The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (12 page)

Aluela Corbus had come full into puberty, a feminine weight settling into her thighs, her breasts taking shape, acne pocking her face, a coat of cheap makeup covering her discolored cheeks. She claimed she had fallen asleep at a girlfriend’s house, a lie so transparent that Father McEwen did not even attempt to get at the truth. He simply stated that she was too old to be spanked, which sent Mrs. Corbus into a rage.

During her rant, Father McEwen spotted one of the Corbus boys lingering by the kitchen door to witness his sister’s subjugation. The priest in him cared more about the boy’s pleasure in his sister’s pain than he did about their mother’s litany of accusations. It did not occur to him that this feeling stemmed from his own guilt.

He stepped to the doorway to run the boy off. It was Patrick, the younger Corbus boy, who had been arrested for shoplifting just last month.

“Get on with you,” Father McEwen said to him. Patrick had been caught with a bra and panties stuffed into the tops of his boots.
Gifts
, he’d claimed. “You have homework, I’ll wager,” McEwen said.

Patrick pushed his yellow hair from his forehead and gestured for Father McEwen to come with him into the living room.

“I’m occupied.”

Patrick said, “I know where she was.”

“Sure, you do,” Father McEwen replied, stepping to the hall. “Look, turn on the television if you have to. Just give us some room to breathe here.”

The boy presented an exaggerated expression of exasperation. His brother, the father recalled, had moved out of the house. Only Patrick and Aluela remained.

“Go on,” Father McEwen insisted.

“Fine,” Patrick replied, turning his back. “Eat your peas with a knife.”

The turn of phrase almost made Father McEwen laugh. He had a fondness for Patrick Corbus. The boy had once come to the parish to ask God to help him with his math. His sincerity had touched McEwen, and the complexity of the math had shocked him. That had been before the boy’s father vanished, and in the three years since the disappearance Patrick had gotten into one scrape after another. In confession, he had failed to even mention the shoplifting arrest. Father McEwen had made the salvation of the boy a special project, but his duties had kept him busy, and he’d all but forgotten about it.

A slap and squeal came from the kitchen. Father McEwen hustled back. Aluela was bent over the table and her mother had spanked her bare buttocks with the flat side of a butcher knife.

“Stop that now,” Father McEwen called.

Mrs. Corbus tried to swing the knife again, but it slipped from her hand and ricocheted off the wall behind her, landing on its point and sticking upright in the gray linoleum. She glared at him.

“I don’t have the strength,” she said. “You whip her. You whip her or I’ll do to you. I’ll do to you and her both. You whip her.”

Father McEwen jerked the hem of Aluela’s dress over her behind, but he jerked too hard and the dress snapped back. He pulled at it again and successfully covered the girl’s pimpled butt. He couldn’t see what had happened to the girl’s underwear. Mrs. Corbus threw open the closet door. A broom handle fell forward against her shoulder, and she shoved it fiercely to the floor. The paddle hung from a metal hook.

“It’s no use getting that,” Father McEwen said, yanking the butcher knife from the floor and placing it in the sink. The girl did not move from the table. “Leave it,” he said.

Mrs. Corbus could not wrestle the paddle from its hook. Arthritic pain brought tears to her eyes, and as she dropped her arms and leaned forward, a tear ran down her nose and fell onto her shoe. Father McEwen saw its descent and heard it strike the leather.

“You whip her,” Mrs. Corbus demanded hoarsely, “or I’ll take this mop handle to her.”

“All right, then,” Father McEwen said. “Leave us alone.”

“Do I have your word?” Mrs. Corbus demanded.

“You do.”

“Her father named her,” Mrs. Corbus accused. She sighed then, regaining her strength, and straightened. Softly she added, “Little bitch.”

She left the room by the back door, the same thing Teddy Allen had done earlier in the evening, leaving McEwen with trouble to ponder.

He might have struck the girl just to keep his word, although he was also considering slapping the paddle against his own hand to make enough noise to please the woman, but when he turned to Aluela, who still lay prone on the table, he saw that her skirt held a red streak of blood.

