The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (36 page)

“How d’ya know you’re all right physically?” Mac asked him. “You don’t look very strong to me. I took you for a born 4-F. For all you know, you might be turned down and out lookin’ for a job. In the circumstances, I couldn’t promise to hold this one open forever.”

With the usual apprehension, Myles watched Mac pour another drink. Could Mac want so badly for an underpaid chauffeur, he wondered. Myles’ driving was his only asset. As a representative of the Fathers, he was a flop, and he knew it, and so did Mac. Mac, in his own words, was the baby that delivered the goods. But no layman could be as influential as Mac claimed to be with the Fathers, hard up though they were for men and money. Mac wouldn’t be able to help with any bishop in his right mind. But Mac did want him around, and Myles, who could think of no one else who did, was almost tempted to stay as long as he could. Maybe he
was
4-F.

Later that evening Mac, still drinking, put it another way, or possibly said what he’d meant to say earlier. “Hell, you’ll never pass the mental test. Never let a character like you in the Army.” The Fathers, though, would be glad to have Myles, if Mac said the word.

Myles thanked him again. Mac wanted him to drive the car, to do the Work, but what he wanted still more, it was becoming clear, was to have a boon companion, and Myles knew he just couldn’t stand to be it.

“You’re not my type,” Mac said. “You haven’t got it—the velocity, I mean—but maybe that’s why I like you.”

Myles was alone again with his thoughts, walking the plank of his gloom.

“Don’t worry,” Mac said. “I’ll always have a spot in my heart for you. A place in my business.”

“In the supermarket?”

Mac frowned. Drinking, after a point, made him appear a little cross-eyed. “I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” he said distinctly. “If y’wanna know, your trouble’s words. Make y’self harda take. Don’t
have
to be jerk. Looka you. Young. Looka me. Dead. Not even Catholic. Bloody Orangeman. ’S truth.”

Myles couldn’t believe it. And then he could, almost. He’d never seen Mac at Mass on Sundays, either coming or going, except when they were working, and then Mac kept to the vestibule. The bunk that Mac had talked about Myles’ being a cradle Catholic began to make sense.

“Now you’re leaving the Work, I tell you,” Mac was saying “Makes no difference now.” They were in Minnesota, staying in a hotel done in the once popular Moorish style, and the ceiling light and the shades of the bed lamps, and consequently the walls and Myles’ face, were dead orange and Mac’s face was bloody orange.

Myles got up to leave.

“Don’t go,” Mac said. He emptied the bottle.

But Myles went, saying it was bedtime. He realized as he said it that he sounded like the curate the night before.

Ten minutes later Mac was knocking at Myles’ door. He was in his stocking feet, but looked better, like a drunk getting a hold on himself.

“Something to read,” he said. “Don’t feel like sleeping.”

Myles had some books in his suitcase, but he left them there. “I didn’t get a paper,” he said.

“Don’t want that,” Mac said. He saw the Gideon Bible on the night stand and went over to it. “Mind if I swipe this?”

“There’s probably one in your room.”

Mac didn’t seem to hear. He picked up the Gideon. “The Good Book,” he said.

“I’ve got a little Catholic Bible,” Myles said. The words came out of themselves—the words of a diehard proselytizer.

“Have you? Yeah, that’s the one I want.”

“I can’t recommend it,” Myles said, on second thought. “You better take the other one, for reading. It’s the King James.”

“Hell with that!” Mac said. He put the King James from him.

Myles went to the suitcase and got out his portable Bible. He stood with it at the door, making Mac come for it, and then, still withholding it, led him outside into the corridor, where he finally handed it over.

“How you feel now, about that other?” Mac asked.

For a moment, Myles thought he was being asked about his induction, which Mac ordinarily referred to as “that other,” and not about Mac’s dark secret. When he got Mac’s meaning, he said, “Don’t worry about me. I won’t turn you in.”

In the light of his activities, Mac’s not being a Catholic was in his favor, from Myles’ point of view; as an honest faker Mac was more acceptable, though many would not see it that way. There was something else, though, in Mac’s favor—something unique; he was somebody who liked Myles just for himself. He had been betrayed by affection—and by the bottle, of course.

