Image & Likeness
by Anthony Otten
First Runner-Up, 2025 Fiction Contest
I wasn’t a priest for that long. Only three years. The undergrads I taught theology at the college, of course, figured I’d been born wearing that white collar. But I wasn’t even raised Catholic.
I was born in eastern Kentucky in a mountain town called Sweet Branch, brought up by my mom and dad, then just my dad, and finally by my older brother, Ricky. Our family name was Harp. Dad was a miner until I was five; then he got laid off and took a cashier job at a Shell station that let him drink enough free Mountain Dew to poison a small tree. He had a lean chinless face and a tall frame interrupted by a potbelly like a mild pregnancy. He knew or rather suspected how the folks stopping off I-75 looked at him—a middle-aged guy smoking Kools over his Wonder Bread dinner while he waited for March Madness to start on the little TV over the cigarette case. Sometimes he’d daydream out loud about breathing tainted air in customers’ faces, giving them a little cancer to remember him by. But he liked to remind me and Ricky we weren’t as desperate as we looked—we still had his severance from the coal company. “After that’s gone,” he said, “I’m rentin you two to the circus.”
We’d lost Mom to lung cancer when I was two, even though, strangely enough, she wasn’t the parent who spent twelve-hour shifts breathing black dust underground. She’d been just twenty-five, a hostess at Cracker Barrel, honey-brown curls piled over her forehead. My only memories of her were the crusty Kodak prints stapled into an album in Dad’s closet, pictures of a woman knee-bouncing a baby me. When I first opened that book, at nine years old, I felt a wash of secondhand grief as if I were spying on another boy’s life. Dad had pushed the photos at me because he got to worrying I didn’t think about Mom enough. Once when he was drunk, he mused aloud that he’d breathed death into her face as they lay together in bed. Ricky, sprawled on the couch, told Dad to shut up.
Ricky was five years older than me. When he was fourteen, he lied about his age and got a pallet job at the hardware store. He could pass easily for eighteen, blond stubble sanding his jaw, tall like Dad and long-faced like Mom. He was sort of beautiful to me, but he had a muscle in his cheek that always twitched like he expected everyone he met to punch him in the face. He only lost that flinch when he and I were alone, safe between the beadboard walls of our single-wide trailer, playing our old Scrabble game with chipped, greasy tiles as we waited for Dad to get home. “It could be just you here and I wouldn’t mind,” he said once after a long silence. His sincerity made me look down, like he’d started praying over me. I was too young to leave him, and because of that he seemed to love me like nobody else.
The best and worst part of our life began when Dad slipped a disc lifting thirty-pound ice bags at the Shell. The store’s insurance paid for a big amber bottle of white pills. It was the late ‘90s: everybody in the hills was living in Oxytown courtesy of Purdue Pharma. Dad could have been one more case, getting hooked, dying next to a stranger’s toilet with blue lips and pinhole pupils. But he never took a single pill. He drank his way through the pain and stuffed the bottle in his Dodge Ram’s glove box so he could show off to the neighbors. “See these?” he’d shout out the window at Angie Carson checking her mailbox. “You can’t tell nobody I needed loopy pills.”
One day Angie was outside our screen door, asking how much Dad wanted for that Oxy. She was a real estate lady with her face on bus stop benches all over Sweet Branch. She wouldn’t take the bottle for free, so Dad let her name a price—sheepishly, like she was doing him a favor. He counted her hundred dollars under the cheap light of our faux Tiffany lamp, amazed. The Shell had just let him go because he couldn’t lift anymore.
As it turned out, a hundred bucks for that bottle was a steal.
Dad maxed out his refills. Then he shopped around for other doctors. Some were willing to play in exchange for a cut, passing out scripts like lotto tickets. In barely a week, our trailer was a twenty four-hour drive-thru. Dad had no shame about his dealing, only a kind of joy I’d never seen in him. That joy had a vengeful tint: a lot of his customers were the yuppie types who used to stop off I-75 at the Shell and squint their eyes at him. Now they couldn’t help coming to him, haggard pilgrims visiting a shrine.
Dad bought me Air Jordans that made my toes ache as I broke them in. I loved those shoes. Ricky, for his part, dropped out so he could work overtime at the hardware store. He wouldn’t take Dad up on the offer of his own car. One night, he said he was going to get his own apartment in Sweet Branch.
Dad didn’t look up. He was tallying the day’s take at the kitchen table. “You’re set up good here.”
Ricky said, “You know this could all be over in a second. All it takes is the sheriff gettin a tip.”
Dad quit counting. He looked at Ricky.
“Tip from who?”
Ricky’s cheek twitched. “Not from Mom. I know that.” He glanced over to make sure I heard him.
“Look, I got to keep the shit somewhere,” Dad said. “You ruther I end up in jail? You two in the system?”
That kind of talk terrified me. In our part of the world, the most shameful fate was losing your kids to the system. I had classmates who’d disappeared into those words.
“Worse things,” Ricky said.
I was fourteen when Dad taught me to drive, though I didn’t get my license until I was in the seminary years later. He did it so I could be his chauffeur. His legs had turned stiff and blue like bad milk, making it hard to manage the pedals. He needed rides to pain clinics, to the big deals, to the storage unit where he kept the bulk of his inventory (“Don’t want you boys into that junk,” he said). Ricky, of course, wouldn’t help him, and he cussed whenever he saw me up in the cab. Once I started working for Dad, though, he quit talking about moving out of our trailer.
While I was sore to disappoint him, I also felt a thrill of pride at Dad trusting me—a thrill only matched by my terror at edging a Dodge Ram down a mountain in perfect dark. “You know there’s a gas pedal, right?” Dad liked to say.
One night that winter, I brought Dad back from a deal up in a remote hollow. “No hurry, Tim,” he teased me, because I was only doing twenty, and then the truck lost traction on black ice and skidded into a big tree. The fender crunched. I gasped, but neither of us was hurt.
I tried to back up and couldn’t. Dad told me he couldn’t walk it: “Go call Ricky. No cops.”
“He don’t have a car.”
“Tell him fetch Angie,” he said. “I got to think of all this?”
I slid out and started the slushy hike up to the Sunoco at the turnoff, crossing train tracks that bristled with frozen weeds. I wasn’t afraid of the cops—I was afraid of some kid from my high school catching me calling a ride for my stone-drunk dad. The idea made me blush so hard I left my hood down.
Ricky said he’d be there soon. I waited for him under the gas station’s lights, wrapped up in scarf and parka like a hitchhiker in the Arctic Circle. After two hours, I worried I’d given him bad directions.
At last he showed up, but he wasn’t with Angie. He drove a red, rust-caked Pinto I’d never seen before. “My car,” he said, and added with a cocky glint, “Paid for it my own self.”
“I don’t give a crap,” I said. I rubbed my chalky elbows, teeth clicking from the chill.
We found the Dodge where I’d left it, headlights glaring. Ricky honked for Dad to join us. He didn’t come. At last, I got out and opened the truck’s door. Dad was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes wide open, his mouth wrung in a grimace. So we ended up having to call the cops, anyway.
