Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [44]
That night was the night, they later confessed, they had made a plan “to get George drunk.” It started innocently enough with a late dinner at a nice restaurant. Following the first course, he noticed that his iced tea tasted different. It wasn’t the iced tea he was used to. There was a sweet taste to it, syrupy, but it wasn’t a sugary sweetness. It was something else. When he wanted to complain or ask for something else to drink, the other guys had convinced him it was fine, and he had ended up having two refills.
Later, when the roommates decided it would be fun to take a cab over to the river walk and find a club to hear some live music, George decided to head back to the hotel. He had told them that he wasn’t feeling very good, and after they admitted to him what he had been drinking, and after he had already been to the restroom three times, sick from the drinks, they agreed to go on without him. The plan to watch George get drunk didn’t produce the great excitement the others had expected. It was actually quite a letdown. So they believed him when he promised them that he was fine and would be able to find his way back to the hotel.
He recalled that on the last day of the trip, hours after they had missed their bus back to seminary and minutes before they were getting ready to call the police to report that he was missing, he had stumbled into the hotel room, hungover, without his shirt or his wallet, claiming he had no memory of where he had been or what had happened.
After a week they quit asking, quit feeling angry and guilty, and they never knew where George had been, never knew what had happened to him while they were listening to some bad karaoke and flirting with college girls. They also never invited him to join them on a weekend out of town again. Father Leon knew that there was some story to tell, that something had happened, but after three sessions in which George would speak only of his upcoming vows and what would be required of him upon graduation, refusing to answer questions about the trip or what happened, the older priest quit pressing as well. He simply denied the young man’s request for foreign service, thinking George needed more time to mature spiritually and socially, more time located near supervision and assistance before being sent somewhere out of the country.
“Is this what you had in mind for me as a priest in the States, Father Leon? You think somebody would have gotten me drunk in Haiti after being there only four days?” He asked the questions out loud again, the words filling up the room. “You think New Mexico is all that much better than a foreign mission field?” He shook his head slowly, careful not to make the pounding worse. “You’re the one who needs to get out more,” he said. “This is a Third World country.”
He pulled himself up from the floor and made his way, leaning against the wall, back to the bedroom. He took a deep breath and removed his clothes and hung them on the chair next to the bed. He pulled aside the covers, reached for his rosary on the table beside him, and crawled in. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he started to pray, and then he stopped. He rubbed his eyes and started the rosary prayer again. “Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners now. . . .” And he stopped again.
This time he quit praying because he thought he heard something outside. He listened, straining to hear whether the voices were real or just more sounds from earlier in the night that were rumbling across his mind. He opened his eyes. There were voices, he thought, coming very near his window. He clinched his fingers around the rosary and held his breath.
“He’s home.” It was a whisper, male, very close to his head.
“Shhhhh . . . get away from there.” Another voice, female, a little farther