The Confession of Joe Cullen (2 page)

She went into the kitchen then, and Cullen listened to the sound of water and ice. She came back with two oversized old fashioned glasses, loaded with ice and whiskey.

“You drink bourbon?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“I grew up in New Orleans with sweet whiskey. Drink up. You'll feel better. You always had this trouble?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” Cullen muttered.

“Oh, shit. Grow up. They sell condoms on the TV now.”

“If I always had it, I wouldna come on to you. I got more sense than that. If you came out of that bedroom, looking the way you look, six months ago I would have popped my pants.”

“What happened?”

He took a drink of the bourbon. “Good. I like bourbon. Nobody drinks it anymore.”

“I drink it. Come on, Culley. What happened?”

The bourbon was warm inside him, and on top of the two beers, it warmed him and eased him. This was a beautiful woman. He could see the deep red discs around her nipples, the hard thimbles of her nipples erect and ready. Some damn fool had once argued with him that prostitutes could not be aroused. This woman was aroused. He could taste the hot scent of her, and as he drank the whiskey, raw over the ice, he felt the change and the hardening in his loins.

“I can't tell you.”

“You can tell me anything. You know how it goes — a whore's a slob who'll listen to anything.”

“Why do you have to call yourself a whore?”

She smiled, rose, and walked behind Cullen and kissed him on the top of his head. Then she dropped down in front of his chair with her arm over his knee. “Because that's what I am, lover.”

“Can I have another drink?”

“Makes you nervous, me sitting here.”

“Like hell it does. I just need another drink.”

“OK, OK, don't bite my head off.” She rose and took his glass. “It's not water. You say you're a pilot. What do you fly?”

“Anything. If it has wings, I can fly it. I'm a damn good helicopter pilot, as good as anyone in the business. That's how I was trained, Jesus God forgive me. What in hell difference does it make to you?”

“Just asking.” She handed him the drink. “You really blow hot and cold, don't you?”

“You got another name besides Sylvia?”

“Why?”

“Why? Why? I don't know.” He felt the second whiskey. He was not the kind of a drinker who could put down a fifth of whiskey and then walk away. The two beers had put a fuzz on his head, and now he was getting truly drunk. It was a warm, comfortable feeling that was nevertheless threaded through with fear, and he fought against the feeling of being enshrouded with fear, like a fly laced into silk by a spider. “You're a lady. Oh, shit, do you know what I mean?”

“Maybe.”

“Trouble was, Frannie never knew what the hell I was talking about.”

“Sylvia Mendoza. No secret. Who's Frannie?”

“My wife. Once.”

“So tell me what you want, Culley. Right now, you're sitting here and getting stinking drunk. If you couldn't do it before, you're sure as hell not going to do it now. You want to take the money back and get out of here before you get sick and vomit on my rug. That rug cost me twelve hundred dollars.”

“I don't vomit, and I don't want the goddamn money back. I want to talk to someone. I got to talk. Can't you understand that — I got to talk.”

She dropped onto the couch, indifferent now to her nakedness as a fact of sex. She had let go of seduction. Seduction was business, and she had dismissed Cullen as a client. “I'll tell you what,” she said. “I got a John who's a shrink. I'll make a date for you, and for a hundred dollars an hour, he'll let you talk your head off.”

“The hell with that! I don't need no hooker to put me down.” He was bristling now. “Who the hell are you to put me down? I paid.”

“Come on, come on,” she said, getting up and going to him and taking his hand. “I didn't want to make you mad. I'm not putting you down, Culley. Come on to bed. I don't need to be satisfied, I'm not your wife.”

“I want to talk.”

“Then talk,” pulling back from him. “Talk. What's eating you?”

“I'll tell you what's eating me,” Cullen said, spacing the words so that each word stood by itself, the way some drunks speak. “I murdered a priest. That's what's eating me.”

At first, Sylvia Mendoza did not react. She stood facing Cullen, her mouth slightly open, and that tableau, the two, the man and the woman, facing each other, staring at each other, silent, maintained itself for at least ten or fifteen seconds, and then she whispered, “Say that again, what you just said.”

“I murdered a priest.”

Now she reacted, her voice shrill, almost a scream. “Get out of here! Get out of here, goddamn you, you crazy motherfucker, you crazy bastard, get out of here or I call the cops!” She ran into the kitchen and returned with a ten-inch butcher knife in her hand. “Don't come near me, motherfucker, or I'll cut your heart out.”

Cullen staggered to his feet, his hands spread, palms down. “Hey, take it easy. Be cool. I'm not going to hurt you.” He shuffled to the outside door, opened it, and she followed him, the knife outthrust, for all the world like a bullfighter going in for the kill.

“Jesus God,” Cullen begged, “get that damn knife away. I ain't going to hurt you.”

The door slammed. A moment later it opened, and his hat and coat were flung out into the hall. Other doors were opening now in response to the shouting. Heads peered out, but no one came out of a door and into the hallway. Shocked back into a sort of sobriety, Cullen kept his finger on the elevator button until the car appeared. When at last he left the building to stumble out into the rain, he breathed a sigh of relief.

The Second Confession

T
HE CATHOLIC CHURCH
of Saint Peter the Rock, in the West Twenties, had long since fallen on hard times. The docks that had once been a base for the loading and unloading of the goods of America, and the world too, had moved across to the Jersey shore, and the stevedores, the Irish and Poles and Italians who had made their living as longshoremen on the downtown docks, had drifted away to other places. Saint Peter the Rock had never placed among the great Catholic churches of New York, but it had been built with love and care out of the same brownstone that had built thousands of New York houses, and its stained glass windows were the gift of an Italian immigrant who had made a small fortune in the ice business, and who went to Verona himself to order the windows and supervise their construction. But that was a long time ago, and now Saint Peter the Rock served only a handful of old people who clung to the neighborhood.

