Christopher Buckley
Wet Work
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
– H. L. Mencken
Prologue
He had done only two deathbeds up to now, and both of them coma cases. Father Toomey reserved to himself the conscious; he got the brain-dead, the vegetal and the Do Not Resuscitate. "Dues," said Father Toomey one night, tossing back his third vodka martini. "It was the same when I was just out of seminary. They think because you're new you'll make a mistake and send them to Hell on a technicality."
There wasn't much challenge in ministering to people who just lay there with tubes going in and out. What drama he'd experienced had been decidedly unpleasant. He'd just finished with the anointing when the hairdresser showed up. The family had provided for a weekly shampoo, set and rinse. The hairdresser pointed to the smear of holy oil on the old lady's forehead and said, "Okay if that gets wet?" Six years of seminary to dicker over forehead rights with a hairstylist to the dying?
But now this. Now this had promise.
He was in an Italian sports car with a name like exotic pasta, being catapulted through the dark countryside by a man with a melted face who'd shown up on the rectory doorstep at three in the morning asking for Father Toomey. When he saw the face he'd gasped, but the man only smiled as if to say, That happens all the time. He was a friendly man, in a gangsterish sort of way, with two heavy gold rings. It was entirely possible, he mused, that he was on the way to the deathbed of a Mafia don. The elements were all there.
"Hope we don't hit a deer, huh?"
Strange conversational gambit, he thought. The man tapped a black box on the dash. "This thing here, it sends out like a kind of Morse code to deer-we can't hear it, but they can-that tells them there's this maniac doing eighty on a road posted forty-five and they should stick to the sidewalk. You like venison? I never had it till I came down here, now I eat it all the time."
"Can you tell me something about your employer?" the young priest ventured.
"Charles Becker."
The priest gathered the name was supposed to ring a bell. "Yes?"
The driver seemed amused. He downshifted and the car screamed up a hill, bare-trunked sugar maples flashing by like fence pickets. "He's a businessman."
"I see." There was a long silence. "What kind of businessman?"
"Good businessman." He nodded.
Mafia. The priest felt his heart rate increasing.
"Real estate, mining, agricultural fertilizers, aircraft, cod-you know Captain Pete's fish sticks?"
"Sure."
"Those are his fish sticks."
"Is that right? I ate a lot of those fish sticks, growing up."
"There you go. You made him rich. What else? Oil, gas, timber-he owns a good deal of Oregon, I believe it is, or Washington State. You remember when Mount St. Helens blew up, that volcano? Well, a lot of that ash landed on his land. He turned around and sold it for agricultural fertilizer. This is a smart man, Padre." Padre? "Livestock. Weather satellites. One of the movie companies, he owns a good of piece of that. Defense, his company used to do some defense work for the government."
The priest recoiled. Defense? What ironic grace had brought him to the deathbed of an arms dealer, he who'd been arrested for demonstrating outside the El Salvadoran embassy in Washington. He saw napalm lighting up the jungle, cluster bombs free-falling from the bellies of B-52s, tanks crushing human beings, ballistic missiles hurtling toward what the "defense" industry liked to call "population centers," saw the sky-the very heavens-polluted with laser weapons. He saw children starving, people dying of AIDS, the homeless shivering on steam grates, battered wives, crack babies abandoned in hospitals, he saw-they were going through a gate, a large gate that seemed to open without human agency. He turned and saw them, two men with-of course-holsters. Remember, he told himself through pursed lips, that Christ went to the home of Matthew, the tax collector. But a defense contractor?
"Halfway."
"What?" said the priest, sounding annoyed.
"That's the house up there, those lights."
The priest could barely make them out. They were-miles away anyway. Good lord, how many wars had it taken to acquire a front lawn this size?
"This is the golf course here. The buffalo tear the hell out of it. If it was me, I'd stick them somewheres else, but he likes looking at them from his window, so they just go on replacing the divots. You ever seen a buffalo divot? Tell you something else about buffalo," he said with a confidential air. "They're major defecators. We got someone on staff, that's all he does."
They drove over a stone bridge. The priest saw swans and Canada geese in the moonlight.
"When I was a kid growing up they called it 'Extreme Unction.' You remember that? I guess that was before your time."
The priest didn't like the allusion to his youth. He said a bit stiffly, "It's called the 'Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick' now."
"That's nicer. Takes the sting out, doesn't it? 'Extreme Unction' always sounded so severe, you know? Like 'Unction with Extreme Prejudice.'" He chuckled.
The young priest thought it was a little funny, but he wasn't in the mood to laugh. "Is Mr. Becker a practicing Catholic?"
"Sure."
Sure? "I mean-"
He pointed. "That's the chapel over there." The priest made out an ecclesiastical silhouette surrounded by poplars on top of a hillock. "That's where everyone's buried. Underneath, in the crypts." He pronounced it crips. "They've got this plumbing system, I guess you could call it that, to get rid of the methane. Apparently you can actually get explosions. You imagine, you're laying a wreath on Aunt Martha's crip and baboom!"
The car crunched to a stop in front of the large Georgian mansion covered in ivy, not a moment too soon as far as the priest was concerned. He reached for the door handle. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned toward the melted face.
"Before you go in, Padre, there's something I should tell you."
What now?
"He's a little doped up."
The priest nodded. "Thank God for the drugs."
"Yeah," the man chuckled, "thank God for the drugs. Look, Padre, he's likely to tell you this story. Don't take it too seriously, if you see what I'm saying."
"No," said the priest. "I don't." What a strange man.
"It's this story he's made up for himself, to get through a bad part of his life."
"Story?"
"So you know, okay? He lost his granddaughter couple of years ago. She was like a daughter. I mean, he raised her from when she was a kid. The buffalo were a birthday present to her when she was five, so you can appreciate how he felt about her, right? How many kids when they're five get a herd of buffalo? Anyway, she died, and it hit him real hard."
"I'm sorry. Was it… leukemia, or…?"
"It was an overdose of cocaine."
"Oh Lord. I'm sorry."
"Yeah. One of those things. Nice kid, good-looking. Extremely good-looking, in fact. She was going to be an actress. Actually, she was already an actress but she was just getting started. She had this part in a play. Then"-he shrugged-"end of career. It was an accident. But they're all accidents."
"That's terrible."
"Yeah."
"We need to do more than we're doing. While I was in the seminary I did some fieldwork in a hospital where-"
"She was all he had left, I mean"-he gestured toward the mansion-"aside from all this. He was an orphan. Worked his way up from zip. He had a son and he died, a wife and she died, so the granddaughter became, like, his life, and then she died, and when that happened, he went a little-he made up this fantasy for himself about how he… anyway, if he starts telling you this story about how he killed a bunch of dope dealers, don't believe it. You're not dealing with some major criminal here. He's a very sweet old guy. Just play along. You see what I'm saying?"