On the terrace in Martinique, the first Mrs. Hevert freezes as she notices a hummingbird fluttering silently near the hummingbird feeder that Mrs. Hevert the First has been hopefully filling all summer—for it is eternally summer here, or at least, mostly summer, except during the monsoons, when it is still summer, but drenching--with things hummingbirds like to drink, and Sylvia, as her name is, stops packing sod into a clay pot in which she plans to plant some narcissus bulbs, pulls off her gardening gloves, swipes the flat of one hand across the bridge of her nose and sniffles, too much pollen around for her allergies to abide, but Sylvia’s as balanced as the bulb of a scallion, or a narcissus, or one of the tulip bulbs once so prized by the Dutch and other speculators that whole fortunes were tossed to the winds to obtain them.
Step by step, she thinks. Remain calm, she thinks. Keep racing thoughts at a safe remove, she thinks. If I could have Randolph killed, she thinks. I would need to think it out very carefully, she thinks.
What an astonishing bird, she thinks. The first I have seen all year. They’re so elusive, they fly so swiftly and so surely, and they must also be the most prudent and circumspect creatures of the air.
How much would it cost to have Randolph killed, she wonders. How could I get this done without leaving anything untidy, no loose threads leading back to my vicinity, she wonders. Who could I reasonably turn to and expect discretion—unless, she suddenly realizes, it were a Catholic priest! A Catholic priest with an unsavory secret, a secret that would blow his Priestliness out of the water if revealed. But Sylvia, she cautions herself, think carefully about this. Yes, you know such a Catholic priest. Yes, the Seal of the Confessional would be quite adequate if the subject were broached in a hypothetical way, at least with Father Benedict, who Likes a Drink as well as a cherubic pair of altar boy’s buttocks.
The thought of Father Benedict reminds her that she hasn’t eaten breakfast. The most important meal of the day, or so the legend goes. It happens that Josephine makes the most scrumptuous Eggs Benedict on Martinique, or perhaps in the entire Caribbean Basin. With, she considers, a prudent Shirley Temple, no vodka today, one must skirl these questions with zenlike clarity, Be Realistic, for what doth it profit a man, or a woman, if she Gain the Earth and Lose Her Immortal Soul? Does killing Randolph qualify as losing my immortal soul? If so, is it worth it?
“Josephine, si vous plait, je voudrais un plat des oeufs Benedict, avec votre hollandaise speciale…”
“Oui, madame…”
“Et une verre de…verre de l’eau, je crois.”
“D’accord, madame…”
Tomato juice really is too acidic, Sylvia considers, don’t stir up the bile, stay calm, approach the problem in a geometric fashion, factor in variables, make some headway on pruning those hedges, what a blessing the bourgainvillea, spilling over the wall, this perfect sky, this calm, that sea, and the whisper of a warm humid breeze, well, not a whisper really, a murmur….
“Father Benedict, how good of you to come.”
Father Benedict is a pasty man, a thin man, a man whose brow needs frequent swobbing with a handkerchief in the balmy climate of Martinique, a man of five foot ten, whose face resembles that of a handsome man entrapped in a compressing device, a man more impressive in profile than full-face, and his cassock and Roman collar cannot be helping things, thinks Sylvia, he’s sweating like a steamed dumpling squashed by a pickup truck. I like the black frock but it’s so unseasonable, can he never wear mufti, and how does he lower his trousers and raise the cassock with any sort of grace when buggering some comely lad after celebrating Mass?
“I have sinned, Father.”
“We are all sinners, Sylvia. Myself more than others, I sometimes think.”
“Yet the Lord promises us forgiveness, am I right?”
“The Blood of Christ washes away all sins.”
“I’m thinking not only of sins of Thought, Father Benedict. But future sins as well, sins of Deed.”
Oh for the love of mike, thought Father Benedict, why doesn’t she just get to the point. Sylvia knows perfectly well that whatever she wants to do, she does, and Father Benedict wished terribly to get down to the beach at the hour when those bronze-colored gods of the island, the indigenous males with bodies so muscled from everyday activity they seem wrought from tempered steel, ventured into the lapping waters surrounding the island: for it is often as good to receive as to give, and Father Benedict had made many a friend among these dark-skinned youths, friends who had filled him with joy, quite as much as he, in his way, had filled their younger siblings with that same joy, though he would readily have admitted that the joy he bestowed was hardly as ample as that of their older brothers. To watch them at their games, to join in at kickball, to ply the warm currents in their proximity—these were among the many blessings Father Benedict had received on Martinique, in tremendous variety and awesome liberty of conscience.
“Well, Sylvia,” he finally said, pretending to give it his gravest concentration, “once a thought has become a deed, we must of course turn to the Lord for His infinite mercy and understanding. But He is no stranger to our weaknesses, our transgressions, and while these are sometimes irresistible, His love for us is likewise inextinguishable.”
Christ what a mouthful, thought Father Benedict.
“Oh, Father Benedict, I can hardly bring myself to ask you the rest of my question.”
Coy little bitch, he thought. She must be cooking up something prodigiously vile.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you would feel more comfortable asking it under the Seal of the Confessional?”
