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It is in the dark, wet, night, somewhere in rural Minnesota, when John Ward discovers that Father Garcia is a demon.
Alternatively, John Ward thinks he has always known. He’d like to believe the first statement– that the conception of Garcia, as a demon, sprung virgin and unbidden; born into the sodden, black, grass in Minnesota: like a saviour in a manger. However, he knows better. Biblically, he’s always been intimately aware of what Garcia is. It’s in his veins and pouring down the side of his wounds; it’s bloodlike and he’ll stitch that secret back into his body. It’s no fault of the other father; the blame lies in his own foul nature. If Garcia is a demon, then John is no man either.
John Ward is a prey animal. A good one. If Garcia was God’s soldier, and Gary was the vessel of The Beast, then John Ward was a sacrifice, wild with instinct. Unruly with cicada-singing in his breath. Wet lungs gasping with dew. The Lord makes all things with divine intent; when He made John He knew that he would spend his life being hunted and Made him so. He put him together like a pedigree greyhound. His father taught him silence, his mother taught him hiding, and the Holy Father taught him meekness. He has the quick-pace heart of a rabbit that survives. The flinch-flee reaction of a deer, vanishing into the woods. He has the cowering spine of an opossum, playing dead. He is at his best when he is gritting his teeth and trying to breathe without sound and praying for another moment alive. That’s the divine purpose of his creation. Toothless. He doesn’t bite. He runs.
It has led him too far, into too many strange places, for John not to recognise it as God’s plan. Every hair on his arms is lifted with divine intent, when he crouches down in the bedroom of a once-girl now-not and prays. It’s the Holy Ghost, holding his breath for him, when he goes limp and unbreathing with fear.
Spinel called him a self-made-saviour. John barked a laugh that was added to the compendium of symptoms of insanity. A saviour? He’s hardly a survivor. He knows not how to heal, how to fix, or how to help. His life is littered with the ruins of others; his own, strewn between like weeds. It is paved with good intentions, and his own crumbled remains; there is nothing and nobody to save. Not him. He knows only how to keep himself walking, running, pacing. To hide and burrow down, even into his own mind. He is not a hero.
He is simply just prey.
And so, like all good quarry, like all clever animals of hunting, he develops a sixth sense. He is prescribed medication after medication, which he hides. And hides. He stares enviously at the lines of orange bottles, on nights where sleep is caught and butchered in the sharp canines of memories. He cannot dull this sense for all the peace in the world. It is some sort of wild running, his blood racing through his veins, pumping through his heart, by which he lives. Alive, only by the mercy of his own instincts; medication will render him a dead creature, sedate and silent and domesticated. It’s what he tells himself, gasping awake in the pitch black. It is life pouring through him, breath wheezing against aching lungs. It is life. He is surviving and it’s okay. It’s more than enough, like this.
His marriage with Molly exists on tumultuous grounds because he is so used to the chase that settling down has made him feel caged. He bites at her fingers, a little. Snaps, then cowers. Guilty, he haunts the kitchen, the garage, the churches. John admits to himself, he finds it that he cannot enjoy her presence at night when he is too wound up. Or in the morning. Mostly, he loves her; from afar. A wild dog, watching enviously. She’s so beautiful his gums ache vividly. And so impossible he feels afraid. He is haunted by phantom pains of clawing desperately at any remaining chance of living. The sense which makes him good at realising when a stare may linger, or when a noise may whisper, keeps him alive. It keeps him alone, and that, in all senses, is safety. He doesn’t say that, when she gives him A Look. When he sleeps on the couch, ousted from the bed. He itches for distance. He itches for the wind whistling, his heart racing, his breath short and shallow.
He writes the note with hardly shaking hands.
It’s good to be running again.
He meets Garcia; they’re both slick to the skin with blood and sick with aliveness. The man racks his shotgun and says “Be not afraid.”
John thinks he should have fled, for his sixth sense was screaming. Because he was afraid. Terrified. He should have listened to that quick-beating prey heart which has never led him wrong. Should have not come close to the man, in desperate need of companionship. Should not have mistaken him for a friend, or a saviour, or another rabbit.
