Paulie and the Church Mouse

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
08/14/05
http://zeppscommentaries.com/Humor/pauliechurch.htm

Paulie looked perturbed. It takes some doing to make Paulie look like that, so I paid close attention.

"I just came up from that place down in the canyon..." Paulie snapped his fingers.

"Dunsmuir" I supplied.

"Dunsmuir, right. We stopped to get gasoline since I do not like the prices up here..." I shook my head sadly. Gas under four dollars a gallon was for sissies. "...and I noticed a bunch of people wearing gloves and overcoats sitting around a fire, warming themselves."

I nodded sympathetically. Homelessness was becoming a growing problem up in these parts. Then I frowned. It had to be eighty degrees out, which meant that in Dunsmuir, it was near 100. Paulie saw my sudden frown and nodded, gratified that he did not have to spell it out for me. "So I went over and asked them what they were doing. They explained that when it was cold, they would normally bundle up and sit around a fire in order to stay warm. So they figured that being the case, then if it was warm, it made sense to bundle up and sit around the fire in order to become cool."

"Did it work?" I asked.

Paulie gave me a long, level look. I finally took pity and grinned. "Just kidding. Look, people here are still adapting to global warming. I get a couple of calls a day from people who see green things growing out of the dirt in their front yards. They figure it’s an alien invasion or something. I explain that it’s just grass, and then I get bitched out by the local doctor because the people I talk to run out and try to smoke it. Down in Dunsmuir, they rejected fire for warming themselves upas just one of those hippie dippy spiritualist things that Mount Shasta was always going on about, and didn’t use it until the 1980s. So sudden hot weather is really messing with them."

Paulie looked like a man who was suddenly seeing advantages to living in New Jersey. "What is wrong with those people?"

"Well" I amplified, "there’s a lot of train traffic through there, so there’s a lot of Diesel smoke in the air, which doesn’t move around much. So the inhabitants live in a semi-permanent state of anoxia. If Terri Schiavo lived there, they probably would have made her mayor." I sometimes thought that between Mt. Shasta and Redding, the highway maintenance people should put up big signs that read: 'Roll up your windows. Drive fast. Do not stop for anything. When it’s safe, you’ll see another sign, looks like this one.'

Paulie said "Mmm" and just then, a shadow fell across the table. "Coffee?" the owner of the shadow said in a voice that reminded me of Lurch from the old 'Addams Family' TV show. "Thanks Jimmy," I said. "Just put it right there." Rightsideup, I hoped. The hand holding the coffee cup was twice the size of any of Creeping Jimmy’s hands, and about three times as hairy. I glanced up, and was startled to see another Paulie, only about five years younger and 50 pounds lighter. "Who th’hell are you?" I demanded.

"Ah, Zepp, I would like you to meet my new business associate, Rat."

"New torpedo, eh? What happened to Creeping Jimmy?"

"He is taking a Sabbatical, so to speak. I have been introducing Rat to the intricacies of the business."

I looked from Rat to Paulie and back. "Are you guys related or something?"

"Or something." Paulie explained.

Rat pursed his lips. "Cousin, niece, something like that."

"It speaks. Improved model?"

"Zepp, we have spoken of your misplaced sense of humor before."

"That we have. Sorry, Rat. Paulie’s business associates tend to be...taciturn." I frowned. "Rat? Like the mammal?"

"Rat. Not Ratzo. Friends call me Ratty. Don’t call me Ratty."

Friendly type. Well, I did start out by insulting the guy. "So where are you from?"

"The joint."

Yeah, well, that was a given. "What were you in for?"

"Mass murder."

Oh. "Here? California?"

"Texas."

"Texas? I heard they trended toward tough love in capital cases."

Paulie spoke up. "We had lawyers intercede on Rat’s behalf. Upon reflection, the judge determined that the evidence was..." Paulie drew fingernails under his chin, a cat-pleasing motion, "...tainted."

Suddenly I felt sorry I had made any jokes at Rat’s expense. A change in subject seemed in order.