Myles watched Mac going down the corridor in his stocking feet toward his room, holding the Bible and swaying just a little, as if he were walking on calm water. He wasn’t so drunk.

The next morning Mac returned the Bible to Myles in his room and said, “I don’t know if you realize it or not, but I’m sorry about last night. I guess I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I won’t stand in your way any longer.” He reached into his pocket and took out his roll. “You’ll need some of this,” he said.

“No, thanks,” Myles said.

“You sure?”

Myles was sure.

“Forget anything I might have said.” Mac eased over to the window and looked out upon the main street. “I don’t know what, but I might have said something.” He came back to Myles. He was fingering his roll, holding it in both hands, a fat red squirrel with a nut. “You sure now?”

Myles said yes, he was sure, and Mac reluctantly left him.

Myles was wondering if that had been their good-bye when, a few minutes later, Mac came in again. His manner was different. “I’ll put it to you like this,” he said. “You don’t say anything about me and I won’t say anything about you. Maybe we both got trouble. You know what I’m talking about?”

Myles said that he thought he knew and that Mac needn’t worry.

“They may never catch you,” Mac said, and went away again. Myles wondered if
that
had been their good-bye.

Presently Mac came in again. “I don’t remember if I told you this last night or not. I know I was going to, but what with one thing and another last night, and getting all hung up—”

“Well?”

“Kid”—it was the first time Mac had called him that—“I’m not a Catholic.”

Myles nodded.

“Then I did say something about it?”

Myles nodded again. He didn’t know what Mac was trying now, only that he was trying something.

“I don’t know what I am,” Mac said. “My folks weren’t much good. I lost ’em when I was quite young. And you know about my wife.” Myles knew about her. “No damn good.”

Myles listened and nodded while all those who had ever failed Mac came in for slaughter. Mac ordinarily did this dirty work in the car, and it had always seemed to Myles that they threw out the offending bodies, one by one, making room for the fresh ones. It was getting close in the room. Mac stood upright amid a wreckage of carcasses—with Myles.

“You’re the only one I can turn to,” he said. “I’d be afraid to admit to anyone else what I’ve just admitted to you—I mean to a priest. As you know, I’m pretty high up in the Work, respected, well thought of, and all that, and you can imagine what your average priest is going to think if
I
come to him—to be baptized!”

The scene rather appealed to Myles, but he looked grave.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mac said. “Don’t think I don’t know the awful risk I’m taking now, with my immortal soul and all. Gives me a chill to think of it. But I still can’t bring myself to do the right thing. Not if it means going to a priest. Sure to be embarrassing questions. The Fathers could easily get wind of it back in Chicago.”

Myles was beginning to see what Mac had in mind.

“As I understand it, you don’t have to be a priest to baptize people,” Mac continued. “
Anybody
can do it in an emergency. You know that, of course.”

Myles, just a step ahead of him, was thinking of the pastors who’d been deceived into giving Mac the pledge. It looked a lot like the old package deal.

“We could go over there,” Mac said, glancing at the washbowl in the corner. “Or there’s my room, if it’d be more appropriate.” He had a bathroom.

Myles hardened. “If you’re asking
me
to do it,” he said, “the answer’s no.” Myles was now sure that Mac had been baptized before—perhaps many times, whenever he had need of it. “I couldn’t give you a proper certificate anyway,” Myles added. “You’d want that.”

“You mean if I wanted to go on with it and come into the Catholic Church? All the way in? Is that what you mean?”

Myles didn’t mean that at all, but he said, “I suppose so.”

“Then you do get me?” Mac demanded.

Myles stiffened, knowing that he was in grave danger of being in on Mac’s conversion, and feeling, a moment later, that this—this conversion—like the pledge and baptism, must have happened before. He hastened to say, “No. I don’t get you and I don’t
want
to.”

Mac stood before him, silent, with bowed head, the beaten man, the man who’d asked for bread and received a stone, who’d asked for a fish and got a serpent.