He knew, in that moment, what Garcia was. Perhaps he came out of the dark too inhuman; his shape all too wrong; or his voice, holding onto the rasp of a Beast. John’s not sure, and his mind, still slow on blood loss and adrenaline, had not seen it. But his heart knew. It raced and banged itself bloody against his ribcage in a terrible symphony of fright. A deer, which has heard the growl of the wolf in the underbrush. A rabbit, catching the brief downwind of a fox. A mouse, seeing the flick of a cat’s shadow. He had recognised, in some part, what he was facing down. He should have run. He should’ve tried to spare himself from his fate.
But what could he have done?
Like all good prey, he knows when running is futile. He knows when it is best to crawl up and imitate a corpse. He knows when to grit his teeth and retreat to a place, in his mind, where nothing hurts. (It’s a pond, behind his seminary. He sits and waits the worst of the pain out, he watches the half-remembered birds flutter like paper tearings across the pavings and tries not to ache.) He played dead often, in his life. Seminary, when older priests wanted to establish their favour. An obedient lamb, he became quiet with fawning and turning himself inside out to become invisible. To Molly, when she came scrapping for some sort of fight, to wheedle an emotion out of a husband which felt neither fear nor favour towards her, but only a steady attempt to hide himself in her recesses. He laid down on the bed and feigned sleep when she came home late. Creeping along the woods in Snake Meadow Hill, he prayed that nobody, no thing, would see him; covered himself in blood and gore, ready to feign nothingness.
A rabbit like John Ward can outrun many wolves. He is wise in this. But he knows that the perils of man cannot, ever, be escaped. A rabbit is nothing but a trophy; mounted above the hearth; against the quick spray of buckshot. Is nothing but a smear grinded into the highway against the roar of an engine. Is nothing but a feeble priest, in the grand machinations of ritual circles and sacrifice and child death.
Poor rabbit.
In the aftermath of the Profane Sabbath, John Ward looks at Lisa. Lovely, lovely, Lisa. She has the same doe-like eyes as him. The same darting looks, fingers nervously twisting in her cardigan. He imagines the life they could lead. They would start running and never stop. They would vanish into safe obscurity, into burrows and high mountains and mouse holes.
He imagines the hiding. Arguments which are not arguments but rather simply the forecast of rain in the air, that causes them both to buckle down. Playing dead, again, on a queen-sized mattress. He can’t do it to her. Selfishly, he cannot do it to himself. They may find safety in each other for a good couple years, but they are animals of the hunt, and eventually, their instincts will lead them in different directions. Fear and hunger are his immortal companions, and even her lovely image shall always pale in comparison.
He kisses her, softly, on the cheek. She nuzzles his collarbone, and they breathe the same air for a moment. A quick, shared exchange of warm living, from lung to lung. Prey-breath, precipitated fear. Then, unsure of who turns first, they say quiet goodbyes into the darkness of the night. She gets into her own car, and leaves John with Garcia.
The man has been leaning on the hood of his Ford, smoking, with a journal in hand. He’s left handed– the ink has smudged all down the side. As John approaches, he finds his heart rate, which slowed down to a shared beat with Lisa, begins to speed back up to a chase.
“Let’s get in the car, hijo.” Garcia says, affectionately. John gives him a smile.
There is an old parable about willful blindness. About a man, a foolish man, who loves his wife so much he lets her poison him. He had hoped, one day, he would win her over with his wiles and charms. That he could, perhaps, escape his fate as it were. Dying alone, blood dripping out between his black teeth; that was a fruit of his blind labor. A stone watered, unsoftened. Fool men, die to a love that kills them. John wonders how much they have in common. He thinks, in sardonic reflection, about all the times they had sat thigh to thigh in a diner, heat passing like a secret, or every cigarette filter that had touched both their lips; a kiss, unspoken, unmeasured. Garcia had poisoned him, too. Made him sick on elixirs of hushed confessions, soft laughter, the warmth of a leather jacket as he slept in the passenger seat. Blind, fool man, John Ward. His teeth, black with nicotine rot, blood pouring like smoke from his lips; he waits, eyes closed, drinking up the presence of Father Garcia. He’ll die to a love that kills him.
