Father Briar and The Angel (19 page)

She didn’t want to directly
contradict him, though, that would be impolite. And since he’d made
such a show earlier of not being rude and teasing her, she wasn’t
going to say anything about the silliness of his
theories.

“
It is turning people into
lousy neighbors and lousy tippers. I’m sure you’ve noticed that,”
he said, winking.

“
Not really,” she thought,
sipping her drink to cover her silence, “but I have noticed you
throwing money around like its nothing, especially when pretty
women are involved. Me, lately. Heck, I’ve got twenty extra dollars
in my pocket right now because of you.”

Twenty dollars was a huge
amount of money. Huge. The equivalent of one hundred and seventy
five dollars today. A loaf of bread cost twenty cents, a gallon of
milk was eighty five cents, and two dozen eggs were a dollar and a
half, not that anybody in Brannaska was wanting for chickens or
eggs.

“
They aren’t that bad,”
she said, trying to dismiss the situation. He took another measure,
although large, gulp of beer, and then called for another. “Wow,
that one went down fast,” she noticed. And he’d started repeating
himself.

“
Those old folks come down
from the senior home like a group of squabbling old pigeons. Those
old people love that glorified rice and love it when someone gives
them good service. You give good service.”

Now Julianna felt like she
was in a bit of a bind. If she drank her vodka orange juice too
fast, she’d be drunk and not able to drive home. There was no way
she was spending any time in the parking lot here! Goodness knew
what the truckers might do. But equally painful would be sitting
here listening to him try to, as the kids said, “put the make on
her.”

“
I just try to listen to
them, to give them a little bit of affection if they need it, and
to get their food to them as quick as I can,” she said, trying to
keep the conversation light and personable. “They are all cooped up
like chickens in that home and they either don’t have any children
or the kids they have don’t care to come round and visit. So
smorgasbord is the only time they get to go out all week, to get
out and do something.”

“
Yah,” he agreed, “smorg
is good for the community.”

Even when drinking, Mr.
Montana was well-spoken and never slurred his words. She’d overhead
him discussing a variety of events and news items with fellow
farmers at Bjorn’s, and despite his loony theories, he was well
informed. As he drank more, those claims only became sillier and
more outlandish, but still entertained people enough so that now
their little two person outing had turned into a late-night
drinking session with some of northern Minnesota’s roughest
characters.

Julianna had been in the
WAC, and Seattle was a port city, so she was no stranger to rough
gentlemen who began and ended many a conversation with their fists.
That seemed to be code among sailors, especially, although her
Cedric was nothing like that.

Cedric! How mad he would be
if he saw her now!

Was she being naughty? At
the moment, she didn’t care. “Montana Frank,” as she was now
reluctantly calling him, was a hoot and a half, in the local slang.
Meaning, the fellow was good for a laugh. A lot of laughs. Why
couldn’t she go out? She certainly couldn’t go out with Cedric,
“the paranoid old stick in the mud,” as the vodka had made her take
to calling him.

Speaking of vodka, Julianna
had finished her drink. The glass sat, the ice melting into the
pulpy remains of the orange juice.

“
Thank you, Montana Frank,
that was delicious.” She had anticipated adding “but now I have to
go” to the end of that sentence, but at the very last millisecond,
decided it wasn’t necessary.

“
You are having another,
right?” he commanded more than asked, already signaling the barman
for two more before she had a chance to respond.

“
Maybe this waitress won’t
be as fast as me. Maybe she’ll be as helpless at bringing drinks as
she is at cleaning tables,” Julianna thought, noting the
ketchup-stained napkin still sitting there, “and maybe I’ll be able
to sneak away unnoticed.”

Nope.

The drinks were there in
moments. Montana Frank had just gotten to the punch line of his
first joke when they were delivered.

“
Eh, let yourself go a
little bit, Jewels,” she thought, using Cedric’s nickname for her.
Cedric again, thoughts of him were never far from her mind, were
they? Despite that nagging little devil on her shoulder, Julianna
smiled, a mixture of excited, content, and tired. And a little
ashamed for betraying Cedric in this manner, then a little ashamed
at being involved with a priest in the first place. But such were
the conundrums of life and love, eh?

