Mision San Pablo

Here is what I do: I scan weeklies all over the state and hone in on some good family that for one reason or another catches my eye; it could be a photograph or a headline on the sports page or a couple of kids with the same last name on school honor rolls. Or none of those. The only thing that connects them is that they are complete strangers to me.

I drive to their town and observe them for several weeks; I see the kids waiting for the school bus in the morning. Some days I follow mom to work. Some days, dad. I go along with them to restaurants and movies. I mark down who mows the lawn--and when. I note when the lights go out each night. Eventually I discern who is happy and who is putting up a front. I am only interested in the happy ones.

The job takes 45 minutes at most. I wait until the house is empty. Believe it or not, I often find an unlocked door and just walk in. If all doors are bolted, I simply tape and break a small pane of glass from a back door. (FYI, alarm systems are deal breakers.)

Their homes look like they are always expecting unexpected guests. Donning disposable rubber gloves and surgical shoe covers, I head straight to the parents’ bedroom, clear each bureau top with a smooth Fred Astaire sweep of my arm, pull out the dresser drawers, rip and hang a pair of mom’s panties on the bedpost. Jewelry and prescriptions are thrown into a pillow case; the cash in dad’s sock drawer is stuffed in my back pocket. I then go about trashing the kids’ rooms, shards of glass and ripped-up posters and shattered computers piled on their beds, their names scribbled on the walls with mom’s lipstick.

Down in the living room I knife the couch, rip family pictures off the walls, knock over the etagere, spear the flat screen with a fireplace poker. You can imagine the kitchen. Afterward I wash up in the bathroom, plug the sink and turn up the hot water.

For my time and effort I keep approximately 50% of the gross monies for food and rent and save the rest for the 22nd Mission Fund. The jewelry I take to the dump in a green plastic bag along with the rest of my daily trash. I’m not in it for the money.

Here’s a bone: My father was a minister. We lived up in Butte County. I still see Father at the head of the maple table in his collar and ruddy cheeks, hands together and head bowed as he thanks the Lord for our daily bread. Mother sits to the right. She is wearing an apron. Five-year-old Ruth sits across from me. I am 7. It is morning, the sun lighting up the daffodils Mama had put in the bay window.

The next thing I know Father’s eyes are wide open like he’d seen the Devil himself and then he falls off his chair. The next thing I know we’re living with my mother’s parents in Fresno.

The tedious story of a childhood after a parent dies has been told and retold by so many other orphans that it seems pointless to make a point of it. Would you like to know that my grandfather died soon after of emphysema? That I found him in the backyard? That I tried and tried to be the good boy my mother said my father would want me to be? That my sister Ruth didn’t try; at 15, she stole Gram’s rainy day money and ran off with 22-year-old Ray Don Walton?

Well, believe any or all of it, if you must. But my intent is not to leave subtle psychological clues alongside the path of this narrative so that shortly after the climax you will smile, nod gravely or raise your finger as if you truly understand. This is not about pathology. I will not allow you that easy consolation.

Instead I offer you the story of the Jostens, my grandparents’ next-door neighbors. They befriended me and Gram after Ruthie disappeared and my mom drowned herself in a bottle. (I neglected to mention that.)

So a decade after we fled Paradise for Fresno, I was sitting in Gram’s yellowed kitchen with the Jostens right after my high school graduation, eating a white Ralphs sheet cake with a chocolate mortarboard and tassel on top. Mrs. Josten’s thick lower lip trembled as she held out a forkful of cake, saying she was so proud that I would be going to the seminary in the fall. Then Mr. Josten, a high school teacher and deacon at the Methodist church, got up from his chair, walked around behind me and laid his thick pink hand on the back of my skinny neck. I bowed my head. “Paul,” he said, “each of us has something special to give to others. It is God’s plan. Because you have known so much unhappiness in your young life, I think you may have more to offer than many others. Look around and see who needs you.”

