The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (16 page)

“It is sort of an odd place for a single young woman to call home.”

She lights another cigarette, exhales. “I guess so. But I’m not just any single young woman. I’m the daughter of a priest and get a little tired of explaining it over and over again when I move beyond my little world.”

“What about dating? What about men?”

“Oh. That,” she says.

“Sorry. Just asking.”

“Let’s just say it’s been a while. Will probably be a while yet.”

“What happened?”

“Why did something have to have happened?” she asks.

“Just an educated guess,” I say.

There’s another long pause before she speaks. “James Stinson happened.”

I suddenly remember the name on the shirt she’s wearing. “Oh,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “He was in the 256th. Just one of those guys you hear about on the news getting blown up by IEDs.”

The emotion has gone out of her voice.

“Were you two serious?”

“Had the dress picked out and the caterer booked.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea. None at all.” I guess the gossipmongers of Grand Prairie have some respect for her misery.

“Not your fault. Nothing anyone could have done. Damn fool loved his army almost as much as he loved me. He died doing what he loved.”

She stands up suddenly, flicks her cigarette off into the trees.

“How about we go get a couple more beers?” she says, and offers her hand to pull me up.

The conversation, it seems, is over. We walk slowly, in silence, back to the rectory.

A warm weekday evening finds me standing in the middle of St. Pete’s cemetery, smoking a cigarette while working on next Sunday’s homily. We’re two weeks from Lent, itself forty days from Easter, forty-five from the festival—and full of musings on death and resurrection. We’re getting to the business end of Christianity. And while I’d like to avoid the subject, maybe talk about elephants or roller coasters or something, I’m not a Protestant, so I can’t just haul off and sermonize about any old thing. I’m a Catholic priest and that means sticking to the topic at hand, which is set by the Gospel reading for that particular week. So I’m standing in a cemetery and, impossibly, finding it hard to think about death coherently.

“Steve,” a man’s voice says, hesitant but expecting.

I wonder if he saw me jump.

I turn to find Mark, in jeans and flannel shirt, stepping out of the shadows of the church. Great. I wasn’t planning to host a pity party for two.

“Mark, you kinda scared me. Didn’t see a car.”

“Oh, I had Mama drop me off.”

“Drop you off?”

“Yeah. Look, I’m a bit of a mess and I just couldn’t stay with Daddy and Mama. She’s brokenhearted about me quitting and Daddy…well, let’s just say he had a strong suspicion that the reason I quit and the reason I joined might be one and the same.”

We both look down and contemplate the cracks in the driveway. I know what I have to do. I don’t have to ask myself WWJD.

“Where’s your stuff?” I finally ask.

“You don’t mind?” he says.

I look at him. “No, Mark.” And I realize the next sentence is true only as it comes out of my mouth: “To be honest, maybe I could use a roommate out here.”

“Yeah. It is spooky,” he says. “I was getting a little creeped out by it. I saw one car pass by in the last half hour.”

“That busy, huh? Well, we can go inside and crank the TV up all the way.”

“Sounds good.”

We walk around to the church entrance to grab Mark’s luggage.

“Why’d you put it up here?”

Mark laughs self-consciously. “I don’t know. I kinda pictured me throwing myself down on the steps before the heavy wooden doors and screaming ‘Sanctuary’ or something. But I forget what a low-rent operation you have out here. Glass doors. No steps.”

“Well, you should have gone to St. Landry if all you wanted was effect.”

“Not just effect, Steve. Drama!”

“Just because you’re completely out of the closet doesn’t have to mean you have to actually be a stereotype.” I’ll say this much for guys, gay or straight: it’s easy to pick up a friendship and act like nothing’s happened. I can only imagine how quickly Christianity would have collapsed had Jesus and the Apostles been a bunch of women. Jesus would never have gotten over the fact that they abandoned him during the Crucifixion. “I can’t believe you guys would
do
that to me. I’m never speaking to you again.
Ever!
” Then, out of spite, he would have run off and joined up with the Zoroastrians.

I stop short at the sight of Mark’s luggage: an army-surplus duffel and a pet carrier.

“Look, Steve,” Mark says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

I, in fact, do mind. It’s one thing to be babysitting him. I don’t want the complication and aggravation of a pet. But it’s the first time Mark’s voice has wavered. He sounds almost desperate at the thought that I might say no.

“Well, I don’t think I mind,” I lie.

“I promise you, it won’t be a problem at all,” Mark replies.

“Yeah, and that’s what you said about that goldfish I bought you when you were nine.”

“Shut up, Steve. Look. He’s the most adorable thing.” Mark opens the door and reaches in. “Come out here, you,” he says in that voice people get when talking to children and pets. He pulls out a black puff of fur, just bigger than his hand, and thrusts it at me.

