The deep smile lines around his eyes and the salt in his black pepper hair gave away his fifty one years. He had accumulated a bit extra around the belt line, but that was dwindling thanks to the Mexican heat and the fact that, more and more lately, he wasn’t finishing his drinks.
The vehicle at the corner was a sparkling navy-blue Nissan Gobi pick-up, the kind that looked like an egg pulling a cart. There was no mud spray behind the wheels or dents or parts missing. His ride was usually some old, beat up Volkswagen, fuel cell making a sound like angry bees. This vehicle was new. The windows were up. He thought it might even be air-conditioned. There was no cool breeze off the ocean tonight. The truck was so nice he slowed his stride and looked hard at the tinted back window. There was a circular sticker, festive oranges, reds and yellows. It was at home on a Mexican truck, unless you took the time to read the text: Bronx Zoo.
Black linen pants. Black short-sleeve shirt. Collar. He walked right up to the truck, opened the passenger door and got in like he owned it. The truck started moving while he was still searching for the inside handle.
"Evening, Father." The voice was female. He slid his hand into the molded cleft and yanked the door hard against the inertia of the turn.
"Evening. Dodgers playing tonight?"
"Not in Brooklyn."
Anthony turned to see who had given the correct response. He swallowed hard, wishing he’d slugged down the vodka. Hair like spun gold. Smooth, even skin filled with sunlight. Tight, but unobtrusive musculature. Feminine -- so feminine -- but fit. She watched the street. The lights from the bars and nightclubs came through the windshield, letting him see her profile, cheekbones rising like sand-dunes. Prim nose. Eyelashes like little bull whips. She wore a white sleeveless top, short white denim skirt. No shoes. He thought she might be thirty, but he didn’t trust those judgments anymore. All the girls looked so young.
"I’m Regan. Honored to be at your service, father."
"The pleasure’s all mine."
"Do you need anything."
The list that came to mind was lengthy and inappropriate. He tore his eyes away, needing to find the window switch or crank or what ever this thing had. He put his finger on a green glow, pressed and lowered the side window.
"The air is on," Regan said.
"I like the kind outside."
"Sorry." She poked something on the black dashboard. "Did you need anything else? Bible or something. I don’t know."
"The same people that arranged for you will have arranged for an altar boy. Or girl."
Anthony told her when and which way to turn. He lead her down several obscure alleys, through a garage’s front door, then it’s back. He had expected to see some young person behind Planet Hollywood, waiting with a backpack or sack. The door to the kitchen was open by an inch, so he asked her to pull in close to the dumpster and give him a minute.
The kitchen was filled with steam and atomized oil and people in drooping t-shirts side-stepping grills and chopping blocks and huge gray metal pots. Everyone had glossy, molded hair shields that twinkled as they scurried. No one looked up.
"Father Anthony." The small voice came from behind, next to the door he'd just used. Lonzo sat cross-legged on a plastic garbage can. There was a canvas sea-bag on the ground beneath him. He was fifteen and looked as though he'd been formed from reddish-brown wire. His brown eyes were too big for his head and kept darting around the room. He was a mouse with a whiff of cat.
"Not tonight," he said. "It’s bad tonight."
"It’s a night like any other." Anthony smiled.
"There was a woman. She was asking questions in the restaurant today. She didn’t know the right words."
Anthony’s smile vanished. "Did you see her?"
"No. Eric did. He said she was a totally take-home and eat --"
"Yes. Anything specific. Age? Hair color?"
Lonzo tapped his jutting chin. "Eric does not like ‘em old. He gets most booted about the blondes. I think he said her eyes were like glass cleaner."
Anthony pressed his hands together flat and brought his lips down to meet their edge. He took three long blinks then brought his eyes up to meet Lonzo’s.
"I can’t ask you to go tonight."
"But you’re going."
"I have to. These people came a long way. They’re risking a great deal." Anthony picked up the sea-bag. "You need not risk anything."
