She arched an eyebrow. “If so, He hasn’t exactly been breaking His hump doing anything for either the Satarianos or the Smiths.”
“Pat...”
She sighed, then leaned forward, and her smile was not unkind. “Michael, if it makes you feel better to believe this ridiculous superstitious nonsense, go right ahead. Just don’t ask me to go along with you.”
“Then you have lost your faith?”
She reared back. “Are you for real? Whatever ‘faith’ I had died when we got that telegram about Mike! Jesus, Michael — look at our life! Look at your life! Your mother and brother, shot down like animals. Your father dead on a kitchen floor. These gangsters you’ve worked for, for so many goddamn years, they’re ankle deep in blood... knee deep!”
He cradled his coffee cup in both hands, couldn’t look at her. “None of it’s God’s fault.”
“Whose fault is it, then? Ours?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, because we’re born sinners? Give me a break...”
“My father chose his path. I chose mine.”
She grunted. “Revenge?”
“Yes.”
“Would you do it any differently?”
“What?”
She shrugged. “You wanted to kill the men who killed your father. Just like your father wanted to kill the men who killed your mother and Peter. Would you do it any differently today than thirty years ago?”
“...I don’t know.”
She sipped her decaf, thought for a moment, then said, “You told me once that you thought it was sad that your father felt he could commit murder, then walk into a confessional, fess up, get forgiven, and walk back out and commit murder again.”
“I remember.”
“Is that how you see it?”
“I... I don’t know how I see it. I... I haven’t had to see it, look at it, for a long, long time. We’ve had a good life, Patsy Ann, for a lot of years now. We had two great kids.”
“Have two great kids.”
“Have two great kids. All I’ve been doing over the years is trying to keep my head down and provide for us. And all I’ve been doing these past couple months is trying to keep my feet under me.”
“Me, too. Me, too.”
“But I don’t think I could do that, if I didn’t think that... that there was something out there, bigger than this, better than us. A heavenly father. Forgiveness.”
She shook her head, smiled distantly, but her eyes were locked on to him. “You really do still believe.”
“I guess so.” His eyebrows went up. “But I never thought you’d think less of me for it.”
Her expression dissolved into concern, and she reached both hands out and took one of his. “Oh, I don’t, darling. Really I don’t. I think it’s... sweet. Naive. Kind of cute.”
“Cute?”
She shrugged. “Or maybe I envy you. Because if I believed what you believe, I could handle the days better. And the nights.” She sipped the decaf again. “Maybe even... face the thought that I may never see Mike again.”
“It’s not a crutch, Pat. It’s—”
Shaking her head firmly, the blonde locks bouncing, she said, “No, Mike, it’s a crutch. It is a crutch. And God knows I could use a crutch. Because, Mike — most of the time? I feel like I’m falling down.”
“I’m here to catch you, baby.”
“I know. And I do love you. You’re not gonna let that little bitch at the restaurant come between us are you?”
“No. Hell no.”
She smiled; there was love in it. “Good. Take me to bed, why don’t you? Let’s fall asleep together in our four-poster bed like the old married people we are. And we won’t talk religion anymore. Or bitches.”
“I can dig it,” he said.
“Ha! Aren’t you the hepcat?”
She was laughing as they walked arm in arm to the bedroom. Pat hadn’t laughed like that for a long time, and Michael found the sound pleasing, and chose not to recognize the desperation in it.
Seven
In the shimmering distance, a dazzling white edifice seemed to hover over the beige expanse of desert to meet a violet ragged ribbon of mountains and rise into cloudless blue.
The castle-like Mission of San Xavier del Bac was no mirage, rather a Moorish monument whose stately dome and proud parapets contrasted sharply with an otherwise stark Arizona vista. In the midst of the hell of an American Sahara, the church promised paradise, burning bright and white, stucco covering adobe bricks to conspire with the intense desert sunlight to create that ghost-like glimmer.
Michael had driven out Mission Road, onto the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, through a severe landscape of tiny houses and tilled fields that made Paradise Estates seem a world away, not just a few miles. The White Dove of the Desert, as the mission was called, was a tourist attraction, but it was also a working church, holding mass daily, four times on Sunday.
This was Friday, the morning after Michael and Pat had discussed religion, among other things, and he’d asked her to come along, and she, in her robe at the kitchen table with coffee and a cigarette, had declined.
“But by all means, darling,” she said, “you go.”
And she’d waved a hand in a regal fashion reserved for monarchs, popes, and wives.
Things had gone so well the night before that he knew getting back into the touchy subject of church attendance — much less the existence of God — was no way to start their day. But he had gone to mass regularly for as long as he could remember; even on the road with his father, all those years ago, they’d stopped at churches, if not for mass, for confession and to light candles for those Michael’s father had dispatched to final judgment.
Almost two months of no mass had put Michael into a kind of spiritual withdrawal. He needed a God fix.
The mission sat on a slight elevation — to call it a hill would be an exaggeration — which had encouraged that optical illusion of hovering that Michael had, from a distance, noted. The parking lot was about half-full, separating the mission buildings from a plaza of craft shops and stalls selling American Indian snacks, the fragrant food aroma and displays of pottery, jewelry, and baskets emphasizing the tourist aspect of San Xavier.
But the churchgoers making the pilgrimage to the mission for mass were a mix of sightseers and locals, the latter comprised of Indians and Mexicans.
Many of these wore suits and ties, however humble, while the tourists wore sport shirts and slacks and sundresses, including western-style apparel picked up on their Tucson trip, right down to cowboy hats and brand-new boots. Michael — the only Anglo in a suit and tie — could not avoid feeling he was, with these other whites, invading the land of the natives once again.
On the other hand, the collection-plate contributions would stay here, in this parish, just like the money made across the way, selling fried bread and friendship bowls.
At the edge of the parking lot, Michael paused to take in the magnificent wedding cake of a structure, which was a series of arches and domes, every surface elaborately decorated. The only use of wood he could see was in the window frames and doors; otherwise, all appeared to be burned adobe brick or lime plaster.
Twin towers — one lacking a crowning dome, as if to say God’s work is never finished — bookended the finely carved Spanish baroque stone entry, which was a weathered red in contrast to all the surrounding white, embellished by gifted if naive native artisans with arabesques, shells, and swirling scrolls.