Before they arrived, Ricky dragged Dad over to the driver’s seat. I turned away and put my hands over my numbing ears. I couldn’t watch him do it. But I didn’t cry, either.
Heart attack, the coroner said. An alcoholic.
“His own bad luck,” Ricky said.
He would repeat those words often in front of our bathroom mirror as he brushed his teeth or pinched at zits. I could see he was sick with the fear that his little punishment for me, making me stand in the cold for choosing Dad over him, had killed our father. Now he couldn’t do the one thing he longed to do—say he was sorry—without admitting he was to blame.
I still loved him, maybe just out of my own relief. He was nineteen and they let him keep me. I didn’t have to go in the system.
“You’re taller than me,” Ricky said one morning as we reached for the same box of Cheerios in the pantry. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never felt bigger than him, anyway. I was sixteen, but it was that time in my life when my brother loomed tallest for me.
Ricky’s contest with Dad didn’t end when Dad went to the cemetery. Pretty quickly, he changed his mind on the family business. He quit the hardware store and set out to sell more dope than Dad ever had. Dad’s suppliers didn’t care if they worked with a kid, but he still gave up shaving, trying to look older. He emptied the storage unit and kept all the product in our trailer.
I tried to talk to him about Dad, but he shut me up by telling me Dad had leased that storage under our dead mother’s maiden name. He’d made the mistake of revealing this to Ricky like it was a genius move. Won’t nobody make that connection. Ricky had asked him if he’d rather just dig up Mom’s grave and hide the drugs in her coffin. After that exchange, they’d been like two cobras knotted up in a basket, hot with rage and surprise at one another. Ricky threw this story at me like he aimed to wound my picture of Dad; but then he went around in Dad’s Carhartt shirts and busted sneakers, and sometimes I wondered who was dead.
No matter how he dressed, though, Ricky broke from Dad in the biggest way, by using. First it was Oxy. Soon it was H. I found burnt-black spoons in our kitchen sink, shoelaces in the garbage can—more laces than he had shoes for. He was staying up three, four days in a row. Meanwhile, the grief I couldn’t share with him was like my own drug, the only one I ever took. Under its weight, I had a funhouse sense of time: days swelled like bruises, whole months vanished without any memory of what I’d been doing.
I had to get away—from my brother, from the silence in our trailer. I got a job stocking shelves after school at a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store run by a Catholic parish called Our Lady of the Mountains. I told Ricky it would help keep us legitimate in the government’s eyes; naturally, he wasn’t filing taxes.
He was proud of me. “Ain’t nobody gonna be suspicious of that.”
Father Villegas, the parish priest, was a short Filipino man with curly black eyebrows. One Saturday after my shift ended, reluctant to go home, I followed him into the church to see what he called a vigil mass. Nobody else was there except for three nuns visiting from Cincinnati. I picked the row behind them, pressing my knees into the kneeler’s cushion like they did. In the silences between the Greek and Latin prayers, the air around us became a different, slower medium, trembling with a solemn anticipation, like a jelly struck with a flat palm. I had to stay put when Father Villegas handed out the body of Christ; yet the whole ritual, the invoking of an eternal family in which we all had our part, made that hour beautiful to me. I couldn’t relate to it in any way—that’s why I loved it. It was the holy opposite of having a dead dad, of Ricky and the users lining up at our door for their own bastard communion. The shame in my gut, which touched the very dirt on which I stood, pulsed with hunger for that divine meal.
I was received into the Church the next Easter, choosing Paul, the apostle, as my confirmation saint.
Religion was my teenage rebellion: I had a rosary and a crucifix under my mattress, and I applied for a spot in the seminary’s next class. The prospect of giving myself to a calling seemed wise, crazy, and madly erotic all at once. Yet, for months, I kept my plans an aching secret. Ricky couldn’t handle me leaving him. He’d become as warped as one of those spoons in our sink, forgetting to eat, his cheeks whittled down to hollows. I was afraid enough that, finally, I told him I aimed to be a priest.
He patted me on the back hard, twice. Then he laughed at me. Like Dad, he saw religion as a business to make preachers rich. He pulled his sweatshirt hood up like it was a habit and prowled around our den. “You gonna dress like them folks? You get your own costume?”
I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t even sure I would go away. Really, I’d just wanted to scare him.
The next morning, I woke up to absolute quiet. When I came out to the kitchen, a sweet, flowery scent hung in the air. I followed it to the door of Ricky’s room, which stood wide open, framing him on the bed, the twisted sheets concealing his nudity like the rags of a martyr in a morbid tableau. I looked at him for the longest time—his moon-white chest staticky with soft black hair, his arms flung out in total abandon. His eyes were closed. There was a syringe on the window sill. I knelt beside the bed, but I didn’t pray. Some instinct sent my hands fishing under the mattress, where I’d often heard Ricky rustling in his own secrets. I dug out all the cash. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said, a rehearsal for the guilt I didn’t yet feel. I crammed the money in my olive-green duffel bag from high school gym class, along with the rosary, crucifix, and St. Christopher medal Father Villegas had given me when I got my acceptance letter from the seminary. I forgot the album with Mom’s photos. I’ve kept trying to forget it since.
I left. I left and took a Greyhound to college in Pennsylvania, clutching that ratty old bag in my lap. I never called anyone.
For years I’d jolt awake at night, waiting for a cop’s fist to hammer at my door. Nobody ever came looking for me. I didn’t want them to—the sight of my brother’s body on that unkempt altar had erased all desire to be found, to touch or be touched. But the silence, it was stunning. I had just turned eighteen, and the system didn’t want me.
Nobody wanted me, in fact, except the Church. The dean let me move in early, before classes began, when I told him my Baptist family had kicked me out. Once I was alone in my dorm, I counted the money. It totaled over sixty thousand dollars. Far more than I needed for tuition.
I never had to break those bills. As it turns out, the Catholic Church takes cash, no questions asked.
After my first year of college, I changed my legal name to Paul Birken. Paul was my patron saint, Birken my mother’s maiden name. The seminary was alert for signs of instability, but I explained it as my way of marking a new life in Christ apart from a godless family. I’d been named after my father, I said. That much was true.
My formation for the priesthood gave me exactly what I wanted: freedom from the responsibility of being somebody. I embraced God with more passion than belief, a boy so feverish with a first crush that he couldn’t see what he claimed to adore. When I came back to Kentucky for my ordination as Father Paul, it was terrible—and also gratifying—that nobody was there for me in the pews. I had never admitted, even in confession, anything Tim Harp had done: Ricky sprawled in his bed belonged to another history. Yet the fraying duffel bag packed with drug money under my own bed, with every night I slept over it, seemed to grow fuller and heavier like a little purgatory crowded with trapped souls.
Now I was assistant to the bishop of Lexington. I served in that role for two years, even after the one unremarkable mass when I realized I’d never quite accepted anything the Church taught—none of the doctrines which, under the most casual attention, dissolved like dope in a flame.