At times, this phrase brought to Father Benedict’s mind the image of a dark brown or grayish, aquatic mammal with flippers and a button nose, with extremely long hairs sprouting beneath it, undulating its way forward on a gleaming expanse of arctic ice—not that there was any arctic ice any more, or precious little, and what remained of it was, as far as he knew, seasonal. He had, in Sylvia’s case, every reason to associate the Seal with blubber, since she turned on the spigot every time she “confessed” to some mischief she happened to be contemplating, expecting a Get Out of Hell Free Card from Father Benedict’s preemptive Absolution. She knew perfectly well these admissions of hers were delaying the moment when Father Benedict could slip out of his frock and into his red Speedos and hit the nude beach, where, after spreading his Martha Stewart beach towel, he would promptly peel off this mingy covering of his male parts and rush towards the surf, his heart pumping joyously as he commenced his diurnal frolic—which, with any luck, would prolong well into sunset, that varicolored miracle of the tropics, after he had Made A New Friend, or, quite often, more than one.
As Father Benedict’s fingers kneaded the rock-solid buttocks of Quentin, a broody-eyed, laconic, tobacco-brown youth whose pendulous, leftward-bent member was currently choking off his oxygen supply, his mind raced through a veritable Rolodex of confessions he’d heard in the Diocese of Rochester while serving in that dreary northern city’s suburbs as a parish priest. Eternity ago though it seemed, Father Benedict’s recall for other people’s transgressions was vivid and comprehensive.
He recalled one particular, troubled Irish lad he had counselled only four summers earlier, during a heat wave that had dried up his rock pond and killed all the carp. Always getting into perdition, that boy, Sean his name was, robbed the till at his auto lubricating job, whored every night of his life and found time to hold up convenience stores, and—this was the salient detail, Father Benedict recalled, withdrawing his larynx from Quentin’s pulsating, steely member in order to widen his mouth sufficiently to draw breath—on at least two occasions, Sean had sodomized and shot the store clerks, or rather, sodomized one before killing him, killed the other before shooting a substantial wad of seminal fluid into the victim’s face—it seemed not to matter, which order Sean popped his homicide targets in, so long as they got popped, and so long as Sean popped his nut during the act of killing.
Father Benedict had been reticent to grant absolution, but chump that he sometimes could be, allowed the lad to charm him with his sinuous smile, his touseled carroty hair, his smattering of freckles, and a brief sampling of his magic wand and its taut attachments, even though Sean did not seem genuinely Repentant of his grievious mortal sin. I wonder, Father Benedict wondered, greedily licking Quentin’s baseball-sized, mahogany testicles, where I put Sean’s telephone number. I know he’s living in a trailer with that piece of trash he married on an impulse. Sean’s wife, so-called, he recalled, was named Vikki, and she’d already dropped a couple of Junior Seans to further pester the world with importunity and keep the juvenile justice system working at full throttle.
Our Heavenly Father, thought Father Benedict, The size of these balls is an Epiphany…
“Maybe he’s out back maybe he’s took the pickup into town, who’s callin’ here wants to know?”
Father Benedict heard two squalling brats in the background. That skank from yesteryear would answer the telephone, just his luck.
“I’ll bet that’s Vikki Klingsore, I haven’t heard your voice since you worked at the Dunkin’ Donuts over in Graveltown.”
“I’m still workin’ at Dunkin’ Donuts over in Graveltown, who the fuck is this?”
“Why Vikki it’s Father Benedict from St. Anselm de Flouride Parish, don’t you remember me?”
“Oh God Father I said Fuck didn’t I just now, geez I shur didn’t mean to say Fuck to no Priest, it’s nice hearin’ your voice Father Benedict, I certainly am all full of contrition it’s just I got two of the rowdiest little tykes you ever seen hangin’ off my tits at the moment—fuck, I just said ‘tits’ Father I didn’t mean to, you know I have always had a problem with language, I tend to use it when I’m all exasperated like I am right now, I got Sean’s breakfast ‘bout to burn up on the stove and these two little monsters shoulda been weaned a long time ago yankin’ on my nipples ever time I turn around, which I can tell you get all soren’ swillin’ up from what they call milk teeth, damned little succubi as I call em always greedy for the tit, Father Benedict, ahm tellin’ you, it ain’t easy bringin’ up two boys I mean these two I got ‘em potty trained two years ago and I swear they’ll be taller than me and still ‘spectin’ me to pop the old milk jugs outa my blouse every time they get peckish—”
“Well, Vikki, I wouldn’t worry about Language with your old friend Father Benedict, I can tell you, a priest has heard it all—”
“Done it all too, I betcha, Sean don’t tell me everythin’ but a girl has what they call In-Two-Ishin, ya know—”
“Hahaha, Vikki, you are a caution.”
“I know I can be, Father Benedict. And I gotta caution you, whatever you and Sean had goin’ on afore him and I got hitched, you better not be plannin’ to commence again, they got laws—”
Father Benedict remembered little Vikki Klingsore from St. Judas Iscariot Grammar School. He knew precisely how to deal with these modern-day Jezebels: give me their souls for a year, he thought, and I’ll have their clits in a wringer for life.
“Don’t forget, Vikki. There are laws and then, there are laws. The laws against homicide have no statute of limitations, unlike unsubstantiated claims of molestation when the so-called victim is over sixteen in the Empire State.”