I dutifully lifted my head against the weight of his moist palm and twisted around. “Your father,” he continued, “named you Paul for good reason, Paul. Heed well the words of your namesake: ‘Take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when you are weak, then are you strong.’”

I stared at the closed eyes of a man who wouldn’t recognize real distress if it smacked him across his boneless face. He saw Jesus, but did not see the cross.

So that night while they were at church, I ransacked the Jostens’ lovely colonial home, unsettling their earthly lives forever. And over the ensuing eight years, through seminary training and beyond, I made it my mission to toss similarly weak, narcissistic people into maelstroms of confusion and despair--and in the process help them to save their eternal souls.

In retrospect, my problem is that I am weak. After eight thankless years, maybe I got bored --or perhaps ambitious. Certainly I was insulted. Maybe all three.

My undoing began with the Weiners’ uncanny ability to bounce back from adversity. It was always my practice to hang around for a few weeks to observe the results of my charity, but within a mere 10 days of my intrusion into their homey home near Gilroy, the Weiners had seemingly returned to normal. The resolutely thin Dr. and Mrs. lost only a day at their respective jobs; the three kids, Jennifer, 17, Sarah, 15, and Benjamin, 13, never even skipped school.

Workmen were at the site by day two to repair the damage that the family was unable to clean up themselves. And at 14 days, when I should have been packing, they were no longer locking the house in the morning.

So I bided my time and returned to their split-level fortress 40 days after my first incursion. The place looked like I had never been there. I methodically went over some of the same old territory --Mrs. W’s pink lace underwear, the diaphragm, the posters, the couch, the family photos--just to let them know it was me, and then upped the ante: I slipped the dead robin I had found in the backyard beneath the parents’ comforter. I hung Benjamin’s bobble head Barry Bonds doll by the neck from the ceiling. I trashed Jennifer’s room and wrote “Lightning Strikes Twice” on her mirror. The coup de grace, however, was leaving Sarah’s room absolutely untouched.

When I returned to the neighborhood a few days later to make sure my mission was finally accomplished, I was heartened by the sight of an expensive alarm system. Better still, on Saturday after I tailed the good doctor and his handy friend Ray to Ace Hardware to buy motion sensors, I heard him mutter, “Barb is devastated!” And when he whispered through the side of his mouth, “I can’t even comfort her,” Ray and I understood that there was no sex going on at 9 Arbor Lane.

Yet something continued to gnaw at me. I was irked by how quickly they had reassembled the second time. It took the Sadowskis from Sonoma three months just to get a new sofa. And when I saw the “For Sale” sign in the Weiners’ frontyard, I almost became unglued. Did they think they could escape me? The arrogance of that family was appalling.

A week later, by mere chance (as if . . . ), I was driving through the neighborhood early one morning and got stopped behind the school bus in front of their house. Jennifer came running out and gestured with one finger to the driver. Then she walked directly at my car, veering off at the curb and stepping into a van behind me. Thirty seconds later, Dr. and Mrs. Weiner appeared on the small porch, followed by Sarah. She kissed both of her parents and ran to the bus.

They turned and spoke to the darkness in the door. Benjamin, 13, was staying home; probably a cold or the flu. I imagined--yea, I knew--what mom and dad said to do if someone came to the front door.

I also knew he wouldn’t listen. An hour after the parents left, I parked a few blocks away and knocked on the front door. Benjamin peeked out from behind a slit in the new drapes, and by the time he turned the knob on the front door I had the stocking over my head and had rammed the door open, pushing him backward toward the stairs.

I screamed that I’d kill him if he didn’t listen to everything I said. And when he started to cry, crumpled up on the steps, I kicked him in the meaty part of his thigh and, jabbing him from behind, shouted “UP THE STAIRS! IN YOUR ROOM! IN YOUR ROOM!” shoving him onto the bed and tying him to the headboard with rope I had in my pocket. I cut it with a knife and gagged him with a strip of sheet I ripped out from beneath him. Wide-eyed, he urinated in his pajamas.