One summer the bishop reassigned me to the chaplain’s post at St. Erasmus, our liberal arts college near Sweet Branch. I argued with him to reconsider. He was surprised; he’d assumed I would enjoy working where I grew up. “You need pastoral experience,” he said. “You know the folks down there.”
No matter how gently he spoke, I heard him corraling me into a hog pen with those folks down there, even though I’d been away for thirteen years. He should’ve had more sense than to think a native could do any good in his own land.
As the chaplain I had an upstairs apartment in St. Erasmus’s oldest dorm, built in the dismal brutalist style of the 1950s. I parked my Civic by a tennis court where two students plocked a ball back and forth. One of them dropped his racquet and came over. He was short, slender. Blond sun-streaks ran in his brown hair. His name was Garrett. He asked if I was the new tennis coach.
I was in a fish fry T-shirt and khaki shorts. Not ideal, but it was too hot to be in uniform.
“Nope,” I said. “New chaplain.” I knew most kids were wary of priests—why wouldn’t they be?—but I was already irritated and sweaty, and I didn’t care if I spooked him.
As it turned out, Garrett wasn’t bothered. He volunteered to unload my trunk, then stood behind me freely telling me about himself while I bent over my dashboard, trying to kill a wasp that had flown in the car.
Together we hauled my belongings up to the apartment. Garrett picked up the duffel bag before I could stop him, twenty thousand dollars unknowingly slung over his shoulder. He had a fresh, unguarded way about him, but I snatched the bag from his grip as if he’d pressed his finger into a bruise.
“That’s fragile,” I said. Up in my room, I shoved it far back under the bed.
Breathing hard from the climb, Garrett rolled my luggage in and looked around. “Jeez, they need to clean this place.”
I fanned myself with the flyswatter from my battle with the wasp. There was no AC.
“So what happened to your old coach?” I asked, looking for a distraction.
“Quit,” he said. “The school’s on its last leg, you know.” His words had the air of received wisdom, of wanting to impress me. “Pretty much everybody quit last year. Like half the teachers.”
“Then I’m not the only newbie,” I said. I was cheerful for the rest of the day; maybe I wouldn’t be here as long as I’d feared.
In those first weeks at St. Erasmus, however, something unexpected happened. I began to belong there. It wasn’t the Catholic school I figured on. No dress code, no chapel requirement. The students were mostly locals on scholarship—a company I didn’t know I’d welcome after my stuffy, sheltered life at the cathedral. The ones in my theology courses liked to tease me about being robotic, talking in a monotone. “Do they have to plug you in after class?” a boy asked once.
“No,” I said flatly. The class had a roaring laugh at that. It surprised me, how they could hold me in their affection.
For the first time, as I found myself filling the role of odd bachelor uncle, the voices under my bed receded from my dreams. I could almost forget the money was there.
Though Garrett wasn’t Catholic, he had a work study job in the chapel, and like me at that age, he was curious, taken with all he didn’t know about the Church. He liked to follow me around after mass and quiz me on my job, how I cleaned the chalice, or what I’d do if a little kid threw up the Eucharist. He always wore the same two or three American Eagle t-shirts, washed and put on so often that the eagle logos had faded to watermarks. His only family was his brother Corey, a janitor who lived on campus and got Garrett free tuition.
“I like you better than the last guy,” Garrett told me one day as he seated the paschal candle in its holder, prepping for the Easter Vigil. I didn’t expect this to move me, and I worked to keep my face blank: “You didn’t care for Father Mudd? He had a great name.”
“He had dandruff,” he said, “and he always got up in your face.”
Happy as I was, I felt a quiet dread mounting at St. Erasmus that spring. Like just about any liberal arts school, we lived on the financial edge; but now, rumors of bankruptcy stalked campus. The week after finals, the president committed a Friday morning massacre, laying off a third of the faculty. The stunned survivors found each other in the lounge, where I loved to pick up petty administrative gossip. I should have felt invincible—if the school closed, after all, the bishop would just send me somewhere else. But I cared too much about this dusty, old-fashioned place. A sharp ache needled at my heart.
In the summer it was only Garrett and me in the chapel, plus the few elderly parishioners who trooped in on walkers for weekday mass. I tried to argue Garrett out of working over the break. “They might cut your job altogether,” I warned him, trying to be gentle. He was sweeping the steps up to the sanctuary.
His face slowly crumpled as he listened, holding back tears. The broom slipped out of his hand and he bent to grab it. I reached to pat his shoulder, but then pulled away. The smart priests never touched anybody—it was a caution that suited me.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m gonna have to drop out, anyways.”
“You’ve only got one more year. We’ll make it another year.”
He shook his head. “They’re kickin me and Corey out of our room. He’s gonna quit.”
After a pause, I asked him how long they had. I couldn’t think what else to say.
“Like a week.” He turned his burning face from me. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t have the money.”
I got him a box of Kleenex. I hadn’t cried for anyone my whole adult life, and I didn’t start then. But not long after he went home, I had to admit that Garrett’s fate, more than anything, was why I cared about the school. He was a Sweet Branch kid, reliant on his big brother for everything after losing his parents to God knows what. Now, I couldn’t help seeing my untaken road play out through him: what if I hadn’t had Ricky’s money, had never made it to school—had been stuck here forever?
I had carried that bag of cash around for years and only now saw I’d been waiting for the right way to get rid of it. I could cover Garrett’s last year of tuition. Give it to Corey in installments, as if I was scrimping to help them, and make him swear not to tell his little brother. It seemed like the Christian way to launder money.
That afternoon I tracked Corey to the library patio. He was up on a ladder, knocking robin nests from the gutter. He glanced down and jumped: “Jesus!”
My hands shot out to steady the ladder. I apologized as he climbed down.
“You preach funerals, man, but you ain’t supposed to cause them.” Corey pressed his hand over his heart. With a scrubby beard and wrinkles cornering his eyes, he looked tired, older than he could have been. For a second, I wasn’t able to speak.
“I heard they’re throwing you out,” I said. I took a deep breath and explained my offer to him.
He listened so politely that I knew he’d refuse me. “Oh, I wouldn’t be beholdin,” he said. In my debt, he meant. I could’ve quoted that line from my own dad. I didn’t risk offense by pushing him.
As the days ticked down to Corey and Garrett’s eviction, I suffered restless dreams. Under me, through the mattress, whispers seeped from the duffel bag with greater and greater volume. In my obsessive retelling of our talk on the patio, Corey’s eyes became Ricky’s, taking on the sly, sensitive gleam I remembered from the gloom of our trailer. I felt that once the brothers left, I’d never see them again.
One day after I’d said mass distractedly for the nursing-home crowd, my caution broke. I changed into street clothes, hoping Corey would look at me differently, and hunted around campus for him. He was riding a John Deere by the gymnasium, mowing the lawn into stripes.
I screamed at him until he lowered the throttle. He listened to my proposal again.
“Call it a favor,” I said. “To me.”
I must’ve looked awful—ring-eyed like a raccoon from my haunted nights. He seemed unsure, even annoyed, but then he took off his right glove and put out his hand. His palm was callused, cool and dry.
