The Natural Order of Things (4 page)

Behind him the gothic bell tower rises stately and imperturbable above the evening, above the decades and the centuries, and somewhere within its shadow, the eyes of a thousand angry souls watch and wait, never letting him out of their sight.

On a Monday morning in early October, three weeks before the big game, Malachy McSweeney paces back and forth on the loading dock of the Burning River Brewery, going round and round with the automated speed of a conveyor belt. The first stinging winds of autumn come whipping off the lake, kicking up dust and leaves and scattering cigarette butts across the parking lot. Somehow the icy air shrivels his already haggard face and drains his cheeks of color like the crabapples that litter the ground. His coffee quickly turns tepid and tastes acidic on the tip of his tongue. To keep warm he pauses beside a steel barrel where he vigorously rubs his hands above the dying embers. His fellow truck drivers huddle beside him, and in an oddly lyrical low-life patois fused from the slang of a dozen different languages and never heard outside the perimeter of these wretched streets, the men grumble about the impending winter imprisonment with their nagging wives, unappreciative children, and disobedient dogs; dreaded months of sleet and snow when an epidemic of cabin fever sweeps through the city, making the men do things so desperate and despicable that many seek the guidance and mercy of the Jesuits.

Like a squadron of soldiers in a defeated army, the men form a disorganized line and await further orders. They fart and yawn and pick their teeth. They cough and wheeze and drum their chests with clenched fists. They stomp their heavy, black boots in time to the rhythmic scuff and scrape of forklifts against wooden pallets and the sharp percussion of robotic arms clanking against longneck bottles of beer. Then from out of this cacophonous canticle of machinery comes a booming voice that commands them all to “Shut it!”

Cloggy Collins emerges from the sweltering inferno of his small, windowless office and stares them down. Already chewing his first cigar of the day and perspiring profusely through his white collared shirt, Cloggy trundles across the loading dock, cradling what at first appears to be a large cardboard sarcophagus stuffed with human body parts—a jumble of arms and legs, elbows and knees. In a gesture meant to show his disgust and impatience with his sorry crew of drivers, he wipes the corners of his mouth with thumb and forefinger, flicking a pasty glob into the wind where it seems to freeze in midair before falling to earth and shattering like a delicate crystal of exceptional beauty.

“Here’s a little surprise, boys.” He drops the box on the platform. “New marketing strategy.”

With a wave of his hand and the word “Abracadabra!” he makes a life-sized cardboard cheerleader appear from out of the box. At six feet tall, she towers above these dwarfish men like some colossus of coitus, her long legs and smooth bronze thighs spread in a deliberately provocative pose, her tight tummy and delectable navel partially concealed by a pair of shimmering pompoms. Her bright eyes burn with uninhibited and exuberant lust. Her lascivious and dazzling smile encourage all present to come hither and pay homage to her unique majesty.

The men whistle, ogle, adjust themselves with frostbitten fingers; they discuss esoteric and vulgar sexual techniques, a Kama Sutra for the workingman—the Cleveland Steamer, the Tennessee Snow Plow, the Dirty Sanchez. Here is a clever decoy guaranteed
to lure men by the thousands out of their comfortable recliners and into stores to purchase inordinate amounts of ale and to drink as much of it as their diseased livers will allow. Even McSweeney, the most reserved of the bunch, can’t help but grin. It’s a cruel deception, yes, but one that doesn’t deter his cock—that vindictive prick—from briefly nodding its otherwise somnolent head in the pathetic void of his trousers.

“Get these out pronto!” Cloggy shouts. “Put ’em on top of every display. And try not to feel any of ’em up. We don’t want no damaged goods. Now move it, all of yous.”

But before distributing the models to the drivers, Cloggy slides his rough hands around a narrow waist and brushes his bristly, tobacco-speckled chin against the airbrushed cleavage. His eyes grow bleary and distant. The wrinkles in his face deepen. When he speaks, it is as though he is in the midst of a drug-induced trance.

