from For Readers Only

from Have Pen, Will Marvel

Library Of Congress catalogue no. available on request

Benidickedus

In the quaint hamlet of C’erebadicio, in Northeast Italy, are two nearly identical tall hills, the Mounds of Our Lady Democritia.

On one hill stands the charming little chapel of Vita Vista, surrounded by roses, impatiens, and marigolds. The sun almost always shines on Vita Vista, and, upon the occasional cloudburst, her honeysuckles are said to fatten in the rain. The chapel, girded by a lovely ornate fence smothered in ivy and creepers, is unoccupied—indeed has rested vacant since its construction some three years prior.

Upon the adjacent hill stands the rather gothic home of Benito il Dinera, C’erebadicio’s founder, financier, and de facto patriarch. Beni, as the townspeople are rumored to fondly call him, has not been visible over those three years. He’s been bedridden, far too ill to resume his beloved coach rides through the hamlet’s pretty little slums and cemeteries.

The community of C’erebadicio spills below the Mounds like an unfenced junkyard.

An overgrown road winds up il Dinera’s hill, grooved and scattered by cartwheels and hooves.

An untouched brick path, nearly swallowed in clover, winds up the Mound to Vita Vista.

You don’t ordinarily encounter chateaus in deeply rural Italy; those things are French jobs, famous for their elite charm. Same with Venetian cobbles, Grecian marble pools, and Chinese dwarf pines: these articles, very exotic, are all but impossible to find in that static pocket of the planet. Not so on Benito’s hill. Over many years these, and other very dear objets, were imported, by grateful peasantry via mule and dog cart, across desert and swamp, on the sagging backs of hobbled children and wizened granmamas. Benito paid well: the elsewise impoverished populace were able to season their swill (ordinarily just offal) with bread crumbs, roof their shanties with sorghum and tin, and dance for Benito’s pleasure in the ramshackle town square, children and adults alike dressed in homespun blankets dyed with leftovers scavenged from their master’s generously tossed garbage. And, utilizing this rolling jetsam, their tambourines were made with the cuttings from real aluminum cans, not that discordant tin stuff shaken by their ancestors.

Padre Peste bon Bella was one of the luckier C’erebadicioanami. His hovel stood more magnificent than the rest: an 8 x 10 cardboard lean-to with a roof of tangleweed and a floor of God’s own sweet dirt. Padre Peste lived in this adorable home with Cosito, his blind donkey, with Fhfrhhn, the village idiot, and with Dominique, his blessed companion and soul’s sounding board. And, of course, with God, smiling equally upon the community’s beneficiaries and the famous house of their cherished master, Beni.

Sister Dominique was a lovely woman, originally from the convent at Our Mother Most Merciful. God had been generous with His graceful Hand; Dominique was well into her ninety-seventh year now, and showed no sign of relinquishing the Lord’s work. He had blessed her with an indomitable spirit: although rickets, extracrotcherian cancer, and compound dorsal elephantiasis had crimped, folded, and twisted her darling three-foot frame to a degree seemingly physically impossible, she nevertheless retained the presence of mind to darn Padre Peste’s sandals with regularity, and to milk Cosito whenever Fhfrhhn’s giggling screams roused her from her rambling soliloquies. Fhfrhhn, born of a sign painter and a circus cobbler, was responsible for hand-lettering that cardboard sign reading FOLLOW US perpetually hung round Cosito’s nappy neck, and for constructing a sturdy pair of gorgeous orthopedic shoes for precious little Dominique. These custom-made beauties, designed for stature as well as for locomotion, came with eighteen-inch heels, causing Dominique’s posterior to stand level with her ash-fringed habit, her shoulders to further round the hunch on her back, and her knuckles to bobble and drag as she walked. One most blessed circumstance of this right-angle stoop was that Sister Dominique’s battered yellow ukulele could rest horizontally on her spine, and thus be spared certain collisions with the multitudinous rock-and-branch crucifixes Fhfrhhn, in his blessed creative zeal, had ordered upon the cardboard walls’ gnarlwood supports. It was Dominique’s wont to play her ukulele with passion, at times that might seem inappropriate to any but the most worshipful of God’s sheep. Dear Dominique knew but one song, heard fallibly over an old portable record player carried by a passing tourist. That song was, not so coincidentally, Dominique, an American blockbuster classic by the immortal Singing Nun. Dominique realized it was the Lord’s way of calling her, and so made a point of singing her sweet heart out whenever His loving touch teased the humongous tumors of her thyroidally-inflated larynx. So poor had been that old record’s reproduction, and so infirm were the auditory powers of blessed Dominique, that her interpretation of the lyrical content was simply:

“♪Do♪mi♫niko♫niko♫niko, ♪Do♪mi♫niko♫niko♪ni.”

