“If a hit man tracked you down, sir, wouldn’t you be dead by now?”
“For sure. I’d be parked in an unpadded waitin’-room chair, readin’ old magazines in Purgatory.”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with who you used to be.”
He turned from the window. “From your lips to God’s ear. Worst thing would be anyone here hurt because of me.”
“Everyone here’s been lifted up because of you,” I assured him.
The slabs and lumps of his face shifted into a smile that you would have found scary if you didn’t know him. “You’re a good kid. If I ever would’ve had me a kid, it’s nice to think he might’ve been a little like you.”
“Being me isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, sir.”
“Though if I was your dad,” Brother Knuckles continued, “you’d probably be shorter and thicker, with your head set closer to your shoulders.”
“I don’t need a neck anyway,” I said. “I never wear ties.”
“No, son, you need a neck so you can stick it out. That’s what you do. That’s who you are.”
“Lately, I’ve been thinking I might get myself measured for a habit, become a novice.”
He returned to his chair but only sat on the arm of it, studying me. After consideration, he said, “Maybe someday you’ll hear the call. But not anytime soon. You’re of the world, and need to be.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I need to be of the world.”
“The world needs you to be out there in it. You got things to do, son.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. The things I’ll have to do.”
“The monastery ain’t a hideout. A mug wants to come in here, take the vows, he should come because he wants to open himself to somethin’ bigger than the world, not because he wants to close himself up in a little ball like a pill bug.”
“Some things you just have to close yourself away from, sir.”
“You mean the summer before last, the shootings at the mall. You don’t need no one’s forgiveness, son.”
“I knew it was coming, they were coming, the gunmen. I should’ve been able to stop it. Nineteen people died.”
“Everyone says, without you, hundreds would’ve died.”
“I’m no hero. If people knew about my gift and knew still I couldn’t stop it, they wouldn’t call me a hero.”
“You ain’t God, neither. You did all you could, anyone could.”
As I put down the Coke, picked up the bottle of aspirin, and shook two more tablets onto my palm, I changed the subject. “Are you going to wake the abbot and tell him that I fell over an unconscious monk?”
He stared at me, trying to decide whether to allow me to change the subject. Then: “Maybe in a while. First, I’m gonna try to take an unofficial bed count, see if maybe I can find someone holdin’ ice to a lump on his head.”
“The monk I fell over.”
“Exactly. We got two questions. Second, why would some guy club a monk? But first, why would a monk be out at this hour where he could get himself clubbed?”
“I guess you don’t want to get a brother in trouble.”
“If there’s sin involved, I ain’t gonna help him keep what he done from his confessor. That won’t be no favor to his soul. But if it was just some kinda foolishness, the prior maybe don’t have to know.”
A prior is a monastery’s disciplinarian.
St. Bartholomew’s prior was Father Reinhart, an older monk with thin lips and a narrow nose, less than half the nose of which Brother Knuckles could boast. His eyes and eyebrows and hair were all the color of an Ash Wednesday forehead spot.
Walking, Father Reinhart appeared to float like a spirit across the ground, and he was uncannily quiet. Many of the brothers called him the Gray Ghost, though with affection.
Father Reinhart was a firm disciplinarian, though not harsh or unfair. Having once been a Catholic-school principal, he warned that he had a paddle, as yet never used, in which he had drilled holes to reduce wind resistance. “Just so you know,” he had said with a wink.
Brother Knuckles went to the door, hesitated, looked back at me. “If somethin’ bad is comin’, how long we got?”
“After the first bodachs show up…it’s sometimes as little as a day, usually two.”
“You sure you ain’t got a concussion or nothin’?”
“Nothing that four aspirin won’t help,” I assured him. I popped the second pair of tablets into my mouth and chewed them.
Knuckles grimaced. “What’re you, a tough guy?”
“I read that they’re absorbed into your bloodstream faster this way, through the tissue in your mouth.”
“What—you get a flu shot, you have the doc inject it in your tongue? Get a few hours’ sleep.”
“I’ll try.”
“Find me after Lauds, before Mass, I’ll tell you who got himself conked—and maybe why, if he knows why. Christ be with you, son.”
“And with you.”
He left and closed the door behind him.
The doors of the suites in the guesthouse, like those of the monks’ rooms in another wing, have no locks. Everyone here respects the privacy of others.
I carried a straight-backed chair to the door and wedged it under the knob, to prevent anyone from entering.
Maybe chewing aspirin and letting them dissolve in your mouth speeds up absorption of the medication, but they taste like crap.
When I drank some Coke to wash out the bad taste, the crushed tablets reacted with the soft drink, and I found myself foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
When it comes to tragic figures, I’ve got a much greater talent for slapstick than Hamlet did, and whereas King Lear would step over a banana peel in his path, my foot will find it every time.
CHAPTER 9
THE COMFORTABLE BUT SIMPLE GUEST SUITE had a shower so small that I felt as if I were standing in a coffin.
For ten minutes I let the hot water beat on my left shoulder, which had been tenderized by the mysterious assailant’s club. The muscles relaxed, but the ache remained.
The pain wasn’t severe. It didn’t concern me. Physical pain, unlike some other kinds, eventually goes away.
When I turned off the water, big white Boo was staring at me through the steam-clouded glass door.
After I had toweled dry and pulled on a pair of briefs, I knelt on the bathroom floor and rubbed the dog behind the ears, which mad
e him grin with pleasure.
“Where were you hiding?” I asked him. “Where were you when some miscreant tried to make my brain squirt out my ears? Huh?”
He didn’t answer. He only grinned. I like old Marx Brothers movies, and Boo is the Harpo Marx of dogs in more ways than one.
My toothbrush seemed to weigh five pounds. Even in exhaustion, I am diligent about brushing my teeth.
A few years previously, I had witnessed an autopsy in which the medical examiner, during a preliminary review of the corpse, remarked for his recorder that the deceased was guilty of poor dental hygiene. I had been embarrassed for the dead man, who had been a friend of mine.
I hope that no attendants at my autopsy will have any reason to be embarrassed for me.
You might think this is pride of a particularly foolish kind. You’re probably right.
Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.
I have persuaded myself, however, that brushing my teeth in anticipation of my untimely demise is simply consideration for the feelings of any autopsy witness who might have known me when I was alive. Embarrassment for a friend, arising from his shortcomings, is never as awful as being mortified by the exposure of your own faults, but it is piercing.
Boo was in bed, curled up against the footboard, when I came out of the bathroom.
“No belly rub, no more ear scratching,” I told him. “I’m coming down like a plane that’s lost all engines.”
His yawn was superfluous for a dog like him; he was here for companionship, not for sleep.
Lacking enough energy to put on pajamas, I fell into bed in my briefs. The coroner always strips the body, anyway.
After pulling the covers to my chin, I realized that I had left the light on in the adjacent bathroom.
In spite of John Heineman’s four-billion-dollar endowment, the brothers at the abbey live frugally, in respect of their vows of poverty. They do not waste resources.
The light seemed far away, growing more distant by the second, and the blankets were turning to stone. To hell with it. I wasn’t a monk yet, not even a novice.
I wasn’t a fry cook anymore, either—except when I made pancakes on Sundays—or a tire salesman, or much of anything. We not-much-of-anything types don’t worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.