So it is not to say that John finds out. It is more to say he wakes up to what he has always known. That he wants to refuse knowing.
But, still. It is in the dark, wet, night, somewhere in rural Minnesota, when John Ward discovers that Father Garcia is a demon.
It happens deceptively simply. It is such a stupid, foolish moment. John wishes he could just forget. That it would never have happened. That the world could keep going on like Garcia had never told John he was a demon, that he could keep pretending– Blind fools suffer lightly.
The air, that night, is burning with rain. So thick, so wet, it presses down upon them, forcing them against the ground. The moon is sightless; barely an impression of light comes between the pouring clouds and huddled trees. John is deafened under the onslaught, holding desperately to his cross between slippery, white-knuckled fingers. He’s fixated on trying to steady his footing; the ground swallows him up in a mudded embrace; or rejects him, grass springing up in slippery troves. He turns to say something, yelling over the rain and blackness of the night when he sees it, right before him. It happens, like a flash of lightning; descending upon them in a moment; then gone in another.
Garcia’s arm opens up under the cleaving claws of a demon like shredded paper, and Garcia turns around and loads it full of lead. The gunshots briefly light his face, which looks tearstained. It crumples to the ground, discarded, papery limbs folded bizarrely. Twitching. John’s belated cry of worry comes too late; unheard, anyways, over the downpour. The creature is dead, and the Father is free bleeding into the wind. Wildly, John looks around, but finds nothing but darkness. He raises his cross, spinning aimlessly, but Garcia grabs his shoulder and turns him around, pressing up to him. Heaving, their chests flutter like dying birds.
It is still, all of a sudden, the blue-green grass is wet with moonlight and rain. It falls around them, endless and loud, even forcing itself through the gaps in the woodland. It is the kind of night so dark it saps light from the ground, drinking hungrily whatever sun has left itself baking on the trees and grass. It doesn’t matter. Garcia is weeping blood like the sky. It’s a miracle he could even see the demon accurately enough to aim; God knows John can hardly place his own shivering white fingers a few inches from his face. John fumbles with his bag for a second. Garcia leans woozily against a tree, fingers clenching and unclenching against the shotgun. In the pitch black of the night, his face is as impenetrable and strange as the thick of the trees. John digs a first aid kit, and a flashlight out of his bag.
Garcia shouts “John, don’t–”
Before the light reveals the winking wound on Garcia’s arm, bleeding black. Sickly blood, eating up itself. Flesh zipping itself together, slowly. Fat bubbling up, condensing like curdling yellow milk, then dark-brown wet skin knitting together. Drooling tar; it can’t even look red, with how dark the blood is. There is no room for denial. Pitch as the night, a drop wells over the wound, trails down Garcia’s arm. It stains him dark. John has an insane thought that it looks so good. It’s like their history on his flesh, a black winding road cutting down the brown skin of the Midwest. His heart slows, beating Thank You, Lord, he’s so lightheaded with relief that Garcia is okay that he doesn’t even think. His wet, trembling fingers press up against Garcia’s burning hot hands, and squeeze. Then, lightning illuminates the entire clearing. John looks up, and in that millisecond, he sees Garcia’s eyes. Black holes with pinpricks of light. Gary Loves You, John’s mind supplies.
Then, two things occur to John Ward immediately. Firstly, that he has never seen the other Father bleed.
Secondly, it is time to run like prey.
He drops the flashlight, and bounds into the night; fast as a rabbit. Garcia lets him.
John dreams of ice fishing. His father, fleetingly present, had walked him to a frozen lake in Vermont and taught him something like silence. It was cold and quiet and still; a pleasant summary of their relationship at best. In his dream, he takes a pick and saw to Amy Martin’s pale face, and spears an embryonic baby onto the hook. Garcia crawls out from the yawning hole of her face and says “I love you. I love you I Love You I. Love. You” and it’s liturgy on fire.
He wakes up in the hotel bed, sweaty fingers grasping pathetically at the sheets. He’s too good at surviving to scream; that’s how you get caught. Run, rabbit. He bites his knuckles until something him-tasting makes his mouth water. Run, rabbit. His other hand untangles from the sheets; a reluctant lover; and grabs his crucifix. His eyes take a couple minutes to settle in the low lighting. His heart is pounding, pounding, crying like a choir boy– run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run.
