All Due Respect Issue #1 (9 page)

“Would you be interested in some coffee?” Vicky asks as he steps outside to the sidewalk.

She was waiting for him. He looks at her face, open and appealing. No trace of malice or abuse. Not like the strippers at Fantasy Factory he takes home from time to time. She is from a world he would love to reenter.

“That sounds perf—”

“Oh, honey. Hey, beautiful!”

Across the street Razmig and Melik loiter around his Cooper, laughing. They both have gelled hair and wear tight T-shirts and gold chains. Melik lets out a predatory whistle.

“Who are those guys? Friends of yours?” Vicky asks with a half-smile.

“Um, co-workers,” John says, staring at his toes.

“Really? I thought you were a doctor?”

John holds her gaze for a second. Vicky’s eyebrows tighten as if she is trying to imagine what line of work would have hooligans like that on the payroll.

“Hey, hotpants,” Razmig shouts with an accent. “You’re looking sexy.”

The weight returns as John’s shoulders slump. Why did he even entertain the daydream that he could have coffee with someone like Vicky? Not ever in this life.

“Private practice,” John says, tucking the rolled mat under his arm. “See you Thursday.”

He turns toward the street without waiting for her response. Crossing, he wills himself not to look back.

Melik and Razmig wait for him with moronic grins plastered across their faces. So proud of themselves, believing they are comic geniuses. Woe to the audience who doesn’t laugh at the great Armenian duo. They have another job for John. Another victim who needs to be preserved until they get whatever it is that they want. They wouldn’t be smiling if one of their own was fucked up.

His chest begins to ache as his muscles and joints tighten. The last hour was in vain. Vicky, yoga, all of it, nothing more than feeble escapes from reality: a putrid swamp he wades through, chin deep, searching for an exit that doesn’t exist.

Travis Richardson
was born in Germany, raised in Oklahoma, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He has worked over 20 jobs in fields ranging from secret bus rider to television postproduction to university fundraising. His novella
Lost in Clover
was listed in Spinetingler Magazine’s Best Crime Fiction of 2012. His stories have been published in online zines including
All Due Respect, Shotgun Honey
, and
Powder Burn Flash
as well as the anthologies
Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes
and
Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble
. He edits Ransom Notes, the Sisters In Crime Los Angeles newsletter and sometimes shoots a short movie. His latest novella,
Keeping The Record
, will be out in January 2014 through Stark Raving Group. The story concerns a disgraced ex-baseball player who dodges creditors while dealing with steroid side effects as he takes a cross-country journey to stop the man who is about to take the only thing he has left in this world, his all-time home run record. Find out more at
tsrichardson.com

The Church of
the Sad Sisters

Mike Miner

T
HERE WAS ONLY ONE
way to get there. A treacherous path through a rainforest infested by poisonous snakes. Built centuries ago by Jesuit missionaries trying to bring Christ to the natives, instead they brought disease and death. The convent remained abandoned for years until a group of nuns reclaimed it.

It stood at the foot of the Santa Maria Mountains and took its name from them. Peaks the color of bone rose out of the jungle surrounding it. When visitors approached the front gate, the tall stone buildings loomed, the cliffs leaned as if trying to protect the property, shield it from the world. Gargoyles danced on the roof of the church, struck rakish poses. There was an old rumor that the creatures visited the chaste nuns in their dreams, performed devilish acts.

There were a lot of old rumors about the Santa Maria Convent, known also as La Iglesia de las Hermanas Tristes. The Church of the Sad Sisters. Some wondered if it even existed.

The sisters wore light blue robes that brushed the ground as they walked. Long sleeves covered hands always joined in prayer. Perfectly white coifs framed their faces and draped down their necks. Few people ever laid eyes on these women.

A rickety, slippery rope bridge crossed the wide, roaring River of Saints’ Tears. Piranhas survived on whatever, whoever, fell in. As one crossed they might hear the angelic voices of the sisters singing or the sad lament of their prayers, messages from Heaven reaching the sinners’ ears. From the near bank of the river, the chapel’s tower could be seen. Perhaps they continued closer while the fat gong of the bell called for noon prayers.

It was a land of echoes. The trees a metropolis of monkey shrieks and bird calls, mixed with women’s whispers and jaguar roars, sometimes the sound of children at play, and always, always, the electric hum of mosquitoes in the air.

Children?

An orphanage. A school. Not all of the women who braved the dangerous trail through the deadly jungle were alone. Many carried a baby in their swollen bellies. The children, even before they were born, knew the taste of terror.

Castaways. Women sent to the sad sisters to avoid scandal, they trudged into the heart of the steamy forest, hidden by the thick canopy, kept company by the warning growls of unseen predators, the bites of mosquitoes, the memories of the men in their lives, the forbidden acts. In their dreams they heard again the slap of skin on skin, each slap of a mosquito a reminder. They spoke to their unborn children, promises of a life free of evil, free of sin, they begged God for forgiveness.

