J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“Sort of a supermarket?” Myles asked, thinking of chalices and turkeys roosting all in a row.

“That’s the idea.”

“It’d be nice if there were one place in this country where you could get an honest piece of ecclesiastical art,” Myles said.

“I’d have that, too, later,” Mac said. “A custom department.”

They were getting along very well, different as they were. Mac was a good traveling companion, ready wherever they went with a little quick information about the towns (“Good for business,” “All Swedes,” “Wide open”), the small change of real knowledge.

One day, when they were passing through Superior, Wisconsin, Mac said that originally the iron-ore interests had planned to develop the town. Property values had been jacked up, however, by operators too smart for their own good, and everything had gone to Duluth, with its relatively inferior harbor. That was how Superior, favored by nature, had become what it was, a small town with the layout of a metropolis.

“It’s easier to move mountains than greedy hearts,” Myles commented.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mac said.

Myles found the story of Superior instructive — positively Biblical, he said. Another case of man’s greed. The country thereabouts also proved interesting to Myles, but difficult for Mac when Myles began to expound on the fished-out lakes (man’s greed), the cut-over timberland (man’s greed), the poor Indians (the white man’s greed). The high-grade ore pits, Mac foolishly told him, were almost exhausted.

“Exhausted for what?” Myles asked.

“Steel,” said Mac, who didn’t realize the question had been rhetorical.

“This car!” said Myles, with great contempt. “War!” Looking into the rearview mirror, he saw Mac indulging in what was becoming a habit with him — pulling on his ear lobes.

“What are you?” Mac finally demanded. “Some kind of a new damn fool?”

But Myles never gave up on him. He went right on making his points, laying the ground for an awakening; it might never come to Mac, but Myles carried on as if it might at any moment. Mac, allied with the modern world for better or worse, defended the indefensible and fought back. And when logic failed him, he spluttered, “You talk like you got holes in your head,” or, “Quit moanin’!” or, “Who you think you are, buster — the Pope?”

“This is when you’re really hard to take!” Mac said one day, when the news from Korea was bad and Myles was most telling. Myles continued obliviously, perceiving moral links between Hiroshima and Korea and worse things to come, and predicting universal retribution, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. “And why?” he said. “Greed!”

“Greed! Greed! Is that all you can think about? No wonder they had to get rid of you!”

A few miles of silence followed, and then a few well-chosen words from Mac, who had most certainly been thinking, which was just what Myles was always trying to get him to do. “Are you sure the place you escaped from was a seminary?” he asked.

But Myles let him see he could take even this, turning the other cheek so gracefully that Mac could never know his words were touching a sore spot.

Later that day, in the middle of a sermon from Myles, they passed a paddy wagon and Mac said, “They’re looking for you.” Ever after, if Myles discoursed too long or too well on the state of the modern world, there came a tired but amiable croaking from the back seat, “They’re looking for you.”

At night, however, after the bars closed, it was Mac who was looking for Myles. If they were staying at the same hotel, he’d knock at Myles’ door and say, “Care to come over to the room for a drink?” At first, Myles, seeing no way out of it, would go along, though not for a drink. He drank beer when he drank, or wine, and there was never any of either in Mac’s room. It was no fun spending the last hour of the day with Mac. He had a lot of stories, but Myles often missed the point of them, and he knew none himself — none that Mac would appreciate, anyway. What Cardinal Merry del Val had said to Cardinal Somebody Else — the usual seminary stuff. But Mac found a subject to interest him . He began denying that Myles was a cradle Catholic. Myles, who had never seen in this accident of birth the personal achievement that Mac seemed to see, would counter, “All right. What if I weren’t one?”

“You see? You see?” Mac would say, looking very wise and drunk. Then, as if craving and expecting a confession, he’d say, “You can tell me .”

Myles had nothing to tell, and Mac would start over again, on another tack. Developing his thought about what he called Myles’“ideas,” he would arrive at the only possible conclusion: Myles wasn’t a Catholic at all. He was probably only a smart-aleck convert who had come into the Church when the coming was good, and only thought he was in.

“Do you deny the possibility of conversion?” Myles would ask, though there was small pleasure in theologizing with someone like Mac.

Mac never answered the question. He’d just keep saying, “You call yourself a Catholic —a cradle Catholic?”

The first time Myles said no to Mac’s invitation to come over and have one, it worked. The next time, Mac went back to his room only to return with his bottle, saying, “Thought you might like to have one in your pajamas.” That was the night Myles told Mac, hopefully, that whiskey was a Protestant invention; in Ireland, for example, it had been used, more effectively than the penal laws, to enslave the faithful. “Who’re you kiddin’!” Mac wailed.

Mere admonishment failed with Mac. One day, as they were driving through primitive country, Myles delivered a regular sermon on the subject of drink. He said a man possessed by drink was a man possessed by the Devil. He said that Mac, at night, was very like a devil, going about hotel corridors “as a roaring lion goeth about seeking whom he may devour.” This must have hit Mac pretty hard, for he said nothing in his own defense; in fact, he took it very well, gazing out at the pine trees, which Myles, in the course of his sermon, had asked him to consider in all their natural beauty. That afternoon, they met another hard nut — and Mac took the pledge again, which closed the deal for a production on the following Sunday, and also, he seemed to think, put him into Myles’ good graces. “I wish I could find one that could give it to me and make it stick,” he said.

“Don’t come to me when I’m a priest,” said Myles, who had still to see his first bishop.

That night Mac and the bottle were at the door again. Myles, in bed, did not respond. This was a mistake. Mac phoned the office and had them bring up a key and open Myles’ door, all because he thought Myles might be sick. “I love that boy!” he proclaimed, on his way back to his room at last. Later that night Myles heard him in the corridor, at a little distance, with another drunk. Mac was roaring, “I’m seein’ who I may devour!”

More and more, Myles and Mac were staying together in the same hotels, and Myles, though saving money by this arrangement (money, however, that he never saw), wondered if he wasn’t paying too much for economy. He felt slightly kept. Mac only wanted him handy late at night, it seemed, so as to have someone with whom to take his pleasure, which was haranguing. Myles now understood better why Jack had liked the places he stayed in. Or was this thing that Mac was doing to him nightly something new for Mac? Something that Myles had brought upon himself? He was someone whom people looking for trouble always seemed to find. It had happened to him in the hospital, in the seminary, in the Boy Scouts. If a million people met in one place, and he was there, he was certain that the worst of them would rise as a man and make for him.