The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (13 page)

I turn to find Vicky laughing at me, her hand already waiting for mine. She leans in. “It’s not going to kill you,” she says. “Besides, look how happy she is.”

As I take Vicky’s hand, Miss Rita squeezes my left hand hard.

I whisper to Vicky, “I guess you’re right. But it seems a bit dishonest. It’s just pretend.”

Vicky looks down at Miss Rita. “She’s a hundred years old, Steve. I think she knows what she’s doing.”

“I guess,” I say.

“Now shut up and sing,” she says.

I don’t have to be told four times.

The tent is thick with the smell of gumbo and the murmur of voices. It’s a brisk Saturday night in Grand Prairie and half the population seems to have turned out for our gumbo fund-raiser. Many of them are the exact same people who buy the cakes and plate lunches, the same ones who give their kids change to drop into the box decorated with brown bunnies that sits in the entryway to the church. I’m afraid of asking how much more money we need to raise.

I’ve got a fake smile plastered to my face and if I have to drink a gallon of beer to keep it there, then so be it. I’m tempted to go inside and drain half a bottle of whiskey, but that would lead to very bad things. So beer it is. And the fake smile is staying there, regardless of the infantile thoughts zipping through my head. Christmas was two weeks ago and today I got another call from the bishop, telling me Mark hadn’t been seen. No one knows where he is. Not even his parents. Screw Mark. Screw him for dredging up the sorts of things that should stay buried deep in the mind. Mark is wrong; an adult lifetime of repressing our most basic urges is perfectly healthy.

“I have to wonder, Vick. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ask each of these people for a hundred-dollar donation and be done with the whole thing? You know, ‘Give us a hundred bucks, we’ll hire the carnival, and then we’ll charge you again for the rides.’” I might have a fake smile on my face, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be a pain in her ass.

She takes a swig of beer out of a plastic cup. She’d decided today to pick up a couple of kegs—I don’t know when she became copriest, but there it is. Now Denise is selling beer for a dollar a cup while my three old birds dish out the rice and gumbo. I’ve noticed Denise take a few swigs, and I’ve also noticed her parents watching and doing nothing about it. It’s a fine Louisiana ritual, watching your child sneak her first beers—even if it’s at a fund-raiser in the church parking lot.

“Boy, Steve, you have a special talent for missing the point,” Vicky says, pushing her bowl away and tipping her chair back. She’s wearing cargo pants and a camo army jacket with the name Stinson over the breast pocket. Her blond hair’s pulled in a tight ponytail and her eyes glint with satiation. It takes a rare woman to be so comfortable—and look good doing it, if I must admit—under the glare of the naked hundred-watt bulbs we used to light the tent.

“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing full well what she’ll say.

“This was never just about the money. And it’s not just about the festival, remember? You’ve got yourself a community on your hands.”

I put my fingers together in the shape of a cross, stick them out toward her, and hiss.

“Shut up,” she says, laughing. “Seriously. Look around you. You got practically the whole town out here, even the ones that don’t go to church. I used to nag Daddy to do things like this, but he was just too damn lazy.”

“Really? You? Nagging? Say it ain’t so.”

I do feel something resembling pride. It’s either that or a bad piece of sausage. I look around. Everyone is laughing and smiling. Old ladies are clustered in circles, clucking like hens. Children dart in and around the tables, rush out of the tent into the cool night air, and dare each other to go into the cemetery. At the back end of the tent, Boudreaux and a crew of old farts stand around on his cooking trailer.

“I guess you’re right,” I say.

“You should be used to that by now,” she says. “Besides, for someone so paranoid about B.P. raiding your flock, this is the exact sort of thing to keep the Pentecostal wolf out of the fold. You’re being a good shepherd.”

“Wow. Bonus points for using Christian imagery,” I say. “But let’s not mention B.P., please.”

“Too late,” she says.

“Well, don’t mention him again.”

“No, I mean too late,” she says, rocking her chair forward and motioning toward the front flap of the tent.

There, conjured by the mere mention of his name, is B.P. In the flesh. He surveys the scene before him as if he’s gauging the crowd, determining their worth before stepping all the way into the tent. Filing in behind him are his wife, his youngest boy, Little Red Riding Redneck her own self, and another seven or eight Pentecostals.

A second of silence washes through the tent as the flock stops eating and talking long enough to assess the intruders. Most of them go immediately back to what they were doing, but a few stare.

Good. I wish they’d point and laugh as well.

