his cries and screams may have suggested a diffident level of affinity for the tub. The one member of his household who was uninformed was in the process of having the two-letter negative syllable stricken
from the front of the word. Uninformed to informed. Simple as that.
The slosh of the water, the slick feel of the enamel on his skin, even his lone bath toy, a squirt bottle that had long ago held Palmolive dishwashing soap that floated unused and empty at the foot of the tub, all of these things should have brought him physical comfort and emotional familiarity. And perhaps in some far distant reach of his perceptions they did. A little bit that is.
They were minor creature comforts at best. But they held little chance against the creature feature movie that was running through his mind in living color; that,
and
the blood that was running out of his bottom and diffusing into a pastel pink contrail. It would have been better if daddy had added bubbles to the bath. Even a light a scrim of lather would have helped to hide the sight of the blood.
With the door closed the wails of Corky’s cries began to be unnerving to his own ears. He began to hitch back his howls, if even just for a moment to briefly interrupt his own self-created cacophony. But when he saw the streaks of pink and where they were coming from, his mind suffered a final cataclysmic jolt. The bathroom began a kaleidoscopic freefall. Corky’s mind disengaged and he plummeted down a blackened mineshaft. He fell deeper and deeper, faster and faster. The darkness so complete that he could only sense the plummet. Then came images… the telescope… the pool of his tears, drool and snot on the floor… the priest – evil, raging, brandishing vials, incense burners and crucifixes to shove up his behind, the blood seeping out between his legs. Faster and faster the images shot by. Corky braced for impact with the bottom of the shaft by doing the only thing he could. He resumed his screaming.
5
Mommy slumped into a kitchen chair. She picked up the underwear and turned it to and fro like an archeological student
on his first dig wondering if the rock she held was noteworthy or just another piece for the slag pile. The bloodstain she could comprehend. It was the other part. The statement ‘Father Milliken Fucked Corky’ that she could not fathom. “That’s impossible.” Naïve denial. “That’s – that’s only men and women.” Immediately she realized her transgression of suggesting that father Milliken would actually copulate with a woman, but rather than embark on a litany of sackcloth laden expressions, she merely crossed herself and resumed fingering the waistband. Corky’s underwear. Corky had soiled his underwear somehow and was trying to blame the priest by using the word “fuck.” A word that he couldn’t possibly know the meaning of.
“Corky told you this!” She burst in obvious relief. “He-he may have broken something in the rectory. Kids are always breaking things. And he didn’t-didn’t know what to do. And he had heard that word somewhere – but he didn’t know what it meant – and he said the priest had fuc- he said the priest did that to him. And then you spanked him, or the priest spanked him (at this she again crossed herself) and he bled on his underwear.”
There were more than a few inconsistencies with mommy analysis. The least of which being that it would require a spanking with a cat-o-nine tails to produce that much blood. But she was a newcomer to the drama and as such was allowed a dose of naiveté. The problem was that this kitchen table exchange was doing little to help their son who was bleeding in the bathtub.