The Paper Shepherd

by Olivia Landis

  “That will be good, Max,” she said.

  “That will be very good.”

  The next morning, Tiar heard a crackle over her walkie talkie as she sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

  “Little Bird, Little Bird, are you there, over?” She giggled

  “Yes, and I’m not going to do those silly code words, either,” she objected. There was a pause on the line.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, were you done? I didn’t hear you say ‘over’. over.”

  “Fuck off,” she said. She took another sip of coffee. “Over.” She heard laughing from Max’s end.

  “Ah ha!” he shouted. “I got you to say it, over.”

  “What do you want, Max?” she asked good naturedly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m reading the newspaper.”

  “Can I read it with you?” he asked.

  “What section do you want to read?”

  “Sports, I guess.”

  “Fine.” In his bedroom, Max could hear Tiar leafing through pages of the news paper.

  “Okay?”

  “Ready,” he said. They kept this up for half an hour, making comments to each other about different stories from professional, college, and high school athletics. Suddenly, Max stopped talking. Tiar wondered at first if his batteries had already worn out. Finally, his voice returned.

  “Bird, have you eaten?”

  “Nah, I was getting tired of meat loaf in the morning.”

  “Want to meet at the coffee house for breakfast?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there in twenty.”

  “See you there. Over and out.”

  Twenty minutes later, Tiar was sitting in her favorite spot in the coffee shop munching on a muffin. Max came in, his varsity jacket zipped all the way up to his knitted gray scarf. He plopped down in the chair across from her and tossed a folded page from the newspaper onto the table between them.

  “What’s this?” Tiar asked, putting down her plate to pick up the article.

  “Oh, just some article I was reading before I walked over here.” Shallot topples the Lady Cardinals. Tiar shrugged and put the paper down. “That’s it?”

  “So? Shallot is pretty good this year. It’s not a big surprise they beat St. Jude’s.” Max furrowed his brow.

  “Tiar, that game was two nights ago.”

  “So?”

  “So! You were with me two nights ago. Are you blowing off games now?” Tiar took a sip of coffee and looked out the window. Then she looked back at Max.

  “I quit the team,” she said evenly.

  “Why? Was the coach hassling you again?”

  “No, nothing like that. It just took a low priority in my life,” Tiar explained. “I mean, look at Thanksgiving. You drove ten hours round trip to be here for four nights, and I was gone for two of them. That’s just dumb.”

  “But, Tiar, you have...”

  “Ugg! Don’t even say talent,” Tiar interrupted. “I am tired of hearing about talents. If God made me good at biology or not skittish around animals so I can heal someone’s seeing eye dog when they decide to eat car keys or socks or any of the other silly things dogs eat, that is a talent I am supposed to pay back. But, God doesn’t need me to play basketball. This community doesn’t need me to play basketball. Maybe God needs me to spend time with you. I know I need that, anyway.” Tiar looked at Max. He had listened to all of this attentively but did not seem convinced.

  “Anyway, even if it is a talent, it’s not one God gave me. It’s one you gave me, dragging me out into the back yard and making me practice until my arms were too tired to move. The only reason I ever played in the first place, Max, was to get to spend time with you. What sense does it make for me to play when you’re home?”

  “What did Jack and Eleanor say?”

  “I told them I needed more time to study.” Max considered this. It was a flimsy excuse for someone who was already a straight A student. But, maybe his parents didn’t know her grades.

  “When did you make this decision?”

  “The night you came home,” Tiar answered. “I realized, Max, if this is all going to work out, we have to be a team, right? But instead, it was like a contest to see who could be the most delusional. Here I am on the court, playing a game I hate to try to make you proud, and you are in the stands counting the seconds for the game to end so you can talk to me for a few minutes before you go back to school. No wonder we were both feeling so crazy. We can’t fix all the things that keep us apart, but this is one we can fix. Over the Christmas break, do you realize that is six games. With travel time, that is more than 24 hours, more than a whole day apart. What for?”

  “You’re sure this is what you want?” Max asked sincerely.