“Between us,” he said. “Nobody hears.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t take help from strangers, either,” he went on. “Let me buy you a beer.”
I was taken aback, but I agreed. Folks around Sweet Branch won’t borrow a rake from you until they’ve spent a whole summer on your porch.
That night I put a thousand bucks in an envelope and picked up Corey in my car. We went to his favorite spot, the Bloodhound Tavern, crunching into the neon-lit gravel lot among motorcycles and pickups. I passed him the envelope before we got out. He nodded blankly and slid it in the pocket of his flannel shirt.
An actual bloodhound sat outside the bar, gazing up from its rumpled face. The dog had my father’s sad, challenging eyes—a flash that startled me, because I’d tried for years not to think of Dad. Corey opened the door to a throb of country music that pushed me back on my heels. It was a young crowd, but a certain kind of young that was all white, mostly male: a Confederate flag hung over the bar. Corey steered me over the sawdust floor to a hightop table, where Garrett waited with a basket of wings, buffalo sauce smeared on his upper lip. I stood frozen, shocked to see him. Corey licked his thumb and wiped Garrett’s lip clean. Garrett gagged, flailed his arms at him, then turned to me. “Hey, Father.”
“Call me Paul here,” I said, and reluctantly hopped up on a stool. I would have walked right out of that place if not for my obligation to Corey. Just let the bishop hear one report of me drinking with a student, and he’d have me chasing geese out of the cathedral cemetery for the rest of my life.
Corey sensed my unease. He leaned like a conspirator between me and Garrett.
“I won’t let you hit it hard,” he promised. “You’re the guy gettin me home.”
But he let his little brother order. Garrett came back from the bar with three beers and a couple shots of Bacardi. His grin told me he already knew about the money. I didn’t want to act like the robot I usually was, so I gave in and clicked glasses with Corey. Soon I had to plant an elbow on the table to anchor myself. I didn’t have my dad’s liver.
Corey and Garrett watched me with bleary amusement. They had a different and ominous quality together, backlit by the carnival glow of the jukebox.
“The man of God,” Corey declared in a solemn tone. Garrett snorted beer onto his T-shirt. He recovered by explaining, with an exaggerated dignity, that it was an old shirt. “I wear the same crap over and over.”
“You can relate,” Corey told me, and he and Garrett knocked shoulders. I nodded, good-humored. I’d let them yuk it up, feel superior to the holy fool they were corrupting.
“Yeah, how come you only got one outfit when you got so much money?” Garrett asked.
Corey glanced sharply at him, but the question didn’t put me out.
“You wouldn’t know it,” I said, “but I got an outfit for every day of the month. Every mornin I wake up and say, ‘What’ll it be? This black one or that black one?’”
We all broke out laughing, and Corey thumped me on the back. My world was tilting Titanic-style—I was Dad back in our trailer, young Tim sitting across from me, and Ricky’s hand patting me between the shoulder blades, the first touch in a long time that hadn’t made me flinch. “We’re all here,” I said, with a low, gurgling laugh. “Hey, we’re all here!”
Garrett and Corey traded grins. It wasn’t long, though, before Corey nudged me off the stool: “Reckon that’s enough fun for Father. Let’s get you home,” and I agreed. I paid the tab and they guided me out to the lot.
“You’re too drunk to drive,” Corey said.
“I’m too drunk to walk. That’s how come I got to drive,” I said. Another of Dad’s sayings.
But I couldn’t even find my Civic. That was how Reverend Paul Birken, M.Div., ended up slumped in the cab of a college student’s F-150. The cab smelled like Pine Sol and cigarettes. “Who’s been smokin?” I said.
“We’ll bring you back for your ride tomorrow,” Corey assured me.
I was more worried about Garrett. “You ought not to drive, either. You’ll get kicked out of school.”
“I’m flunkin anyways,” he said. “They ain’t lettin me come back.”
I groaned in sympathy. Corey chuckled.
“Look for the power plant,” I said. “Get us home.”
I don’t recall the rest of the drive, or how they carried me upstairs to my apartment. The liquor still roared in my blood when I woke in bed, alone, and crawled on my knees to hang my head over the wastebasket.
There in the bin was my cell phone, smashed apart. I felt around in my pocket—I still had my keys. My wallet, too. But it was empty of cash. I looked under the bed.
The St. Christopher medal sat on the drab carpet, left behind. The duffel bag was gone.
I remembered the day I met Garrett in the parking lot, when he’d had a moment alone with my belongings. I held back a cry. It wasn’t sadness, exactly, or even betrayal. After a lifetime of not being touched, it felt shockingly intimate to be robbed. I was sorry not to recall how last night ended, the feeling of hands bearing me up under the arms, angel-like, stair after stair.
After coffee and Advil, I went over to the brothers’ apartment by the boiler room in the academic building. Their door was unlocked, the rooms bare, even the mattresses gone. No bodies to be found this time.
I never saw Garrett or Corey again. I could have called the police, but I’d have had to explain where I got all that cash to begin with. I’d have had to confess that there was no crime. Only a theft repaid.
We didn’t have mass on Saturdays, but that morning, alone on campus, I still felt a tug toward my duties as a priest. I went to the chapel, put on my vestments, and lit the candles at the feet of the Virgin’s statue. Her eyes, naked of any pupils, shot straight through my costume to the body within.
I turned to face the invisible congregation stirring in the pews. My perfect, unreal mother was there. Also Dad, and Ricky, and the nameless many we’d made our living from, users more terrible and beautiful for having been used.
I celebrated mass by myself. Ricky and Dad must have been losing it at the sight of me, hungover, rejoicing that I’d finally found somebody to rob me. Once my prayers were finished, I turned to place the last remaining body of Christ in the tabernacle. I thought of Ricky—the ragged beard he guarded so intensely, afraid to shave it, knowing how young and vulnerable he’d look. Twenty years old, struggling to write us a grocery list. His brother’s keeper. I carried him in my hands now as he’d once carried me, and when I closed the tabernacle’s door, it was the burial I’d never given him. Then I took the St. Christopher medal from my pocket and dropped it in the collection basket at the edge of the sanctuary. I was crying.
That was the last mass I ever said. I resigned the chaplaincy, and soon left the priesthood altogether. The bishop gave me a sad, sheep-faced look that was meant to haunt me. “Your faith always did seem theoretical,” he said.
I guess I agree. Priest or heretic, I was just another person giving gifts to the dead.
I changed my name back to Tim Harp. That might have been a mistake. When I tried for a teaching license, the state board denied me. They learned I’d forsaken religious life and had reasonable suspicions about my past. I can’t blame them: free for the first time in my life, completely myself, I must’ve seemed unstable.
I kept waiting for a divine hand to sweep me onward, for a dream to send me into the desert. But the silence was always my answer. I followed my love of studying into an archivist job at the public library in Sweet Branch, the secular equivalent of the priesthood in which I’d buried myself for so long. Found at last, I still live day by day with the lost, saved by that morning when a couple of counterfeit Christs took me for all I had, when I came to see that every stranger is a blank page on whom we write our own names.
