The Trinity (28 page)

The world, this life, is wrought with possibility.

The galley is closed. It won’t open for lunch for another two hours.

He finds his billfold and counts his money. Thirty pounds and twenty dollars. He decides to go off base on his own.

He walks to the lobby of the barracks and calls a cab. He will go to Brechin.

He puts on his Navy pea coat over his civilian clothes and walks towards the gate while staring at his feet, his breath visible and cloud-like in the chilly and moist air.

Walking past the chapel, he looks up, getting the feeling that someone is watching him.

Father Crowley is standing inside the doorway with his arms folded across his chest. As Chris looks up, Crowley’s face brightens with recognition. He waves to Chris and beckons him in.

Chris shakes his head and points to his wrist, indicating that he has a time commitment.

The priest’s face is immediately crestfallen, as if Chris has distressed him greatly.

This look of disappointment concerns Chris, but he forgets about it as he spots the taxi already waiting for him outside the gate.

He climbs in and instructs the driver. “Brechin.”

“Aye, where in Brechin?

“I don’t know… Somewhere in the middle, I guess. Someplace I can eat.”

The driver nods. He thinks Chris is peculiar, but a fare is a fare. Silently, they ride the ten minutes past farms and pastures and cottages and woods until they approach Brechin.

Chris is deposited in front of a storefront café, and he enters and studies the very short menu. Too early for lunch and too late for breakfast, he sits at a rickety table with a linoleum top and orders two sausage rolls, as that is all that is being offered at the present time. The café is nearly empty save an older man in a dirty overcoat who stares at Chris grimly over the rim of a tepid cup of tea. The waitress is friendly and aloof and doesn’t cater to Chris the way he is accustomed to in the restaurants in Michigan.

The rolls are greasy but relatively palatable, and he thinks he will eat them again if the opportunity arises. His eyes never leave the picture window; he watches the activity of High Street, studying the cars and pedestrians as they pass by.

He is hoping to see Karen’s Mini, or Karen herself, drive or walk by.

He leaves the café and wanders around Brechin, much the way he and Brad did a few weeks prior.

This time it is different. He is looking for someone. The whole point of his trip to Brechin is the possibility of seeing Karen.

He wanders along the narrow and clean sidewalk. His Americanism is made even more obvious by his choice of outerwear. His hands are thrust into his pockets, and his collar is upturned to keep out the wind and the cold and gentle rain that is now falling sideways.

He looks up, studying the windows above the businesses that look like they may have apartments inside. He makes several trips up and down the four blocks that make the center of Brechin.

He wonders what he will say if sees her, standing in a window or on the sidewalk.

Would he let her know he was looking? Or would he make it seem happenstance? Or would he be too happy to think? He may be too happy to talk.

He decides to put that situation in the hands of fate and continues to look up and down along the sidewalk, picturing how his day would go if he does indeed run into Karen. They could have lunch again, and maybe he would tell her about his family at home. Maybe she would invite him to her apartment. He could sit next to her on her couch and watch television in the comfortable manner that he suspects happy couples do.

His neck is craned in futility; he doesn’t see Karen anywhere. After nearly an hour of walking up and down High Street and its adjoining side streets, he decides to surrender his search. He eyes a pub and ventures inside.

He drinks a pint but does it quickly, as he is quite alone in the crowded pub, belying the lack of people outside. He returns to that awkward feeling of being alone in a crowd, merely a listener in a room chattering with animated conversations.

He finds a cab in a queue just uphill from the pub.

The cab driver doesn’t even ask Chris where to go. He knows.

Chris returns to his room, lies down on his bed and stares at the ceiling. He will do little else except venture out for food until it is time to go to work.

Though his search for Karen was fruitless, he decides it was a good thing to do, to strike out on his own, to see a little bit of the country.

The middle part of the week is the happiest for Father Crowley. There are no Masses to prepare for or suffer through, and no church related activities. No one comes to the office to discuss a spiritual crisis on Tuesday or Wednesday; the requests for answers to life’s problems usually come just before and just after Mass, when he is usually ambushed by tense faces with eyes full of expectation.

He hates those kinds of faces because they expect him to act a certain way.

They expect him to act priestly.

But Tuesday and Wednesday nights are his. He can sleep without dread and relax the entire evening, drinking wine, listening to records.

On this Wednesday night, he takes a large map of Scotland and places it on the wall above his sofa. Underneath that map, he affixes four smaller maps depicting the city centers of Dundee, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

He stands on the couch, naked underneath his bathrobe, his right hand occasionally pulling at his penis, his left hand holding a sterling silver goblet of wine, a vessel that he found at a resale shop in Dundee during one of his travels. Odin probably drinks wine this way, he thought as he greedily snatched it from a dusty shelf.

