SEVEN
FATHER JOHN CALVIN drove northwest from Phoenix on a Saturday afternoon. The digital thermometer in the rear view mirror read off an outside air temprature of one hundred and fifteen in grains of electric-blue rice. It had been a hundred and twenty-two when he’d steered the Mercury Mountaineer off the airport rental lot a half hour ago. That was the city for you though. No matter which one, they were all places of extremes. Didn’t matter what was going on outside the limits, once you hit fields of pavement, everything intensified. Precisely the reason he was now driving out of town.
Calvin headed for an area of little-known high pine forest along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It could only be reached by hiking a good ten miles of trail that ran along the top of sheer cliffs, where there was trail at all. The rest of the way required a certain kind of forest craft not available for purchase at discount prices from R.E.I.
The flight to Phoenix and then the drive to the North Rim was not the most direct route, but it would afford him some time to mull over his next assignment. He wanted the details sorted out before he reached the forest. The woods were for retreat and meditation. Calvin didn’t need work jumping in and out of his thoughts like some annoying insect. And it would if he didn’t at least lay the ground work before taking his little vacation.
Calvin turned the SUV onto State Highway 60, once the main road to the Canyon and points north and west. Twenty years and a few hundred thousand more people demanded a six lane concrete river to replace this two lane blacktop as the main artery between cities. If he took the big blue line on the map, National Highway 17, he would make the forest at least a half day sooner, but that would mean a loss of scenery and silence. Calvin remembered the squalling infant on the plane from Dublin. There’d been another screamer on the long jaunt from Rome to Boston and then on to Chicago and finally Phoenix. The screeching infant and its mother had followed him through every lay-over and plane transfer. Again, he had found himself unable to screen out the noise. But here, at last, was a great nothing. The two lane blacktop shot off into the distance and plunged between two rocky hills at least five miles distant. There wasn’t another car in sight. Calvin sighed and put his foot down.
The American Southwestern desert slipped by the windows; sage and cactus, weeds and green. Desert. That was kind of funny when he thought of its middle eastern counterparts. Every now and again, a large modern dwelling, jeweled with smoked glass and environmentally friendly solar panels, reared up from clumps of brush and boulders. This was the outskirts of the Phoenix suburbs. Calvin’s head whipped to the side, drawn by the motion of a jack rabbit scampering away from the road. He thought about an assignment he’d endured in the Sahara four years ago, a Berber tribal leader with aspirations involving certain information Holy Mother Church preferred buried in the sand. Calvin caught a patch of deep jade and glanced over in time to see a man watering a small lawn in front of his house. A tiny line appeared next to Calvin’s mouth. The Great American Desert. The Sahara would laugh at this place.
“Fucking Disneyland,” he muttered.
And it was, at least just outside of major cities like Phoenix where they had grabbed a river and forced it through a concrete channel running the length of the city. But to be fair, Calvin knew, there were small islands of hell in the American Southwest that hid the desiccated remains of more than one hapless traveler. Places like Valley of the Gods. The last time he’d been out this way, Calvin had toured those canyons and towering spires. It had felt like walking among the ruins of a temple city—a little like Angkor Wat but covered in blood and ground smooth over time.
A driveway slid up on the right. A mailbox tacked to a forty foot pole and marked with a sign reading “Air Mail” marked the entrance. A sun damaged woman with yellow hair, enormous sunglasses, in a white halter top and shorts was washing a pick-up truck. As if in slow motion, Calvin watched the arc of clear water gush from the hose and hang, glistening in the sun. He remember that other desert, another arc of liquid, darker, and the sand that drank it up without leaving a trace. The world was just full of Disneylands.
He stopped looking around and focused his eyes on the road, his thoughts on the next assignment. He remembered his conversation with Bishop Neary just threes day ago. Or had it been two? With all the travel, it was hard to keep track sometimes. They had sat at the modest kitchen table in the Italian country house eating pancakes. After devouring most of a tall stack, Neary had leaned back in his chair and groaned. Taking it as a compliment, Calvin had favored the Bishop with a rare genuine smile.
“I wonder,” Neary said.
“Hm?”
“Of all the amazing things we’ve spent so much money for you to learn, if your best trick isn’t making pancakes.”
“God, I hope so.”
“Do you?” Neary stared at him. For a while, neither man spoke. Outside, a sparrow trilled in the bright blue morning. “We need another martyr, Johnny.”
Calvin looked out the window, the taste of good coffee fresh on his tongue. “Busy year.”
“Indeed.” Neary pushed a piece of pancake around in a pond of syrup. “It’s something of a special assignment.”
“They all are.”
“Not like this.”
Calvin pulled his gaze back indoors and looked over. “Who is it?”
“An American.”
“Big deal, so am I. So’re you for that matter.”
“An American priest.”
Calvin was in a good mood and wanted to make a joke of it then, repeat himself, but something in his superior’s, his friend’s voice cut him short. Calvin nodded, and Neary laid it out. The martyr to be was the priest of a small parish on the Ute Indian Reservation in southern Colorado. According to Neary, Father Matthew Katey had always been something of an embarrassment.
“Problems with alcohol and some bucking of authority.”
“Like him already.”
Neary sighed, and in the harsh morning light, Calvin thought he looked very old. “A few years ago, while Katey was still in Boston, there were some reports of molestation.” Neary looked back at his plate. “Nothing was substantiated, but—”
“With things in the media the way they were you had him shipped off to the land of cowboys and wild injuns.”
“Exactly.”
Calvin waited. There had to be more to require his services for a guy like Katey. A disgusting piece of trash, sick and worth sticking under a rock for the rest of forever, but sadly priests like that were not that uncommon. Not enough to order martyrdom for all of them. “What else, Thom?”
Neary’s little pancake raft had become the center of his world.
“Thom?”
“Three kids have gone missing on the reservation in the past few months.”
Calvin sat back. “Most pederast priests aren’t predators in that sense,” he said. “It doesn’t really fit the profile.” He watched Neary try to scuttle the raft with his fork. “What makes you think it’s Katey?”
Neary banged his fork on the plate. “Because he’s done it before.” He got up and walked out of the kitchen. Calvin half smiled and shook his head. Can’t get away like that, Thom. He went after Neary and they ended up strolling down the lane into an olive grove. They walked without speaking, the only sounds were the crunch of their footsteps on the gravel, the twittering of birds, and the sush of the breeze through the trees. After they’d gone some distance down the little road, Calvin asked, "How many times?”
“Just the one that we know of for sure. A boy, street kid from a downtown mission Katey staffed on and off when he was in Boston.”
Calvin didn’t need to ask how they knew. Confession was good for more than the soul. “Johnny,” Neary put a hand on Calvin’s shoulder, “it has to look natural this time.”
Calvin laughed. “Natural.”
“Dammit, Johnny, you just can’t be so sloppy, so angry.” Neary waved a
hand in the air as if shooing an insect. “We’re not the damned C.I.A.”
“I know; they have better toys.”
Neary ignored him. “I want you to take some leave first, some down time.” He held Calvin’s eyes. “Get yourself together.”
Calvin went stony. There was an implied consequence at the end of Neary’s statement. Father John Calvin and Bishop Thomas Neary were two members of a very old, very elite order, but it was an order that could go on without Calvin if need be. For a moment, he wondered if they were already training his replacement. He stared hard at His Eminence and tried to read the truth in his seamed face.
* * *