Free The Confession of Joe Cullen by Howard Fast

me.”
    Cullen shook his head. For some reason he could not understand, there were tears in his eyes.
    â€œShall we split a can of sardines?” the priest asked.
    â€œDo you know what I forgot?” Cullen asked excitedly. “I don’t have a brain in my head. I forgot the Coke. They got a cooler up there in the executive shack and maybe a hundred bottles of Coca-Cola in it. We’re sitting here and both of us sweating, and I forget the Coke.”
    â€œHold on,” O’Healey cried as Cullen bolted out of the shack into the blazing sunlight, but Cullen, moving faster than anyone ever moved at that airstrip, was off and running, and a minute or two later he returned with two bottles of Coca-Cola clenched in the fingers of each hand. He was pouring sweat as he put down the bottles.
    Wiping his face with a handkerchief, Cullen then opened a bottle for each of them, took a long drink, and lit a cigarette. “Smoke, Padre?” he asked, offering the pack to the priest.
    â€œPadre. I like that. That’s what the campesinos call me. It comes easier than ‘Father,’ trippingly on the tongue, as Shakespeare put it. Ah, Joe, Spanish is a lovely language, music in words. It makes talk a pleasure. No, I don’t smoke. It was a pack a day for years, until I came down here. But you don’t find tobacco in the hills, so I kicked it. Not easy, not easy at all.”
    â€œSomeday I’ll quit, but not now,” Cullen said, taking a long drag. “Right now I feel too good, and if I had my wife, Frannie, here for just an hour, I wouldn’t ask for more — but only for an hour, because after an hour we hate each other. Ah, but I shouldn’t be talking like that in front of a priest.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWell, you know—”
    â€œWhat do I know, Joseph Cullen? Not a devil of a lot more than you do. Oh, maybe a feeling for God that you have yet to encounter. You don’t think you believe in God, do you?”
    â€œNo, Padre.”
    â€œThen what do you do with the wonder, Joe?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThe wonder, the mystery? Have you never felt that moment when things come together and it explodes in your mind with the sheer beauty of it?”
    Cullen thought about it and then said that he felt pretty good right at this moment.
    â€œNot exactly what I mean.”
    â€œNo, I guess not,” Cullen agreed. “You know, Padre — you don’t mind I keep calling you Padre?”
    â€œI told you, Joe. I meant it.”
    â€œYeah — well, what I meant, I mean what I’m trying to say is that I never had this kind of a conversation with a priest before, I mean not in confession but just sitting like this and talking. You know, with a chaplain, well, you don’t go to the chaplain, and anyway I hated the bastards, if you’ll forgive me, and I’d see them doing their absolution thing when maybe there wasn’t even a head in the body bag, and even if there was a head, you couldn’t be sure whose body or legs were in there with it — oh, Jesus Christ, I’m really being stupid.”
    â€œNo. You’re being honest.”
    â€œI shouldn’t say this to you, but I don’t mean you, Padre. I mean—”
    â€œI know what you mean.”
    â€œAnyway, I think you’re the first person in my life I ever talked to about this kind of thing. I mean, God — you know, and then I dump on priests—”
    â€œGo on,” O’Healey said. “I’m not putting up any defense of priests. I’ve seen some cold and heartless bastards who walk around in black nightshirts and I’ve seen others too brainless to know what was going on in the world, and there are all kinds, so say your piece. I’m curious. I’m interested.” He smiled and nodded at Cullen, for all the world a beardless, redheaded Santa Claus, his pink cheeks a bit puffed, his tiny nose