“You figure it out for yourself,” I said. “There’s no authority in AA. Nobody’s in charge.”
“The lunatics are running the asylum.”
“That’s about it. And how you approach the step is open to interpretation. The advice I got was to write down everything I ever did in my life that bothered me.”
“By God, wouldn’t your hand be cramped up by the time you were done?”
“That’s exactly what happened. Then I sat down with my notes in front of me and talked it all out with another person.”
“A priest?”
“Some people do it with a clergyman. In the early days that was the usual way. Nowadays most people take the step with their sponsor.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Yes.”
“And that was the Buddhist fellow? Why can I never remember the poor man’s name?”
“Jim Faber.”
“And you told him every bad thing you ever did.”
“Pretty much. There were a few things that I didn’t think of until later on, but I told him everything I could remember at the time.”
“And then what? He gave you absolution?”
“No, he just listened.”
“Ah.”
“And then he said, ‘Well, that’s it. How do you feel now?’ And I said I thought I felt about the same. And he said why don’t we go get some coffee, and we did, and that was that. But later I felt . . .”
“Relieved?”
“I think so, yes.”
He nodded. “I’d no idea your lot did any of that,” he said. “It’s a good bit like Confession, but there’s more ritual and formality our way. No surprise, eh? There’s more ritual and formality to everything we do. You’ve never done it our way, have you?”
“No, of course not.”
“’No, of course not.’ There’s no ‘of course’ about it with you, is there? You’ve been to Mass with me. More than that, you took Holy Communion. Do ye even remember that?”
“I wouldn’t be likely to forget it.”
“Nor I myself! By God, what a strange fucking time that was. The two of us fresh from Maspeth with blood on our hands, and there we were at St. Bernard’s at the Butchers’ Mass, staying put as we always did while the others went up to take the wafer. And all of a sudden there you are, on your feet and on your way to the altar rail, and I a step behind you. I with decades of sins unconfessed, and you an unbaptized heathen altogether, and we took Communion!”
“I don’t know why I did it.”
“And I never knew why I followed you! And yet I felt wonderful afterwards. I couldn’t tell you why, but I did.”
“So did I. I never did anything like that again.”
“I should hope not,” he said. “Neither did I, you may rest assured of that.”
We walked a little ways in silence, and then he said, “Ritual and formality, as I was saying. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ is what I’d say as a way of starting. ‘It has been forty years and more since my last confession.’ Sweet Jesus, forty years!”
I didn’t say anything.
“And then I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t think there’s a commandment I’ve not broken. Oh, I’ve kept my hands off the altar boys, and that’s more I guess than some of the priests can say for themselves, but I can take no credit for that as it’s been lack of inclination that’s spared them. I suppose I could go through the list, commandment by commandment.”
“Some people do the Fifth Step by going through the list of deadly sins. You know, pride, greed, anger, gluttony . . .”
“It might be easier. There’s seven sins, and that’s three fewer than the commandments. I like your way, though. Just saying the sins that are weighing on your soul. Well, I’ve enough of those. I’ve lived a bad life and done bad things.”
A twig snapped underfoot, and I heard something scurry in the brush, some small animal we’d startled. Off in the distance I heard what must have been the hooting of an owl. I don’t think I ever heard one before. He stopped walking, leaned his back against a tree.
“One time,” he said, “I was trying to get this man to talk. He had money hidden and he wouldn’t say where it was. Hurting him only seemed to strengthen his will. And so I reached in and took his eye out, plucked it right out of his head, and I held it in the palm of my hand and showed it to him. ‘Your eye is looking at you,’ I said, ‘and it can see right into your soul. Now shall I take the other one as well?’ And he talked, and we got the money, and I put the barrel of my gun to his empty eye socket and blew out his brains.”
He fell silent, and his words hung in the air around us, until the breeze could waft them away.
“And then there was another time,” he said. . . .
I’ve forgotten almost everything he said.
I can’t explain how that happened. It’s not as though I wasn’t paying attention. How could I have done otherwise? The wedding guest could have more easily ignored the Ancient Mariner.
Even so, the words he spoke passed through my consciousness and flew off somewhere. It was as if I was a channel, a conduit for his confession. Maybe that’s how it is for priests and psychiatrists, who hear such revelations regularly. Or maybe not. I couldn’t say.
We walked and he talked, sometimes at great length, sometimes quite tersely. There was a point when we reached a clearing and sat on the ground, and he went on talking and I went on listening.
And then there was a point when he was done.
“A longer walk than I remembered it,” he said. “It’s slower going at night, and we stopped now and then along the way, didn’t we? The stream’s my property line. It’s just a dry ditch in the heat of summer, and a regular torrent when the snows melt in the spring. Let’s find a place to cross it where we won’t get our feet wet.”
And we managed, stepping on a couple of rocks.
“After he heard you out, your Buddhist friend,” he began, and caught himself. “Jim Faber, that is to say.”
“You remembered his name.”
