The Confession of Joe Cullen (22 page)

She wondered whether he was conscious of the tears on his cheeks. “You don't have to talk about it. It was a long time ago.”

“When I dream about it, it's now.” He spoke slowly, as if he were clutching for each word before he spoke it. “There was nothing left alive in the village, and then I saw a little girl, maybe five or six years old, and I thought she was alive because she had a smile on her face and her eyes were open, but her dress was bloody, and when I lifted it, I saw that the rapid fire had cut her practically in half. You know, I have a daughter,” he went on, flowing one thought into another. “She's five — I don't know, I haven't seen her in two years — God, I don't even know whether she remembers me or knows who I am.”

“Lighten up,” Ginny said. “We all have garbage that we carry—”

“No, no,” he protested. “I'm trying to connect some things, and as much as I try, I get lost.”

“Well, that happens. How many of us ever try to look inside ourselves and make some sense out of what we are and what we do? It's not easy.”

“What I'm trying to say is that after I spoke to the old man at Saint Peter's — well, the next day I spilled it all out at the precinct house. It had to come out, because after I left the church I went over to Billy Sullivan's place and I got drunk. I'm not a good drinker. I saw too much Irish drinking when I was a kid to feel good about it, and after I finished air force training and became a pilot, I never touched the stuff. But I got awful damn drunk at Billy Sullivan's, and the same thing happened to me that always happens when I drink too much. I fell asleep and then I woke up and my stomach felt like the pit of hell and I vomited. And then I crawled out of the bathroom and I must have been totally zonked, because there was God or Jesus or something looking at me, and He said, “Report!” not angry but very firmly. So I said that I killed people. I went to a place that I had never been to or heard about even, and they put me into a gunship and I killed. I can't even count how many I killed and mostly they were village people in these lousy little hutches, women and kids and old people, and it was a lead-pipe cinch to knock them over, and there was always some stinking, motherfucken officer screaming at me to give him a good body count, and I don't give a fuck, he'd tell me, whether it's six days old or a hundred years old, you put it in the fucken body count. And that's how I came to go to the precinct house the next day and make the tape.”

They sat in silence after that for a minute or so. Ginny felt as close to Cullen as if she had known him a lifetime. She wondered if he had that kind of a feeling about her.

“You don't have to cry,” he said.

She hadn't realized that her eyes were heavy with tears. Cullen's remark was so gentle that she had to tell herself specifically that this heavy, powerful man, with his thick sloping shoulders and his thick neck — a football player's neck in her book — was neither a brute nor a fool, but a human being wounded so deeply, so terribly, that for him there could be no absolution or peace ever.

She shook her head. She hadn't realized, and now she went for a box of tissues.

Wiping her eyes, she tried to explain her tears, but did it poorly. “I'm supposed to be a hard-nosed DA,” she said, “and I'm sitting here like a sentimental schoolgirl.” She tried to change her approach. “Is the tape the truth?”

“Most of it. Captain Sanchez — he was on the chopper with me — he pushed the priest out, and then I shot him—”

“They let you have a gun?”

“Oscar carried the gun. No one knew he had it — except me.”

“All right,” Ginny said, “let's go on to another point. According to the evening news, you killed Kovach, called Lieutenant Freedman, and then fled the scene. I want to know what happened.”

“I had a feeling about things, and I was scared — I mean, I had a sense that they would try to come after me.” He told her about Sylvia Mendoza and Father Immelman.

“And you seriously think that they were killed because they knew about you and Father O'Healey?”

“And the dope. Maybe.”

“But the tape. The cops saw the tape. I saw it. The DA saw it — OK, we pass that. Where did you get the gun that killed Kovach?”

“I can't tell you that. Anyway, it was a floater. You can pick up a floater any time you need a gun.”

“All right, tell me about Kovach.”

“There's nothing to tell. He came into my place and pulled his gun. I threw a beer bottle at him as he got off his first shot. He flinched, and the bullet seared my ribs. He threw two more shots at me as I ducked behind a chair, and then I got a clear shot with the Saturday night special, and I killed him. I didn't want to kill him. Oh, Christ, I never liked Oscar; he was a louse; but I didn't want to kill him. I never wanted to kill anyone — even in Nam. I killed, but I didn't want to.”

“And what about the wound?”

“Nothing. I cleaned it and put a heavy bandage on it, and then I changed my shirt.”

“Why didn't you wait for Freedman? The wound would help in a self-defense plea.”

“Ah, come on, lady,” Cullen said hopelessly, “an illegal gun … Who's to say who fired first?”

“Ah, Cullen, use your head,” she begged him. “If your gun fired once and his gun fired three times —”

Cullen shrugged.

“You're giving up your life. Why? Right now, from what you tell me, there's only one safe place for you, and that's in jail. Do you have any money?”

“In the bank — yeah, enough.”

“But you can't touch it, because the moment you do they pick you up. By now, they've covered the banks, and by nine in the morning they'll know where your money is. Cullen, Cullen, believe me.”

“Why?” he wondered. “Why you — why anyone? Oh, Jesus, I'm so tired.” He rolled over and stretched out on the couch, and she noticed how he winced with pain as he changed his position. “Lady,” he said sleepily, “you're beautiful and I'm too damn tired to get up and kiss you. Thank you.” A moment later, he was asleep.

She glowed with that, telling herself that no one had ever said a nicer thing to her; but that thought was concocted out of the same romantic illusion that had prompted her to put her job, her career, and her future on the line to help Cullen. After all, what did she know about Cullen? Or, for that matter, what did Cullen know about Cullen? He was still struggling out of the morass of war's stupidity, the idiocy of spending a million dollars on a trial to establish the guilt or innocence of a single killer, and then sending an army to kill a nation so that the body count could be measured against the body bags covered with the Stars and Stripes, which so proudly we hail at the twilight's last gleaming.

