Hanging up, the phone cord snaked momentarily around what Happy called his gaff — already starting to dance at the sound of Marcella’s voice and the vision of Happy here, soon, the speared whale, white tail flipping — then slipped off, just a touch, a taunt, just enough to bring his entire attention to bear briefly on that obstreperous machine, filament and didymous anther, feel himself that instant only an extension of the mechanism, accouterments of defense and motion: sperm carrier. It wasn’t sex that whipped him, whipped them all, it was the spook behind sex, that thing that designed him, reshaped him, waked him, churned him, thought for him even: Jesus, when was the last time he’d committed a wholly rational act! He felt the engine drive his legs to the bath, hoist him over the edge, felt his balls sensitizing his fingertips as he turned on the water, his prick reach for the soap, heard the tubes boil and sigh as the hot water struck and soothed. Wesley Edwards had once chided him for his “romantic attachment to rationalism.” Rationalism indeed! Christ! Old Edwards would laugh his ass off if he knew!
5
“God,” said Tommy Cavanaugh, alias Kit Cavanaugh, alias the Kitten, known in the bleachers and back seats as “the boy with the paws that refresh,” youngest son of the town banker, starting forward on the basketball team and class officer, owner at sixteen of his own set of wheels, “wouldn’t hurt people.”
Reverend Edwards argued that while God was surely just and benevolent, He was still capable of righteous punishment, and that sometimes when a man thought he was being hurt, he later found out it had been for his own benefit, as when a father chastises his son, for example, or when a coach makes you go to bed early at night. Everybody snickered at that, since it was already out in closed circles that Tommy had the very night before broken training rules to take Sally Elliott out parking at the iceplant. Bushwhackers had come on a scene of some disarray, the implications of which Tommy had not, though perhaps he should have, denied. “God is good,” said the minister in that talk-down tone of his that always bugged Tommy, “but sometimes He makes us to suffer experiences we might rather avoid. Remember the stories of Adam and Joseph, of Abraham and Noah. Remember that, as good as God is, this is a God Who could say to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is—’”
“I can’t believe all those stories,” said Tommy flatly. He looked around at the class and saw that they were with him. Usually Mr. Robbins or Sally’s Dad taught their Sunday school group, and then they talked sports. Reverend Edwards was an aggravation. For Tommy, though God was a distant elusive substance difficult to envision, He was nonetheless guardian of what was good in human affairs, a kind of president, as it were. “Anyway, you said we weren’t supposed to take them literally.”
“No, that’s right, but I didn’t mean you were to ignore them altogether either. Just reflect, fellows, how God made His own Son to suffer, and how He promises a terrible judgment upon those who turn away from Him.”
Tommy knew nothing of terrible judgments. He knew that God was generally satisfied with a token pledge of allegiance once a week, a more or less solemn pause to consider the moral virtues, and that anything more than that would suppose a pride in God only imaginable in men. He supposed that some day, after a happy life on this earth, he would pass an even happier eternity in God’s country, a place spatially distant but not entirely unlike West Condon. “All I’m saying is that I think if God wants us to believe in Him, He makes us believe, and if He wants us to do something, He knows how to get the job done without a lot of faking around. A coach is just a man, you know, he may be a pretty smart man, but he’s just a man, he doesn’t know everything, but God is, well, God is God!”
Reverend Edwards smiled, as the other guys giggled and wheezed. “That’s right, Tommy, but sometimes God may think that you learn a lesson better if you learn it by yourself. As the Bible says, ‘For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields—’”
“But why?” demanded Tommy, getting exasperated. “Has God got control over things, or hasn’t He? You know, if He has to pass signals to me by blowing up a mine and killing a hundred guys almost and then not bother to tell me why, well, He isn’t even much of a coach!”
“Well now, let’s not be impertinent,” scolded Reverend Edwards, no longer smiling, chewing on his lip like he always did when he got bothered. “As for all that seems evil in this world, you’re forgetting about the devil and—”
“That’s the other team,” interrupted Tommy. “I don’t play for them.” Again the convulsions of snorting and snickering. Tommy himself giggled without being able to hold back.
Reverend Edwards looked at his watch. “Well, fellows, I thing it’s about time …”
“One thing’s been bothering me, though, Reverend,” said Tommy, “and that’s about sin.”
“Well now,” said Reverend Edwards with a sly class-is-over smile, “have you been sinning, Tommy?”
Everybody laughed. Tommy grinned, accepting the laughter as praise, having in fact set himself up for it. “What I mean is, if God knows everything, even before it happens, and has all that say-so over everything we do, well, if we sin, it must be because He wants us to sin, and if He wants us to sin, then how is it sin?” He paused, a little breathless. “If you see what I mean.”
“Yes, I do, Tommy, though I’m afraid it gets us into the doctrine of predestination,” said Reverend Edwards gravely, again consulting his watch, “and I doubt we can cover all of that in the two or three minutes we have left. But let me say that, as Presbyterians, we do not believe that man is without free will. Perhaps, Tommy, God in His infinite wisdom has granted man the one freedom to turn away from Him, and that this is what is really meant by sin.”
“Oh yeah? Well, why would He want to do that?” Tommy asked, and when the minister showed no signs of answering, added, “I don’t know, I can’t see giving up something you already got or playing spooky games like that with people who are too stupid to know what’s going on. If it’s all so indefinite and weird and shaky like you say, well, that’s a pretty scary idea.”
“I think God is a pretty scary idea,” said Reverend Edwards softly, and he smiled. The bell rang and they all went outside, even though it was cold, eighth day of February, to horse around ten or fifteen minutes before they had to go to church.
“Comin’ at you, Kit!”
Tommy pivoted to receive the morning’s church program, wadded into a loose ball, as the guy who had pitched it made a hoop behind his back with his arms and faded like a football end. Tommy the Kitten mock-dribbled, wheeled, cupping the paper ball in the broad long-fingered hand that was his on-the-courts trademark, and hooked it gracefully through the receding hoop, bouncing it off the guy’s butt below.
“Hole in one, Kit baby!”
“Well, a hole in one is better than no hole at all,” Tommy gagged and they howled with laughter. Old standby of his Dad’s. His father was, in fact, at that very moment on the other side of the church lawn surrounded by the older guys. They were laughing and that meant his Dad had a new story. His Dad was a great storyteller, if not the greatest of all time, but he never told a sacrilegious joke, and he never told a story that made fun of West Condon. Those two things went together for his Dad: the community was sacred and religion was there to keep it so. For Tommy, both were pretty boring and restrictive, but he didn’t really mind either. If you really had to, there were ways of getting around both. The ice plant, for example, was outside the city limits. His Dad, he thought, had a few pretty old-fashioned ideas, but everybody’s Dad did. For one thing, he would always lecture Tommy that although property was in itself a kind of virtue, it carried with it an equal responsibility, and Tommy could never get it out of his mind that he would have the property, whether he was responsible or not.