"You didn't just leave. You hung around for years, yelling and cursing, drinking and hitting. You only left when I made you."
"Yeah, you'd think that." Effinger blew smoke out his lower lip, so it streamed upward like the ghost of a burnt offering.
"Face it, kid. You makin' me kiss linoleum wasn't why I left. I was more'n ready to go. I'd made connections here in Vegas. The chorus girls were younger and gamier than your ma had ever been. So I split, and if you wanna think you was man enough to make me, well, I guess the last fifteen years have shown you you're not even man enough to be a skirt-swishing priest."
Matt almost wished he could smoke. Could inhale acrid air and spit it back out as toxic fumes. But he wasn't angry, not now.
"You know why you're standing here talking to me, Effinger? Even though you don't know who I called and who might be coming, and that makes you nervous? Because, finally, you can't get away. You can't hide behind a corpse, or my mother, or the years. I saw it in the motel room. You're such a little man. In every way. You're not worth my anger. I'll never forgive you for what you did to my mother, and I'll see you in prison or in hell, that I know. But I don't have to be there. I don't have to pull the plug or hit the switch. I just have to know how really insignificant you are. I think the people you're working for now know that too. I think they're waiting until your usefulness fuse fizzles out. And then you'll be another truly unidentified body that dropped out of nowhere on the way to home, sweet hell."
"You hate me, kid. You still hate me as bad as you did then. And you can mumble all the 'Hail Mary's' you want to, but hate's a big sin. If that's all I did, show you that hate and hurt make the world go round, then I'll take the final drop to whatever, satisfied. Why should you have a life, Mister fair-haired pretty boy that mama dotes on and daddy left behind to bug some poor guy who ain't no relation to no fussing kid?"
Matt was starting to see what a pawn and an anchor one small child could be, that he had been, when the phone squealed beside them. He collared Effinger again, jerking the cigarette butt from his mouth and crushing it out on the damp asphalt, as if tidying up the school scum for an appointment with the principal.
"You're developing a gift for timing that rivals that of our Miss Barr." Molina's deadbeat voice hummed over the line at its most sardonic, but a glimmer of genuine curiosity leaked through. "So you got him. The real live Cliff Effinger. Why the heck during Christmas week? I'm supposed to be making illuminaria tonight out of lunch bags, not doing paperwork on a guy everybody'd rather see dead. He still in one piece?"
"And talkative too."
"Damn. Okay. I'll have to stop by the office first. Might be half an hour. You can baby-sit him until then without committing a misdemeanor or a felony, right, kemosabe?"
"Yes Ma'am," Matt said, adding the name of the motel and the room number.
"Not your kind of people there, padre. Watch them, if not Effinger. I'll be as fast as I can be."
He marched Effinger, like a truant kid, down the line of battered doors to Door Number Three, feeling the unexpected bliss of total control. For all his spit and bluster, Effinger had been no physical threat since Matt had fought back and knocked him to the floor in Chicago. Too bad it had taken Matt a wrong vocational turn and sixteen-some years to see that.
"She coming too?" Effinger asked nervously.
"In a while. Meantime, you and I can reminisce in your room."
"What kind of room you ever had?" Effinger asked when they returned to his ugly little unit. "You priests like to put on a show that you're holier than us, with your second-hand cars and your first hands on the altar boys and girls."
"You know, Cliff, first you say priests are sissies, then you say they're satyrs. Which is it going to be?"
"Satires? Yeah, they're a joke, except it ain't funny. They're everything bad, and the old women listen to them like crazy, the mothers and the grandmothers, and the young babes with their knees Super glued together. I bet you didn't see a lot of that. A guy with your looks. You grew up real pretty, I'll give you that. I shoulda fixed that better."
Matt laughed, surprising himself as much as Effinger. "I bet you're really dying to know. I should realize by now that meanness always comes from envy. You really are a sorry excuse for a human being. I bet whoever's using you to cover up what's going on wished that could have been you hitting the craps table at the Crystal Phoenix. Don't worry; you'll get your turn in the spotlight. I'm sure of it."
"I wanta watch TV." Effinger stared straight ahead at the now-dark, dusty rectangle.
"Sure. Whatever station you want, Cliffie."
A sly smile crossed the wizened face. "Channel forty-eight."
Matt went to the TV to tune out the interference. A blizzard of snow whitened the screen and its electrical howl muffled dialogue.
"I could use a drink too. It's in the bottom bureau drawer."
Calling the busted piece of furniture a "bureau" was a gentility Matt couldn't endorse. A bottle half full of smoked amber liquid rolled over like a corpse when Matt jerked open the stiff drawer.
Effinger slumped on the rumpled bedspread, gazing slack-mouthed at the sleazy snow. Not about to run. Then Matt tuned in on what the television was trying to show them. Porn movies. A woman with grotesquely large breasts blurred in and out of view, and a man was pleading and promising . . .
Matt lifted the bottle from the drawer. He'd never seen a pornographic movie. Maybe it was about time, and besides, the reception was virtually a shield against sin. And the Blue Lady guarded above.
Keeping an eye on Effinger, he went to the bathroom, where the showerhead still dripped mournfully. A glass white with a wake of toothpaste sat on the old-fashioned pedestal sink. Matt ran the left faucet until hot water came. Then he washed the glass with his fingers in the boiling water, until it was clean and clear again.
He poured three fingers into it and joined the rapt Effinger in the other room.
The on-screen lovers were grunting now, like pigs in pig heaven, if that happened to be a blizzard. Matt leaned against one wall, between Effinger and the door, and watched the interference perform its acrobatics to what sounded like the "Anvil Chorus."
Effinger glanced at him resentfully. "That's my booze."
"Thank you." Matt toasted with the glass and drank. Rotgut was rotgut; he was beginning to appreciate the wonders of brand-name liquor. Still, this was a celebration. He was free, finally free. He didn't even care if Molina could hold Effinger on any charge. It was enough to know he finally had to answer to something. The past was just the past, and needed to be settled somewhere other than here, at some future date. Future. Matt had a future.
Matt's thoughts unrolled, drowning out the television sound effects. He glimpsed bodies in conjunction now and then, but he felt no sense of sin, only of liberation. The Halloween monster had taken off his mask, and he was just Jack Nicholson. The joker. The joke.
Matt drank again, feeling the fire chase down to his stomach and hang there like an internal vigil light. What had Effinger said? About Matt being a bastard? Matt had never thought of him, the other father, the real father, the faceless sire who had paled after the arrival of his substitute. Temple had implied once that the identity of that man was the true corrosive secret in Matt's personal non-history.