On the other hand, there was Father O'Healey, who had been thrown out of a helicopter, and was he now a saint in heaven, provided you believed in heaven, which Virginia Selby certainly did not? And what had it meant to a man like Cullen, who had slaughtered with professional ardor, to meet O'Healey, wearing sandals and a homespun robe, and ministering to the poorest of the poor, like a veritable Saint Francis, laying them to rest and closing their eyes after they had been mercilessly slain by clients of the U.S.A., armed with guns from the U.S.A. and an ideology from the land of the free and the home of the brave? Had something exploded in Cullen's mind? Or was it actually Jesus Christ, Son of the Lord God of Hosts, who had shared a living room with Cullen and had said to him, “Explain.”

“What a burden to put on the poor sod!” Ginny whispered, and then, seeing how soundly he slept, decided to go out and buy some food for a decent meal. She scribbled a note in case he woke, and then left, closing the door quietly behind her. No one had thought of Virginia Selby as being either romantic or delusional, nor would she ever be able to explain a vague and undefinable feeling that had pervaded her since she saw the tape in Timberman's office. Was the face of Cullen her father's face? She wondered about that, trying desperately to insert sensible reasons into senseless behavior. In so many words, she was harboring a criminal and a murderer — whether he had spoken to Jesus or Saint Francis notwithstanding. Only his word said that he had killed Kovach in self-defense, and all she knew of that killing was what she had heard on a news program. She had put her life and career on the line.

She thought of a delicious steak, one of those fine, triangular cuts of meat, an inch thick, that when cooked melts like butter; but of course the butcher was closed. Henry's Deli was the only possibility, and she had him cut a half-inch-thick slice off the big roast of cold beef that was always sitting in his counter. A box of instant mix would give her mashed potatoes, and she bought a small apple pie and a six-pack of imported beer. Not in a hundred years would she herself eat such food, but the same illusion that led her to shelter Cullen also led her to believe that a man like Cullen would be pleased with food like this. She also bought a small can of gravy. She would warm the slice of roast beef so gently that its taste would not spoil, fix the potatoes, pour the hot gravy onto the potatoes, and warm two water rolls that she had in her breadbox. He would find the meal irresistible — and then?

What then?

There was no
and then
. “Joseph—” She had never called him by his first name, or Mr. Cullen. That was the cop thing, their rule of politeness for a collar. They could pick up the worst bum in the city with a string of priors a yard long, yet when they talked to the media, it became Mister bum. She had always called him Cullen. What had he called her? She tried to remember. He had called her Miss Selby — and then Ginny. She remembered how he had been in the restaurant, hard and tough and distant. Now he was something else. Or was he? Could someone like Cullen invent the sight of Jesus Christ standing in his living room? Drunks saw snakes and devils and things like that.

“Miss Selby,” Henry said.

“Oh?”

“That'll be seventeen dollars and eighty cents.”

She gave him a twenty-dollar bill. She stared at the change and then dropped it into her purse. She couldn't count; she couldn't focus. Back at her front door, she turned the key and entered quietly. The couch was empty.

“Well, he's in the bathroom,” she said to herself as she put the bag down in the kitchen.

“Cullen, it's me, Ginny. I'm alone.” When there was no response, she glanced into her bedroom — empty — and then faced the closed door of the bathroom.

“Cullen, are you in there?”

She opened the door and the bathroom was empty. For a long, long moment, she stood and surveyed the room. The toilet seat was up. He had used the toilet before he left, which meant nothing, but it had to be noted. Whenever men were in the place, they lifted the seat but did not replace it. Men were thoughtless that way.

Ginny closed the bathroom door and went back into the kitchen, where she took out of the bag the food she had bought at the deli, laying each item on the cabinet top. Then she picked up her garbage container and swept the food into it.

She went into the living room and sat on the couch where Cullen had sat, and began to cry. “Oh, fuck it,” she thought, using language she would not speak aloud, “you're an asshole. You and your goddamn fantasies. Now you're up shit creek, and now you have nothing but grief. Where were you? they ask him. I was with Virginia Selby, who never called the cops. No, he wouldn't do that.”

“Oh, my God,” she said aloud, “what was I hoping? Sweet Mother of God, tell me.”

A Conversation with the Bishop

“T
HE POINT IS
,” the bishop said to him, “that there is such a thing as liberation theology, and it is not anything the Holy Father regards with pleasure.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“The fact that you volunteer so easily, Father O'Healey, must not be held against you. Absolutely not. You are a man who thinks, and I think you have made an effort to understand yourself.”

“I try.”

“Do you meditate?” the bishop asked.

“Yes. That began at the seminary.”

“In the Buddhist fashion, I presume?”

“Yes. It had taken hold at that time. I was told that even in Ireland it became a sort of underground mode of prayer.”

“Oh?” The bishop was curious. “Then you see it as prayer?”

“Yes. To me, prayer is only to listen, not to demand.”

“Then tell me, Father O'Healey, what do you listen to?”

O'Healey smiled. “If I knew that, Bishop—”

“I have never tried it, sitting cross-legged as you do, and I'm not sure that at my age my legs would consent. If I were to ask you whether your meditation connects in any way with your willingness to go to Honduras, how would you answer me?”

“With great difficulty,” O'Healey replied, breaking into laughter. “With very great difficulty.”