Father Max pulled down the kneeler in front of the pew where he sat, and carefully lowered himself until his arthritic knees were touching the Naugahyde-covered padding. Before assuming a position of prayer, he pulled his knitted hat down over his ears and forehead until it was even with his eyebrows.
He burrowed deeper into the left-behind coat he’d lifted off a peg in the vestibule before flattening his hands—thrust inside a pair of gloves someone had forgotten in the confessional a week before—on the back of the pew he was leaning against.
He was hiding. From her. Sister Mary Paul. And he was exhausted. From fighting. With Pastor Keenan.
The two men argued over many things both secular and religious, regarding creation and eschatology, about liberation theology and the prosperity gospel. Mainly, however, they fought over the soul of Kendall Keenan, who was one of the most wayward members at St. Ambrose, Father Max’s church. Kendall Keenan was also the brother of Pastor Larry Keenan, a former member of St. Ambrose parish who married into a family of Pentecostals and became a full-on apostate soon after.
Every Tuesday morning at nine on the dot, that idiot Keenan parked his Cadillac Escalade four blocks away from the liquor store and swaggered up the sidewalk along Highway 323 with his hair slicked back, a lethal crease in his dungarees, white button down shiny with starch sprayed on it by Maria Guzman, an illegal immigrant who cooked and cleaned and washed clothes inside the McMansion Keenan and his wife had knocked down three low-income rental properties to build over on Sugar Street in the Candy Land section of Kilter.
“As soon as I smelled potting soil, garlic, and cigarillos, I knew Mr. Burke must be nearby. You should bottle that, call it Our Useless Priest of the Heathens.”
Everything about Keenan was fake, from the blinding white of his teeth to the way he pretended politeness by calling Father Max “Mr. Burke.” Merely looking at Keenan’s face—that smug sneer, those dead eyes, the obvious “work” he’d had done to appear more youthful than he actually was—made Father Max’s blood boil.
“I’d rather smell like the honest work done by these gnarled hands than strut around smelling like a soap factory with no evidence of Christ’s teachings within a mile of me!”
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness, Mr. Burke. Even if you don’t believe it, I’m sure you’ve skimmed through the Bible enough to have seen the phrase.”
“Patrick Keenan, there is no such verse in the Holy Bible—not in the Catholic Bible, and not the version you read,” Father Max said. “When I was your age, I would’ve been defrocked for letting my congregates read from the King James Bible.”
“Then it’s a pity you didn’t,” Keenan said. “It’s a pity all of you dress-wearing alkies weren’t defrocked. It’s a pity every Roman Catholic Church on Earth hasn’t been burned to the ground.”
“I’ll forgive you for that, just like I forgive you every dirty, nasty thing you have to say about the One True Church,” said Father Max.
“I don’t need your forgiveness—I can ask God for it myself. But what I do need is for you to move along and go make the sign of the cross elsewhere. I have business to take care of between here and that street corner,” he said, pointing in the direction of the intersection of Highway 323 and Kilter Avenue.
It was in that moment that Father Max decided he was too tired to argue, fuss, or trade verbal jabs with Keenan on this day. His legs hurt, his ankles were swollen, his knees were singing a song of pain. And his heart was lately too heavy to be buoyed by the righteous anger Keenan usually stirred within Father Max to the point of explosion.
So he said nothing else, and trudged across the street where his old ten-speed bicycle was leaning against the outside wall of Donut hut, not locked but untouched by any would-be thieves. This might have been because he and some of the altar servers had painted and affixed religious symbols and stickers along the length of the bike frame. As a further deterrent, he kept a copy of the Bible and a bottle of holy water in the woven basket attached to the handlebars of the bike at all times.
When he pedaled almost as far as the church parking lot, he checked his watch. It was nearly 10:00, which meant it was time to swallow some of his medication and to get his blood sugar checked. After gripping the rough tape around the curved handlebars of the bike, his fingertips begged him to hold off just for a little while.
But he knew Sister Mary Paul wouldn’t let him wait. She would insist. She would, in fact, meet him at the door of the rectory with a glass of water in one hand, and his mid-morning pills clutched in the other. In her pocket would be the test strips and the lancet to prick his finger. She would guide him to the tiny table in the small kitchen and force him to sit down on one of the rickety chairs before she pricked and squeezed and pressed to gather that dot of blood for the glucose monitor, all the while calling out a litany of tasks he was bound to perform for the rest of the day.
Hospital visits. Collecting money from the Thrift Store (she didn’t trust the manager). The monthly meeting with his Altar Guild (she would try to attend in order to cast aspersions upon their upkeep of the sanctuary and the way they polished the brass: not ever to her liking). Preparing for the weekly R.C.I.A. class (she always attended these classes with Father Max, to remind him of teachings he sometimes forgot).
Father Max hid his bike behind the rose bushes beside the church entrance, grabbing as he went in the coat and gloves and hat he now wore as a disguise.