“This is what we all dream about at night, eh? This is what we deserve as men, as American men. Yessir, this is what it’s finally all about. What else is there? A winning team and a hot piece of ass to cheer on the players …”

With forced smiles, the drivers collect their share of cardboard women and jump down from the dock, but as they slog through the leaves that pile up in the weedy lot and make their way to the trucks, they are forced to endure the familiar gales of half-mad laughter that erupt from the gaping maw of Cloggy Collins.

Malachy McSweeney’s first stop is the Jesuit high school.

With their astonishing ability to discriminate between various types of rich, dried, delicate malts, the priests are acclaimed as connoisseurs of beer, and each week they request (some would say require) a delivery of lagers and stouts and fancy raspberry lambics from the local brewery. Under normal circumstances, they are so delighted to see Malachy McSweeney, their prompt and dependable deliveryman, and are so concerned for his safe passage through the dangerous streets of this once grand city, that they lay their hands on his head and say a quick prayer to Saint Fiacre—he’s the patron saint of cab drivers, true, but because the Vatican has yet to canonize a beer truck driver, it’s the best they can do.

McSweeney, ever grateful for these humble petitions to heaven, looks forward to his regular stop at the school, but lately he has noticed a change among the priests. They seem irritable and cast accusatory glances in his direction. Some openly stare at him and scowl. At the start of the football season, the Jesuits, who initially had so much to celebrate, doubled their consumption from the usual six kegs to twelve, but in recent days their celebratory toasts have turned into drunken disputes about sacking the head coach and the almost blasphemous suggestion of replacing the starting quarterback with an inexperienced backup. It’s still early in the season, but already the team has lost two crucial games, and playoff hopes are beginning to fade.

After he parks the delivery truck behind the main classroom building and starts to unload the kegs, McSweeney can sense the priests observing him from high atop the gothic tower. Their eyes burn past cloudy cataracts and through classroom windows smeared with the fingerprints of teenage boys frantic to escape yet another tedious lecture on heaven and hell. Though they speak of tolerance and forgiveness, the Jesuits clearly resent the fact that someone so poor, so uneducated, so utterly incapable of managing a
crisis can wield such enormous power over them; that a man like Malachy McSweeney, a humble truck driver and inhabitant of the surrounding slums, can in some way be responsible for the fate of the football team and thus for the fate of the entire school. The fact that his son is the star quarterback is obviously a divine blunder, a cosmic joke. It goes against the natural order.

Trying to ignore their stares, McSweeney rolls the kegs one by one down the steep incline into the cellar, where he places them in neat rows against the limestone walls. After completing this task, he removes his cap, bows his head, and waits for the customary blessing. He stands there for five minutes, but no one comes to greet him, not even to check the inventory or sign the invoice. Cold air roars through the baffling network of musty tunnels and sounds like a priest making a grim proclamation from the pulpit:
Failure in children can always be traced back to the parents!

The words fly out of the dark like an assassin’s dagger; they hit their mark, strike deep, and McSweeney, fearing the mysterious power of the priests, races up the incline, climbs inside his truck, and speeds away from the school’s haunted landscape.

Although the rest of his route is a familiar one, to McSweeney it seems utterly alien and uncharted. The convenient marts and liquor stores are suffused with a ghastly blue light, and the sales clerks regard him with eyes that reflect their deep suspicion of thieving humanity. As morning turns to afternoon and as the white lines in the road begin to hypnotize him, he finds himself driving past his house, which is nowhere near his next stop. He shifts the truck into high gear and turns the volume up on the radio, but still he hears, or at least imagines he does, his wife’s voice, a sharp, high-pitched, nerve-rattling squawk that rips through the paper-thin walls of their bedroom, carried aloft on the massive swells of early arctic air. Her duty in life is to remind him of his utter ineptitude and to recite an endless list of repairs—oil the hinges, tighten the faucets, sand and stain the hardwood floors, patch the cracks in the ceilings, clean the storm windows. There is also the small matter of his tossing and turning in bed, his thunderous snores, his peculiar habit of screaming in the night. Her complaints even reach him in the basement, his only refuge, where he spends his evenings on the sofa, watching television and smoking the quality reefer he manages to procure from one of his son’s friends. In the basement he can at least
pretend
to be busy changing the filter on the furnace, setting mousetraps, and sorting through boxes of nails and screws. Usually this little pantomime is enough to appease his wife, but it doesn’t prevent the house from sliding ever further into decrepitude.

