The Christian
By John Biggs
When Craig Vitutti was on dispatching duty everybody
stayed clear of the desk. He always changed the desk computer screen
saver to read “He who pursues righteousness and love finds life,
prosperity, and honor. – Proverbs 21:21." In his private
numerology, he felt that the double twenty-ones were good to have
around kids who were far away from home and probably tempted by sex,
alcohol, and drugs.
“When I have a boy,” he said once, “he’s going to
grow up strong and he's going have Jesus right here.” And he pounded
his chest.
That got around to the rest of the force and they
started calling him Good ‘n’ Plenty because he was so big. He must have
weighed about four hundred pounds and no one could imagine him falling
in love, let alone having a son. But, like they say, he who pursues
righteousness...: Craig met a
graduate student who looked like a shaved mouse and married her
straight away. There was a rule about fraternization with students, but
it was ignored in Craig's case. Everyone agreed it would mellow him out.
Craig didn’t like blacks or Jews, which was a big
problem with a lot of people, but they could never pin overt racism on
him. He took the late shift, usually, when there were only a few of the
junior officers on the
grounds of the school. He did time hacks every few minutes, checking to
see where his officers were, and wrote and ran off incident reports.
His reporting prose was rich, like a hotel King James: Officer Helms
entered the room and found Wendell Stanes (19), James Larimie (20), and
Michael Doulin (18) sitting
smoking pot. Smoke filled the room.
Officer Helms asked the suspects where they bought
their drug, but they refused to give up any information.
The one prejudice Craig entertained was a grave
anger at drug dealers and users on campus. He hated that they were
treated at the counseling center and not at a proper reeducation camp
where the kids would have to work hard hours just to receive food and
water. He said this, over and over. “Camps, man, like back in Germany.”
Craig said that he used to be a drunk when he was a teenager, but his
father sent him out to the country to get right with God. Over and
over, he told the story of his temptation and redemption, alone in the
wilderness, a story as baroque as Saul having the scales cast from his
eyes.
The true story was different. We learned the real
story from Tommy Shawnee, another guard who quit, one of Craig's
friends from that period who knew him before and after. Tommy had also
been sent to a man named Weaver, the summer after they sent Craig, and
he basically knew the drill. At age seventeen, Craig was a wild boy,
kind of a bully and very nearly a crook. His father traded horses and
knew all kinds of
characters in Minnesota and Montana. One day he saw that Craig was
headed down the wrong path and sent him to a ranch outside of Hibbing
to live with Weaver.
When Craig’s father dropped him off at the ranch,
Weaver came out to greet him with a shotgun.
“I hear you’re hot shit,” he said, training the gun
on Craig’s already big belly.
Slowly, after a few weeks, Craig turned around. He
cleaned the manure out of the stalls, washed down the barn and brushed
the horses. He brought water from the stream until he fixed the diesel
pump. Summer vacation ended and Mr. Weaver had him reading scripture
and completely off smoking and drinking. It was like a Hallmark
special.
The change was amazing. Craig came back a Christian
and his old enemies tore into him with a vengeance. He was the butt of
jokes; kids tripped him in the hall. But nothing shook his faith. He
felt like Lazarus.
So Craig Vitutti left high school, got a GRE,
completed security guard
training and signed on at the school, where he hooted into the radio
and ate the complex midnight lunches his mouse wife made him. One day
it was individually wrapped bologna slices and individually wrapped
Swiss cheese and some bread that she made him promise not to put in the
freezer or the fridge, and other days it was some kind of weight loss
gruel that looked like purple soup.
Now this was about four weeks before Craig quit and
we were all kind of feeling that he was on his way out. We had a new
black CO, Paula, and she circulated a memo that no one was allowed to
change the screensaver on the computer anymore and then she circulated
this kind of Employees Bill of Rights that said right on it that there
wasn't going to be any talk of religion at work or talk of sex or
whatever else. So that was another dig at Craig right there.
It got to be that Craig would only talk to me and a
couple of other
guys, and he'd be mumbling about black women usurping the great order
and all kinds of shit. He'd tell us about his wife, the woman, and we
didn't even know her name. He just called her the woman and said
how he thought she was straying. Then he invited us all
over for a birthday party.
We were floored.
He gave us all invitations his wife had made. They
had one of those Jesus fishes on there and it gave the date and a bible
quote, the one where “When I was a child, I spoke as a child...” and
all that. So we all agreed we'd go but that we'd ask him to invite the
CO, just to see what happened.
So he invited her, to be all Christian, and we all
got ready for the Good 'n' Plenty party, which we all took to calling
it.
* * *
The first thing you've got to understand is that this guy's house was a
saltbox right by the railroad tracks. It was inside this weird area
where there probably shouldn't have been any houses. It was sort of a
square parking lot. On one side was a bar called the Pig Tail Tavern,
then there was an auto parts store on the other side, close to the
tracks, and between the two was Craig's house. It was painted a kind of
funny blue on one side and dark brown on another and there was a big
picture window looking out on the parking lot. We all came about the
same time and parked and Craig's wife came out and told us to re-park.
