If You Could Make God Bleed.
Sept 24, 2018 1:44:46 GMT -5
The Anarchist, Holden Ross, and 1 more like this
Post by Kyle Shane on Sept 24, 2018 1:44:46 GMT -5
"I'm sorry, you were going where?"
The kid shifts rest from one cheek to the other on the barstool bellied up to the island, looking at me calculatingly around a sandwich that had been garnished with potato chips. His look says, exactly: see, this is why I didn't want to tell you. Johnny sighs and puts the sandwich half down. "I didn't see what the big deal was, Kyle..." my precocious, too God damn smart for his own good progeny begins. "You're always off, either on the road with Pure Class Wrestling or trying to spend time with Array... like I just wanted somewhere to go after school."
Perhaps I, old latch key kid that I was, just felt a little insulted at the thought. My son, had been going straight after school to the local Catholic church. Just participating in the youth after-school activities on the playground at first, but being drawn into the groups and discussions, and before you knew it it was like he had fallen down a Sunday school rabbit hole. It stung; it really did. It felt almost akin to him joining a gang.
In point of fact I would near rather have had him told me he'd done that. It would be more on brand for the Shane-Rodriguez line, and I could have dug my old duster out for him to pin gang colors on.
I don't know why his strong, defiant declaration of faith bugged me so, but it did.
Except I felt Willard over my shoulder. His specter grinned at me, his phantom teeth baring in a nightmarish smile, saying, no, no you know why.
I shook the apparition of Willard away, but he remained firmly there, where he has been, chattering away. What if you're wrong, Kyle? What if young Juanito has the right idea? Ahh you're so cocksure and secure in your own faith that this wouldn't make you question? I thought you believed only in yourself?
"Look," I start, haltingly, hating the awkward cadence of my attempts to come across to him, "I'm not averse to you figuring out your own way. I just think, well, you're still young, ya know? You're ten, and -" I reach across the island to put a stony, steady hand on his shoulder. He swats it off in a pique.
"I turned 11 last week. Father Bowen had a party for me in Bible Study Class. We had cake. It had whipped cream frosting." Every word was an embittered, acidic projectile hurled with as much bite as a (wow) 11 year old could muster and I knew how it felt to be an opponent of mine caught up when I got on a really good reel of trash talk, retreating to the back foot. He was growing up. I tried not to let my dismay show that I was losing him. Johnny was off the stool now, but his string of invective continued.
"Just like what me and Father Bowen talked about. Parenthood is supposed to be responsibility, providing nurture and support. When you accepted me from social services instead of me going to live with my granma Rosa you swore to them that you were gonna step up and take care of me."
I can't fully process the fact that Johnny is talking about me to this Father Bowen because my cheeks are flushing hot, and as always when someone is lashing out at me I have that deep seated urge to fight back. "Will you listen to yourself kid, you're just spouting rhetoric some asshole has been feeding you. So you go down there with the altar boys and sit around some basement with Father Bowen, and oh, he feeds you guys some sweets and ya rap about the Big Man JC, and what? He has you convinced I don't care about you?"
"Well don't you? Do you even give a shit? Dad?" Johnny says, challenging, and his eyes meet mine as he turns. I marvel. Eleven years old now. Was I this much of a little shit at eleven? My mindseye flashes back to post-Karen coexistence between Eric and Kyle Shane in the world's shittiest trailer, and slap after slap to the face flicks by on that mental viewfinder and yeah, okay, maybe I was. I observe him challenging me now the same way I used to. Square up to the taller entity, lower lip pooched out, eyes burning. I observed it clinically, without feeling the heat or the want to hit him. I just watched.
But conversely, where I assessed that I needed to calm things down and work this out with him, I recognized the fact that as always, I can't give him what he needs in this moment because that feeling of clinical observation is occurring behind a shield. I can't connect with him in this moment because my heart is behind a pane of glass. His mouth turns sour as if he's sucking on a lemonhead that's turned inexplicably foul. "Yeah." He answers himself, and he turns away from me.