  “Absolutely,” she answered without hesitation. Max looked across the table at Tiar. He had known her for so many years, and yet on some level he didn’t know her at all.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  “You’re not disappointed in me?” He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “No, not at all.” Opening his eyes again, he looked at her sympathetically. “Just promise me we can just be honest with one another from now on. Jeez, Tiar, I didn’t have any idea you hated basketball that much.”

  “Well, it had advantages,” she said. “I made a lot of friends. I stayed in shape. The game is fun. It’s just all the pressure to win I couldn’t take.”

  “Regardless, it’s okay for you to tell me these things. You don’t have to just suffer alone. Just be honest with me.”

  “I want that, Max.”

  “I want that too.” Tiar pushed her plate across the table and Max popped the remainder of her muffin in his mouth.

  “Speaking of being honest...” she looked around and lowered her voice. “What did you think of that homily on Christmas?” Max hesitated.

  “It was.... interesting...”

  “It sucked,” Tiar charged.

  “It wasn’t as clear as it could have been,” Max said diplomatically.

  “The baby Jesus was born to be a short stop?”

  “A pinch hitter, Bird.”

  “Whatever.” Max smiled.

  “It’s my deficiency, not Father Neman’s,” he said apologetically. “I should have known you wouldn’t learn anything about baseball unless I explained it to you. A pinch hitter is....”

  “I know what a pinch hitter is,” Tiar interrupted. “Jack took me to a few minor league games while you were away.” Max was taken aback.

  “Jack took you to a baseball game?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yeah, dozens over the past few years,” Tiar said casually.

  “Why?” Max continued to press her. Tiar narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Why does he care?

  “I don’t know,” she speculated. “I guess he needed someone to pal around with since you were gone.”

  “Jack never took me to a baseball game,” Max revealed. “Not once.”

  “Well, maybe he figured I needed someone to pal around with since you were gone.” Max knit his brow.

  “Jack doesn’t ‘pal around,’” he added. Tiar shrugged, feeling they were at an impasse in the conversation. She finished off her enormous mug of coffee and let Max reflect silently on why his father found it so much easier to spend time with Tiar then with his own son. Max had always consoled himself by thinking his father was too busy between work, Knights of Columbus, and keeping up maintenance on their 90 year old house to spend time with him. Plus, he hates teenagers, his mind added. But, in Tiar, his father clearly had found a teenager he would carve out time for in his busy schedule.

  “Whatever, dude,” Tiar finally added. “Your dad’s totally cool. But, what were you saying about the homily?” Max rolled his eyes and continued.

  “I think what the pastor was trying to say is that we think of Jesus as a pinch hitter—someone to stand up and bat for us when we are in trouble. We should think of him as our third base coach, directing us how to live our
lives so we don’t get in trouble in the first place. It all goes back to....”

  “You okay Max?” Tiar asked. He had stopped suddenly and looked off into the distance as though remembering some disturbing event. You’re doing it again, he thought. He had promised himself he wasn’t going to do this. He wasn’t going to talk about church. Not to Tiar. Not to anyone. He was done with that. Tiar took a sip of coffee and looked out the window. “I wish you could write homilies,” she said carelessly. “They would be so much better.”

  “That’s a silly thing to say, Bird,” Max said gravely. “A very silly thing to say.”

  25

  Max and Tiar spent the rest of the day window shopping and raiding after Christmas sales in Hectortown. The next few days were spent uneventfully having snowball fights, drinking cocoa, and watching movies. Life felt normal. The day before Tiar was to return to school, Max was sitting at the kitchen table reading the news paper when he heard Tiar let herself in the front door and hang her jacket up in the hall closet.

  “Traitor,” she called down the hall.

  “And to what do I owe this dubious distinction?” he asked without lifting his head.

  “Where were you this morning?”

  “Where should I have been?”

  “Church.” Max looked up at her and scratched his chin.

  “Didn’t feel like it,” he said simply.

  “You didn’t feel like it?” Tiar asked. Max never didn’t feel like going to church in the nine years she had known him.