“This is better than TV,” Vicky says.

“Shut up,” I say.

“Aren’t you going to get up and say hi?”

“No. He can come to me.”

“You are so, so ridiculous. Paranoid, ridiculous, and a bad host.”

The last comment is the only one that stings, but before I can get up, B.P. and his posse are closing the distance.

“Father Steve, it sure do smell good in here tonight,” he says, shaking my hand with his right paw and grabbing my shoulder with his left. Sure do smell good? There he goes with the aw-shucksterism again. He’s probably got a degree in English, the jerk. “How yall doing tonight?” he asks, his eyes sliding over to Vicky, who’s still sitting down, then back to me. He’s probably starting to think we’re attached at the hip.

“A lot better now that yall are here,” I lie. “Glad you could join us.”

“You kidding me? We was gonna eat macaroni and cheese tonight, but we could smell the gumbo all the way down to the church.”

Church. Right. Fancy name for a big pile of dirt and a trailer park.

“Sister Vicky, good to see you again,” he says, acknowledging her.

“Same here, B.P.,” she says, raising her glass of beer to him. His eyes narrow some, but his smile remains fixed to his face. “Who are all these fine people following you around tonight?” she asks.

“Just my little bit of family,” he says, hitching up his pants and looking like a rancher who’s about to give a tour of his thousand-acre spread. He begins the introductions and I immediately forget all their names. With the exception of his oldest son, they all look like clones—ruddy-faced, thin-lipped polite people. The men are in jeans and flannel shirts. The women are in denim ankle-length skirts, sensible shoes, and floral-print tops. They wear no makeup and their yards of uncut hair are twisted into buns.

His son, though—the older one—he’s a different story entirely. He’s wearing designer jeans. A well-worn black leather jacket over a just-wrinkled-enough blue-and-white-striped shirt, the sleeves of which are French-cuffed. Silver cuff links. Italian leather loafers. His hair is moussed into one of those perfectly mussed bed-heads. He looks like something his plain-jane wife accidentally ordered out of a J. Crew catalog one rainy day and never bothered to send back.

The only reason I forget his name is that I immediately think of him as B.P. Junior. And Junior he shall remain.

“Mind if we join yall?” B.P. asks, both he and Junior pulling out chairs and sitting down before I answer. B.P. reaches into his pocket, pulls out a roll of cash, and hands it to his wife, who, along with the other women, is still standing. “Yall go get us some food,” he says, and they move off silently.

Vicky’s left eyebrow arches as she watches them go and come back with bowls for the men, then go and come back with bowls for the children, then finally go and come back with bowls for themselves.

When they’re all seated, B.P. interrupts the stream of small talk and grabs the hands of the two Pentecostals closest to him and says, “Let us pray,” which causes them to all bow their heads. “Dear Lord, we thank You for the blessings You’ve put on this table before us. We thank You for our health and this beautiful night. We thank You for blessing us with these neighbors.”

That’s nice of him.

“And have mercy on their souls,” he adds.

As he says “Amen,” I look at Vicky, my eyes big in a “See? I told you so” gesture. But she just puts her hand over her mouth and looks over her shoulder to hide her laughter.

“Let’s eat,” says B.P. He and his family tear into their food as if it had personally insulted them.

The nerve of this man, to come to my church and tell
his
God to have mercy on
our
souls! He and his pack of dogs who eat as if they hadn’t in five years, who were probably stuffing their pieholes just minutes before arriving.

Then Denise lopes over to our table, doing her best to impersonate a Labrador retriever puppy, what with the gangly legs, the flopping hair, the dopey grin. She throws her arms around my neck and I freeze in horror. I can smell her shampoo, but what I really notice is the beer on her breath.

“Hey, Father Steve,” she says too loudly. “Can I get you another beer?”

The entire B.P. clan stops in midslurp, like feasting hyenas who’ve just heard the growl of an approaching lion. Their eyes turn to Denise and me.

Denise, looking right back at them, says, “Hey, yall want some beer, too? It’s just a dollar a cup.”

“Excuse me,” Vicky says before pushing away from the table and running off, no doubt to fall on the ground and laugh herself into a stroke.

B.P. lowers his spoon and considers the both of us. His lips slide into a sly smile that makes me want to punch him.

“No, thanks, honey,” he says.

“Really?” she asks, then drops her voice to an exaggerated whisper. “It tastes good, though.”