If I wanted to reach out for him now, my hand would have thumped and stopped short, bumping into that pane of glass like a bird. I hold back, and let him walk to his room, but he doesn't, yet. He looks at me, his expression softer. "I think I should follow Father Bowen's instructions and call social services, get them to look over the apartment." And then, after saying that, he does go to his room.
It doesn't break the glass but it does make me start building pressure inside of it. Get an Eric reaction out of that, maybe, as I stand behind it and watch from far away. That little turd, he wouldn't dare.
Realizing that I've got weed and a bump or two of coke stashed around the house, pique turns to second guessing and anxiety. What if he does? Would he? Has he been telling Father Bowen about drug use at his dad's apartment, and this teetotaling do-gooder from the church outreach program is going to crusade to bring this boy into a world of morality? I'm giving him morality, I'm teaching him here, I've showed him all the ways I know not to let himself get picked on at school. My projector plays against that glass, flicking over the good times in this apartment, us wrestling on the couch, late night movie sessions. It hasn't been all bad...
And more than that, I tell myself this is just what religion does. It bitterly divides against the faithful and the wicked, a false distinction. It's not that simplified. It never is.
"But maybe," Willard says, holding a finger up, and I shoot a look of contempt at him, "maybe it's a way of giving direction to those that feel lost."
"Bullshit, it's not giving direction to nyeh nyeh nyeah lost," I mock back at my demon," because that's not what you do. Look, don't side track me here. And anyway, why am I talking to you?"
"Why am I in your head? Because you know deep down that my argument is right. That I am in the right," the demon boasts, coming around to lay an arm on me like an ol pal. "And that your misguided doctrine of having faith in nothing fails to inspire. It doesn't even serve the people that have been closest to you all along. It's religion that does that. It's having something to believe in that makes people greater, makes people work harder than they were before. It's having a cause. And it looks like that's what your boy is looking for."
"Shut up!" I tell the demon, and it scatters, because it is not really Willard, it's me telling me this (anxiety in the form of Willard, if you will.) "And you're wrong."
The problem with faith in an ideology is that when the person who brings you into that world of faith is exposed as having feet of clay, you lose all belief in the power that the ideology brings. If God bleeds, then the followers that see the blood falling from the sky will lose their faith.
"Yes," says Anxiety Willard, "but doesn't that cut both ways?" His smile is wide, peeling back from his gums grotesquely. I squint him/me look of pure, unadulterated hate.
There's some days when I think that's the only thing that permeates through the glass, you know?
I march down the hall and I begin to knock on the door to Johnny's room, but I pull back when I hear him. He's on his cell phone, trying to muffle his voice with a hand up around his lips to shell right into the speaker. I lean in, spying but not feeling bad about it, as I listen to my son speaking to his spiritual guidance counselor. He's pacing around the room with the anxious energy of someone years older, on the throes of a moral dilemma.
"-He just doesn't understand me, Father Bowen I don't get why, like all I was trying to tell him about was a Bible study and he lashed out at me. He doesn't even care. He keeps everyone at an arms length where he can get to them when he wants, like side quests in some stupid video game. And I've been trying to tell him I need someone to talk to - "
"No, I - yeah, Father, I really am glad I've got you, if it wasn't for your group, I -"
"...What do you mean?"
Despite myself, I lean in, interested. His overflowing, rampant tween emotion has shifted into somewhat of a confused state as he listens.
"Father, I don't know if I can go away with you like that, what would you even - A camp...?"
I can feel my brows knit, a soft "what the fuck" escape my lips. Other parents would know what to do about this, a child of theirs talking to an adult who wanted to take them on a camping trip. I am not those adults.
"...Father Bowen, this is scaring me... what do you mean?"
His voice sounded so sad, and so much younger than the eleven he belligerently hurled at me. He sounded five years younger, and suddenly calling for his mom.
"What do you mean you're going away? Why? I don't understand. Why do you have to?"
"Father... I told you I thought that was weird, and -"
At his uncomfortable hitching voice, I had leaned in to the door to the full of what it was going to bear while it was cracked, and I forgot myself because I was so invested in my son's uncomfortable phone call. So it was no surprise that I came bursting into the room at that one inopportune moment. He hopped back, squawked, and threw the phone behind his back, ending the call. I just lay there on my side, one arm cocked up, looking at him.