"So the last time I saw Creeping Jimmy, he was shooting my television."

"Now, Zepp, I believed we had reached an accommodation on that particular unfortunate event."

"We have, we have. I wasn’t complaining." Until Paulie’s delivery truck had pulled up, I hadn’t been aware that they made 84" plasma screen HDTVs. Jimmy had actually been shooting at my friend and meal ticket, Artie the Pearl. Luckily for Artie, Jimmy seemed to be a rather poor shot. "I was just wondering what became of him."

"Well, you may recall that he found the events that lead to the demise of your television set to be personally upsetting. He was firing at a person he erroneously believed to be attempting to assassinate me at a range of less than eight feet, and missed with all six shots. Jimmy prided himself on his marksmanship and he was and is a remarkably loyal employee, so he took what he perceived to be a devastating failure on his part to heart."

He would have been even more devastated if he had come back and watched me after everyone had left on that strange day. I knew exactly where Jimmy had been standing. He was the same height as me, and of course, there was a small circle of bullet holes behind the ruined television. The chair Artie had been standing upon had not been moved. I had stood where Jimmy had stood, and aimed a laser at the six holes in the wall.

Every one of those bullets should have passed through a portion of Artie’s heart, as near as I could figure.

I didn’t believe my own findings, and I wasn’t about to tell Paulie about them. Or Creeping Jimmy. He might decide it was a personal challenge or something. Artie had amazing luck sometimes, but there was such a thing as pushing it.

"He was shooting at a friend of mine, Paulie. I’m finding it hard to be overly sympathetic."

Paulie grinned. Even in his line of work, sympathy for unsuccessful killers was limited. "It was felt that Jimmy could benefit from a form of therapeutic work for a while."

What sort of work would cheer Jimmy up? Euthanasia attendant at a large city pound? Prison screw in a place for the violently insane? Republican ballot box attendant? I gave up. "So what do you have Jimmy doing?" I wish I hadn’t sipped coffee at that point.

"He is a church minister."

Fortunately, I missed Paulie, but did nothing to improve relations with Rat.

I looked up from the floor where the coughing fit had left me. "Jesus. I’m sorry, Rat. Ask the waitress for a towel. Lucky I drink it black, no sugar, huh? Um, Paulie?"

"Yes, Zepp?"

"You’ll love this one. When I asked you what Creeping Jimmy was doing, I could have sworn I heard you say ‘church minister.’ That’s why the coughing fit."

"I did say church minister."

Now, the big advantage of lying on your back on the floor is that if you feel faint, it’s no big deal. You’ve already fallen as far as you can. So I disregarded the grey strobing sensation around my field of vision. "That’s not possible."

Paulie ran a towel over his hands – apparently I hadn’t missed him completely after all – and looked down at me with some distaste. "You might consider, Zepp, that perhaps you are underestimating James. After all, he did pass his bar and do a stint as DA a couple of years ago."

I remembered that. The San Francisco papers called him "the world’s most criminal lawyer." In the subsequent recall election, Jimmy kept his job after all the electronic ballots vanished, but quit soon after that to rejoin Paulie. The Attorney General was quoted as saying Jimmy was a "vicious, murderous thug" who, the Attorney General marveled, "wasn’t a member of the President’s cabinet." Politics in these parts have gotten a tad tetchy.

I sat up, shook my head. "Yeah, I can see him as a lawyer. But a church minister?"

"The two occupations are more closely related than you might think. L’humanité ne sera heureuse que lorsque le dernier roi sera étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prLtre. "

I showed Paulie the palms of my hands. "Yeah, but don’t ministers have to act like they like and care about people? Jimmy would run down little old ladies in crosswalks just so he could get insurance payments on his radiator grill."

"No, that didn’t work." While I was working it out that Paulie was joking, he grinned and said, "His parish is only a few miles from here. Shall we pay him a visit?"

"Jimmy is priesting HERE?"

