Brother Odd (6 page)

The slabs and lumps of his face shifted into a smile that you would have found scary if you didn’t know him. “You’re a good kid. If I ever would’ve had me a kid, it’s nice to think he might’ve been a little like you.”

“Being me isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, sir.”

“Though if I was your dad,” Brother Knuckles continued, “you’d probably be shorter and thicker, with your head set closer to your shoulders.”

“I don’t need a neck anyway,” I said. “I never wear ties.”

“No, son, you need a neck so you can stick it out. That’s what you do. That’s who you
are
.”

“Lately, I’ve been thinking I might get myself measured for a habit, become a novice.”

He returned to his chair but only sat on the arm of it, studying me. After consideration, he said, “Maybe someday you’ll hear the call. But not anytime soon. You’re of the world, and need to be.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I need to be of the world.”

“The world needs you to be out there in it. You got things to do, son.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. The things I’ll have to do.”

“The monastery ain’t a hideout. A mug wants to come in here, take the vows, he should come because he wants to open himself to somethin’ bigger than the world, not because he wants to close himself up in a little ball like a pill bug.”

“Some things you just have to close yourself away from, sir.”

“You mean the summer before last, the shootings at the mall. You don’t need no one’s forgiveness, son.”

“I knew it was coming, they were coming, the gunmen. I should’ve been able to stop it. Nineteen people died.”

“Everyone says, without you, hundreds would’ve died.”

“I’m no hero. If people knew about my gift and knew
still
I couldn’t stop it, they wouldn’t call me a hero.”

“You ain’t God, neither. You did all you could, anyone could.”

As I put down the Coke, picked up the bottle of aspirin, and shook two more tablets onto my palm, I changed the subject. “Are you going to wake the abbot and tell him that I fell over an unconscious monk?”

He stared at me, trying to decide whether to
allow
me to change the subject. Then: “Maybe in a while. First, I’m gonna try to take an unofficial bed count, see if maybe I can find someone holdin’ ice to a lump on his head.”

“The monk I fell over.”

“Exactly. We got two questions. Second, why would some guy club a monk? But
first,
why would a monk be out at this hour where he could get himself clubbed?”

“I guess you don’t want to get a brother in trouble.”

“If there’s sin involved, I ain’t gonna help him keep what he done from his confessor. That won’t be no favor to his soul. But if it was just some kinda foolishness, the prior maybe don’t have to know.”

A prior is a monastery’s disciplinarian.

St. Bartholomew’s prior was Father Reinhart, an older monk with thin lips and a narrow nose, less than half the nose of which Brother Knuckles could boast. His eyes and eyebrows and hair were all the color of an Ash Wednesday forehead spot.

Walking, Father Reinhart appeared to float like a spirit across the ground, and he was uncannily quiet. Many of the brothers called him the Gray Ghost, though with affection.

Father Reinhart was a firm disciplinarian, though not harsh or unfair. Having once been a Catholic-school principal, he warned that he had a paddle, as yet never used, in which he had drilled holes to reduce wind resistance. “Just so you know,” he had said with a wink.

Brother Knuckles went to the door, hesitated, looked back at me. “If somethin’ bad is comin’, how long we got?”

“After the first bodachs show up…it’s sometimes as little as a day, usually two.”

“You sure you ain’t got a concussion or nothin’?”

“Nothing that four aspirin won’t help,” I assured him. I popped the second pair of tablets into my mouth and chewed them.

Knuckles grimaced. “What’re you, a tough guy?”

“I read that they’re absorbed into your bloodstream faster this way, through the tissue in your mouth.”

“What—you get a flu shot, you have the doc inject it in your tongue? Get a few hours’ sleep.”

“I’ll try.”

“Find me after Lauds, before Mass, I’ll tell you who got himself conked—and maybe why, if he knows why. Christ be with you, son.”

“And with you.”

He left and closed the door behind him.

The doors of the suites in the guesthouse, like those of the monks’ rooms in another wing, have no locks. Everyone here respects the privacy of others.

I carried a straight-backed chair to the door and wedged it under the knob, to prevent anyone from entering.

