The Black Mass of Brother Springer (22 page)

       "Come in, Abbott! Come in!" I greeted him, and grabbed his big right hand with both of mine. The Abbott's black, groundlength cassock had been discarded, and he wore a pair of eggshell linen trousers, and a green silk shirt with short sleeves. His thick muscular arms were covered with damply matted red hair, and his head and eyebrows were freshly shaved.

       "Well, Springer," the Abbott boomed, "what have you got to say for yourself?"

       "Sit down," I replied. "Over here on the couch. It's more comfortable."

       "Looks like you're raising all kinds of hell up here, Springer. How'd you get mixed up in all this mess?"

       "I don't know, sir. Everything just seemed to happen, and there I was right in the middle. How about some iced coffee?"

       "No, thanks." Abbott Dover shook his bald head. "I can't stay long. I just dropped in to say hello and goodbye. I sold the monastery, at my figure, to a real estate combine out of Miami. They're going to subdivide the acreage and sell lots for project houses, eight thousand on up. They'll lose their shirts.

       "But the hell with that, I came to talk to you. You fooled me, Springer, you certainly did. I've only made one mistake in my life, but I think that you're my second mistake. When I was a boy in Lincoln, Nebraska, I went into a movie one afternoon, and sat in the balcony—"

       "You told me about that mistake, Abbott," I broke in. "About the colored girl and you under the projector?"

       "That's right, I did. The moral of that story was never look at the projection booth. Well, I can carry the moral a little further now. Never look at the movie on the screen, either. Instead, just watch the people in the audience who are watching the movie!"

       "What do you mean by that?"

       Abbott Dover took a fresh plug of Brown Mule chewing tobacco out of his shirt pocket, looked at the plug with affection, and then returned it to his pocket. "I'm trying to give up chewing," he growled, "but it ain't easy. Here's what I mean. I read your novel, No Bed Too High."

       "Really?" I was pleased. "What did you think of it?"

       "It was worth two-bits all right. I picked it up at the Orangeville Drugstore, off the rack. After you left that morning to come up here, I got leery, wondered if I'd done the right thing. I was anxious to close the books on the monastery, and a minister for the Jax church was a loose, dangling end. Besides, I liked you. This church could be a good setup for a writer who really wanted to write. A couple of sermons on Sunday, and the rest of the week to himself—"

       I laughed. "Are you kidding? I've never worked so hard in my life."

       "That's what I mean. You don't want to write, Springer. Not really. I read your novel. You don't have anything to say. You don't know anything about people and you don't want to learn. A successful minister is the minister who does as little as possible. He listens, but he seldom speaks. A man in trouble who is allowed to talk will automatically feel better just for the opportunity to get it off his chest. A troubled man doesn't want any advice; he wants a sympathetic ear. You talk too much, and you talked when you should have been listening, and now you're in a lot of trouble."

       "I wouldn't say that, Abbott. The boycott is going along fairly well, and in the long run the Negro race will probably benefit."

       "But do you care? Does it make any difference to you, Springer, one way or the other?"

       "No. Not really." I didn't lie to Dover. His flat blue eyes with their frank and piercing stare demanded the truth and nothing else.

       "I found that out when I read your novel. A clever little book. Why not? You're a well-read man, and the characters said brittle and clever things, the surface brilliance of a thousand books you've read, and not an original idea of your own on a single page. Cute situations, complications in the right places, and the inevitable straight romantic plot with the obvious ending. You don't know a damned thing about people, and even less about yourself."

       "I think you're being a little hard on my book, Abbott. It's only a first novel, and I had to start somewhere."

       "Right. It was your escape novel and it provides escape reading. Fifty paperbacks a week are published just like it, and probably for the same reason. But I'm not concerned with the novel's literary merits. Reading the book was an insight into your character. You had me fooled on the surface, and I made a mistake when I ordained you as a minister."

       Again, Abbott Dover took the Brown Mule plug out of his pocket. "I think I'll have a small chew, and then afterwards I can rinse my mouth out with a little water, and nobody'll know the difference." He bit off a good third of the plug, and chewed reflectively before he continued.

