Kris hurt like hell, but he still had a job to do. He opened the door slowly to the stairwell
and had to convince himself that lightning didn’t strike in the same place
twice. “Ok,” he reassured himself,
“let’s go.”
Kris found Donnie’s office unlocked and let himself in. The lighting was terrible, but the room was
nearly immaculate, and smelled strong of Pine-Sol. Someone had placed a wide sheet of plywood on
the heavy desk and was constructing a model train town. It looked to be almost completed, and Kris
couldn’t help but stare at the miniature people and shops and cars for a
spell. An empty animal cage was against
one wall, and a door with a strap hinge and pad lock on another. Other than this, the room was pretty much
empty. Kris rifled through the drawers
of the desk for some sort of clue, but all it yielded was some train magazines
and model-making tools: three different
types of glue, an X-acto blade, a bunch of tiny oak trees and auto
mechanics.
“Nothin’,” Kris lamented to himself. “Hmm.
Okay, well, what’s behind door number 3?” He saw that a painted board had dozens of
keys hanging from it. He checked them
all, but they were clearly not keys for a padlock. “No problem.
We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”
Another quick search of the desk yielded up a short, skinny screwdriver,
and Kris knew exactly what to do with it.
Despite its slenderness, when Kris threaded the shank through the loop
of the lock, it popped open quite easily.
Kris opened the door slowly.
The light from Donnie’s office opened like a fan from left to right, revealing
as it did what could only be thought of as an altar.
Against the wall opposite the door where Kris stood, a tall,
plaster Madonna stared back at him in absent benevolence. She was painted in vivid crimson and azure;
rays of gold radiated from the crown of her head. She stood upon a heavy industrial cable
spool, 4 feet in diameter, which made her taller than Kris. The wooden makeshift tabletop was covered
with wax from votives in various stages of degeneration. From her vantage, the Virgin Mother looked
down kindly upon the young beaten man, one arm open in a Zen-like invitation to
absolute peace, the other effortlessly pointing to her own blood-red and sacred
heart.
There was a square of carpet set neatly before the altar; it
was perpendicular to all of the walls, and centered upon Mary. Other than this, and the altar itself, the
room was completely bare.
Kris noticed that there was a second door. It was locked simply from his side. He opened it and saw that it led back out
into the main hallway. The brighter
light from the hall came in through the newly opened door and revealed a most
curious feature which Kris had not been able to see before: somebody had cut a
photo out and placed it over the statue’s face, like a child’s Halloween costume. And the photo was of Mary Pendleton.
Kris started just a bit at the familiar but also strange
face. He found a light switch and
flicked it on; the statue’s reds and blues jumped into true Technicolor. Kris extended his left hand and inched
slowly, fearfully towards the Mary-Mary, as if it would spring to life at any
moment and bark at him, “Let it be!”
Kris touched the mask, peeked underneath. Someone said, “Yeah, he really loved her.”
Kris’ heart jumped through his chest. Paul Gomez was leaning against the frame of
the door between the office and the secret chapel, rubbing his great
salt-and-pepper moustache thoughtfully.
He had on jeans, a white tank-top undershirt, and a wool and denim
jacket. The coat must have been brand
new: when Paul opened it a bit, Kris saw that it was stark white next to the
dinginess of Paul’s worn “wife beater”.
The pristine quality of the wool brought to the back Kris’ mind the
sheep that it must have come from.
“Paul?!” Kris stammered, “I was, I was looking for you in
your office. But you weren’t there . .
.”
Paul motioned for him to calm down, “I know, I know. Don’t sweat it, hermano. I get it. No big deal.”
He looked back to the Mother Mary, “Donnie loved her, you know? She was like a mother to him. She was
his mother.” Paul shook his head as if
to say, What a waste.
Kris’ phone vibrated.
“Paul, I need to ask you something.”
Paul’s eyes grew moist.
“He was really a good boy, you know?
Nobody ever got that. But really
and truly, deep down he was. He wasn’t a
retard, Kris. Know what I mean? People say cruel things.” Paul bowed his head and made the sign of the
cross. “Do you believe, Kris? In the blessed Virgin? Do you believe?”
Kris pulled some documents from his satchel that he had
printed earlier from the newspaper archival site. He thrust them at Paul, Exhibit A: “Paul, why did you rape these girls?”
“Say what?!” Paul snapped.
“Jail. You went to
jail for raping these girls.”
Paul took the stack from Kris. A look of acknowledgement came over Paul as
he reviewed the evidence. “Ay Chingao, Kris! What are you doing,
esse?
You’re steppin’ into deep stuff here – things you don’t
understand.” He handed the papers back
to Kris who put them back in his satchel.
Kris pulled his phone out from his bag finally. He had an email.
