the rainswept night to the melodies of “Funeral for a Friend,”
“Daniel,” and “Benny and the Jets.”
The blacktop glimmered with quicksilver puddles. To Jim, it was eerie
that the water mirages on the highway a few days ago had now become
real.
He grew more tense by the minute. Boston called to him, but it was far
away, and few things were darker or more treacherous than a blacktop
highway through a storm-wracked desert at night. Unless, perhaps, the
human heart.
The priest hunched over the wheel as he drove. He studied the highway
intently while singing along softly with Elton.
After a while Jim said, “Father, wasn’t there a doctor in town?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t call him.”
“I got the cortisone prescription from him.”
“I saw the tube. It was a prescription for you, made out three months
ago.”
“Well. . . I’ve seen sunstroke before. I knew I could treat you.”
“But you seemed awfully worried there at first.”
The priest was silent for a few miles. Then he said, “I don’t know who
you are, where you come from, or why you really need to get to Boston.
But I do know you’re a man in trouble, maybe deep trouble, as deep as it
ever gets. And I know. . . at least, I think I know that you’re a good
man at heart. Anyway, it seemed to me that a man in trouble would want
to keep a low profile.”
“Thanks. I do.”
A couple of miles farther, the rain came down hard enough to overwhelm
the windshield wipers and force Geary to reduce speed.
The priest said, “You’re the one who saved that woman and her little
girl.”
Jim tensed but did not respond.
“You fit the description on TV,” the priest said.
They were silent for a few more miles.
Father Geary said, “I’m not a sucker for miracles.”
Jim was baffled by that statement.
Father Geary switched off Elton John. The only sounds were the swish
bum of the tires on the wet pavement and the metronomic thump of the
windshield wipers.
“I believe that the miracles of the Bible happened, yes, I accept all of
that as real history,” the priest said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“But I’m reluctant to believe that some statue of the Holy Mother wept
real tears in a church in Cincinnati or Peoria or Teaneck last week
after the Wednesday-night bingo games, witnessed only by two teenagers
and the parish cleaning lady. And I’m not ready to believe that a
shadow resembling Jesus, cast on someone’s garage wall by a yellow bug
light, is a sign of impending apocalypse. God works in mysterious ways,
but not with bug lights and garage walls.”
The priest fell silent again, and Jim waited, wondering where all this
was leading.
“When I found you in the church, lying by the sanctuary railing,” Geary
said in a voice that grew more haunted word by word, “you were marked by
the stigmata of Christ. There was a nail hole in each of your hands-”
Jim looked at his hands and saw no wounds.
“-and your forehead was scratched and prickled with what might have been
punctures from a crown of thorns.”
His face was still such a mess from the punishment of sun and wind that
it was no use searching in the rearview mirror for the minor injuries
the priest had described.
Geary said, “I was. . . frightened, I guess. But fascinated, too.”
They came to a forty-foot-long concrete bridge at an arroyo where the
runoff had overflowed the banks. A dark lake had formed and risen above
the edge of the elevated roadbed. Geary bulled forward. Plumes of
water, reflecting the car’s lights, unfurled on both sides like great
white wings.
“I’d never seen stigmata,” Geary continued when they were out of the
flooded area, “though I’d heard of the phenomenon. I pulled up your
shirt. . . looked at your side. . . and found the enflamed scar of
what might have been a spear wound.”
The events of recent months had been so filled with surprises and
amazements that the threshold on Jim’s sense of wonder had been raised