She’d told Cedric that her
new job felt like a bore after working those long years of war and
meaning. There were similarities between waitressing and being a
mechanic, she realized, the booze liberating her thoughts. Both
involved endless hours on the feet, ten to twelve hour days, verbal
abuse (and the occasional slap on the ass) from men, and not a lot
of money.

Waitressing even had some
fun aspects to it that working in the war effort did not. After
that disastrous first Sunday smorgasbord, she had enjoyed chatting
with the staff and serving the customers. The free meals were the
best of the perks, the cook was a master and Julianna had gained a
half dozen pounds in the short time she’d been working
there.

She got to bring whatever
food that was leftover from smorgasbord home, and whenever she was
in town and dropped by for coffee and breakfast or a light lunch,
Bjorn or the cook would invariably wave off the grubby bills she
held out for the tab.

“
Wouldn’t Father Briar be
ashamed of his choice of lovers if he saw me here now,” she
thought, taking a pull of her new, ice cold drink through the
plastic straw. “All of our high-minded theological discussions
about fidelity to one’s vows, ones morals, tossed out the window of
a pickup truck into the frigid north woods night, for some jokes
and some laughs and some cocktails.

“
Oh, the heck with it,”
she told herself. “We won the war. Then we won another war in
Korea. Why can’t we have a little fun? But what about dad? Would he
think I’m shirking right now?” All the time she’d spent in church
and in service, yet here she was, contentedly swilling drinks in a
cold northern dive bar.

Julianna decided she needed
a glass of water. She went up to the bar and plopped herself down
on one of the stools, noting that they were the same make and model
as the ones in Bjorn’s, but were a lot more decrepit. While the
barman was getting her water, she looked across the smoky room.
There were all sorts of unshaven men and a big band tune from
fifteen years ago on the radio. Like the music, this looked like a
crowd lost to time. It was late enough and empty enough that the
sluggish waitress, who doubled as an indifferent cleaning woman,
had pushed a few of the chairs up against the walls and was
sweeping with all of the enthusiasm of the condemned.

At one end of the room
there had once been a dance floor but it had long gone to rot, the
hardwood floor now mottled and stained with spilled drunks and shed
blood. Julianna shuddered at how down on their luck a band must’ve
been to have played their music here. The water tasted good,
though, these farm towns had wells deep into the aquifer and it
came out fresh, frigid, and sweet smelling. It brought a much
needed clarity to her thoughts.

This place was miles from
the sorts of places she’d recently been with Cedric. He was not
fussy; heck, he’d been a sailor, but so many years under the rigor
of a Jesuit education had given him a certain refinement that was
otherwise rather lacking in Brannaska. Combine that with their
justified fears of being seen together or caught in a compromising
position and the number of places they could safely venture was
minimal. This filled her with a feeling as bitter as the Angostura
bottle behind the bar.

And then she had the most
fantastic idea came into her head, alcohol-fuelled, to be sure, but
still, what was the saying? In vodka veritas? “Something like
that,” she thought, a plan forming. What if she let Father Briar
find her in such a low class locale, slumming with truckers and
jazzbos and whores?

“
That would make him
jealous, so jealous! Maybe he’d see how silly it is, to not be able
to go out together. Maybe things will change. Anyway, it is what he
deserves. Isn’t that what the Church teaches us, that we all get
what we deserve, in the end?”

She returned to her seat in
the booth across from Montana Frank. Thankfully, in her absence,
he’d finished her vodka orange.

“
Sorry, sweetie, about
your screwdriver,” he slurred, slumped back in the seat.

This was going to be easier
than she thought. She already had an accomplice who was very
pliable. It would be easy, stepping out around town with him a few
times. Naturally, nothing meaningful could ever occur between them,
this was just for show.