It was in the midst of this absurd comedy of errors that we stared at each other for a good, long moment. Finally, I righted myself, and tried to project an air of authoritative demand. "Alright, kid, I wanna know who you were talking to. Tell me now."
"What the FUCK, Kyle, you were spying on me?" He covered.
I jabbed a finger in the air. "Listen, kid, I am your God damn father, and whether you like it or not, that means something in this house. And we are going to talk about this. You called Father Bowen, didn't you? You were going to talk about calling social services to inspect the house on his insistence, weren't you?"
For the briefest moment, he looks guilty. Then, he throws a pillow at me, trying to get me to get out. "I was calling someone who cares about me! I was calling somebody who wants to take me out of this situation. He said it tonight, I have a father who prefers to air his demons out there for all the world to see instead of getting better. I have a father who likes to live immorally instead of being a good fucking person. Father Bowen wants me to - to go to a retreat with him, and I -"
"A secluded church camp with some priest I've never met before where he can indoctrinate you into his little cult? Uh uh, buddy. That's not happening. Hope you didn't pack a bag for that."
"Why aren't you listening to me! Father Bowen just wants me to -"
"Father Bowen wants the same thing any priest wants, control, he wants what Seromine wants, he wants a congregation of stupid, traumatized, sheep faced nobodies who don't think for themselves to sit around and tell him that he's changed their life. I raised you better than that, Johnny. I'm raising you to think for yourself and don't follow what those kids at school are all doing. I taught you that and I have to believe that if Izzy saw the way you were getting sucked in to that shit, she would be so disa-"
"SHUT UP!" the boy roars, and tears are coming from his eyes as the jab about his mother, my girl hits home. "SHUT UP! YOU'RE SO STUPID. MOM WOULD WANT ME TO ASK QUESTIONS. MOM WOULD WANT ME TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING, NOT, NOT -"
I scoff, "Oh, not what? You wanna be like them? Like all the little kids going to Father Bowen's "camp?" You wanna be like Gabriel, glassy eyed and singing stupid songs and finding a shitty Bible quote that somehow sort of relates to what they're saying? Be like -"
"WILL YOU FOR ONCE JUST SHUT UP? IT ISN'T ABOUT ANY SHITTY WRESTLERS YOU KNOW, KYLE, AND IN CASE YOU DIDN'T UNDERSTAND, THIS ISN'T ABOUT YOU!! NOT EVERYTHING!! IS ABOUT!!! YOU!!!"
I can feel Willard at my back, smirking and looming. I breathe deeply, and I shut him out.
We both take a beat, I go against my instinct not to lash back at him and his chest hitches in and out shallowly as he gulps and tries to contain his boyish tears.
"It's about believing in something. I know. You're trying to make sense of the world, because nothing feels right. Since Isabel died, leaving you with a parental figure you just can't for the life of you relate to you feel alone in this world." I speak to him calmly, from experience, and he looks up at me, eyes shining. "But Johnny... kid... I'm telling you, I've looked everywhere you've looked. I've searched high and low, I only half believe in any fucking Christian or organized religion for one tenet; that if there's a heaven then there remains a possibility that I could see my mom again some day. And maybe, there's that hope that you'll see yours again too."
"But Bible study? Camp? Being taken away on a retreat with this Father Bowen you've known, like, two weeks? He isn't giving you the answers you are going to want."
He's quiet, thinking, gears turning at lightspeed behind his eyes, and then his mouth becomes a firm line. "Take me to Our Lady of Lourdes in Southie, by my school." He picks up a backpack off his bed.
"Johnny, I'm not -"
"If you ever loved me or ever cared about me - Kyle - you're going to take me to Father Bowen, right now. He didn't sound right. His voice was funny. I'm going to see him. Now. Get your keys." And he marched to the door, strong, willfulness and attitude. How had I ever survived at such an age. And I'm dimly aware that a better parent would put their foot down, set boundaries. But the boy is going to see Father Bowen one way or another, and judging by their terse phone call and the urgency of his trip to see the church at 10 pm at night, I know that there is still a part to play.
