The Natural Order of Things (7 page)

For most of these men this news comes as a great relief, since the only thing they have with which to barter is the worthless currency of a hundred broken promises. Of course a few of them, the more reasonable ones, find her motives suspect, but in the end desperation always wins out. They don’t even wait for her to scribble an address on a napkin; they simply follow her back to the building, a never-ending parade of derelicts and fools marching up the walkway—scrawny, scruffy, their faces frozen with expressions of self-pity and stunned disbelief. How many men has she lured here over the years? How many has she cajoled, threatened, and humiliated in this warren of stinking, threadbare cubicles? Some have second thoughts.

Sensing their misgivings, Mrs. O’Neill tries to sweeten the deal by offering rooms on the seventh floor. “Lucky number seven, eh, honey?”

Bernie Kaliher can hardly believe that he has joined the ranks of these losers. Only three months ago the local sports columnists—those hacks who never see eye-to-eye on anything—agreed that his team would crush each of its regular- and post-season opponents with ease and cruise undefeated to the state championship game. No one dared to think otherwise. It was predestined. God had commanded it to be so. How then to explain the slew of injuries to his offensive linemen, the diminishing skills of his star quarterback, the heartbreaking defeats in overtime? God does not abandon the pious. Surely a decisive victory tomorrow night will turn this disastrous season around, but history has shown that even God needs a little convincing, and to appease him the Jesuits have ordered the students to pray on their knees, to petition the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Armies, to lead their beloved team to victory.

Kaliher intends to do his part, too. As head coach, he has access to the athletic department’s bank account for discretionary funds and has already made a sizable withdrawal. His bookie insisted on having the cash up front this time, but Kaliher has every intention of returning the money before the Jesuits even notice the transaction. He has done it before. Sometimes he bets small amounts on professional sports—a hundred here and there, nothing of great consequence. Big bets are strictly reserved for his own team, a thousand dollars on the opening game, thousands more in the weeks to follow.

After tomorrow’s triumphant win, he will beg God’s pardon for violating the trust of his players—the sheer stupidity of his mistakes, the magnitude of his financial indiscretions. Even when faced with the prospect of eternal damnation, he will not deny his culpability … with this one small caveat. God must give him an unequivocal answer to a question that has haunted him for many months: why do so many men have an almost instinctual urge to sabotage their own lives?

He can’t think of these things now. Only twenty-four hours remain until the big game, the infamous Holy War, and there is still much work to be done, grand strategies to map out, small but crucial tactics to perfect. Defeat is no longer an option, victory the only possible means of escape.

No matter how many times he submits to this monthly ritual, he is shocked by the vulgarity of Mrs. O’Neill’s bedroom talk and the rough manner in which she shoves his face into the swampy valley between her sloping breasts, down to the impressive rolls of fat that have congealed around her navel, across the rugged terrain of her thorny snatch, ever lower,
lower
, all the while rasping her sinister commands with pitiless glee: “That’s right, Coach, go on, work it,
work it
. Now, suck my toes! Suck ’em like you mean it.”

Taking direction like a trained seal, he sweeps his tongue over the tough meat of the sole, up and down the swollen arch, heel to toe, heel to toe. He recoils from her foot, trying hard to control his gag reflex, but Mrs. O’Neill digs her claws into the back of his neck. Finally, he opens his mouth to accept the five little piggies and uses his teeth to gently nibble on the thick stumps that look like a man’s knuckles—large, hairy, simian.

“That’s a good boy …”

The apartment smells faintly like a sewer; its rooms are drafty, poorly insulated, the walls cracked and bubbled from years of rain and snow, but these things do not prevent Mrs. O’Neill from sweating through the sheets. Using the advantage of her weight, she pins him to the mattress, parts her legs and slowly envelopes him in her clammy flesh.

Thirty minutes later, the tentacled creature squirts her ink over his abdomen, and the unspeakable ordeal comes to an end. She releases him from her grim embrace, fires up another cigarette, last one in the pack, and says, “Okay, Kaliher, you can stay one more month. But you’re a real awful lay, do ya know that? Truly despicable. Now I understand why yer old lady left ya.” She coughs, forces up a gob of green phlegm, then swallows it. “A little friendly advice. Either come up with some cash or improve yer skills in the sack.”

