The Trinity Read online

  THE TRINITY

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2007 by David LaBounty

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this e-book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in it are fictitious, except where specific historical events are mentioned or cited in context. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published by Offense Mechanisms, an imprint of Silverthought Press

  www.offensemechanisms.com

  www.silverthought.com

  Cover illustration and design by Paul Hughes

  Remember the young man standing in the large picture window. Remember the young man staring out at the damp early dawn suburban street, studying the uniform box-like houses he has known all his life that vary only in aluminum siding and landscaping.

  He is waiting for a plain white sedan with U.S. government plates. He is waiting for a sedan driven by his recruiter, who will take him to the processing center twenty miles away in downtown Detroit.

  His house is nearly silent. His mother is sleeping in the main bedroom after coming home late from a date the night before. His father is in the basement, the flat sound of the television traveling up the staircase. His father moved to the basement years ago, when he and Chris’s mother stopped liking each other, and the television is left on continuously to kill the sounds of loneliness. Chris never was quite sure why his father never left or why his parents never divorced. Perhaps economics, perhaps laziness.

  His father turned into a hermit—home from work and straight to the basement—every day, without a deviation.

  His mother: reliving her youth, hardly home, never eating with Chris nor studying a report card in two or three years. She dates, often and with great variety, and the men sometimes leave the house as Chris leaves for school.

  Chris isn’t sure if anyone will bother to see him off. He sighs with indifference. He lights a cigarette and waits, thinking about himself.

  Eighteen and blond, pink-skinned, bespectacled, vaguely overweight and definitely out of shape (the result of beer and a steady stream of fast food) and a virgin, an aspect of his life that grieves him to no end. He has never had a girlfriend, nor has he even kissed a girl, an aspect of his life that grieves him even more.

  No one among his few friends claims virginity.

  Chris strays from the subject of girls altogether.

  He has faith that the Navy will change things. He has faith that the Navy will change him, and reconstruct the details of his life.

  A car arrives in the driveway, an older, rusty two-door Chevrolet driven by his brother, four years his senior.

  As his brother leaves his car, beer cans roll into the driveway and into the street. His brother walks clumsily into the house. Once inside, Chris detects his brother’s residential odors—beer and marijuana. Chris looks at his watch and notes that his brother has come home one hour before his job as a warehouseman starts.

  His brother is startled by Chris’s presence in the living room at such an early hour.

  “What the fuck you doin’ up?”

  “I leave today.”

  “For the Navy?”

  “Yep.”

  “Do Mom and Dad know?”

  Chris shrugs his shoulders.

  “No shit, the fuckin’ Navy.” And his brother ambles out of the small living room and into the hallway. It will be an eternity before Chris sees him again.

  The twilight gives way to daylight and another cigarette disappears before the recruiter pulls up in front of Chris’s house. Chris walks out without taking a last look inside. He closes the door to his house and a lot of other things.

  The recruiter, a Petty Officer Arnold, was a factor in Chris’s decision to join the Navy. Arnold is a young man, thirty still several birthdays away, but he appears worldly and wise to someone as sheltered as Chris.

  For Chris, there were few choices upon graduation from high school. College? No. His sub-par grade-point average saw to the fact that a four-year university wouldn’t be interested. Community college? No. That meant living at home, and Chris wanted anything but that. A job? No. No job he could get at his age would pay enough for him to get his own place, own a car, et cetera, and that too meant living at home, and he didn’t want to wind up like his brother.

  That left Chris with four choices: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.

  The Army? No. He didn’t want to fight in a trench if World War III started. The Air Force? No. It seemed too technical and just not fun. The Marines? No way. Chris lacked the certain masochistic machismo the Marines seemed to attract and require.

  The Navy held the greatest lure for Chris: the travel. He had never left Michigan in his life, save a short trip to Chicago when he was small and his parents still operated the household as a family. The recruiter enchanted him with tales of stops in Australia, Japan, Italy and Hong Kong. Additionally, Petty Officer Arnold seemed the most relaxed, his shirt somewhat untucked and his face round and soft, in contrast to the Marine recruiters, sitting at attention in their desks, belt buckles glaring, faces stern and serious.

  Petty Officer Arnold maybe spent a little more time with Chris than was necessary, realizing how impressionable and inexperienced Chris was.

  Arnold had many, many tattoos. He tried to collect one from each port of call.

  His favorite, a red and green dragon, impressed Chris the most.

  “I got this one here in Singapore; I was drunk as a skunk. This Chinaman give it to me. The man was damn near blind, but it came out pretty good, though.”

  Arnold told Chris about the women he had met during his travels.

  “Do you like blondes with big tits?”

  Chris said sure, of course.

  “Then, my friend, make sure you get to Australia. Them women down there just love American sailors. Their men don’t treat women right. Hell, they got eight women to every man down there. I guess they can do what they want. Anyway, an Australian gal will screw you all night and make breakfast for you in the morning. Good luck finding that anywhere in this country. Hell, these days, women want you to make them breakfast.”