So, yeah...
A short time later, we're in the car, and he's sitting in the passenger seat, arms folded over his chest, looking sternly ahead. I look across the console, trying to think up an ice breaker, but it's like that pane of glass has slid straight down into a partition between us.
At length, he breaks the tension, by giving me just the slightest bit of conciliation. "Your way works for you. And it's a good way. I was wrong about you, and I think maybe I told Father Bowen some wrong things about - the way you are... you know?"
I nod. He continues.
"You never lack for confidence. Even when you don't know what the right thing to do is, you always put faith in yourself that you can figure your way out of it, and that you don't need to look for answers from God because it's inside you all the time. I believe that. And when you're doing bad, I know you're thinking about it, obsessing over it. When you're at your worst, you are trying. And - Kyle -- dad... the thing about being your son and watching you is that I learn that when you do ... get better, when you get over your demons and fight back, it is one of the most inspiring things in the world to see. I know that."
I'm kind of touched. I look through that glass, and my smile weakens the partition between us, if only just a little. Kid is so much smarter than his years. He purses his lips, thinking of what he wants to say.
"But I need help, and Father Bowen was there for me. He showed me a faith different from yours, but it's still just as valid to me. So whatever you think about him or his religion, can't you just see that maybe it was something I needed, that people need when they feel lost?"
"Yeah, Kyle... can't you see that it's doing some good for this world?" Willard cackles, he's leaning with an arm over both headrests, his cheeks pushed between the front seats like he's doing the most macabre Jack Nicholson "Heeeeere's Johnny" impression.
I look over at my kid. "If what he did was helpful, then that phone call, where you said he did something weird. I'm just going to ask, did he - "
The boy clams up, looking darkly out the window. "I don't wanna talk about it."
The glass is fully back in place, and I don't have the wherewithal or the experience getting through barriers like that to reach out. I just say, uncertainly, "Okay."
"Because I don't know what happened. And Father Bowen is a good man. And I'll just leave it at that." His words are more to himself, defensive, rationalizing, and something he obviously needs himself to hear.
I leave them hanging in the air, and I simply breathe out, "Okay."
We see the blue lights as soon as we reach the street the cathedral towers over in the old, run-down ghetto neighborhood. People are milling out on the streets, and the entire block has come out, scandalized and hanging in clumps of lookers on. Johnny opens the door. I feel a sinking feeling as I exit my door.
"Father? Father?" Johnny's voice is rising in pitch out there in the street, and the babble of confusion and conversation goes on. Police lights paint the entire area in washed out color.
I catch some snatches of conversation from the people huddled together. Disbelief, horror, voyeuristic sadism and the urban detachment of something fucked up happening in ya neighborhood, can ya believe it, what this woild is comin' to.
"Mother Mary turned him in to the inspectors don't ya know," someone told Kyle, a sneer on their face saying it was perverse and messed up and weird. "Found pictures of little boys in his desk."
"Police found more, down there in the Bible study class. Sick, sick freak." There was more, but it was just extra apocrypha to the horror that he didn't need to know.
And his kid, exposed to it all, was standing by the police cordon, looking at the squad car holding his new moral figurehead in the back of it, and the war of emotions washing over his face was breaking like a dam. It hurt to see him going through a proving of my theory. When the person who brings you into that world of faith is exposed as having feet of clay, you lose all belief in the power that the ideology brings. Make God bleed... and, well...
The only thing that hurt worst about it was seeing it happen before my eyes to someone I cared about, as their last vestige of childhood was stripped from them, their last bastion that they looked to to give them comfort in a world that didn't make sense shown out to be just as much of a monster as anyone else in their life.
To his credit, he didn't cry anymore. His face fixed into a cold, impassive mask, and I could sense as well as see him adopting the same shell that I had grown around me when I wasn't that much older and had started reaching the same conclusions. I did put my arm around him, but it didn't matter. It was like two panes of glass bumping into each other, and the distance contained therein said more than I ever could.
