Catholic Guilt
Lolo had a breakfast date with a charming man, a writer with interesting hair and a bright wild eyes and a good sense of humor. He was witty and treated her with respect, opening the door and standing when she stood, which was new to her and made her a little uncomfortable she hated to admit. He dressed like he was from another time, in tight green wool highwater pants, green and black socks, and shiny green wingtip shoes that looked like a deep polished marble floor. She couldn’t help but to look at his legs under the table and when he playfully asked if he reminded her of a leprechaun, she smiled defensively and said, no, presuming that to be a negative, but not quite sure. He wore a dark green sports coat, like those golfers wear, and he gently placed his Boston Redsox ballcap on the table and ran his fingers through his hair.
“It’s alright,” he offered wryly with a grin. “I don’t mind being made fun of.”
“I wouldn’t ever make fun of you. You just don’t dress like anyone around here. It’s...unique. But I like it.” As much as she liked it, which was no lie, it made her feel uncomfortable. As metropolitan as she liked to fashion herself to be, she was little different than the Wrangler and cowboy boot wearing farmers who were all she had ever known, many of who gave her and her date a look as they came and went in and out of the busy diner. As beautiful as she was, she was a country dirt road lined with trailers and burned and dilapidated barns that ended up at the same place.
He grinned, sipping a cup of coffee. Yet, in his expression was a pain she detected which he clearly suppressed behind grins and quips. He wasn’t like the rubes she knew around here in this old farming town whose existence and prosperity, if one might call it that, came solely from the slaughtering of unsuspecting pigs. A sign on the way in to town boasted that McNaught was the pork capital of Ohio and several local businesses had hokey pig-themed names, including Poling’s Paint Pig Supply, Harry’s Big Pig Hot Dog Stand, a generic Piggly Wiggly not affiliated with the southern chain, and the Peel and Squeal, a gas station where everyone bought lottery tickets and cigarettes. Although Lolo was worldly in that she was an avid reader and had an imagination greater than most of her fellow yahoos, her body was very much happy here and she knew that she would never move away. She had become so used to living in McNaught that traveling to any larger metropolis made her feel like she was having a panic attack. So she let the outside world come to her. She told her date that she had an anxiety disorder. It was ironic that she often used that as an icebreaker.
“Well, I have a snoring disorder,” he replied dryly. He had a kind face with gentle features. They laughed. The waitress brought their food and they shared a look. One of those pleasant kind of looks that seems to stick. It would be a body blow if this had been a boxing match, he thought. He had the mind of a writer, but though he didn’t express himself as such, he was always creating such metaphors in his head that made him smile before they dissipated into an inevitable nothingness. Poofs, he called them. Lolo knew him as a writer because that is how he presented himself. Yesterday he was a lawyer and last week he was an amateur baseball player. He was thinking of being a pilot tomorrow.
“Have you been to McNaught before?” Lolo asked forking at her eggs.
“Yes,” he answered truthfully. “I worked on a farm up the road as a kid. My uncle lived down this way, so several summers I spent working that farm.”
“What kind of farm?”
“It was a pig farm.”
“Oh. Who is your uncle? Maybe I know him,” she smiled.
“Robert Hartley. Well, Bob, I suppose.”
“Is he related to...”
“Bob passed. And it’s best to leave him that way,” he replied coldly. He relaxed in his booth seat like a fisherman relaxes with his rod and reel in hand, another one of his metaphors that floated like a cloud in his head before going poof. “Bob died in a barn fire.”
“Bonfire?”
“Barn fire.”
“Oh, I think I remember hearing of it when I was young.” Lolo smiled uneasily, feeling she had touched a nerve in her clumsy inquiry.
One of her many attributes was that she was very fond of animals. But despite eating pigs all of her life, she was sad to think of a barn full of them burning so the thought of a barn fire made her morose. She was a famed rescuer of abandoned cats. She told him of dozens of cats she had saved from certain death and he listened intently, very seldom looking away from her. He didn’t tell her that he was fond of cats too, but his wide smile as she told him of her harrowing rescues and them living a life of purpose in her barn as mousers spoke well enough for that which he needn’t say. He had never heard the term “mouser” before, and he thought that if he truly was a writer, and if this was a story he would someday write, a simple first date over breakfast at a diner, he would call it just that. The Mouser.
