Cat In A Leopard Spot

Matt locked the bike, hung the silver moon of his helmet on one handlebar, where it reflected its twin sister in the sky. Then he ambled across soundless asphalt to the sidewalks leading into the man-made Garden of Eden beyond the building.

Well, part Garden of Eden, he corrected himself. The other part of the Ethel M candy company’s famous cactus collection was Garden of Gethsemane. Garden of thorns. Where Jesus had spent his last hours before submitting to the mockery of trial, torture, and death.

Naturally, an ex-priest in Las Vegas needed to find someplace lone, harsh, and absolutely natural for contemplation. The area was meant for self-guided tours, kind of like life itself, and was a no-man’s-land at this hour, even in around-the-clock Las Vegas: 24/7, like they said. Everywhere was getting onto Las Vegas time nowadays: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Somewhere in that blur of time, Sunday had been swallowed up. Were God interested in creating Las Vegas, which Matt was pretty sure He would pass on, as He had on Sodom and Gomorrah, He’d probably skip taking the seventh day of rest off. Las Vegas and the Internet never slept.

Matt’s footsteps ground slightly against the paved walks someone had slipped into his Garden of Woe when he wasn’t looking.

When he’d first moved to Las Vegas, straight from leaving the priesthood, Matt had come here often, especially in the punishing summer heat. It reminded him of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness before he began his ministry, and struck him as fitting that he should tarry in a cactus garden at the end of his own ministry.

Tonight, though, Matt found that someone had paved purgatory (if not put up a parking lot, as the song said) since his last visit. Instead of raw sandy footpaths, broad sidewalks meandered among the cactus specimens. He couldn’t read the small identifying markers impaled in the ground by moonlight, but the plants’ bristling forms were somehow even more satisfying half-shrouded, their exact identities hidden.

A handsome wooden bench was now the centerpiece of an artistic break in the gently hilly layout. Matt sat on it, surrounded by shadow and silence.

He didn’t know if he sat in a paradise about to be lost forever, or a garden of thorns, of the uncertain angst that precedes the final agony.

He knew he was at a crossroads. Someone actually wanted his soul besides God. That’s what a religious vocation was, giving your soul to God. What happened when you walked away from that path? Did God return your soul, slightly used? Was it now up for grabs? Not that many people aspired to soul robbing these days.

That made Kitty O’Connor unique.

Was she the Devil then? Or just his private edition? He had to take her at her word. She wanted to force him to do the thing he least wanted to do. With her, anyway. Her weapon was to threaten those he cared about, anyone around him, really. Even a mere acquaintance like Sheila had been injured at the New Millennium Hotel only a few days ago. So Temple, Lieutenant Molina’s preteen daughter, Mariah, anyone he associated with, was in danger.

Therefore…he would associate with no one.

And she had won.

Or…he lived his life as before, took his chances. And gambled with the lives of everyone who touched his.

Temple. Sheila. Mariah. Electra Lark, his motherly landlady at the Circle Ritz. Another name joined the roster. Janice. He’d forgotten about her telephoned invitation to dinner Monday night. Tomorrow.

Who else would be coming to dinner?

Sitting there, alone in the dark, he heard the occasional hiss of tires on a nearby thoroughfare. When he’d first come here, the world had seemed so remote. Now it crowded in, smelling and sounding like city.

Or was he just now hearing the civilization that had always hemmed in his private piece of wilderness?

The civilization, and the corruption.

Okay. What did Miss Kitty want? Nothing any teenage boy wouldn’t gladly give in a Las Vegas twenty-four-hour second. His body. His virginity. The unblemished record of his priestly chastity. Since coming to Las Vegas, Matt had actually come to consider his sexual inexperience an encumbrance in dealing with a secular world. Kitty O’Connor wasn’t, as she pointed out, ugly, so why agonize over it? She probably wouldn’t kill him anyway, because once having forced him to do what he didn’t want to do, she’d want him to live with the aftertaste. Why not? The answer in his gut was simple: because it didn’t matter the issue or the history or even whether it was him or some other guy or girl: forcing someone against his will was coercion, and in the sexual arena, it was assault, molestation, rape.

So was that any worse suffering than the Passion of Christ and Way of the Cross? Identifying with Jesus was hubris, or delusion, but the issue Matt faced was simple self-sacrifice. What made his innocence so precious that one hair on one other person’s head should be harmed by it?