       "I'm the efficient type, Springer. But in your case I was in too much of a hurry. I should have waited and ordained one of the church members here instead of you. I'll tell you why. Religion is a funny thing. You can be too religious, and make your life miserable. A man who follows the Bible too closely begins to look on everything he does as a sin, and he's soon in a miserable state. At the other end, an atheist is too damned happy. In either case, the person gets along all right. But you're in that category which is the worst of all. You are groping, and so you pretend indifference. An indifferent minister is a sorry son-of-a-bitch. Not only is he unhappy; he makes everybody else unhappy."

       "Did your twenty years in the Army as an enlisted man qualify you as a cheap psychoanalyst?" I asked scornfully.

       "I apologize, Springer," Dover said sincerely. "I came here to thank you, and I start out by raking your personality over the coals."

       "Thank me? For what?"

       "For providing me with something I've never known. Love!" The Abbott's red face beamed, and he smiled broadly.

       "Love? Perhaps I'm clever, as you say, but—"

       "Never mind," Dover said,, "just sit there and drink your iced coffee. I'll explain. I like to talk. Perhaps you haven't noticed it, but I really like to talk."

       "I've noticed," I said.

       "What a man hasn't had he doesn't miss, and that goes for love too. Not that my years of professional soldiering were continent years. Continence is for the very very young and the very very old. But I never knew love, and I didn't allow myself to associate with the type of women I could fall in love with. I was afraid of love and didn't know it, both with my mind and body. My body grew this paunch of mine." Dover patted his round hard stomach fondly. "For more than ten years I've kept my head and eyebrows shaved. In order to love a man who looks like me a woman would have to work two shifts. My nose is too large, and my personality is overbearing. I know myself, Springer.

       "I ought to boot myself in the ass for not seeing it sooner!" He shook his shiny head and pursed his lips. "A man is nothing but a complex defense mechanism. As a substitute for love—I realize now that I had substitutes—I collected things. Things that couldn't love me in return. I started out with a rock collection. I could love the rocks, but they couldn't love me. I've got a footlocker in storage in Washington containing more than one hundred three-act plays with the first act ripped out and destroyed. Did you ever hear of a play collection like that?"

       "No, sir. Not like that."

       "Nobody else ever did either. A psychiatrist would love to get ahold of that one. He could write a paper on it. What I was doing, you see, was reading the plays by starting at the second act. If I refused to read the first act, I'd never know how a love affair started! A brilliant defense I devised in my subconscious. I've never seen the start of a movie either. I've always entered in the middle, and left before it began again. Once I kept a rattlesnake in a cardboard box as a pet. Kept the snake for over a year in my wall locker right in the barracks. I loved that snake, Springer, and I called him Mary Lou. But Mary Lou didn't love me."

       "This is all very interesting, Abbott, but what has it got to do with me?"

       "Because I met you, and because I sent you to Jax," Dover laughed, "I got your wife. Virginia and I have been shacked up for two days now, in my little cell in Orangeville!"

       This was a startling bit of information, and I couldn't think of a reply. Abbott Dover left the couch, went into the kitchen and got rid of his chew at the garbage can. He rinsed his mouth out with a glass of water at the sink before he returned to his seat.

       "I don't believe you," I said at last.

       "Take a look out the window." Dover shrugged indifferently.

       I slowly got out of the swivel chair and walked the three steps to the window, pulled the sleazy curtain to one side. Parked at the curb was the Abbott's black-and-white convertible Ford. The top was down, and my wife sat placidly in the right-hand seat, the sun glistening in her blonde hair. As I stared across the lot, I thought I saw a muscle move in her cheek. She was chewing gum, I suppose, and she stared straight ahead, patiently waiting. She could sit still for hours on her broad pedestal, and with the patience of Job. She had waited for me like that in Columbus, sitting in our car while I was on errands or shopping, for hours at a time.

       "You have a very voluptuous wife," Abbott Dover said pleasantly.

       "She's fat, if That's what you mean," I replied, returning to my seat in the swivel chair.