Maybe chewing aspirin and letting them dissolve in your mouth speeds up absorption of the medication, but they taste like crap.

When I drank some Coke to wash out the bad taste, the crushed tablets reacted with the soft drink, and I found myself foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.

When it comes to tragic figures, I’ve got a much greater talent for slapstick than Hamlet did, and whereas King Lear would step over a banana peel in his path, my foot will find it every time.

CHAPTER 9

T
HE COMFORTABLE BUT SIMPLE GUEST SUITE had a shower so small that I felt as if I were standing in a coffin.

For ten minutes I let the hot water beat on my left shoulder, which had been tenderized by the mysterious assailant’s club. The muscles relaxed, but the ache remained.

The pain wasn’t severe. It didn’t concern me. Physical pain, unlike some other kinds, eventually goes away.

When I turned off the water, big white Boo was staring at me through the steam-clouded glass door.

After I had toweled dry and pulled on a pair of briefs, I knelt on the bathroom floor and rubbed the dog behind the ears, which made him grin with pleasure.

“Where were you hiding?” I asked him. “Where were you when some miscreant tried to make my brain squirt out my ears? Huh?”

He didn’t answer. He only grinned. I like old Marx Brothers movies, and Boo is the Harpo Marx of dogs in more ways than one.

My toothbrush seemed to weigh five pounds. Even in exhaustion, I am diligent about brushing my teeth.

A few years previously, I had witnessed an autopsy in which the medical examiner, during a preliminary review of the corpse, remarked for his recorder that the deceased was guilty of poor dental hygiene. I had been embarrassed for the dead man, who had been a friend of mine.

I hope that no attendants at
my
autopsy will have any reason to be embarrassed for me.

You might think this is pride of a particularly foolish kind. You’re probably right.

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.

I have persuaded myself, however, that brushing my teeth in anticipation of my untimely demise is simply consideration for the feelings of any autopsy witness who might have known me when I was alive. Embarrassment for a friend, arising from his shortcomings, is never as awful as being mortified by the exposure of your own faults, but it is piercing.

Boo was in bed, curled up against the footboard, when I came out of the bathroom.

“No belly rub, no more ear scratching,” I told him. “I’m coming down like a plane that’s lost all engines.”

His yawn was superfluous for a dog like him; he was here for companionship, not for sleep.

Lacking enough energy to put on pajamas, I fell into bed in my briefs. The coroner always strips the body, anyway.

After pulling the covers to my chin, I realized that I had left the light on in the adjacent bathroom.

In spite of John Heineman’s four-billion-dollar endowment, the brothers at the abbey live frugally, in respect of their vows of poverty. They do not waste resources.

The light seemed far away, growing more distant by the second, and the blankets were turning to stone. To hell with it. I wasn’t a monk yet, not even a novice.

I wasn’t a fry cook anymore, either—except when I made pancakes on Sundays—or a tire salesman, or much of anything. We not-much-of-anything types don’t worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.

Nevertheless, I worried. In spite of worrying, I slept.

I dreamed, but not about exploding boilers. Not about nuns on fire, screaming through a snowy night, either.

In the dream, I was sleeping but then awoke to see a bodach standing at the foot of my bed. This dream bodach, unlike those in the waking world, had fierce eyes that glistered with reflections of the light from the half-open bathroom door.

As always, I pretended that I did not see the beast. I watched it through half-closed eyes.

When it moved, it morphed, as things do in dreams, and became not a bodach any longer. At the foot of my bed stood the glowering Russian, Rodion Romanovich, the only other visitor currently staying in the guesthouse.

Boo was in the dream, standing on the bed, baring his teeth at the intruder, but silent.

Romanovich went around the bed to the nightstand.

Boo sprang from the bed to the wall, as though he were a cat, and clung there on the vertical, defying gravity, glaring at the Russian.

Interesting.

Romanovich picked up the picture frame that stood beside the nightstand clock.

The frame protects a small card from a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy. It declares
YOU ARE DESTINED TO

BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.