B.P. casts his eyes around the place as if noticing for the first time all the plastic cups of beer, the lit cigarettes. Those eyes come back around to me, to my plastic cup ringed with foam, the pack of Camel Lights in my black shirt pocket, which sits about six inches south of my white collar.

“Well, honey,” he says. “Temptation often tastes good. But some things are bad for a man’s body and, more important, his soul.”

Her grip on my neck loosens. She’s confused. “Oh,” she says, then, God bless her, shrugs off B.P.’s words as if they meant absolutely nothing. “Okay. But how about you, Father?”

B.P.’s smile grows. That son of a bitch is daring me to make a move.

I look him right in the eye and say, “I’d love another one, Denise. Make sure you fill it up all the way.”

As she skips off, Vicky comes walking back. B.P.’s eyes slide over to her for a moment, but I’m not done yet. I look at his wife, old what’s her face, and the other women.

“I know yall aren’t partial to alcohol,” I say, “and beer certainly isn’t everyone’s thing. But I got plenty of wine in the house if yall want.”

They all look down at their bowls.

“No, thanks, Father,” B.P. says, trying to keep his greasy smile on his big fat face.

“Really? No wine, huh? Funny thing, that.”

“What’s so funny about avoiding the sins of alcohol, Father?”

“I don’t know. Seems a pretty harsh thing to call something like that a sin, considering Jesus’s first recorded miracle was turning water into wine.”

His ears turn a touch red. “Bible don’t say he drank it.”

“You know, B.P., I think you might have me on that one.” I look at Vicky, who hasn’t managed to sit down yet. “He’s got a point, Vicky,” I say, standing up. “But that’s an awful lot of sin to be throwing around for free. I wonder, though, what it was He was drinking at the Last Supper.” I shrug. “Anyway, don’t want to turn a fine meal into a theological discussion, and I should probably go make sure Boudreaux ain’t burning the gumbo. So thank yall for coming and good night.”

But I don’t go check on Boudreaux. I head toward the rectory and get myself a real drink.

How did I get here in the first place? I mean, a priest. Really.

In junior high, I looked at the adults around me—teachers, bus drivers, crawfish farmers—and wondered “Why that?” Surely, as children, they didn’t think to themselves,
I want to be a crawfish farmer when I grow up
. I grew a little older, and I chalked it up to gender or education gaps. My parents’ generation, the lower-class folks at any rate, clawed their way into the middle class as quickly and efficiently as possible, dreams be damned. Middle class was the goal, not a dream job. The man would take what he could get and the woman, if inclined to work, would either teach or become a nurse. They’d set up a base from which the kids could aspire to better things, be lawyers, doctors, and bankers and such. Which is what we did, my generation. We hit the playground running, promising to get big, important, adventurous jobs and leave this place and never come back.

It never occurred to us that people sometimes simply fell into jobs and houses and families. That, unless you’re particularly focused and driven, life sort of has its way with you.

When I was fifteen, I figured people became priests the same way prophets became prophets, the way Joan of Arc became whatever it was that she was. One day while walking through a field of flowers or one night while you slept wrongly imprisoned, God tapped you on the shoulder, gave you the lowdown, and that was it. You just didn’t say no when called up to the majors.

That didn’t happen with me. I wonder if it happened with B.P. He certainly seems sure of himself. He certainly seems to think he’s on a mission from God.

There’s a knock on the door. “Padre! You okay in there?”

Vicky.

“Just a second,” I say.

“You okay?” she asks again.

“Yeah, yeah. Just needed the bathroom is all.”

“Look, everyone’s leaving, so be a good boy and come say your good-byes.”

“Is he still here?”

“No, they left already.”

That established, I venture back out to my flock and help with cleanup. After they’ve all gone, I ask Vicky inside for a drink.

“Nahhhh. It’s too nice out,” she says. “Let’s go see if that old swing still works.” She points her chin at the swing.

She holds the screen door open for me.

We fall onto the swing and she opens a couple of cans. “Kegs were kicked,” she explains. The beer’s near freezing; little flecks of beer ice dissolve on my tongue.

The slow thrum of crickets is punctuated by moths and other bugs ticking and tocking into the security lights. We push at the ground with our toes and the swing squeaks as we move back and forth. I wonder, if someone saw us from a distance, if we’d look like an old couple, or two ridiculously oversized children. I’d venture the latter, considering the way Vicky’s dragging her boots in the worn patch of dust below the swing, causing an imbalance in our motion. The groove under her boots is a good inch deeper than the one under my shoes.