Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

Tomorrow he would meet the woman from Timor. He’d asked the hotel desk clerk the location of that island. The clerk had revealed ignorance even deeper than Moon’s.

“It is somewhere way down on the south coast of Leyte,” the man had said, after thinking about it a moment. “Dirty little port town, I think. Nothing much to see there.” He had wrinkled his nose, made a motion of dismissal. “Smells bad. You don’t want to go to Timor.”

The woman with the Dutch name and the Dutch accent could clear up the geography question for him at breakfast. Beyond that, she’d either tell him something useful or she wouldn’t. If she didn’t, he would begin hunting Ricky’s friends. Perhaps they would justify the optimism of Castenada. Until then there was nothing to do except walk. Carefree hours in a place new to him and exotic. He should be luxuriating in that. Why wasn’t he?

He was nervous, that was why. He was nervous about Mr. Lum Lee for one thing. It was a rare feeling for. Moon, and he tried to deduce the reason. Perhaps it was the Chinese-looking man in the lobby who seemed to be watching him. More likely the man had seemed to be watching him only because Moon was already nervous. He was an Oriental wearing a blue turtleneck shirt. Chinese, Moon guessed, but that was probably because Chinese had been his generic label for all Orientals who were not clearly Japanese. And why had Mr. Lum Lee followed him to Manila? He’d called the number Lum Lee had left for him. No one had answered.

“Who’s the man sitting over there by the fountain?” he’d asked the clerk. “Wearing the blue shirt? Is he one of the guests?” And the clerk had looked, shook his head, and said, “Maybe. I think not so.” And then when Moon had walked away from the hotel, past the line of waiting taxis, he’d seen Blue Turtleneck standing in the doorway looking after him. Or possibly just looking at the weather.

The weather was mild, dead calm, more humid than he’d ever experienced. Prestorm weather, he thought. Certainly far different from the high dryness of the Colorado Plateau. The surface of Manila Bay reflected city lights, the lights of traffic along Quezon Boulevard. Moon walked briskly, at the three-miles-in-fifty-minutes pace the U.S. Army had taught him, past dark warehouses and the twinkling mast lights of a thousand boats docked in the Manila yacht basin. He smelled fish, oil, flowers, salty ocean air, decayed fruit, a strange animal aroma. The perfume of the tropics, he guessed. Strange, exciting country. He should have been enjoying it.

The vehicles passing him were mostly World War II vintage jeeps, remodeled as taxis, garishly painted, honking for no reason he could understand. The sidewalk now was illuminated by the yellow glare of a streetlight. It showed him a shallow flood of dark water running down the concrete toward him.

Water?

Moon stopped, stared, sucked in his breath, and jumped to one side.

The stream was a multitude of insects: agile, light brown cockroaches. A migration of them flowing rapidly down the sidewalk. The crunching he’d felt under his shoe soles on the dark street behind him hadn’t been dead leaves as he’d thought. Feeling slightly sickened, he hurried down the sea-wall away from this grotesque strangeness.

The rain caught Moon as he crossed the park in front of the Manila Cathedral. A drizzle at first, the tiny droplets oddly warm. But the drizzle quickly became a heavy shower. Moon ran across the grass and up the cathedral steps. In the shelter of the vestibule he stopped to catch his breath, looked back. A man was hurrying through the rain behind him, protecting his head with a newspaper. He wasn’t wearing a blue turtleneck.

Moon sat at the end of the final pew. A dim red light at the main altar told him the Consecrated Host was there. An electric bulb cast a yellow glow on one of the side altars, silhouetting two kneeling men and a woman. But the body of the church was dark, lit only by a bank of offertory candles burning before an ornate crucifix in an alcove. The breeze brought in the smell of rain, of pollen, of mildew, seaweed, and decay. And then the breeze died. Moon found himself engulfed in the aroma of burning candle wax, furniture polish, old incense. Engulfed in memories.

Of sneaking with Eddie Tafoya and Ricky into St. Stephen’s and salvaging guttered-out candles, melting them down, making their own candles which Eddie believed, erroneously, they could sell in competition with Father Kelly. Of swinging the censor in the sacristry, fanning the charcoal to red heat, producing a great blue cloud of aromatic smoke. Moon closed his eyes, trying to remember the sound of the Latin-“Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis”-and Ricky saying, “Who told us pick cotton Monday,” and getting away with it because Father Kelly was too deaf to tell the difference.

“He who takes away the sins of the world,” Moon said, “have mercy on us.” He slid out of the pew, walked down the side aisle, looked out the doorway at the rain, examined the stained-glass window above him-the Holy Family in faded colors. He walked past the row of confessionals, the center door of each with its barred window curtained in black and the doors to the penitents’ booths solid wood. Much like the ones in old St. Stephen’s.

That was so Father Kelly could see who was coming, Eddie.had always insisted, so he’d know which boy was admitting his awful crimes against God and society. Moon had asked his mother about that and she’d laughed. Actually, Victoria had said, it was because the priest had to sit in that hotbox for hours and needed the air to keep from smothering.

Moon opened the penitents’ door. In addition to the standard kneeler, a little straight-backed chair had been crowded into the tiny space. Perhaps this booth was intended for the aged and infirm. At St. Stephen’s one knelt, infirm or not. But times change. He sat on the chair, closed the door behind him, and let the memories come. The darkness was the same, and the silence, and the fear he could remember. And, most vividly, the shame. And finally, the despair.

Moon knelt and leaned his forehead against the wooden grating. The only difference between this.and the confessionals of his boyhood was the sound. Closing the door had shut out the whispers and shuffling of the other students waiting for their turn. But through the closed privacy shutter behind the grate you could hear the indistinct, indecipherable mutter of offenses recited by the sinners on the other side, and of Father Kelly’s instructions to the sinner. And then the shutter would slide open. The dreaded moment would arrive.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Moon whispered into the emptiness. “It has been-it has been a hundred thousand weeks since my last confession, and since then-”

A slight sound reached him through the grating, a polite, throat-clearing cough. The shutter was open. Moon felt his heart stop beating.

“How many weeks?” a soft accented voice said. “A long long time, I think you mean.”

Moon sat back on the chair, drew in his breath. Of course. A priest had been sitting there thinking his thoughts, his night on duty in the confessional. “Sorry,” Moon said. “I’m sorry. I was just… it was raining, and…” He stopped. Nothing to say.

“If I were a religious man,” the voice said, and chuckled, “If I was that, I would say the rain drove you in. And since God makes the rain, perhaps God had a hand in this. In getting you here after one hundred thousand weeks.”

The voice sounded neither young nor old and the accent had that odd cadence Moon had noticed in Filipinos speaking English. A little like reciting song lyrics. He’d heard it in Castenada’s voice. The man behind the wooden grating is about my age, Moon thought. Maybe a little older. But he could think of nothing to say. He opened the door.