In my first manuscript, I recounted the curious history of this object, which is sacred to me. Suffice to say that Stormy Llewellyn and I received it in return for the first coin we fed the machine, after a guy and his fiancée, in line before us, got nothing but bad news for their eight quarters.

Because Gypsy Mummy did not accurately forecast events in this world, because Stormy is dead and I am alone, I know the card means that we will be together forever in the
next
world. This promise is more important than food to me, than air.

Although the light from the bathroom did not reach far enough to allow Romanovich to read the words on the framed card, he read them anyway because, being a dream Russian, he could do anything that he wanted, just as dream horses can fly and dream spiders can have the heads of human babies.

In a murmur, in accented speech, he spoke the words aloud:
“You are destined to be together forever.”

His solemn yet mellifluous voice was suitable for a poet, and those seven words sounded like a line of lyrical verse.

I saw Stormy as she’d been that evening at the carnival, and the dream became about her, about us, about a sweet past beyond recovery.

After less than four hours of troubled sleep, I woke before dawn.

The leaded window showed a black sky, and snow fairies danced down the glass. In the bottom panes, a few ferns of frost twinkled with a strange light, alternately red and blue.

The digital clock on the nightstand was where it had been when I’d fallen into bed, but the framed fortune-teller’s card appeared to have been moved. I felt certain it had been standing upright in front of the lamp. Now it lay flat.

I threw aside the bedclothes and got up. I walked out to the living room, turned on a lamp.

The straight-backed chair remained wedged under the knob of the door to the third-floor hallway. I tested it. Secure.

Before communism bled them of so much of their faith, the Russian people had a history of both Christian and Judaic mysticism. They weren’t known, however, for walking through locked doors or solid walls.

The living-room window was three stories above the ground and not approachable by a ledge. I checked the latch anyhow, and found it engaged.

Although lacking nuns on fire, lacking spiders with the heads of human babies, the night disturbance had been a dream. Nothing but a dream.

Looking down from the latch, I discovered the source of the pulsing light that throbbed in the filigree of frost along the edges of the glass. A thick blanket of snow had been drawn over the land while I slept, and three Ford Explorers, each with the word
SHERIFF
on its roof, stood idling on the driveway, clouds of exhaust pluming from their tailpipes, emergency beacons flashing.

Although still windless, the storm had not relented. Through the screening cold confetti, I glimpsed six widely separated flashlights wielded by unseen men moving in coordinated fashion, as if quartering the meadow in search of something.

CHAPTER 10

B
Y THE TIME I CHANGED INTO THERMAL LONG johns, pulled on jeans and a crewneck sweater, got feet into ski boots, grabbed my Gore-Tex/Thermolite jacket, rushed downstairs, crossed the parlor, and pushed through the oak door into the guesthouse cloister, dawn had come.

Sullen light brushed a gray veneer over the limestone columns encircling the courtyard. Under the cloister ceiling, darkness held fast, as if the night were so unimpressed by the dreary morning that it might not retreat.

In the courtyard, without ski boots, St. Bartholomew stood in fresh powder, offering a winterized pumpkin in his outstretched hand.

On the east side of the cloister, directly across from the point at which I burst into it, was the guesthouse entrance to the abbatial church. Voices raised in prayer and a tolling bell echoed to me not from the church but instead along a passageway ahead and to my right.

Four steps led up to that barrel-vaulted stone corridor, which itself led twenty feet into the grand cloister. Here a courtyard four times larger than the first was framed by an even more impressive colonnade.

The forty-six brothers and five novices were gathered in this open courtyard in full habit, facing Abbot Bernard, who stood on the bell dais, with one hand rhythmically drawing upon the toll rope.

Matins had concluded, and near the end of Lauds, they had come out of the church for the final prayer and the abbot’s address.

The prayer was the Angelus, which is beautiful in Latin, when raised with many voices.

A chanted response rose from the brothers as I arrived:
“Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.”
Then abbot and all said,
“Ave Maria.”

Two sheriff’s deputies waited in the shelter of the cloister as the brothers in the courtyard finished the prayer. The cops were big men and more solemn than the monks.