With a heavy sigh he glances at the cardboard model propped up on the passenger seat, his trusty co-pilot, and like a nervous teenager reeling in virginity, he places his hand on her knee. A sudden urge comes over him. Briefly he considers pulling over to the berm, lowering his pants, and pressing his aching manhood against her leg, but he thinks better of this plan and tries to snap out of his silly fantasy.

After parking the truck behind the Select’n’Save, McSweeney unloads a dozen cases of beer and navigates his squeaky dolly through a maze of shelves. On Aisle 69, he stacks the cases into the steep tiers of a ziggurat, like the one he saw in his son’s history textbook, and then places the cheerleader on top like some voluptuous temple prostitute
of ancient Babylon. He steps back to examine his handiwork, a master builder with a knack for symmetry and a sense of the numinous, but there is something about this scene that he finds deeply unsettling. He tries to reposition the model but soon finds himself massaging the small tattoo on her right thigh and stroking the faint outline of nipples beneath her half top. She gazes down at him and seems to indicate her pleasure with an almost imperceptible flick of her black and white pompoms. McSweeney’s face goes flush, his knees buckle, his lips form words of reverence and awe.

From the deli comes the sharp sound of mechanized death. An old woman, squinting from behind the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed glasses, stops cranking a hand-powered meat grinder to observe McSweeney.

He scuttles sideways toward the exit with the cardboard girl dangling under his arm. “This one is damaged,” he tells her with a sheepish grin.

The woman lets out a long, thin witch’s cackle that poisons the air with foul omens, then she returns to her work, stuffing handfuls of bloody scraps deep inside the funnel and cranking the handle until the meat oozes out of the grinder, gray and gristly on the stainless steel countertop.

That evening, when he opens the back door of his house, a gust of wind sends a halo of leaves spinning above his head. Standing at the stove, Maggie stirs a pot of chili, the sleeves of her high school football jersey crusted over with tomato paste, her white slippers sprinkled with the crumbs of stale soda crackers. “Hey, there, Malachy McSweeney.” She gives him a quick kiss on the cheek and says, “Would ya mind shutting the damn door? I like my chili without maple leaves.”

He does as he is told and then tries to ladle some chili from the pot.

She swats his hand. “Did you stop at the hardware store like I asked?”

“Hardware store?”

She shakes her head, slowly, to make sure he registers her displeasure. “You promised to fix the furnace tonight, remember? There’s exposed wiring. Christ, if I left things up to you this place would burn to the ground. Maybe I should ask our son to fix it.” She turns her head toward the living room. “Oh, Frank!”

“No, no. I’ll check it out right now.”

“And close the basement door behind you. Smells like a wolf’s den down there.”

He slinks away, wondering if it’s part of the marriage contract, something in the fine print, wherein a woman has the option to put on a pair of slippers every night and treat her husband like a complete imbecile. At the bottom step, he pauses to listen to the creak and groan of the floorboards, and when he is sure that his wife has gone to some distant corner of the house, perhaps to the bathroom to sit on the toilet and read the sports page, he removes the cardboard model that he has folded and hastily concealed inside his winter coat. After smoothing out any unsightly lines and creases, he places the model on the coffee table, where for one frustrating hour, he contemplates her heavenly breasts, ruby red lips, and shiny black hair. Marveling at her statuesque physique and curvaceous wonderment, he vows to understand the inexplicable hold her beauty has on him.

In the end, there seems to be only one solution to the enigma. He lets his hand drift down to his pulsing erection. A natural phenomenon that needs no further explanation.

That night, as they occupy their separate territories of the bed and watch the Monday night football game on their new TV (a gift from the Jesuits at the beginning of the season), Maggie reaches across the widening chasm that divides them and strokes her husband beneath the sheets. When he turns to face her, he sees only a nest of curls, bleached white and wiry, protruding from behind her ears and over the pillow. Every now and then he catches the lingering scent of chili powder and spices. The flannel nightgown she wears makes her look square, squat, rigidly geometric. For some time now he has worried about her weight. There is a long history of heart disease in her family, and he often wonders how he’ll take to widowerhood.