Driving Blind

“Your pants then! Your shoes! You must pretend to get ready for the Grand Affair, with or without rain.”

Doone kept his cap on but yanked his shoes and belabored his coat.

“The test, Doone!” Nolan shouted. “If you do not writhe to remove your shoelaces and untie your tie, we will not know just how fast a maid in the undressing or a man at his mating dance will slide from view. Now we must find is there or is there not time for a consummation devoutly to be wished?”

“Consummation—devoutly—damn!” cried Doone.

And grousing epithets and firing nouns to smoke the air, Doone danced about, flinging off his coat and then his shirt and tie and was on his way to a dropping of the pants and the rising of the moon when a thunderous voice from Heaven or an echo from the mount banged the air like a great anvil somehow fallen to earth.

“What goes on there?” the voice thundered.

They froze, a riot iced by sin.

Doone froze, an art statue on its way to potato deeps.

All time froze and again the pile-driver voice was lifted and plunged to crack their ears. The moon fled behind a fog.

“Just what in hell is going on here?” thundered the voice of Kingdom Come and the Last Judgment.

A dozen heads spun on a dozen necks.

For Father O’Malley stood on a rise in the road, his bike clenched in his vengeful fists, so it looked like his skinny sister, straddled and lost.

For a third time, Father O’Malley tossed the bolt and split the air. “You and you and you! What are you up to?”

“It’s not so much up as down to my smalls,” piped Doone in a wee piccolo voice, and added, meekly, “Father—”

“Out, out!” shouted the priest, waving one arm like a scythe. “Away!” he blathered. “Go, go, go. Damn, damn, damn.”

And he harvested the men with maniac gesticulations and eruptions of lava enough to lay a village and bury a blight.

“Out of my sight. Away, the mangy lot of you! Go search your souls, and get your asses to confession six Sundays running and ten years beyond. It’s lucky ‘twas me came on this calamity and not the Bishop, me and not the sweet morsel nuns from just beyond Meynooth, me and not the child innocents from yonder school. Doone, pull up your socks!”

“They’re pulled!” said Doone.

“For one last time, out!” And the men might have scattered but they held to their bikes in deliriums of terror and could only listen.

“Will you tell me now,” intoned the priest, one eye shut to take aim, the other wide to fix the target, “what, what in hell are you up to?”

“Drowning, your lordship, your honor, your reverence.”

And this Doone almost did.

Until the monsignor was gone, that is.

When he heard the holy bike ricket away over the hill, Doone still stood like a chopfallen Lazarus to survey his possible ruination.

But at last he called across the boggy field with a strange frail but growing-more-triumphant-by-the-minute voice:

“Is he gone?”

“He is, Doone,” said Finn.

“Then look upon me,” said Doone.

All looked, then stared, then gaped their mouths.

“You are not sinking,” gasped Nolan.