“
I mean,” she thought,
gulping her water and the little square ice cubes that she crunched
between her teeth like a horse crunches sugar cubes, “I can barely
tolerate him on an hour cocktail date or through an eight hour
shift waitressing at Bjorn’s, much less a life
together!”

But she wasn’t going to
tell Cedric that!

“
Let the locals talk. Let
them talk about me,” she thought, “for once, the gossip will work
in my favor, instead of against me, like it usually does. I won’t
even tell him myself. Word that I’m stepping out with another man
will get back to him soon enough.”

Now all she had to do was
convince Frank Montana, now mostly finished with his sixth beer, to
be her accomplice.

As he slipped further down
in his booth, wherein he was so comfortable it looked like his home
away from home, and fiddled with the beer bottles in front of them,
peeling the labels down halfway and exactly halfway, never off, and
arranging them in a straight line, she decided to make her move.
Julianna leaned forward in the booth, making sure to press her
breasts together to enhance the size of her cleavage, even though
she was clad in three layers of sweaters, and said, “Montana Frank,
as you know, I’m new in town, and I’m so terribly
lonely…”

Chapter Nineteen:
Francisco and Julianna’s First… Date?

When she’d first asked him
out, Montana Frank had thought he’d gotten drunk enough to fall
asleep in the booth and have a delicious dream. “This young woman
can’t be serious,” he’d assumed. But she’d persisted, inviting him
to dinner date at Hurley’s Hanging Gardens, the nicest restaurant
in the trendy tourist destination of Mille Lacs.

“
Mille Lacs means
“thousand lakes” in French.” Mr. Montana man-splained.

“
Oh, just like Des Moines
is French for ‘the Moines,’ she joked.

People from both of the
Twin Cities make the drive up to eat here,” he enthused. “And even
better, it’s your treat!”

He was teasing. She’d
offered to pay, which was mind-blowing enough, but there was no way
any woman was paying for his dinner.

“
Call me a chauvinist, but my mama raised me right. I’m a
member of the Church in good standing. I always pay for “shakes” at
Bjorn’s, even when I lose. And hell will freeze over before I allow
a woman to pay for a meal. Even an alluring woman with a hidden
agenda, a woman like Julianna Warwidge.”

Of course, he knew that she
must have had ulterior motives. She was young and beautiful; he was
aging and a bit of an overweight scoundrel, when he honestly
appraised himself. This he didn’t do often, where was the fun in
that? But when he did, he was honest. There were many more
desirable bachelor farmers around town than he; why hadn’t Julianna
showed the slightest bit of attention in any of them?

And he’d inquired. Bjorn
always knew the good gossip and he hadn’t heard any scuttlebutt
about her being seen stepping out with any other fellows. This was
the 1950’s, so lesbianism never entered his nor any other of the
townsfolk’s minds. Nobody, that is, but Bjorn and the cook,
strangely, as they remembered Sweden’s free and open nudist culture
from their youth, where attitudes towards the body and sex were
free and uninhibited during the summer months They’d discussed the
possibility that Julianna might have been a “daughter of Eros,” but
dismissed the possibility out of hand. This was Brannaska, after
all.

“
I am honored that you,
such a high-falluting girl, would be seen out with me in public,”
he said, his flattery oozing across the table like the butter
melting over the bread. Julianna enjoyed it, too; Mr. Montana was
an exceptionally manly physical presence despite his silly theories
and awkward sense of humor. And any man would’ve been an
improvement over being seen out with no man, which was her usual
predicament.

“
I’ll be on my best
behavior,” he promised, after accepting her invitation to dinner.
That she hoped would be true. She still had no romantic interest in
the man; she was just looking to make Cedric jealous. She wasn’t
nervous being our or even alone with him; she was a tough girl
who’d fended of plenty a horny and drunken sailor during her time
in the WAC. Her father had taught her “to never take any guff from
any man,” and he’d even showed her a few dirty tricks with which to
defend herself. “Ain’t dirty tricks,” he’d explained, “if you are a
lady and some brute is trying to assault your honor.”