by John Boyd
“That’s all right with me, Father.”
“My son, are you a Christian?”
There the question was again, and Hansen met it head on. He was not a Jew and he was not a Mohammedan. “Father, I’m a Christian.”
“Then, you accept the Virgin Birth?”
“Yes, but let me qualify that right at the start, Father; accepting the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ doesn’t keep me from sympathizing with Joseph, one whit, and Vita-Lerp isn’t the Holy Ghost. I’m a father, too, and I have to admit I’m worried about my daughter. Father, would you like it if your daughter married a capsule?”
The Father’s expression of spiritual serenity was broken by a sardonic smile, and he wiped the question away with a swipe of his hand before his face. “Oh, no, my son! You’re not trapping me with that argument. I know where the pope and I stand on birth control. I want to know where you stand.”
“I’ll go along with Jesus,” Hansen said, “but His is the only parthenogenesis that’s getting my okay. I’m one hundred percent against Vita-Lerp.”
“Well,” the Father said, rubbing his hands together to signify his task was finished, “that scratches hope, so lay every dime you’ve got on faith. Faith is your horse, my son. God willing, you will find peace in Jesus.”
Captain Hansen thought for a moment. “Father, I’m a military man, and I just can’t seem to pin Jesus down.”
“Therein lies the beauty of Christ. Read as far as you wish into His Word and the boundaries of the Scripture constantly expand with new significance.”
“I’m not much of a reader. Father. I learn best by example. Words don’t seem to…”
Again the Father lifted his hand for silence, his serenity quickened by inspiration. “My son, the Lord has directed you to us. If you profit by example, by all odds the most convincing example of a life lived by pure faith is lived right within these walls by the late Brother Johannis.”
Even Steward, the grammarian, would have had trouble parsing that sentence, Hansen thought, as the Father continued. “Brother Johannis lost his belief in God, but the power of his faith is such that I am proposing him for canonization while he still lives, and my proposal has been taken so seriously that the devil’s advocate is arriving within the fortnight from Rome to adjudge his claim to sainthood. Brother Johannis lives in a belief in the absence of life. His cell is only three doors down, adjoining our young lady’s bathroom. Captain, would you care to view the living remains of our late Brother Johannis?”
Nothing seemed cranky about the layout, Pope thought, as he sat on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes. “You’re a gentleman,” the girl said.
“When there’s time, I like to be considerate,” he said, “and it seems from the activity around here that you’ve got all night. What’s happening in New York?”
“This town is so dead, mister, that I’m thinking of going back to Omaha for action.”
“Are you a native of Omaha?”
“You bet.”
“I dated a girl, once, in Omaha,” he told her, “but she was a judo artist who didn’t take kindly to my approach.” He threw his eyes out of focus and felt her thigh. Her muscle tone was good but, considering her work, not exceptional. “You don’t press nerves and all that, do you?”
“No,” she said. “Glands is my trade. Mister, there’s something about you. I’d be grateful if you’d hold off long enough for me to do a little exercise.”
This is getting cranky, Pope thought, slipping off the last leg of his trousers. The girl was lying behind him, stretched out. Her fingers fluted over the small of his back and walked around his thigh in a rippling caress. He twisted around and leaned back, looking down at her. “What kind of exercise?”
“Just this, a finger exercise. My piano teacher showed it to me. It’s sort of a mood piece.”
She walked her fingertips around his waist, fluttering over his navel. Her eyes were closed, her lips moistened. One knee was cocked and waving slowly from side to side. Pope understood. This was her holy time, and she was rapt. He joined her, playing his own mood piece on her stomach, an andante supporting her allegro. When their silent music swelled to a crescendo, became a duet on organs, she said, “I’m ready.”
Pope preferred professionals to amateurs even though he appreciated the enthusiasm of the latter. This girl had passion controlled by skill. She restrained his thighs with her hands while she parried his thrust with a back arch, teasing herself; and her avidity was tempered by a peculiar reluctance, an almost virginal shyness, as if fear wished to evade what her desire wished to pursue. Her performance went beyond commercial art.
