Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

The pastor knew too much. He could finger Cassandra and me in a lineup. At the very least, I’d have to take him with me, lock him up in the potato cellar underneath my grandfather’s cabin. He knows too much, I’d keep telling myself. It’s either him or me.

But I wasn’t a killer and it made me sick to my stomach to be thinking like one. Maybe I was beginning to unravel from the inside out. Maybe I was beginning to disintegrate. Maybe, with my back up against the wall, I was becoming one of them.

There was an orange-red sky on the horizon, and a steady north wind bucked against the Pontiac, making it veer to the right. I pulled off the highway onto the ramp for Pottersville, not far from the Pottersville Inn-a century-old, three-story, wood-framed building that took up one full square block in the small upstate town.

As I came to the end of the exit and made a left turn onto the road to the inn, I was suddenly stricken with vivid memories of my grandfather. It was thirty-five years ago and we were on our way from Albany to his cabin. But first he turned off the highway for a “cold one,” and led me into the inn. Driving now through Pottersville I could still see the long mahogany bar and the wide, gilt-framed mirrors behind the shelves of bottled liquor; I could see the giant moose head mounted above the ladies’ room and the fire going in the woodstove; I could smell the burning hardwood and stale beer and the distinct, steamy fish smell from my grandfather’s oversized mackinaw as the snow melted off it. Then I remembered my grandfather’s callused hand wrapped around my smaller hand, and I smelled the sweet smell of Scotch-sour on his breath, and I recalled the weird feeling in my stomach when I realized, even at eight or nine years old, that this short man, with black-and-gray stubble on his face and a halo of light brown hair around his head, was my father’s father and how different the two men looked and how differently they acted-one slow and methodical and tender, and the other (my father) fast and direct and always occupied.

I pulled the Grand Prix over to the soft shoulder.

Cassandra turned to me.

“Why are we stopping?” she said.

“This is where the pastor gets out,” I said.

She opened her eyes, wide. Her first real emotional response since we’d borrowed the pastor’s car.

“But he can recognize us now,” she said. “We can’t just let him go.”

“I’m not a kidnapper.”

“Short-term memory can be a real bitch,” she said. “Trust me. I used to study stuff about the brain, how it works.”

“What college?” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“The University of Bad Breaks,” she joked.

“I see.”

“I used to take correspondence courses, before Eddy hired me on.”

“So you think we ought to keep the pastor with us.”

“All I’m saying is he can spot us now.”

“We’re innocent, remember?”

“Innocence never kept anyone from jail. You of all people should know that.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”

Cassandra retreated back into herself again, as if I had scolded her. But then, she didn’t seem quite like the kind of person who could be easily scolded by anyone, least of all me. She gazed down at the rubber foot mats on the Grand Prix and tried to tune me out, just like that.

“Listen,” I said. “By the time he finds his way back to Albany, we’ll be long gone.”

But she said nothing, as if I couldn’t possibly convince her that letting the pastor go was the right thing to do. I reached around the bucket seat anyway and pulled the gag out of his mouth. I undid the belt tied around his wrists, tossed it onto his lap.

“End of the road, Father,” I said. “You’re free to go.”

He wiped away the white patches of dried saliva that had collected on his lips, and he coughed.

“You mean you’re not going to kill me?” he said in a strained voice.

Cassandra laughed suddenly and glanced over her left shoulder.

“Would you like us to kill you, Father?”

“You two are wanted murderers.”

“I think the padre here wants to be a martyr,” Cassandra giggled.

“That’s enough,” I said.

But Cassandra turned away and shook her head and laughed a little bit more. When she moved her head quickly, her shoulder-length hair bobbed, exposing the red, heart-shaped tattoo on her neck.

“Despite public opinion, Father,” I said, “the lady and I are not Bonnie and Clyde.”

I got out of the car and pushed the driver’s seat in toward the steering column so that he would have an easier time getting out. At the same time a car passed and then another. As far as I could see, neither driver seemed to suspect that anything was wrong.

“You have any money, Father?”

The red-faced, gray-haired pastor gave me a look like the skin was melting off my face. He patted his pants pocket with open hands.

“I wasn’t planning on needing any,” he said, clearly fearing a mugging.

I pulled the roll of bills out of my pocket, peeled off two tens.

“Here,” I said. “Now I’m going to ask you, as a Christian and a man of God, not to call the police for at least one hour. That’s all I’m asking. And I’m asking you in the name of the Father.”

The pastor stood there, mouth open, little tufts of gray hair blowing in the wind that trailed each passing car and truck.

He said, “One hour.”

His stringy hair stuck up on one side and the bald spot in the middle of his round head made him look like a friar more than the pastor for the Church of the Nazarene. His collarless shirt now hung out of his pants. He had two tens folded up in his fisted hand.

“You did not harm me,” he said, looking down at his hand. “You are letting me go free. You’ve given me money. Maybe you are innocent, maybe you are not. But I will give you the hour you ask for.”

He took a deep breath and raised his face to mine.

“Then I’m going to call the proper authorities and tell them what I know.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” I said.

He started to walk away. But before he got far, he stopped and turned back to me.

“What about the car?” he said. “The car belongs to the parish.”

“I’ll take good care of it,” I said, trying to work up a semblance of a smile. “I’ll return it when I no longer need it.”

The pastor looked down at the ground, most likely convinced he would never see the car again. He was certainly justified in thinking that way. But then, for a second or two, both of us were drawn to Cassandra. She sat motionless in the Grand Prix, her eyes peeled on the Pottersville Inn just ahead. She seemed transfixed by the old building. But then, I had the feeling that she saw something completely different.

“She going to be okay?” the pastor said.

“Her boyfriend was just blown away by the very same people that want to see me go down,” I said.

“I’ll say a prayer for both of you,” he said.

“Do it now,” I said, getting back inside the car. “Do it often.”

WE GOT TO THE cabin at a little past seven-thirty.

The five-room cabin had been built by my grandfather in 1947, just a couple of years after he’d come back from the war in Europe, where, during the Battle of the Bulge, he’d taken rounds in the leg and the shoulder from a Tiger-tank-mounted machine gun. He’d set the cabin into the base of what some locals referred to as a very small mountain called Old Iron Top because of the way the metal aggregates in the bald, granite hilltop glistened in the sun when it shined down directly at noontime.

The cabin had been constructed of timbers felled from the forest that surrounded it. The roof was framed in the shape of an A and shingled with wood shakes that had been replaced only twice that I knew of since the old man had died from stomach cancer back in ‘81. The cabin had been set so far into the base of Old Iron Top that you could access the roof from the back without using a step ladder. Coming up the paved drive I was besieged with childhood memories of warm summer nights, and of sneaking out the bedroom window and shimmying up onto the roof, and of how in the morning my grandfather would swear he’d heard animals running around overhead during the night.