Rabid (28 page)

“I’m really busy right now. Bye.” The phone line went dead.

Dante hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair. The chair dipped back.

Free-fall jerked him before the chair stabilized, and he stared at the ceiling of the rectory, his legs and arms extended, balancing so the chair wouldn’t dump him. His gold crucifix bumped his cassock and his chest, then slithered aside and hung from his neck, pulling.

On the ceiling, one white-painted wooden board had no nails.

~~~~~

Motion, like spinning, only straight ahead. Cool air chilled Conroy’s nose.

Leila was talking. “You hang in there, Conroy. Yuri will try to talk you down to two thousand if the car smells like puke.”

Conroy turned his head to see who she was talking to but he had forgotten what she had said. Outside, light streaked and cars flew by as if they were broomsticks with women arching on them. He tried to talk, but the world spun and he spun the other way, fighting.

“Sit back!” His chest caved in, struck.

The world rushed by, streaks of cerulean and cinnamon, amber and chartreuse, and howls and scratches and twitters, and rage and remorse and screaming black. The dashboard undulated and spots glimmered on it, reflections in a hematite mirror of the insanity outside.

The images meant something.

As opposed to him, who was nothing.

~~~~~

Knocking battered the front door. Bev trotted to it and peeked out the window.

Conroy’s black Porsche was parked on the street. Red sunset reflected in its rear window.

She opened the door. A girl wearing jeans and a too-small silver shirt under an open gray coat stood outside, staring down the block. The intermittent February breeze whipped her black hair and obscured her face. Chill air leaked into the house, carrying a faint odor of stale cigarettes.

“Mrs. Sloan, um,” the girl said in a husky voice and looked back at the car. She clenched Conroy’s keys in her small fist. “I’m Leila Faris. I’m in Conroy’s lab.”

That’s where Bev knew this Leila from. The Sloans threw a Christmas party every year. Leila had been to the house two months ago for the party. “Are you driving Conroy’s car?”

The girl tapped a cigarette pack, hesitated, and slid it back in her coat pocket. “I found him in his office. I think he’s drunk.”

In the car, a man’s weedy form slumped in the front seat. “Oh, dear Lord.” Bev ran out.

He was curled over in the front seat, his white head touching the dash like an accident victim trapped inside a crushed car.

Bev yanked the door and touched the strong pulse in his neck. His chest rose coordinately with a raspy snort. He reeked. His arm was sloppy in her grip. His torso shifted but he was stuck.

Leila, standing beside her, said, “Hold on, hold on,” and leaned across his lap. “I put the seat belt on him.”

“Did anyone see him?” Bev leaned on the door in the cold air.

Leila ran around the car to the driver’s seat. “I don’t think so. Weekend evening.”

Surely a guardian angel had sent Leila to find Conroy and bring him home safely. Bev leaned down and looked through the car at Leila climbing over the driver’s seat towards Conroy. “It was so nice, so nice of you to bring him home.”

“It’s nothing,” Leila muttered. “Grab his arm, and I’ll push him from here.”

Bev grabbed his arm and Conroy stretched like putty. He rocked forward from Leila’s shove, and Bev lifted with her legs and dragged him halfway out.

He mumbled, “Damn,” and dropped to his knees on the asphalt.

Leila ran around the car, lifted him from the other side, and roped his arm around her neck. Conroy’s white-haired head flopped, fishlike, and he cursed again.

Conroy’s body puppet-jiggled as Leila lifted from her side.

Leila said, “Hey! Dr. S.! Walk!” and Conroy gathered his mantis-long legs under him. His weight, yoked on Bev’s neck, lightened marginally but his lanky body sagged between them.

“Walk!” Leila ordered.

~~~~~

Christine peeked around the edge of the bedroom door and watched her sick father curl up his colossal legs. Mom pulled up the covers but didn’t kiss him.

The skinny girl touched Dad more gently than Mom did.

Christine sneaked downstairs to tell Dinah that they had to play quietly because Dad was sick. Christine kept Dinah quiet, even watching babyish cartoons over and over again.

~~~~~

Bev pushed Conroy’s shoulders sideways and Leila, from the other side of the bed, pushed pillows behind him, like a foam wedge for propping infants. The girl found a trash can and set it on the ground near his head.

“If you want to be nice, you could pour some water down him,” Leila said over the bed and Conroy’s inert body. Leila pulled her cell phone from a belt clip, thumbed a button, and held it up to her ear. “Malcolm? You almost here?” She listened. “Yeah, he’s fine. See you in a minute.” She hung up. “I’ll wait outside. I told him Dr. S. had the stomach flu. You should tell him that, if anyone asks on Monday, he ate some undercooked chicken or sushi or something.”

