“Just thought you’d want to know a friend of yours is about to get himself in some trouble.”
“And who might that be?”
“Oldest son of Cort Wesley Masters. Named Dylan, I believe. I’d hurry if I were you.”
7
BOERNE, TEXAS
“New game,” Guillermo Paz said into the microphone, from the table set atop a small portable stage at the front of the dining room in Morningstar Ministries at Menger Springs Senior Living Community.
At seven feet tall, Paz hardly needed to be standing on even a meager platform. But the placement was easier on the fading eyesight of the elderly residents, who sat with varying numbers of bingo cards assembled before them, patiently waiting for him to call each number.
After all, Paz reasoned, they weren’t going anywhere except back to their rooms in the assisted living portion of the facility. The priest he’d been visiting at San Antonio’s historic San Fernando Cathedral for more than seven years was now living in the nursing center section, after suffering a stroke. Paz had been the one who found him, the man’s body canted outside the confessional, blood dribbling out one of his ears and staining his white hair red on that side. Paz had wanted to pray for him while he waited for the paramedics to arrive, but he wasn’t much for prayer. He figured God’s tolerance for his murderous actions hardly entitled him to heavenly favors. Although Paz had long ago lost track of the number of people he’d killed, the Almighty certainly hadn’t.
“First number,” Paz said into the microphone. “Under the B, seven. That’s B seven. B for Boylston. That’s the name of my priest. He lives in this place now but isn’t in shape to play bingo. Want to hear something? I didn’t even know his name until I came to visit him here for the first time. The receptionist asked who I came here to see and all I could tell her was, ‘My priest.’ She nodded and said, ‘You must mean Father Boylston.’ And that’s how I learned his name.”
The residents of Menger Springs’s Boerne campus continued to look up at him, seeming to hang on Paz’s every word, eagerly awaiting his call of the next number, bingo dabbers held like guns. Visiting his priest almost every day had left Paz with a fondness for the entire facility, for its peace and pleasantness, in spite of the stale fart smell in the hallways and the general hopelessness that characterized the nursing center section. He thought Father Boylston would be proud of him for volunteering, playing a role, making a difference. Each number he called was a small homage to the priest who’d helped him define his ongoing transformational period.
“See, a man is more than the measure of his name,” Paz continued. “Aristotle is Father Boylston’s favorite philosopher. Personally, I prefer the Germans, but since my priest cottons to Aristotle, I’ll tell you that Aristotle believed the body and soul were prime parts of what creates our nature, that a man’s identity belongs to a holy trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. The first time I visited Father Boylston I told him the first man I killed had murdered my first priest, back home in the slums of Venezuela, for daring to stand up to the gangs. He bled to death in my arms, the food he’d bought to feed the poor scattered in the street. I watched the life fade from his eyes and knew what I had to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Paz churned the wire cage holding the numbered bingo balls, then grasped the one that had found its way to the top.
“Under the G, fifty-four. That’s G fifty-four. G for goodness, something I look for in my eyes every day. I came here all those years ago to kill a woman, a Texas Ranger. But when I looked in her eyes I saw something I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know what it was, only that I wanted to see it in my eyes too. All of you have lived a long time and done a lot of things, both good and bad. But how many of you ever thought that life could change in a single moment, a single glance? I mean, isn’t that something?”
Most of the elderly bingo players looked at Paz blankly, but a decent number, women mostly, were nodding up a storm.
“Ever since that moment, I’ve wanted nothing more than to see the same thing in my eyes. Was it bravery? Determination? Conviction? Belief? Only recently did I realize it was goodness, G for goodness. In the course of my transformation, I’ve done a lot of good. But my eyes haven’t changed yet, so I keep trying.”
Sensing the crowd’s impatience, the eager residents of Menger Springs ready with their dabbers once more, Paz spun the cage again, so hard the balls inside rattled up against each other, clacking like hailstones against glass. He grasped the ball that emerged out the top, but he stopped short of reading it because he spotted the figure of a V-shaped man with a military-style haircut standing in the back of the room, smirking as he nodded Paz’s way.