“A mouser,” he repeated fascinated.
“Yes,” she smiled back. “Their purpose is to kill mice.”
“It is good to have a purpose,” he remarked.
“Not everyone seems to though. Often people live such aimless lives. I think. These days, especially.”
“In that, I agree.” He raised his coffee mug and offered her a toast. She giggled but toasted nonetheless.
Patrick Parker was 37 and had two kids he hadn’t seen in five years and an estranged wife who never filed for divorce. She packed her things one night and left for Georgia and Patrick never heard from her again. He didn’t think often of her, or why she had left him, but sometimes he did and the pain of it would begin to shut him down before he killed it, the way mousers kill mice. His guilt was a barn full of scurrying mice.
“Were you ever married?” she asked.
He paused for a moment. “Yes.”
“You’re not still married are you?” she laughed uneasily.
“No,” he softly said shaking his head.
She looked across the table at him smiling.
“I don’t like talking about it,” he admitted. “Catholic guilt, I suppose.”
“Oh. Well, say a few Hail Marys and all will be well, right?”
“A few won’t begin cover it.”
“Can’t be that bad. Did you cheat?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well, we all have some measure of guilt. It’s what separates us from the animals. Let us forgive each other of any sins and start fresh right here and now. Pretend this saltshaker is Mother Mary and directly ask her for forgiveness for your sins.” Lolo pushed the saltshaker to the center of the table and adorned her with a white robe napkin. She waited for him to speak and encouraged him with her eyes. She didn’t mean anything by it and hoped he wouldn’t be insulted.
“Mother Mary forgive me,” he smiled looking directly at the saltshaker. “Okay. Let’s have a drink.”
“It’s 10 am!”
“This is a bar isn’t it?”
“Sure. By night. Not at 10 am,” she replied.
“I’m Catholic, you’re forgetting. Bars are bars at any hour.”
“Do people call you Pat?”
“No one living,” he joked.
As Lolo set across the table in front of a plate of half-eaten fried eggs and potatoes, Patrick felt a tinge of something different spark within him. Something lost somewhere that suddenly came alive again, the way Frankenstein’s monster came alive on an electrified slab of metal in a dark dank castle. He drank coffee and smiled at her as a fog of silence settled between them. And as much as Lolo promised herself that she would not talk about her exes, sure enough her mouth fell open almost involuntarily and drama tumbled out like a troupe of clumsy acrobats. Like some bad Danielle Steele novel.
“Travis was a monster. He had a darkside I never knew about. I was recently divorced and was at a bar and he came in, tall, dark and handsome and swept me off my feet. We went to high school together, but I never hung out with him back then. I was fat and nerdy. A while after we started dating I realized he was an alcoholic. The next morning he would always apologize for what happened the night before. He was such a manipulator. His excuse was his alcoholism. After we broke up he got so bad he would come out to my house and sleep in his truck when I wouldn’t let him in. The next morning he would be passed out in his truck covered in urine and vomit. My girls would see him on the way to the school bus. He was dying. His body was shutting down.”
“And what would you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you found him there in his truck covered in urine and vomit?”
“I’d clean him up,” Lolo trailed off pathetically. She suddenly realized how defeated she was and how sad it all sounded. And somewhere inside of herself she realized she was always going to fall for the monsters. What good men she had actually known she pushed away because the laws of attraction were nothing that she could control or weigh to the favor of good sense. So she gave up and let herself be a perpetual character on Hee-Haw or the girl in some bad country song. She sunk down into the booth cushion and consoled herself with the fact that at least she got two beautiful daughters from a shitty marriage with an apathetic sociopath who never deserved her. Another of her monsters. She had an entire jar of them.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she said banally, though she really never found a reason for the herpes she got from the drunk which she had to explain to every new guy who came along and which weeded many out.