None of this was known to Joe Cullen, who had spent most of his childhood in Broad Channel on the edge of Jamaica Bay, where you see the towering skyscrapers of New York in the misty distance; but he had some recollection of seeing a church not too far from his apartment on Eighteenth Street. On this day, some three days after his encounter with Sylvia Mendoza, he found himself in front of the old church, standing there and staring at it for at least five minutes, after which he sat down on the steps, lit a cigarette, and smoked it until the heat of the butt touched his fingers. He then snapped it away, shook his head, closed his eyes for a long moment, and entered the church. Once inside the doors, he stood still, blinded by the dark shadows, waiting for his sight to clear.

His eyes focused now. The only light in the church came from a few candles and the glow from the stained glass windows, and in this dim light an old woman was straightening out the hymnals on the backs of the pews. Cullen took a few steps and then stood in the aisle, watching the old woman approach him. All unconscious of his presence, intent on her work, she glanced up suddenly and let out a shrill gasp.

“Please,” Cullen said.

“Oh, you did startle me, sir.”

“I didn't mean to. Is there a priest here now who could hear confession?”

“Oh, yes. Father Immelman is here, but he's having his afternoon nap. He's getting on, you know, and he needs his nap. He's seventy-three. When you get to that age, you want a nap in the afternoon. Not myself, of course; there's so much work to be done. Do you come here often?”

“No.”

“I should have known. I know all the churchgoers, but my memory's so poorly these days. What time is it, sir, if I may ask?”

Cullen looked at his watch. “Ten minutes to three.”

“Well, there you are. In another ten minutes, he'll be down. You can sit in the booth — the one over there,” she said, pointing. The moment he comes down, I'll tell him you're there.”

He nodded, mumbled a thank-you, and then went to the confession booth and sat there, breathing the musty air and remembering his childhood without joy. The smell had not changed, and he had a notion that anywhere, in any booth, the smell would be the same.

The smell was his childhood. He remembered hearing, somewhere, that the deepest memory was odor, the deepest impression, the link of man to an ancient time when he was not man at all, only becoming, and this odor was filled with the fears and frustrations of an adolescent boy. Cullen did not want to remember the adolescent boy. There was a great deal that Cullen didn't want to remember. There was the odor that came from the body bags, and there was the odor of mud when your face is in the mud, and there was the odor of sheer terror the time he was shot down with VC all around him. He was beginning to sweat, and in another moment he would have leaped out of the confession booth and fled the church.

Then, on top of that thought, pinning him to his seat, there was the sound of the old priest's slow steps, and the opening of his door to the booth.

“My son?”

Cullen opened his mouth but no sound came from it.

“My son, you wish to confess? To receive absolution?”

“Yes.”

“How long is it since your last confession?”

Long moments passed before Cullen could count the years.

“My son?”

“I'm trying to think about it, Father.” It was before Vietnam. Was it 1970? That would make it seventeen years. Or was it 1968? Nineteen years.

“I think — nineteen years.”

From the priest, a long silence — to the point where Cullen had the feeling that he had left the box, and then when he spoke, he asked whether Cullen was still a believer. “You said you were, my son — or that you had been in the past. You have not put the church out of your life, have you?”

“Things happened, Father. I was in Vietnam.”

“And that kept you from confession?”

Cullen was not used to self-examination. It was only recently that he had begun to look into himself, trying desperately to find motives and see himself as another might see him.

“I don't know,” he answered. “I'm not sure. In some way, it made it too hard to confess.”

“Yes.” The old priest's voice was without rancor. He had lived a long time and heard too many confessions ever to be surprised. When he asked Cullen what he had done that brought him here today, after so many years, he could almost have anticipated a tragedy of some sort.

“I murdered a priest,” Cullen replied, each word torn out of his gut.

“You murdered a priest? Is that what you said? My hearing is not of the best.” There was not surprise nor anger nor horror in the old man's voice.

“Yes, Father,” Cullen whispered.

“A little louder, please, my son.”

“Yes, Father. I said that I had murdered a priest.”

“I see.” Then silence, silence. Cullen heard the old man's breathing, his own breathing. Then the old man asked, his voice unshaken, “Were you conscious of what you were doing?”

“Yes, Father.”

“And tell me, how do you feel about what you have done?”

“Terrible.”

“And sorry? Contrite?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Tell me, my son, do you believe in God?”

Cullen's hesitation was so long that the priest asked his question again. “My son, I asked you whether you believed in God. Can you answer that question?”

“I don't know,” Cullen said finally.

“That is not an answer, and you know that, my son. Look into your heart, and then tell me what you believe or disbelieve.”

“I was in Vietnam,” Cullen said forlornly. “How can I tell you that I believe in God?”

“You saw what man does and not what God does. Can you accept that?”

“No,” Cullen whispered.

“Please, louder, my son.”

“No. No, I can't accept that what man does isn't what God does — I mean, I guess I want to. I can't.”

“Then I must ask you again — do you believe in God?”

“Father, I want to.”

“But do you?”

Cullen felt every muscle in his body tighten. He knew what the priest's question meant, and as much as he wanted to lie, he couldn't.