The Paper Shepherd

by Olivia Landis

  Max kissed Tiar’s slender neck and underneath him, she started unbuttoning his jeans. With his free hand, he helped her pull them off and dropped them onto the floor. With two buttons, Tiar’s wrap around wool skirt was untethered from her body. Their legs slid past one another, tangling together in a sea of young flesh. Tiar wrapped her right arm around the back of Max’s head as he followed the curve of her neck with his lips. His kisses gave her goose bumps. This is what she had been waiting for. She was certain of him. The past few weeks together had been all the reassurance she needed that his mysterious crisis had ended. He knew himself again. He loved her.

  Tiar reached under Max and traced her fingers over the curves of his pectoral muscles and brushed his nipples with her thumbs. She was close enough to him to feel his stomach tighten as he gasped slightly and removed his lips from her neck. She met them with hers. Max turned over onto his back, pulling Tiar on top of him. He pulled the edge of his bedspread over her to keep her warm. Under the blanket, his hands traced out every curve of her neck, back, and hips. Max slid his hands down Tiar’s sides. His thumbs slid into her panties. She felt them there, moving downward a millimeter at a time, as gradual and silent as a sunrise. She rubbed her cheek against his neck expectantly. Max removed his hands from Tiar’s underwear and pulled the blanket up to cover her back. He brushed her cheeks with his hands.

  “Do you know how much I love you, Tiar?” he asked.

  “Pretend I don’t,” she said, breathing heavily. Max said nothing. He just gazed at her. Behind his eyes, Tiar could see that he was contemplating something of great significance to him, something he would never be able to explain to her. Finally, he grabbed her below one firm buttock and pushed her body higher on his so her breasts dangled pendulous around his face. Make her scream in bed, he thought. He took one of her nipples in his mouth and flicked it with his tongue. Tiar moaned. He closed his eyes and traced his hand down the side of her body and finally rested his hand in the space between her legs. Her underwear was smooth and soft under his fingers as he rubbed her. Tiar tightened her stomach and supported herself on her elbows as Max continued to touch her. Her every moan and gasp was like music to him. Make her scream... Then for nearly half a minute, she seemed to stop breathing entirely. With a loud gasp she collapsed onto his chest. She was trembling. Max held her in his arms until she fell asleep and then covered her with an afghan from the foot of the bed. He watched her sleeping, her chest gently rising and falling. He stroked her chocolate brown hair, a velvety soft cloud cascading down her back. He felt her breath warm and soft on his chest until he fell asleep himself.

  The next morning, Max’s alarm went off at seven. It was still fairly dark out when Max opened his eyes, reaching over Tiar to turn off his alarm. She opened her eyes and, seeing him leaning over her, she smiled sleepily. He brushed her hair back from her face.

  “Good morning, Little Bird,” he said softly.

  “Good morning,” she answered back, tucking her hands under her chin and closing her eyes again. Max climbed over Tiar and repositioned the afghan to cover more of her. Then he climbed into the shower. When he got out, he looked at Tiar still asleep in his bed. He was filled with a new sense of wellbeing. He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand on Tiar’s shoulder.

  “Sweetheart, I have to leave for school soon,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered, sitting up. “I’m ready.”

  Twenty minutes later, his car packed with a semester’s worth of clothing and books, Max drove Tiar back to her uncle’s house. Outside in the driveway, they were both quiet, neither wanting to be the first to say good bye.

  “I’ll be back in six weeks,” Max assured her.

  “Promise,” Tiar said, turning to face him, her right hand already on the passenger side door release.

  “I promise,” he said, and leaned in to kiss her. Tiar sighed heavily.

  “I love you,” she whispered. Then, she opened her door and got out. Max watched her walk up the path to her house and enter before restarting the car.

  “I love you.”

  Inside, Tiar was half way up the curling staircase when her uncle stuck his head out of his bedroom door.

  “Whore,” he said.

  “Donkey’s ass,” she shot back over her shoulder as she walked away.

  “One more month, Orphan. One more month and I’m done with you.” It was the most they had said to one another in over a month.

  The sky was bright and cloudless as Max drove back to school. A blanket of crisp white snow covered every imperfection in the landscape, masking mail boxes and tractors, making barbed wire fences into long lines of meringue. Max felt at peace as the highway stretched out before him. He was happy to have been home. He was happier still that in six weeks he would be on this same highway driving in the other direction back to Hectortown. For one beautiful sun filled moment, he was half way between both destinations. Every sharp, jagged object in sight was softened and hidden by snow. It was easy to believe that there was nothing sharp or hurtful in the world.

  Max stopped at a fast food restaurant for lunch and hurried back to school, hoping to finish the trip while it was still light. He pulled onto campus just as the sun’s retreat lit the sky in a brilliant pink. Max quickly delivered his suitcases to his room and stopped by the post office. After three and a half weeks away, it was jammed full. He stood over the giant gray plastic trashcan sorting through brightly colored glossy envelopes. Credit card offer, CD offer, Credit card, book of the month, make money without leaving your home, credit card, save ten percent on text books, credit card... Then, a plain white matte envelope with a St. Andrew’s seal in the corner caught Max’s eye. Too early for grades to be back, he thought, pulling open the corner. He unfolded the thick white letter head.

