Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

A tall, pipe-cleaner-skinny waitress with an awesome arrangement of interwoven dreadlocks took their orders. Matt joined Letitia in a Bloody Mary, suddenly reminded of another wise woman of color and size, this one from the musical South Pacific.

Her tangerine false fingernails curled around the tall thick glass of tomato juice and vodka as soon as it arrived.

“This is a three B. M. night,” she announced. “Glad you’re driving me home.”

Matt noticed that her chocolate complexion had grayed to the color of cold cocoa. “Then one’s my limit,” he said.

“Didn’t plan on getting you drunk and compliant anyway,” she chuckled, drinking from a straw that rode alongside the usual celery stalk. She twiddled the celery like a swizzle stick and winked. “Good drink for dieters.”

Matt just shook his head.

“No use playing innocent. What you got after you? The mob? Some crazed Elvis nut?”

“Elvis. That’s what I thought the motorcyclist was at first. And a motorcycle did follow me one night…a motorcycle cop — maybe.” He shook his head again, wanting to clear away the biker roar he still heard, still felt. “After tonight, I have no doubts. It’s my stalker.”

Letitia made a face, shook her celery playfully. “Not this kind of stalk, I guess. Stalker. What gender we talking about here, Matt?”

This time he laughed as he shook his head. “I didn’t think anybody could get me to see the bright side of this…Female.”

“Ooh, well, then.”

“If you say ‘relax and enjoy it,’ I’ll steal your celery.”

“Nobody steals one more thing off me tonight.” Her mock defense softened into a radio cajole. “Tell me about this Leather Lady on wheels, Matt.”

“First off, I didn’t know she had wheels. I’d seen a motorcyclist following me, but like you I’d assumed it was male.”

“You thought it was really Elvis! Admit it!”

“Well, it did occur to me. He was a speed freak. Things had been pretty weird, especially at the Elvis impersonator competition.” Matt actually nibbled his celery stick.

He wanted to remain sober, after all. No, he didn’t. For the first time in his life he didn’t, and he couldn’t get drunk. He had to drive. The story of his life.

“So how’d you pick this freako up? Through the show?”

“No. She came first.”

“Now, no dirty talk. I might get outa control.”

“Dirty talk?”

“How long were you a priest? Never mind. Where’d she come from?”

“Out of the blue. Looking for another man. She thought she’d use me to lead her to him. She seems to have gotten stuck on me.”

“Like an old LP that gets in one groove and won’t jump out of it.” Letitia had drunk half her Bloody Mary and was working on the celery stick. “That pepper vodka really gives this bite!” She waved at the waitress for a follow up. “So. She’s not the usual groupie.”

“Definitely not. The second time I ‘met’ her, she cut me.”

“You’re not talking high school snub here?”

“Razor. Superficial, but a lot of blood loss.”

“Jesus!”

He kept silent, listening to the piped-in rapper excoriate “ho’s” and “hot mamas.” Why’d anybody want this as aural wallpaper? It was like listening to Hitler. Except nobody here was really listening, which made it even worse. Cultural nihilism was easy to ignore until it got into the communal bloodstream and then it lashed out and bit.

“Jesus,” Letitia whispered this time. “Where’d she cut you?”

Matt put a hand to his right side. Didn’t mention it was where the spear had pierced the God-man she’d just invoked without much thinking about it.

Catholic kink might be a little out of Letitia’s line, as much as she knew about human nature when it came softly over an anonymous radio line.

“Poor baby!” She was now halfway through the second Bloody Mary and growing a little unfocused.

That was all right with Matt. If he was finally going to confide the whole story to someone, he’d prefer a slightly tiddly confessor.

Her sympathy, her distance from the whole conundrum that was Kitty/Max/Temple made Letitia the perfect big sister. He could even picture her in a habit, with rosary beads instead of the African trade variety. Now, that would really horrify her.

“Say, Matt, you’re doing okay here.” She looked around the funky bar.

“What you do mean?”

“For a sheltered white boy.”

He didn’t bother to tell her that he’d haunted black Baptist churches for the music for years. If he hadn’t become color-blind, he’d become color-immune.

“You’re so strange. Way ahead of the rest in some ways, way retarded in others. Must be the priest thing. Anyway, what does this witch-woman want?”

“I think she really wants to destroy the man she was looking for and can’t find. So she’ll settle for me.”

“She’ll kill you?”

“No. Not physically. That would be too kind.”

“Gee, Matt. You gotta remember you’re dealing with Bloody Mary here. I am feeling no pain from my necklace rip-off, okay? But I am also feeling no pain, so ’splain it to me in teeny-tiny syllables of one word. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. Okay. She wants my history. My past. Everything that was sacred in it. She wants my priesthood.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What if somebody came to you and demanded that you do the one thing that most undid whatever you were, or everybody at the radio station would be killed? And that person could do it.”

“Wait. I’m trying to think what would take that much away from me. Being made to do something would.” Letitia’s face suddenly sobered, grew ashen. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Matt.”

“I’m sorry. You wanted to know. I —”

Her extravagantly manicured hands cupped her exquisite face, which wore a mask of slack horror. “I hadn’t thought of that for thirty years.” Her eyes interrogated him. “How’d you know, Matt. How’d you know?”

“I don’t. I don’t know anything.”

“Someone comes and stirs up the worst hurt, the worst hate in your whole life.” Her hands entwined, twisted, the nails clawing into the dark backs until dead white moons appeared there. “The ones who call at night. Call us. They all have hurts like that. We make them feel better for a while, but we don’t really cure anything for good. Only until tomorrow…when we talk to a whole new set who are all the same, really. God, if Someone came for me, she’d bring memories of Him back.”

“God?”

“No! The devil. My own particular devil, whom I will now drown in a third Bloody Mary.” She lifted a dagger-nailed forefinger, signaled the waitress. “Tell me about your devil.”

For some reason, Matt felt obliged to distract Letitia from the monster in her past that his trouble had raised from the dead. He was a good counselor. He would sacrifice himself to prevent anyone around him from suffering. Just open a vein and he would bleed tomato juice and pepper vodka.

He understood how utterly Kitty O’Connor had trapped him.

“She wants my vows,” he said. “My virtue, I guess. She wants me to sleep with her.”

Letitia blinked. “I heard a hundred sob stories from girls up against it, but I never heard a guy complain.”

“I’m not a guy. I’m an ex-priest. I made promises of chastity.”

“Ex, baby. That’s all history.”

“No, it’s my choice now. It’s a sin outside of marriage.”

Letitia snorted.

“In my religion it is. Especially for me, who was holier than holy.”

“Listen, plenty of priests have made the news —”

“They are not me and I am not them. I was a faithful servant, okay? Think of me as a monogamous married man. I love my wife. I’ve been faithful to her. And some woman comes along and insists that betraying my wife is the only way for my wife, and me, to live.”