The silence at the other end of the wireless phone signal confirmed that Vikki, slow though her so-called brain might have been, had “stopped to think.”
“Ahm sure I don’t have a clew what you’re talkin’ about, Father Benedict, I’m awmost sure I don’t.”
Nice try, cunt, he thought.
“Are you truly sure about that, Vikki? No idea what I’m talking about? Does the name Cousin Willy Bluehog mean anything to you? One summer back in—oh, golly, time certainly does fly, Vikki, after those who brought us into this world have departed in a so-called boating accident.”
Now he heard the rasping breath of the asthmatic jailbait he remembered so vividly flailing about for her inhaler in the confessional.
“…can’t breathe, Father Benedict…inhaler’s in the can…”
“That’s all right, Vikki. Nobody’s asking you to breathe. I’m telling you to go out behind the trailer and yank Sean’s ass out from under that pickup engine and over to the telephone. It always fills my heart to chitchat with one of my former parishioners, but I’m afraid I have more important things to deal with today.”
“…aaaagggh….”
The sound of rasping hyperventilation warmed Father Benedict’s cockles.
“Just fucking go do it, clitweed, and take your flabby old tits and the rug rats with you.”
“What on earth do you intend, flying the little shit down here?”
Sylvia’s abrasive voice has been known to shatter glass, and it’s climbing to that keening pitch Father Benedict considered the single least attractive feature of all Martinique.
“I can’t very well instruct the lad over the telephone,” he reminds her. “Don’t forget, every telephone call on earth is recorded by the Homeland Supreme Authority.”
Sylvia fumes into her sixth dirty martini of the afternoon.
“All I need,” she mutters. “I told you, NO FINGERPRINTS. This trailer trash comes down here, goes back there, pops off Randolph, fucks it up, gets caught, you might as well hire a skywriting plane to draw an arrow pointing from upstate New York to my gardening efforts.”
Little does she know, thinks Father Benedict, not for the first time.
“My my my, Sylvia, you DO underestimate me at times.” And at all times, as far as he’s concerned.
Sylvia examines a strand of her ash-blonde, shoulder-length hair, done up in her Debby, as she calls it, in the harsh sunlight: split ends, she just knew it. All the unguents and priceless oils of Arabia she lavished on her tresses, yet like a bad penny, they inevitably recurred—more like cancer, she thinks, instantly developing symptoms in her imagination.
“That’s an opaque statement. You know I can’t abide ambiguity.”
Father Benedict has an ace up his sleeve. At the same time, he feels like an utter martinet, resentful that his tenure in Martinique, at St. Ullula of the Waterways, has been continually underwritten by Sylvia’s substantial Tithes to the Parish, and her chummy relations with Cardinal Quisling, a situation of dependency that obliges him to oblige her, in matters great and small.
In practical fact, Sylvia monopolizes nearly all of Father Benedict’s pastoral time, for the practising Catholics in the parish are few, far between, and the laity hereabouts are shamefully lackadaisical in their Faith, far more absorbed in hedonistic persuits than in Good Works, indeed Lapsed in every important respect, yet insouciantly unashamed to take Communion when their pious relatives fly in for visits, as if they prayed like the dickens night and day when these mainlanders were busy with their lives in various parts of the world.
Among the Poor, of course, Father Benedict has obdurately toiled, despite Sylvia’s frequent importunities: almost every Native family has entrusted him with the Instruction of their Youthful Sons, who might otherwise Wander from the Fold, and Father Benedict has a special affection for those on the island who repine in poverty—though they, too, pass their every hour in screwing, inventing novelty rum drinks, and fashioning trinkets to peddle on the glorious beaches of Martinique to tourists.
On Saturday nights, quite often, these worshippers gather in dance halls and rowdy bars, eager to chart new realms of carnality and drunkennness, without giving a wooden nickel to any thought of their immortal souls.
Many, too, devote as much if not more time to practice of the Black Arts and their infernal Santeria as they spend contemplating the Divine Mysteries and drawing sustenance from the Adoration of the Blessed Virgin or the Holy Trinity.
“Sylvia, Randolph is planning a little trip. Avec his trophy second wife Rebecca.”
Syliva gags on her dirty martini.
“You call Rebecca Milner a trophy?” Sylvia’s outrage is Palpable. “She’s a bloody frigging kike, I remember her nose from college, and she’s NO YOUNGER THAN I AM!!!”
This, of course, is merely Sylvia’s sixth or seventh lie of the day: Rebecca Milner, it is true, attended MIT, just as Sylvia did. But Rebecca was Class of 93, whereas Sylvia’s Bachelor of Artshood and subsequent Master’s Degree in Biophysics was awarded no later than 1987.
“I remember that cunning little bitch from Cambridge, Father Benedict. She cheated on the Singularities in Threaded Molecules exam!! At least I earned that internship with Dr. Fabrizio della Portago, and let’s not forget, I was the person who hybridized the lycanthropus orchidii, not that jumped-up Jewess from the Five Towns!!!”
Oh God, thinks Father Benedict. As if I haven’t heard all this before.