But no, Mac wasn’t that at all, Myles saw. He was the serpent, the nice old serpent with Glen-plaid markings, who wasn’t
very
poisonous. He’d been expecting tenderness, but he had caught the forked stick just behind the head. The serpent was quiet. Was he dead? “I give you my word that I’ll never tell anybody what you’ve told me,” Myles said. “So far as I’m concerned, you’re a Catholic—a cradle Catholic if you like. I hold no grudge against you for anything you’ve said, drunk or sober. I hope you’ll do the same for me.”

“I will that,” Mac said, and began to speak of their “relationship,” of the inspiration Myles had been to him from the very first. There was only one person responsible for the change in his outlook, he said, and it might interest Myles to know that
he
was that person.

Myles saw that he’d let up on the stick too soon. The serpent still had plenty left. Myles pressed down on him. “I want out, Mac,” he said. “I’m not a priest yet. I don’t
have
to listen to this. If you want me to spill the beans to the Fathers, just keep it up.”

The serpent was very quiet now. Dead?

“You do see what I mean?” Myles said.

“Yeah, now I see,” Mac said. He was looking only a little hurt; the flesh above his snow-white collar was changing pinks, but he was looking much better, seemingly convinced that Myles, with an excuse to harm him, and with the power to do so, would not. Mac was having his remarkable experience after all—almost a conversion. “Had you wrong,” he confessed. “Thought sure you’d squeal. Thought sure you’d be the type that would. Hope you don’t mind me saying that. Because you got my respect now.”

Myles could see, however, that Mac liked him less for having it. But he had Mac’s respect, and it was rare, and it made the day rare.

“Until I met you, why— Well,
you
know.” Mac stopped short.

Myles, with just a look, had let him feel the stick.

“We’ll leave it at that,” Mac said.

“If you will, I will,” said Myles. He crossed the room to the washbowl, where he began to collect his razor, his toothbrush, and the shaving lotion that Mac had given him. When he turned around with these things in his hands, he saw that Mac had gone. He’d left a small deposit of gray ash on the rug near the spot where he’d coiled and uncoiled.

Later that morning Myles, as a last service and proof of good will, went to the garage and brought Mac’s car around to the hotel door, and waited there with it until Mac, smoking his second cigar of the day, appeared. Myles helped him stow his luggage and refused his offer to drive him to the railroad station, if that was where Myles wanted to go. Myles had not told Mac that he intended to hitchhike back to the last town, to confront the difficult bishop and strike the rock a second time. After shaking hands, Mac began, “If I hear of anything—” but Myles silenced him with a look, and then and there the team split up.

Mac got into the Cadillac and drove off. Watching, Myles saw the car, half a block away, bite at the curb and stop. And he saw why. Mac, getting on with the Work, was offering a lift to two men all in black, who, to judge by their actions, didn’t really want one. In the end, though, the black car consumed them, and slithered out of view.

FATHER FABRE, COMING from the bathroom, stopped and knocked at the pastor’s door—something about the door had said, Why not? No sound came from the room, but the pastor had a ghostly step and there he was, opening the door an inch, giving his new curate a glimpse of the green eyeshade he wore and of the chaos in which he dwelt. Father Fabre saw the radio in the unmade bed, the correspondence, pamphlets, the folding money, and all the rest of it—what the bishop, on an official visitation, barging into the room and then hurriedly backing out, had passed off to the attending clergy as “a little unfinished business.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“How about that table you promised me?”

The pastor just looked at him.

“The one for my room, remember? Something to put my typewriter on.”

“See what I can do.”

The pastor had said that before. Father Fabre said, “I’m using the radiator now.”

The pastor nodded, apparently granting him permission to continue using it.

Father Fabre put down the old inclination to give up. “I thought you said you’d fix me up, Father.”

“See what I can do, Father.”

“Now?”

“Busy now.”

The pastor started to close the door, which was according to the rules of their little game, but Father Fabre didn’t budge, which was not according to the rules.

“Tell you what I’ll do, Father,” he said. “I’ll just look around in the basement and you won’t have to bother. I know how busy you are.” Father Fabre had a strange feeling that he was getting somewhere with the pastor. Everything he’d said so far had been right, but he had to keep it up. “Of course I’ll need to know the combination.” He saw the pastor buck and shudder at the idea of telling anyone the combination of the lock that preserved his treasures.