James Cain - Serenade

I jumped for him, and he stepped back, but then I turned to water, and I sank down beside her, the cops, the lights, and the ambulance going around and around in a horrible spin. If he had done that to her, what had I done?

Once more I was in the vestry room of the little church near Acapulco, and I could even see the burned place on the bricks where we had made the fire. Indians were slipping in barefooted, the women with rebozos over their heads, the men in white suits, extra clean. Her father and mother were in the first pew, and some sisters and brothers I didn’t even know she had. The casket was white, and the altar was banked with the flowers I had had sent down, flowers from Xochimilco, that she liked. The choir loft was full of boys and girls, all in white. The priest came in, started to put on his vestments, and I paid him. He caught my arm. “You sing, yes, Señor Sharp? An Agnus Dei perhaps?”

“No.”

He shrugged, turned away, and pulled the surplice over his head. This horrible sense of guilt swept over me, like it had a hundred times in the last two days. “... Never... Never again.”

“Ah.”

He just breathed it, and stood looking at me, then his hand traced a blessing for me, and he whispered in Latin. I knew, then, I had made a confession, and received an absolution, and some kind of gray peace came over me. I went out, slipped in the pew with her family, and the music started. They carried her out to a grave on the hillside. As they lowered her down, an iguana jumped out of it and went running over the rocks.