“You’re probably thinking, you’ve heard this all before,” Sylvia whines, shattering a wineglass on the veranda wet bar. She’s wearing her Gel Pack to protect the epidermis around her eyes from the wrinkling ravages of the soleil tropique. Father Benedict can only imagine the blazing expression in Sylvia’s eyes, which are hidden by Siamese inflatable blue blobs of soothing Gel resembling a Carnivale mask.
“I’M THE ONE the Department of Absolut Defense turned to when they needed a seemingly harmless floral bioweapon, not some WOODBURY HEEB!!”
Sylvia’s anti-Semitism, the ecumenically-minded Father Benedict had always thought, went truly Beyond the Pale, there was no earthly or unearthly excuse for it, but whenever she got on the topic of Randolph’s second wife, she managed to resemble Josef Stalin launching a pogrom. Most offensively, she apparently staged these outbursts in the belief that such sentiments would please Father Benedict, when nothing could have been more remote from reality. Like Edith Stein, he had Converted from Judaism—so much for Sylvia’s all-too-oft-repeated claim that she could “smell a Jew.”
In many regards, he reminded himself, Sylvia is a barbarian. Atavistic in her impulsiveness, murderous in her rages, lustful every moment of the livelong day, and quickly becoming a complete alcoholic. Yet she’s cunning enough to entrap me into aiding and abetting a felony for which there exists no statute of limitations, and for that, I suppose, he thought, I must give credit where credit’s due: having taken the measure of my own weaknesses, she’s contrived a use for them within her own nimbly spun arachnid’s web.
“Don’t even tell me they’re planning to come HERE,” screches Sylvia, shattering two more long-stemmed glasses, some fragments of which soar off the veranda and pelt the Japanese gardener currently pruning the succulents and laying mulch upon the flower gardens, which are a far cry from Gertrude Jekyll.
Father Benedict tugs off his Roman Collar.
“Pardon me, but I’m feeling stifled by this,” he says ambiguously.
“WELL? What’s the story, morning glory?”
“It just so happens, Sylvia—”
And Father Benedict fills her in on what he’s learned through his elaborate network of connections, which include the waiters in the cocktail lounge of the Carlyle Hotel, where Randolph Hevert habitually quaffs with his colleagues from work after an arduous day of counting their chickens before they hatch.
“Well? When’s your bum boy arriving from Rochester?”
Sylvia’s wearing her gel pack again. If she tans much more she’ll contract melanoma before anything else happens.
“I wouldn’t worry about that, if I were you,” Father Benedict says. Meaning, You have something else to worry about, bitch, if it hasn’t crossed your addled mind already.
Sylvia gropes for her martini, finds it, feels the cool glass against her palm.
“Oh, I’m not worried, ever see me worry? I’m drunk, though.”
“Certainly you’ll never see him. More importantly, he’ll never see you. There’s absolutely nothing to connect the two of you.”
“Except you,” Sylvia tartly observes.
Father Benedict has thought of that, so has Sylvia, cards on the table time. He’s also thought of what the thought of that might inspire in Sylvia’s scientifically brilliant but otherwise rotten mind, in close detail. He knows exactly the sort of thing she’d contrive, and really, she ought to lay off the sauce if she wants to play that game.
“I ought to tell you, I’m taking quite a risk here. Should anything happen to me, my dear, you may not be sitting as pretty as you expect to be once little Sean gets the job done.”
Little Sean, needless to say, wouldn’t be returning to the arms of Vikki Klingsore after his holiday in the tropics. Maybe the transient bag of water containing little Sean, in some sort of new receptacle, but that’s still an unfixed variable in Father Benedict’s calculations.
“Meaning what, I’d like to know. Cryptic as a mongoose this morning aren’t you.”
“Meaning what you could probably guess I mean if you hadn’t hit the gin at eight this morning.”
Deadly as an asp this morning, aren’t you, the blessed father thinks. She knows I have her number and she knows I know she knows, I know she knows I know she knows, the question is….he forgets what the question is, though he had it perfectly framed in his mind before showing up at Sylvia’s poolside Shangri-La. Not that anything Sylvia says or does throws him off-track; simply put, he has an array of answers to a corresponding array of questions, he’s simply lost the thread of one.
Sylvia teasingly peels the gel mask from her booze-brightened eyes and looks him foresquare in his own flinching hazel orbs. I really must stop flinching like that, he thinks.
“I get better at guessing,” she drawls, “with every passing cocktail. So, Father Benedict, let me just guess.”
“What I’d like to know,” Rebecca Hevert carps, or perhaps flounders, at her hardly listening spouse, who is, at this moment, inserting a gaudy turquoise-and-obsidian link through an eyehole of a pink-pinstriped Brooks Brothers shirt cuff, “is why they call it a ‘convention.’ Do you happen to know, or is this another case where corporate duck quacking has supplanted the King’s English?”
Randolph can carry on a conversation with Rebecca while reviewing plans for her liquidation quite easily. Deceit gives him pleasure, he’s discovered. In that, at least, he and Rebecca are well matched.
“I believe the word has been used for all sorts of things. The Continental Congress held a convention, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes, but Randolph, why that word, why not…you know, slumber party or free-for-all whoring expedition?”
