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“Is that so?” I asked, playing along. Because Shane wouldn’t be Shane if he wasn’t making light of his own fucked-up situation.
I didn’t realize he was actually serious…until he plucked a scrap of ugly pink flowered fabric from the weedy undergrowth, twirled it between his thumb and forefinger, and said, “Obviously, we’re in Limbo.”
8
I might be a sorry excuse for a Catholic, but I did remember what the priests used to say about Limbo. Mainly because, even as a kid, I could never wrap my head around what kind of God would condemn the souls of unbaptized babies to wander around outside Heaven’s gates, neither here nor there, for all eternity.
Shane and I were standing now. Him smoothing out his new suit with its sewn-shut pockets, me ignoring the bloody smear the back of my head left behind on the gray weeds. Both of us uncomfortable as all hell.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” he said. “I’ve been baptized. I know that for a fact. Baptism, Communion, even Confirmation. My mother’s got the photos she never looks at as proof that yes, indeed, I’ve dotted all my i’s and crossed all my t’s. Unless the priest who dripped water on my baby forehead was actually an impostor, so none of the other sacraments actually counted….”
He was being a wiseass while he said it—but then his face went just a bit too still. I could tell how he thought. Maybe not an impostor—but a priest with mortal sin on his soul? No big stretch.
“If the problem was the priest,” I told him, “this whole riverbank would be full of people clamoring to get on the boat.”
“True. Unless…they eventually fade away.”
“Don’t go inviting trouble,” I said. It would always find you soon enough.
As we talked, Shane had been toying with that scrap of pink flowered material, and he paused to consider it. “Besides, the same priest baptized Heather. I’d like to think this little souvenir means that she, at least, made it across. Though that would beg the question, why her and not me?”
Because he’d had the misfortune to cross paths with me before he met the boatman.
“I’m no model citizen,” Shane went on, “but neither was my sister. We both lied. We both stole. We both did things for drugs that were better off forgotten. True, I had the opportunity to keep racking up sins a lot longer than Heather did. But I’d bet we both thought there’d be plenty of time to set things right before the final tally.”
I slipped a hand into my pocket and fingered the hard edge of Shane’s coin. Lying, stealing, tugging on some horny dealer’s dick…maybe those weren’t the sorts of things to keep you from crossing the river.
But sending a guy on a one-way trip to the riverbank? Something I’d done no less than four separate times?
Some things leave a stain on your soul that no amount of Hail Marys can erase.
“Cheer up, Gino,” Shane said with a wry smile. “At least we’ve got each other.”
When I didn’t have anything to say back to that, Shane chattered on to fill the silence. “I hope wherever Heather did end up, there’s no devils and pitchforks. Not that I necessarily think the pearly gates exist, but some sort of classical afterlife, like Nirvana or the Elysian Fields? That might be pretty cool—not that I think she’d know what to do with herself in any kind of field, not unless it involved a bonfire and a keg. Or, how ’bout this? What if, on the other side of the river…the hospital we’ve been looking for actually does exist? What if the other side is a second chance?”
I made myself stop playing with the coin. Even so, it weighed heavy in my pocket.
“Kinda makes you wonder what that pissed-off guy in the wetsuit did to get stuck over here without a fare,” Shane said. “What d’you think? Insider trading? Money laundering? I’ll bet it’s some kind of icky white-collar crime. He had that rich-guy vibe about him. In fact, I’ll bet he drove a Beamer—electric, obviously, so he could feel all virtuous about it—”
As he spoke, a wind kicked up out of nowhere and the scrap of pink fabric flew out of his hand as if an invisible hand had yanked it from his grasp. We both grabbed at the air as it somersaulted away, and Shane was off like a gunshot before I could warn him not to go chasing after it.
Of course, I followed him.
Shane was quick. The heavy crunch of gravel rasped against my splitting headache as I lumbered along behind, and soon enough, his footfalls tuned to the squishy thud of the riverbank. As I drew up beside him, the scrap of fabric did a final loop-de-loop, light as air, then settled on the surface of the gray water just out of reach.
I grabbed Shane’s fancy new suit by the back of the collar, just in case he had any bright ideas of splashing in after it. But with Surfer Boy’s blowup fresh in our minds, I didn’t need to tell him wading in would be suicide…so to speak.
The flowered pink scrap bobbed there on the surface, spinning gently….
Then all at once, it sank as if it had been sucked down to the center of the earth.
Through the wad of jacket in my fist, I felt Shane tremble.
Nothing happened on this river without a reason, so I pricked my ears for the whine of the outboard motor, figuring that asshole at the tiller was about to come coasting out of the fog and announce that Shane had a ticket out of this no-man’s-land after all—and it’d been in my pocket all along. But there was no motor. No boat. No nothing. Just Shane and me and that murky gray river.
“C’mon. Let’s go back to the trees.” I gave his jacket a gentle tug and took a half-step back…and tripped over something sticking out of the mud.
A green glass bottle.
