I came out onto 38th and turned right, passed a run of businesses, everything closed up tight this early morning. A clothing shop called The Big & The Tall; a barbershop called Men & Ladies; a steak-and-lemonade place called just Steak & Lemonade. One sad liquor store with the paint peeling from around the door frame, with a solitary drunk smoking in an oversize warm-up jacket, playing it cool, dying for the place to open. This is where he had come, cherry-cheeked Father Barton, on Sunday afternoon. He was down in this unlikely neighborhood for some reason, and he had stopped at that bank right over there—the one next to the gas station that’s next to Captain D’s Fish Fry—to take out a couple hundred bucks, which was gone from his wallet by suppertime last night.
The ATM stood under a little green awning, just to the right of the front door of the bank proper. As I ambled toward it I felt my body take on the young father’s spirit, the righteous white man, walking upright and unafraid in a black neighborhood, a man of the people, wearing his serious, sacred expression. I stood at the cash machine a second, then I did a slow 360, even going so far as to mime the action of taking out a wallet, tucking bills inside it, putting it away again. Halfway through my turn, I was looking down the cross street, Central Avenue, toward the south. Down there, a block down, a streetlight was blinking, reflecting itself back murkily in a pothole full of rainwater. On one side of the road was a weedy vacant lot, and across the street was a small white-painted building with a wooden cross hanging above the door. The sign beneath the cross said SAINT ANSELM’S CATHOLIC PROMISE: COMMUNITY WELCOME.
“All right, now,” I said, hastening my step, bobbing my head. “All right, all right.”
Approaching the building, I heard the rush and roar of a small engine, and then I saw him: a groundskeeper, hunched over and focused, working a leaf blower in an even line along the curb, throwing clouds of dirt and detritus off the sidewalk into the road.
“Hey, hey, man,” I said, waving my hands as I came up the sidewalk. “Hold up a sec.”
The groundskeeper looked up, weary and wary, but he killed the engine.
“Oh, yeah, hey man. Hey.” I rolled into the character as I came up on him, taking on a little decrepitude, a little stagger in my walk, a little grit in my eyes. Drifter, knucklehead, working on that good early-morning drunk. “How you feeling, brother?”
“What can I help you with?”
The gardener was a tired middle-aged black man, a dozen lifetimes of this kind of yard-work bullshit already behind him. Not old, but getting there fast. Tired this morning, bones and fingers tired. Wanting to get this job done, get back in his truck before the rain came, if it was coming.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, talking quickly, licking my lips, addled and rapid. “Yeah, I tell ya, man, I been wandering. You feel me? Been wandering today.”
He raised his eyebrows just the tiniest bit. He wore forest-green coveralls with the name RUBEN stitched into a white oval above the breast pocket and CIRCLE CITY LAWNSCAPING in big stenciled block letters on the back.
I hustled out my words. “Yeah, so I saw this was a church, okay, and I just felt like I had to come on down here. ’Cause listen, man, it just happens I been hearing the angels, man, and they been saying I need to get right. Get right with God. Angels been saying what I need to do is go on and get right today.”
“Well, you won’t be doing it here, man.” Ruben turned his cracked lips up for a brief smile. “This is not a church. It’s a community center.”
“What? Oh.”
“Church own it, but it ain’t a church. And it’s closed, man.”
“Well, shit.”
Ruben liked that. He ground out a laugh, gravelly and low. “Sorry, boss. The what-you-call-it—you know, the diocese—they closed this place up a while back. Six months ago, something? They got us coming by once a week to keep it from getting overgrown and all. That’s it.”
“Oh, wow. Wow, wow. Guess my angels got they wires crossed.”
“I guess they did.”
We both laughed a little then, me and my man Ruben, and I stood and swayed in my drunkenness and shook my head and took a good hard look at that building. Not so grand a structure as Saint Catherine’s up there on Meridian Street, not by a long shot: old, wood-sided, one-storied, a flat black roof. The front of the building had but one door, up a short walkway lined with box hedges and ivy. One of the windows was broken, a shatter scar down the middle of it like an unhealed wound. At the door handle, though, was a bright glint of gold.
I held my eyes to that door for a second, squinting hopefully, as if to open it by force of will and get the salvation I was seeking.
“All right, well.” Ruben raised his leaf blower. “I better get back to it.”
“Hold up a sec,” I said, in a burst of inspiration. “Y’all hiring?”
His brows arched with fresh skepticism. “I dunno. You gotta ask Rick about that.”
“Rick?”
“Yeah. Rick or I guess—Rick or Tiny.”
“Tiny?”
“That’s right.”
“You got a number?”
“It’s on the truck, man.”
Ruben was done with me. He turned away and fired up his leaf blower and called “Good luck” over its roar as I tippled over to that truck, a Pakistani pickup on high wheels towing an enclosed flatbed trailer cluttered with mowers and rakes and shit. Both the truck and the trailer had CIRCLE CITY LAWNSCAPING painted on the side, and under the name was the number.
The whole community center was about as big as a Monopoly house, and it looked older than sin, older than Adam and Eve the sinners.