This magic she would howl to the heavens on the moment, while Fhfrhhn stomped in time and blessed Cosito peed accentato. Padre Peste, having enjoyed this ritual far more than he dared remember, had learned to zone out like the mightiest of meditators, and so come to the Lord with a frequency far too blessed to describe.

Fhfrhhn now lifted his tatterdemalion sleeve to expose a heavy old wristwatch with a cracked plastic faceplate. It was one of those famous American timepieces, an authentic Roleks, the kind rich men wear when driving their Leksuses to look for seks with the ladies. Our generous God had blessed kindly Fhfrhhn with this illustrious keepsake through a roving intermediary. That man had grudgingly let it go for Fhfrhhn’s life beggings (good a beggar as Fhfrhhn was, he was a better saver), and had even showed the awestruck idiot how to wind it with the little insertable crank. Fhfrhhn’s eyes now followed the second hand round and round, his frame tensing up, his held breath bursting. Just when it looked like his face would explode, he jumped up and stamped twice on the gorgeous dirt floor.

Peste nodded. “Yes, dear Fhfrhhn. It is time.”

Wired to one posted-branch cardboard-wall support was Fhfrhhn’s most beautiful three-foot bramble-branch crucifix, delicately disengaged from one of C’erebadicio’s many enchanting bloodyhorror trees. Draped about the neck and arms of this crucifix, like an unimpeachable pendant to all that is good and holy, was a heavy chain closed by a red-faced combination lock. Fhfrhhn carefully removed it, went down on one knee, and offered it to the padre.

“Master.”

Peste received it with decorum. “Yes, Fhfrhhn, a fine American lock company.” He then gently placed the chain about Cosito’s bowed neck, allowing that the cardboard sign was not in harm’s way, and that the thick links rested securely between two of the larger buboes. Peste patted her gnarly rump. “Little Cosito, you are now our noble prow, the Good Book’s frontispiece.” Cosito gratefully dripped on the sweet dirt floor while Peste furiously scratched his forearm. There came a waist-high entreaty.

“Domino?”

Peste turned with a sad shake of the head. Sweet Sister Dominique had swiveled the ukulele round to her belly, and was poised with one talon on the strings and the instrument’s neck crooked in hers. “Not now, Dominique. When the Lord’s work is done.”

“Domi_no . . . ”

The good padre bowed, compassion further mellowing the crests of his brow. “Benedicto.”

She returned the bow, eyes raised, chin scraping the ground, and swept an arm toward the entrance. “Domino.”

Fhfrhhn hauled aside the cadaver hide flap, and the four made their way to that fork in the dirt path resting in the cleavage of Our Lady’s mounds. One branch led to il Dinera’s, the other to the chapel, now standing like a fresco amidst floral watercolors.

The entire community stood grieving at the forked path’s bottom; everyone knew the planned hour of Beni’s confession. Padre Peste raised his arms symbolically, but their heaviness wore him down. He dropped his head, and the four began the long climb up the master’s road, past the crumbled columns and lewd statues, around the fungal fountains and brambly benches, all the way to the dilapidated porch of Benito il Dinera.

Fhfrhhn waited back, scavenging and chewing blessed Cosito’s salamander-sized fleas in the shade of a drooping elm.

The door was opened by Benito’s manservant Mike, bent at the sternum and tail, his gray old head dusted by webs and heel marks, his entire face afflicted with a massive case of Italian Cameltoe.

“We have come for him,” Padre Peste announced. “He is well enough to receive us?”

Mike, with an effort, took his eyes from dear Dominique’s brokeback posterior. “Hn.”

“Lead us, then.”

“Nh.”

Benito’s bed was partly shrouded by mildewed curtains of gnawed lamé. The room itself was noticeably cooler than the house proper, and downright chilly within the pall containing the passing master of C’erebadicio.

Beni the man was the core of this chill: a gray and blue, liver-speckled disease enveloped in cobs. His lids parted at the pair’s approach. The left eye rested on Peste while the right followed Dominique round to the bed’s far side. He raised his arms pathetically, and each took a hand.

“Ah, Benito . . .” Padre Peste cooed. “It is with profound sadness that we make this call.”

The grip tightened. il Dinera’s jaw dropped. “Not a problem,” he coughed, “Padre. Now, you know the deal.” One bleary eye rolled to the window. “The chapel’s yours, on the condition I leave this world knowing I’m forgiven for any and all what you guys call sins. That’s a fine little chapel there, Padre; you know it and I know it. If you think I’m simply gonna give it away for nothin then you just don’t know Benito il Dinera.” He groaned from the bowel. “I had my time in this world, and I’m totally prepared to make my confession.”