They stared at me. Clearly I was not a cop, and apparently I was not a monk. My indeterminate status made me a person of interest.

Their stares were so intense that I wouldn’t have been surprised if, in the bitter air, their eyes had begun to steam as did their every exhalation.

Having had much experience of police, I knew better than to approach them with the suggestion that their suspicions would best be directed at the glowering Russian, wherever he might coil at this moment. As a consequence, their interest in me would only intensify.

Although anxious to know the reason that the sheriff had been called, I resisted the urge to ask them. They would be inclined to view my ignorance as merely a
pretense
of ignorance, and they would regard me with greater suspicion than they did now.

Once a cop has found you of even passing interest, regarding a criminal matter, you can do nothing to remove yourself from his list of potential suspects. Only events beyond your control can clear you. Like being stabbed, shot, or strangled by the
real
villain.

“Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi,”
said the brothers, and the abbot said,
“Oremus,”
which meant “Let us pray.”

Less than half a minute later, the Angelus concluded.

Usually, after the Angelus, the abbot’s address consists of a brief commentary on some sacred text and its application to monastic life. Then he does a soft-shoe number while singing “Tea for Two.”

All right, I made up the soft-shoe and “Tea for Two.” Abbot Bernard
does
resemble Fred Astaire, which is why I’ve never been able to get this irreverent image out of my head.

Instead of his usual address, the abbot announced a dispensation from attendance at morning Mass to all those who might be needed to assist the sheriff’s deputies in a thorough search of the buildings.

The time was 6:28. Mass would begin at seven o’clock.

Those essential to the conduct of Mass were to attend and, after the service, were to make themselves available to the authorities to answer questions and to assist as needed.

Mass would be over at about 7:50. Breakfast, which is taken in silence, always begins at eight o’clock.

The abbot also excused those assisting the police from Terce, the third of seven periods of daily prayer. Terce is at 8:40 and lasts for about fifteen minutes. The fourth period in the Divine Office is Sext, at eleven-thirty, before lunch.

When most laymen learn that a monk’s life is so regimented and that the same routine is followed day after day, they grimace. They think this life must be boring, even tedious.

From my months among the monks, I had learned that, quite the contrary, these men are energized by worship and meditation. During the recreation hours, between dinner and Compline, which is the night prayer, they are a lively bunch, intellectually engaging and amusing.

Well, most of them are as I’ve described, but a handful are shy. And a couple are too pleased by their selfless offering of their lives to make the offering seem entirely selfless.

One of them, Brother Matthias, has such encyclopedic knowledge of—and such strong opinions about—the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan that he can bore your ass off.

Monks are not necessarily holy by virtue of being monks. And they are always and entirely human.

At the end of the abbot’s remarks, many brothers hurried to the deputies waiting in the shelter of the cloister, eager to assist.

I became aware of one novice lingering in the courtyard, in the descending snow. Although his face was shadowed by his hood, I could see that he was staring at me.

This was Brother Leopold, who had finished his postulancy only in October and had worn the habit of a novice less than two months. He had a wholesome Midwestern face, with freckles and a winning smile.

Of the five current novices, I distrusted only him. My reason for not trusting him eluded me. It was a gut feeling, nothing more.

Brother Knuckles approached me, stopped, shook himself rather like a dog might, and cast the clinging snow from his habit. Pushing back his hood, he said softly, “Brother Timothy is missing.”

Brother Timothy, master of the mechanical systems that kept the abbey and school habitable, wasn’t one to arrive late for Matins, and certainly wasn’t a man who would run off for a secular adventure, in violation of his vows. His greatest weakness was Kit Kat bars.

“He must’ve been the one I nearly fell over last night, at the corner of the library. I have to speak to the police.”

“Not yet. Walk with me,” said Brother Knuckles. “We need a place don’t have a hundred ears.”

I glanced toward the courtyard. Brother Leopold had vanished.

With his fresh face and Midwestern directness, Leopold in no way seems calculating or sly, furtive or deceitful.

