They should spend their time reinforcing their self-esteem, instead of pursuing autographs from people like him who looked like they had it all together and certainly didn’t.
He breathed deeply. The air was the exact temperature of his body. Breathing seemed to be swimming in a puddle of warm, unscented night.
Was she really gone, out of his life, Kathleen O’Connor? But before he could breath free, something fell from somewhere, out of the corner of his eye, a piece of air-lifted paper, whatever. It looked like a falling woman, Vassar slipping downward in the hollow core of the Goliath Hotel at an hour when everybody else was wafted upward in the glass cages of hotel elevators.
A pale figure stepped out of the radio station building’s one-story shadow.
Matt straightened, tightening his fingers on the car keys in his pocket.
He’d been dreaming when he should have been following Leticia’s orders and getting himself out of the deserted parking lot.
The figure was slight, light-colored, and coming toward him.
For a moment he fantasized the ghost of Vassar. Then he feared it was Kitty.
Before he could act on any instinct: stand or run, the figure had come too close to avoid.
“Matt? You are Matt Devine?”
He hesitated, unwilling to give anything of himself away again.
The figure stepped closer, into the wedge of green light that shed a lime pall over Matt and his white car. He was relieved to see it was a man.
Most people would fear male muggers. Matt feared a female one.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
This invitation to inspection had Matt trying to pin a label on a cipher. The guy was maybe five-five, pale-skinned, no Las Vegasite. Balding hard, but only in his … mid-thirties, maybe? Mild-looking. No mugger. So what was he, then?“It’s Jerome,” he said.
Jerome. Okay. Didn’t ring a bell. Or did it?
“Do I know you from somewhere?”
“St. Vincent’s. And I guess I’ve changed. Used to have a mop of hair. That’s the way it always is with us bald guys; heavy on top at the beginning, cue balls by the time we hit the late twenties. Your hair seems to be hanging on.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Matt didn’t think much about his hair, except when it needed cutting. It had never occurred to him that cutting was a privilege. “St. Vincent Seminary?”
“In Indiana. We were there. Together.”
“Jerome. Jerome! Uh, Johnson, wasn’t it?”
“Still is.”
“Sorry. Las Vegas is so far away from all that.”
“Is it ever.”
“What are you doing here?” •
“Here? Right now? Or here in Las Vegas?”
“Both, I guess.” Matt looked around, realizing their vulnerability. “You have a car. Want to go somewhere?”
“I have a Geo Metro. Sure, but I don’t know the places yet.”
“Why don’t you follow me to the first fast-food joint we hit? They’ll have chairs and coffee.”
“Kinda like an AA meeting.”
“Yeah.” Matt immediately wondered if that was Jerome’s problem. Because he had to have one. People from your past didn’t turn up unless they did. Look at himself, turning up in Cliff Effinger’s present. And now Effinger had no future at all. Ever. Anywhere.
I’m dangerous to know, Matt wanted to tell Jerome Johnson from St. Vincent’s. You don’t want to go anywhere with me.
The man reeked of the Midwest. He could have been an extra in Fargo, but he’d come a long way to be in this parking lot. Matt couldn’t turn him away.
He got into the Probe, started it, watched in the rearview mirror for Jerome’s vehicle to wheel in behind him. It did, a toy car on spindly wheels, looking as insubstantial as the man who drove it.
Why? Matt wondered.
Johnson had obviously come here trying to make a connection. St. Vincent’s was an Ice Age ago to them both. So much water had melted under the church’s medieval bridge since those days. So much had happened to them both. Jerome today had not worn a collar. It didn’t mean he had left the priesthood too. Lots of priests nowadays dispensed with obvious religious labeling. But Matt sensed they had something in common. That was why Jerome had looked him up, had approached him in this disconcerting way. The only way he could have found him was through the radio persona, and even then he would have had to have tried hard.
Matt pulled onto the deserted street, watching for motorcycles, but more worried about the unassuming man in the very unassuming car behind him.
Matt didn’t like surprises from his past any more than he liked surprises from Max Kinsella’s past. In that case, he had ended up stalked by a madwoman. What did this sad little guy want from him? More than Matt could or would want to give, he’d bet.
Lose one crown of thorns, gain another. God help him.
He drove, half an eye ahead on the highway of lit signs fifteen feet above the street level, half an eye in his rearview mirror, not only scanning for the headlights of Jerome’s little car, but for any other following vehicles.
Nothing.
Matt suddenly swung the Probe’s steering wheel up the usual Strip center rise and dip designed to discourage speedsters. A Wendy’s he remembered only when he saw the big lighted sign.
He took a slot between two mammoth SUVs near the front door. Jerome found a place in the street-facing row behind him.
They entered together, suddenly lit by night-bright restaurant fluorescents.
It was awkward standing in line to order, strangers surrounded by strangers, not wanting to make small talk because there was none. Between graduates of the same seminary there was only large talk.
They found a fairly crumb-free table for their plastic trays and sat near the window, where they could watch lights stab the night ad infinitum. It was like a fallen universe, a big city street at night, with galaxies of signs touting 24/7 enterprises and the small satellites of cars cruising by continually.
The black-backed window faintly reflected their faces, neither particularly recognizable.
“So how did you find me?” Matt asked, stripping the flimsy paper jacket off the straw for his Sprite.
“Just … luck. I saw the billboard. Or one of them.”
“Those miserable things! Hype. But the radio industry is a media business, and it’s all hype. What were you doing in Las Vegas?”
“I work here. Live here.”
“Really? You ever go to the ex-priest meetings in Henderson?”
Jerome lowered his eyes to his tissue-wrapped burger. Grease was soaking through like giant raindrops. “No. I … I felt no need.”
“I don’t go myself. I just was surprised that there were enough of us in Las Vegas to get a group together. So you are … ex, then?”
Jerome nodded as if not happy about it. Or about admitting it. Matt said, “There are almost as many `exes’ as `ins,’ these days.”
“I know. I heard about you.”
“What?”
“Nothing bad. Only that you’d gone through the whole laicization process. I didn’t. I just … walked away.”
“I guess that’s the norm.”
“You were never the norm. In seminary, I mean. You were always different.”
“Different? Me? How?”
“You kept to your studies and yourself. Oh, you played sports, did the community thing, but it was like you were never fully there.”
“I felt pretty grounded.”
“You never—” Jerome sucked on his own straw, as if swallowing his next words. He was drinking a cola, and Matt wondered about taking in all that caffeine so late at night … so early in the morning.
“I never what? I’m used to having my failings presented to me. Seminary, you know.”
“You didn’t have any failings. We all figured you were the one who’d never leave. Except I—”
“You what?”
“I never bought that, even though you always seemed like you were really meant to be there. I always felt you were escaping your past, but I had to honor what you were trying to be.”