  “Do sailors ever marry Australian women?” Chris asked, his mind in the middle of a fantasy with a beautiful Australian woman attached to his arm.

  “I don’t know. Why the hell would you care about that?”

  Chris shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.

  “Sailors do marry a lot of Orientals, though.”

  And Arnold told him of the debauchery in Asia, especially in the Philippines, with its inexpensive call girls and even less expensive beer.

  “I had me two girls, a real good buzz, a little Flip to drive me around and a hotel for the night, and I didn’t even spend twenty bucks.”

  Chris has never felt especially patriotic, having only a thumbnail knowledge of current events. He likes President Reagan for no real reason, knows that the Russians are evil, and the world he lives in is under the constant threat of communists and nuclear war.

  “My friend, our job is the most important in the world,” Arnold told him during one of his frequent visits before signing up. “If it wasn’t for our military, them commie-pinko-faggot-hippies would rule the world. And they’re trying. Look at Nicaragua; we shouldn’t have let that happen. If it weren’t for those damn democrats in Congress, Reagan would have sent us in there, cleaned that place up. Anyway, we keep the world at peace and keep America free. Be proud of that uniform when you finally put it on.”

  On the way to the processing station, A
rnold gives Chris some final advice.

  “Do exactly as you’re told, keep to yourself, and you’ll be fine. Basic is easy. There’ll be every type of fellow you can imagine—old and young, rich and poor, black and white, some real smart and some really dumb, and hell, anymore, gay and straight.”

  Chris hasn’t given much thought to boot camp, just life afterwards, the places he’ll see, and the life he’ll lead.

  In Eastern Scotland, somewhere between Aberdeen and Dundee and just a few miles from the North Sea, lies a small U.S. naval base, a listening post, hidden in a valley surrounded by low and smooth green hills and pastures full of many sheep and tidy farmhouses made of stone.

  The base contains just over five hundred Americans, mostly sailors and their families. If one were to travel more than thirty miles from the base, a Scottish person would not know there was an American base just outside the village of Lutherkirk.

  The base is an old Royal Air Force installation, built just after the British were brought into World War II. Some of the original hangars remain, and they have been converted into tennis courts, a gymnasium, a galley and the base commissary. The base is still officially referred to as RAF Lutherkirk, and a token RAF Major is the lone British serviceman assigned to the base. He is given the title of Base Commander, but he is only a liaison with the British government, the local community and local law enforcement.

  Father Alexander Crowley arrives at the base late in the summer. He is the new Catholic chaplain, and it is his first duty station. He was given the rank of lieutenant after a brief period of Naval Chaplain Corps training in Newport, Rhode Island. Already past forty, he is rather old for the rank; his dark red hair is graying throughout, and the pale skin around his bluish eyes is starting to wrinkle. He is thin in the arms, legs and shoulders, but, due to his recent development of a love of wine, his khaki uniform is taut across his stomach and snug around his waist.

  He had been removed from his duties after many years as a parish priest in Houston’s Fifth Ward for homilies that had nothing to with religion. He had taken to telling his parishioners about the evil of the Jewish-controlled banking system and the erosion of American culture by too many immigrants and minorities. His parish was mostly African-American, and they became irritated. After many complaints and warnings over several years, the diocese recommended a transfer to another parish, even another diocese, or even resignation. The hierarchy of the Houston diocese sensed Crowley had become bored and frustrated with parish life in the inner city.

  But he wasn’t bored, he was angry. Faithlessness, bitterness, indifference and a smug and perverted intellectualism had eroded his once youthful and fervent love of Jesus and the Church.

  He was born the youngest of seven kids, five girls and two boys all about two years apart, and raised in a small town in Northern Minnesota. His sole brother was the oldest sibling and he had left for work in Minneapolis by the time Alexander was four, leaving Alexander essentially the only boy in a house full of women.

  His father was the town’s high school history teacher and football coach. His father was a large and outspoken man with broad shoulders, large hands, and an even larger head with a Marine Corps style haircut. He was very masculine and a contrast to his devoutly Catholic and thin and timid wife. He was privately atheist, despite going with the family to Mass every Sunday.

  Alex’s mother was a homemaker of the most obedient kind, surreptitiously devoted to her husband but more devoted to her church. Rosary beads, crucifixes, and images of Mary and Jesus could be found throughout the house, and she was constantly seen kneeling, especially after a confrontation with her husband, who had despised her by the time Alex was born. But he would never leave her, despite the malaise that crept into their marriage; he had too much comfort in his lifestyle, being a big man in a small town. His peers assumed his family life was perfect.

  Alex took after his mother much more than he did his father throughout his childhood.

