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

But Mac wasn’t always looking for trouble. One afternoon, for no reason at all, he bought Myles a Hawaiian sports shirt. “For next summer,” Mac said, as if they would always be together. The shirt was a terrible thing to look at — soiled merchandise picked up at a sale — but it might mean something. Was it possible that Mac, in his fashion, liked him?

“A fellow like you might handle that end of it,” Mac said one day in the car. He had been talking about the store part of his dream and how he would put out a big catalogue in which it would be wise for manufacturers — and maybe religious orders, too — to buy advertising if they expected to do business with him. “Interested?” he asked.

Myles was definitely not interested, but he was touched by the offer, since it showed that Mac trusted him. It was time to put matters straight between them. Myles spoke then of his dream — of the great desire he had to become a priest. Not a punch-drunk seminary professor or a fat cat in a million-dollar parish, he said, but a simple shepherd ministering gently to the poorest of God’s poor. He wouldn’t mind being a priest-worker, like those already functioning so successfully in France, according to reports reaching him. “That can’t happen here,” Mac said. Myles, however, saw difficult times ahead for the nation— Here Mac started to open his mouth but grabbed instead for his ears. Myles felt pretty sure that there would soon be priest-workers slaving away in fields and factories by day and tending to the spiritual needs of their poor fellow-workers by night.

“Poor?” Mac asked. “What about the unions? When I think what those boys take home!”

Myles then explored the more immediate problem of finding a bishop to sponsor him.

Mac said he knew several quite well and he might speak to them.

“I wish you would,” Myles said. “The two I’ve seen looked impossible.” Then, having said that much — too much — he confessed to Mac his real reason for taking the job: the urgency of his position with regard to Selective Service.

Immediately, Mac, who had not been paying much attention, released an ear for listening. He appeared ill-disposed toward Myles’ reluctance to serve in the armed forces, or, possibly, toward such frankness.

“I can’t serve two masters,” Myles said. Mac was silent; he’d gone absolutely dead. “Are you a veteran?” Myles asked.

“Since you ask,” Mac said, “I’ll tell you. I served and was wounded — honorably — in both World Wars. If there’s another one, I hope to do my part. Does that answer your question?” Myles said that it did, and he could think of nothing to say just then that wouldn’t hurt Mac’s feelings.

That night, Mac, in his cups, surpassed himself. He got through with the usual accusations early and began threatening Myles with “exposure.” “Dodgin’ the draft!” Mac howled. “I oughta turn you in.”

Myles said he hadn’t broken the law yet .

“But you intend to,” Mac said. “I oughta turn you in.”

“I’ll turn myself in when the time comes,” Myles said.

“Like hell you will. You’ll go along until they catch up with you. Then they’ll clap you in jail — where you belong.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Myles said, thinking of St Paul and other convicts.

“Then you’ll wish you were in the Army — where you belong. I’m not sure it’s not my duty to report you. Let’s see your draft card.”

Myles let him see it.

“‘Flynn, Myles’—that you? How do I know you’re not somebody else by the same name?”

Myles made no reply. Had prohibition been so wrong, he wondered.

“Don’t wanna incriminate yourself, huh? Hey, you’re 1-A! Didja see that?”

Myles explained, as he had before, that he was awaiting his induction notice.

“Bet you are! Bet you can hardly wait! I’d better hold onto this.” Mac slipped Myles’ draft card into his pocket.

In the morning, Myles got the card back. Mac, sober, returned it, saying he’d found it in his room, where Myles (who had not been there) must have dropped it. “Better hold on to that,” Mac said.

The next night Myles managed to stay in a rooming house, out of reach, but the following night they were together again, and Mac asked to see Myles’ draft card again. Myles wouldn’t give it up. “I deny your authority,” he said, himself emboldened by drink — two beers.

“Here’s my authority!” Mac cried. He loosened his trousers and pulled up his shirt in front, exposing a stomach remarkably round, smooth, veined, and, in places, blue, like a world globe. There was a scar on it. “How d’ya think I got that?”

“Appendicitis,” Myles said.

There was no doubt of it. The scar testified to Mac’s fraudulence as nothing else had, and for once Mac seemed to know it. He’d strayed into a field in which he believed Myles to be supreme. Putting his stomach away, he managed a tone in which there was misgiving, outrage, and sarcasm. “That’s right. That’s right. You know everything. You were a bedpan jockey. I forgot about that.”

Myles watched him, amused. Mac might have saved himself by telling the truth or by quickly laughing it off, but he lied on. “Shrapnel — some still inside,” he said. He coughed and felt his stomach, as if his lungs were there, but he didn’t get it out again. “Not asking you to believe it,” he said. “Won’t show you my other wound.”

“Please don’t,” said Myles. He retired that night feeling that he had the upper hand.

One week later, leaving a town in Minnesota where they had encountered a difficult bishop, Mac ordered Myles to stop at a large, gabled rectory of forbidding aspect. As it turned out, however, they enjoyed a good dinner there, and afterward the pastor summoned three of his colleagues for a little game of blackjack — in Mac’s honor, Myles heard him say as the players trooped upstairs.

Myles spent the evening downstairs with the curate. While they were eating some fudge the curate had made that afternoon, they discovered that they had many of the same enthusiasms and prejudices. The curate wanted Myles to understand that the church was not his idea, loaded up, as it was, with junk. He was working on the pastor to throw out most of the statues and all the vigil lights. It was a free-talking, free-swinging session, the best evening for Myles since leaving the seminary. In a nice but rather futile tribute to Myles, the curate said that if the two of them were pastors, they might, perhaps, transform the whole diocese. He in no way indicated that he thought there was anything wrong with Myles because he had been asked to leave the seminary. He believed, as Myles did, that there was no good reason for the dismissal. He said he’d had trouble getting through himself and he thought that the seminary, as an institution, was probably responsible for the way Stalin, another aspirant to the priesthood, had turned out. The curate also strongly disapproved of Mac, and of Myles’ reasons for continuing in the Work. He said the Clementines were a corny outfit, and no bishop in his right mind, seeing Myles with Mac, would ever take a chance on him. The curate thought that Myles might be playing it too cautious. He’d do better, perhaps, just to go around the country, hitchhiking from see to see, washing dishes if he had to, but calling on bishops personally — as many as he could in the time that remained before he got his induction notice.

“How many bishops have you actually seen?” the curate asked.

“Three. But I couldn’t say anything with Mac right there. I would’ve gone back later, though, if there’d been a chance at all with those I saw.”

The curate sniffed. “How could you tell?” he asked. “I thought you were desperate. You just can’t be guided entirely by private revelation. You have a higher injunction: ‘Seek, and you shall find.’ Perhaps you still haven’t thought this thing through . I wonder. Perhaps you don’t pray enough?”