Patrick wasn’t one of them and smiled at her, though he abhorred such corny cliches. Nonetheless, he shook his head and smiled sympathetically. He finished his plate of pancakes and sipped his coffee which wasn’t as good or as hot as he had hoped it would be and no amount of sugar or cream would help it. He looked at the quiet bar and wished again for a drink. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he craved drinks on occasion, sometimes at 10 am. All the glasses hung on the racks perfectly and the bottles were tented with white Dixie cups which made them look like Klansmen.
Lolo watched him with her eyes and began to feel that feeling she had when she was falling in love, which was like drowning, so she desperately asked questions to find out more about him to stay afloat before she willingly committed herself to the fate of the great unknown once more. She pretended inside herself, as she always did, that it had never been this way before, or that she could prevent it if she wanted to. As though drowning was a matter of choice, or the body’s simple refusal yet alterable to swim.
Patrick answered as though he were being interrogated, calmly and softly with little apparent emotion, his hand laid out on the goldflake table as though electrodes were attached to his fingertips and wired to an invisible machine. Mother Mary stood stoically between them robed in a napkin. Lolo didn’t mean to sound like an inquisitor and twice apologized, but he welcomed her curiosity with such equanimity that he only encouraged her. And at the end of the session when all those electrodes had been removed and that machine put safely away, she was sure she was in love. This time with a good guy and she made it known to him without saying a word.
But again her mind went astray and she began talking about the serial killer who she was sure lived around here and she admitted that she had a fascination with serial killers and often listened to podcasts and read about them in books by retired detectives that practically stunk of cigar smoke and cheap scotch. She even claimed a favorite killer, so to speak, which made Patrick doubt his gut feeling for a moment that he was in love with her as well. And she went on and on about Ted Bundy and BTK and Richard Ramirez and some rich guy near Cleveland who killed gay boy prostitutes and buried them on his estate. She settled her story by declaring that he killed himself under a tree, or in his car, when detectives found buried bones on his property. She seemed unsettled that she couldn’t remember the detail of his suicide, but excused it and went on to talk about someone else before apologizing to Patrick for being so weird, though finding it weird that Patrick had only heard of Ted Bundy. She stopped short of telling him about her body board, as she called it.
Patrick smiled and forgave her, though there was nothing to forgive. Dozens of dates like this he had been on and they all started out with some reasonable promise, but they ended up capsizing or emulating themselves, he thought metaphorically with a modest grin of satisfaction before that poof. But in Lolo’s eyes he saw more than he had seen before and despite her oddities, he felt a different sort of burning. One that would not relent. Normally it was a bonfire, but she was wildfire. And through a gap in the window blind a stream of sunlight danced in and made the shape of a yellow heart over her left breast. Patrick stared at it, always being one to follow signs. And he thought of when he was young and gathering those pigs for Bob how there was a bloodstain on the concrete that was in the shape of a heart and how he stared at it until it was indifferently washed away by some shit-kicking grub with a hose. And he thought of the terrifying sound of their screams when they were slaughtered and the frightened look in their scared blue eyes and how they convulsed before the moment came little different than a person.
His monster that had come alive on that slab had terrorized the village but had fallen in love with something pretty suddenly, a little girl at the edge of a pond. And he offered her a flower and she smiled and accepted it, not seeing him as the monster that others saw him as, but just as he was. He felt he was a good man or else he wouldn’t have felt so damn sorry for those pigs which he could never get out of his mind. He had simply made some mistakes along the way and ended up here. Single at 37 with two kids he hadn’t seen in years. Perhaps, he thought wildly in a few moments of loud silence between them, that it was fate. And all his mistakes and misfortunes were meant to be made because if they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have met Lolo.
His wild wandering thoughts were interrupted by bells on the diner door that jingled as a little girl came in with her grandmother in tow which made him think of his youngest daughter. And a part of him fissured again before being fused by Lolo’s eyes and warm smile. Then he remembered those pigs that he had let out of the barn before the fire that stood around outside in the dark and Bob laying on the barn floor with his head split open, doused in gasoline.