  He was born prematurely, was tiny as an infant and child and had many grave childhood illnesses: mumps at three, measles at five, a near-fatal flu at seven, and chicken pox at eight. With each illness, his mother would pray constantly and convince the local priest to come and pray over him. After each recovery, his mother would tell Alex that God had saved him, and that He had set a special purpose for his life. Because of all the religious imagery his mother surrounded him with, young Alexander Crowley saw his childhood as some sort of an amazing divine drama. He thought of himself as a knight of God, battling disease and pestilence and evil in the world. He developed an early love for Mass and Sunday school, and would join his mother in prayer at home whenever the mood struck her. He read scripture often, especially the canonical Gospels. He was fascinated by the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the walking on the water, the temptation in the wilderness, the cross being carried to Calvary, the brutal crucifixion and the miraculous resurrection. But he was more interested in the Catholic rites than he was scripture; he had a fascination with the sacraments and the lifestyle of their parish priest.

  Because of his frailty and his interest in religion, Alex had his mother’s undivided attention. She all but ignored her daughters and husband.

  His father, sensing and fearing an effeminate nature in the boy, tried pushing sports and hunting and fishing and martial arts training on Alex. He wasn’t interested. He would remain small until he reached college, and he possessed no athletic ability whatsoever. In fact, his father was embarrassed when he watched Alex try to play with other boys. Alex felt hunting was barbaric and fishing very boring. Martial arts was tolerable, as it gave him time alone with his father, time his father never normally provided. But he much preferred spending time indoors with his mother, reading the Bible or almost anything non-fiction or church related, and going to Mass and different church functions. His childhood ran the full gamut of Catholicism; he took all the catechism classes he could and was an altar boy throughout junior and senior high school. The Roman Catholic population in his town was small, and no parochial school existed. Alex would have preferred a parochial school to the public high school where he was taunted and left friendless, despite his father’s imposing and respected presence.

  Early in Alex’s senior year of high school, his father died of a heart attack while coaching a football game. As his father fell on the field, Alex and his mother, who were sitting in the stands, didn’t bother to run to him. They sat peacefully and watched as paramedics ran to his side. They didn’t bother to rise until the ambulance drove him away. This cinched Alex’s future (and his desire since childhood): he would become a priest with his mother’s strong approval. The vows of celibacy would be no problem, as he had no interest in girls or sex, and felt guilty when any sinful thought crossed his mind. His heart was a bit lighter when his father passed away; he had been wishing for years to be rid of him. He felt a small amount of shame at the glee he experienced upon his father’s demise, and prayed at length to absolve himself. It was to no avail. The selfish joy he felt upon his father’s death would be his first insight into his innately cruel and selfish nature.

  He completed his undergraduate degree in theology at Bemidji State and attended seminary at a small Catholic university in southern Minnesota. He was ordained in the tearful presence of his mother and in the indifferent presence of his siblings.

  His first work as a clergyman was as a roving assistant priest for rural parishes in North Dakota, saying several Masses from town to town on Saturdays and Sundays, as none of the parishes had enough people to support a fulltime priest.

  After three years in North Dakota, Houston became available. He welcomed the opportunity to leave the Midwest and he welcomed the challenge of serving in the inner city. He rekindled his childhood fantasy life. He pictured himself as a knight of God, as a sort of divine superhero to rid Houston’s Fifth Ward of poverty, drug abuse, rampant crime and faithlessness. He failed miserably.

  Shortly after his arrival in Houston, Father Cro
wley’s mother developed breast cancer. It spread quickly to her lymphatic system and into her lungs. She passed away within six months, without giving Alex a chance to come home and say goodbye.

  Alex was devastated. He was angry with God and angrier still with his remaining family.

  He blamed his sisters and brother for their mother’s quick demise. He felt that if they had been more attentive in his absence and had taken better care of her, she would have lived, or at the very least, the cancer would have been spotted sooner. Only two sisters actually remained in their hometown, and they had husbands and children of their own. They weren’t particularly close to their mother, especially after being reared in the shadow of her beloved Alex.

  Father Crowley returned for the last time to Minnesota to deal with his mother’s funeral and all the other family business that comes with the death of a last remaining parent. Things were tense between him and his siblings, especially since Alex was named executor of the will, even though he was the youngest child. There wasn’t much in the way of finances to settle. The house was sold at a bargain just to unload it, and the monies were equally divided between Alex and his brother and sisters.

  After the family business had been settled, Alex returned to Houston and remained solely in Texas for the next several years, communicating with his family only cordially on holidays and after a few years not at all. They never shared his religious zeal, and they felt he looked down upon them. He was fairly self-absorbed as a young priest, and despite the implied forgiving nature of a clergyman, he held a grudge against his family and vowed he would never return to Minnesota, not even in the event of another family member’s death.

  Despite his pride, Father Crowley felt adrift and empty without a family to come home to.

  His faith began to ebb as he neared the age of forty when he realized that after years of frustration, he was a lousy priest.

  From his days of assistant priest to head of his own church, he had inspired no one. His Masses were listless and eventually sparse; only the devout would remain, staring hopefully from the pews.