Two things make themselves known in his vision. A circle of salt, white crystalline pure hope on the ground. It looks like snowfall. John shudders at the recollection, his dream suddenly pulsing and vivid behind his eyes. He must have made the circle before he crashed on the bed; he remembers, fizzily, the grains digging under his fingernails. He rolls over, shivering at his wet clothes clinging to his skin. The bedding is sodden too, now. A dark imprint of his body, curled fetal with sleep, appears against the sheets. It looks like a grave. He fumbles in the half-dark, heart thudding and disorientated, until he finds the vial of holy water he’d left on the bedside table. He looks across, at the time. It’s two in the morning.
John stays huddled up on the hotel bed, now shiveringly sleepless. The circle of salt on the cheap motel carpet feels like nothing compared to the rounds of bullets John himself loaded into the shotgun half a day ago. Oh God. Oh God. John bites his lip desperately. His mouth fills with heavy fear and blood. A tear, uncontrolled, flees down his clammy cheek. Another. He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes, praying. Silent, knuckles white with tension, he tries to turn himself into a ghost. Please, John prays, I am meek. I am unseen. I am safe. His heart, in response, beats and beats and beats. It pounds against his eardrums, relentless as rain. Outside, the drumming of it continues, sodden with the night. He fits his numb left hand into the gaping, terrified space between his teeth. His eyes close. The image of Garcia’s eyes, dark and yawning burns his eyelids and he smothers the involuntary, animalistic sob tearing up his throat. His blood is still ringing like the recoil of a shotgun.
Then, the sound of the lock turning, a key struggling, feels like an actual gunshot. John stiffens. His heart roars. Terrified of sobbing; of doing something like begging for his life – doing something like reaching out for Garcia, for someone he has always found safe, he bites down onto the flesh on the back of his hand until it burns warm and wet and bloody in his mouth. The wound opens up with a dim burst of pain. He stares down the door, as it latches open. As he watches the chain, keeping the door only tethered half-open, it begins to shimmer with heat. It goes red, then orange and incandescent. His eyes burn a little from not blinking.
The chain, now just a molten string of useless metal, drips onto the carpet. It hisses. Garcia pushes open the door, and John suddenly feels a terrible recognition from that first meeting. This is Garcia, inhuman; heat pouring off him. Garcia, blurry and something unrecognisable in his shape, holding on a little too desperately to his human look. As he comes closer, he muddles into a looser, more human form; but his eyes are still dark, whites receded. His hair falls from his face oddly. His body fits into his clothes just barely, eager to reform into something horrifying.
John presses himself up against the corner of the bed. Briefly, his eyes squeeze shut; an involuntary, terrified action. Please, he prays, wake me up, wake me up. This is some horrible nightmare. I will roll over, sweaty and asleep in the car, and Garcia’s jacket will be over me. Please. If The Lord is listening, he is not merciful. John knows; he’s prayed like this in the haunted room of a teenage girl and never woken up. His eyes sting. His tears brand themselves against his cheek, and he forces himself to look.
Garcia is staring, something destroyed in his inhuman expression. His coat is barely wet – dried by the flame of his body. The shotgun hangs limply by his side, clasped loosely in his hand. John avoids his face. He stares, trembling, at the weapon. Garcia opens his mouth; as if something needs to crawl out between his teeth; and then jerkily steps closer. John pushes even more of his body into the corner. Garcia reaches over, and leaves the shotgun in the line of salt. His hand recoils like he’s been stung, and he presses it against his body.
John, without thinking, scrambles off the bed and pulls the shotgun into his chest. It bears the weight of a loaded conscience. He retreats back to his corner, the Mossberg encased by his body. He hopelessly bares his crucifix to Garcia, who hardly flinches. It is his face, instead, which collapses entirely. His eyes, now just dark, warm pits, are wet. It looks like the night, outside. Garcia has always been a force of nature, John thinks, helplessly. Garcia slides down to sit on the floor, head knocked back against the other bed. He eyes the circle of salt with trepidation, then turns his face back to John.
He wets his lips, searching for words. John recovers faster.
