The Trinity Game (42 page)

“And hallucinogenic,” he said.

“Sure, if you drink about a cup of the stuff. We use about twenty drops. At most, it enhances your sense of connectedness to the world, boosts your awareness of your own mental imagery, and causes a slight numbing of the tongue.”

“
Loa-in-a-bottle
,” said Daniel, handing it back to her. “Very clever.”

“It is an aid to spiritual insight. It does not render that insight false.” She sighed deeply. “We agreed that the goal was for Tim to receive what I provide. You may not like it, but this is it.”

“Exactly right,” said Trinity. “You can wait in the car. I’m going back in for my date with Mr. Shango.”

Ory shook her head. “I’m sorry, Tim. You left the peristyle in the middle of a possession. You walked out on Papa Legba. The crossroads are no longer open to you tonight…and I don’t think he’ll open them again to you any time soon, after such disrespect.”

Daniel could not detect any insincerity in her at all. He didn’t know what to think. He said, “So you actually believe that old man in there is possessed by Legba?”

“What does it matter? He believes it, and I believe he gets something of value from it. Daniel, you’re looking for absolute knowledge about the ultimate reality of the universe. I don’t have that knowledge. Nobody does. What I have is faith. And what I
do
know is, people have an inborn need to believe in the spirit, and ritual helps sustain that belief. And that is what I provide.”

Daniel gestured toward the sound of the drums. “So all this is just a ritual to sustain belief in something we can’t understand. That seems pretty hollow to me.”

“Not hollow at all,” said Priestess Ory. “It’s healing, and it’s very human. Listen, I didn’t come up in Voodoo, I was raised a good Catholic girl, but I always knew I wanted to be a healer of some kind. I tried the conventional route, got a PhD in clinical psychology at Loyola, spent fifteen years as a therapist. Fifteen years of frustration…successes were too few and too fleeting. Then I found Voodoo, and it just spoke to me. And I’ll tell you, I’ve helped more people by waving a chicken’s foot over their heads than I ever did in endless discussions of how their daddies were mean to them as children. I don’t deny there’s an element of performance in the ritual, just as there is for a priest giving communion, just as there is in all human ritual. But whatever the ultimate reality behind it, the bottom line is, it works.” From the backyard, the drums changed tempo and the singing stopped. Priestess Ory glanced toward the gate. “I must get back to my
ounfo
.” She turned and walked away.

Trinity stepped forward and snatched the car keys from Daniel’s hand. “Walk with me.” He marched off down the middle of the street.

Daniel caught up and fell in beside him. Trinity kept marching in silence. Daniel said, “I know you’re angry, but wandering around the Lower Nine in the middle of the night is a very bad plan. Let’s at least get the car.”

“I’m not angry, I’m thinking. I always think better at a brisk walk. Be quiet a minute so I can hear my thoughts.”

The skyline of downtown New Orleans glowed faintly in the distance, and the sound of drums faded away as they walked the empty streets, Trinity listening to his thoughts and Daniel listening to their footsteps and watching for trouble among the ruins.

They reached an intersection and Trinity turned right. Daniel stopped him.

“Not that way. No streetlights.” So they turned left instead.

A few blocks later, Trinity stopped walking. “Can you find the way back to the car?” he said.

“I think so.” Daniel pointed down the next block.

“Let’s go.”

And as they walked, Trinity shared his thoughts. “I’m not angry with you…I actually think everything happened tonight exactly the way it was supposed to. Think about it: We all react to things according to the people we are. God knows who you are, and he brought you into this knowing you’d react exactly as you did. I wasn’t led here to commune with Shango at all, I was supposed to experience this night just as it happened.” His hand swept across the devastation all around. “I was supposed to see all this.” Even in the dim light, Daniel caught the glint of his smile. “Nothing tonight happened by accident. And I’m beginning to understand what it means.” He stopped at the intersection, looked around. “God, I wish there were some street signs. Which way?”

Dawn was now breaking, and everything looked different bathed in its dim blue light. “Right, I think. No, wait.” Daniel scanned for something recognizable, came up empty. “Damn. I don’t know.”

Trinity dug into his pocket, pulled out a quarter. “Heads it’s right, tails left.” He flipped the coin, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his hand. “Tails.” He turned left and resumed walking. A foghorn moaned somewhere in the distance.

Halfway down the block, Trinity came to an abrupt stop, his mouth hanging open.

Daniel reached for the gun. “What?”

“Oh my…will you look at that!” Trinity ran toward the ruins of a single-story commercial building. The cinderblock structure
was still in one piece, but the glass double-doors and all the windows were gone, and the sign was smashed. “You see?” he said. “This proves it.”

Daniel looked to where he was pointing, to the smashed sign above the entrance.

T__ TRIN__Y WORD OF GOD MIN_______ NUTRIT_____ CENTER

The sign jolted his memory, and he recognized the place from a photograph he’d seen on Trinity’s website. It was his uncle’s old soup kitchen.

Nothing tonight happened by accident…

Trinity sat on the curb. “Now I can see it clearly.”

Daniel sat beside him. “Tell me.”

