Джо Горес - Cases

Two seagulls slipstreamed overhead, each with a tiny drop of red on its beak that looked like blood. A tern sliced the air with razor wings. The water shone like shook foil. When the sun touched the ocean would it hiss? But it sank without a sound.

When he returned, the light over Fayme’s trailer door cast a warm golden glow under the awning. Everyone was eating, they hadn’t bothered to send anyone down to get him. Gus handed him a can of beer and a church key, Angela gave him two burgers.

Her mouth full, she said, “We were too hungry to wait.”

Birdie laughed a slow laugh. “Some surfers wanted to pick us up but Gus defended us. He was sweet.”

“I flexed at ’em. Gravedigger muscles.”

Dunc drank beer and snapped at a hamburger like a hungry wolf. Fayme finished her second burger and lit a cigarette.

“God, I never eat this kind of crap! Vegetables and fruit and broiled fish — healthy food. This is awful for you. So much grease. You two think you’re big tough musclemen, but inside you’re in terrible shape. Your organs—”

“Hey, baby,” said Gus, “have I got an organ for you!”

“Men!” hissed Fayme. “You’re disgusting!”

Birdie looked up from her nails, said, “Oh, do get off it, Fayme dear. What will you be doing in Mexico for two weeks?”

Fayme jumped to her feet and stormed up the flimsy steps to her trailer and slammed the door. Dunc had finished his burgers. Gus had his hand on Birdie’s thigh again when Fayme came clattering back down the steps, a framed picture in one hand, her eyes flashing. She thrust it under Dunc’s nose.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” she yelled.

In the picture, she stood posed nude on the beach with her head back, eyes fixed on some distant goal. Her breasts were firm, the nipples erect, her pudenda had been shaved so the dark lips were visible. Dunc felt a stirring in his groin but said nothing.

She yelled, “Why were you looking at it while I was gone?”

“I’ve never been in your trailer, lady.”

Angela said almost lazily, “I was looking at it earlier.”

“Oh.” Deflated, she sat staring at her photo. The traffic had died, but waves thudded; the surf had risen since Dunc had watched the sunset. “I’ve had enough. I’m going to bed.”

The door to her trailer slammed behind her. Birdie also stood. “Come on, you,” she said to Gus, “let’s go get sweaty.”

Angela looked warily at Dunc. “I’m not going to sleep with you, so don’t get your hopes up. We’re a bad lot, you can’t get mixed up with us. You aren’t Gus, you’ve still got your innocence. Believe me, once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

“How about I sleep on the floor with Muffy?”

“He sleeps on the bed with me.”

A half-moon was up, playing tag with clouds scudding in from the ocean. Dunc went up to Grey Ghost for his sweatshirt and Gus’s windbreaker; it would be chilly sleeping on the beach.

He was glad Angela had refused the pass he hadn’t really made. But going by Birdie’s trailer he heard the steady thump of her bed against the thin aluminum shell. Sexual images exploded inside his head. And then pale light from the long narrow open window above the head of Fayme’s bed brushed his face as he passed the back of her trailer. He stopped, stared down.

Fayme’s nude photo was wedged upright on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, flanked by lighted candles. Fayme herself was naked on the bed, her head propped up by her pillow so she could look at the photo, her legs splayed so her heels could be hooked over the edges of the bed. Her left hand was rolling her left nipple, her right hand was curved down around her crotch, the hidden fingers working diligently. Her body arched up and a soft cry escaped her lips.

He whirled away, zigzagged down the dirt path between the hummocks, jinking and cutting like a halfback in the open field. On the beach he tore off his clothes, splashed out to let the surf batter him with icy fists, knock him off his feet, kick his ribs, smash him against the bottom upside down. He fought his way out of the moon’s lead-foil wake, shivering, his hair full of sand.

Long after moonset, wrapped in sweatshirt and windbreaker, he drifted into uneasy teeth-chattering slumber.

A few miles north on the Coast Highway I, Fayme and Angela, Muffy on her lap, directed him down a steep blacktop past a weathered sign reading CHURCH OF THE ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK. He parked behind a bankrupt motel next to a hulking olive-green army-surplus Jimmy six-by-six personnel carrier with slat sides and a canvas top. The cabins were set around a circular gravel drive. There was a cross over the office door. The swimming pool was half filled with foul water, its concrete apron tilted and broken.

The women took the last two of a score of deck chairs set out on the crumbling concrete; Dunc sat on the side of the pool. Rephaim, the Seventh Priest of Melchizedek, a tall man in white robe and leather-strap sandals, stood on the tip of the diving board and gently bobbed up and down as he spoke to his congregation.

“ ‘Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.’ Genesis.” Hector appeared behind him wearing an ecstatic look and yesterday’s clothes. “Now come we to the 110th Psalm. ‘Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.’ ”

Rephaim easily rode the narrow springy plank up and down as it bounced, silver-bearded face crosshatched with wrinkles, lustrous hair gleaming long and silver in the morning sun.

“Paul echoes this, pointing out that the Psalmist was speaking of a Davidic Savior who was also a High Priest.”

The sun was making Dunc sleepy... He came awake with a start. Rephaim’s eyes, dark and hawk-piercing and much younger than the man himself, seemed fixed on his.

“Now, who do the Psalmist and the Epistle writer mean will be a priest forever after the Order of Melchizedek?”

Hector slipped away into the former office. Rephaim, arms spread like an eagle’s wings, bounced on his diving board.

“Paul knew, Paul understood, Paul remembered, and Paul gives us the answer in his Epistle to the Hebrews, Chapter Five.”

A score of short, silent, hard-bodied Mexicans with dusky faces and straight uncut black hair right out of Viva Zapata! had joined the otherwise all-white congregation. They stared at Rephaim with uncomprehending eyes.

“It is Jesus Himself Who is forever a priest after the Order of Melchizedek — and His message is love . That is why I am here, I, the Seventh Priest of Melchizedek. Are you stuck in your lives while other people seem to be going somewhere?”

Dunc stole a quick look over his shoulder. Fayme and Angela, and the other women, were leaning forward intently. They were actually buying this tripe! He couldn’t believe it.

“That’s all right! Where you are is where you should be. Your job is to love. Love God and love God’s works, nothing else matters. The Kingdom of God is in your own backyard.”

Not my backyard, thought Dunc. He asked, “How can there have been only seven priests of Melchizedek since the time of Christ? Do each of you live like three hundred years?”

“You choose to misunderstand. There are always seven of us in the world; when one dies another is chosen to take his place.”

Hector reappeared in a dingy white robe with gold trim, cradling a woven wicker basket. Behind Dunc, Fayme said, “I’m glad I’m going to Mexico. There’s no one here to love.”

“There’s Muffy,” said Angela. “I have Muffy.”

“Hector the Seminarian will now pass among you,” said Rephaim, “so that you may tithe to our Order of Melchizedek.”