I take it—a black kitten with a white patch at the throat. It opens its eyes, looks at me, yawns, then goes back to sleep. Well, put a fork in me, I’m done.

“What’s its name?”

“I named him Chase,” Mark says, running his finger gently over the kitten’s ears.

I scratch Chase under his chin and look at Mark’s face. He’s thoroughly absorbed in the kitten. I hand it back and he places it into the carrier slowly, closes the door quietly while holding his breath. I’ve seen that look before on some priests’ faces as they close the tabernacle doors.

“Well, let’s get Chase inside,” I say. “See if we can set yall up with a place to rest your weary heads.”

After we’ve settled in, there is a brief nightmarish moment in which silence settles over the rectory and nothing seems to move.

“So,” says Mark.

“So,” I say.

It’s not just the conversation from Esperanto standing between us, it’s the fact that he’s gone from the guy who stops by to the guy who will be living down the hall. I feel the pressure of months of awkward silences.

“Sit tight,” I say. “I’m going to make a phone call.”

Vicky, never one to disappoint, shows up with a case of beer.

“So, this is Mark,” she says. “Good to meet you finally. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

As she loads the beer into the fridge, Mark raises his eyebrows at me.

“Well, Steve certainly didn’t tell me his girlfriend was hot,” Mark says.

“Oh, please,” Vicky says.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Mark starts, intent now on making me blush. “I sure wish I could be hearing Father Steve’s confessions to see just what exactly goes on between you two.”

“Unless a wet dream is a sin,” she counters, “I don’t think there’d be too much to hear.”

“Oh my,” Mark responds. “I like this one already.”

“Okay, you two, knock it off.” I can feel my ears going bright crimson, but I’m pleased the two of them hit it off. “And give me a beer.”

So we start drinking. They pick on me. We play drinking games. We play video games. We taunt the kitten.

“You’re not going to get stuck with a lousy old sweater, are you, Chasey?” Mark says over and over. “We’re going to get you a nice foxy lady cat.”

“What’s that all about?” Vicky asks.

“Long story,” I say.

We start in on tequila shots. And when we are so drunk that we can no longer keep our video-game cars on the video-game roads, we do the smart thing: we wander off into the woods, making crow noises in the night and laughing so hard we can barely walk. The sky is just turning gray with morning when we finally make it back to the rectory.

Mark scoops up Chase and goes to the guest room.

Vicky throws herself on the couch. “I’m staying here,” she says.

“Fine by me,” I say, a wee little voice in the back of my head making a wee little noise about the fact that her car has been parked out there overnight. What will the parishioners think? Whatever. I grab a blanket from the hall closet and spread it over Vicky, who’s got her arm thrown across her eye.

“You run a weird show, Padre,” she says. “Daddy would be proud.”

“Yeah,” I say, somewhat touched. “Wonder what Bishop Flemming would think?”

“Well, don’t worry your pretty little head over that,” she slurs. “Now go to bed.”

I’m pulled up through my hangover by a clanging in the kitchen. Sunlight streams in through the windows and it sounds like someone is beating on a pot with a wooden spoon. It’s two in the afternoon. I stumble into the kitchen, on the way noticing Vicky trying to bury her head under a pillow.

In the kitchen, Mark is beating on a pot with a wooden spoon.

“Mark! What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m trying to wake you people up. The day is getting old. We have work to do.”

The kitchen reeks of bacon and eggs and coffee.

“The Lord does not smile upon the lazy,” he says, banging on the pot again. “Bring out your dead!” he yells.

“Okay! Okay! We’re up,” I say. “Now stop it before some old lady in the parish hears all this and decides to call the bishop or something.”

“Oh,” Mark says, suddenly stopping. “Guess that wouldn’t be too good.”

“No. Not at all.”

He puts the pot and spoon in the drain board. “Anyway, you and Vicky need to wake up and eat so we can get to work.”

“Work? Work on what?”

“Everything,” he says.

“Jesus,” I say, stumbling off to the bathroom.

“I heard that,” he shouts. “Name in vain. That’s ten Hail Marys for you.”

As we sit down to Mark’s afternoon breakfast, he begins to prattle on about his plans. His first order of business is to “do
something
” to the rectory, which he considers a travesty of late ’60s design. “This wood paneling and toothpaste-colored paint. That’s just got to go.”

“Okay, Queer Eye, slow down. I don’t have that kind of budget.”

“First of all, Steve. It doesn’t cost that much. Secondly, I got plenty saved up and it’ll give me something to do.”

Vicky and I look at each other.

“And speaking of money, how are things going on this festival?”

That’s right. At some point in the night, we’d filled him in on that.

“We’re almost there,” Vicky says.