“Are you coming with me to this tropical shindig or not?” Even though she’ll be six feet under, or well on her way, in mere days, Randolph still finds Rebecca’s whining abrasive and demanding, just as he would if the situation were otherwise.
“Of course I’m coming,” Rebecca says acidically. “You can do your boozing and whoring all you like, it’s all the same to me. I plan to shop till I drop.”
Truer words were never spoken, Randolph chortles to himself.
Step by step, she thinks. Remain calm, she thinks. Keep racing thoughts at a safe remove, she thinks. If I could have Randolph killed, she thinks. I would need to think it out very carefully, she thinks.
What an astonishing bird, she thinks. The first I have seen all year. They’re so elusive, they fly so swiftly and so surely, and they must also be the most prudent and circumspect creatures of the air.
How much would it cost to have Randolph killed, she wonders. How could I get this done without leaving anything untidy, no loose threads leading back to my vicinity, she wonders. Who could I reasonably turn to and expect discretion—unless, she suddenly realizes, it were a Catholic priest! A Catholic priest with an unsavory secret, a secret that would blow his Priestliness out of the water if revealed. But Sylvia, she cautions herself, think carefully about this. Yes, you know such a Catholic priest. Yes, the Seal of the Confessional would be quite adequate if the subject were broached in a hypothetical way, at least with Father Benedict, who Likes a Drink as well as a cherubic pair of altar boy’s buttocks.
The thought of Father Benedict reminds her that she hasn’t eaten breakfast. The most important meal of the day, or so the legend goes. It happens that Josephine makes the most scrumptuous Eggs Benedict on Martinique, or perhaps in the entire Caribbean Basin. With, she considers, a prudent Shirley Temple, no vodka today, one must skirl these questions with zenlike clarity, Be Realistic, for what doth it profit a man, or a woman, if she Gain the Earth and Lose Her Immortal Soul? Does killing Randolph qualify as losing my immortal soul? If so, is it worth it?
“Josephine, si vous plait, je voudrais un plat des oeufs Benedict, avec votre hollandaise speciale…”
“Oui, madame…”
“Et une verre de…verre de l’eau, je crois.”
“D’accord, madame…”
Tomato juice really is too acidic, Sylvia considers, don’t stir up the bile, stay calm, approach the problem in a geometric fashion, factor in variables, make some headway on pruning those hedges, what a blessing the bourgainvillea, spilling over the wall, this perfect sky, this calm, that sea, and the whisper of a warm humid breeze, well, not a whisper really, a murmur….
“Father Benedict, how good of you to come.”
Father Benedict is a pasty man, a thin man, a man whose brow needs frequent swobbing with a handkerchief in the balmy climate of Martinique, a man of five foot ten, whose face resembles that of a handsome man entrapped in a compressing device, a man more impressive in profile than full-face, and his cassock and Roman collar cannot be helping things, thinks Sylvia, he’s sweating like a steamed dumpling squashed by a pickup truck. I like the black frock but it’s so unseasonable, can he never wear mufti, and how does he lower his trousers and raise the cassock with any sort of grace when buggering some comely lad after celebrating Mass?
“I have sinned, Father.”
“We are all sinners, Sylvia. Myself more than others, I sometimes think.”
“Yet the Lord promises us forgiveness, am I right?”
“The Blood of Christ washes away all sins.”
“I’m thinking not only of sins of Thought, Father Benedict. But future sins as well, sins of Deed.”
Oh for the love of mike, thought Father Benedict, why doesn’t she just get to the point. Sylvia knows perfectly well that whatever she wants to do, she does, and Father Benedict wished terribly to get down to the beach at the hour when those bronze-colored gods of the island, the indigenous males with bodies so muscled from everyday activity they seem wrought from tempered steel, ventured into the lapping waters surrounding the island: for it is often as good to receive as to give, and Father Benedict had made many a friend among these dark-skinned youths, friends who had filled him with joy, quite as much as he, in his way, had filled their younger siblings with that same joy, though he would readily have admitted that the joy he bestowed was hardly as ample as that of their older brothers. To watch them at their games, to join in at kickball, to ply the warm currents in their proximity—these were among the many blessings Father Benedict had received on Martinique, in tremendous variety and awesome liberty of conscience.
“Well, Sylvia,” he finally said, pretending to give it his gravest concentration, “once a thought has become a deed, we must of course turn to the Lord for His infinite mercy and understanding. But He is no stranger to our weaknesses, our transgressions, and while these are sometimes irresistible, His love for us is likewise inextinguishable.”
Christ what a mouthful, thought Father Benedict.
“Oh, Father Benedict, I can hardly bring myself to ask you the rest of my question.”
Coy little bitch, he thought. She must be cooking up something prodigiously vile.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you would feel more comfortable asking it under the Seal of the Confessional?”