He stands with his legs slightly apart for balance, as the coach is old and sagging, and his body rocks back and forth. He feels like a general mapping out his strategy. In his mind, the scenario is clear: first, some low-level sorties, some indications of warning to let them know they’re here and they mean business. And then the final blows, dealt in such a fashion that their effects will be heard around the world.

First, we take Scotland, he thinks, drinking the wine in an undignified fashion, the excess liquid running down the corners of his mouth, streaking red on his fleshy chin.

Then maybe England, and after that, who knows? He calculates that he has just under two years left on his tour. After that… He could end up anywhere if he stays in the Navy. He doesn’t want to waste any time at all.

He needs to replenish his Trinity, to make his triumvirate complete.

He thinks of Chris. A week from Friday and he will be here, in this house.

Crowley will pull out all of the stops: steak, maybe prime rib, beer—plenty of beer—perhaps ice cream, whatever, whatever Chris wants.

He wants Chris to feel like family.

He will use the same approach that he used on Rodgers and Hinckley, one of paternal friendship. His years of priestly discernment tell him that Chris is hungry for that sort of attention, for an older man to take an interest in his life.

He steps down from the couch and goes to a kitchen drawer and rummages through a clutter of utensils and small tools and finds a red felt-tip pen. He climbs back on the couch and places a solitary dot on the Aberdeen map as well as one on the map of Dundee.

He places several dots on the maps of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

He then takes the pen and draws a swastika on the face of the Scotland map. He takes a long drink of wine in triumph. A twinkling of light above the map tells him that the gods are pleased. He can feel the faces in Valhalla smiling upon him.

Chris eats breakfast in the galley quite hurriedly on the morning of his first day watch signaling the end of his long break.

The break has been brutal, especially the last day, hanging about in his room or in the barracks lounge, watching the television, perpetually tuned to the Armed Forces Network. The same propaganda over and over again—news broadcasts depicting servicemen and women doing honorable things—with just a little real news thrown in and the occasional and very mild sitcom from a few years back shown for laughs.

But his mind was anywhere other than the television. He was deciding how he would act with Karen the first day back to work. It would be different. The last time he saw her at work, she was merely his supervisor.

Now she is the object of much emotional—and maybe a little physical—desire.

Various scenarios play through his head, starting with not speaking to her at all. He could act totally aloof and maybe a little obnoxious. Girls in school always seemed to go for the obnoxious sort.

One problem—he doesn’t know how to act obnoxiously.

Then the other extreme. This fantasy allows him to confront her immediately and tell her how he feels and that he is deeply and madly in love with her. In response, her eyes become teary and she presses her face against his and they kiss passionately.

One problem—he doesn’t know how to kiss, at least not more than a peck on the cheek.

He puckers his lips while watching the television, not caring if anyone else in the lounge notices. He shapes his lips, first tightly, as if they kissed on the outside, and then more openly, as if his lips would surround hers.

In this daydream, his lack of experience haunts him, and he favors it with an approach a little more subtle.

He will be himself and try to be kind and maybe a little more amiable, not as morose as he can sometimes be. He also expects her to act differently, too. She may not feel the same about him as he does her, but they did form a bit of a bond that day. Surely, she will look at him differently, not as some lowly seaman.

He eats only a bowl of cereal poured from a small cardboard box of the same kind he took on his few camping trips in northern Michigan with his Boy Scout troop. His career as a Boy Scout was short lived; his parents weren’t exactly encouraging and he grew embarrassed at showing up at functions that required the attendance of parents. Typically, neither of his would show up.

Thoughts of those days in early junior high are with him as he crumples the empty box violently, but then they quickly fade. He is seeing Karen today, and all those people and memories are many years and miles away.

He arrives at the site early, twenty minutes before his shift begins. The pair that he is relieving eyes him with curiosity. He wants to be at work early, to be in place as Karen arrives.

He receives the pass-down from the seaman that he relieves, a thin sailor with two years of seniority on Chris who always fails to be promoted due to marginal behavior, fighting in the club because of alcohol, late for work, out of uniform due to the length of his haircut. He is referred to as a burn-bag by Karen and by members of the day staff of their division. A burn-bag is merely a brown paper bag that one would find in a grocery store where classified documents are disposed of until the bag is full and then stapled shut before being taken to an incinerator to be burned. A burn-bag is a generic term for any sailor in the communications field whose military bearing or performance is sub-par.

Chris strives to avoid that label; he makes sure his hair is cut and his uniform clean and wrinkle-free. He is always on time; he has always hated being late. Being late makes him tense.

Chris reads the entries in the logbooks; the mid-watch had been a quiet one. There are only two entries, and little concentration is required. He assumes his station and stares at the door with much anxiety.

He is shaking.

The hands of the clock move very slowly as he alternates his glance from the clock on the wall to the door. He is waiting for 6 a.m.

She arrives just as the hands of the clock are exactly opposite one another.