He mentioned a church down in Dunsmuir. Now, I’m not the church-going type, and generally if you mention two different brands of protestantism to me, I have to lift the tails and peer in, and even then, I usually can’t see any difference. But this particular church stood out for its policy of "Tough Christian Love." It caused a stir in the local paper when a Sunday School teacher had a lesson entitled "Jesus Is Coming Back, So Watch It, You Little Shits." They got the guy out of the public mind by promoting him out of harm’s way. Bishop of Nevada, or something like that.

OK, so maybe Creeping Jimmy as a church minister wasn’t all that improbable. It all depends on what you consider a "church" to be.

I mentioned the Sunday School incident to Paulie, who smiled reflectively. "As a life-long Catholic, I have to admit the Sunday school situation as you describe it is not particularly alien to my experience. I’ve often thought that some of those nuns would do a splendid job collecting on the numbers."

"I just remembered where else I heard about these guys. They demanded that Ted Kennedy be excommunicated for his views on abortion."

"So? There are some nitwit politically virulent Catholic bishops who have said similar things."

"Yeah, but at least Kennedy is a member of their church."

"A point." We strolled out to the powder blue limo, and Rat glided us smoothly out into the traffic, which consisted mostly of one guy sitting lotus on the center line and chanting something in Tibetan. There’s nothing in the world quite like Mt. Shasta traffic.

The church looked like something out of an old Jimmy Stewart movie. White clapboard, surrounded by a white picket fence. Well-tended roses along the fence, irises and lilies along the clapboard, carefully-mowed bright green lawn – I wondered if the whole thing had been under a greenhouse for the previous years before it warmed up – stained glass window of Jesus standing in bright light with his arms extended downward, palms forward, in the classic "gather the little children" gesture. A flyer in the message board cheerily announced that all your sins could be forgiven, ask inside. I couldn’t even smell Diesel in the air. Butterflies and hummingbirds fluttered and buzzed among the flowers, while a pair of swallows darted in and out from under the eaves. In a corner of the churchyard, a content mother cat looked over a clutter of frolicking kittens. I felt an overpowering sense of warmth and strength.

We went in.

It was chill and damp and dark, and our footsteps echoed hollowly in the cavernous lobby. I looked around, puzzled. The church hadn’t seemed quite so big from outside.

There was a bright light at the other side of the room, and unbidden, we gravitated toward it. Rat, I noticed, had pulled out a gun. It didn’t seem appropriate behavior for a church, but I wasn’t inclined to pick another fight with the guy. After all, he’d had a rough day.

As we approached the light, we saw it was one of those brass tube affairs used to illuminate paintings. In this case, it had a halogen in it. Not surprising, since it had to illuminate a large hanging. I peered in.

At the top, it said, "Enemies of the Christ" Below were – I counted across, then down – 330 images of people. I looked closer. Mostly locals. There were the folks who ran the local bookstores, and the head of the Democratic party. The mayor was there, and two of the city councilmen. The local Catholic priest was there, circled in red. And near the middle was...

Ah, geez. Where did they get that? My hair looked like hell! I pointed at it. "Paulie, remind me to get Jimmy a more flattering shot of me, ok?"

Paulie was scanning the collection of portraits with some perplexity, and I realized he probably didn’t know most of the people there. "It looks like they got pictures of every liberal and free-thinker in town, plus all the non-Christian spiritualists and most of the Catholics."

"This seems rather odd." rumbled Paulie.

"‘Creepy’ is the word I would use. I mean, it took a lot of time and effort to put all those pictures together. It’s not like the newspaper has an 'Atheist of the week' column."

"Paulie--" We both turned to Rat, followed his pointing finger. We leaned in together, nearly bumping heads. "I don’t believe it!" I said.

Paulie shook his head, amazement glittering in his eyes. "Clearly, I will have to speak to Jimmy. I find this most disturbing."

As we moved on toward the inner door, I glanced back. The picture of Paulie was cracked, and beginning to curl on one corner. Obviously it had been there for a couple of years.