“God forgive,” he said. When his hand went for her skirt, she tugged it up, expecting him to swat her. “You’re bleeding,” he said, the impression of the blade a red welt stretching across the girl’s behind. The sharp end of the knife had cut into her, a thin incision on either side of the buttocks’ cleft.

He did not consider calling the girl’s mother back to tend to her, though he took a step to stare out the window. Mrs. Corbus had wrapped her withered arms around herself and walked huddled against the cold across the street. He returned his attention to the girl.

“Are you all right?” he asked her softly. “You must be bandaged.”

Her eyes were already wet, and now she began to sob.

Father McEwen unrolled a strip of paper towels, dampened them, and laid them across the wound, covering the remainder of her nakedness with the bloody skirt. He stepped to the door and called for Patrick.

Patrick Corbus ran to the kitchen door, moved not by the call of his name but by the desperate tone in the voice. The red face and man’s shoulder protruding from the door, the big hand holding the same door tightly against the body, spoke of secrets, of the illicit. Patrick’s first thought was that his sister had done something to the priest, but he was standing there on his big feet, flustered yet unharmed. Which meant that the priest had done something, and that desperate tone had been one shaped by guilt and fear of exposure. These impressions flashed through his head almost too fast to leave a residue. Patrick was not merely a smart boy; in many ways he was brilliant. His gifts had gone unrecognized by the nuns who taught him; they could not penetrate his guises to see what lay underneath. By the time he pulled up just short of the door, he had deduced that his mother had lost herself again and left the priest to clean up her mess.

“What has she done?” he said.

Father McEwen mistook the pronoun. “Forget your prying for a moment and fetch me some bandages.”

The human body, at times, must do nothing, must stand as still as the plastic torso on a crucifix. As Father McEwen saw it, the boy froze for a second and then regained his senses and ran to the bathroom to get the necessary medical supplies. But Patrick’s mind ran faster than Father McEwen’s in any case, and in a moment such as this, when the father was close to panicking, Patrick’s thoughts rained while the father’s dribbled. From the second that he stopped his forward movement to the instant that he reversed himself and began his gallop to the medicine cabinet, Patrick saw in the red orbit of the priest’s face a dozen human failings—dishonesty, desire, drunkenness, delight in the suffering of those who opposed him. These failings did not distance the priest from Patrick but made him human. He could see the father had lost some faith in God. He guessed that Aluela was not fully clothed, and understood that their mother had stripped her for a beating. What a pounding reason took in the deluge of reasonable thoughts. The boy could see it all with a rapidity that made the most complex things appear simple. The priest was embarrassed by his own desire and fearful of it. Patrick’s mother was tormented by her husband’s desertion of her arthritic body. That her husband had abandoned their children did not bother her. She would not have hated him had he taken her along and left the children in the moldy house to fend for themselves. What other course could her revenge take but to seek the bones of those same children and break them?

His sister, in that frozen moment, stood naked in his imagination, her hand shyly covering the brown patch of hair between her legs. An image speaks volumes to an agile mind. He had stolen the bra and panties for his sister, but he could not confess this without revealing the intense derangement in the Corbus house. Their mother had shredded Aluela’s undergarments, accusing her of a deadly sin she could not name. Patrick had known many names for it, though, and as he spun to sprint to the bathroom, those words appeared before him in red letters tumbling through the air like the rolling credits of the cinema: the sin of clear breath and heartiness, the sin of the unbuggered body, the sin of fine fettle, the sin of upright bones and pliant flesh, the sin of energy, the sin of the muscles’ easy contraction, the unapologetic and hateful sin of health.

The priest’s voice shook, as did the telephone in his hand.

“I cannot leave them here with her,” he said. “She’s gone off the deep end, and I can’t permit her to harm these children.”

He spoke to Liam Hitchens, a middle-aged man with a large family and modest income, a devout Catholic, bald but for the slap of hair he parted just above the ear to saddle his bare pate. His wife, Mary, was a woman so physically attractive that Father McEwen had more than once fallen into doubt about his calling in her presence, wondering whether he could still find comfort in a woman’s arms. Liam had never been handsome, and time had been cruel, having stolen his hair and eyesight, silver glasses perching on a nose grown too large. Mary, on the other hand, was incapable of aging, no matter the number of children she bore. In Liam’s secret heart, that place secret to even himself, he wanted her to succumb to age as he had; their six children were the products of this desire. He could never consciously conceive such a motive; he could only act upon it. Therefore, he had decided that it must be his Catholic upbringing that had made their family large, which encouraged him to consider himself religious. He became devout by failing to understand himself and substituting the handiest excuse. Which is not to say that he did not love his wife. Not even God held his heart so securely; without her, he wouldn’t have needed a god.