He smiled at the little girl as her loudmouth grandmother was telling everyone who would listen that the FBI was down the road and had found another body. And though Lolo didn’t want to be rude to Patrick, she perked up and listened and asked the grandmother where exactly, and the grandmother said she didn’t know, but that they had Possum Hollow Road blocked off and she figured it was somewhere down there by the old Hanson’s mill. Lolo’s eyes lit up thinking of her body board and of the next letter she would write to the paper about where and when the monster would strike again. She’d offer an uninvited profile. She was happy to hear that the FBI was in town because the sheriff’s department wouldn’t listen to her anymore and she knew it meant the FBI was at last acknowledging what she had said for the past two and a half years in various letters to the McNaught Daily Squealer. There was a killer on the loose.
“He prays upon young college-aged women. A few young mom’s. Not prostitutes or drug addicts like many of the others. No. Always on pretty young women, educated, middle to upper class.” She could hardly control her excitement as Patrick smiled at her enthusiasm, thinking morbidly of what became of those pigs after the fire. He was only 12 and couldn’t save them. They were herded on a truck and crammed in so tightly they couldn’t move and shipped somewhere else to be slaughtered. And he felt sorry for them and angry at how they just went up that ramp into the truck, though they could have ran free. Then he thought of that heart on Lolo’s chest only moments ago, which had since faded because of drifting clouds or the Earth’s rotation in relation to the sun. Her body was without any direct light and seemed to be fading fast away.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “You probably think I am so weird!”
“No,” he replied pleasantly. “I think you’re wonderful.”
He watched the little girl with her grandmother oblivious to all the talk of a serial killer and sitting on a barstool waiting patiently for her food. She was much like the little girl in Frankenstein by the pond that the monster throws in. He could not remember why the monster threw the girl in the water, but he does. It doesn’t matter, he supposed. The thought of that drowning girl made his heart ache just as those pigs made it ache.
Apart from Lolo’s preoccupation with serial killers, he found himself falling in love with her so swiftly and unexpectedly that his before dim prospect of life suddenly had a rainbow and promise at its gloomy end. Guilt was washed away by hope. But the incessant chant and ruckus of the villagers and their torches in his troubled mind grew louder and louder and there was no way for him to suppress it apart from the Mother Mary saltshaker coming to life and personally forgiving him of all sin by dunking his head in Holy Water or pouring him enough shots. Despite all his flagellation, his penance could not be paid so simply as to fall in love with a decent woman and help her wash dishes and raise two kids. Yet her love would not relent.
But just when he was about to forget himself, what he looked like, what indeed he was at his core, he stared down at her plate of hashbrowns which were doused much too generously with ketchup and some absurd thought burglarized his mind of a bloody body lying on a creak bed and her cold and lifeless eyes staring up at him. And no amount of tears or beauty or translucent hearts could ever replace the appalling view he had of contorted corpses and dead pigs.
Lolo was infatuated by him, and at long last, she thought confidently inside herself, she would be with a decent man. A charming man who opened doors for her and treated her civilly and listened when she spoke. She giggled within herself, thinking that she had never dated a catholic and hoped that she hadn’t offended him with the Mother Mary bit. She wondered what Mass would be like. Or their wedding. She was making arrangements in her mind about when she would introduce him to her parents and her girls. But just as she was about to pick out the color pattern of their wedding and baby names, Patrick stood up abruptly, excused himself, and paid the check at the counter. Bells on the door jingled and a few FBI agents walked in for lunch. They had taken off their dark blue jackets but everyone knew who they were.
Patrick walked past them and stood beside the table near the door where Lolo sat watching him helplessly. She had her phone out to check for updates about the body. She looked up needlessly apologizing with a smile and he looked back absolving her of any unintentional discourtesy. He smiled too, apologizing to her and himself for what couldn’t be.
“Thank you for meeting me for breakfast, but I got to go.”