Without another word, we pushed through the dark oaken doors that led from the anteroom to the main body of the church. A gigantic crucifix adorned the far wall. Either the artist who made it had a surplus of red paint, or it was designed by Mel Gibson. Jesus, unsurprisingly, had an accusing look on his face. I leaned over toward Paulie, and for no sensible reason, whispered. "Don’t Protestants go for plain, unadorned crosses?"

"That is my understanding, Zepp. That is one grotesque crucifix." Paulie realized he, too, was whispering, and shook his head impatiently. "Hullo? Is anybody here?"

Jimmy popped his head up from behind the altar. I didn’t recognize him at first, because he was smiling. "Hey, Paulie! Zepp! Glad to see you!"

We strode forward, and Paulie, noting my baffled expression, passed me a grave wink. Explanations might be forthcoming at a later time. Maybe. If I behaved.

Jimmy strode around the altar, and I saw he was holding a screwdriver. While I was wondering if I had ever seen an object in his hands other than a steering wheel or a handgun, he enthused, "Lots of work to do around here! I’ve just been using the old carpentry skills to shore up the altar and nave. I’m afraid Reverend Bradley wasn’t much on upkeep."

"You sound quite animated, James. I trust you are enjoying your new occupation."

"You bet! Spreading the Word, working with kids, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. It’s the life I dreamed of, Paulie!"

"Then pastoral life suits you well, James."

"No, that means ‘rustic’ Paulie. I think you meant to say ‘pastorale life. Or maybe pastorial."

Correcting Paulie’s grammar was one of those things that could lead to Consequences. Much safer to criticize his mother’s linguini.

Too much going on, too many shocks in too short a time. I found myself without anything to say. Unbidden, I remembered the first time I encountered one of my school teachers in the local market, shopping for groceries. I was seven, and she was polite and friendly, and not at all like the terrifying Presence in the second grade who hated left handed kids. I had never realized there was a Jimmy other than Jimmy, the grim, murderous torpedo.

Paulie frowned slightly. "Well, James, this IS a rather rustic region."

"We do have inside plumbing, TV, and several traffic lights all within twenty five miles of here. But we can save the linguistic jousts for a later time, Paulie. How’s tricks?" Creeping Jimmy nodded at me. "Still keeping disreputable company, I see." He took any sting that might have been in that with a merry wink at me.

"Well, James, since you are doing handyman tasks around the church, you might consider taking down that wanted poster in the vespers."

"The where?"

"The lobby. I cannot say that I was pleased to see my picture in amidst those of Zepp and all his friends."

"Your picture is in there? Really? I haven’t really looked at that thing."

"What is that anyway, Jimmy?" I asked. "Do you really think that’s appropriate for a church to have? A wanted list of people guilty of no crime other than having different political or religious views?"

Jimmy shrugged. "Some of the parishioners put it up back during the Gore Bush campaign. Personally, I think it’s a bit silly, but where’s the harm?"

Granted, there hadn’t been any mysterious deaths or beatings in the area lately. Oh, it happened up in places like Fort Jones and Happy Camp, but in places like that, "The son of a bitch had it coming" was considered a valid legal defense, and I couldn’t recall anyone getting beat up for being a liberal or a free thinker. "It isn’t harmful until it is. Aren’t you worried this might incite some of your people?"

"Nah." Jimmy shook his head. "These people are good Christians. They understand that the purpose in pointing out the ungodly is to help them, not harm them."

I allowed myself to feel some slight skepticism. Especially since about half the people on that list were churchgoing types. I glanced over at Paulie, who appeared lost in thought. Feeling eye tracks, he looked up. "James, you know I’m not local, not associated with this neighborhood other than my acquaintanceship with Zepp. I would consider it a personal favor if you were to remove my picture from that poster."

You selfish prick, I thought. You just sold me out.

