But he couldn’t blame all his problems on the authoritarian nature of the institution he served. In his private hours or in the middle of the night, he had to concede that many of the passions burning in him were not those of a spiritual man: the flashes of anger that left his face mottled; the bitterness he felt when he accepted injury or insult; the twitch in his right hand when he saw a child abused or heard a racist remark or watched a chain-saw crew mow down an oak grove in order to build another Walmart. Sometimes his efforts at self-control were not successful. Two years ago he had lost it.
A large, sweaty off-duty policeman at a Lafayette health club was punching the heavy bag while he told a story to two other cops. Julian was hitting the speed bag and at first paid no attention to the story, then realized what he was hearing. “He took his dick out and rubbed it all over her,” the man said, steadying the bag, laughing so hard he was wheezing. “From top to bottom, I mean it, in her hair, everywhere.”
Julian let his hands hang at his sides and stared at the floor. Finally, in the silence, the teller of the story looked at him and smiled crookedly. “Hey,” he said.
“You’re a police officer?” Julian said.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“I’m Father Hebert. I’m okay at the speed bag. But I don’t have the moves for the ring. You look like you do.”
“You’re a padre?”
“I was when I woke up this morning.”
“Sorry about the language.”
“Can you show me?”
“The moves?”
“Yes,” Julian said. He opened his mouth to clear his eardrums; they were creaking, as though he were sinking to the bottom of a deep pool.
“Rotate in a circle, see,” the man said. “Never lead with your right except in a body attack, then hook your opponent under the heart. Catch him with your left, then chop him with a right cross. It’s easy. Where’d you learn the speed bag?”
Julian didn’t answer.
“You hearing me?” the policeman said.
“Yes,” Julian said.
The policeman’s forearms were thick and wrapped with black hair, a fog of body odor wafting off his skin. “You really want me to show you?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t deck me, now, Father,” the man said, grinning.
Julian slipped on a pair of padded ring gloves, his eyes veiled.
“Good. Let’s dance,” the man said.
Julian had to breathe through his nose to slow down his heart. His skull felt as though it were in a vise. “Who was the woman?”
“Woman?” the man said. “What woman?”
“The one who was sexually abused.”
“I was talking about something that happened in a case.”
“You said circle to the left? Or lead with the left?”
“Forget about that. What’s this with the woman?”
“Is this how to do it?” Julian said. He flicked his left into the man’s face. Then again.
“You’re trying to fuck with me? Why you looking at me like that? You want to get serious here?”
“Hit me.”
“You got a crucifixion complex?”
“Is the woman in an asylum?”
“You fucking with me? Big mistake, Father.”
The man forgot his own admonition and led with his right, then discovered he had just swung at empty space. Julian’s blows were a blur, landing with such force and ferocity that the larger man couldn’t raise his arms. He went down on the floor mat, but Julian went down on one knee with him, beating his face as though hammering a nail. “Don’t you ever harm a woman again,” he said through his teeth. “You got that? Shake your head if you hear me!”
But neither the man nor his friends could speak or move. Julian pulled off his gloves and slung them aside and got his gym bag out of his locker. He walked outside without showering or changing clothes. Then he put his vehicle into reverse and bounced over the curb into a fireplug.
Now, as he pounded down Old Jeanerette Road in the sweetness of the morning in his cheap running shoes, past plantation homes strung with fog from the bayou, he wondered if he was a failure both as a priest and as a man, one who had lied to himself about his secret obsessions and his constant unfulfilled sexual yearning.
He had become a priest after reading Ammon Hennacy’s Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist, then had lived at the Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, New York, and been a missionary in El Salvador, jailed five times in civil protests.
In reality, who was he? Perhaps a closet sybarite. The idea was not untenable. He could not deny that he was attracted to women. Actually, “attracted” was not an adequate word. They were the most beautiful and intelligent creatures in God’s holy creation, and so superior to their male counterparts that the comparison was laughable. He literally burned for them, not just in his sleep but throughout the day. His desires were oral, penile, glandular, olfactory, auditory, infantile, protective, lustful, spiritual, and ultimately, torturous when he woke early in the morning and sat throbbing in his underwear on the side of his bed, asking God for an exemption to let him have a woman’s love and the love of the children that would come from their union. Then he despised himself for his self-pity.
As he jogged down the road, he could not keep his mind off the three or four women who, as always, would be at Saturday afternoon Mass, a distraction he could not get out of his head until Mass was over and they were gone. One had thick blond hair and a complexion that looked as smooth as an orchid’s petal; another one was buxom and jolly with a small Irish mouth and mischievous eyes and freshly air-blown red hair and perfume strong enough to get drunk on; another was tall and part black/part Indian and wore purple and scarlet dresses she must have gotten into with a shoehorn; and number four always managed to have the top of her blouse unbuttoned, a gold chain and cross hanging inside her cleavage, her hand warm and fleshy when she squeezed his.
Now he was the subject of a homicide investigation. Hallucinogens had been planted in his refrigerator, and stamps from his collection stolen and glued on the shoe of the murder victim. His name was sullied by charges of child molestation, the one sin Jesus denounced so vehemently that he warned the perpetrators they would be better off not born or fastening millstones about their necks and casting themselves into the sea.
When he got back from his run, sweating and out of breath, he went straight to the kitchen and took a bottle of brandy from the cupboard and poured three inches into a jelly glass. Then he poured the brandy back into the bottle and stared listlessly out the window, wondering if a day of deliverance would ever be his.
That evening, at sunset, he locked the church and returned to his small house and tried to keep his mind clear of negative thoughts. Fifteen minutes later, hail began bouncing like mothballs on the roof and the lawn, followed by a steady rain and a wind that thrashed the trees and bamboo along the bayou. A bolt of lightning struck the water just beyond the drawbridge, and he thought he saw a man running along the road with a raincoat over his head. When he looked again, the man was gone.
He fixed a fried-egg sandwich and a slice of chocolate cake and poured a glass of milk, then sat down at the table and began to eat. He would work on his stamp collection that night and go to bed early, then rise in the morning with gratitude for the life and the opportunities that had been given him. Or at least he would try to do these things, he told himself, knowing the weakness that seemed to live in his soul.
A car came around a bend in the road, its headlights on, and Julian saw the man with the raincoat standing among the crypts by the bayou. He put down his sandwich and opened the back door. A mist blew through the screen, touching his skin. “Can I help you?” he called.