“Um... Well, okay,” she answered confused. Suddenly she was rejected and abandoned, only moments ago sure that their feelings had been very mutual, now thoroughly confounded. She excused it to her plain Jane nature, or her anxiety, or her morbid fascination with serial killers, or her ex drama she involuntarily introduced, or her confession of herpes of which he had allayed her of concern. But one of those things, she was sure, soured him and she would remain a hopeless romantic until some other country boob presented himself in such a way that she could pretend that he was something he was not until she found him in front of her house covered in urine and puke. And that prospect upset her enough to be happy single.
But disappointed with that which she could not control, her mind was soon impregnated with the thought of the green thumbtack that would be the body of Kallie Vorst. But she managed to say nothing else and he stood there for a long moment as though he wanted to explain, or wanted to change his mind, or for her to protest and change it for him. But he looked down in quiet despair glancing over again at those bloody potatoes before walking out. The bells on the door rang at his departure and all that was left of him in the diner was an empty coffee mug, a plate of syrup, and a memory in Lolo’s head that would be replaced by fancy thoughts of a serial killer. Her ultimate fantasy abuser. Maybe when they caught him, she thought luridly, she’d write him letters in prison. But what would she say.
A real chance to speak to actual FBI agents never presented itself before to Ms. Lolita Lowe or to anyone else in McNaught, so despite her trodden heart that was quite used to being mud-stomped, she grabbed her cup off coffee and sat at the counter near them so she could hear them talk, hoping they would give something away that they in their haughty professionalism never would. She glanced out the window and watched Patrick’s back as he walked away to his car, which was a few streets over. Then a coup d’oeil of their table revealed he had forgotten his Red Sox cap, but it was too late to catch him so she decided to hold on to it in case he ever came back. She watched him drive away and another chapter solemnly closed.
Some days later an eye witness emerged from one of the previous murders. They said they saw the victim, a pretty twenty year-old Rio Grande college student named Hannah Dorsey leaving a diner with a thin handsome man dressed in green. The papers called him “The Green Monster” because besides for his head-to-toe green attire, he wore a Boston Redsox cap. Lolo read the account on her phone as she sat in a loft in the barn with her barefeet dangling down, his hat backwards on her head. She looked down and watched what were once rescued and scared kittens instinctively chase and kill mice across the barn floor. Then she put her phone away and climbed down the ladder, went inside, kissed her girls goodnight, took off the hat, took a hot bath and went to bed. She looked up at the body board from bed until she closed her eyes. On the back of her eyelids she watched those mousers chase frantic mice and she fell asleep.
There was never another murder attributed to The Green Monster killer. He simply vanished and was never identified. Snow fell heavy on the fields the following January as a dark blue Amazon cargo van pulled down the lane. A black man in a thick acrylic jacket emerged from the van in stark contrast to his settings and trekked up to the door of the A-frame house. He asked for Lolita Lowe, who answered, and he handed her a package. When the van went away, the fields were blanched white again, undisturbed but for the tire tracks that rutted the snowdrifts that covered the partially plowed lane. In the small paper package was a self-published book, a wickedly critical self-realization. Only the self was the whole of humanity addressed as one being. No one was distinct. Everyone was one. There was a pen-sketched saltshaker on the otherwise barren-white cover and it was titled The Mouser with no author credit. It read like a 372 page confession which began: Holy Mary, Mother of God and Lady of Mercy, we confess to you that we are sinners, transgressors of the Holy Law, undeserving of Your Son’s mercy and love.
It was an apology to God. Not for himself but for everything. For everyone. In the end of the book the boy gets the girl and they live in paradise, a not-so-subtle reverse Eden, the last two people on Earth. It ends in darkness with a baby crying. Lolo read that book dozens of times and wore that Redsox hat almost everywhere she went. She got a tattoo of a saltshaker on her left inner forearm, which confused everyone besides for God and herself, who were one in the same according to the book’s author. She wondered if there would ever be another body, or if he would ever come back. Somehow she was satisfied that neither would come to pass.
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