With that she stands up, pulls the bathrobe around her thick torso, and plunges into a pool of black shadow, Grendel’s mother, glutted on warrior blood, diving into the heaving depths of her sinister fen somewhere in the misty moorlands. Kaliher, marveling at the terrible strength of this tusked and taloned tarn-hag, wonders if she ever had children of her own, stillborn things sent straight to Limbo.

Before limping out the door, Mrs. O’Neill turns and says, “Best of luck tomorrow night, Coach!”

“Oh, you horrible, horrible …” Kaliher whispers.

In the darkness, without daring to light the candles, he sits cross-legged at the end of the mattress and runs his hands over his head. For a long time he does nothing at all, just stares into space and listens to the lunatic laughter of the other residents, the chanting, singing, crying that comes night and day through the dusty vents. In this madhouse, there is never a moment’s peace.

Though he is aching and drained of energy, he somehow finds the strength to get to his feet and staggers to the bathroom. Thankfully, there is no mirror in here, no way for him to inspect the dark circles under his eyes, the new lines that have formed on his forehead and at the corners of his mouth. He hunches over the sink. Using the crusty remnants of an old tube of toothpaste he brushes his teeth, but no matter how hard he scours, gurgles, and spits, he cannot get rid of the putrid taste of toenails, sour and bitter like old lemon rinds, that clings to the roof of his mouth and the back of his throat. When he can no longer tolerate the dirtiness on him, in him, and around him, he stands in the
shower under an icy spray of water. There is no soap, no exfoliating scrub, no shaving gel, none of the fragrant lotions he once enjoyed as a happily married man. In fact, very little remains of his old life except the mattress on the floor where Mrs. O’Neill occasionally positions herself and groans with unbridled pleasure.

Reluctantly he returns to the bedroom, but when he tears off the soiled sheet he notices a twenty-dollar bill wedged between the mattress and the wall. How he overlooked it he does not know. With a little whimper of gratitude, he holds it up to the light, smells it, rubs it between his fingertips, and after several minutes of meditation decides that this must be an act of divine providence, irrefutable proof that God is watching over him. Quickly, before some new disaster befalls him, he gets dressed and hurries out into the cold October night. A celebration is in order. It’s happy hour at the local brewery. One-dollar pints of lager and stout.

Kaliher shivers and pulls the collar of his jacket tight around his throat. Already the weather is beginning to turn. Forecasters are predicting a hard winter. As he hurries along the sidewalk, he moves aside to let a young man pass, another hapless bohemian, judging from his tattered jeans and T-shirt with a large, grinning skull. Maybe he’s a musician or a fledgling poet choking on a bolus of foolish fantasies, the old childish dreams of fame and fortune. But there is something different about this kid, something vaguely familiar. Though he can be no more than eighteen or nineteen years old, he looks world-weary and soul-sick. His left eye is bruised, his lip swollen. He has seen hard times, harder than most perhaps, and in his wake he leaves a long, messy trail of despair.

The kid glances up at Kaliher. There is a flash of recognition between them. Could he be a student from the Jesuit school? The boy looks away, picks up the pace, and disappears inside the building. Kaliher considers warning him away from this necropolis of dead dreams. But what’s the use? People never change. Besides, like everyone condemned to stay at the Zanzibar Towers & Gardens, this kid probably has it coming to him.

The city echoes with the wail of sirens. A police cruiser races by, its lights flashing. Gripped by a vivid premonition, Kaliher stands rooted to the street corner, mesmerized by the baffling array of kaleidoscopic color dribbling over the windows of the apartment building. It’s almost like someone has knocked over a thousand cans of paint from the rooftop, thick globules that hurtle into space and then vanish in the darkness only to reemerge an instant later in striking new patterns. A sign! While he watches this mystifying cascade, tastes its powerful essence, breathes its eerie energy, Coach Bernie Kaliher feels absolutely certain that his luck is about to change and breathes a long, heavy sigh of relief.

