Cross Dressing (32 page)

“It’s okay,” she said sweetly. “As long as your thoughts were pure.”

T
he priest is bound, gagged, and naked, save his ratty pair of briefs. He’s sitting on a toilet in a filthy bathroom stall, a camouflage military uniform wadded up in his lap. Aircraft exhaust wafts in through the open window behind him. The humid African heat draws sweat from every pore of the priest’s body and he’s beginning to wonder if this is really part of God’s plan.

The Third World Man is in the next stall adjusting his new collar while trying to decide whether he should kill the priest before he leaves. A few days earlier the Third World Man had talked to a reticent Red Cross worker who knew Father Michael. The Third World Man pulled his knife and nearly cut off the woman’s thumb. When he got to the bone, she finally said where Father Michael was rumored to have gone.

Now, after three days of hard travel, the Third World Man is at the airport in Addis Ababa preparing to take a series of flights that will eventually land him in Los Angeles. While sitting at the airport, the Third World Man can think of no better disguise for tracking the elusive Father Michael than that of a fellow priest. The nearly naked man in the next stall was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Third World Man finishes dressing. Before leaving the rest room he squeezes into the booth with the sweaty priest and latches the door. “Your prayer has been answered. I have decided not to kill you.” The Third World Man holds up his new Bible and poses for a moment like a cartoon missionary. “Now you better start praying for Father Michael.” The Third World Man slithers out from under the door, then stands and brushes the dirt
from his clothes. He looks at his ticket. His flight will leave in ten minutes.

I
t was a long night. The four children—unsure if they’d been rescued or rekidnapped—were frightened, and nothing Peg or Dan said seemed to assuage their fear. In the kitchen at the Care Center, the children clung to one another, a huddle of uncertainty. Not knowing whom they could trust, they trusted no one. Finally Sister Peg had a thought. “Father, you and Ruben get them something to eat,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later, Sister Peg walked back into the kitchen wearing her best habit. She was a holy vision of elegance and piety. The children looked as amazed as if Mother Mary Herself had suddenly appeared before them. She smiled beatifically and kissed each of them on the head. It was all the reassurance they needed.

After some cheese sandwiches, they got the kids to sleep. Sister Peg put two of the children in her own bed while Ruben and Dan made up the sofa for the other two. Sister Peg finally fell asleep at her desk at three in the morning.

Ten hours later, Sister Peg was still at her desk, wishing that Josie were there to rub her back. She twisted her neck until it made a loud pop that sounded more satisfying than it really was. She had been on the phone since eight-thirty trying to find foster homes for the children. So far, the only places willing to take them were some famously substandard group homes. Sister Peg would turn to them only as a last resort. If nothing else, they were preferable to having the children traded on the street like items at a swap meet.

There were more than 100,000 children in foster care in California, more than half of those in Los Angeles County. Among the many things you didn’t want to be in Los Angeles was a child in the foster care system. The problem was the
shortage of qualified caretakers. According to a grand jury report Sister Peg had read about in the L.A.
Times
, some group homes were so overcrowded that children ranging from three to twelve years old were routinely drugged to make them easier to handle.

A friend of Sister Peg’s—a woman who ran a child-advocacy group within the public defender’s office—called this the chemical straitjacket approach. She said their office had found more than two hundred cases of children who were given adult doses of antimanic and antiseizure drugs on a daily basis without legally required consent. They had also discovered a dozen group homes where all the toddlers were kept narcotized on sedatives. A caseworker told Sister Peg that she had come across mildly hyperactive children who had been rendered catatonic by Risperdol and Trazodone. This combination of antipsychotic and antidepressant had been given in dosages appropriate for grown men with full-blown schizophrenia, not overactive children.

Unqualified caretakers routinely gave foster kids Tegretol, Depakote, and Clonidine to treat attention deficit disorder. Unfortunately, those drugs were for treating mania and bipolar disorder, not ADD. Sister Peg knew that the children trapped in this end of the foster care system suffered from uncontrollable tremors, drug-induced psychosis, hallucinations, abnormal heart activity, liver problems, and worse. But at least they were easy to deal with.

However, the news wasn’t all bad. Sister Peg knew there were some good homes out there. She knew there were good people who took children in and gave them the love and attention and patience they required. She just hoped she could find some of them, and quick.