  “Tiar, as you know, the church has a three year cycle of readings. I’m almost twenty. That means I have heard every reading the church has to offer at least six times, some of them seven times. And, with Father Neman being the only pastor I’ve known my whole life, I’ve heard mostly the same homilies three or four times. Do you really think I needed to go to church today? Anyway, I was walking through town and I bumped into some old friends I hadn’t seen in a while.”

  “Old friends?” she asked suspiciously. Max didn’t answer, instead getting up from the table to boil some water to make Tiar tea.

  Max stood at the counter trying to avoid Tiar’s eyes lest she somehow see his thoughts. Earlier in the day, Max had bumped into Prentice and Matt, who had graduated a year behind him from high school. For years they had been teammates. He could barely describe their relationship as “friendly.” It would have been an exaggeration, almost a lie, to call them friends. Although it had been a chance occurrence, Max did not want Tiar to know how the rest of the morning unfolded and think he had chosen that course over spending the morning with her. Matt and Prentice had seen Max walking alone through town and invited him to Matt’s house. I need more normal friends like me, Max remembered thinking. Not future priests or nerdy religion majors. Normal guys like me. But, Max had quickly realized that these young men had very little in common with him off the basketball court. They mostly wanted to talk about places they had passed out during their first semester in college and girls they had “bagged.” Max had very little to add to the conversation. He sat on Matt’s couch occupying himself with a college basketball game.

  “You dated her, too, Max, didn’t you?” Max looked up at the sound of his name.

  “Hum?”

  “Matt and I were trying to decide who’s hotter, Sarah, or Jen,” Prentice said. “I said Sarah’s a better kisser. Any thoughts?”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess,” Max said non-committal. “Although, she isn’t really my type.”

  “Not your type?” Matt said in disbelief. “She’s gorgeous.”

  “Too tall,” Max said, looking back at the TV.

  “She’s only five eight.”

  “I’m only five eight,” Max reminded his two taller teammates. “And I don’t get to wear heels to formal events.” A cheer roses from the TV. Two teams Max didn’t care about were playing in a mediocre fashion in an unimportant game. But, Max felt it was important to at least try to have something in common with these two normal young men. He watched the lack luster game with feigned interest. A few minutes later he heard a hoot from the love seat next to him.

  “Now there’s a girl I would like to sink my teeth into,” Matt said, a smug look on his face. Max looked over at him and glanced at what he was reading. He quickly averted his eyes.

  “Have you seen the December edition yet, Max?” Matt said, tossing the magazine into his lap. Max nearly vomited into his mouth. The woman pictured on the glossy pages had clearly had some sort of surgical breast enhancement. Dr. Alfred and friends at it again, Max thought. He wondered how she could even stand without loosing her balance. She looked like a cow that had gone far too long without being milked, engorged, about to burst out of her skin.

  “Hey, do you have October?” Prentice asked. Matt thumbed through a pile next to his chair and tossed Prentice a magazine. Is this what normal guy do? Max wondered. Fine. He flipped through the pages until he found two in a row without pictures. If he held the magazine just right, Prentice and Matt wouldn’t have any idea what he was looking at. He would just stare at the words on these two pages and pretend to flip them every once in a while. They would have no idea how disgusted he was by pornography. He didn’t want them to feel like he was judging them.

  Max skimmed over the page, trying not to absorb any of what was written there. Make her scream in bed, he saw written in bold sixteen point font as his eyes flashed by. Don’t look. Don’t remember anything, he thought to himself. He didn’t worry what Tiar would think if she thought he was looking at pictures in pornographic magazines in some ill-fated attempt to complete a male rite of passage. He did worry how offended she would be if he accidentally did something with her that he had read there, even if it was enjoyable for her. Somehow, she had gotten this strange idea that affection should be innate and spontaneous, chiding her friends for wasting their money on teen magazines, taking quizzes to learn their “Sex IQ.” We’re not all born knowing this stuff, Max thought. We don’t all live with the biggest gigolo in town getting to listen a new orgy every week...