  Dear Mr. Franklin,

  We were delighted to receive your application to our seminary. Let me applaud you on your record, both academically, and spiritually. If your application is an accurate indication of your intelligence and character, you are exactly the sort of fine young man we are looking for for our program. We are still awaiting your letters of recommendation to complete your application. However, the feedback we have already gotten informally from your professors within the religion and philosophy departments make us confident of your success in our program.

  I encourage you to call me personally with any questions you have concerning our program and application process. I look forward to meeting you.

  Yours in Christ,

  Father Jacob Raleigh

  27

  February snow fell heavily on the old stone buildings of St. Andrew’s. Max felt warm and safe in his dorm room listening to the wind howl outside with delight. It was a great day to stay inside and study. He had been back at school for three weeks. He lay on his bed reading about the economic impact of the Crusades on southern Europe when the phone rang down the hall. He hung one arm over the side of the bed to where he had earlier dropped a highlighter.

  “Max, phone,” a voice shouted. Max put the highlighter in his book to mark the page and trotted down the hall. He was expecting his mother to call about a package she had just sent for St. Valentine’s Day. He put the receiver to his ear.

  “Tell me again how transubstantiation is not the same thing as the creb cycle,” a familiar voice asked. Max smiled to himself and sat down next to the phone, leaning against the wall. He had to really concentrate to remember back to high school biology.

  “First of all, Bird, the creb cycle is about converting sugar to energy. I think you mean catabolism—breaking down food and making it into body parts. Second, I don’t think you can make all the elements of a human being by eating bread alone. You need protein, for example. Some of the amino acids can’t be made from starch.”

  “What if it were high protein soy flour bread?”

  “Unleavened for Passover.”

  “It’s conceivable,” she said after a pause.

  “Okay, say you find me
a loaf of unleavened vitamin enriched high protein soy flour bread,” he conjectured. “It’s still not the same as transubstantiation. At the Last Supper, Jesus made the bread into His own flesh and gave it to the disciples. He did not make it into their flesh and give it to them.”

  “I’m not following,” Tiar said.

  “Let’s say Jesus gave Peter this magic soy bread,” Max explained. “Peter’s body digests it and makes it into Peter’s body. For your theory to work, the disciples would have to give Jesus the bread, he would digest it, and then give them his fingers to eat.” There was a pause. “Still there, sweetheart?” Max asked. Then he heard a pencil frantically scribbling on the other end.

  “Okay,” Tiar’s young voice finally said. Max smiled to himself.

  “I’ll see you in three weeks, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Tiar answered casually. “Only, don’t go to my uncle’s house. I’m not there anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, uh.... my uncle kinda kicked me out,” Tiar said calmly. “Apparently that was the deal with my mother… that he watch me until I was 18… and he took it quite literally. He kicked me out on my birthday. He told me like three days earlier. Plenty of time to make arrangements, right?”

  “I’m so sorry, Tiar,” Max sounded worried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did, silly,” she said jovially. “Anyway, I didn’t want you to freak out right at the beginning of a new semester. I’m better off on my own.”

  “Well, do you need anything?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

  “No, silly. I’m fine,” she assured him. “I have some money uncle didn’t manage to steal left over from my summer job and since I don’t have basketball I can work after school too. You wouldn’t believe how cheap you can get a room in Hectortown. And, get this, my mom set up an account for me for money to go to college but I guess, knowing my uncle, she didn’t want him to steal it so she put it in an account that I can only use for tuition or there are huge penalties for taking the money out. So, basically, I have a big chunk of change I can’t touch until next fall. On the bright side, I guess since I have my own place, you can call me now,” she added, almost as an after thought. “Although, I can still curse at you and slam the phone down for old time’s sake.” Max laughed to himself.

  “Okay, Little Bird. Sound’s great.”

  Max talked to Tiar for another half hour. It was rare that they did not get interrupted by her tyrannical uncle or another student on Max’s end who needed to use the phone. It kept their phone calls short and infrequent. Max was feeling upbeat as he walked back down the hall to his dorm room. On his hand, he had written Tiar’s phone number. He could actually call her now without the fear that Dr. Alfred would pick up and then hang up on him after a bout of emphatic cursing. Max settled in to read another chapter about the Crusades. Half an hour later, John walked into his room to borrow a thesaurus.

  “Hey, who were you talking to earlier?” he inquired, thumbing through the pages.

  “Tiar,” Max answered without lifting his head from his text book.

  “Tiar, your girlfriend?” Max nodded. “You were lecturing your girlfriend about transubstantiation?”

  “I wasn’t lecturing her,” Max protested. “We were having a discussion, a meeting of minds.”

  “One,” John said, raising one of his scrawny fingers in the air. “You were lecturing her and two, that is fucking weird.”

  “What’s so weird about it?” Max challenged him.

  “Bud, Valentine’s day is in two days, and you’re talking to the women you love about Catholic theology?”