I was born in eastern Kentucky in a mountain town called Sweet Branch, brought up by my mom and dad, then just my dad, and finally by my older brother, Ricky. Our family name was Harp. Dad was a miner until I was five; then he got laid off and took a cashier job at a Shell station that let him drink enough free Mountain Dew to poison a small tree. He had a lean chinless face and a tall frame interrupted by a potbelly like a mild pregnancy. He knew or rather suspected how the folks stopping off I-75 looked at him—a middle-aged guy smoking Kools over his Wonder Bread dinner while he waited for March Madness to start on the little TV over the cigarette case. Sometimes he’d daydream out loud about breathing tainted air in customers’ faces, giving them a little cancer to remember him by. But he liked to remind me and Ricky we weren’t as desperate as we looked—we still had his severance from the coal company. “After that’s gone,” he said, “I’m rentin you two to the circus.”
We’d lost Mom to lung cancer when I was two, even though, strangely enough, she wasn’t the parent who spent twelve-hour shifts breathing black dust underground. She’d been just twenty-five, a hostess at Cracker Barrel, honey-brown curls piled over her forehead. My only memories of her were the crusty Kodak prints stapled into an album in Dad’s closet, pictures of a woman knee-bouncing a baby me. When I first opened that book, at nine years old, I felt a wash of secondhand grief as if I were spying on another boy’s life. Dad had pushed the photos at me because he got to worrying I didn’t think about Mom enough. Once when he was drunk, he mused aloud that he’d breathed death into her face as they lay together in bed. Ricky, sprawled on the couch, told Dad to shut up.
Ricky was five years older than me. When he was fourteen, he lied about his age and got a pallet job at the hardware store. He could pass easily for eighteen, blond stubble sanding his jaw, tall like Dad and long-faced like Mom. He was sort of beautiful to me, but he had a muscle in his cheek that always twitched like he expected everyone he met to punch him in the face. He only lost that flinch when he and I were alone, safe between the beadboard walls of our single-wide trailer, playing our old Scrabble game with chipped, greasy tiles as we waited for Dad to get home. “It could be just you here and I wouldn’t mind,” he said once after a long silence. His sincerity made me look down, like he’d started praying over me. I was too young to leave him, and because of that he seemed to love me like nobody else.
The best and worst part of our life began when Dad slipped a disc lifting thirty-pound ice bags at the Shell. The store’s insurance paid for a big amber bottle of white pills. It was the late ‘90s: everybody in the hills was living in Oxytown courtesy of Purdue Pharma. Dad could have been one more case, getting hooked, dying next to a stranger’s toilet with blue lips and pinhole pupils. But he never took a single pill. He drank his way through the pain and stuffed the bottle in his Dodge Ram’s glove box so he could show off to the neighbors. “See these?” he’d shout out the window at Angie Carson checking her mailbox. “You can’t tell nobody I needed loopy pills.”
One day Angie was outside our screen door, asking how much Dad wanted for that Oxy. She was a real estate lady with her face on bus stop benches all over Sweet Branch. She wouldn’t take the bottle for free, so Dad let her name a price—sheepishly, like she was doing him a favor. He counted her hundred dollars under the cheap light of our faux Tiffany lamp, amazed. The Shell had just let him go because he couldn’t lift anymore.
As it turned out, a hundred bucks for that bottle was a steal.
Dad maxed out his refills. Then he shopped around for other doctors. Some were willing to play in exchange for a cut, passing out scripts like lotto tickets. In barely a week, our trailer was a twenty four-hour drive-thru. Dad had no shame about his dealing, only a kind of joy I’d never seen in him. That joy had a vengeful tint: a lot of his customers were the yuppie types who used to stop off I-75 at the Shell and squint their eyes at him. Now they couldn’t help coming to him, haggard pilgrims visiting a shrine.
Dad bought me Air Jordans that made my toes ache as I broke them in. I loved those shoes. Ricky, for his part, dropped out so he could work overtime at the hardware store. He wouldn’t take Dad up on the offer of his own car. One night, he said he was going to get his own apartment in Sweet Branch.
Dad didn’t look up. He was tallying the day’s take at the kitchen table. “You’re set up good here.”
Ricky said, “You know this could all be over in a second. All it takes is the sheriff gettin a tip.”
Dad quit counting. He looked at Ricky.
“Tip from who?”
Ricky’s cheek twitched. “Not from Mom. I know that.” He glanced over to make sure I heard him.
“Look, I got to keep the shit somewhere,” Dad said. “You ruther I end up in jail? You two in the system?”
That kind of talk terrified me. In our part of the world, the most shameful fate was losing your kids to the system. I had classmates who’d disappeared into those words.
“Worse things,” Ricky said.
I was fourteen when Dad taught me to drive, though I didn’t get my license until I was in the seminary years later. He did it so I could be his chauffeur. His legs had turned stiff and blue like bad milk, making it hard to manage the pedals. He needed rides to pain clinics, to the big deals, to the storage unit where he kept the bulk of his inventory (“Don’t want you boys into that junk,” he said). Ricky, of course, wouldn’t help him, and he cussed whenever he saw me up in the cab. Once I started working for Dad, though, he quit talking about moving out of our trailer.
While I was sore to disappoint him, I also felt a thrill of pride at Dad trusting me—a thrill only matched by my terror at edging a Dodge Ram down a mountain in perfect dark. “You know there’s a gas pedal, right?” Dad liked to say.
One night that winter, I brought Dad back from a deal up in a remote hollow. “No hurry, Tim,” he teased me, because I was only doing twenty, and then the truck lost traction on black ice and skidded into a big tree. The fender crunched. I gasped, but neither of us was hurt.
I tried to back up and couldn’t. Dad told me he couldn’t walk it: “Go call Ricky. No cops.”
“He don’t have a car.”
“Tell him fetch Angie,” he said. “I got to think of all this?”
I slid out and started the slushy hike up to the Sunoco at the turnoff, crossing train tracks that bristled with frozen weeds. I wasn’t afraid of the cops—I was afraid of some kid from my high school catching me calling a ride for my stone-drunk dad. The idea made me blush so hard I left my hood down.
Ricky said he’d be there soon. I waited for him under the gas station’s lights, wrapped up in scarf and parka like a hitchhiker in the Arctic Circle. After two hours, I worried I’d given him bad directions.
At last he showed up, but he wasn’t with Angie. He drove a red, rust-caked Pinto I’d never seen before. “My car,” he said, and added with a cocky glint, “Paid for it my own self.”
“I don’t give a crap,” I said. I rubbed my chalky elbows, teeth clicking from the chill.
We found the Dodge where I’d left it, headlights glaring. Ricky honked for Dad to join us. He didn’t come. At last, I got out and opened the truck’s door. Dad was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes wide open, his mouth wrung in a grimace. So we ended up having to call the cops, anyway.
