by Owen Egerton
Night after night, he’d return to the dorm room he and Milton shared filled with stories of free-thinking liberal art majors or, even better, theater majors, with a deficiency in math skills but an openness to other arts. Some women were attractive, others less so. But Roy quickly developed an eye for inner beauty.
He’d complete the pages of assigned equations, careful to adorn his numbers with enough bubbles and flair to divert a professor’s suspicion. Then he and his client would move to her thin dorm bed or apartment couch and wrestle with geometric formulas of another kind. And still, he got paid.
“There’s a name for this kind of work,” Milton told him.
“It’s a noble profession. As old as farming!”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“You just have to let them know that you’re willing. If you can communicate that without dousing it all with desperation, you’ve got it made!”
Milton was desperate. He wore desperation like a neon ski jacket with a turquoise fringe.
Halfway through the semester, Roy was spending three to four nights a week educating the masses one coed at a time. Milton, meanwhile, had found his client base whittled down to one.
Her name was Tess. She wore a perfume that brought to Milton’s mind fields of wild strawberries and honeycombs, though he had never seen a field of wild strawberries nor an actual honeycomb. Her eyes, bright as broken glass and twice as sharp, would watch him while he stumbled through explanations. He found it hard to bear so he kept his own eyes to the page. Malice-free but inquisitive, her gaze had a force he could feel. Later, when alone, he would check his cheek for the red burn mark.
Once he made her laugh. Nothing terribly witty. “The worst thing about imaginary numbers is someone took the time to imagine them.”
Tess laughed. The sound danced through Milton’s soul like carbonated bubbles. He found himself crafting another joke the next week, and the next, soon spending hours on what would hopefully come across as an offhand witticism.
And when she laughed, he thrived.
But no Morrissey played, no futon was shared, and Milton never stayed beyond his allotted hour. In the name of reticence, Milton kept a professional demureness, never broaching any personal subject more intimate than her preference in pocket calculators. And Tess, though friendly, affectionate even, shared little about her life and thoughts outside of math. Until one day late in the spring, she invited Milton to the University of Texas’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes Spring Campout.
“I’m not an athlete.”
“That’s all right. I only play tennis. And I’m pretty bad.” She laughed. Oh, that laugh.
“I’m not a Christian.”
“That’s okay, too.” She smiled, those eyes sweetly cutting into him. “Well?”
“Can I bring my roommate?”
“Can you bring your fucking roommate?” Roy was horrified when Milton recounted the conversation.
“I was nervous! I didn’t know what to say.” Milton paced the dorm room, which, considering his wide gait and the limited square footage, didn’t amount to much.
“A girl asks you camping and you offer to bring your roommate?”
“It’s a Christian campout, not some sex orgy in the woods!”
“We’ll see about that.”
The next weekend the boys arrived at the grounds of a middle school summer camp in Roy’s half-dead VW Bug with sleeping bags, swim trunks, and apprehension.
They wandered into the crowded dining hall—three rows of picnic tables in a wide cedar cabin. Tess waved from across the room. Leaving her conversation with a broad-shouldered baseball player, she jogged through the crowd and gave Milton a hug, an act of intimacy she had never displayed before. Though the embrace was gentle enough, Milton lost his breath.
Tess led them through the hall, smiling and nodding at friends. It was immediately apparent that this was not Roy and Milton’s crowd. These people owned matching socks, these people voted in national elections, these people knew more about the University of Texas’s football record than they did the Italian cannibal/zombie film genre. But to both Roy and Milton’s surprise, these people were kind and welcoming.
The daylight was spent on girl-versus-guy touch football, ultimate Frisbee matches, and swimming in the silt-heavy lake. In the evening the campers gathered in the dining hall with the picnic tables pushed to the sides. They sat on the floor before two seniors with acoustic guitars and the words of hymns, camp songs, and Eagles ballads projected on a white screen. After the sing-along, a speaker was introduced, a former NFL linebacker who, enthusiastically if not all that elegantly, shared the story of his conversion to Christianity.
