Sin Insurance
By Michael P. Ferrari
Originally published in 34th Parallel magazine.
“Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It’s been…shit, how long has it been?”
“Excuse me??” He says, half-alarmed. Like he’s never heard somebody curse before.
“Eight weeks-ish? Yeah…it’s been about eight weeks since my last confession.”
“It’s been a bit longer than eight weeks, Ricky.”
“Crap.”
“You didn’t think I’d recognize your voice?” There’s a laugh at the end of his sentence. A small one.
“Well, no, not really.”
“Well, you’re a retard,” he reminds me. “What’s on your mind?”
“I think I kind of did something bad, but I don’t know if it’s bad, so I wanted to come here and pass it through you. You know, cover my bases.”
“Cover your bases?” he asks. His Irish accent is so thick that it borders on cliché.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Thought I’d get it off my chest. That way you assign me a few Hail Mary’s and then I’m covered just in case what I did was actually wrong.”
“The hell is the matter with you??” His voice doesn’t sound angry, it sounds more confused and annoyed. “You’re using my church for back-up insurance?”
“Yeah,” I say, “like, ‘sin insurance.’ So I don’t have to worry about Hell or anything.”
“Honestly! What the hell is the matter with you??”
“What??”
“Have a shred of reverence, will ya??”
“Heh…I’m plenty reverent.”
“’Plenty reverent’?? This is my church, Ricky!”
“And?” My knees are starting to hurt. Why do we have to kneel in these things? I think the Catholic Church has gotten liberal enough to spring for chairs. And do they honestly want young men like myself kneeling in front of priests these days? It’s a PR nightmare waiting to happen.
“…and then I’ll “plenty” whoop you upside the bottom part of your chin, how would you like that??” Crap…he’s been talking this whole time? I have to stop zoning out.
“Hey, Father Bill?”
“What?”
“Have a shred of reverence, will ya?” I hear him sighing with frustration over my snickering.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Like I said, I think I did something bad, but I’m not sure, so…”
“We’ve been over this,” he says, rushing me forward. “Tell me what you did and I’ll decide if it was all that bad.”
“Isn’t that, um…you know…God’s job to decide?” He doesn’t say anything. He just groans. “Okay, well I cheated on Vicky.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’d say that’s pretty bad.”
“How bad?”
“Commandment-breaking bad.”
“They have a commandment for that?”
“Are you kiddin’ me, boy??” he yells. I hope nobody is outside of these tiny pine boxes. “’Thou shall not commit adultery!!’”
“Oh, it’s nothing that serious. Trust me, we didn’t fuck.” I hear a hard bang come from his side of the wood.
“This is your last warning, Ricky!!”
“Yeah, sorry. No more f-bombs.”
“Continue.”
“Yeah, anyway, I didn’t really sleep with the other person or anything. We just kinda…fooled around. Is that bad?”
“Well,” he breaths out slowly. “It’s wrong to betray the trust of any loved one, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Yeah, but I really don’t love Vicky. To be honest with you, I don’t really even like her. She’s kind of a b-word.”
“B-word?” he asks. “You mean a bitch?”
“I thought we weren’t allowed to curse in here.”
“My church, my rules.”
“But I thought your rules said I couldn’t curse.”
“You can’t curse. I’m excused.”
“Why not?”
“When you live a life devoted to chastity we’ll talk.”
“I don’t know how you can live like that,” I tell him.
“I don’t know how you can live like you do: atop your rich father’s pile of money, betraying good women who care about you.”
“Well, that’s the glory of being a trust fund baby, Father Bill. It’s like an invitation to act immoral.”
“Ricky,” his voice is considerably calmer. “Your father is a good man. I married him and your mother, you know.”
“So?”
“He’s a rich man because he’s an important, popular man. Not important by celebrity, but important by value. He’s made his money by being good and helping people. Haven’t you ever thought about that? Haven’t you ever thought about doing that? Haven’t you thought about doing something other than fighting, drinking, gambling or lusting?”
“I’m not my father,” I tell him. “And you’re not my probation officer, so don’t lecture me over my mistakes.” The calm, quiet air around us is abrupt. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be giving you a hard time. I’m the one who came to you.”
“Aye,” he says. “But I’ll respect your privacy.” His voice stops, and all I can hear is some fiddling on the other side of the thin pine partition, some rustling while he gets adjusted.
“You’re right though. I haven’t earned a buck I have. I spend my dad’s cash getting into trouble and then paying lawyers to keep me out of jail.” A small purged feeling cleanses the back of my mind after I say that, then the reality sits in. I never asked for forgiveness for anything serious. I never asked for God’s help, even when I’ve done the most horrible things. That woman last week. I nearly killed her. I nearly killed her because she wouldn’t fuck me. All this while I have a girlfriend who worries about me every night while she cries in and out of sleep. And my parents, my father. All I’ve put them through. All the pain of watching their only son fuck up again and again, spending his righteously earned cash just to keep me out of a cage one more week before I fuck up again.
“Are you okay, Ricky?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Father Bill?”
“Aye?”
“That girl I cheated on Vicky with. There’s more.” He’s quiet aside from some more rustling. His silence begs me to talk. “I attacked her. It started with kissing, and then I attacked her when she said “No” to sleeping with me.” I say it, expecting my eyes to faucet, rushing icy tears. They stay dry, and my heartbreaks in two while I finish. “I attacked her, and then paid off all the right people not to tell after I sent her to the hospital.”
Silence expands the next 30 seconds into infinity before Father Bill finally talks again.
“Pray,” he says. “Pray before God for forgiveness.”
I stay humbled on my knees, waiting for forgiveness, but I get something else instead.
“So you paid off evil men to keep a dirty secret? You, Richard Jameson, son of industrialist and philanthropist Connor Jameson, paid off these men to hide the fact that you attacked an innocent women for staying chaste?” He’s creepy and calm as he says it, nothing like before.
“Yes, father.” I hear nothing in response, so I call out again. “Yes, father. I did it. I paid them off.”
The pine door shoots open, Father Bill–his long shoulders and arms intersecting perfectly with his thin legs and torso to make him appear like a human cross covered in black cloth. He’s wrinkled only slightly for his age; his skin still tight along his mouth and jaw while stands over me, throwing down a grim smile. A tape recorder clicks in his hand as his stern smile turns to a grin.
“And how much would you be willing to pay me to keep it a secret, lad?”
The End
