Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Matt already felt a little awkward. He’d hadn’t attended a meeting for area ex-priests at Maternity of Mary Church’s community rooms in Henderson for months after his first visit.

Everything here was the same, as plain as a convent: beige vinyl tile floors, inexpensive folding tables, metal chairs, Styrofoam cups, even the echo from no carpet or drapes. Holy Mother Church frugal. The show was saved for vestments and mass. Priests were the church’s underpaid but cock-of-the-walk peacocks, and he wasn’t one anymore. He wasn’t even the same as he had been a few months before.

“Silver is the coolest car color,” another man said.

Then Matt realized that it was his car, his relatively new silver Crossfire two-seater, they were all talking about. And blushed.

God! He was a real boy now. He wanted to sleep with a woman without benefit of matrimony. He shouldn’t lose it like this back on the old stomping grounds. Actually, he didn’t want to sleep with Temple without benefit of matrimony; he’d gladly marry her first. Except she wanted to sleep with him and wasn’t sure she was ready for matrimony. What’s a good Catholic boy to do?

Matt turned from the table to the filling room, knowing he looked sheepish.

“It’s mine. The car.”

He was going to add an apology when Nick, whom Matt characterized as the Progressive Cleric, ex-version, came over and pounded him on the back.

“Good going, Devine. Losing the lust for a simple Honda Civic provided through parish donations is the first sign of becoming a civilian. What’s it do?”

The same first question Temple had asked. This time Matt didn’t hesitate.

“One forty.”

The men in the room nodded sagely. Who would have thought it? Priests could be guys who talked cars and speed. Their first names and thumbprint IDs began to come back to him: Jerry, the Really Nice Guy, with acne scars and thick glass lenses; Paul, the Earnest Thinker, already in trifocals and thinning hair; Damian, the Theologian, bald and distant; Nick, the Coach.

They were a mixed bag as to age and home state, all the city of Las Vegas had to offer in terms of resident ex-priests. LV wasn’t exactly a Mecca for the religiously inclined, at least not along the Strip. It had one of the country’s largest numbers of churches of all denominations in the residential areas, including Molina’s home parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It even hosted one of Temple’s Universalist Unitarian churches, housed in a shopping center. Okay, he’d looked it up, thinking if they got married soon . . .

“The first and last time you attended was a zoo,” Damien noted with a chilly quirk that passed for a smile. “What brings you and your fancy new car back now?”

Damien was an ascetic. The disdain in his voice echoed the stern voices from Matt’s seminarian past. The original Father Damien had founded an island refuge for lepers when they were truly pariahs. Matt felt right now that he’d kinda like to go there.

“Lighten up, Damien.” Nick pulled Matt into the circle. “Attendance here isn’t mandatory, like Sunday mass. You’re just jealous of the wheels.”

This was so absurd that everybody laughed, including Damien. A little.

“I forgot about that,” Matt said as he took a seat in the circle. “They were offering such good deals and the mileage is pretty good—”

“God, Matt, are you going to plead guilty for avarice or energy consumption, make up your mind! Religious or secular sinner?” Jerry joked.

Matt sighed. “Probably both.”

Nick leaned back in his chair, the natural leader. “Let’s introduce ourselves and our life states,” he said, looking around at two new guys, both older.

They went around the circle. Phil and Tom were new in town, Phil a college instructor, Tom an administrator for the local National Public TV station.

“That means I’m working my old con: raising money.”

Everyone laughed. Parish priests were renaissance men in every respect except husband and literal father.

When Matt’s turn came, he merely said he was a radio counselor at a local station.

Nick didn’t prod him to say that he was the radio shrink in town, Mr. Midnight, syndicated nationally and a frequent national talk show guest. A man who had an on-air popularity. A man who made money. Even ex-priests could get jealous, and the group’s driving force was support, not rivalry.

Matt decided that he should have asked to drive the old Probe he’d passed on to Electra tonight. That anyone would look at his car had never occurred to him, although Temple sure had, and sure had looked good in the passenger seat. He felt a shiver that was surely confessable just thinking about that. The questions he wanted answers to were so corrosively personal that his hands were sweating, as they had in the dark St. Stanislaus’s confessional in Chicago when he was eight and was trying to decide whether to declare a “bad thought” to commit murder, or not.