"I'm sorry, kid," I said, my arm around his shoulder. But Johnny didn't say anything at all. Just watched the blue lights playing over Our Lady of Lourdes and looked at the squad car for a long, long time.
The kid shifts rest from one cheek to the other on the barstool bellied up to the island, looking at me calculatingly around a sandwich that had been garnished with potato chips. His look says, exactly: see, this is why I didn't want to tell you. Johnny sighs and puts the sandwich half down. "I didn't see what the big deal was, Kyle..." my precocious, too God damn smart for his own good progeny begins. "You're always off, either on the road with Pure Class Wrestling or trying to spend time with Array... like I just wanted somewhere to go after school."
Perhaps I, old latch key kid that I was, just felt a little insulted at the thought. My son, had been going straight after school to the local Catholic church. Just participating in the youth after-school activities on the playground at first, but being drawn into the groups and discussions, and before you knew it it was like he had fallen down a Sunday school rabbit hole. It stung; it really did. It felt almost akin to him joining a gang.
In point of fact I would near rather have had him told me he'd done that. It would be more on brand for the Shane-Rodriguez line, and I could have dug my old duster out for him to pin gang colors on.
I don't know why his strong, defiant declaration of faith bugged me so, but it did.
Except I felt Willard over my shoulder. His specter grinned at me, his phantom teeth baring in a nightmarish smile, saying, no, no you know why.
I shook the apparition of Willard away, but he remained firmly there, where he has been, chattering away. What if you're wrong, Kyle? What if young Juanito has the right idea? Ahh you're so cocksure and secure in your own faith that this wouldn't make you question? I thought you believed only in yourself?
"Look," I start, haltingly, hating the awkward cadence of my attempts to come across to him, "I'm not averse to you figuring out your own way. I just think, well, you're still young, ya know? You're ten, and -" I reach across the island to put a stony, steady hand on his shoulder. He swats it off in a pique.
"I turned 11 last week. Father Bowen had a party for me in Bible Study Class. We had cake. It had whipped cream frosting." Every word was an embittered, acidic projectile hurled with as much bite as a (wow) 11 year old could muster and I knew how it felt to be an opponent of mine caught up when I got on a really good reel of trash talk, retreating to the back foot. He was growing up. I tried not to let my dismay show that I was losing him. Johnny was off the stool now, but his string of invective continued.
"Just like what me and Father Bowen talked about. Parenthood is supposed to be responsibility, providing nurture and support. When you accepted me from social services instead of me going to live with my granma Rosa you swore to them that you were gonna step up and take care of me."
I can't fully process the fact that Johnny is talking about me to this Father Bowen because my cheeks are flushing hot, and as always when someone is lashing out at me I have that deep seated urge to fight back. "Will you listen to yourself kid, you're just spouting rhetoric some asshole has been feeding you. So you go down there with the altar boys and sit around some basement with Father Bowen, and oh, he feeds you guys some sweets and ya rap about the Big Man JC, and what? He has you convinced I don't care about you?"
"Well don't you? Do you even give a shit? Dad?" Johnny says, challenging, and his eyes meet mine as he turns. I marvel. Eleven years old now. Was I this much of a little shit at eleven? My mindseye flashes back to post-Karen coexistence between Eric and Kyle Shane in the world's shittiest trailer, and slap after slap to the face flicks by on that mental viewfinder and yeah, okay, maybe I was. I observe him challenging me now the same way I used to. Square up to the taller entity, lower lip pooched out, eyes burning. I observed it clinically, without feeling the heat or the want to hit him. I just watched.
But conversely, where I assessed that I needed to calm things down and work this out with him, I recognized the fact that as always, I can't give him what he needs in this moment because that feeling of clinical observation is occurring behind a shield. I can't connect with him in this moment because my heart is behind a pane of glass. His mouth turns sour as if he's sucking on a lemonhead that's turned inexplicably foul. "Yeah." He answers himself, and he turns away from me.
If I wanted to reach out for him now, my hand would have thumped and stopped short, bumping into that pane of glass like a bird. I hold back, and let him walk to his room, but he doesn't, yet. He looks at me, his expression softer. "I think I should follow Father Bowen's instructions and call social services, get them to look over the apartment." And then, after saying that, he does go to his room.