Paul rubbed at
something on the vinyl floor until it came free and then bent down and swept in
to his cupped hand. “I didn’t hurt those
girls, friend. But yes, I did go to jail.” Paul walked over and dropped whatever it was
that he had scrubbed off the floor into a trash can. “Guess we might as well talk straight about
it. . . Donnie attacked those girls,
Kris. Stupid pendejo. He just couldn’t
control himself, you know? He wasn’t
bad, Kris. He just didn’t have any self-control. Like all of us, right? I know that’s hard for folks to
understand. He was no different than the
alcoholics, or the tweekers. His appetites were just different than the rest of
the folks around here is all. But he wasn’t bad.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you went to prison
for Donnie?” Kris noticed that Paul had
a massive tattoo of a wolf beneath the yellowed undershirt that sprawled across
the width of his brown chest.
“He couldn’t
have handled prison. He would have died
in there. I plead ‘no contest’, they had
no evidence against me, I played nice inside:
I was out in 60 months.” Paul
clapped his hands to say – no big deal.
“Donnie would have been dead.
But, you know what? It was the
best thing that ever happened to me. No
lie. It got me sober, guerro, cleaned me up inside, too. Got me back on the Good Path, you know? That’s why I lead the recovery program
now. All the good stuff I learned
inside. I had to hit my rock bottom.”
“But what
about Donnie?”
“Donnie was a
beautiful, proud Aztec warrior!
Descended from a noble people – with the blood of a thousand strong
fathers and mothers in his veins.”
“But Paul, he
was a rapist!”
“Mary looked
over him for me while I was in, she was his mother. She was his angel. She kept him on the narrow path, see.”
Kris rubbed his face with both hands, exasperated, “I think
my head is going to explode.”
The two men stood in silence as Kris tried to absorb the
messy family history of Sacred Heart.
“So in fact, you’re telling me that you’re a saint?”
Paul smiled, but his eyes were sad, “I’m no saint, hermano.
Maybe an angel . . . with dirty wings.
How’s that? But no saint.”
He reached in a pocket and pulled out a lighter, with which
he lit as many candles could be lit. He
made the sign of the cross and besought the blessing of the figure before him,
“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of
Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished
children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this
valley of tears. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the
hour of death.”
Kris sighed, exhausted, and finally checked his phone. A second message came through from kris1969@bigbrother.net. He opened this mail first. Bigbrother had tracked down the address of
origination for alphamail. It was 1900
San Nueces. Or to put it another way,
the email had originated at Sacred Heart.
Kris froze inside, and wondered now why he had chosen to confront
Paul this way. In that moment Kris
figured something out that, in hindsight he thought, really should have been
obvious.
“Why is it,” Kris asked himself, “that great insights only
happen for me at moments of great crisis?”
Kris realized that Alpha had to know that Maggie was the detective on
his trail – and very few people Maggie’s identity. Paul, of course, was one of
those few. “Why could this have not
occurred to me earlier?”
Paul took his coat off and hung it on a doorknob. His arms were littered with gang tattoos;
scarcely a square inch of Paul’s brown skin was not covered in ink. His shoulders and arms were a map of his
life, a palimpsest of former allegiances.
Kris found that Paul had a large gun in his right hand. Paul dug around the folds of his jacket and
pulled out a bolt of white fabric. He
sighed. “Well,” he said, “I guess you
should put this on now, little brother.”
He tossed the thing to Kris who unfurled it. It was a baptismal gown.
“What is this, Paul?”
“Everything was fine, before you got here. You and Red Riding Hood. You took my heart, man, my heart. We could have taken care of our own, just
like we’ve always done. But you messed
everything up, brother.” Paul rubbed his
macho moustache again, pondering. “I
like you, Kris. But, I don’t know. This just ain’t going to work. I’ve always cleaned up Donnie’s messes since
he was a kid,” Kris smelled the Pine-Sol and candles, “and even after
he’s dead, I guess I’m still cleaning up after him.” Paul pointed the gun at Kris, “Just put it on
now. Time to clean up, vato!”
Kris was on the precipice of a great chasm, falling in slow motion over
its edge, the abyss yawning open before him.
On nothing but instinct, Kris in one motion flung the gown in Paul’s
face, flicked the light switch off and slapped Paul’s gun-hand away before
crouching to the ground whisking backwards out the hall door. Paul’s gun fired, shooting the Virgin
Mother’s forearm completely off.
Mary-Mary tottered slowly like a bowling pin, and then fell forward upon
the host of candles. Hot wax splattered
onto the floor and Mary Pendleton’s face slowly charred onto the Virgin’s
porcelain features.
Kris ran with all his might.
Paul dashed from the room and unloaded his gun down the hallway after
the mulatto. Divine Providence, or the
Master Plan, or Blind Luck protected Kris from getting hit. He turned the corner hard and found himself
bolting down a hallway lined with doors marked with large, red letters. Paul called to him, “You don’t know what it
means to protect someone you love! Everything was fine before you came! You don’t know what it means,” the recovery
specialist screamed, “to protect someone you love!”
Kris ran up a set of stairs, and was blinded by the dazzling light of
the sun, sent scattering in fractured rays off of a stories’-tall tile mosaic
of a good shepherd.
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