The rest of the night was pickup basketball games played under the fluorescent lights of the outdoor court and an extended game of capture the flag among the dark pines. The next day’s schedule was packed with a similar slew of activities.
Roy, as always, threw himself into everything, exhausting himself in the games and even the singing. Milton followed, his shyness soothed by the occasional smile from Tess from across the field or while passing in the pine-lined paths.
By late Saturday night, Milton sat in a sleepless haze as the crowd of campers listened to the former NFL linebacker’s most passionate talk yet.
“Listen, on the football field there’s an inbounds and an out-of-bounds. Those lines are defined. Clear as chalk. Life is the same way. You know when you’re out-of-bounds, even if you don’t get caught. Your heart tells you.”
This illustration drew Milton in, not that he had ever played a formal game of football, but he did know the reoccurring sensation of being out-of-bounds.
“I know a lot of those college profs want to tell you that it’s all relative, that those lines are something we make up as we go along. I had those same eggheads when I went to school.”
The crowd chuckled. Milton could just catch Tess’s laughter in the mix.
“Can you imagine playing football with every player making up their own boundaries? Their own rules? It’d be Aggie training week.”
More laughter. Milton dared a glance at Tess. She threw her head back in her amusement, showing her white teeth and red mouth.
“But I’m here to tell you there are things that are certain. Things you can count on as solid. Not just now, but forever.” He lifted the small, worn Bible. “No matter what anyone says, there’s truth that doesn’t change.”
Roy slumped forward, dozing. Milton leaned closer, drinking in this possibility. The world was not how his father had described it, nor how Dr. Sang had taught it. Could it be that the world consisted of truths?
“God and his word. They don’t change. God drew the chalk boundaries in the field of life. And you know who has stepped out-of-bounds? We all have. The play is over.” The linebacker nodded slowly in what felt like an overly choreographed pause. “Even worse, each of us has enough penalties racked up to push us back past our own end zone. Left to our own devices, every offensive play we try ends up a safety.”
Milton was lost, but something snuck through the football lingo and monotone presentation. A solid world, a clear distinction between right and wrong. A solid something emerging from Sang’s probability cloud or his father’s endless parallel universes.
“So what do we do? We’ve been acting like there’s no rules, no boundaries, and we find ourselves way back in our own end zone with two seconds on the clock. Well, I’ll tell you what happened. The referee—who is also the coach and the owner—he put on a helmet and jersey and joined our team. And, man, can he run! Give him the ball, and he zooms, dodging, cutting, knocking the other team down flat and scoring the ultimate touchdown!”
A couple of guys in the crowd hoot.
“That’s Jesus. That’s what happened on the cross. Salvation.”
Milton tried to follow the connection, but couldn’t. In his head was a bleeding man in a robe dancing in an end zone. Somehow that was salvation.
“The quest
ion each of us has to answer as we mope in our own end zone is this: Are you going to give Jesus the ball?”
After the talk, a bonfire was set ablaze. The scent of burning marshmallows and the play of light gave the night a feel of fantasy, of fairy tale, of possibility. Roy had met a girl, of course, and lured her away from the fire with promises of constellations and shooting stars. Milton circled the fire in a daze, new ideas finding form. One truth, not many. Not random. Knowable. Perhaps the world did have boundaries and a Maker of boundary lines. Perhaps—and this was most tantalizing of all—the world had a point.
Tess touched his arm. “Want to go for a walk?”
After concealing the muscle spasm in his neck with a cough, Milton said yes.
They strolled through the dark woods toward the lake, her strawberry perfume mingling with the smell of pine. She spoke in a soft, melodic tone about how very much she loved Jesus, how real he was, how she knew he would never abandon her.
“My parents divorced when I was three. I’ve never had the best relationship with my father. But now I have a relationship with my Heavenly Father.”
“My father’s dead,” Milton spit out, unsure why he had shared this.