Yet he has an unsettling way of arriving and departing with a suddenness that sometimes reminds me of a ghost materializing and dematerializing. He is there, then isn’t. Isn’t, then is.

With Knuckles, I left the grand cloister and followed the stone passage to the guest cloister, from there through the oak door into the main parlor on the ground floor of the guesthouse.

We went to the fireplace at the north end of the room, though no fire was burning, and sat forward on armchairs, facing each other.

“After we talked last night,” Knuckles said, “I did a bed check. Don’t have no authority. Felt sneaky. But it seemed the right thing.”

“You made an executive decision.”

“That’s just what I done. Even back when I was dumb muscle and lost to God, I sometimes made executive decisions. Like, the boss sends me to break a guy’s legs, but the guy gets the point after I break one, so I don’t do the second. Things like that.”

“Sir, I’m just curious…. When you presented yourself as a postulant to the Brothers of St. Bartholomew, how long did your first confession last?”

“Father Reinhart says two hours ten minutes, but it felt like a month and a half.”

“I’ll bet it did.”

“Anyway, some brothers leave their doors part open, some don’t, but no room’s ever locked. I used a flashlight from each doorway to quick scope the bed. Nobody was missin’.”

“Anybody awake?”

“Brother Jeremiah suffers insomnia. Brother John Anthony had a gut full of acid from yesterday’s dinner.”

“The chile rellenos.”

“I told ’em I thought maybe I smelled somethin’ burnin’, I was just checkin’ around to be sure there weren’t no problem.”

“You lied, sir,” I said, just to tweak him.

“It ain’t a lie that’s gonna put me in the pit with Al Capone, but it’s one step on a slippery slope I been down before.”

His hand, so brutal-looking, invested the sign of the cross with a special poignancy, and called to mind the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

The brothers arise at five o’clock, wash, dress, and line up at 5:40 in the courtyard of the grand cloister, to proceed together into the church for Matins and Lauds. At two o’clock in the morning, therefore, they’re sacked out, not reading or playing a Game Boy.

“Did you go over to the novitiate wing, check on the novices?”

“No. You said the brother facedown in the yard was in black, you almost fell over him.”

In some orders, the novices wear habits similar to—or the same as—those worn by the brothers who have professed their final vows, but at St. Bartholomew’s, the novices wear gray, not black.

Knuckles said, “I figured the unconscious guy in the yard, he maybe came to, got up, went back to bed—or he was the abbot.”

“You checked on the abbot?”

“Son, I ain’t gonna try that smelled-somethin’-burnin’ routine on the abbot in his private quarters, him as smart as three of me. Besides, the guy in the yard was heavy, right? You said heavy. And Abbot Bernard, you gotta tie him down in a mild wind.”

“Fred Astaire.”

Knuckles winced. He pinched the lumpy bridge of his mushroom nose. “Wish you never told me that ‘Tea for Two’ thing. Can’t keep my mind on the abbot’s mornin’ address, just waitin’ for his soft-shoe.”

“When did they discover Brother Timothy was missing?”

“I seen he ain’t in line for Matins. By Lauds, he still don’t show, so I duck outta church to check his room. He’s just pillows.”

“Pillows?”

“The night before, what looked like Brother Timothy under the blanket, by flashlight from his doorway, was just extra pillows.”

“Why would he do that? There’s no rule about lights out. There’s no bed check.”

“Maybe Tim, he didn’t do it himself, somebody else faked it to buy time, keep us from realizin’ Tim was gone.”

“Time for what?”

“Don’t know. But if I’d seen he was gone last night, I would’ve known it was him you found in the yard, and I’d have woke the abbot.”

“He’s a little heavy, all right,” I said.

“Kit Kat belly. If a brother was missin’ when I did bed check, the cops would’ve been here hours ago, before the storm got so bad.”

“And now the search is harder,” I said. “He’s…dead, isn’t he?”

Knuckles looked into the fireplace, where no fire burned. “My professional opinion is, I kinda think so.”

I’d had too much of Death. I’d fled from Death to this haven, but of course in running from him, I had only run into his arms.

Life you can evade; death you cannot.