Walter Mosley - Parishioner

“She on the con?”

“Some of us are always working,” Iridia said with a brilliant smile. “It’s like being an alcoholic or under a nature bequeathed by God.”

The truck pulled up next to Xavier’s fancy two-toned-and-chrome car. A tall white man with big muscles under a red-and-cream-checkered shirt leaped out from the driver’s side.

Xavier and Iridia ignored him.

“You believe in God?” Xavier asked. His voice was neutral but there was sharpness to his eye.

“I didn’t before I met Frank.”

“You think Frank believes in God?”

“It doesn’t matter what he believes in.”

The powerful young man walked up and put his arm around the woman.

“Hey, Ecks,” Colt Chapman said.

“Why not?” Xavier asked Iridia.

“Niagara Falls doesn’t believe in electricity but those dynamos run twenty-four hours a day.”

“Chapman,” Xavier said in greeting. “Just getting a professional reading from your girlfriend.”

“We’re engaged,” the russet-haired white man said, trying his best to make the words sound like a threat.

Xavier smiled and said, “Congratulations.”

“Come on, baby,” Iridia said. “Let me take you home and rub your feet.”

“It’s only four,” Chapman said, his tanned face turning from the dark gangster.

“It was a good sermon,” the courtesan replied.

She climbed into the driver’s side and over to the passenger’s seat. Her young lover followed, proving somehow the words of destiny that Father Frank drummed into the congregation week in and week out.

After the unlikely pair had driven off, Xavier wondered whether he should go back into the church and search out the pastor. He considered this action for long minutes, finally realizing that if Frank wanted to tell him something more, he would. The minister was not shy or half-assed.

Xavier lived in a small studio on Flower Street between Olympic and Ninth. The building was old and brown, seven stories, and out of place like an octogenarian that had outlived her family and now made do living among strangers. The elevator had stopped working years before but he didn’t mind. He liked the walk up to the top floor and didn’t know any of his neighbors. He had a hot plate and an aluminum sink, linoleum floors and a small window with a view of the alley where his thirty-year-old, wood-paneled delivery truck was parked. The door that led to his utility toilet, with its jury-rigged shower stall, was opposite his single bed.

Xavier had no television, BlackBerry, or electronic music player. He had a laptop computer that was mostly used for correspondence courses, a cell phone that could do a few tricks, and two custom-made Afghani handguns that could slip into any pocket and fire fourteen shots.

His license read, Egbert Noland , and there was a passport under the name Ryan Adonitello. He most often went by Ecks but never explained when asked where the nickname came from.

At Frank’s behest Ecks had enrolled in the Southern Minnesota Correspondence University studying religion and literature. He spent the first year online getting his GED, realized that he liked doing homework, and continued his studies with no clear intention of getting a degree.

He read books in his spare time, perused the LA and New York Times most mornings after delivering papers. Afternoons he meditated for an hour and then walked three miles to the YMCA, where he exercised, swam, and then worked out in the boxing gym.

That was his schedule six days a week, but on Sundays he limited himself to delivering newspapers, driving his Edsel up north to church, and then sitting on his straight-backed hardwood chair to think about the things he had done wrong. This he found much easier than forgetting.

That particular Sunday he thought about a group of young thugs who called themselves the Easties. This gang wanted to take over the girls down around the Meatpacking District and make them hand over Xavier’s percentage.

The Easties didn’t come from the Lower East Side, or East New York, and the girls of the Meatpacking District weren’t really girls. But Xavier and his main man Swan killed Tommy Tom and Juju Bean on a side street that smelled of rotting meat. The executions occurred at three in the morning so that all the late-night sex workers down there could see who was in charge.

Juju Bean had called for his mother, before Swan, on Xavier’s order, had cut his throat.

“Mother!” he shouted-not Mama or Mom .

Ecks sat at his multipurpose kitchen table wondering what the execution of Juju Bean had to do with Benol. After an hour or so of trying to get the incongruous puzzle pieces into some proximity, he shook his head and went about his Sabbath routine.

Sunday dinner was cornflakes and skim milk followed by a can of sardines in virgin olive oil topped with slices of raw onion and sweet balsamic vinegar. He ate slowly while paging through LA’s and New York’s Sunday papers.

Xavier saw the manila folder sliding under his door but he didn’t go to see whether it was Benol through the viewer in the wall. Neither did he retrieve the file immediately. Instead he thought, once again, about Juju’s blood under his bone-colored shoes and Tommy Tom’s brains coming out of the bullet hole over his left eye.

Neither he nor Swan was ever even questioned about those murders. The authorities were relieved that the Easties, who were a threat to civilians, had been kept at bay by the more conservative and predictable duo.

The knock at the door, maybe forty-five minutes after the folder slid through, was a surprise. Xavier went to the wall eighteen inches to the right of the door and removed a paper calendar hanging there. Behind the calendar was a small screen connected to an invisible electric eye over the door.

She was wearing a little black dress.

“Hey, Ire,” Ecks said upon opening the door. He looked both ways but the dim hallway was empty.

“Can I come in?” she asked. In her left hand she carried a small, test tube-like vase that contained a single iris.

“Is this a visit?”

When she didn’t answer he stepped aside and she walked past, going directly to his yellow table and placing the vase and its purple flower dead center.

The table was set under the window that looked down on the dark alley. The sun had gone down but the sky was aglow with electric light shining from tall buildings just out of sight.

Iridia and Xavier sat across from each other. He had served her sour mash whiskey and taken a Mexican beer for himself.

“Are you doing a job for Frank?” she asked. “One of his special jobs?”

“That’s a question you’d do better to ask him.”

“I work for him now and then,” she said. “I’ve gone as far as Hong Kong and Mumbai.”

Xavier sipped his beer and sniffed. He was bothered by her visiting so soon after his memories of murder. The scent of one seemed to rub off on the other.

“I’ve never seen you not wearing robes,” he said.

“You only know me as a church lady.”

“I’ve seen you outside church.”

Iridia smiled and let her head lean to the right as Father Frank often did.

“Why haven’t you asked to have sex with me, Ecks?”

“You got Chapman.”

“That has nothing to do with us.”

“Us?”

“The congregation,” she said, “is like a hill clan. No matter what we do or how far we go, we always know the special smell of our sweat.”

Again Ecks was reminded of the odor of rotted meat and the dead men.

“What are you doing here, Ire?”

“You were waiting for me after the service.”

“I wanted your opinion. You gave it to me.”

“You wanted more than that.”