“Oh gosh,” Tess said. She put a hand to her chest. “My grandmother died last summer. I bet you were mad at God for taking him.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“He took himself. If there’s anyone to be angry at, it’s him.” His throat felt dry and suddenly narrow.
It was quiet by the water, the singing and laughing of the bonfire softened by the pines. She sat on a log overlooking the lake and asked him to sit beside her.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said.
“Me either,” Milton said.
And she laughed. She took Milton’s hands—her hands so warm Milton nearly swallowed his tongue. She smiled and opened her eyes to him. Milton’s body chemistry boiled over, but he forced himself not to look away.
“Milton,” she said in a quiet voice. “Would you pray with me?”
Pray? She wants to pray? How do you pray?
“Close your eyes,” she said, and bowed her head.
For a moment Milton kept his eyes open and stared at the smooth shine of the top of her head. His stomach wiggled. He closed his eyes and breathed nothing but strawberry perfume.
She whispered that he should accept Jesus into his heart, that the time was now. “Can you feel him? He’s here.” She squeezed his hands.
“Yes.” Wait, what?
“Do you want him to come into your heart?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do.” I do? And then he was surprised to hear himself whisper, “Come into my heart.”
When he opened his eyes, she was smiling, glowing. Milton had never made anyone but his mother smile with such joy and that was an image just on the edge of his memory. He smiled back, giddy, drunk on perfume and sleepiness.
“Everything is going to change now,” she said, giving his hands one last squeeze before releasing them. She jumped to her feet. “We should get back,” she said. “My boyfriend will be wondering where I went.”
Like stepping on a nail, the pain shocked Milton, filled him with a thick sensation of sudden nausea, and hurt doubly for the fact that it should not have been a surprise.
“Are you coming?”
Milton stood, numb and wordless.
“You know, I knew there was a reason God never gave me a talent for math. It was so I could meet you and you could meet Jesus, right?” She laughed, and the bubbles sent through him burned.
“Tess . . . ” he managed to say. She turned, her smile as lyrical as the half-moon peeking through the trees. He could say nothing more. She reached out and took his hand.
“It’s okay,” she said softly. “I never thought about it this way, but right now you’re kind of like a newborn. Born again, right? So I bet things feel a little weird.”
She led him back through the pines, the light and shadows of the bonfire moving in the distance. As they walked, quiet now, Milton learned his first lesson of faith. Comfort may come from the same source as the wound.
He watched wood burn, seeming to disappear in the process of transformation, sending out a heat that warned in its warmth. He watched Tess across the flames nuzzle into the chest of the broad-shouldered baseball player. Roy was gone, somewhere, he was sure, happily seducing a young Evangelical. The world, Milton felt, was horribly lonely and on fire.
Milton walked from the fire back toward the still lake waters. He sat on the same bench Tess had led him to and watched as the moon disappeared behind low clouds. Insects hummed, a few small drops of rain tickled the lake’s surface, and Milton hurt like never before.
“Please, God, let this mean something.”
The next night, back in the normalcy of their dorm room, Roy asked a reticent Milton his thoughts on the weekend.
“I think . . . I’m not sure, but I think I became a Christian,” Milton said.
“Yeah?” Roy said, chewing on a pencil. “Well, okay. We’ll be Christians.”
Milton smiled. Roy stood.
“Want to order a pizza?”
No time for certainty
RICA SLEPT, HER limp body sprawled out on the couch, the remote still resting in her grasp, and the frozen face of Hayden Brock as Chip Bradley gasping from the television.
Milton burst through the front door. Rica jumped, her finger pushed down, and with a whack a steel hollow-tipped arrow rammed through Hayden’s heart.
“You’re home early,” she said, dazed. She sat up and clicked the television off as Chip Bradley’s partner pried Chip’s corpse from the tree and used it to escape a downpour of hollow-tipped arrows.
“Rica.” Milton knelt beside her. “The world is ending.”