At times, this phrase brought to Father Benedict’s mind the image of a dark brown or grayish, aquatic mammal with flippers and a button nose, with extremely long hairs sprouting beneath it, undulating its way forward on a gleaming expanse of arctic ice—not that there was any arctic ice any more, or precious little, and what remained of it was, as far as he knew, seasonal. He had, in Sylvia’s case, every reason to associate the Seal with blubber, since she turned on the spigot every time she “confessed” to some mischief she happened to be contemplating, expecting a Get Out of Hell Free Card from Father Benedict’s preemptive Absolution. She knew perfectly well these admissions of hers were delaying the moment when Father Benedict could slip out of his frock and into his red Speedos and hit the nude beach, where, after spreading his Martha Stewart beach towel, he would promptly peel off this mingy covering of his male parts and rush towards the surf, his heart pumping joyously as he commenced his diurnal frolic—which, with any luck, would prolong well into sunset, that varicolored miracle of the tropics, after he had Made A New Friend, or, quite often, more than one.
As Father Benedict’s fingers kneaded the rock-solid buttocks of Quentin, a broody-eyed, laconic, tobacco-brown youth whose pendulous, leftward-bent member was currently choking off his oxygen supply, his mind raced through a veritable Rolodex of confessions he’d heard in the Diocese of Rochester while serving in that dreary northern city’s suburbs as a parish priest. Eternity ago though it seemed, Father Benedict’s recall for other people’s transgressions was vivid and comprehensive.
He recalled one particular, troubled Irish lad he had counselled only four summers earlier, during a heat wave that had dried up his rock pond and killed all the carp. Always getting into perdition, that boy, Sean his name was, robbed the till at his auto lubricating job, whored every night of his life and found time to hold up convenience stores, and—this was the salient detail, Father Benedict recalled, withdrawing his larynx from Quentin’s pulsating, steely member in order to widen his mouth sufficiently to draw breath—on at least two occasions, Sean had sodomized and shot the store clerks, or rather, sodomized one before killing him, killed the other before shooting a substantial wad of seminal fluid into the victim’s face—it seemed not to matter, which order Sean popped his homicide targets in, so long as they got popped, and so long as Sean popped his nut during the act of killing.
Father Benedict had been reticent to grant absolution, but chump that he sometimes could be, allowed the lad to charm him with his sinuous smile, his touseled carroty hair, his smattering of freckles, and a brief sampling of his magic wand and its taut attachments, even though Sean did not seem genuinely Repentant of his grievious mortal sin. I wonder, Father Benedict wondered, greedily licking Quentin’s baseball-sized, mahogany testicles, where I put Sean’s telephone number. I know he’s living in a trailer with that piece of trash he married on an impulse. Sean’s wife, so-called, he recalled, was named Vikki, and she’d already dropped a couple of Junior Seans to further pester the world with importunity and keep the juvenile justice system working at full throttle.
Our Heavenly Father, thought Father Benedict, The size of these balls is an Epiphany…
“Maybe he’s out back maybe he’s took the pickup into town, who’s callin’ here wants to know?”
Father Benedict heard two squalling brats in the background. That skank from yesteryear would answer the telephone, just his luck.
“I’ll bet that’s Vikki Klingsore, I haven’t heard your voice since you worked at the Dunkin’ Donuts over in Graveltown.”
“I’m still workin’ at Dunkin’ Donuts over in Graveltown, who the fuck is this?”
“Why Vikki it’s Father Benedict from St. Anselm de Flouride Parish, don’t you remember me?”
“Oh God Father I said Fuck didn’t I just now, geez I shur didn’t mean to say Fuck to no Priest, it’s nice hearin’ your voice Father Benedict, I certainly am all full of contrition it’s just I got two of the rowdiest little tykes you ever seen hangin’ off my tits at the moment—fuck, I just said ‘tits’ Father I didn’t mean to, you know I have always had a problem with language, I tend to use it when I’m all exasperated like I am right now, I got Sean’s breakfast ‘bout to burn up on the stove and these two little monsters shoulda been weaned a long time ago yankin’ on my nipples ever time I turn around, which I can tell you get all soren’ swillin’ up from what they call milk teeth, damned little succubi as I call em always greedy for the tit, Father Benedict, ahm tellin’ you, it ain’t easy bringin’ up two boys I mean these two I got ‘em potty trained two years ago and I swear they’ll be taller than me and still ‘spectin’ me to pop the old milk jugs outa my blouse every time they get peckish—”
“Well, Vikki, I wouldn’t worry about Language with your old friend Father Benedict, I can tell you, a priest has heard it all—”
“Done it all too, I betcha, Sean don’t tell me everythin’ but a girl has what they call In-Two-Ishin, ya know—”
“Hahaha, Vikki, you are a caution.”
“I know I can be, Father Benedict. And I gotta caution you, whatever you and Sean had goin’ on afore him and I got hitched, you better not be plannin’ to commence again, they got laws—”
Father Benedict remembered little Vikki Klingsore from St. Judas Iscariot Grammar School. He knew precisely how to deal with these modern-day Jezebels: give me their souls for a year, he thought, and I’ll have their clits in a wringer for life.
“Don’t forget, Vikki. There are laws and then, there are laws. The laws against homicide have no statute of limitations, unlike unsubstantiated claims of molestation when the so-called victim is over sixteen in the Empire State.”
The silence at the other end of the wireless phone signal confirmed that Vikki, slow though her so-called brain might have been, had “stopped to think.”
“Ahm sure I don’t have a clew what you’re talkin’ about, Father Benedict, I’m awmost sure I don’t.”
Nice try, cunt, he thought.