She kind of mumbled something to Paula and we all re-parked so we were
far away from the bar and the shop.
So it was three of us, the CO, me, and Ellie Nelson,
all ready to go in when Craig came out in a goddamn curtain. He was
dressed up like in a toga kind of thing and he had a huge wooden cross
on a chain around his neck and we all about pissed ourselves.
“You guys are early,” he said. “I gotta
change.”
So he went back and the wife took us to the backyard
where Craig had a broken outdoor pool with dirty water in it and a
grill that started smoking up the place. A couple other folks came and
we recognized Tommy who had gotten a lot fatter since we'd last seen
him. Then Craig came out wearing a
God's Gym t-shirt and jeans and he was carrying a beer.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said and slapped all
the guys on the back and went over and had words with his wife. He was
yelling at her to go get the hamburgers and stuff for the grill. He
offered us all a drink, but I wasn't drinking by a long shot, after I
saw him hopping around in a goddamn toga. So I kind of nursed a Coke
that I kept telling Craig was a rum and Coke so he'd stop trying to
give me booze.
The party was quiet, no music, not too much talking,
and Craig kept drinking beers. Tommy and his buddies left.
His wife kept going inside for more of whatever.
They had these Vienna sausages on little pieces of toast and a lot of
weird blood sausage that Ellie was really sucking down. It was just us
until some guy came around the side of the house. He was drunk and said
that Craig had invited him. He had a Pigtail Tavern t-shirt on so
we figured he was either a regular or the owner. Craig came out.
“Paulie! What's up, man? How are you doing?”
“Good, man, good. I got my goddamn back out of
whack at work. On disability.”
Craig's face pinched up.
“Naw, man, I'm sorry. I really am. I got my back out
of whack. It's killing me,” said Paulie again. “Can't think straight.”
“There's women, Paulie.”
“I know, I know.”
Craig's wife brought Paulie a beer and Paulie
whispered something to her and she kind of nodded with a bit of smile.
Craig was stumbling around the yard. He was showing Ellie where he
wanted to install an in-ground pool. And a smaller pool so his
church could do baptisms.
Paulie and Craig's wife were inside for about ten
minutes and Craig came over to us. He was drinking J
ack and Coke now.
“I need you to go inside, Paula. This is man's
talk.”
“What?”
“You heard me. At work you may be my CO but this is
my turf.”
Paula left. Then Craig started up. “Men, these
are grave times. These are the end times, men, and I'm glad
I have all of you here together. I'm glad we have a quorum. Wherever
and whenever two or more are gathered in His name, He'll be there, and
He's here tonight.”
“You know what's going on inside that house? Paulie
and my wife, my bonded wife, are fornicating. They think I don't know.
They think I'm a fool. This is the time when God's wrath comes down.”
He was screaming now. He dropped his glass and it
shattered on the porch. He kicked in the door and then pulled it off
its hinges.
We followed him inside. Craig's wife and Paulie were
sitting on the couch looking at a small book of pictures.
“What's up, dude?”
Craig tore Paulie out of the chair. “You come
here and fornicate on my wife and make eyes at her. You come here to
ruin my marriage and insult me in front of my friends.”
“Naw, man. I'm showing her Maui. Me and Crystal went
to Maui.” Craig had Paulie's shirt bunched up and he pulled him
close.
“You're drunk, man. Stop it,” said Paulie.
Craig pushed Paulie onto the floor. Then he looked out the window. His
stomach was heaving under his t-shirt. He was sweating and in the
single
bulb he was shiny as a piece of rancid meat. I looked around,
finally, to see what he had in there. There was a photo of Jesus
above the TV and some kind of pillows on the floor. There were a bunch
of exercise tapes
near the VCR and I figured they were Craig's wife's because she was a
stick. There was a folding chair on one wall and a busted down sofa
facing the TV. There was the cross that Craig had been wearing and next
to it was a bag of chips, almost empty, and a bottle of some kind of
cherry spritzer drink. Then Craig pushed through the front door. The
screen door was laying inside the house, along the wall, so this must
have happened a few times already.
We followed Craig into the parking lot.
Craig's wife, who finally introduced herself as Myra, told us that she
was sorry. She told us Craig did this a lot.
We knew Craig had a Thunderbird, an old one
with T-tops. Well, Craig walked up the Thunderbird's hood, dented that
all to hell, and kicked a hole through the glass t-top with his foot.
He almost fell through. Then he sat down on the pavement and started
screaming. He had cut himself. Paulie and Myra staunched the
bleeding and we hauled ass out of there.
* * *
Paula fired old Good 'n' Plenty a week later. We’d had enough of him.
He was limping around the office all week. He kept changing the
screensaver to “A faithfull friend is a strong defense – Ecc. 6:14,”
misspelling and all. We never had so much trouble as we had with
that fat bastard.