The Bighead (6 page)

“
Come on up, girls,” Annie
bid. “She pushed through the parlor curtain, her arm around
Charity’s shoulder, and led them toward a winding staircase. “Let
me show yawl to your rooms.”

Charity’s arm, in turn, slipped around
Annie’s slim back. “Are there many guests right now?” she
asked.

“
Well, hon, no, none right
now, but I do gotta reservation comin’ tomorrah.” And at that
instant, Annie paused on the stairs and looked over her shoulder at
Jerrica.

“
It’s a priest, as a matter
of fact,” Annie said. “Stayin’ here a week or so.”

“
A priest?” Jerrica
asked.

“
That’s right, hon. A
Catholic priest…comin’ all the way from Richmond.”

Why on earth?
Jerrica frowned.
A
priest? Coming to this place? Why?
But
Jerrica didn’t even need to ask.

Annie continued up the steps,
finishing her revelation. “He’s comin’ here to reopen Wroxeter
Abbey.”

(II)

Had Alexander ever even heard of
it?

Shit,
the priest thought.
Wroxeter
Abbey?

“
That’s right, Tom, we’re
sending you to Wroxeter. Assessment and evaluation, you might call
it.” Monsignor Halford’s high, cushioned chair creaked minutely
when he’d leaned back, his fingers steepled in his lap. Halford was
Chancellor of the Richmond Diocesan Pastoral Center. “In fact,
we’ve already made arrangements for your accommodations. You’ll be
staying at a nearby boarding house, since the abbey itself isn’t
habitable as yet. It’ll be a nice project for you to take over.
And, you’ll be happy to know, the diocese doesn’t consider this
TDY, so you’ll maintain your benefice pay status.”

Oh, that’s just fuckin’
great,
Alexander considered now, Richmond
long behind him. Like the extra hundred bucks a month on benefice
should appease him. Alexander didn’t give a shit about money; his
spirit had long since outgrown that.
Benefice, my ass,
he thought
now.
The diocese is greasing me, that’s
what they’re doing. They’ll never give me my own goddamn parish,
and they don’t have the balls to tell me to my face. So they send
me on these little trips instead.
At least
Halford had let him take the old parish Mercedes, so the gruelling
drive wouldn’t be all that intolerable.

The reasons were legion,
and none too surprising. Bureaucracy, like God, worked in intricate
ways. He’d seen its many webs throughout his life: on the
battlefield in South East Asia, on the college campus, in taverns
and strip joints, and now, if not more so, in the Church. Alexander
had been a priest for twelve years; they were no closer to giving
him his own parish now than the day he’d graduated from the
seminary.
You’re a firebrand, Tom,
Monsignor Halford had told him a hundred
times.
You’re like a high-powered engine
that burns a little too hot.

All right. Maybe it was
true. Forty-five now, and fifty seemed dreadfully close. But he’d
been an unlikely candidate for the clergy since day one. At twenty,
he’d been an Army Ranger, 5th Special Operations Group. He’d sat in
the bush behind Claymores, reading Thomas Merton and St. Ignatius
between firefights. He’d killed dozens of men, and even a woman
once—it was almost too proverbial—a
pregnant
woman. She’d been ten yards
away from tossing a two-kilo satchel charge into a field hospital
full of wounded. What appalled Alexander most was not the war
itself but the notion in general.
There’s
no reason for this,
he concluded each time
he dropped Charlie in the peep-sight of his M16. Not in The Nam,
not anywhere. It was the only thing he’d learned during his
twelve-month combat tour, and perhaps the only
real
thing he’d ever learn in his
life. C-rats, trenchfoot, crotch-rot; dysentery; chiggers the size
of hazelnuts under his skin, mosquito bites more like dog
bites—none of that bothered him. It was just the notion. There was
simply no reason for people to kill each other.

He’d slummed for a year after his
hitch, working civvie jobs and doing the things that
twenty-one-year-olds do, and quite a few of those things involved
women. But the civilian world only reinforced what he’d learned in
the field. Too much of life revolved solely around itself, everyone
looking out for number one. Alexander didn’t want to be like that,
and he knew there was a way out:

God.