“Are you truly sure about that, Vikki? No idea what I’m talking about? Does the name Cousin Willy Bluehog mean anything to you? One summer back in—oh, golly, time certainly does fly, Vikki, after those who brought us into this world have departed in a so-called boating accident.”
Now he heard the rasping breath of the asthmatic jailbait he remembered so vividly flailing about for her inhaler in the confessional.
“…can’t breathe, Father Benedict…inhaler’s in the can…”
“That’s all right, Vikki. Nobody’s asking you to breathe. I’m telling you to go out behind the trailer and yank Sean’s ass out from under that pickup engine and over to the telephone. It always fills my heart to chitchat with one of my former parishioners, but I’m afraid I have more important things to deal with today.”
“…aaaagggh….”
The sound of rasping hyperventilation warmed Father Benedict’s cockles.
“Just fucking go do it, clitweed, and take your flabby old tits and the rug rats with you.”
“What on earth do you intend, flying the little shit down here?”
Sylvia’s abrasive voice has been known to shatter glass, and it’s climbing to that keening pitch Father Benedict considered the single least attractive feature of all Martinique.
“I can’t very well instruct the lad over the telephone,” he reminds her. “Don’t forget, every telephone call on earth is recorded by the Homeland Supreme Authority.”
Sylvia fumes into her sixth dirty martini of the afternoon.
“All I need,” she mutters. “I told you, NO FINGERPRINTS. This trailer trash comes down here, goes back there, pops off Randolph, fucks it up, gets caught, you might as well hire a skywriting plane to draw an arrow pointing from upstate New York to my gardening efforts.”
Little does she know, thinks Father Benedict, not for the first time.
“My my my, Sylvia, you DO underestimate me at times.” And at all times, as far as he’s concerned.
Sylvia examines a strand of her ash-blonde, shoulder-length hair, done up in her Debby, as she calls it, in the harsh sunlight: split ends, she just knew it. All the unguents and priceless oils of Arabia she lavished on her tresses, yet like a bad penny, they inevitably recurred—more like cancer, she thinks, instantly developing symptoms in her imagination.
“That’s an opaque statement. You know I can’t abide ambiguity.”
Father Benedict has an ace up his sleeve. At the same time, he feels like an utter martinet, resentful that his tenure in Martinique, at St. Ullula of the Waterways, has been continually underwritten by Sylvia’s substantial Tithes to the Parish, and her chummy relations with Cardinal Quisling, a situation of dependency that obliges him to oblige her, in matters great and small.
In practical fact, Sylvia monopolizes nearly all of Father Benedict’s pastoral time, for the practising Catholics in the parish are few, far between, and the laity hereabouts are shamefully lackadaisical in their Faith, far more absorbed in hedonistic persuits than in Good Works, indeed Lapsed in every important respect, yet insouciantly unashamed to take Communion when their pious relatives fly in for visits, as if they prayed like the dickens night and day when these mainlanders were busy with their lives in various parts of the world.
Among the Poor, of course, Father Benedict has obdurately toiled, despite Sylvia’s frequent importunities: almost every Native family has entrusted him with the Instruction of their Youthful Sons, who might otherwise Wander from the Fold, and Father Benedict has a special affection for those on the island who repine in poverty—though they, too, pass their every hour in screwing, inventing novelty rum drinks, and fashioning trinkets to peddle on the glorious beaches of Martinique to tourists.
On Saturday nights, quite often, these worshippers gather in dance halls and rowdy bars, eager to chart new realms of carnality and drunkennness, without giving a wooden nickel to any thought of their immortal souls.
Many, too, devote as much if not more time to practice of the Black Arts and their infernal Santeria as they spend contemplating the Divine Mysteries and drawing sustenance from the Adoration of the Blessed Virgin or the Holy Trinity.
“Sylvia, Randolph is planning a little trip. Avec his trophy second wife Rebecca.”
Syliva gags on her dirty martini.
“You call Rebecca Milner a trophy?” Sylvia’s outrage is Palpable. “She’s a bloody frigging kike, I remember her nose from college, and she’s NO YOUNGER THAN I AM!!!”
This, of course, is merely Sylvia’s sixth or seventh lie of the day: Rebecca Milner, it is true, attended MIT, just as Sylvia did. But Rebecca was Class of 93, whereas Sylvia’s Bachelor of Artshood and subsequent Master’s Degree in Biophysics was awarded no later than 1987.
“I remember that cunning little bitch from Cambridge, Father Benedict. She cheated on the Singularities in Threaded Molecules exam!! At least I earned that internship with Dr. Fabrizio della Portago, and let’s not forget, I was the person who hybridized the lycanthropus orchidii, not that jumped-up Jewess from the Five Towns!!!”
Oh God, thinks Father Benedict. As if I haven’t heard all this before.
“You’re probably thinking, you’ve heard this all before,” Sylvia whines, shattering a wineglass on the veranda wet bar. She’s wearing her Gel Pack to protect the epidermis around her eyes from the wrinkling ravages of the soleil tropique. Father Benedict can only imagine the blazing expression in Sylvia’s eyes, which are hidden by Siamese inflatable blue blobs of soothing Gel resembling a Carnivale mask.