  “St. Valentine’s day is a religious holiday,” Max protested. “St. Valentine...”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” John interrupted. “We all know about how he was martyred by the Romans for illegally conducting weddings for their soldiers. I am going to be a priest you know.”

  “Whatever,” Max said as John walked out of the room with the book. Max tried to continue reading, but he found it hard to concentrate, unable to get John’s words out of his mind. He reached over to his night stand and picked up the picture of him and Tiar. Look how normal we are, he thought to himself. Two normal American teenagers. Normal and in love. Nothing weird about it at all. Nothing weird about it except we like to talk about theology to one another two days before Valentines day. They looked so happy, their arms wrapped tightly around one another. Max remembered that that felt wonderful, that it had been one of the happiest days of his life. But, that was all it was, a memory. He used to be able to concentrate really hard and pretend she was near him. He would lie perfectly still in bed and pretend that were he to just reach his arm out, she would be there, warm and soft, waiting for him. Now, having lived that experience in real life, it seemed more fictional to him then ever. The girl in this picture still existed. She was in Hectortown right now. And the boy in this picture still visited her there, this boy who could hold her and sleep with her after years of waiting patiently for that chance. But, more and more, this boy stayed in Hectortown, and someone else went back to St. Andrews. This youthful face was not that of the man who studied within those stone walls among the ancient willows. Even Tiar realized this, consciously or not. She hadn’t called to talk to him about her day at school or the weather or what they were going to do together over his spring break. She had called to ask him about transubstantiation. She had called him knowing he would have an answer, accurate or not. Max sighed, a sorrowful expression on his face. Why were so many of the things she said she admired about him tied to the church? The boy in this picture was him, but the man who was forming at St. Andrew’s was him too, and she loved him for that. Which man does she want me to be? Max asked himself, shaking his head. Does she even know? One thing was increasingly clear. One of these two would eventually win, casting the other out. Max shuddered as he realized he still did not know which man it would be.

  28

  It was not yet March, but Pugs was already decorated for St. Patrick’s Day. Tony stood at the sticky wooden bar and ordered a beer. Spotting Max in the corner, alone with an empty glass of soda in front of him, Tony ordered a second. He had barely seen Max since they had returned to school in late January. Max had been skipping basketball games or running out quickly afterward to shower and go to the library instead of going out to eat with the team. When Tony found out a few days ago about Tiar’s change in situation, he initially attributed his teammate’s sudden absence to his new found ability to talk to his girl friend. However, this seemed less and less likely as he thought about how seldom he had come to visit Max in his dorm room and found him on the phone. When he did see Max now, the younger man seemed subdued. Unlike the fall semester, when he seemed to be actively unhappy, fighting something he did not want to acknowledge, Max now seemed resigned. Outwardly, he could smile and seem content, but like someone who is reminiscing about a fond pet that has died or child hood home knocked down to build a strip mall. His face nearly always fell as he appreciated that something he enjoyed was passing out of existence.

  Tony paid for the beers and sat down across from Max at a booth in the back of the bar adorned with paper shamrocks. He pushed a glass of beer toward him. Without looking up, Max shook his head.

  “Come on,” his friend urged. “There’s nothing better for depression than a depressant.”

  “I gave it up for Lent, as should you,” Max said, raising his head. “Anyway, what makes you think I’m depressed?”

  “You haven’t smiled in two weeks, for starters,” Tony said. Tony pushed the beer further toward Max who picked it up and took a sip.

  “What’s wrong, chief?” Tony asked. Max let out a sigh.

  “It’s Tiar,” Max said sheepishly. “I love her, Tony.”

  “That’s evident, Max,” Tony said.

  “No, I mean I really, really love her,” Max insisted. “I think she feels the same way.” Tony listened attentively. “I found myself thinking over Chris
tmas break I should marry her. Not just Christmas. All summer, too.”

  “That’s a good thing, though, isn’t it?” Tony asked.

  “I guess,” Max said. “But....” Max took a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. He had hidden it under a pile of papers in his desk drawer and tried not to look at it. Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. Even now, he wanted to tear it into tiny shreds or burn it, to remove it from his memory. Instead, he unfolded it and slid it across the table. Tony picked it up curiously and started reading.

  Dear Mr. Franklin,

  We were delighted...

  “Max, you didn’t,” Tony said. “Shit.” Max stared down at the table and said nothing. “I can’t let you do this.”

  “Can’t let me?” Max said, looking up at Tony with disbelief. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “It’s a small program, Max,” Tony explained. “What do you think would happen if I mentioned in my weekly spiritual guidance meeting that one of my friends wanted to join the seminary to hang out with his friends.”

  “What are you talking about?” Max practically shouted.

  “You can’t make a life time commitment based on peer pressure.”

  “You really think that’s why I’m doing this?” Max asked accusingly. “You think I’m like, ‘well that’s what the cool kids are doing. Why don’t I become a priest?’ Jeeze, Tony, give me a little more credit then that.”

  “Then what is this about, Max?” he asked pointedly. “Why did you suddenly go off and apply to a life altering seminary program all your friends have been preparing for for several years without even talking to them about what it was like.”