“No, I understand,” Sister Peg said. “I’ll try there. Thank you.” She hung up, then scratched another name off an already short list. She was about to dial another number when
she looked up and saw a man standing in the doorway. He was a five-foot-ten, 150-pound pile of white trash. He was wearing a raggedy-ass pair of blue jeans and a faded Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt. “You in charge here?” He had a scruffy rodent’s face, twitchy and mean with too much tooth for his little mouth. “I’m Carl Deats,” he said. “Where the hell’s my little girl?”

Sister Peg casually dialed 911 as she stood up. The man wasn’t very big, but she knew he was violent. “Hello, Mr. Deats,” she said. “Alissa’s not here. She’s been placed in a foster home.” She gestured as if to indicate the place was far away.

Carl squinted his bloodshot eyes. “Bullshit,” he said. “Lady at the courthouse said that little crumb snatcher’s still here.” He tilted his head upward. “Guess I’ll go have a look.” He walked back to the hallway. “Hey! Alissa! Where the hell are you?”

Sister Peg raced out of the office after him. “You can’t take her, Mr. Deats,” she said.

“I damn sure can,” he said. “She’s mine and I’ll do exactly as I please with her.”

Sister Peg was right behind Carl, her words measured and sure. “I’ve called the police. You have no business—”

Carl turned and grabbed Sister Peg by the shoulders. “Get outta my fuckin’ way, bitch!” He threw her against the wall and continued searching for Alissa. “Where you at, girl?” He looked in each room as he stormed down the hall. He stopped at the open door by the stairway and looked in. Alissa was curled up in the corner, her eyes wide in terror. She was clutching her doll with all her might. “There you are,” Carl said, real sweet. He crossed the room and reached down. “C’mon!” He grabbed the doll and tried to jerk it out of Alissa’s arms, tearing off its head in the process. “You’re too damn old for dolls, girl. Now, get up!”

Dan was upstairs when he first heard the raised voices. He was on his way down when he heard Alissa scream. He took the last ten stairs in two steps and got to Alissa’s room just as Sister Peg jumped on Carl’s back, trying to keep him away from Alissa. Carl threw Peg off his back, then he reached down and slapped Alissa. “Get up!” he yelled.

Dan was halfway across the room when Carl slapped Alissa again. If Dan didn’t already have murder on his mind, he did now. “Hey!” he screamed. Carl turned around just in time to see Dan’s fist. He was too slow to duck and Dan caught him square on the nose. Carl staggered backward into the wall, blood spurting from both nostrils onto Ozzy’s head.

Alissa ran across the room, grabbed her headless doll, then ran off crying.

Dan wasn’t sure, but it felt like he’d broken his hand, and unfortunately, it didn’t look like the fight was over yet. Carl came up spitting blood. He charged at Dan, screaming, “Son of a bitch!” He’d taken about two steps when Sister Peg teed off on his balls. It was a square, cracking kick that ended in a hideous squishing sound. Carl dropped to his knees, vomited a little, then fell forward onto his broken nose.

Except for the soft gurgling noises coming from Carl, the room was suddenly quiet. Dan’s heart was pounding, as was Sister Peg’s. They looked sheepishly at one another, then shared a smile. Sister Peg felt like one of them ought to say something about what just happened.

Dan was thinking the same thing, so he looked up at Sister Peg. “Helluva kick.”

“Thanks.” Sister Peg looked down at Carl. “You know, I don’t care what it says in the Bible. Vengeance is
mine,”
she said.

“Yeah, that turn-the-other-cheek business doesn’t always apply,” Dan said. “This seems more like an I’d-rather-fight-than-switch moment.” Dan nudged Carl with his foot but got
no response. “Exactly what order of nun are you anyway?” he asked. “Like, Sisters of Very Little Mercy?”

Sister Peg smiled. “Something like that,” she said. “How’s your hand?”

Dan flexed it gingerly. It was a little sore, but it seemed okay. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might be broken.” He held it out hoping she’d take a look at it.

Sister Peg took his hand and gently inspected the bones one at a time. She applied some pressure to a metacarpus. “Does that hurt?” Dan acted tough and said it didn’t. She wanted to kiss each and every one of his knuckles, but she refrained. She looked up into Dan’s eyes. “Thanks for the help,” she said.