Now he was a boy, once more, conning the kitchen maid in his first tryst when his parents were gone from the house. He remembered the exquisite compliment Beulah paid a stripling when she slipped a dab of butter into her palm and went with him to his secret “cave” under the muscadine vines along the back-yard fence. His nostrils tingled again to odors of musk and morning glories, and the memory triggered an end to dalliance. With an ingasp and an upflip, the girl met his downsurge and Pope moaned, “Oh, Mama!”
Those were the last words of John Pope.
The girl from Omaha was weeping softly when a big blonde, dressed in a kimono, entered from the next room to help disengage the body. “Marge,” she said to the blonde, “I mortally hated to see that boy go.”
“You mean you hated to see him mortally go,” Marge said, rolling Pope onto his back. “Check his wallet while I wrestle his pants on.”
“He was a gentleman,” Thelma said, “to the very end.”
“They could be gentle, when they wanted something, and he died happy. Look at that expression on his face. Now, brace up, honey. We got to get this thing out of here.”
Thelma braced up and reached into Pope’s coat pocket as Marge slid on his shoes. She glanced through his wallet and turned to Marge. “Say, this rube was a G-man!”
“That explains it,” Marge said. “He was weaseling his way. Thelma, I’ll bet that gorilla out front knew he was a Fed. If he don’t come out. Big Fats will come in. And that gorilla ain’t no gentleman…” She slapped Pope’s shoe heel softly against her palm. “Jeez, honey, I’ve got one helluvan idea. We’re closing this joint, tonight. Load yourself with a double charge.”
She tossed the shoe on the bed and walked to the window, leaning out. Five stories below, a garbage truck with a scoop and a closed top was parked in the alley. Marge took a penny from her kimono and tossed it below. When the coin struck the hood of the truck, the driver leaned out and looked up. Marge held her finger to her nose, then spiraled it in front of her, and spread her hands in the “safe” position of a baseball umpire.
She watched as the truck drove away.
“Why’d you do that?” Thelma asked.
“Here, lend me a hand with this stiff. I want you to go out and tell the gorilla you’d like to give him one for the road, then give me the signal when you’re ready for the lift-off.”
“Now, that I won’t mind,” Thelma said, lifting Pope’s legs. “But what’ll we do with two bodies?”
“Leave that to me, honey. When I’m through with this bastard, the FBI’ll disown him. Mother Carey ought to give up a medal for this night’s work!”
“To paraphrase Santayana, Captain, ‘Living, Brother Johannis made it easier for us to die, and dying he has made it easier for us to live.’ ”
The Father Superior opened the door on a cell uncarpeted and barely furnished. On the right wall, a candle burned below an icon of Mary and reflected onto the face of a large electric clock above, which was stopped at four thirty. When the Father turned on the electric bulb that dangled from the center of the ceiling, Hansen saw a hooded monk lying on a board bunk, his right side against the wall beneath a narrow window. His hands lay folded over a heavy crucifix on his stomach. A bottle of fluid attached to the wall was connected to the monk’s right arm by a tube, but his eyes were open and he was not breathing.
> “He’s been in this position for ten years,” the Father explained. Leaning over the body, he lifted a hand mirror from the window ledge, placed it beneath the monk’s nostrils, and held it. No moisture clouded the glass.
“He’s breathing,” the Father said, “but his respiration is so slow it doesn’t form moisture. His pulse is undetectable by standard methods, and his body temperature is far below normal. Any doctor, giving him a casual inspection, would write out his death certificate. But look!”
He turned the mirror and took an alarm clock from the ledge, wound it, set the alarm, and placed it, ticking, on a strip of bare planking to the left of the monk’s midsection. He pulled the alarm release and stepped back.
“We don’t perform this experiment often, only when needed as an example for some brother who is troubled in his faith. It’ll not be performed again until the devil’s advocate arrives from the Vatican.”
“You said Johannis was a backslider, Father,” Hansen said. “Yet you use him as an example of faith.”