“There’s hope for me yet. After he heard you out, was that the end of it? He didn’t absolve you of your sins. Did he at least give you any penance? Any Aves to say? Any Our Fathers?”
“No.”
“He just left it at that?”
“The rest was up to me. The way we do it, we have to forgive ourselves.”
“How, for God’s sake?”
“Well, there are other steps. It’s not penance, exactly, but maybe it works the same way. Making amends for the harm you’ve done.”
“However would a man know where to begin?”
“And self-acceptance,” I said. “That’s a big part of it, and don’t ask me how you do it. It’s not exactly my own area of expertise.”
He thought about it and nodded slowly. The corners of his mouth turned up the slightest bit. “So you won’t grant me absolution,” he said.
“I would if I could.”
“Ah, what kind of a priest are you? The wrong kind entirely. Knowing you, you’d probably change wine into water.”
“The miracle of Insubstantiation,” I said.
“Wine into Perrier,” he said. “With all the tiny bubbles.”
We were on his land from the moment we’d forded the little stream, and we had another five minutes in the woods before we came to a cleared patch of ground. At the high ground on the other side of the clearing was the orchard, to the side of which we’d buried Kenny and McCartney. Beyond the orchard were the gardens and the hogpen and the hen coop, and a ways past that was the old farmhouse.
“Now we’d best be quiet,” he murmured, “for voices carry. They’d never hear us this far off, but the animals might. In fact ‘twill be the devil’s own trick getting past the hog lot without the beasts knowing it. Even if we’re dead quiet they’ll catch our scent, though how they can smell anything at all beyond their own raw stench is a great puzzle to me.”
And there were a few guinea fowl
penned in with his hens, he said. Pretty creatures, that roosted in the trees and made a racket when you went near them. O’Gara liked having them, liked the way they looked, and assured him they were a delicacy and much prized on the fanciest table, but he found them stringier than chicken and not as tasty. They were splendid for raising an alarm, though, true watchdogs with wings, and there’d be a little noise from them, a little grunting from the hogs, no matter how carefully we got by them. But these were city boys we were coming after, and what would they make of a bit of cawing and oinking from the livestock?
We switched off our flashlights. There was enough moonlight for us to make our way over cleared ground. We walked slowly, picked up our feet deliberately and set them down softly. When we cleared the orchard I could see lights on in the farmhouse. The only sound I could hear was my own breathing.
We walked on. There was a graveled path but we kept to the side of it, where the grass and weeds made a quieter surface underfoot than the loose gravel. A lighted window in the farmhouse kept drawing my eyes. I could picture them in there, sitting around a table, eating and drinking things from the big old refrigerator, opening Ball jars and spooning out preserves that Mrs. O’Gara had put up. I didn’t want to imagine all this, I wanted to concentrate on what I was doing, but the images filled my head anyway.
He stopped in his tracks, caught my arm.
“Listen,” he whispered.
“To what?”
“That’s it,” he said. “As close as we are, we should hear them.”
“In the house?”
“The animals,” he said. “They can hear us. They should be stirring, and we should be hearing them.”
“I can’t hear them,” I whispered back, “but I can certainly smell them.”
He nodded and sniffed the air, sniffed it again. “I don’t care of it,” he said.
“Would anybody?”
He frowned. He was picking up something on the night air that I couldn’t make out. I guess he was used to smelling his hogs and chickens, and knew when something didn’t smell as it should.
He touched a finger to his lips, then led the way. The smell got stronger as we neared the fenced hogpen. He went right up next to the fence, leaned his forearms on the topmost rail. Not a sound came from within, and now I smelled it, too, a stale top note to the usual reek of the animals’ waste.
He switched on his flashlight, played it around the pen, stopped the beam when it lit up a dead hog. The animal lay on its side in its own blood, its great white flank stitched with bullet holes. He moved the light here and there, and I could make out others.
He switched off the light, nodded to himself, and started walking to the hen coop. It was the same story there, but a little more vivid, with blood and feathers everywhere. He stood there and looked at the carnage and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. Then he switched off his light and turned on his heel and began walking back the way we’d come.
My first thought was that he was going to walk away from it, from all of it, that we’d go back across the stream and through the woods to where we’d left the Chevy. But I knew that couldn’t be, and realized he was heading for the little toolshed, the one that looked like an outhouse. I knew there was a shovel in there, and another inane thought came unbidden, that he was going to bury the slain animals. But that couldn’t be, either.
He said, “When a mink or a weasel gets into a henhouse, why, it will kill like that. You’ll find every hen dead and none of them eaten. Wanton savagery you’d call it, but, don’t you see, the weasel has a reason. It wants the blood. It drinks the blood from each of them, and leaves the flesh. So if you said it was bloodthirsty, why, you’d only be saying the simple truth. It’s thirsty for the blood.”
He turned to me. “What they wanted,” he said, “was target practice. A chance to test their guns and show off for each other. And the job of shooting the animal and watching it stagger around, blood spouting from it, and then shooting it again. And again.”
I thought about what he’d said. I nodded.
