Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“What are you doing here?” •

“Here? Right now? Or here in Las Vegas?”

“Both, I guess.” Matt looked around, realizing their vulnerability. “You have a car. Want to go somewhere?”

“I have a Geo Metro. Sure, but I don’t know the places yet.”

“Why don’t you follow me to the first fast-food joint we hit? They’ll have chairs and coffee.”

“Kinda like an AA meeting.”

“Yeah.” Matt immediately wondered if that was Jerome’s problem. Because he had to have one. People from your past didn’t turn up unless they did. Look at himself, turning up in Cliff Effinger’s present. And now Effinger had no future at all. Ever. Anywhere.

I’m dangerous to know, Matt wanted to tell Jerome Johnson from St. Vincent’s. You don’t want to go anywhere with me.

The man reeked of the Midwest. He could have been an extra in Fargo, but he’d come a long way to be in this parking lot. Matt couldn’t turn him away.

He got into the Probe, started it, watched in the rearview mirror for Jerome’s vehicle to wheel in behind him. It did, a toy car on spindly wheels, looking as insubstantial as the man who drove it.

Why? Matt wondered.

Johnson had obviously come here trying to make a connection. St. Vincent’s was an Ice Age ago to them both. So much water had melted under the church’s medieval bridge since those days. So much had happened to them both. Jerome today had not worn a collar. It didn’t mean he had left the priesthood too. Lots of priests nowadays dispensed with obvious religious labeling. But Matt sensed they had something in common. That was why Jerome had looked him up, had approached him in this disconcerting way. The only way he could have found him was through the radio persona, and even then he would have had to have tried hard.

Matt pulled onto the deserted street, watching for motorcycles, but more worried about the unassuming man in the very unassuming car behind him.

Matt didn’t like surprises from his past any more than he liked surprises from Max Kinsella’s past. In that case, he had ended up stalked by a madwoman. What did this sad little guy want from him? More than Matt could or would want to give, he’d bet.

Lose one crown of thorns, gain another. God help him.

He drove, half an eye ahead on the highway of lit signs fifteen feet above the street level, half an eye in his rearview mirror, not only scanning for the headlights of Jerome’s little car, but for any other following vehicles.

Nothing.

Matt suddenly swung the Probe’s steering wheel up the usual Strip center rise and dip designed to discourage speedsters. A Wendy’s he remembered only when he saw the big lighted sign.

He took a slot between two mammoth SUVs near the front door. Jerome found a place in the street-facing row behind him.

They entered together, suddenly lit by night-bright restaurant fluorescents.

It was awkward standing in line to order, strangers surrounded by strangers, not wanting to make small talk because there was none. Between graduates of the same seminary there was only large talk.

They found a fairly crumb-free table for their plastic trays and sat near the window, where they could watch lights stab the night ad infinitum. It was like a fallen universe, a big city street at night, with galaxies of signs touting 24/7 enterprises and the small satellites of cars cruising by continually.

The black-backed window faintly reflected their faces, neither particularly recognizable.

“So how did you find me?” Matt asked, stripping the flimsy paper jacket off the straw for his Sprite.

“Just … luck. I saw the billboard. Or one of them.”

“Those miserable things! Hype. But the radio industry is a media business, and it’s all hype. What were you doing in Las Vegas?”

“I work here. Live here.”

“Really? You ever go to the ex-priest meetings in Henderson?”

Jerome lowered his eyes to his tissue-wrapped burger. Grease was soaking through like giant raindrops. “No. I … I felt no need.”

“I don’t go myself. I just was surprised that there were enough of us in Las Vegas to get a group together. So you are … ex, then?”

Jerome nodded as if not happy about it. Or about admitting it. Matt said, “There are almost as many `exes’ as `ins,’ these days.”

“I know. I heard about you.”

“What?”

“Nothing bad. Only that you’d gone through the whole laicization process. I didn’t. I just … walked away.”

“I guess that’s the norm.”

“You were never the norm. In seminary, I mean. You were always different.”

“Different? Me? How?”

“You kept to your studies and yourself. Oh, you played sports, did the community thing, but it was like you were never fully there.”

“I felt pretty grounded.”

“You never—” Jerome sucked on his own straw, as if swallowing his next words. He was drinking a cola, and Matt wondered about taking in all that caffeine so late at night … so early in the morning.

“I never what? I’m used to having my failings presented to me. Seminary, you know.”

“You didn’t have any failings. We all figured you were the one who’d never leave. Except I—”

“You what?”

“I never bought that, even though you always seemed like you were really meant to be there. I always felt you were escaping your past, but I had to honor what you were trying to be.”

Trying to be? Matt wondered. Was he still trying to be something unreachably honorable? Not a priest, but a celibate. Would Max Kinsella consider honoring him for his … restraint with Temple? Would he be having this conversation with Kinsella ten years down the pike?

But this was now, and that was then, and it was disturbing news.

“All? You were all talking about me? I didn’t talk about you.”

“Maybe that’s why—You didn’t know what was going on. Did you?”

“I like to think I’m fairly observant.”

“But then.”

“But then … we were kids. We were engaged in a very serious course of self-examination and study.”

“I used to admire you.”

“Used to?”

“I mean, back then, when I was just a kid. I was two years behind. You don’t remember me, do you?”

Matt tried to, and then he tried to think of a way oflying and saying he did without actually lying, but Jerome cut through all that.

“I not only had hair then, but I had glasses.” He looked up from his burger. He had pale blue eyes, rather soulful. “I wear contact lenses now. I don’t much want to be what I was back then.”

“It’s understandable.”

“Is it? How can you say that when you don’t understand?”

Matt felt irritation scratching like his long-lost clerical collar. He’d finished a draining night shift at work; he was at worst a suspect in a murder and at best responsible for a woman’s suicide. And now he was expected to make small talk with someone he didn’t even remember from a time he wanted to forget.

And who expected him to do this? He asked himself. He did. He smiled wryly, at himself.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind, and, no, the brain is not turning back the album pages very efficiently right now. Doing a live radio show is terribly draining. I’m told by those who know that there’s a natural let-down’ afterward. It’s not my best time.”

Jerome swallowed, not any food or drink, just his own very visible Adam’s apple. “Mine neither. I’m not an after-midnight kind of guy.”

“What’s your job?”

“Day shift, obviously. I’m a picture framer.” He shrugged. “Guess it’s an outgrowth of all those Sacred Heart paintings the old folks at home had framed on the walls everywhere. You can’t outrun your own history.”