“Please, not that again.” Rica pulled her legs underneath her. “Listen, I’ve been thinking. If you don’t want to be responsible for—”
“The world is ending! The Floater told me. Or led me to tell me. And a bunch of others. I said it out loud and knew it was true.”
Rica paused and studied Milton’s face. “Please, Milton.”
“They’re showing me some horrible stuff. End of the world stuff. It will all be over by Sunday.”
“This Sunday?”
“Maybe Monday. I guess it depends on what time zone you’re in. That’s stupid, I know, but true.” Milton shook his head and took Rica’s hand in his. “Babe, I thought there’d be time to be better. To, you know, be there for you. But now things are going to get bad. And there’s stuff I have to do.”
“Slow down,” she said. “Couldn’t this be another Bigfoot or pyramid power?”
“Of course it could be,” he said, plunging his hands into his hair. “But there’s no time for certainty. I have to act. Tell people. Be a messenger.”
“Why you, Milt? You get hives when the anchorman uses second person.”
“I can’t figure it out. Can’t hear what they’re telling me.” He paced the living room like a long-haired Groucho Marx. “I need to do something. I’ve never done anything!”
Rica shook her head. “If you don’t want this kid, just say so. Don’t blame it on some ghost or alien spouting about the Apocalypse.”
“They’re interdimensional travelers,” Milton mumbled.
“Run away if you want. Really,” she said, rising to her knees. “I give you my blessing. Honestly. Go commune with ET and talk Revelations. I’m having a baby in five months. That’s what I’m doing.”
“That’s not enough.” Milton stared at his hands. “I don’t want to live for a baby just so that baby can grow up and live for another baby. People call that a purpose. It’s nothing but survival. Survival is overrated.”
“That’s such bullshit, Milton,” she said. She heard the brittle coldness of her tone. “You’re just afraid.”
“It’s the end of the world. It’s a good time to be afraid.”
Behind every good saint
ALMOND SKIN AND green eyes. She was close; he could smell her skin and hair.
They were together in a house no roads lead to, a house alone.
Hayden woke to glass clinking. The hotel room was dark, it was still night. The air-conditioning droned away. Hayden sat up. On the carpet by the foot of the bed Melinda sat pouring a glass of red wine. She looked up at Hayden.
“Just a little midnight snack,” she said through a bite of bread.
“Wait,” Hayden said, still less than awake. “That’s the body of Christ.”
Melinda paused for a moment and examined the roll in one hand and the wine in the other.
“I’m surprised it’s not more gamey.” She took another bite and followed it with a gulp of wine. “You think vegetarians go to mass? That must be a dilemma.” She laughed. A loud full laugh, pieces of Christ’s flesh and blood flying from her mouth.
Hayden fell back and blinked his eyes. He dragged himself from the bed and stumbled to the shower.
It was a powerful shower, the kind he liked. He wanted the water to sober him up, clear his head, wash off the events of the last few hours. His first day to sainthood had not gone as expected. He gargled water, trying to get the taste of whiskey and Melinda out of his mouth.
Melinda. He had been led astray so easily. He knew house cats with more discipline.
But maybe this was exactly as it was supposed to happen. God does move in mysterious ways, doesn’t he? If God could change wine into blood and bread into flesh, couldn’t he also change Hayden into a saint? And would it be that strange if he sent a loose, one-legged whiskey-drinking woman to help him on his quest? Of course. She was a Catholic, after all. God was giving him a partner in pilgrimage. A support for his journey. Behind every good saint lay a good woman. Or at least that’s how it should be. Especially in the twenty-first century, now that we understand sex, in a scientific sense. He lathered up his armpits. Maybe he’d fall in love with Melinda. Maybe they’d get married. A beautiful Catholic wedding with a priest and candles.
“So many towels,” he cheered as he stepped from the shower. “And each a different size.” He wrapped a large one about his waist and a midsize one around his head. Both fit perfectly. “Providence!”
