Bones of a Saint
Excerpt
CHAPTER TWELVE
CONFIRMATION
I’m sitting in the shadows in a corner of the chapel at Mission San Miguel Arcangel, waiting for the right tourist prospect to wander in so I can make that cash. The mission sits outside Arcangel Valley, but it’s about as close as tourists get to wandering into our little world. I used to be a sort of unofficial tour guide here. I made more than a few bucks off tips. But that was when I was eleven and being cute was still a factor. Now the best I got to work with is obnoxious.
The summer heat pounds outside, but it feels sweet soaking in this cool air and listening to my breath sliding across adobe walls. It smells like two hundred years of prayers seeping out of the oak pews as I squirm down, waiting for a prospect. No matter how many times I look, I always see something new on the walls, what they call frescoes. The high walls all crammed with designs painted in greens and blues and golds like someone went crazy with funky wallpapers, these big pictures on the side walls that could be fans or seashells depending on your mood, a wall pulpit painted in blues and greens and reds and yellows and even some gold and silver, the altar surrounded by for real pink pillars and all kinds of tiles with squiggly shapes, and above that altar this all-seeing eye of God in its triangle, sitting in a cloud, with these 3-D sun rays bursting out of it. How do you figure something that trippy in a for real church? A product of divine madness, Father Speckler had called it.
How does a kid kneel and take God with that eye staring down at him?
The door creaks open, and I scrunch down in a pew.
A girl creeps into the chapel. With that straight oil- slick black hair and milk-glass white skin, I know right off, except that I haven’t ever heard of her being in church. She wears a white sheet that’s been sewed into a raggedy dress, these big red stitches tying it together just under where her tits bump out, and red ribbons stitched along the sleeves and a red sash around her waist.
Roxanne peeks around, and I slide down in the pew. She’s whispering a song, and I hear “Roxanne” and then the part about a red dress, and I know it’s that new Police song, and that Roxanne is just crazy enough to think it was written about her.
Then she glides down the aisle like some kind of wannabe bride. At the altar, she glances around like she don’t know what to do next. She sees the wishing chair and walks over and sits down in it, closing her eyes. Her chewing gum click- clicks like pebbles plinking against the adobe. Roxanne isn’t your tourist prospect, but she looks in bad need of a guide right now and there’s no one around except me.
She opens her eyes when she hears my steps, but she don’t move.
“That’s a wishing chair,” I whisper when I reach the altar. “Don’t you think I know that?” she says.
The quiet hangs on so long I can’t hardly stand it. “Didn’t know you were Catholic,” I say.
“I ain’t nothing.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I just want to be confirmed.”
“But if you’re not . . .”
“You know, confirmed.”
She looks at me like I’m a total dork.
Staring into a face that’s half hate and half sad, who am I to tell her she’s mixed up on this confirmation stuff?
“I should’ve known I wouldn’t find it here,” she says. “I like this place, though. Hey, you used to be in that children’s choir. I heard you even had solos.”
“I don’t sing no more.”
“Did I ask you to sing?”
She hasn’t said about our meeting by the river, which makes me think it really was a figment.
“Confirm me.”
I don’t know if she says this, or if it’s just the wind snickering off adobe walls. “What?”
“Confirm me. You ain’t much, but at least you know what to do.”
Is she really expecting me to be a wannabe priest? It sounds like a sin, but I can’t figure it for sure. That all-seeing eye stares down at me.
“You know what a priest says or does, don’t you?” “Sort of, but . . .”
“Well?”
“I ain’t a priest.”
“Duh. That don’t matter to me.”
I can tell myself it’s only playacting at being a priest. Except that Roxanne, whatever she wants, it isn’t playacting. “Okay, well the priest, or a bishop if it’s big-time, he presses the sign of the cross on your forehead with his thumb.”
“That’s it?”
The way she asks makes the whole thing sound so cheap.
Except that when I look into those black eyes I see there’s nothing worth more to her than being confirmed.
“I don’t know if this is for real,” I say, “but I heard that in the good old days the bishop would slap you. Man, I’ll bet he’d knock that Holy Spirit right into you.”
I wait for her to laugh. I never understood that part myself. But Roxanne just nods like she knew all along that being confirmed had something to do with someone hitting you.