The G.I. Bill took him through
Catholic U. and a 3.9 grade-point average with a double major,
philosophy and psych. Then, two more years divided between pissant
jobs and volunteer work, mostly AIDS hospices. You knew you cared
about people when you cleaned the shit out of their pants, for
free. But…

Would the Church take a former
soldier, a killer?

Admission to the seminary didn’t come
easy. Talk about ballbreakers. It had been Halford himself who’d
done the preliminary interviewing for Christ The King Seminary,
upstate. “Why do you want to be a priest, Tom?”

“
So I can tell people how
much I love Jesus. So I can draw them closer to Him,” came
Alexander’s simple yet honest answer.

“
Not good enough,” Halford
said. “Stock answer.”

“
I want to do things for
the world instead of for me,”

“
Still not good
enough.”

But then Alexander had slapped several
dissertations onto the priest’s desk. Abstracts he’d written on his
own: the modern applications of the works of Ignatius, Aquinas,
Kierkegaard, Christian philosophies made functional in the 90’s.
Alexander had graduated from the seminary first in his class at the
age of thirty-two.

But it didn’t take him long
to realize they’d never give him his own parish.
You’re too valuable as a psychologist,
Tom,
had been Halford’s favorite excuse for
years. Valuable? Sometimes a priest would quit, and it was
Alexander’s job to reel them back. He generally succeeded but
always wondered if it was the right thing. Why goad a man to do
what he doesn’t want to do anymore? The rest of the time he sat in
the little office behind the Richmond Main Rectory, trying to put
broken men back together. Priests never came to him on their own,
they were
ordered
to psychotherapy by either the diocese or the court. He got a
lot of drunks and a lot of alleged pedophiles. Antabuse for the
drunks, behavioralist thrashings for the pedos. “You’re a
goddamn
priest
,
you asshole!” he’d rail at them. “Priests don’t feel up kids! And I
don’t want to hear a bunch of liberal horseshit about bad
childhoods and hormonal imbalances. You’re a
priest,
and you have
responsibilities!
People
trust
you because of that candyass collar around your neck, and you
have an
obligation
to them. If you screw around with anymore kids, you’re gonna
go to fuckin’ jail, then you’re
really
gonna know what sexual abuse
is. Is that what you want, tough guy? You want to be the cellblock
bitch? You got any idea what cons do to pedophiles in the joint?
They’ll make you boy-pussy, chief. They’ll turn you to a punk in
less time than it takes you to say three Hail Marys, and they’ll be
trading you back and forth every night for cigarettes. But that’ll
be the least of your worries, hoss, because if you do it again, I’m
gonna kick your ass so bad your own mama won’t recognize
you.”

He put them on Depo-Prevera
and left them to wonder. Needless to say, there were many
complaints about Alexander’s methodologies. But the diocese never
stepped on his tail because his success rate was so high. Any
priest gone bad was an embarrassment, and the Church didn’t like
embarrassments.
Here’s the problem. Fix
it.
They didn’t care how.

But what of Alexander’s own
problems? Celibate since twenty-eight, not once had he even
considered breaking his vows.
Hell, I
don’t even jerk off.
He smoked and drank in
moderation, and—well—he had a propensity for foul language, not a
priestly trait. Once he’d called Monsignor Tipton an asshole at an
ordination reception, during an argument over whether or not girls
should be allowed to acolyte. Halford had nearly shit his cassock.
“Damn it, Tom! That man’s going to be a cardinal someday, and you
just called him an asshole!”

Alexander shrugged.
“He
is
an
asshole.”

“
That’s beside the point!
He could request a reprimand! You want that on your Church record?
He could have you reassigned to a mission in Africa, for God’s
sake.”

“
Let him,” Alexander said.
“I’ll kick his bootie with my tooty fruity.”

“
He deserves
respect!”

“
He deserves my foot up his
ass.”

“
You’re impossible, Tom!”
Halford continued with his tirade. “You’re so indecorous,
so…profane. You cuss worse than a longshoreman. There’s absolutely
no excuse for a priest to use that kind of language.”