“I’M THE ONE the Department of Absolut Defense turned to when they needed a seemingly harmless floral bioweapon, not some WOODBURY HEEB!!”
Sylvia’s anti-Semitism, the ecumenically-minded Father Benedict had always thought, went truly Beyond the Pale, there was no earthly or unearthly excuse for it, but whenever she got on the topic of Randolph’s second wife, she managed to resemble Josef Stalin launching a pogrom. Most offensively, she apparently staged these outbursts in the belief that such sentiments would please Father Benedict, when nothing could have been more remote from reality. Like Edith Stein, he had Converted from Judaism—so much for Sylvia’s all-too-oft-repeated claim that she could “smell a Jew.”
In many regards, he reminded himself, Sylvia is a barbarian. Atavistic in her impulsiveness, murderous in her rages, lustful every moment of the livelong day, and quickly becoming a complete alcoholic. Yet she’s cunning enough to entrap me into aiding and abetting a felony for which there exists no statute of limitations, and for that, I suppose, he thought, I must give credit where credit’s due: having taken the measure of my own weaknesses, she’s contrived a use for them within her own nimbly spun arachnid’s web.
“Don’t even tell me they’re planning to come HERE,” screches Sylvia, shattering two more long-stemmed glasses, some fragments of which soar off the veranda and pelt the Japanese gardener currently pruning the succulents and laying mulch upon the flower gardens, which are a far cry from Gertrude Jekyll.
Father Benedict tugs off his Roman Collar.
“Pardon me, but I’m feeling stifled by this,” he says ambiguously.
“WELL? What’s the story, morning glory?”
“It just so happens, Sylvia—”
And Father Benedict fills her in on what he’s learned through his elaborate network of connections, which include the waiters in the cocktail lounge of the Carlyle Hotel, where Randolph Hevert habitually quaffs with his colleagues from work after an arduous day of counting their chickens before they hatch.
“Well? When’s your bum boy arriving from Rochester?”
Sylvia’s wearing her gel pack again. If she tans much more she’ll contract melanoma before anything else happens.
“I wouldn’t worry about that, if I were you,” Father Benedict says. Meaning, You have something else to worry about, bitch, if it hasn’t crossed your addled mind already.
Sylvia gropes for her martini, finds it, feels the cool glass against her palm.
“Oh, I’m not worried, ever see me worry? I’m drunk, though.”
“Certainly you’ll never see him. More importantly, he’ll never see you. There’s absolutely nothing to connect the two of you.”
“Except you,” Sylvia tartly observes.
Father Benedict has thought of that, so has Sylvia, cards on the table time. He’s also thought of what the thought of that might inspire in Sylvia’s scientifically brilliant but otherwise rotten mind, in close detail. He knows exactly the sort of thing she’d contrive, and really, she ought to lay off the sauce if she wants to play that game.
“I ought to tell you, I’m taking quite a risk here. Should anything happen to me, my dear, you may not be sitting as pretty as you expect to be once little Sean gets the job done.”
Little Sean, needless to say, wouldn’t be returning to the arms of Vikki Klingsore after his holiday in the tropics. Maybe the transient bag of water containing little Sean, in some sort of new receptacle, but that’s still an unfixed variable in Father Benedict’s calculations.
“Meaning what, I’d like to know. Cryptic as a mongoose this morning aren’t you.”
“Meaning what you could probably guess I mean if you hadn’t hit the gin at eight this morning.”
Deadly as an asp this morning, aren’t you, the blessed father thinks. She knows I have her number and she knows I know she knows, I know she knows I know she knows, the question is….he forgets what the question is, though he had it perfectly framed in his mind before showing up at Sylvia’s poolside Shangri-La. Not that anything Sylvia says or does throws him off-track; simply put, he has an array of answers to a corresponding array of questions, he’s simply lost the thread of one.
Sylvia teasingly peels the gel mask from her booze-brightened eyes and looks him foresquare in his own flinching hazel orbs. I really must stop flinching like that, he thinks.
“I get better at guessing,” she drawls, “with every passing cocktail. So, Father Benedict, let me just guess.”
“What I’d like to know,” Rebecca Hevert carps, or perhaps flounders, at her hardly listening spouse, who is, at this moment, inserting a gaudy turquoise-and-obsidian link through an eyehole of a pink-pinstriped Brooks Brothers shirt cuff, “is why they call it a ‘convention.’ Do you happen to know, or is this another case where corporate duck quacking has supplanted the King’s English?”
Randolph can carry on a conversation with Rebecca while reviewing plans for her liquidation quite easily. Deceit gives him pleasure, he’s discovered. In that, at least, he and Rebecca are well matched.
“I believe the word has been used for all sorts of things. The Continental Congress held a convention, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes, but Randolph, why that word, why not…you know, slumber party or free-for-all whoring expedition?”
“Are you coming with me to this tropical shindig or not?” Even though she’ll be six feet under, or well on her way, in mere days, Randolph still finds Rebecca’s whining abrasive and demanding, just as he would if the situation were otherwise.
“Of course I’m coming,” Rebecca says acidically. “You can do your boozing and whoring all you like, it’s all the same to me. I plan to shop till I drop.”
Truer words were never spoken, Randolph chortles to himself.
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