Anthony walked out and around the truck. He tossed the bag over the side and opened his door. The dome light lit up the cabin and he paused. He looked Regan in the eyes. They were large, radiant and the color of Windex. He got in slowly and told her they were all set.
As they pulled away there was a loud thump in the truck-bed. Regan’s eyes shot to the rear-view mirror. Anthony spun in his seat. Lonzo laughed and waved.
Regan pulled back the sliding rear window. Lonzo stuck is small fingers through and held on.
"Father, you almost forgot something."
"What, Lonzo?"
"Me."
Anthony fought with his grin, but it broke through. He asked Regan if they were going far.
"10 minutes off-island." Regan pulled the Gobi out of the alley into the sparse traffic. They headed in the direction of the bridge.
"Do you know what the problem is?" He asked.
"Huntington chorea." Regan watched the taillights and traffic lights and stumbling, vacationing, brightly clad tourists.
"Not surprising." Anthony watched the water. Lights from the city made pink and yellow and blue-green flashes on the ever-undulating surface.
"So you are Father Shadow."
"You can call me Anthony."
"You look pretty normal for a man who can become invisible and walk through walls."
"This is all a disguise. I’m really a four foot Japanese woman."
Regan put her hand in front of her mouth when she laughed. It was so girlish, Anthony almost relaxed for a second. Almost.
"Seriously," she said, "there must be something to the rumors."
"Sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s only smoke."
"It’s documented that you, and your party, disappeared before the eyes of four trained investigators."
"Hype."
"The two Pinkertons that lost you in an empty rail car?"
"Mirrors."
"With 25 witnesses watching you vanished from the bow of the Eve Saint Marie and didn’t surface until two weeks latter at a hotel bar."
"You know a great deal about my mishaps." Anthony watched her reaction.
"Article in the New Yorker last month. That’s what brought me here."
"Oh." He went back to gazing out the window.
"Can I ask you something?"
"I’ll even try to answer."
"Why are you doing this?"
"Same reason you are, I imagine."
"It’s different for me. I’m not being chased by the police."
"You are too kind. The police don’t chase me anymore. What do they want with a middle-aged priest? It’s only the insurance companies that care."
"They’ll have you arrested just the same. With evidence, the police can’t ignore you. You take big risks."
"The Lord fills this world with love. I took vows to help keep that love flowing. The risk -- the big risk -- would be in not doing all that I can."
"So it’s the vows? You ignore the law because of your interpretation of the vows?"
There, behind the wheel, was that same sweet face. For a moment Anthony thought it had gone. But there it was, under a wonderland of hair and bubbling over with youth.
"Vows are a formal expression of my beliefs. Their interpretation is an interpretation of me, in the most radical sense. I will not re-interpret myself every time Congress meets and decides to author something new."
"Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s," Lonzo shouted from the back.
Anthony laughed a little. "He’s been down this road before."
On the mainland it sometimes took only one turn to leave the modern
world. The truck rolled from easy pavement on to a bumpy rut in the
fields. The tall faded green cane ate it up. The yellow glow put out
by the headlights looked weak. A few minutes later the Gobi stopped in
a small clearing. A tall, broken barn, big enough for ten trucks,
squatted in the middle. The sides had slid into a trapezoidal shape.
The wood could have been cut by the Conquistadors. There were no
evidence that there was anyone else around.
"Does this take long?" Regan pulled up the parking brake.
"I use the short service. You can wait here if you like. There’s no need to further incriminate you with proximity."
"In for a penny." Regan opened her door. The dome light stung everyone’s eyes.
Lonzo hopped out of the back, took his sea bag and stood, eyes wide as they would open.
Anthony got out and rounded the front of the pick-up, cutting Regan off. "Are you sure about this?" He made a slight move, like he was going to take her arm, but stopped. His arm hung at a strange angle.
"Why are you sure about this? You don’t even know these people."
"I’m not here to know them. You can have plausible deniability if you stay in the truck."