The daughters of farmers, politicians, policemen, gangsters. By the time they reached the thick tall gates of the convent, they were just desperate, pregnant girls.

Like Ernesta. All she knew when her fingers squeezed the rusty, moss-covered gate was that she was hungry. Like the others before and after, she thought she was safe.

The sisters found her at dawn, shivering, mumbling, sobbing. They half pulled, half carried her to a vacant bed in the infirmary. Brought her food. Another sad sister.

She gave birth to a boy. Gabriel. Her angel.

Mother Superior was so old it was hard to picture her as a young woman, impossible to imagine her as a child. As if she was created just as she looked now, a wise old nun. She was strict, but kind. It was said she ruled with two fists, one steel, one silk, and her voice contained both elements. Her voice singing the Ave Maria could make one want to die, just to glimpse heaven. Her voice scolding was as cold and sharp as an axe blade.

She visited Ernesta when Gabriel was born. Asked to hold the newborn.

If Ernesta stayed, Mother Superior informed her, the child would be raised in the orphanage, once he stopped breast feeding. The boy would be well tended to, and Ernesta could keep a close eye on him. Ernesta would join the order. Take the vows, wear the robe, devote her life to Christ. To a simple life of prayer and work.

Strict and kind. Eyes the blue of a winter sky scrubbed clean of clouds by a harsh wind. Eyes the same color as her son’s.

She stayed. Of course. After six months she took her vows, joined the order of Our Ladies of Sorrow, became Sister Ernesta. A gold band on her wedding finger with a cross carved into it. She was married to Christ now.

Gabriel slept in the orphanage. A loveable rascal, he quickly became a favorite of the sisters who tended the children. On Friday nights, Sister Ernesta would read to the children, perhaps something from the Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel, and Gabriel would sit on her lap. She breathed in the smell of her little boy, brushed a hand through his too long hair, read slowly, savored the feel of his weight against her. Her voice cast a spell on the children, lulled them unconscious. Long after he was asleep, Ernesta lifted her son in her arms, and carried him, cheek to cheek, to his bed. A soft whisper in his dreams, “Good night, my son.”

They were safe, he was happy. She consoled herself with these facts until she nodded off on her tear-stained pillow.

Dreams. Not safe in her dreams. She wore no robes in her dreams. In the sultry tropical nights, most of the sisters wore nothing. Her hair shone dark, dark brown, like her eyes. Men pursued her through the jungle, braved the snakes, the jaguars, the deadly river. One man she wanted to pursue her. Men pawed her, mouths drooled, they left money on the nightstand, the room, her room, nasty with the reek of sex and sweat, loud with the sounds of girls sold to men for an hour, and another hour, and another.

The Madame, her face too close—Ernesta didn’t want to look at her face, at the scar along her cheek, at the blind eye drained of color as if it could not bear to see any more.
Be nice to this one, Ernesta. He might just take you away.
His hands like hairy spiders crawled up and down her. His breath battled with his aftershave, smelling to her nose like a grease fire.

Be nice to this one.

She did not shiver.

He liked to choke her.

She let him.

Liked to tie her up.

She did not squirm.

He took her away.

Later, in the dark jungle, fat with Gabriel, thirsty and worried, she remembered the cruel man,
Call me Papi
, and she laughed at the snakes, at the jaguar’s yells, at the fish with razors for teeth.

Laughed at nature’s idea of frightening.

Every morning she woke to the sound of nuns at prayer, in her simple room, with its small bed, and a wooden desk with a candle and a bible on it.

The routine of the sisters was easy to fall into. Wake at dawn, a rosary in the room. A hundred sisters prayed at the same time, soft, but together creating a communal, soothing buzz of Our Fathers and Hail Marys.

Chores. Cows to be milked, gardens to be tended, breakfast to be prepared, children to be dressed and fed.

Daily mass by a snow-bearded whiskey priest, Father Rodriguez. Father would nod off during the readings. The altar boys, orphans in white robes, would nudge him awake. When he read the gospel, his voice started brittle and cracked like the pages of some forgotten book, but then gained strength as he recognized the words. He would look out at the dim church, no longer needing to read the page, at Mother Superior alone in the front pew, the sisters in the rows behind her, the children behind them, most of their feet not reaching the floor.

Father’s homilies were rambling, sentimental things, stories of his youth told like fairy tales, nothing to do with the readings. He would mutter until Mother Superior cleared her throat, then look around as if remembering where he was, who he was, an apology on his face, a bow, and he would launch into the Apostle’s Creed.

After mass, he would listen to the confessions of the nuns. Perhaps it was this that had broken him. Had he thought it would be a litany of impure thoughts, the barely sins of young virgins? He had underestimated his sisters in Christ. Only the small sins of the orphans, the petty theft, the lustful thoughts, the Lord’s name in vain, gave him any relief. Maybe it was the sins of the sisters that drove him to the bottle. Only Mother Superior remembered what state he arrived to the convent in.