“OK…all my life I was a grifter, religion just a con, I didn’t even believe in God. But I
did
build schools and clean-water wells in Africa and a medical clinic in Haiti, and I
did
fund the largest soup kitchen in Louisiana. Sure, I did it just to keep the IRS off my back, but that’s not the point, just like my lack of belief wasn’t the point. The point is I was doing good works, whatever the reason. But after Katrina, I abandoned the very people who made me rich. When this city desperately needed some good works, I ran off to Atlanta and revved up the money machine again. And then the voices started. And the tongues.” Trinity looked back to the sign. “Remember that last sermon, before the bomb went off? I thought God left me up on stage looking like an idiot with nothing to say, but I was wrong. He said everything. It was the only time he’s ever spoken through me clearly, no backwards tongues, just straight out. And he said:
Faith without works is dead
.”

“But you’re saying more than that. You’re saying faith is irrelevant.”

“Of course faith is irrelevant. God brought together a Catholic priest, a Voodoo mambo, and a total unbeliever. I don’t think He cares what the hell we believe—or even
if
we believe—as long as we live the word. Think of it this way: In my dream, Mama Anne said, ‘There’s only one God—everything else is metaphor.’ Now, strip away all the metaphors, and what is the one single commandment common to every decent religion ever known?”

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“Exactly. Every religion in human history has had a variation of it, but why do so few people live by it? Because of all the other crap, because of the metaphors. Jew or Muslim or Christian or Hindu or Voodoo, everybody’s trying to connect to the same fundamental truth, but they’re confusing themselves, taking the metaphors literally. They’ve all got their checklists—
I don’t work on the Sabbath, I don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, I don’t eat pork, I don’t drink, I don’t commit murder, whatever
—but in the meantime, they treat each other like shit. Taking the metaphors literally gives them a free pass to duck out of the real heavy lifting. Hell, look around.” Trinity gestured to the street. “And I don’t just mean this, I mean look at the state of the whole world. People do the easy stuff, they run around bragging about their faith in God and their love of their fellow man…but easy to say ain’t easy to do. And love is a verb. It carries obligation.”

Love is a verb.
The weight of it hit Daniel with an almost physical force. It was the very foundation of Jesus’s message to the world
. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another
. It was also the Catholic prayer for the holy day of Corpus Christi…now just two days away.

Daniel stood and faced the old soup kitchen. “I’ve spent the last fourteen years searching for a miracle,” he said, “searching for evidence that God is present in the world. But you know, I think what I was really looking for was that feeling I had as a kid…when you were God’s messenger and I was His messenger’s companion. The feeling that I was living in a state of grace.”

“That feeling came from your belief that we were helping people,” said his uncle. “I think you’ve spent the last fourteen years looking in the wrong places, son. It isn’t about miracles or proof or having God on speed dial. You want to be close to God? Reach down and help your neighbor. Faith without works is dead…and maybe in the end, works is
all
that matters.” Trinity stood and put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “It is God’s
only
commandment.”

D
aniel danced around the heavy bag, snapping off left jabs and pounding home right hooks, left uppercuts, the bag rattling its chains, sweat pouring down his brow.

The Saint Sebastian’s Boys Athletic Club hadn’t changed a bit. When Daniel rang the doorbell just after sunrise, Father Henri had welcomed him with a hug and a pat on the head. The old priest set up a couple of cots for Daniel and Trinity in the back rooms and then handed Daniel a key to the front door. No questions asked.

Daniel reversed his footwork and pounded the bag with another newly remembered combination, amazed by how being in the old gym melted the years away, brought it all back.

Trinity had his brisk walks, Daniel had this.

It wasn’t just the boxing exercises flooding back. He remembered himself as eighteen-year-old Danny Byrne, remembered how it felt to be that kid. Soon-to-be New Orleans Golden Gloves Welterweight Champion. Living with the fathers and more than a little relieved that these particular priests in this particular parish didn’t seem to have a thing for teenage boys. Good student, and street-smart as hell, courtesy of a childhood spent with the Reverend Tim Trinity, grifter-at-large. Enough swagger to carry on a relationship with a beautiful and smart college grad and drink with her friends in bars that catered to grownups.

But scheduled to enter the seminary after his next birthday. Scheduled to become a priest. On a mission to find a miracle.

He had told himself that it was a great way to get a free university education. He had told himself he’d find a miracle before his twenty-sixth birthday and still be a young man with his whole life ahead of him, an advanced degree on his resume, and the stain of the con man washed clean.

He had told himself a lot of things. He had even told himself that,
if it was
meant to be
, he might still end up with Julia.

He was a smart kid. He could rationalize anything.

But he couldn’t face the truth. Truth was, Daniel was an angry young man, and more than just angry. Trinity’s betrayal of his boyhood trust had provided a perfect channel for it, but truth was, the anger had always been with him, a deep rage that rushed like ocean currents far below the surface calm. Rage for a mother who died in childbirth and, worse, a father who chose to kill himself rather than stay and raise his newborn son.

And rage for himself. Because, underneath it all, in the silent stillness of his innermost self, this thought was always waiting for him:
I killed my parents.

At the seminary, Daniel had worked on it with church therapists, and in time he came to accept his personal history with not much more emotional baggage than most people carry through life. And he had learned to be honest with himself, most of the time, which he figured was about as much as anyone can ask for.