Bones of a Saint Read online

  “I got the truck. I say we leave it.”

  “You’re getting soft.”

  “Not hardly. But I’m the only one with the brains here. If RJ can’t get around, then he can’t do his delivery.” Keating turns and heads back to the entrance and the other two have to follow if they want his ride. “If he can’t do his delivery . . .” Keating is shouting like he’s talking more to me than to them. “. . . then the Ace is out something more valuable than this sorry bike.” Truck doors slam. “And if he ain’t happy . . .”

  The roar of the truck drowns out the rest. I wait until I hear the truck rumble away, in case they’re trying to trick me. But after they’re gone, the wait stretches into something else as I don’t want to come down.

  It was Saturday Night Fever that killed the Stardust.

  We were pumped when we saw the movie trailer announcing it was the next show after Star Wars. Not that we really cared about the story. It looked lame and we’d rather lie out there every Friday night forever falling asleep to Star Wars. No movie replacing that stood a chance. But Saturday Night Fever had one thing Star Wars didn’t. It was rated R. And not R for violence. This was R for sexual content and nudity. The Stardust had never shown one of those before.

  At first, if I ignored the music, Fever wasn’t so bad. But there was no nudity through most of it. Still, the part about the gang was cool. And I liked the older brother when he quit the priesthood. But then there was this girl, Annette, who was all messed up and reminded me of Roxanne. She even looked like if Roxanne cleaned herself up. Then, by halfway through, I was thinking that if this was what love was supposed to be, I didn’t know why anyone bothered. And by the time it got to that bridge scene, and what those guys did to Annette, I was done with that movie and wished I could unwatch what I just seen, but there was no chance of that . . .

  It’s a yipping sound that wakes me up. I stare over the side of the platform and spot three coyotes slinking between the speaker posts. The summer drought has driven them from the hills. I could jump down outside the fence and go home without facing them, but the bike is still inside and I’m not going to leave it. I should wait until they leave, but I’m done waiting and I’m done hiding. So I crawl down to the top of the fence and then jump inside the Stardust. The coyotes freeze. The biggest one is in front of me and the other two are spread out on either side.

  The hell with this. I wave my hands in the air, scream, and run right at that mangy thing. “Aaawwwwwww!!!” And damn it if he don’t turn tail and run, the other two joining him. I chase those yipping cowards clear out the entrance.

  Then I return to the Stingray and kneel and dig the chain out of the weeds.

  I could make one last attempt at stealing from Leguin. But I know it’s no good. I can’t do it. I need another plan.

  The chain is gunked with grease and dirt and weeds.

  Maybe I can go to Mrs. Elliot’s Antiques and Collectibles Emporium and buy something that looks fancy but don’t really cost a lot. Something I could pass off as Leguin’s.

  I take the knife out of my back pocket and flick it open and pry it between the chain and the sprocket, carefully working one notch at a time.

  I got a few bucks stashed I could pay her, but that won’t be enough. Damn, that means I got to come up with some quick con to make a few bucks. But it don’t make sense stealing from one place to avoid stealing from another. Father Speckler called that stealing from Peter to pay Paul. Or something like that.

  The chain catches and I lift the back tire and spin it. Not great. But it will hold. I hop on and cruise past the ticket gate, and it’s adios to the old Stardust. The chain slips once as I turn onto the street, but then catches again. The Blackjacks are gone. Just me alone.

  There is another way to get cash. I haven’t done it in years, and it won’t be so easy as back then. And even in those days, it could get tricky. Still, it might work. Only problem is that it’s sort of like stealing from God. But I’m counting on Him forgiving me for a whole lot worse than stealing before I die, so why not?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Confirmation

  I’m sitting in the shadows in a corner of the chapel at Mission San Miguel Arcangel, waiting for the right tourist prospect to wander in so I can make that cash. The mission sits outside Arcangel Valley, but it’s about as close as tourists get to wandering into our little world. I used to be a sort of unofficial tour guide here. I made more than a few bucks off tips. But that was when I was eleven and being cute was still a factor. Now the best I got to work with is obnoxious.

  The summer heat pounds outside, but it feels sweet soaking in this cool air and listening to my breath sliding across adobe walls. It smells like two hundred years of prayers seeping out of the oak pews as I squirm down, waiting for a prospect. No matter how many times I look, I always see something new on the walls, what they call frescoes. The high walls all crammed with designs painted in greens and blues and golds like someone went crazy with funky wallpapers, these big pictures on the side walls that could be fans or seashells depending on your mood, a wall pulpit painted in blues and greens and reds and yellows and even some gold and silver, the altar surrounded by for real pink pillars and all kinds of tiles with squiggly shapes, and above that altar this all-seeing eye of God in its triangle, sitting in a cloud, with these 3-D sun rays bursting out of it. How do you figure something that trippy in a for real church? A product of divine madness, Father Speckler had called it.

  How does a kid kneel and take God with that eye staring down at him?