It doesn't break the glass but it does make me start building pressure inside of it. Get an Eric reaction out of that, maybe, as I stand behind it and watch from far away. That little turd, he wouldn't dare.
Realizing that I've got weed and a bump or two of coke stashed around the house, pique turns to second guessing and anxiety. What if he does? Would he? Has he been telling Father Bowen about drug use at his dad's apartment, and this teetotaling do-gooder from the church outreach program is going to crusade to bring this boy into a world of morality? I'm giving him morality, I'm teaching him here, I've showed him all the ways I know not to let himself get picked on at school. My projector plays against that glass, flicking over the good times in this apartment, us wrestling on the couch, late night movie sessions. It hasn't been all bad...
And more than that, I tell myself this is just what religion does. It bitterly divides against the faithful and the wicked, a false distinction. It's not that simplified. It never is.
"But maybe," Willard says, holding a finger up, and I shoot a look of contempt at him, "maybe it's a way of giving direction to those that feel lost."
"Bullshit, it's not giving direction to nyeh nyeh nyeah lost," I mock back at my demon," because that's not what you do. Look, don't side track me here. And anyway, why am I talking to you?"
"Why am I in your head? Because you know deep down that my argument is right. That I am in the right," the demon boasts, coming around to lay an arm on me like an ol pal. "And that your misguided doctrine of having faith in nothing fails to inspire. It doesn't even serve the people that have been closest to you all along. It's religion that does that. It's having something to believe in that makes people greater, makes people work harder than they were before. It's having a cause. And it looks like that's what your boy is looking for."
"Shut up!" I tell the demon, and it scatters, because it is not really Willard, it's me telling me this (anxiety in the form of Willard, if you will.) "And you're wrong."
The problem with faith in an ideology is that when the person who brings you into that world of faith is exposed as having feet of clay, you lose all belief in the power that the ideology brings. If God bleeds, then the followers that see the blood falling from the sky will lose their faith.
"Yes," says Anxiety Willard, "but doesn't that cut both ways?" His smile is wide, peeling back from his gums grotesquely. I squint him/me look of pure, unadulterated hate.
There's some days when I think that's the only thing that permeates through the glass, you know?
I march down the hall and I begin to knock on the door to Johnny's room, but I pull back when I hear him. He's on his cell phone, trying to muffle his voice with a hand up around his lips to shell right into the speaker. I lean in, spying but not feeling bad about it, as I listen to my son speaking to his spiritual guidance counselor. He's pacing around the room with the anxious energy of someone years older, on the throes of a moral dilemma.
"-He just doesn't understand me, Father Bowen I don't get why, like all I was trying to tell him about was a Bible study and he lashed out at me. He doesn't even care. He keeps everyone at an arms length where he can get to them when he wants, like side quests in some stupid video game. And I've been trying to tell him I need someone to talk to - "
"No, I - yeah, Father, I really am glad I've got you, if it wasn't for your group, I -"
"...What do you mean?"
Despite myself, I lean in, interested. His overflowing, rampant tween emotion has shifted into somewhat of a confused state as he listens.
"Father, I don't know if I can go away with you like that, what would you even - A camp...?"
I can feel my brows knit, a soft "what the fuck" escape my lips. Other parents would know what to do about this, a child of theirs talking to an adult who wanted to take them on a camping trip. I am not those adults.
"...Father Bowen, this is scaring me... what do you mean?"
His voice sounded so sad, and so much younger than the eleven he belligerently hurled at me. He sounded five years younger, and suddenly calling for his mom.
"What do you mean you're going away? Why? I don't understand. Why do you have to?"
"Father... I told you I thought that was weird, and -"
At his uncomfortable hitching voice, I had leaned in to the door to the full of what it was going to bear while it was cracked, and I forgot myself because I was so invested in my son's uncomfortable phone call. So it was no surprise that I came bursting into the room at that one inopportune moment. He hopped back, squawked, and threw the phone behind his back, ending the call. I just lay there on my side, one arm cocked up, looking at him.