This girl was an angel. Bev laid her hand over her pounding heart. Dragging Conroy upstairs had been an exertion. “I appreciate how discreet you were.”

Conroy mumbled from the bed. His legs twitched but were tangled.

Bev lifted each of his legs and straightened it, unbraiding. “I called his office a half an hour ago, but he didn’t answer.”

Leila shrugged. “He’s so drunk that you could have blown a foghorn next to him and he wouldn’t have answered it.”

~~~~~

The next morning, Conroy was a hangover-pounded cliff.

Barely, with the thinnest fingertip grip, buttered toast clung to the inside of his belly. A hammer pounded steel clips into his skull. Mountaineers swung from every hair, yanking. A cold storm salt-stung his eyes and nose. Slipped stones rattled in his veins. Stiff, dead tundra inhabited his tongue.

Beverly towered above him, an unpitying tsunami. “I’ll take the girls to church,” she said, “but the deal is that you attend Mass every Sunday, and just because you drank yourself stupid doesn’t mean you get out of it.” She set both the alarm clocks. “And take a shower. You stink.”

She whirled like a water spout, a tornado drunk on sea water, and left him lying in bed and staring through his fingers as she walked away. A glass of water and a bottle of generic acetaminophen stood on the bedside table.

He had never been so unsympathetic after he had scraped her off the floor and poured her into bed. He had even prescribed a little helper when she had needed to dry out before their wedding. Without that, she would have staggered down the aisle and slurped the communion wine to get her fix at their wedding Mass.

Then she would have stormed and raged like a snapping shark out of water.

~~~~~

Dante held aloft the round communion wafer and prayed for the Holy Spirit to transform it, to rearrange the proteins from cracker’s wheat gluten into Divine flesh.

As a child in Roma, sitting between his mother and sisters in Mass, he had conjured a heresy. He wasn’t sure which Entity of the Trinity but at least one of them, Dante figured, had to be a loaf of bread since the Host was literally God.

The uproar at home when he had vouchsafed his epiphany— his mother begging forgiveness from the crucifix on the wall, his father’s whipping—had locked such musings inside him.

He still liked the idea of the Holy Spirit as a bread loaf, an incarnation of the loaves and fishes distributed by Christ, so one could eat a toasted slice of God.

Dante broke the wafer above his chalice and mingled the bread and wine. The chalice was mostly silver, but the gold rim was his grandmothers’ wedding rings, melted down. The diamonds that lined up three rows just below rim were gifts from family. His mother had donated the diamond from her wedding ring, which is traditional in Southern Italy, where she was from. He turned the chalice so that his right thumb rested on that overly large diamond, to remember her as he sipped.

To Dante’s left, Sloan sat with his daughters, holding his head.

On the other side of the aisle, Leila Faris sat with her eyes cast down.

~~~~~

The congregation milled into the aisles for communion. The theatricality of the Mass inspired them to partake of the ritual as it has been and ever will be. Their souls walked the church, waiting to ingest the body and blood of God. They were immortal in those minutes, feeling the Almighty around them and soon, inside.

~~~~~

Bev took communion for the last time in her life at the six-fifteen Mass. She had hurriedly swallowed the papery wafer to make way for Mary behind her.

A floury bit stuck in her throat and she coughed to clear it. The Host shouldn’t stick. It should slide down and assimilate seamlessly, melding her with God.

Now, at the two-thirty Mass, Bev glanced down from the choir loft.

Conroy’s white head leaned on his arm as he waited for the communion lines to shorten. At least he had fulfilled that bargain. She was willing to accept it as a sign of better things to come.

The choir muttered behind her, and she flipped the hymnal to the next pink sticky note.

In the choir loft, the furnace forced scalding air around her. If she had known that this was her last communion, she would have played more carefully. At the end of the
Ave Maria
, she hit a sad, Russian E minor instead of an E seventh, which would have rung more gloriously, but she held the chord, feeling it in her soul.

~~~~~

The communion line shuffled toward Father Dante as he presented the fragile Host and proclaimed it the Body of Christ. Eight women lusted in their hearts, and two men did, too, for the body of Father Dante, but the music welled in their hearts and lifted them, burnishing them for better things, and then a chord clanged and saddened them, a note of their own deaths in the music.

The line shuffled forward.

Richard the altar boy held the platter of Host and stood straight in his miniature surplice. He kept waiting for Father Dante to notice him. So far, Father had called all the other boys in to talk.

Richard wouldn’t rat out Father Nicolai, though.

If he did, Father Nicolai would excommunicate Richard and his father and his mother and his little sister Anne, and even if Richard was going to Hell, he could save them.

He would save them, no matter what.

~~~~~