  The door creaks open, and I scrunch down in a pew. Newlyweds, hands glued together, creep into the chapel. We get a lot of newlyweds passing through on their way to the Madonna Inn. I wait until they start gawking around before I make my move. I don’t want to interrupt if they pray. This couple moves to the altar and stares up at that all-seeing eye. I sneak down the aisle toward them.

  “You know there’s bones buried right under that altar?” My voice cracks, and I wish for that choirboy alto that used to make ladies smile. The couple stare at me. “Father Martin is buried right under that altar. Died in 1824, so I bet there’s only his bones by now.”

  “Yes, the pamphlet mentioned him,” the guy says as the two of them edge away.

  “That’s the wishing chair you’re heading to over there. It’s like magic. Girls are supposed to sit in it and get their wish, like about love. I ain’t kidding. You can check the pamphlet. It’s all there.”

  He does check the pamphlet, and his face comes up looking impressed when he finds it’s for real.

  “Esteban Munras did all this in 1821.” I wave at the walls. “They’re frescoes. He trained Indians to do it. Fun fact: more than a hundred thousand Indians died building the missions. Moving on.”

  I nudge them out to the grounds. Even in the shade of the archway the heat pounds at us.

  “There was this one priest, Father Antonio de la Concepcion Horra. Now, there was one weird dude. Got freaked out about the ants. Kid you not. Maybe there were ‘untold millons’ like your pamphlet says. Or maybe he only thought there were. But they for sure got on that guy’s nerves. He did all kinds of weird things to get rid of the ants, even shooting off guns to try and scare them away, which worked better on the Indians than it did on the ants. He went totally bonkers and got hauled back to Mexico in chains.”

  “I understand there’s a cemetery.” The wife’s question nearly throws me off my game ’cause it’s usually just old people that want to check out the cemetery, sort of shopping around maybe.

  “You sick?” She does look sort of pale.

  “Sick? Eh, no, why?”

  I shrug.

  The man looks up at the sky like for spiritual help. I feel my tip melting away in this heat, so I herd them through the courtyard toward the convent living room. The Reeds make for a tight closer.

  “In the 1840s, the missi
on couldn’t make it no more, and so this scumbag Pío Pico sold the mission to the Reed family for six hundred bucks, and so it wasn’t a mission no more. Well, Reed went off during the gold rush, and wouldn’t you know he struck it rich and came back with a pile of gold dust. You can figure gold never leads to no good. These deserters from an English warship stopped here. The Reeds were all nice to them and gave them food and shelter. But this Mr. Reed, he started bragging about that gold. Well, those men thanked the Reeds for being so nice and stuff and they left. I think they spent the night up in this canyon, where there’s this big oak tree now. It’s sort of a haunted place, but you won’t find that in no books. Anyway, they came back at night. They didn’t just steal the gold. They murdered the whole family. Women, children, servants . . . eleven people! They just dumped their bodies in this here convent living room right where you’re standing now.”

  The lady grabs her husband’s arm. Like I planned it, they are happy to follow me out into the light of that parking lot.

  “A posse like out of some Western trapped those killers on some cliffs. Shot one guy. Another one jumped and smashed his guts on the rocks. The other three were hanged. They never found the gold. I think it might be buried up in that canyon.”

  Finally, the lady gives the guy a nod. Each couple uses a different signal, but it always means the same thing. Let’s dump this kid and get back to the Madonna Inn and that caveman room.

  I have them climbing into their car and five bucks sliding into my pocket. I head back into the chapel for one more troll. As I wiggle back down in the cool dark corner and wait, I can almost hear my sweet solo recessional filling that chapel during that slick showtime confirmation, with the girls in their stiff white dresses and the boys squirming in their coats and ties. That was the last time I sang choir ’cause then my mom told me about my dad having my same sweet voice.

  A girl creeps into the chapel. With that straight oil-slick black hair and milk-glass white skin, I know right off it’s Roxanne, except that I haven’t ever heard of her being in church. She wears a white sheet that’s been sewed into a raggedy dress, these big red stitches tying it together just under where her tits bump out, and red ribbons stitched along the sleeves and a red sash around her waist.

  Roxanne peeks around, and I slide down in the pew. She’s whispering a song, and I hear “Roxanne” and then the part about a red dress, and I know it’s that new Police song, and that Roxanne is just crazy enough to think it was written about her.

  Then she glides down the aisle like some kind of wannabe bride. At the altar, she glances around like she don’t know what to do next. She sees the wishing chair and walks over and sits down in it, closing her eyes. Her chewing gum click-clicks like pebbles plinking against the adobe. Roxanne isn’t your tourist prospect, but she looks in bad need of a guide right now and there’s no one around except me.

  She opens her eyes when she hears my steps, but she don’t move.

  “That’s a wishing chair,” I whisper when I reach the altar.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” she says.

  The quiet hangs on so long I can’t hardly stand it.

  “Didn’t know you were Catholic,” I say.

  “I ain’t nothing.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I just want to be confirmed.”

  “But if you’re not . . .”

  “You know, confirmed.”

  She looks at me like I’m a total dork.

  Staring into a face that’s half hate and half sad, who am I to tell her she’s mixed up on this confirmation stuff?