Beni feebly tried to sit, collapsing absolutely flat with the effort. His voice went hard. “I ain’t perfect, Padre, but who is? You? You never done nothing and had some doubts later on? How’s about the little princess here? You don’t think there’s some secrets in them panties? Kee-rist. I’ll bet there’s more’n one altar boy you been keeping real close, Padre, if’n you get my drift, and I’ll also bet they ain’t been walking the same since.”

Peste laughed delicately. “Ah, Benito! Beni, Beni, Beni . . . you were always one for the wonderful turn of wit, the playful phrase.”

“This ain’t no joke, Padre. Now you’re either gonna seal the deal with me and the Big Guy or we’re just gonna have to find a priest who can. Mike!”

“Domino!”

“Forgive me, Benito, forgive me.” Peste’s smile was aching sun. “Being so long removed from the ways of God’s wonderful world, I cannot help but misspeak on occasion. Your wishes are of course mine.”

“Yeah. Well, probably the first really big mistake I made was kicking the nuns out of Sweet Mercy convent so I could turn the place into a brothel. Now that’s what I call a house of worship.”

Dominique bit her dear prognathous lip and shook her sweet misshapen head, but the grip on blessed Benito’s spotted claw never relaxed. Peste raised his eyes to the ceiling and stared until the ferocity of il Dinera’s clutch made him look back down.

“Did I done wrong, Padre? I need you to tell me if I done a bad thing: right here, right now, right up front!”

Peste nodded gravely. “You see, Beni, there are . . . mistakes which can be construed as beyond redemption. Certain hands of the Lord are, in effect, untouchables. This means their violation amounts to an act so unforgivable in God’s eyes that any—”

“That’s a sweet little chapel, Padre. Honey of a church.”

Peste’s eye turned to the window. Even as he stared, a trestled vine, so heavy with fat grapes that it weighed low the ornate gate, collapsed in slow motion, the plump fruit bursting on impact with

Vista’s rose cobbles. The juice was Chianti before it ceased rolling. Butterflies laughed in the lingering droplets.

“She is, indeed.” Peste turned back to the cantankerous old man, by contrast festering in phlegm and bile. “What is important is that a man learn from his mistakes, that they not be repeated. He who learns grows wise, and the Lord is pleased.”

“On my word!” il Dinera swore. “No more nun whorehouses! Not a one. Oh, I learned my lesson, all right. My clients was so spooked by all that religious crap that not a one of ’em could get it up. And the broads! They all start sniffin and prayin and talkin about self-esteem and junk.” He shook his head. “Good girls gone bad.” Squeezing dear Dominique’s contorted paw, Benito said, “That weren’t just a mistake, Sis, it was a total boner!” and laughed himself into silence.

Snarling beatifically, Sister Dominique grated, “Scrabble,” and raised her eyes.

Recovering, il Dinera continued:

“How’s about giving kids new names? Can’t be nothing wrong with that, eh, Pustule?”

Peste grinned ear to ear. “A charming practice. Many’s the youngster given a fresh lease on life with a nickname the gang’ll all appreciate. Dominique here loves the sobriquet ‘Dommie,’ and Fhfrhhn just delights at ‘Ffffffffffffh.’ Cosito, of course, can go either way, but he most cheerfully responds to ‘Seato’.”

“Groovy. Well, I didn’t say nicknames; I said new names. You know, like changing Fianchetti to Jones. Americans never wanna buy kids with funny Latin names.”

“Buy them?”

il Dinera’s upper body rose dramatically. His eyes were blazing. “Don’t tell me I done wrong, Padre! Don’t tell me I ain’t forgiven! That’s one hell of a chapel over there—got the works: stained glass, silver bell, rosewood floors, microwave and big screen . . .”

Peste’s blisters crimped in their cracked hide sandals. “Rosewood?”

“You bet your ass. Smooth as glass. Polished to a high sheen by an army of grandmothers desperate to put food on the table. You just can’t buy a more thorough work force.”

“Well . . . I suppose children are the property of their parents. By ‘silver’ bell you mean?”

“I mean silver, Padre. I mean 99 fine. I mean covered by a brass cupola so it won’t get any goddamned bird shit on it. Carved with a bunch of fat little flying whatchacallem angel kids. You and Dummy here can take turns ringing with Burmese teak mallets, the heads made of virgin down off of newborns’ bottoms. F sharp.”

Peste nodded vigorously. “Our Lord is most forgiving.”