Before they arrived, Ricky dragged Dad over to the driver’s seat. I turned away and put my hands over my numbing ears. I couldn’t watch him do it. But I didn’t cry, either.
Heart attack, the coroner said. An alcoholic.
“His own bad luck,” Ricky said.
He would repeat those words often in front of our bathroom mirror as he brushed his teeth or pinched at zits. I could see he was sick with the fear that his little punishment for me, making me stand in the cold for choosing Dad over him, had killed our father. Now he couldn’t do the one thing he longed to do—say he was sorry—without admitting he was to blame.
I still loved him, maybe just out of my own relief. He was nineteen and they let him keep me. I didn’t have to go in the system.
“You’re taller than me,” Ricky said one morning as we reached for the same box of Cheerios in the pantry. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never felt bigger than him, anyway. I was sixteen, but it was that time in my life when my brother loomed tallest for me.
Ricky’s contest with Dad didn’t end when Dad went to the cemetery. Pretty quickly, he changed his mind on the family business. He quit the hardware store and set out to sell more dope than Dad ever had. Dad’s suppliers didn’t care if they worked with a kid, but he still gave up shaving, trying to look older. He emptied the storage unit and kept all the product in our trailer.
I tried to talk to him about Dad, but he shut me up by telling me Dad had leased that storage under our dead mother’s maiden name. He’d made the mistake of revealing this to Ricky like it was a genius move. Won’t nobody make that connection. Ricky had asked him if he’d rather just dig up Mom’s grave and hide the drugs in her coffin. After that exchange, they’d been like two cobras knotted up in a basket, hot with rage and surprise at one another. Ricky threw this story at me like he aimed to wound my picture of Dad; but then he went around in Dad’s Carhartt shirts and busted sneakers, and sometimes I wondered who was dead.
No matter how he dressed, though, Ricky broke from Dad in the biggest way, by using. First it was Oxy. Soon it was H. I found burnt-black spoons in our kitchen sink, shoelaces in the garbage can—more laces than he had shoes for. He was staying up three, four days in a row. Meanwhile, the grief I couldn’t share with him was like my own drug, the only one I ever took. Under its weight, I had a funhouse sense of time: days swelled like bruises, whole months vanished without any memory of what I’d been doing.
I had to get away—from my brother, from the silence in our trailer. I got a job stocking shelves after school at a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store run by a Catholic parish called Our Lady of the Mountains. I told Ricky it would help keep us legitimate in the government’s eyes; naturally, he wasn’t filing taxes.
He was proud of me. “Ain’t nobody gonna be suspicious of that.”
Father Villegas, the parish priest, was a short Filipino man with curly black eyebrows. One Saturday after my shift ended, reluctant to go home, I followed him into the church to see what he called a vigil mass. Nobody else was there except for three nuns visiting from Cincinnati. I picked the row behind them, pressing my knees into the kneeler’s cushion like they did. In the silences between the Greek and Latin prayers, the air around us became a different, slower medium, trembling with a solemn anticipation, like a jelly struck with a flat palm. I had to stay put when Father Villegas handed out the body of Christ; yet the whole ritual, the invoking of an eternal family in which we all had our part, made that hour beautiful to me. I couldn’t relate to it in any way—that’s why I loved it. It was the holy opposite of having a dead dad, of Ricky and the users lining up at our door for their own bastard communion. The shame in my gut, which touched the very dirt on which I stood, pulsed with hunger for that divine meal.
I was received into the Church the next Easter, choosing Paul, the apostle, as my confirmation saint.
Religion was my teenage rebellion: I had a rosary and a crucifix under my mattress, and I applied for a spot in the seminary’s next class. The prospect of giving myself to a calling seemed wise, crazy, and madly erotic all at once. Yet, for months, I kept my plans an aching secret. Ricky couldn’t handle me leaving him. He’d become as warped as one of those spoons in our sink, forgetting to eat, his cheeks whittled down to hollows. I was afraid enough that, finally, I told him I aimed to be a priest.
He patted me on the back hard, twice. Then he laughed at me. Like Dad, he saw religion as a business to make preachers rich. He pulled his sweatshirt hood up like it was a habit and prowled around our den. “You gonna dress like them folks? You get your own costume?”
I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t even sure I would go away. Really, I’d just wanted to scare him.
The next morning, I woke up to absolute quiet. When I came out to the kitchen, a sweet, flowery scent hung in the air. I followed it to the door of Ricky’s room, which stood wide open, framing him on the bed, the twisted sheets concealing his nudity like the rags of a martyr in a morbid tableau. I looked at him for the longest time—his moon-white chest staticky with soft black hair, his arms flung out in total abandon. His eyes were closed. There was a syringe on the window sill. I knelt beside the bed, but I didn’t pray. Some instinct sent my hands fishing under the mattress, where I’d often heard Ricky rustling in his own secrets. I dug out all the cash. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said, a rehearsal for the guilt I didn’t yet feel. I crammed the money in my olive-green duffel bag from high school gym class, along with the rosary, crucifix, and St. Christopher medal Father Villegas had given me when I got my acceptance letter from the seminary. I forgot the album with Mom’s photos. I’ve kept trying to forget it since.
I left. I left and took a Greyhound to college in Pennsylvania, clutching that ratty old bag in my lap. I never called anyone.
For years I’d jolt awake at night, waiting for a cop’s fist to hammer at my door. Nobody ever came looking for me. I didn’t want them to—the sight of my brother’s body on that unkempt altar had erased all desire to be found, to touch or be touched. But the silence, it was stunning. I had just turned eighteen, and the system didn’t want me.
Nobody wanted me, in fact, except the Church. The dean let me move in early, before classes began, when I told him my Baptist family had kicked me out. Once I was alone in my dorm, I counted the money. It totaled over sixty thousand dollars. Far more than I needed for tuition.
I never had to break those bills. As it turns out, the Catholic Church takes cash, no questions asked.
After my first year of college, I changed my legal name to Paul Birken. Paul was my patron saint, Birken my mother’s maiden name. The seminary was alert for signs of instability, but I explained it as my way of marking a new life in Christ apart from a godless family. I’d been named after my father, I said. That much was true.
My formation for the priesthood gave me exactly what I wanted: freedom from the responsibility of being somebody. I embraced God with more passion than belief, a boy so feverish with a first crush that he couldn’t see what he claimed to adore. When I came back to Kentucky for my ordination as Father Paul, it was terrible—and also gratifying—that nobody was there for me in the pews. I had never admitted, even in confession, anything Tim Harp had done: Ricky sprawled in his bed belonged to another history. Yet the fraying duffel bag packed with drug money under my own bed, with every night I slept over it, seemed to grow fuller and heavier like a little purgatory crowded with trapped souls.
Now I was assistant to the bishop of Lexington. I served in that role for two years, even after the one unremarkable mass when I realized I’d never quite accepted anything the Church taught—none of the doctrines which, under the most casual attention, dissolved like dope in a flame.
One summer the bishop reassigned me to the chaplain’s post at St. Erasmus, our liberal arts college near Sweet Branch. I argued with him to reconsider. He was surprised; he’d assumed I would enjoy working where I grew up. “You need pastoral experience,” he said. “You know the folks down there.”