Let me assure you--in case you, in your presumptive wisdom, think we’re headed down mutilation highway--I was not going to hurt the boy. That is not my mission. I wasn’t even interested in trashing the place again. I merely emptied Mrs. W’s jewelry box into the toilet and, upon finding a box of blank checks in Dr. W.’s desk drawer, just tore out one check in the middle of a book. That was it. A gesture.

Then I went into Sarah’s room, as I knew I would. The room smelled of scented candles. The bed was made. Ironed and folded clothing was stacked in a laundry basket. On her night table, resting on top of the unopened book, was a Doors CD, Ruth’s favorite when she was a teenager. I plopped down on the neat bedspread--certain to leave an impression--and then slipped the CD into my jacket pocket and went downstairs. There was nothing else to be done

As I reached the front door, however, the phone rang. I picked it up--thoughtlessly? arrogantly?--a woman’s voice, “Hello. . . . hello? . . . Ben, are you there . . . ?” I replaced the receiver. At the time it seemed like a nice touch.

I quickly yanked off the stocking, peeled the gloves from my sweaty hands, folded them into my pocket and walked out the door, bumping right into Jennifer and a tall boy with long, stringy black hair.

I recognized him as a clerk at the 7-Eleven directly across from my motel (“Weekly Rates”) across town. We never spoke--he doesn’t interest me--but it was his thin fingers into which I had passed a lot of the Weiners’ cash. The terror in Jennifer’s eyes as she stepped backward bore a family resemblance to Benjamin. “Who are you?” she gasped, grasping the boy’s bare arm.

I glared directly through the maelstrom into her green eyes. “I’m the assessor; just counting rooms for the tax rolls--shouldn’t you be in school, Jennifer?”

She was unable to speak, her lips barely parted. The phone rang again. She looked up--as if to ask permission--and then rushed around me, knocking my shoulder and racing through the open doorway. The lanky boy stood there, though, studying my face from behind those dark, bony antediluvian sockets, a bewildered animal peering into a dark cave. I pushed him aside and walked out the door.

“Heeeeeeeeeey! I know you!” I suddenly heard behind me. I never turned around, walking down the driveway and onto the sidewalk as if I didn’t hear him.

“Heeeeeeeeeey!” I felt him running at my back and started to race. I had wings. By the time I was three blocks away I heard the whining sirens and turned my head to find my pursuer. The kid was nowhere. Like a dog, he must have stopped at the first corner. No oxygen. No vision. Just going through the motions like everyone else.

But of course he’d be the one to tell the police where I lived.

I stood there panting, leaning on a telephone pole as if it were my staff. And when I was sure that no one was around, I slipped behind a tall hedge, removed the sport coat, folded it inside out the way Mr. Josten taught me to do years ago, walked down another block and a half to the car, popped the trunk, opened the suitcase, laid the coat neatly across the rest of my clothes, examined the CD and then put it back. I chose a mustache and glasses from my case the way Mother used to choose earrings from the top of the dresser, rolled my sleeves and shut the lid. Pressed down on the trunk. The engine turned over right away and I drove all day and through the night to this next godforsaken town where they probably wouldn’t know God if He opened up a McDonald’s. Tomorrow will be time enough to decide where to keep pursuing my mission. It doesn’t much matter, you know. People are the same all over. The fact that I almost got caught reminds me only that I am not infallible. I am not God. That is why I write this down. I offer you the Weiners as proof of my contemptible weakness, my growing strength. That is all.

That is all.

I know you hear me. I know you want this story to go somewhere you recognize. You want me to get caught, to fall in love, to be reborn in Christ, to be writing this from some mental institution like that fool Holden Caulfield.

I know you better than you know yourself. I know where you live. Some of you even want me to contact Ruth. Whatever. You would even be satisfied if I returned to kill the Jostens or Benjamin or Jennifer or the tall lanky boy. (His name is Jerry.)

Don’t be naive.