“You lied to me.” He says. It’s not an accusation, really. It’s just grief.
“Yes.”
“You told me… You told me my faith kept me safe. From demons.” Like you, goes unsaid.
“It does.”
Neither of them speak. Garcia clears his throat. He’s unable to meet John’s stare, gaze stuck to the curtained window.
“There are many reasons for faith to falter.” He stalls, before steeling himself. His voice is definitive, fatalistic. He knows what he’s saying will kill something.
“But truly, it is only ever one thing. As Adam chose Eve, and as man chose to sin…” He trails off, suddenly unwilling to speak.
“What?” John knows the answer. He wishes he didn't. Horror curdles in his stomach. John knows the root of sin, like he had known the nature of Garcia. His heart beats like he knows.
“Desire.” Garcia is not looking at him anymore . “Do you desire me, John Ward?”
John has no words for this. He stares, unwilling to confess. Please, he thinks, I am playing dead.
“John, I am an old thing. An old, powerful thing.” He struggles, wordless. He is inexplicable, and wanting to be known, he is trying to reason himself out of existence.
“Please. If I’d– God–” Garcia is unkempt. It’s a glorious image and terrible and John can see some of Eden’s walls coming apart in his composure.
“If I’d ever wanted to hurt you, it’d be so easy. So fucking easy, John.” He says this, gravely, growling. The night creeps into his voice, all baritone and south-homesick-sweet. John shivers by the sound of it. He sounds like he dreams of it, a little. Like when he’s touching John’s shoulder, telling him ‘Good work, mijo’, he’s thinking of how papery thin his companion is. How breakable and utterly mortal. How John looks, folded up in death, pale and broken like a tiny bird; and it makes his voice tremble. It frightens Garcia, and that knowledge emboldens John. Oh. John thinks. He’s in love with me. And it terrifies him. Father Garcia is in love with me; and he’s afraid.
John watches Garcia, perched on the edge of the other single bed. He looks ready to take flight– never has John been the one left behind and it is a whole night of revelations. It’s strange; John thinks, feeling a sense of single minded clarity for once; That when cornered, afraid, gnawing at my own bones, I am most divine. I am closest to His great intention. His heart beats slowly and surely, staring down Garcia; it strikes, a church bell tolling with all the certainty of scripture. A deer in eerie, sucking headlights; in the crux of the crossroads between dying and desiring John makes a quiet deal with the devil. His breath comes out, not whistling, as the wind through rain-slick leaves, not whining or rattling or pouring through as blood from the sky. The act of breathing does not ache for John, sitting just a hare’s breath away from touching the brimstone skin of Garcia. John breathes in the air. It still smells a little too heavy. It clings to him. A lover, afraid. A sinning man, hands entwined in self-sentencing, eager for repentance. A Creation of The Beast, neck bared, defanged and declawed, coming back to be domesticated.
“Dear John…” Garcia runs tongue against nicotine stained, fanged teeth. “Please. You can trust me.”
John looks down. The shotgun, lying at his feet. He’d loaded six silver rounds into the Mossburg himself. Garcia follows his gaze, accepting. He’s okay with being crucified. He’s okay about dying for truth, okay if it’s here, between them. A kiss, traitor to traitor. John looks up at Garcia’s old, wan face, lined with years of exhaustion. It looks no different than in the morning before, when they had companionably leaned up against each other in the mirror; John to shave, Garcia to inspect his white hairs. He is still something John knows.
Bearing that weight, John swings his legs off the bed and kicks the shotgun underneath. It lurks, now, the monster under the bed. Six silver rounds, hiding in the dark. The most dangerous thing between them now is just words. Garcia’s already killed their fragile pretense that they would leave this room unscathed. John is free-bleeding, the wound of wanting Garcia aired out between them like an open carcass.
John can trace with his eyes the light darting up Garcia’s cross when he swallows, the air having become oppressive. Their knees are almost touching and the protection of the salt feels more imaginary than ever. Garcia–protective, terrified, hating himself– makes this horrible noise. Like an animal, a predator. He sounds amused and choking and haunted by the concept of John dead. He sounds unable to swallow the penance of his own existence. He waits, coiled. John feels all too weighty, the heaviness of judging Garcia too much.
