The Confession of Joe Cullen by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

mean. He had a round, chunky face with a pink complexion that was sunburned to high color. They walked him past where I was standing and watching, and he grinned at me. I guess he was about my age …”
    Cullen’s voice dropped away. The words impinged on his memory, and with his eyes half closed, he was back there in that strange tropical place that always reminded him of Vietnam, the air not clean and clear, like northern air, but heavy and scented with all the strange scents of the jungle, his shirt wet with sweat, his tongue dry and thirsty.
    â€œThey put him in one of the supply sheds,” Cullen said. “They didn’t lock him in. There was no door to the shed, just a big opening the size of a pair of doors, and there was always a guard with one of those damn flat poker faces. The guard knew me and let me walk past him into the shed. Maybe if it wasn’t a priest he wouldn’t have done it, but he let me. Maybe he remembered. Maybe he remembered a priest he knew when he was a kid. So I walked in there and the priest was on his knees praying, and he must have heard my footsteps but he didn’t move. So I sat down on one of the crates in there and waited. I must have waited about ten minutes before he moved, and then he got up and turned around because when he was praying his back was to the entrance, and he squinted at me, and then he asked me who I was.
    â€œI told him my name and how I happened to be there and then I asked him what dumb son of a bitch put the gyves on him? He burst out laughing, and he says to me, ‘Wherever did you find that name for a pair of handcuffs?’ So I tell him that when we were kids on our block, that’s what we called them, and then he said something about the persistence of words, and, well — well, that was how I met Father O’Healey.”
    They waited. Leary returned with a six-pack of soda, fell into the moment of silence, and passed around the soda. Cullen nodded and drank eagerly. He rubbed his forehead. Suddenly, he was confused.
    â€œTake it easy,” Freedman said.
    â€œI don’t know how to tell it. I could just tell you about the killing, but then it makes no sense.”
    â€œTell it the way you want to tell it. We’ll listen,” Freedman said.
    â€œAll right, I was raised a Catholic. I saw a lot of priests in my time, but I never really talked to one. Like I told you, I had a layover at the strip, and I guess I must have sat and talked but mostly listened to Father O’Healey for maybe fifteen, twenty hours. The day after I met him, we talked until maybe midnight. When I wondered why he’d waste the time on a bum like myself, he said he thought he might save my soul, and when I told him I didn’t have any soul to bother about and that I had stopped believing in God, he just shrugged it off and said that nobody has much authority over his own soul. He told me how he had come down to Honduras eight years before and he was supposed to stay for only a few weeks because the priest at the Church of the Blessed Apostles had died and he was to take over temporarily, and that was up in the mountains, just poor Indians and peasants. He told me how they were victimized by the government and the soldiers, robbed, beaten, murdered like they were so many dogs, and how finally they organized a guerrilla movement to fight against the soldiers. We talked a lot about right and wrong. I never gave much thought to things like that. I got through college because I had to for being a pilot, but I took what I was given and I went where they sent me, and it made no damn difference to me whether we had any right to be in Nam or not, and the truth was that I didn’t give a fuck as long as I could fly and draw my pay. But O’Healey stood it all on its head, because he turned all my thinking upside down—”
    Freedman interrupted him now. It was getting too deep and murky and political, and what Freedman