Serenade by James M. Cain Read Free Book Online Page B

off. Then I took off my pants. I looked around. There was a cassock hanging there, and some surplices. I took off everything, wet undershirt, wet drawers, wet socks, and put on the cassock. Then I took a lighter that was standing in a corner and started out to the sacristy lamp. I knew my matches wouldn't work. Walking on a tile floor barefoot you don't make much noise, and when she saw me with the lighter, in the cassock, I don't know what she thought, or if she thought. She fell on her face in front of me and began to gibber, calling me padre and begging for absolución. "I'm not the padre, Juana. Look at me. It's me."
    "Ah, Dios!"
    "I'm lighting the candles so we can see."
    But I mumbled it low. I pulled down the lamp, lit the lighter and slipped it up again. Then I went around through the vestry room and up on the altar and lit three candles on one side, crossed over and lit three on the other. I cut the lighter, went back to the vestry room, put it in its place again. Then I went back and cut the car lights.
    One funny thing about that that I didn't realize until I snapped that switch. Each time I crossed that altar I went down on one knee. I stood there, looking at the six candles I had lit, and thought that over. It had been twenty years, ever since I had been a boy soprano around Chicago, since I had thought of myself as a Catholic. But they knock it into you. Some of it's there to stay.
    I lifted eggs and about fifteen other things from the rumble, until I could get out her hatbox. It was pretty wet but not as wet as the rest of the stuff. I took it back to the vestry room, set it down, then went out and touched her on the shoulder. "Your things are back there. You better get out of that wet dress."
    She didn't move.
    By that time it must have been about half past eight, and it dawned on me that why I felt so lousy was that I was hungry. I got a candle off the altar, lit it, went back and stuck it to the rear fender of the car, and took stock. I lifted out most of that stuff from the rumble seat, and unlashed what was riding the running board, and all I could see that was doing us any good was the eggs. I unwrapped one and took out my knife to puncture the end so I could suck it, and then I noticed the charcoal. That gave me an idea. There were some loose tiles in the floor and I clawed up a couple of them and carried them to the vestry room and stood them on their sides. Then I got one of the iron plates for cooking tortillas, and laid it across them and carried in the charcoal.
    Next thing was how I was going to cook the eggs. There were no skillets or anything like that. And I went through every basket there was and there wasn't any butter, grease, or anything you could use for grease. But there was a copper pot, bigger than I wanted but anyway a pot, so that meant that anyway I could boil the eggs. While I was rooting through those beans and rice and stuff that would take all night to cook, I smelled coffee and started looking for it. Finally I hit it, buried in with the rice in a paper bag, and then I found a little coffee pot. The coffee wasn't ground, but there was a metate there for grinding corn, and I mashed up a couple of handfuls with that, and put it in a bowl.
    I went in the vestry room with what I had and the next thing was what I was going to use for water. It was dripping through every seam in the room and running down the windows in streams, but it looked kind of tough to get enough of it to cook. Still, I had to get some. Out back I could hear a stream pouring off the roof, so I took the biggest of the bowls and pulled the bolt on the rear door, right back of the altar. But when I opened it I could see a well, just a few steps down the hill. I took off the cassock. It was the only dry thing there was, and I wasn't letting it get wet. I went down to the well stark naked. The rain came down on me like a needle shower and at first it was terrible, but then it felt good. I threw out my chest against it