“Indeed, he was an apostate, but he had to have something to live by, so he decided to believe in the passage of time. He set himself a code of behavior governed by obedience to clocks, a system of horological ethics, I suppose; but there occurred an incident which we at the monastery like to think of as a miracle. One night an electrical storm blew up, and the power supply failed. Brother Johannis’ wristwatch stopped at the precise moment the power failure stopped the wall clock…”
Suddenly, the Father’s words were interrupted by the ringing of the alarm clock beside the monk.
“Watch this,” he whispered.
Slowly, the monk’s left arm lifted. Moving at the elbow in an outward arc, holding to its horizontal plane, the lower arm jerked downward and outward. When the arm was fully extended, the hand was poised over the plunger of the alarm. For a moment, the palm was held rigid above the plunger. Then the hand dropped, pressing down the plunger. As Hansen stared, the hand, in one movement, jackknifed back into position and fell onto the crucifix.
Brother Johannis had shut off the alarm.
As the Father Superior returned the alarm clock to the ledge, he explained. “Brother Johannis awakened as usual the morning after the storm. When he lifted his eyes to the wall, he saw the clock was stopped at four thirty. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was also stopped at four thirty. To you, this would mean little other than an unusual coincidence, perhaps, but to the believer. Brother Johannis, it meant time had stopped. According to his faith, if time had stopped, then Brother Johannis was stopped. In short, he was dead. He’s unique in this respect—all other men die from the passage of time, but Brother Johannis died from a cessation of time.
“When the Father Superior, my predecessor, came to view the corpse, he noticed the clock and the watch, and his suspicions were aroused. We have a brother who is a doctor, and he was called in. He agreed with the Father Superior that it was a case of suspended animation, and the doctor hit upon the idea of reviving Brother Johannis with an alarm clock. It was then that this discovery was made.”
The Father Superior stood in the center of the room to turn off the lights. As he spoke, his voice carried through the small chamber.
“Brother Johannis has faith that he is dead. We have not tried to undermine his faith. In his condition, his total cost of living amounts only to his cell space and two bottles of glucose water a year, which he eliminates by evaporation. We could keep his weight constant on even less glucose if we did not use him in demonstrations, but he’s worth the extra glucose. As an example of the power of faith, he means infinitely more to the brotherhood dead than alive. Alive he was an execrable workman and a poor example of the power of faith.”
“Should you comment on his aptitude in his presence. Father?” Hansen asked.
“No matter. If his faith is pure, he is truly dead and cannot hear me; if he hears, he’s faking and so of poor faith. But the evidence is in his favor,” the Superior added as he turned off the light. “He’s lain there for ten years and has no bedsores.”
Returning down the hall, the Father continued: “What you’ve seen points out an obvious fact—there is no limit to the power of faith. You may even believe in your wife and daughter if you wish. If they betray you, you can regard their betrayal as merely a test of faith… Well, I must excuse myself and go meditate. I know you’ll forgive me. Captain.”
He stood for a moment, reflecting, with his hand on the doorknob. “The communications shack is around the corner, first door on the left. You know, you have to admire those FBI boys. They’re certainly thorough. They’ve installed one phone in the entire monastery, and they’ve tapped it.”
Hansen felt more at ease after his talk with the Father. Obviously, there was more to religion than he had assumed. Still, it was a pleasure to enter the communications shack with the Navy blue lights and the directed activity.
“Captain, your boy is phenomenal,” Steward greeted him. “He’s completed two hundred and twelve separate remarks without a dangling modifier, disagreement in number, or prepositional ending.”
Hansen was pleased with the professor’s enthusiasm but more concerned with the progress of the courtship. Hansen had not read the evening’s paper, but he had seen headlines when they drove through Charlottesville: Dr. Carey had announced for the Presidency.
“Very well, Professor,” he said, “but how’s he doing with the feminine gender?”
“McCormick hasn’t made his move yet. Mostly, he’s listening, letting her adjust to his presence. Listen.”
Steward turned up a speaker. Cora Lee was talking.