John’s got terrible survival instincts, despite everything. He stretches a single leg off the bed, draws a naked toe through the circle. Just like that. Its protection is completely shattered. Garcia surges over the boundary, stops just shy of John’s body.
“John.” He groans. Unholy. Biblical. It creeps into his voice and down John’s spine and it’s hot. Heat is pouring off Garcia when John pulls him closer, closer. Closer.
“Mijo.” It’s so desperate, the way the older man says it.
He’s not the one at risk of dying. John’s all easily broken limbs and paper-white skin; Garcia is clearly thinking this as he holds, gentle as an angel, John to him. His hands are hot as a brand when they snake up the back of John’s shirt. His mouth burns, when it touches against John’s. Again. His head falls against John’s chest, buoyed by the rapid rising and falling of desperate breathing. His beard scratches pleasantly against pale collarbones, and John moans like Magdalene prostrate.
“John, John, John…” It’s liturgy on fire; it’s Garcia confessing; it’s his name said like stupid prayer. Shame boils in his veins, then evaporates into aching, pure, desire. The rain comes down outside, yowling and pelting down and John feels like the ocean on pure fire. The way Garcia’s eyes go dark and lidded, the way his warm fingers hook John’s rosary to pull their body sin-close and kiss him so chastely it hurts. It aches. John finds it glorious. Self-flagellation had always been his strong suit. There’s nothing scary about the stomach of the beast, now that he’s already walked through the teeth– it’s just hot, visceral, and wet. John’s caught up in the gentle caging of a predator who is going humanless in his arms and he has no intention of running. He knows he’ll be caught again. And again. It’s reassuring. The Lord can become incapable of forgiveness, but wherever John ends up, Garcia will find him. There doesn’t need to be forgiveness between them. Nor faith. All of this thinking is quickly rendered a smear against the train of desire which shoots through John’s veins as Garcia rumbles, this volcanic, earthen sound. It turns his limbs weak. He becomes reduced to an animalistic, loving, foolish thing; blinded by desire. Silently, and not for the first time, John gathers courage to disagree with God. There was no possibility he could have been made as just prey, when Garcia’s broad hands fit just perfectly into the hollow of his starving hipbones. No possibility of anything else, when John’s arms perfectly wrap Garcia’s shoulder width to tangle in his hair. If this was the antithesis of faith, then John had reached the end of his understanding with The Lord.
There is an old parable about love. About a man, a foolish man, who loves his wife so much he lets her poison him. He’d trusted her more than Heaven; how could he not? They were the same flesh, the same beating heart. They tangled under the shade of the tree, pleased with their love, the tartness of an apple sweet between their lips. Cold and unprotected, outside the walls of Eden; that was the fruit of his foolish labour. John wonders about their similarity. How cold it is, outside, running, endlessly. The first time he’d caught the eye of another man and been unable to look away– oh there were too many moments he’d sat down in the safety of the imaginary pond behind the seminary to forget, there is too much to forget. How he’d gotten good at running, because he’d spent enough time hiding from his own shadow that being a step ahead was more familiar than his skin; some things will kill you, and others will make you kill yourself.
With Garcia all in his mouth and pouring down his lungs, smelling of the night and brimstone and too much like leather and Camels and gunpowder and love, John thinks God did something silly by conflating desire with sin. With Garcia saying his name right into his skin, so soft, so sweet, like the gentling of dew against a morning meadow, John thinks God knew nothing about desire and nothing about sin. With Garcia touching him, so good, so perfect, John and him becoming something of the same sated, tender, being, John turns his back to faith. For now. The morning and it shall come, inevitable, with the following night, and the creeping presence of the gun under the bed. There is duty, and there is divine purpose, and there is guilt all together on the black road of the Midwest. There is a conversation, too hard for full sentences or eye contact, about Garcia existing, about goodness and about condemnation that will happen, like pulling out stuck teeth.
Now, in the wet night of rural Minnesota, Garcia brushes a fallen lock of hair off John’s face, shining with sweat and smiling softly under lamplight. Simultaneously, without meaning it, they’ll part from a kiss, and without breaking contact, they’ll be thinking I love you.