  “I’m telling Eleanor,” Tiar said finally. Max shook his head, trying to shake himself into the present. His cheeks flush. She couldn’t hear what I was thinking, could she? he wondered. That’s crazy. He turned back to face the table where Tiar was disemboweling his news paper.

  “That I didn’t go to church?” he asked, trying not to let the panic show in his voice.

  “Of course, silly,” she said, looking up at him. “What else would I be telling her about?” Whew.

  “Well, you’re out of luck,” Max said, pouring boiling water into a tea cup. “My parents just left yesterday for a wedding in Scotland. By time they get back, I’ll be back at school.”

  26

  Boxes of Chinese food sat open and half empty on the coffee table and floor. Tiar sat among them, her head resting on Max’s chest, as the credits of the movie they had rented started rolling past. Tiar picked up her empty bottle and blew across the top. The low, resonant drone combined with the soft glow of the lights from the nearby Christmas tree to remind Max of the song The Little Drummer Boy. Max reflexively opened his mouth to sing along with Tiar’s accidental composition when a strange reluctance stopped his breath in his chest.

  “What did you think of the movie?” Max asked instead.

  “I thought it was pretty good, except the lead actress’s lips were too big,” she said, sitting up and turning toward Max who was still lying on the floor with his hands behind his head.

  “Really, I thought they were the best part,” Max said. “They reminded me of yours.” Tiar gave Max a disapproving look, assuming he was mocking her.

  “It was that bad?” she asked.

  “Well, the plot was good,” he agreed. “But, entirely unrealistic. And, that’s not at all what the catacombs look like.”

  “I don’t think that was the point, silly,” Tiar responded, playfully. “And, anyway, how do you know. You’ve never been there.”

  “I spent the
whole semester studying ancient Rome,” he said. “It was my best class. There are pictures in one of my text books,” Max reported. “See for yourself.” Max got up and ran up the stairs, Tiar close behind him. When she got upstairs, he was sitting at his desk flipping through a text book. She flopped down on the bed.

  “Found it yet?”

  “Patience, Little Bird,” he said, walking toward the bed and sitting down next to her. “See.” He pointed at a series of pictures of the catacombs, early Christian tombs and meeting places built underground in Rome. In fact, it looked nothing like the movie set. Tiar tossed the book on the floor and leaned back on her elbows.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of being right?” She said, kicking her feet back and forth.

  “I’ll tell you one thing that I never get tired of,” he said. All at once he pounced on her and tickled her furiously, knocking her off her elbows. She lay on the bed, squirming, nearly hyperventilating.

  “Maxwell.... Franklin....I’m.... going....to .... tell... your.... mother.” Max stopped tickling her for a moment.

  “Tell her what?” he said innocently and began tickling her again. She shrieked and laughed. Finally, he stopped and Tiar lay on the bed, panting. Max was leaning over her, their faces only a few inches apart. Tiar leaned up and kissed him. He leaned toward her, covering her whole mouth with his.

  Tiar put her hands around Max’s waist, her left arm positioned under his. From this position, she pushed his right hand gradually higher on her chest with her elbow, leaving it over her left breast. Then, as if to demonstrate this was not an accident, she put her hand over it, gently squeezing his hand against her. When she was fairly sure he wouldn’t take his hand away, she started unbuttoning her sweater with her left hand. With her right, she felt along the top edge of his jeans, untucking his T shirt as she went. Max felt Tiar under him, the warmth of her body teasing him. He wanted her and he knew she would do whatever he asked. He felt dizzy with the possibilities.

  He balanced his forehead on hers and looked down at her chest. Her sweater had fallen away from her breasts which seemed enormous in the small space between their bodies. He though back two years, catching a glimpse of them as she changed in his car while he drove, never seeing them whole. They seemed magically round and full. He reached for the edge of his T-shirt and started pulling it off, Tiar speeding his progress. Then he reached under her back and pulled her tight against him. Her skin was as soft as Egyptian cotton as it rubbed past his nipples.