“In a way,” he said, “it makes it easier.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was trying to think how to get the O’Garas out of there. On the small chance that they were still alive. But I know now there’s no chance at all. Was it O’Gara answered the phone when you called?”
“I couldn’t swear to it. But I think it probably was, yes.”
“That’s what they kept him alive for,” he said. “Not for you to call, for they’d never have thought that might happen. But in case I called. I might have called before I came out, and they’d have had him there to answer, with a gun to his head and a gun to his wife’s, and no way for him to do anything but whatever they told him to do.”
“Couldn’t they still be alive?”
“No,” he said, “and you can blame me for that, if you’ve a mind to. ‘Twas Andy’s call that killed them. If I’d stopped him from going back to his house, he’d have had no chance to make that call. And they’d have kept O’Gara alive, him and his wife both, and they’d still be alive now. I thought of that, you see, but I thought of it too late. I thought of it when I called Andy’s number and got the busy signal. Now they’ll know we’re on our way, I thought, and then it struck me what the immediate consequences of knowing would be, and I saw my mistake.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I could,” he said, “but I won’t waste a great lot of feeling on it. Call or no call, they might have killed them anyway by now. Out of boredom, for lack of anything else to kill. And even if they were alive now there’s little enough chance they’d still be breathing an hour from now. We’ve a hard enough task ahead of us without having to get two people out of that house alive.” He sighed. “It’s a blameless life they led, both of them. They got to heaven a few hours early, that’s all. They’re up there now, wouldn’t you say? While we’re down here in hell.”
“We’ve another great advantage,” he said. “They’re stupid.”
He was half in and half out of the little toolshed, making his preparations, filling jars and bottles from a five-gallon can, stuffing rages into their mouths as stoppers. I squatted nearby, holding the light for him. The toolshed was way in back near the orchard, not far from where we’d dug the two-man grave. The ground had settled some since we mounded the earth over it, but you could still see the convexity of it.
The farmhouse was a couple of hundred yards away. They couldn’t possibly hear us from that distance, but even so he kept his voice down.
“Stupid,” he said again. “’Twas worse than stupidity that led to the slaughter of the hogs and chickens, but it was stupid all the same. Supposed we drove straight back there. Suppose I’d insisted to Andy that he drive all the way back, because I wanted to inspect the grave site, or have a look at the animals, or for any damn reason at all? He’d have done it, and I’d have seen the carnage, and their great surprise would have been no surprise at all. It’s a good sign, that stupidity. If they’re stupid in one thing they may well be stupid in another. Give me a hand with these, but take no more than you know you can carry. You don’t want to be dropping them, or making any noise with them at all. Better to make two trips.”
We made three in all, carrying the stoppered jars and bottles, carrying the can itself, half empty now, carrying the cloth sack of guns and extra ammunition. We stashed everything in the high grass at the edge of the chicken yard. When we were done Mick leaned back against a fence post and caught his breath, then reached for the silver flask in his hip pocket. He took it out and looked at it, then put it back in his pocket unopened.
He brought his head close to mine, spoke in a soft whisper. “As stupid as they are,” he said, “they might not have posted a sentry. But we’ve got to make sure, and I almost hope they have. We can take him out and shorten the odds.”
We left our flashlights with the bottles and jars and extra guns. Mick reached into the cloth sack and came out
with a suppressor. He made sure it fit his pistol, then took it off and put it in his pocket and the pistol back in his waistband.
We approached the house, picking our feet up and setting them down soundlessly, keeping in the deep shadows, taking a few steps, then waiting and listening, then taking a few steps more. When we drew even with the house I could hear sounds coming through an open window. What I was hearing was a conversation, and one of the speakers had the higher voice of a woman. I thought for an instant that it was Mrs. O’Gara, and then an instant later I realized that it was a television program. They’d taken possession of the farm, they’d killed all the people and animals, they’d set their trap, and now they were watching TV.
Once we were twenty yards or so past the house, I let out a breath and realized I’d been half holding it for a long time, limiting myself to very shallow breaths, as if for fear of disturbing the air. I took a deep breath now. We were past the stretch where they were most likely to hear a stray sound from us, but the task right ahead of us was trickier. We had to look for a sentry without knowing where he’d be posted, or if he was even there at all.
Mick led the way, keeping just to the left of the graveled driveway, and I stayed on the right side, and five yards or so behind. I advanced when he did, stopped when he stopped. It was a long driveway, curving gently to the left as we made our way down it, and following the downward slope of the land itself. It was well shaded, too, by trees and brush, and I had to put my feet down without seeing exactly where I was placing them. My progress was quiet, but not as dead silent as I would have liked it to be.
Ahead of me, Mick stopped dead in his tracks. I wondered why, and then I heard it myself, faint but unmistakable. Dead ahead of us, soft music was playing.
He moved on, cautiously, and I kept apace. The music’s volume increased as we got closer to it Then Mick held up a hand to stop me, and brought a finger to his lips. He reached into his pocket with one hand and drew the gun from his belt with the other, and I could tell he was fitting the suppressor to the weapon.