It was in the midst of this absurd comedy of errors that we stared at each other for a good, long moment. Finally, I righted myself, and tried to project an air of authoritative demand. "Alright, kid, I wanna know who you were talking to. Tell me now."
"What the FUCK, Kyle, you were spying on me?" He covered.
I jabbed a finger in the air. "Listen, kid, I am your God damn father, and whether you like it or not, that means something in this house. And we are going to talk about this. You called Father Bowen, didn't you? You were going to talk about calling social services to inspect the house on his insistence, weren't you?"
For the briefest moment, he looks guilty. Then, he throws a pillow at me, trying to get me to get out. "I was calling someone who cares about me! I was calling somebody who wants to take me out of this situation. He said it tonight, I have a father who prefers to air his demons out there for all the world to see instead of getting better. I have a father who likes to live immorally instead of being a good fucking person. Father Bowen wants me to - to go to a retreat with him, and I -"
"A secluded church camp with some priest I've never met before where he can indoctrinate you into his little cult? Uh uh, buddy. That's not happening. Hope you didn't pack a bag for that."
"Why aren't you listening to me! Father Bowen just wants me to -"
"Father Bowen wants the same thing any priest wants, control, he wants what Seromine wants, he wants a congregation of stupid, traumatized, sheep faced nobodies who don't think for themselves to sit around and tell him that he's changed their life. I raised you better than that, Johnny. I'm raising you to think for yourself and don't follow what those kids at school are all doing. I taught you that and I have to believe that if Izzy saw the way you were getting sucked in to that shit, she would be so disa-"
"SHUT UP!" the boy roars, and tears are coming from his eyes as the jab about his mother, my girl hits home. "SHUT UP! YOU'RE SO STUPID. MOM WOULD WANT ME TO ASK QUESTIONS. MOM WOULD WANT ME TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING, NOT, NOT -"
I scoff, "Oh, not what? You wanna be like them? Like all the little kids going to Father Bowen's "camp?" You wanna be like Gabriel, glassy eyed and singing stupid songs and finding a shitty Bible quote that somehow sort of relates to what they're saying? Be like -"
"WILL YOU FOR ONCE JUST SHUT UP? IT ISN'T ABOUT ANY SHITTY WRESTLERS YOU KNOW, KYLE, AND IN CASE YOU DIDN'T UNDERSTAND, THIS ISN'T ABOUT YOU!! NOT EVERYTHING!! IS ABOUT!!! YOU!!!"
I can feel Willard at my back, smirking and looming. I breathe deeply, and I shut him out.
We both take a beat, I go against my instinct not to lash back at him and his chest hitches in and out shallowly as he gulps and tries to contain his boyish tears.
"It's about believing in something. I know. You're trying to make sense of the world, because nothing feels right. Since Isabel died, leaving you with a parental figure you just can't for the life of you relate to you feel alone in this world." I speak to him calmly, from experience, and he looks up at me, eyes shining. "But Johnny... kid... I'm telling you, I've looked everywhere you've looked. I've searched high and low, I only half believe in any fucking Christian or organized religion for one tenet; that if there's a heaven then there remains a possibility that I could see my mom again some day. And maybe, there's that hope that you'll see yours again too."
"But Bible study? Camp? Being taken away on a retreat with this Father Bowen you've known, like, two weeks? He isn't giving you the answers you are going to want."
He's quiet, thinking, gears turning at lightspeed behind his eyes, and then his mouth becomes a firm line. "Take me to Our Lady of Lourdes in Southie, by my school." He picks up a backpack off his bed.
"Johnny, I'm not -"
"If you ever loved me or ever cared about me - Kyle - you're going to take me to Father Bowen, right now. He didn't sound right. His voice was funny. I'm going to see him. Now. Get your keys." And he marched to the door, strong, willfulness and attitude. How had I ever survived at such an age. And I'm dimly aware that a better parent would put their foot down, set boundaries. But the boy is going to see Father Bowen one way or another, and judging by their terse phone call and the urgency of his trip to see the church at 10 pm at night, I know that there is still a part to play.
So, yeah...