An abrupt rush of cold air whistles through the front window of the cab, wrenching Edward de Vere from his gloomy ruminations. The driver, wreathed in silver smoke, clamps the smoldering butt of a cigarette between his tragic stumps of teeth and makes another small adjustment to the rearview mirror.

“You do not mind?”

De Vere shakes his head. No, the smoke doesn’t bother him, not terribly. After the violent confrontation that morning with his thieving son and the subsequent argument with his wife about the family’s financial troubles, de Vere discovers that he has become almost completely numb to pain, to pleasure, to the unvarying drone of his own thoughts.

From the pocket of his camelhair coat, he retrieves the flask inscribed with his initials (a gift from an utterly forgettable mistress), and with a wistful smile, takes a healthy swig of absinthe. De Vere has come to rely on the stuff. The effects are strictly spiritual of course, not particularly good for his ulcer or for his reasoning faculties, enemies of the mystical experience, but somehow it makes these evenings a little more interesting, less predictable. The liquor sears his esophagus, ignites the walls of his gut, spreads like a vast oil plume across the surface of his consciousness, illuminating the murkiest depths of his soul with tongues of Pentecostal fire. He relishes the sensation.

“Where are you going tonight, sir?” asks the driver.

“Oh, nowhere in particular.”

Because he doesn’t want to sound like just another slurring drunk in the back of a cab during the midnight hours, de Vere lifts his chin, purses his lips, and attempts to enunciate each syllable, each hard consonant, and nasally vowel, but he stumbles over that last word—
par-tic-u-lar
—and realizes, with some chagrin, that he can no longer disguise his old accent, can’t soften the working class cadences that for so many years marked him as a poseur. Lost is the patrician affectation he has fine-tuned since his days as a student at the Jesuit school. The ruse is finally up: his words lack authority; they carry no more weight than if spoken by any predacious degenerate born and raised in this blighted section of town.

Deciding it best to keep his mouth shut, he uses simple hand gestures to direct the driver deeper into the city’s most destitute and ungovernable quarters, an anxious journey without compass or charts. De Vere probes every garbage-strewn corner, every shuttered window, every dangerous alley. Things are desolate now, but it’s only a matter of time before the crazies, decked out in wild costumes, emerge from their shanties and squalid apartment blocks to celebrate under the power lines and behind the chain-linked fences crowned with barbed wire. It’s Halloween, a night sacred to the unhinged mind, but de Vere now sees a deeper pattern and believes it doesn’t matter what day or hour it happens to be. They are everywhere, these lunatics, a never-ending parade of human ruin, a plague cast down from heaven in a way that hints at God’s indifference to the world.

“It is unusually quiet this evening,” says the driver, his eyes nervously scanning the streets.

De Vere tries to suppress a knowing smile. Soon this little preserve will be positively teeming with game, and the idea—of a hunter and his quarry—makes him
wonder if in a former life he had been a gentleman of quality who frequented the private hunting grounds of the king, invited by His Majesty to a country chateau to spend holidays shooting impressive white-tailed stags and, at day’s end, violating young wenches behind a stand of blue pines.

De Vere’s wife is convinced that he is an old soul, that he has undergone innumerable incarnations as insect, beast, vassal, and lord. “You’re afflicted with the curse of metempsychosis,” she explained to him one night.

He sighs and fingers through the dwindling cash in his money clip. If only she could gaze into her crystal ball and divine a simple solution to their financial difficulties—maybe he would be in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam instead of marooned in the city of his birth, riding in the back of a yellow cab that rumbles like a tank in the final cataclysmic scene of some generic wartime melodrama, the rusted muffler scraping along the ridges and fissures in the road, the brakes screeching and grinding at every turn, the radio hissing and crackling and occasionally exploding with unintelligible outbursts from an angry dispatcher. Suddenly de Vere feels not like an aristocrat waited on by a liveried footman but a magician’s assistant stuffed into a tiny black box, waiting to be impaled by sharp objects.

From the rearview mirror dark eyes study him. They blink in rapid succession as if trying to untangle his snarled storyline, the profusion of lives he has lived.

“Family troubles?”

De Vere lowers his flask. “Why do you ask?”

“I have been driving this cab for many years now, yes, many years. Women, children, they take their toll on a man. I have come to recognize the symptoms.”