Cat In A Leopard Spot

Kitty the Cutter had sliced right to the heart of the matter: pride. He was proud that he had left the priesthood not a fallen priest but a mistaken one. Why not be proud that he’d honored his promise of chastity, along with obedience and poverty? Maybe because—although any kid knows what being obedient and poor meant, being powerless—Matt had never really understood what chastity meant. Or, rather, what not being chaste promised.

His Achilles heel. Achilles was another of mythology’s indestructible demigods with one small, nagging vulnerability. No wonder the world had embraced the notion of a destructible God who chose to share human frailty, if not fallibility. Although even Jesus had hesitated in the Garden of Gethsemane. If this cup…

But…blasphemy! He wasn’t Jesus. He wasn’t here to prove he was either godlike or frail. He was here to…what? Do the best he could. Be the best he could be. Be in the army? Army of God.

Dying for the Cause was an honored act for both messiahs and martyrs. Living for a cause was sometimes trickier.

Matt had often thought that the old-time religion had emphasized too much self-abnegation. The Good Friday psalm came to mind, Jesus intoning as he walked meek as a lamb toward the Cross, “for I am a worm and no man.” Such self-abasement would not go over well with the human potential movement today.

It wasn’t going over with him now that he’d encountered someone who truly wished him ill. Ill in the sense of making him sick to his soul.

What did he most lose from caving in to Kitty the Cutter’s demands?

He wouldn’t respect himself in the morning?

No: the idea of being ignorant and vulnerable in the hands of his worst enemy. Pride again.

And worse. Since he had started admitting his sexuality, he had discovered it was a headstrong force. Could a man will his body not to respond when stimulated even by someone he hated and feared? Wasn’t that what torture victims attempted so valiantly? Is that why the line between love and abuse was so narrow in certain warped fringes of human behavior, including torture, including, sometimes, intimacy?

And last, but so very far from least, was something he had pretended was past, and wasn’t. That was his love, passion, hope for Temple. No matter how much he had forced his rational mind to move on, he had never lost hope that she would be his manna in the desert, she would be the one and only to lead him beyond his past and into a fully sexual future. To think of experiencing his first sexual act with someone as much the opposite of her as Kitty the Cutter…that was blasphemy. Better he should have succumbed to the strange, lazy moment on the threshold of Janice’s bedroom the first time he met her. Better some careless, but so very human, hormonal tango than deliberate surrender to a woman who was antilove, antilife, antisex if she used it as a weapon. An anti-Christ, in fact.

And yet, she could kill. And if she killed anyone because of him, then any innocence he kept was lost beyond redemption.

A foot scraped the walkway.

Matt looked up into the dim light of a distant lamp.

A dog stood there, big and dark. Great Dane maybe.

He swallowed, aware of how isolated he was, how isolated he had made himself. This could have been Kitty herself.

Before he could think, the dog turned and trotted off.

Probably it was as surprised to see him there as he was to see it.

Anytime. Anywhere. Anything. Anyone.

That was the lesson of the Garden.

The Judas kiss was always waiting somewhere.

Chapter 2

Bad News Breakfast

Dreams are only in your head.

Max woke up slowly, his dead cousin’s face and voice fading too fast.

Dreams are only in your head.

His cousin Sean hadn’t said that. Bob Dylan had said that in a long-ago song, using the wrong verb tense, is. Mock ignorant. Mock wise. Mockingly.

That was the mantra adults crooned at kids with nightmares, dreams are only in your head. True, but a true lie, also. And even scarier when you think about it, because when you grow up you find out that the only reality that matters is what’s in your head. Or what everyone else put there.

A lot scared Max, who had lived a mostly dreamless life of deception and danger, but Sean in his dreams didn’t scare him. Sean in his dreams was eternally seventeen, his features still blurred by baby fat, but the bones starting to push through to make a statement…until they had pushed through on a blast of explosive to make a final statement no one had expected, least of all Sean.

Sean in his dreams was whole and as precise as a class photo. Senior-high grin, polished mahogany-colored hair and the freckles that went with it. All-American boy via a Celtic pedigree. A middle-class, modern Huck Finn. Or Opie from Mayberry with size twelve feet treading on the brink of manhood. Full of pranks and daring. Class clown. Aching to kiss the girls and make them reveal the sweet mystery of sex. Adolescence personified.

And still that way in dreams.