A short time later, we're in the car, and he's sitting in the passenger seat, arms folded over his chest, looking sternly ahead. I look across the console, trying to think up an ice breaker, but it's like that pane of glass has slid straight down into a partition between us.
At length, he breaks the tension, by giving me just the slightest bit of conciliation. "Your way works for you. And it's a good way. I was wrong about you, and I think maybe I told Father Bowen some wrong things about - the way you are... you know?"
I nod. He continues.
"You never lack for confidence. Even when you don't know what the right thing to do is, you always put faith in yourself that you can figure your way out of it, and that you don't need to look for answers from God because it's inside you all the time. I believe that. And when you're doing bad, I know you're thinking about it, obsessing over it. When you're at your worst, you are trying. And - Kyle -- dad... the thing about being your son and watching you is that I learn that when you do ... get better, when you get over your demons and fight back, it is one of the most inspiring things in the world to see. I know that."
I'm kind of touched. I look through that glass, and my smile weakens the partition between us, if only just a little. Kid is so much smarter than his years. He purses his lips, thinking of what he wants to say.
"But I need help, and Father Bowen was there for me. He showed me a faith different from yours, but it's still just as valid to me. So whatever you think about him or his religion, can't you just see that maybe it was something I needed, that people need when they feel lost?"
"Yeah, Kyle... can't you see that it's doing some good for this world?" Willard cackles, he's leaning with an arm over both headrests, his cheeks pushed between the front seats like he's doing the most macabre Jack Nicholson "Heeeeere's Johnny" impression.
I look over at my kid. "If what he did was helpful, then that phone call, where you said he did something weird. I'm just going to ask, did he - "
The boy clams up, looking darkly out the window. "I don't wanna talk about it."
The glass is fully back in place, and I don't have the wherewithal or the experience getting through barriers like that to reach out. I just say, uncertainly, "Okay."
"Because I don't know what happened. And Father Bowen is a good man. And I'll just leave it at that." His words are more to himself, defensive, rationalizing, and something he obviously needs himself to hear.
I leave them hanging in the air, and I simply breathe out, "Okay."
We see the blue lights as soon as we reach the street the cathedral towers over in the old, run-down ghetto neighborhood. People are milling out on the streets, and the entire block has come out, scandalized and hanging in clumps of lookers on. Johnny opens the door. I feel a sinking feeling as I exit my door.
"Father? Father?" Johnny's voice is rising in pitch out there in the street, and the babble of confusion and conversation goes on. Police lights paint the entire area in washed out color.
I catch some snatches of conversation from the people huddled together. Disbelief, horror, voyeuristic sadism and the urban detachment of something fucked up happening in ya neighborhood, can ya believe it, what this woild is comin' to.
"Mother Mary turned him in to the inspectors don't ya know," someone told Kyle, a sneer on their face saying it was perverse and messed up and weird. "Found pictures of little boys in his desk."
"Police found more, down there in the Bible study class. Sick, sick freak." There was more, but it was just extra apocrypha to the horror that he didn't need to know.
And his kid, exposed to it all, was standing by the police cordon, looking at the squad car holding his new moral figurehead in the back of it, and the war of emotions washing over his face was breaking like a dam. It hurt to see him going through a proving of my theory. When the person who brings you into that world of faith is exposed as having feet of clay, you lose all belief in the power that the ideology brings. Make God bleed... and, well...
The only thing that hurt worst about it was seeing it happen before my eyes to someone I cared about, as their last vestige of childhood was stripped from them, their last bastion that they looked to to give them comfort in a world that didn't make sense shown out to be just as much of a monster as anyone else in their life.
To his credit, he didn't cry anymore. His face fixed into a cold, impassive mask, and I could sense as well as see him adopting the same shell that I had grown around me when I wasn't that much older and had started reaching the same conclusions. I did put my arm around him, but it didn't matter. It was like two panes of glass bumping into each other, and the distance contained therein said more than I ever could.
"I'm sorry, kid," I said, my arm around his shoulder. But Johnny didn't say anything at all. Just watched the blue lights playing over Our Lady of Lourdes and looked at the squad car for a long, long time.