No matter how gently he spoke, I heard him corraling me into a hog pen with those folks down there, even though I’d been away for thirteen years. He should’ve had more sense than to think a native could do any good in his own land.
As the chaplain I had an upstairs apartment in St. Erasmus’s oldest dorm, built in the dismal brutalist style of the 1950s. I parked my Civic by a tennis court where two students plocked a ball back and forth. One of them dropped his racquet and came over. He was short, slender. Blond sun-streaks ran in his brown hair. His name was Garrett. He asked if I was the new tennis coach.
I was in a fish fry T-shirt and khaki shorts. Not ideal, but it was too hot to be in uniform.
“Nope,” I said. “New chaplain.” I knew most kids were wary of priests—why wouldn’t they be?—but I was already irritated and sweaty, and I didn’t care if I spooked him.
As it turned out, Garrett wasn’t bothered. He volunteered to unload my trunk, then stood behind me freely telling me about himself while I bent over my dashboard, trying to kill a wasp that had flown in the car.
Together we hauled my belongings up to the apartment. Garrett picked up the duffel bag before I could stop him, twenty thousand dollars unknowingly slung over his shoulder. He had a fresh, unguarded way about him, but I snatched the bag from his grip as if he’d pressed his finger into a bruise.
“That’s fragile,” I said. Up in my room, I shoved it far back under the bed.
Breathing hard from the climb, Garrett rolled my luggage in and looked around. “Jeez, they need to clean this place.”
I fanned myself with the flyswatter from my battle with the wasp. There was no AC.
“So what happened to your old coach?” I asked, looking for a distraction.
“Quit,” he said. “The school’s on its last leg, you know.” His words had the air of received wisdom, of wanting to impress me. “Pretty much everybody quit last year. Like half the teachers.”
“Then I’m not the only newbie,” I said. I was cheerful for the rest of the day; maybe I wouldn’t be here as long as I’d feared.
In those first weeks at St. Erasmus, however, something unexpected happened. I began to belong there. It wasn’t the Catholic school I figured on. No dress code, no chapel requirement. The students were mostly locals on scholarship—a company I didn’t know I’d welcome after my stuffy, sheltered life at the cathedral. The ones in my theology courses liked to tease me about being robotic, talking in a monotone. “Do they have to plug you in after class?” a boy asked once.
“No,” I said flatly. The class had a roaring laugh at that. It surprised me, how they could hold me in their affection.
For the first time, as I found myself filling the role of odd bachelor uncle, the voices under my bed receded from my dreams. I could almost forget the money was there.
Though Garrett wasn’t Catholic, he had a work study job in the chapel, and like me at that age, he was curious, taken with all he didn’t know about the Church. He liked to follow me around after mass and quiz me on my job, how I cleaned the chalice, or what I’d do if a little kid threw up the Eucharist. He always wore the same two or three American Eagle t-shirts, washed and put on so often that the eagle logos had faded to watermarks. His only family was his brother Corey, a janitor who lived on campus and got Garrett free tuition.
“I like you better than the last guy,” Garrett told me one day as he seated the paschal candle in its holder, prepping for the Easter Vigil. I didn’t expect this to move me, and I worked to keep my face blank: “You didn’t care for Father Mudd? He had a great name.”
“He had dandruff,” he said, “and he always got up in your face.”
Happy as I was, I felt a quiet dread mounting at St. Erasmus that spring. Like just about any liberal arts school, we lived on the financial edge; but now, rumors of bankruptcy stalked campus. The week after finals, the president committed a Friday morning massacre, laying off a third of the faculty. The stunned survivors found each other in the lounge, where I loved to pick up petty administrative gossip. I should have felt invincible—if the school closed, after all, the bishop would just send me somewhere else. But I cared too much about this dusty, old-fashioned place. A sharp ache needled at my heart.
In the summer it was only Garrett and me in the chapel, plus the few elderly parishioners who trooped in on walkers for weekday mass. I tried to argue Garrett out of working over the break. “They might cut your job altogether,” I warned him, trying to be gentle. He was sweeping the steps up to the sanctuary.
His face slowly crumpled as he listened, holding back tears. The broom slipped out of his hand and he bent to grab it. I reached to pat his shoulder, but then pulled away. The smart priests never touched anybody—it was a caution that suited me.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m gonna have to drop out, anyways.”
“You’ve only got one more year. We’ll make it another year.”
He shook his head. “They’re kickin me and Corey out of our room. He’s gonna quit.”
After a pause, I asked him how long they had. I couldn’t think what else to say.
“Like a week.” He turned his burning face from me. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t have the money.”
I got him a box of Kleenex. I hadn’t cried for anyone my whole adult life, and I didn’t start then. But not long after he went home, I had to admit that Garrett’s fate, more than anything, was why I cared about the school. He was a Sweet Branch kid, reliant on his big brother for everything after losing his parents to God knows what. Now, I couldn’t help seeing my untaken road play out through him: what if I hadn’t had Ricky’s money, had never made it to school—had been stuck here forever?
I had carried that bag of cash around for years and only now saw I’d been waiting for the right way to get rid of it. I could cover Garrett’s last year of tuition. Give it to Corey in installments, as if I was scrimping to help them, and make him swear not to tell his little brother. It seemed like the Christian way to launder money.
That afternoon I tracked Corey to the library patio. He was up on a ladder, knocking robin nests from the gutter. He glanced down and jumped: “Jesus!”
My hands shot out to steady the ladder. I apologized as he climbed down.
“You preach funerals, man, but you ain’t supposed to cause them.” Corey pressed his hand over his heart. With a scrubby beard and wrinkles cornering his eyes, he looked tired, older than he could have been. For a second, I wasn’t able to speak.
“I heard they’re throwing you out,” I said. I took a deep breath and explained my offer to him.
He listened so politely that I knew he’d refuse me. “Oh, I wouldn’t be beholdin,” he said. In my debt, he meant. I could’ve quoted that line from my own dad. I didn’t risk offense by pushing him.
As the days ticked down to Corey and Garrett’s eviction, I suffered restless dreams. Under me, through the mattress, whispers seeped from the duffel bag with greater and greater volume. In my obsessive retelling of our talk on the patio, Corey’s eyes became Ricky’s, taking on the sly, sensitive gleam I remembered from the gloom of our trailer. I felt that once the brothers left, I’d never see them again.
One day after I’d said mass distractedly for the nursing-home crowd, my caution broke. I changed into street clothes, hoping Corey would look at me differently, and hunted around campus for him. He was riding a John Deere by the gymnasium, mowing the lawn into stripes.
I screamed at him until he lowered the throttle. He listened to my proposal again.
“Call it a favor,” I said. “To me.”
I must’ve looked awful—ring-eyed like a raccoon from my haunted nights. He seemed unsure, even annoyed, but then he took off his right glove and put out his hand. His palm was callused, cool and dry.