“And thank God for that.” Benito fell back on the bed. “That’s real Christian of you, Padre.” The voice tapered to a whisper: leaves through gravel. The eyes were all but closed. “So tell me, Padre, and make me a believer.” The grip tightened almost imperceptibly. “Let me know, as a man of God, that I’m punching the big UP button here; make me certain that I’m not going to hell on a hand grenade. A lovely chapel, Padre, gorgeous to behold.” The whisper escaped in tiny spurts. “All the way, Padre, on your word . . . sweetheart of a deal . . . let the Boss know I’m coming; with bells on, with your blessing . . . step up to the plate, Padre . . . forgiveness . . . chapel . . . make sure I get a hottie angel . . . divine . . . whorehouse—oh, mama; here we go—it’s liftoff, Padre . . . shaka-shaka-hands with me, Big Guy; it’s your little Benito, all done and delivered . . . open up them gates and roll them bones, ’cause the Padre here says I’m RSVP. Who turned out the lights? Oh, baby, there go the bowels . . . Christ, what a stink; was that you, little Sister? Hear me comin’, Big Fella . . . oil up that cross and goose the gander, ’cause this . . . is . . . it!”

“Benedictus—” Peste began.

The spotted claw shot up, grabbed Peste’s tunic, and yanked him down. “Knock, knock, Padre. Thanks for the password. I’ll sure rest easy knowin you paved my way. All the fatcats in my pocket: forgiven! All the manure I spread in the States: no problem! God, those red, white, and blue gomers’ll pay right out the ass for garbage!”

Peste bent closer, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean money can buy me love, Padre! You don’t think those idiots got that way by genetics, do ya? ‘A three hour tour, a three hour’. . .” He was clearly becoming delirious. “Invisible franchise . . . Snoop Dogg to Spielberg . . . freaking ninja turtles? You gotta be . . . Beni a good boy, mia mama . . . take me, Barbie Twins, all four of ya . . . ooooh, that stings . . . open wide, Oprah . . . it’s your B . . . it’s your Be . . . by the balls, Padre, by the balls! Your Be . . . your Be . . .”

Peste pried off the hand. “You don’t mean!”

The left eye shot open. il Dinera barked bloodily, “Ha! Who do you think gave ’em The Donald, Rowling, Austrian politicians, and rap music? Ja!”

Peste’s entire countenance went black. “You! Are! The! De—”

“Do! Mi! No!”

“Seal it, Padre! Bless dese boogers! I’m a-go I’m a-go—jack me some wings, baby! Chapel of love! Let me hear it, choir boy! Spew it! Do it! Goddamn your virgin holy ass . . . now . . . sing for your freaking supper!”

Peste dangled a hand over that wracked and ruined face. “Si benedictum,” he mumbled, “il Dinera en Christo, obladi oblada. Domino, there you go; roll me over, Romeo. Olly Ollie auction: one, two, three. Mater, mater: gator baiter. Pater, pater: waiter dater. Three, two, one . . . later, satyr!”

And the sigh rolled out of the loom. Rigor mortis was almost immediate in Benito’s case. Dear Dominique gnawed the gray fingers wide, while Padre Peste used his knee for a crowbar. “It is done,” he panted. “Come with me, my child.” The two shuffled out, their heads hanging. Exiting il Dinera’s room was like leaving a meat locker. Mike slithered past to attend to his master.

Outside it was still overcast, yet a veneer of lemon and rose appeared to solidify round the chapel of Vista Vente. The good people of C’erebadicio stood in a bereft pool between mounds, staring up as padre, sister, donkey, and jackass descended. At the path’s fork the padre ran his hand in blessing over the throng before leading the way up. The citizens closed behind the little knot of four; flowing in ascension, as through a sieve in reverse. Sparrows sang ensemble, lilacs bent in welcome. Hummingbirds hovered ahead, displacing rays. The clover was a lush green pile, the air smelled of hot buttered cinnamon rolls. Fhfrhhn and Dominique fairly galloped up the grade, while the Padre and good Cosito strode with a stately dignity becoming the occasion.

At the gate Peste turned and again raised his arms, in every visual particular Christ on the Mount. He looked down on the paused multitude, a sweet tear forming. Buttercups blushed, nectar burbled downhill. Padre Peste bowed, and little Cosito genuflected, that Fhfrhhn might slide free the cardboard pendant. The fool flipped it round. On the opposite side was scrawled in Latin the legend: KEEP OUT! Fhfrhhn hung this sign from one of the gateposts’ blueberry brambles, and the four walked inside, Fhfrhhn slamming and locking the gate behind.

The chapel was lovelier than the padre’d imagined. A sunbeam broke C’erebadicio’s cloud cover to light on the hand-polished cedar door. Peste felt a tugging on his elbow. He looked down.

“Yes, Dominique. Now.”

The sweet sister spun the ukulele round to her belly, clasped the neck in one claw, smashed the strings with the other, and, as the new tenants glided into stained glass splendor, warbled out her dear heart to God’s recoiling Ear:

“♪Do♪mi♫niko♫niko♫niko, ♪Do♪mi♫niko♫niko♪ni . . .”