She slowly shook her head.
"Please don’t come." He tried to force his feeling through his eyes.
Regan started for the barn. Anthony followed. Lonzo ran up along side him and grabbed his arm. He was shaking his head vigorously. Anthony patted his shoulder once and continued walking.
Anthony, Lonzo and Regan entered the opening where a barn door had once hung. The inside was floored with pebbles and weeds struggling to grown up between them. The lack of light made the walls indiscernible. There was enough leaning lumber to hide a half dozen people.
"I am Father Caranni."
A beam of light came from the back accompanied by the sounds of feet shuffling stones.
"Thank you for coming, father."
Lonzo dropped the sea bag, opened it and took out a tripod with a halogen floodlight. He set it out behind Anthony. Once extended above the priest’s head, he flicked it on. A cone of white light dropped around Anthony. He could just make out the shapes of four people coming toward him, two men, two women.
Regan stood outside the circle.
"Three years ago the Lord sent down a thunder bolt." Anthony said in Regan’s direction. "It was a sign from God that I never thought I’d see outside of the movies. It was a sign that I don’t think any of us can ignore. It fried the memory of my parish computer so thoroughly not a byte of data could be recovered. Records of every sacrament I might have performed for two years were gone. That bolt melded everything as only God can, leaving a burnt plastic and silicon metaphor. To me, it is a lesson as powerful as any in the Bible. The tools of man are just that: man’s. They are not God’s tools."
Anthony held his arm out to Regan. "Please, step forward."
She froze.
The four others stepped into the edge of the light. The man and woman in the middle held each other. They were in their mid-twenties. The men had carnations pinned to ripples on their sport shirts. The women had long skits and tight, pastel blouses. Each held a small array of roses and baby’s breath in their hands and a double shot of saline in each eye.
"Look at them," Anthony said across his out-stretched arm. "They went to classes, contacted the underground and flew down here -- they are flirting with jail just for the sake of love."
"I don’t make the laws." Regan stood so still she was nearly impossible to see.
"No one can say for sure that their children will have a disease. No one can even say they’ll have children. But everyone here is willing to swear before God that these two people love each other."
"Go on, Father." Regan’s voice was even. "You do what you have to do; I’ll do the same."
The woman in the center trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks in a steady stream. The man held her more tightly; sweat accumulated in his thick eyebrows. Anthony kept his attention fixed on Regan’s silhouette.
"Walk away," Anthony said. "You can’t testify to something to didn’t see."
"I’ve seen this much. It’s too late for any of your tricks."
"No, Regan." Anthony said. "Now is when I pull my one trick. I tell the truth. That night on the Eve Saint Marie an entire family looked the other way. Those two Pinkertons winked and walked from my box-car. Investigators invented stories about smoke and mirrors."
"That can’t be . . ."
"They saw magic, but it wasn’t stage illusion." Anthony paused. "No one has ever turned me in. You will be the first to put the love of an insurance company over the love of two people."
Anthony reached back. Lonzo placed a weathered leather prayer book in his open hand.
Regan backed out of the barn into the faint light of the stars and planets and quarter-moon. She took what looked like a thin deck of cards out of her back pocket. The top card flipped over and she pressed one of the numbers.
"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today," Anthony began, "to wed this couple in holy matrimony . . . "
"It's Regan," she said into phone. Her eyes were fixed on the young couple. They trembled in each other’s arms, in a crumbling barn, in a sweltering cane-field, hundreds of miles from anything they really knew. "He slipped away. I don't know how. . . . I never actually saw a disapproved marriage ceremony . . . . What can I say. The legends are true, I guess."
Bio:Michael lives on an island in up-state New York ever so slowly pursuing a Nobel Prize for Literature. DC Comics has purchased a few of his stories. He received honorable mention in 1997’s Hewlett Parkard Writing Contest. His first novel, "Eidolon Ground", is available at www.geneses.com
E-mail: mjmartineck@mailexcite.com
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