“Between us,” he said. “Nobody hears.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t take help from strangers, either,” he went on. “Let me buy you a beer.”
I was taken aback, but I agreed. Folks around Sweet Branch won’t borrow a rake from you until they’ve spent a whole summer on your porch.
That night I put a thousand bucks in an envelope and picked up Corey in my car. We went to his favorite spot, the Bloodhound Tavern, crunching into the neon-lit gravel lot among motorcycles and pickups. I passed him the envelope before we got out. He nodded blankly and slid it in the pocket of his flannel shirt.
An actual bloodhound sat outside the bar, gazing up from its rumpled face. The dog had my father’s sad, challenging eyes—a flash that startled me, because I’d tried for years not to think of Dad. Corey opened the door to a throb of country music that pushed me back on my heels. It was a young crowd, but a certain kind of young that was all white, mostly male: a Confederate flag hung over the bar. Corey steered me over the sawdust floor to a hightop table, where Garrett waited with a basket of wings, buffalo sauce smeared on his upper lip. I stood frozen, shocked to see him. Corey licked his thumb and wiped Garrett’s lip clean. Garrett gagged, flailed his arms at him, then turned to me. “Hey, Father.”
“Call me Paul here,” I said, and reluctantly hopped up on a stool. I would have walked right out of that place if not for my obligation to Corey. Just let the bishop hear one report of me drinking with a student, and he’d have me chasing geese out of the cathedral cemetery for the rest of my life.
Corey sensed my unease. He leaned like a conspirator between me and Garrett.
“I won’t let you hit it hard,” he promised. “You’re the guy gettin me home.”
But he let his little brother order. Garrett came back from the bar with three beers and a couple shots of Bacardi. His grin told me he already knew about the money. I didn’t want to act like the robot I usually was, so I gave in and clicked glasses with Corey. Soon I had to plant an elbow on the table to anchor myself. I didn’t have my dad’s liver.
Corey and Garrett watched me with bleary amusement. They had a different and ominous quality together, backlit by the carnival glow of the jukebox.
“The man of God,” Corey declared in a solemn tone. Garrett snorted beer onto his T-shirt. He recovered by explaining, with an exaggerated dignity, that it was an old shirt. “I wear the same crap over and over.”
“You can relate,” Corey told me, and he and Garrett knocked shoulders. I nodded, good-humored. I’d let them yuk it up, feel superior to the holy fool they were corrupting.
“Yeah, how come you only got one outfit when you got so much money?” Garrett asked.
Corey glanced sharply at him, but the question didn’t put me out.
“You wouldn’t know it,” I said, “but I got an outfit for every day of the month. Every mornin I wake up and say, ‘What’ll it be? This black one or that black one?’”
We all broke out laughing, and Corey thumped me on the back. My world was tilting Titanic-style—I was Dad back in our trailer, young Tim sitting across from me, and Ricky’s hand patting me between the shoulder blades, the first touch in a long time that hadn’t made me flinch. “We’re all here,” I said, with a low, gurgling laugh. “Hey, we’re all here!”
Garrett and Corey traded grins. It wasn’t long, though, before Corey nudged me off the stool: “Reckon that’s enough fun for Father. Let’s get you home,” and I agreed. I paid the tab and they guided me out to the lot.
“You’re too drunk to drive,” Corey said.
“I’m too drunk to walk. That’s how come I got to drive,” I said. Another of Dad’s sayings.
But I couldn’t even find my Civic. That was how Reverend Paul Birken, M.Div., ended up slumped in the cab of a college student’s F-150. The cab smelled like Pine Sol and cigarettes. “Who’s been smokin?” I said.
“We’ll bring you back for your ride tomorrow,” Corey assured me.
I was more worried about Garrett. “You ought not to drive, either. You’ll get kicked out of school.”
“I’m flunkin anyways,” he said. “They ain’t lettin me come back.”
I groaned in sympathy. Corey chuckled.
“Look for the power plant,” I said. “Get us home.”
I don’t recall the rest of the drive, or how they carried me upstairs to my apartment. The liquor still roared in my blood when I woke in bed, alone, and crawled on my knees to hang my head over the wastebasket.
There in the bin was my cell phone, smashed apart. I felt around in my pocket—I still had my keys. My wallet, too. But it was empty of cash. I looked under the bed.
The St. Christopher medal sat on the drab carpet, left behind. The duffel bag was gone.
I remembered the day I met Garrett in the parking lot, when he’d had a moment alone with my belongings. I held back a cry. It wasn’t sadness, exactly, or even betrayal. After a lifetime of not being touched, it felt shockingly intimate to be robbed. I was sorry not to recall how last night ended, the feeling of hands bearing me up under the arms, angel-like, stair after stair.
After coffee and Advil, I went over to the brothers’ apartment by the boiler room in the academic building. Their door was unlocked, the rooms bare, even the mattresses gone. No bodies to be found this time.
I never saw Garrett or Corey again. I could have called the police, but I’d have had to explain where I got all that cash to begin with. I’d have had to confess that there was no crime. Only a theft repaid.
We didn’t have mass on Saturdays, but that morning, alone on campus, I still felt a tug toward my duties as a priest. I went to the chapel, put on my vestments, and lit the candles at the feet of the Virgin’s statue. Her eyes, naked of any pupils, shot straight through my costume to the body within.
I turned to face the invisible congregation stirring in the pews. My perfect, unreal mother was there. Also Dad, and Ricky, and the nameless many we’d made our living from, users more terrible and beautiful for having been used.
I celebrated mass by myself. Ricky and Dad must have been losing it at the sight of me, hungover, rejoicing that I’d finally found somebody to rob me. Once my prayers were finished, I turned to place the last remaining body of Christ in the tabernacle. I thought of Ricky—the ragged beard he guarded so intensely, afraid to shave it, knowing how young and vulnerable he’d look. Twenty years old, struggling to write us a grocery list. His brother’s keeper. I carried him in my hands now as he’d once carried me, and when I closed the tabernacle’s door, it was the burial I’d never given him. Then I took the St. Christopher medal from my pocket and dropped it in the collection basket at the edge of the sanctuary. I was crying.
That was the last mass I ever said. I resigned the chaplaincy, and soon left the priesthood altogether. The bishop gave me a sad, sheep-faced look that was meant to haunt me. “Your faith always did seem theoretical,” he said.
I guess I agree. Priest or heretic, I was just another person giving gifts to the dead.
I changed my name back to Tim Harp. That might have been a mistake. When I tried for a teaching license, the state board denied me. They learned I’d forsaken religious life and had reasonable suspicions about my past. I can’t blame them: free for the first time in my life, completely myself, I must’ve seemed unstable.
I kept waiting for a divine hand to sweep me onward, for a dream to send me into the desert. But the silence was always my answer. I followed my love of studying into an archivist job at the public library in Sweet Branch, the secular equivalent of the priesthood in which I’d buried myself for so long. Found at last, I still live day by day with the lost, saved by that morning when a couple of counterfeit Christs took me for all I had, when I came to see that every stranger is a blank page on whom we write our own names.