“You got the carnies?”

“Yeah.”

“You got the booths lined up?”

“Just the carnie ones,” I say. “Haven’t gotten around to fooling with the rest.”

“What!” Mark shrieks.

Vicky rolls her eyes. “I tried to tell him.”

“Steve, you need the local booths. Arts, crafts, yadda-yadda-yadda. And what about the food?”

“Well, we have some volunteers,” Vicky says.

“Volunteers!” Mark practically shouts. “Are you nuts? You crazy? No volunteers. No. Doesn’t work that way.”

“Well, we are sort of new to this,” I say. “And since when did you come out of the festival heavens with knowledge direct from Festivus?”

“Hey, the one thing I did right at St. John’s was run these things for the Catholic school fairs. Anyway, hell, you don’t need any more fund-raisers. You’ll get the rest of your money from the caterers.”

“Really?” Vicky and I ask.

“Think about it. They pull up a trailer for the weekend and sell little itty-bitty tiny bowls of food for five bucks a shot. Then they gouge on the sodas and beer. And most of that money stays under the table.”

“But this is our first year,” Vicky says. “Why would they want to take the risk?”

“Are you kidding?” Mark replies. “These guys go to festival boards every year begging and pleading and weasling and bribing to be let in. But once a festival gets going, board members like to stay with what works. So if some of these newer guys smell a chance to get in on the ground floor? Forget it. They’ll fall all over themselves to pay you an up-front fee
and
give you a cut of the profits.”

He’s not done yet.

“Now. Rabbits? You get rabbits?”

“Rabbits? For what?”

Mark rolls his eyes. We could get a marbles tournament going with all the eye rolling going on at this table. “For what? Hellloooo. It’s the Rabbit Festival. You think the Good Lord is just going to send a fuzzy plague of little white bunnies to Grand Prairie?”

“But wouldn’t the caterers take care of that?” Vicky asks.

“Yeah,” I chime in.

“Not the eating kind, you morons.” Mark shakes his head as if he were an unwilling teacher instructing a couple of slack-jawed students.

“Then what?”

“The petting bunnies. Think of the children. The precious little children and the dollars that follow them. Parents come for the music. It’s the kids who get them to spend the money. So you’ll need bunnies. Lots of little white bunnies. Bunnies for racing. Bunnies for a petting zoo. In fact, call some farmers, get some sheep and goats and stuff for a petting zoo. It’ll stink a little, but hey, it’s open air. Hell, we can even sell bunnies. The parents will hate you, but it’s all about the precious little children.”

“But this is a church,” I counter, finally confident that I have at least one good point. “We’re not Barnum and Bailey. We’re not in this to turn a profit. It’s for the community.”

“Firstly, this is Louisiana and a festival is a festival is a festival. You attach that word to something, you have a responsibility. Secondly, this is the Church. Profit, my boy, profit. Besides, do you really feel like starting over from scratch next year? Bake sales and plate lunches and all that crap.”

That phrase again. “Next year.” And the year after. And the year after. But I hear these words coming out my mouth: “Actually, some of those things were kind of nice. I felt like we were all coming together as a parish.”

Mark stares at me, his mouth slightly open.

“Well, you can kiss my ass if you think I’m starting over from scratch,” Vicky says. “You might have had fun walking around like lord of the manor, but those things were a lot of work, Steve. It’s all you next year. If it’s up to me, and I’m chairman of the festival board, I say we go with Mark. Hell, I say I resign and give it over to Mark.”

Boy, did she wake up on the wrong side of the couch this morning! Talk about yin and yang. I’ve got the Martha Stewart of hangovers on one side and a bitter woman on the other.

Mark puts up his hand. “Oh no, sweetie. No chairman for me. Let’s call me a festival consultant.”

“A consultant?” Vicky asks.

“Sure.” Mark then looks at me. “That way, if the natives start asking questions about your new boyfriend, you’ll have a perfect excuse. The Lavender Mafia man is here to take care of a little business.”

Makes sense to me.

“Okay. So there we go. We’ll set all that up. Any money left over, we’ll stick it into an interest-bearing account. And who knows? If I’ve got free time and I’m still puttering around here, I can do some day-trading with it. By next year at this time we’ll be able to fly in the Rolling Stones if they’re still alive.

“Speaking of,” he continues without much of a pause. I wonder if he’s ever going to stop talking. “What kind of music yall got lined up?”

Vicky and I look down at the table, sheepishly. This has been a point of contention on the board. It was the one thing that Miss Emilia, Miss Celestine, Miss Pamela, and Denise had agreed on. There absolutely had to be music at the festival. But we had fought long and hard to convince them that it was just too much, too soon for such a small village. It would be too expensive, too much of a hassle.