“No problem.” Without thinking, he wrapped his arms around her and she just about melted. It had been too long since she’d felt safe in someone’s strong arms. With her head pressed against Dan’s chest, something stirred in her, something that wasn’t supposed to stir, or something she was supposed to ignore or fight, or certainly stop stirring. But she didn’t want to stop. She liked the way it felt, so she hugged back.

Dan’s head was a choir of reiterated evil interior suggestions. He remembered that night when he saw Peg undress. Lord did she have a body, and the only thing separating his from hers was a habit and a priest outfit, oh, and her vows. Dan suddenly flashed back to one of the lectures he attended while at the seminary. “Temptations,” the Jesuit had said, “are never
intended
by God, rather they are
permitted
by Him to give us the opportunity of practicing virtue and self-mastery.”

Well, the opportunity was certainly knocking right now. Then it cleared its throat.
Wait a minute
, Dan thought.
Someone really is clearing their throat.
Sister Peg heard it too. The two of them simultaneously turned their heads. What
they saw was a cop standing in the doorway, a tickled look on his face. “You call 911?” he asked.

Sister Peg suddenly remembered that she was in the arms of a priest. She almost knocked Dan over pushing away from him. “This isn’t what it looks like,” she insisted.

“Oh? What’s it look like?” the cop asked.

“Well, we were … embracing,” she said, flustered and worried about appearances.

“No laws against that, Sister.” The cop sauntered into the room and extended a hand to Dan. “Father,” he said with a respectful nod. The cop casually looked down at Carl. “You know, seventy percent of my calls are domestic disputes,” the cop said. “Husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, boyfriends and boyfriends, all trying to hurt or kill each other.” He poked at Carl with his nightstick. “I wish I walked in on more people hugging.” The cop turned to Sister Peg and shook her hand. “By the way, I’m Officer Gorman,” he said. He poked at Carl again with his stick. “I assume this is the reason you called?”

As Dan explained who Carl was and what had happened, Officer Gorman’s mood shifted from amused to angered. Each time he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his shiny black leather belt squeaked like a saddle with a fat cowboy in it. “I can’t abide child abusers,” he said. “Lowest form I come across as far as I’m concerned.” He stepped over to Sister Peg’s desk and looked around. “I’ve heard good things about the work you do here,” he said as he shuffled through the papers on the desk. “World needs more people like you.” He opened the top drawer of the desk. “Here we go,” he said, reaching into the drawer and picking up a letter opener.

Dan exchanged a curious glance with Sister Peg. Officer Gorman squatted down and wrapped Carl’s fingers around the letter opener. Then he stood up, holding it by its tip. “So,
Sister, Mr. Deats attacked you with this sharp object?” He asked the question all matter-of-fact.

Sister Peg looked at Dan, unsure. She knew what she wanted to say, but she worried about what Dan would think of her if she said it. Dan didn’t want Sister Peg to have the lie on her conscience, so he took it. “That’s right, Officer,” Dan said. “Then he attacked the child, striking her several times.”

Officer Gorman pulled an envelope from the trash can and dropped the letter opener inside. “Well, that’s assault with a deadly weapon,” he said as he pulled his handcuffs from his belt and hooked Carl up. “If this piece of crap’s on parole, pardon my language, Sister, that’ll violate him plenty.”

“No need to apologize,” Sister Peg said. “He’s definitely a piece of crap.” She looked at Dan. Her eyes were grateful for the lie he told for her.

Officer Gorman did his paperwork, then yanked Carl to his feet. “Now you better go find that little girl,” he said. “Make sure she’s okay.”

A
LISSA WAS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND INSIDE THE CARE
Center, so Dan, Sister Peg, and Ruben resumed their search outside. Dan picked up a trail of cotton stuffing and followed it to the carport, where he found Alissa hiding in the back of his VW van, silently clutching her headless doll. Her face was already showing the bruise where her father had hit her. “It’s okay,” Dan said. “He’s gone.”

Alissa had seen her father put in the back of a cop car before. She didn’t know where they took him or what they did to him while he was gone. She knew only two things for sure. One was that it meant a brief respite from the routine of abuse. The other was that he always came back and did it again. She assumed that was how her whole life would be.