Paulie wasn’t looking at me. He was giving Jimmy a level stare. Jimmy made a noncommittal motion. "I’ll talk to the parishioners about it, Paulie. That’s the best I can do."

Paulie flicked an eyebrow. What he did not do was give Rat a significant glance. Paulie would bide his time.

If Jimmy had noticed any of this, he wasn’t perturbed by it. "Let’s go in the back area. We’ve got a little dining area there, and I can see what we’ve got to nibble on."

Jimmy went into the kitchen, and I immediately pulled out my notepad and started scribbling. This caught Paulie’s attention, which, of course, I was hoping it would do.

"What are you writing?"

"The names of some of the people on that little wanted poster out there. I’m going to the paper and raising a ruckus about it."

"Ah. Aren’t you worried that this might inflame their passions even more?"

I shrugged. "I’m already on their shit list. Bradley, the minister they had here before, publicly called me a minion of Satan once." I grinned. "I was going to add that to my business card. I thought it might give it a certain je ne sais quoi that most business cards lack." I kept scribbling as I said this.

"Suppose they were to sue you?"

"On what grounds? Discussing information they have on a public bulletin board? Anyway, I’ve got a lawyer these days. You’d like him. Italian, devout, thinks religious nuts and right wing radicals are small and crunchy and delicious with ketchup. He’d eat Jimmy’s lunch."

Still scribbling. Paulie was attentively watching my pen move. All according to plan.

"Ah. Will you be mentioning my name?"

By way of an answer, I turned the pad around so he could see it, and tapped his name with my pen. It was, of course, the first name on the list. "Check it, Paulie. I want to be sure I got all the vowels in the correct order."

Little thoughts scampered across Paulie’s eyes. "Do you think it’s necessary to involve me in this, um, crusade of yours?"

I leaned back in my chair, putting my hands out in an unconscious imitation of the "come to me little children" pose. No dignitary encountering a dog turd in his top hat would have looked more astonished. "I -have- to, Paulie. Sure, you’re not local, but you do own property around here..." Paulie looked openly surprised that I had been doing homework, "...and let’s face it, you are something of a celebrity on the national scene. Not to be too ethnic about it, but you are the biggest cheese on that bulletin board."

I knew from the flicker of annoyance that Paulie permitted himself that I had nettled him. Now to bring him in...

"Paulie, you know that bulletin board out there is a terrible idea. All it does is rile up the most loathsome and bigoted members of the church against others who are guilty of nothing more than having different beliefs, or different politics. You might be able to pressure Jimmy into removing your picture, but to sit there and not even say anything about the board as a whole is a betrayal of everything you’ve ever believed – and lectured me about – regarding an open and free society. If you let Jimmy keep that board up..." I leaned forward for emphasis, "then you are no better than any other scared dittohead out there covering up his own craven inability to cope with society behind the bluster of dehumanization that things like that board represent. You might as well start substituting Rush Limbaugh’s stoned babblings for thought."

Paulie looked angry. "Is that what you think? That I’m afraid of these people? That I don’t respect rights? That I’m becoming a mindless right wing clone, a, a," Paulie groped the air, doing a body cavity search for a metaphor, "a PARROT?"

"Paulie, want a cracker?" Jimmy strode in, cheerfully shaking a box of Ritz. In his other hand he had a six pack of soda." Sensing sub-frigid moods, he stopped. "What? Did I say something?"

Paulie looked from me to Jimmy and back, hands clenching and unclenching. It seemed to go on for a long time, though in retrospect it only could have been five seconds. Finally, he gave Rat the Significant Glance and hooked a thumb in the direction of the lobby. "Go take care of it."

Rat strode out, and in moments we heard the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood. This was followed, in short order, by several short bursts of semi-automatic fire. I don’t know why he elected to shoot what was left of the display, but then, I’m not an assassin. Who am I to question an artiste?

Jimmy’s eyes had gone flat and cold, the eyes of the torpedo that I knew so well. He looked at Paulie, and then he looked at me, and gave a little nod, promising that this was not over.