“
What language would you
prefer? French? German? How about Lower Latin or Sanskrit? Anyway
you look at it, Tipton’s an antediluvian asshole with medieval
ideas that are contrary to the needs of the worshippers. It’s guys
like him that keep the Church in a constant state of regression,
and I told him so. I call them like I see them. Tipton’s a shmuck.
A shit-head. A pantywaist Church-bureaucratic dick-lick who’s in
the bizz only for his own self-aggrandizement, and if the Pope ever
makes him a cardinal, I’ll bend over and blow chunky on his
raiments.”

“
God Almighty, Tom,”
Halford groaned.

Such, then, was Alexander’s
clerical plight. If he couldn’t be a priest in any real way, he
wouldn’t want to be one at all. And if the diocese wanted to keep
him swept under a benefice rug because he had a foul mouth, then so
be it. At least they couldn’t fire him.
Though art a priest forever,
they’d
promised at his own ordination.
They’re
stuck with me, and I like that. Besides, I’m probably the best
diocesan psychologist in the country, and they know it.

It was almost, in fact, amusing. Any
priest wanted his own parish, and Alexander knew he’d never—ever in
a million years—get his. And why?

He laughed out loud behind
the wheel.
Because I cuss!

So let the cards fall where they may.
It was fate, wasn’t it? It was Calvian predestination, which
Alexander didn’t even believe in.

If God doesn’t want me to
have my own parish,
he reckoned,
then I guess He’s got a good reason, and I ain’t
gonna argue with Him.

And in the meantime:

There was always Wroxeter Abbey. He’d
be up there at least a month, to assess the cost of reopening, to
recalculate maintenance expenditures, and to supervise preliminary
refurbishments. Well, it would be good to get away for awhile.
Richmond was beautiful in the fall, winter, and spring, but,
conversely, a drab, hot, ugly city in the summer.

Yeah, it’ll be nice to get
out into the great outdoors.

Deep in Virginia hill country now,
Alexander took the old Mercedes around the next bend, to the exit
off of 23.

He’d be there in less than an
hour.

(III)

The girl screamed as The Bighead et
out her clitoris and surroundin’ folds’a girlskin. Lotta blood down
there already— from the corin’ he’d just given her—and Bighead
liked the taste’a blood, yessir, ’specially when it were mixed with
the taste’a girlmeat. He’d popped her open fierce when he’d first
slid his bone in, busted her up bad, but The Bighead were gettin’
used ta that now. Had yet ta find a woman with big enough a poon ta
take all’s his dickmeat.

Too bad.

She were purdy, she was. A right purdy
li’l thing he’d found by the big creek leadin’ out’a the Lower
Woods. She were bendin’ over quite nice, pluckin’ cattails off
their stems, probably ta make cattail pancakes like the way
Grandpappy showed him once. They were a might good.

She had barely no hair at all down
their on her girlcut, as Grandpappy like ta call it, an’ she hadda
right nice smell ta her. Musky an’ sharp, but not all stinky like
most the gals Bighead had come acrost’a late. Had li’l tufts’a hair
unner her arms too, which Bighead bit right out an’ swallered once
her was done bustin’ his nut inta her bloody hole. She’s also had
cute li’l feet on her, tiny li’l things, so’s Bighead brushed the
dirt off the bottom of ’em, then et the skin off her toes, kinda
like fer a tidbit.

Then he whacked open her noggin with a
log an’ et her brain. Real salty-like, this one were, much more so
than that last splittail. Meatier. Burstin’ with flavor…

Gawd damn, but weren’t it good ta et a
raw brain busted fresh out the skull!

A’corse, ’fore he et her brain, he
gave her butthole a good suckin’ outs too. Bighead, he liked the
taste’a buttcrack, he did. It were un-yoo-sher-all, a word his
grandpappy tolt him. Liked ta suck the hot poop right out’a that
tight li’l hole, and it were always easier when they was dead. This
gal here, this li’l blondie—well, Bighead could just tell what
she’d et yesterday. Fresh corn an’ ham hock an’ steamed collard
greens. Coupla fresh water clams in there too, he’s could tell ’cos
clams were always kinda chewy and’d stick ’tween his back teeth. Ta
The Bighead, food always were best comin’ out’a gal’s butt. Ta be
sure! Try it sometime!