       "No, that isn't what I mean. You treated that fine girl mighty shabbily, Springer, but now that things have worked out the way they have, I'm mighty grateful to you. I'll never forget the sight of that chubby, pathetic figure when she climbed out of a truck at the monastery. She didn't have a penny to her name and she had hitchhiked all the way to Orangeville carrying a heavy suitcase, looking for you. That's how love begins, I discovered, with pity. As soon as you can feel sorry for someone other than yourself, you discover love."

       "I wired her a hundred dollars," I said.

       "When?"

       "Yesterday."

       "Too late, thank God!" Abbott Dover crossed himself, and smiled. "She's mine now, unless you want to fight me for her!" He got to his feet and flexed his arms. "And I hope you do. I'll break you in half; you raw-boned, no-good bastard!"

       "Take her," I said, "I don't give a damn! At your age, pity may be your notion of love, but I'm only thirty-two, and my idea of love is still sex."

       "Again you prove to me how little you know about people," the Abbott said grimly. "I've been in bed with a lot of women, Springer, but your wife is the only woman who truly gave herself to me. She has changed my entire life. I'd do anything to make her happy. I've got more than twenty-five thousand dollars saved and a pension coming in at one hundred fifty-six bucks a month for life. I told her this, and gave her a choice of where she wanted to live. She wants to live in Columbus, Ohio, and that's where we're going. If Columbus is only half as good as Virginia says it is, we'll be damned happy there."

       "It's the deadliest, dullest provincial city in the world," I said sincerely.

       "I feel sorry for you, Springer."

       "And I feel sorry for you, Dover."

       "Don't!" He shook his head and glared at me. "Before I met Virginia, you should have been sorry for me. I was all set to enter the Soldier's Home in Washington and rot away. I'm only forty-four, Springer, not an old man by any means. My entire life lies ahead, and now I've got a loving woman to share it with me. Thanks to you, you sorry bastard." Abbott Dover opened the front door, turned to make a final crack. "Look inside thyself."

       "Keep your cheap enlisted man philosophy to yourself!"

       I followed Abbott Dover onto the porch. He started briskly across the lot and when he was half-way to his car I shouted after him: "Go with God!"

       My farewell shout halted Dover in his tracks. He turned completely around and hesitated for a couple of seconds. "Thanks, Reverend. I've got that coming!" He boomed cryptically.

       The Abbott climbed into the driver's seat, patted Virginia fondly on top of her blonde head, and drove away. Not once, and I watched closely, did Virginia look in my direction. I know she heard me shout at Dover, but she kept her eyes straight ahead, and she didn't even look back over her shoulder...I watched the convertible until it was out of sight.

       How did I feel? I had known my wife since high school days, and if I knew any person in the world, I knew Virginia. How could Virginia willingly engage in an illicit relationship with a clown like Abbott Dover? A man who resembled a parody of a television wrestler; a man with a nose like a potato, a shaved and shiny head, a big red face, and a round hard paunch...it didn't figure. I felt no poignant sense of loss, no pangs of regret to see her leave with the retired first sergeant. If she thought she would be happy with Dover in Columbus, more power to the old girl. My vanity wasn't hurt; I didn't have any vanity. Whatever had been between Virginia and me had fallen apart years ago, and maybe there had never been anything between us in the first place...I just didn't know. But I did think she could have taken a last look at me, a farewell look, out of curiosity if nothing else. A wave of the hand, maybe.

       I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.

       And here I was, standing idly on my front porch with the afternoon sun going down, when there were a million things I could be doing at the GHQ of the League For Love! I could draw up a list of demands to present to the Intertransit Omnibus Company. I could write an article on Bessie Langdale, about how she had inspired our boycott, and send it to all of the northern newspapers. I could get on the telephone and contact all of the white ministers in Jax, win them over, talk them into preaching sermons in favor of equality and justice. Certainly I should ask Dr. Heartwell to put me on the evening program; as yet, I hadn't delivered any great and inspiring speech. I would make notes at GHQ, and give a crackerjack pep talk tonight! To gain sympathy among the white people of Jax, I could write a proclamation, dig references out of the Bible to prove how God was in favor of the bus boycott, have the proclamation mimeographed, organize teams of volunteers into leg men and stuff a copy of the proclamation into every mailbox in Jax!