“It has the sound of trouble,” Liam said. “I wouldn’t want Mrs. C. to know where they were staying. I’ll have to check with Mary. She’s at the Rexall getting hose. If she doesn’t wear hose, the veins in her legs will pop and make blue streaks you can see with your own eyes. So she claims. Do you need me to come there? I’d rather not. My littlest is got some project about the earth’s core due tomorrow and it involves magic markers and tracing dinner plates.”

“I’ll bring them,” Father McEwen said. “It’s just Patrick and Aluela. The other one’s moved out. Living at the Y or some such place.” He didn’t want to give Liam a chance to ramble again and so added, “We’d better make haste. I don’t want a scene.” The dark window to the dark world that fronted the Corbus house held white flecks of snow. “It’s snowing. Wouldn’t you know it?” Before putting down the receiver, Father McEwen said, “Snow” instead of “Good-bye.”

Aluela had eavesdropped on the conversation and looked up from the couch at the window. The snow stuck only to the corners of the glass. She had asked her brother to pack for her so that she could lie down. She kept to her stomach to avoid bloodying the cushions. Her backside did not particularly hurt. She simultaneously wished she had on underwear and wanted to pull the hem up and see Father McEwen’s face again as he examined her behind. His hands, while taping on the bandages, had quaked.

As a birthday gift, a friend had given her a reading by the Division Street fortune-teller. Aluela had wound up spending the night in the shop.

“You’re in trouble,” Lucinda had said to her while studying Aluela’s face. “Is it at home? I think it has to do with your home.”

Aluela had burst into tears and begun describing the extent of her mother’s madness, the rages, the inconsolable sadness and weeping, the sleepwalking, the self-mutilation.

“She sticks herself with pins,” Aluela told the fortune-teller. “She won’t let us talk or move while she does it.”

Lucinda dropped the girl’s hands and threw her arms around her. “I live here,” she said. “In the back rooms. You can stay with me tonight.”

Aluela had called home and told Patrick where she was. “Don’t let on. I don’t want Mother to know,” she said. “I called so you wouldn’t worry.”

“Are you coming back?” Patrick asked.

Aluela had offered no answer. Now she believed she should have moved to her older brother’s apartment. James had fled the house as soon as he turned eighteen. His roommates, though, Aluela didn’t trust. They made grabs at her, pinching her butt and nipples, talking dirty every chance they got. She wasn’t a prude, but she didn’t like idiots. She’d had sex a few times, all with her father, whom she and Patrick both missed terribly. She suspected her mother had found out about them. It was true that she had been only thirteen when it started, which was too young, she knew. But her father had been lonely, and she did not hold it against him. The gentle way he had parted her legs had pleased her. He had put his hand over the scant, dark hair that curled about her vagina, and slowly, ever so slowly, maneuvered a finger into her opening, talking all the while about men and women, about what he called the “hang-ups” most people had about sex. After each visit, he had said, “We won’t do this again until you ask me to.” It was only that final time that he had stripped himself. She had told him she wanted to, that she was ready.

She had not liked the physical sensation of his prick inside her, but she had liked the experience. She’d felt very close to him. A day or two later he was gone. He had packed only his clothing. The laptop computer that he always kept with him was left on his desk in the bedroom. He had not written them a note, but Aluela found three hundred thirty-four dollars under her pillow. No explanation accompanied the bills.

She had expected him to contact her, or maybe Patrick. Their elder brother, James, was not bright. He liked to fool with cars and that, luckily, redeemed him. He had work as a mechanic across town. She and Patrick were smart, like their father. She believed he would call or show up somewhere and wave her over, tell her to get Patrick and they would all run away. She did not imagine living with her father as man and wife. She had no interest in that. She simply missed him. That she had fucked him played only a small part in her present emotional turmoil.