“… that’s real sweet of you. John, who brung me here, told me I was pretty, too. Course, you’re the only two boys I even saw since Mama took me out of school, so I reckon I’m two up and two down, as they say in baseball. You ever play baseball?”
“Some. What else this John say to you?”
Hansen rejoiced at the jealousy edging McCormick’s question. Young love never ran smoothly.
“Who’s John?” Hansen asked.
“John Pope.” One of the hooded FBI men answered from the blue shadows, and Hansen turned his attention back to the receiving set.
“Oh, he told me you were coming courting and that you were going to be the next President of the United States.”
“Well, Cora Lee. if he told you that, I may just as well out with it. I’m here to court. I’d like to talk to your papa about you.”
“You can’t. Angus. They got him in Atlanta.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Ten years. He’s done done five… but somebody talked to Mama about you, and she called me on the telephone.”
“What’d she say?”
“She says if it’s the Lord’s will and the government’s doing, them taking another Barnard won’t matter much. She says they’re willing to pay off the mortgage if I let you come a-courting. She said she was willing if I was, but it doesn’t matter to her, win, lose, or draw.”
“Looky, Cora Lee. They got you going to school up here and me going to school down in Washington. Why don’t you come down and let’s go to school together?”
“That wouldn’t be right proper, Angus. I’ve not been spoke for.”
“Well, I’m speaking for you, now, Cora Lee.”
“Angus, I really appreciate you saying that, but I don’t rightly think I can accept.”
Here was a frightening new wrinkle, and Hansen alerted. If this mountain girl turned down the world’s greatest lover, then Lothario X was a false profile. Primrose had erred, Operation Chicken Pluck would fail, Mother Carey would have herself a Presidency, and, after that, Ultimate Thule.
“Cora Lee, this beats me. Are you already spoke for?”
“That’s natural colloquial English, for these parts,” Steward assured himself, aloud.
“Well, not exactly,” Cora Lee said.
“Pope must have locked in on her.” A Federal monk spoke from the shadows. “Th
at Pope could have the Presidency for four terms if he was willing to take a desk job.”
Pride of organization was talking, Hansen knew, but something had gone wrong with this courtship, and the same dumb amazement he felt was in McCormick’s voice. “Cora Lee, how can a girl be spoke for not exactly?”
“I never been spoke for, but I’ve done been spoke for to.”
There was an astonished silence, and McCormick blurted, “Who you done been spoke for to with?”
“His name’s puddin’ and tame,” her voice lilted from the speaker. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”
“Cora Lee,” McCormick said, “I can beat the time of any man lest you’re promised to some boy right here in these hills. Where’s this boy you done been spoke for to with at?”
A thud from Steward’s direction caused Hansen to glance over and down, to see that the grammarian operative had toppled from his stool. In the blue light of the radio shack, Hansen could see the eyes staring into infinity, and he knew faulty grammar had killed the grammarian. A heart which had beat through three prepositions at the end of a sentence had been stopped by four.
CHAPTER 12
Captain Hansen preferred hiatuses to the topic he knew would arise on the trip to the airport. With Admiral Primrose, alone, he could have kept the subject tabled. With Defense joining them, the conversational mixture grew volatile. When Dalton Lamar decided to hitchhike with Defense, Hansen knew that a ewe grazing on a roadside lawn would trigger the flash point.
Since the Secretary of the Interior was hitchhiking, Defense assigned him the pull-down seat forward, across from the captain. As they pulled away from the Pentagon, Interior said to Hansen, “I hear you witnessed a tragedy last night.”
“Yes, sir. One of the FBI men suffered a heart attack while monitoring the young people’s conversation.”
“Whooo-eee! What were they talking about?”
Providentially, Defense intervened to change the subject. “Gentlemen, I got a directive from State this morning, allocating percentages from the preinventory allotment. State figures twenty percent for State for arranging the allocation, ten percent to Agriculture for handling the legwork, ten percent to Interior, and sixty percent to Defense. Any surplus goes to the Senate to be disposed of as the majority leader sees fit, by order of the President.”