  “I should’ve known I wouldn’t find it here,” she says. “I like this place, though. Hey, you used to be in that children’s choir. I heard you even had solos.”

  “I don’t sing no more.”

  “Did I ask you to sing?”

  She hasn’t said about our meeting by the river, which makes me think it really was a figment.

  “Confirm me.”

  I don’t know if she says this, or if it’s just the wind snickering off adobe walls.

  “What?”

  “Confirm me. You ain’t much, but at least you know what to do.”

  Is she really expecting me to be a wannabe priest? It sounds like a sin, but I can’t figure it for sure. That all-seeing eye stares down at me.

  “You know what a priest says or does, don’t you?”

  “Sort of, but . . .”

  “Well?”

  “I ain’t a priest.”

  “Duh. That don’t matter to me.”

  I can tell myself it’s only playacting at being a priest. Except that Roxanne, whatever she wants, it isn’t playacting.

  “Okay, well the priest, or a bishop if it’s big-time, he presses the sign of the cross on your forehead with his thumb.”

  “That’s it?”

  The way she asks makes the whole thing sound so cheap. Except that when I look into those black eyes I see there’s nothing worth more to her than being confirmed.

  “I don’t know if this is for real,” I say, “but I heard that in the good old days the bishop would slap you. Man, I’ll bet he’d knock that Holy Spirit right into you.” I wait for her to laugh. I never understood that part myself. But Roxanne just nods like she knew all along that being confirmed had something to do with someone hitting you.

  “Okay, slap away.” She squeezes her eyelids shut like she’s done this part before.

  “It’s not like that no more.”

  She just sits there, eyes squeezed shut, in that sorry white dress stitched in red. I edge around so I can’t glimpse that all-seeing eye, only I still feel it through the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “Go on.”

  I check out the pews to make sure no novitiates are lurking around, and I lift my hand clear to my ear like Mother Catherine when she’s swatting me with old Thunder. But I can’t. I just reach out and touch her face.

  “That ain’t a slap.” She opens her eyes.

  “I can’t.”

  “Ain’t nothing easier than a slap.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You don’t do it and I won’t be confirmed.”

  I pull back my hand. She scrunches her eyelids closed.

  “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

  My hand smacks her cheek.

  “That it?” She stares at me for just one sec, but in that sec I feel closer than I ever felt to anyone.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Ain’t there something else?”

  “I already said I don’t do songs.”

  “Well, at least we gave it a try, huh?” Her eyes slide back to cold and faraway.

  “What’d you expect? I ain’t a priest.”

  She wanders back down the aisle toward the door. Jesus loves the little children slides up my gut . . . all the children of the world . . . and I squeeze my insides, feeling that song twisting through me, sliding like sickening sweet incense up my throat. I clench my teeth together and keep that song all bottled up inside me.

  Roxanne takes the gum from her mouth and sticks it under the last pew. Then, without looking back, she disappears into that heat like she’s being sucked up into the light.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Buying Time

  I’m standing next to Charley, fingering a wad of crumpled bills in my pocket and looking up at the homemade sign propped against the chimney on the roof of the old clapboard house:

  mrs. elliot’s antiques and collectibles emporium

  Drivers can see that sign clear over on 101. There’s another sign hanging from the porch:

  a turne of the century historical

  farmhouse and museum

  tour: 50c

  Mrs. Elliot gives prospects the so-called tour for free to make them feel good and then tries to sell them some
of her stuff that’s been in her family a million years, complete with its family history. Only she’s so attached to most of the stuff that she mostly changes her mind and won’t sell it and the prospects either stomp out all POed or scratching their heads like they don’t know what the hell is going on.

  Charley starts right away limping for the back gate. Mrs. Elliot’s backyard is the unofficial junkyard in town, filled with what she calls the collectibles.

  “Not today,” I say. “Today, we’re going inside.”

  Charley looks impressed. We’ve never bought inside before, but if I’m to pass off something to the Blackjacks that I pretended I stole from Leguin, then it’s got to be primo.

  Mrs. Elliot has all of six prospects wandering around inside, which is the major rush before the Fourth. She’s dressed for the crowd in her baby-blue square-dance outfit. There are all these frilly underskirts that make it look like she’s being felt up by a gang of butterflies, but she do-si-dos through that room without even wiping out a chamber pot.

  I just sort of browse, not wanting to disturb her in action. Charley bangs against a hat rack, which I grab before it smashes across a table covered with little colored glass bottles.

  “I knew I shouldn’t of let you in here,” I whisper.

  The prospects check us out like we’re part of the emporium—the weird local and his crip brother.

  There’s an old clock that looks like it could be from Leguin’s mantel. It even keeps good time.

  “Moving your business inside, RJ?”

  I jump at her voice. Don’t know how I could’ve missed the swush of her skirts.

  “Just looking,” I say.

  “You been looking a long time.” Mrs. Elliot’s chins wobble under her lizard lips, making a scratchy sound on the frilly neckline.

  “Where’s Charley?”

  “In the kitchen with some cookies,” she says.

  I point at the clock. “It don’t even chime.”

  “But it keeps perfect time,” she says.