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uneasily. “I never said this to anyone else, Father, but the way we did it in Nam, putting a gunship down on a village and raking it, so that every man, woman, and child there was shot to pieces — wasn’t that a crime?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd a mortal sin?”
    â€œI would say yes, a mortal sin.”
    â€œWell, there you are.”
    â€œIn Nam,” the priest said, “you followed orders.”
    â€œDoes that make it different?”
    â€œI don’t think so, but it might make a difference in your own soul, at least the sense that you felt you were doing what’s right.”
    â€œI don’t know what’s right. I don’t believe I have a soul. I watched our kids being shot to pieces. I watched the VC kids being shot to pieces. Did they have souls? Maybe we were doing good, sending all those souls up to heaven. Father, it’s such bullshit. Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me it ain’t bullshit.”
    â€œI can’t tell you that,” the priest said gently. “I can’t even look at it that way. There’s only one way I can deal with it.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œWhat I do. If I have a soul, I must find it. Do you want a piece of orange?”
    Cullen took the offered orange segment and said, “Father, I met you only twenty-four hours ago, and you already got me more confused than I ever been.”
    â€œIt’s time, isn’t it?”
    â€œTime for what?”
    â€œTime to confuse you. Look at it, Joe. You kill, and you work it out. Everyone else is doing it, and if you don’t do it, someone else will. You’re following orders. You’re serving your country. Clean and simple and direct. No confusion. You take a job to bring guns into this place of agony, and what the guns will do doesn’t trouble you, because if you don’t take the job of flying them down, another will, so what’s the difference? And the same goes for the cocaine you take back, and that’s all right because up in Texas at the other end are the fat cats who have always run things, and you know that’s the way it’s always been, and there’s a touch of CIA and army, so you figure it’s no skin off your back if these wealthy and powerful characters want to run dope into the United States, and that’s simple too. So if I confuse you, I have to say it’s high time someone did, and if you feel I put you down too much, you can take your ass out of here.”
    â€œJesus, I come to you,” Cullen said. “I like you, I respect you, I bring you stuff — you know, I want to help you. Not just because you’re a priest and I’m a Catholic, but because — oh, Jesus, I don’t know how to say it, but why do you tell me to get out of here? I’m not mad. Only, sometimes I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and I try — believe me.”
    O’Healey’s pink face crinkled. “And sometimes I don’t know what the hell I am talking about. When I gave my first sermon, I chose this same question — in Catholic thinking, it has the formal name of ‘false conscience.’ That means rationalization, the art of working something wrong through your mind until it comes out right. The act of doing a wrong or evil thing and then rationalizing it into its opposite. This was always at the bottom of my thinking — I suppose part of what brought me to the priesthood — and I built it into that first sermon with all the enraged righteousness of an earnest young man who discovers that nothing in the world bears much resemblance to what he had been taught and read. Fortunately, God was good to me and when I delivered the sermon I was in such stark terror that only a whisper emerged from my lips and no one heard it. I am still a righteous type, and I light into a guy like you for no good reason. I like you, Joe, and I pray for you, so forgive