|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
CHAPTER FIVE
The large room downstairs in the basement was directly beneath, and of the same dimensions as the lobby. It was stuffed with a shuffling of old furniture, a coil of lamps, a dismal of the weeds and cobwebs of ancient clothing, and boxes of every description. In the center of the room was the vast slate billiards table with leather-fringed pockets. I remembered it fondly. It was uncovered. There was a thick layer of coal soot on the once green felt that had been smooth as a putting green, a table of purposeful randomness, a perfectly symbolic surface over which we toiled.
The Hotel Bruxelles, back in its heyday, when the phosphate mine was booming, was a pretty good whorehouse and gambling establishment, despite the vociferous boycott of the town fathers. This was long before the pious Taylor family bought it. But the relics of the rowdy past were all still in the basement, and it was a paradise for young teenagers who spent many an afternoon teaching themselves to play poker, drinking illicit coffee and smoking the stubs of cigarettes gleaned from the many ashtrays in the lobby overhead.
It was a fitting setting, I thought, for the business. Once again Biff and Willy did not rise to greet me. They sat under a dim light bulb at a tilting, wobbly-legged round poker table naked of any objects. Max gestured to a chair and I sat, noticing the drink I had absently carried down with me. It was a highly unconscious signal of my contempt for them and their small lives–a puerile gesture of my continuing rebellion. I lit a cigarette to further confound them, and was able to see, in the dim light, and with great satisfaction, that a red haze of anger and embarrassed blood rise on their faces. Only Max seemed to take my symbolism in stride.
“Has Clayton consented to see us?” I asked generally. “Together?”
“Yes,” Biff said. “I saw him last night. He said it would give him a chance to apologize to you and the rest of us for what he was going to do to us. We are to go to his house at 8 o’clock. He seemed to be glad you were coming.”
“Believe me, he would have died without that comfort under any other circumstances,” I said sarcastically. “Do you think it occurred to him that I might want to ring his neck?” I asked. I saw a generally shocked look on their faces. “Don’t tell me,” I nearly sneered, “that it hasn’t occurred to each one of you.” My own behavior was unbecoming, and I can’t explain it. I hadn’t sneered in a long time.
Their silence was their answer.
“So what cards do we have to play?” I asked, in a very weak attempt at levity.
“We talked about that,” Willy said quickly. He wore an odorous down vest that smelled of cattle, and wore a cowboy hat as battered as his face. The prosperous rancher in his poverty disguise. Biff, I noted, was wearing the same suit and tie he wore in the Denny’s.
“We’ve put together a package that may interest him,” Max said, looking business like. “Without asking you for any contributions– we know how little the military pays– we have pooled an . . . incentive. Clayton has four children, the youngest two are just starting college. He hasn’t much in the terms of wealth. The economy. The world finally passed us by. You may have noticed that his father’s grocery store is closed. That happened what?” Max asked of the other two.
“Closed ‘er up in ‘68, I recall,” Willy offered.
“All the businesses have moved to Appelton,” Biff said. “That’s where my office is. It’s dying too.”
“Well, Clayton went to work as a clerk at the new Safeway, and he’s been there every since. Never advanced beyond checker. Some medical, but not nearly enough. So he’s had a difficult time raising his family on wages.”
“So it’s a financial incentive?” I asked, nodding. “He’s in so much difficulty that he’d listen to this kind of . . . proposal?” I looked at Max, and decided to keep the other proposal, the desperate straw of framing the infidel, to myself for the time being.
“We hope so,” Biff said.
“His wife is not well, his two younger children want to go to college. His oldest two, Beth and Jimmy, well, they moved to Pocatello, and he doesn’t see much of them. They are not well off, in any case,” Max said.
“The medical bills will take his house, for certain,” Biff said.
“So it might work.”
“It’s gotta work!” Willy declaimed.
“What’s the deal?” I asked.
“One hundred thousand dollars to the widow, a college education for the two young kids.” Max finally said.
“That’s an incentive,” I said. “You three have that kind of money?”
“My contribution is in cash,” Max said coolly.
“I’ve sold some stock, live and the Wall Street kind,” Willy said with an odd kind of giggle. As it was Willy who would suffer the ultimate punishment if Clayton Bostwick had his deathbed say, I could forgive him his erratic behavior. One moment he was sober as if he were in the dock on Judgment Day, the next giddy with a kind of macho hysteria. It made me nervous. He was clearly unstable. I couldn’t blame him. I felt that way myself.
“I’ve managed to arrange for a life insurance policy that will pass any inquiry,” Biff said. “For the education.” I could see how embarrassed he was.
“Creative accounting?” I asked with a needle.
“Something like that. But it doesn’t concern you,” he said, looking as if he was going to reach out and strike me with those heavy fists of his.
“Will it work?” I asked. I think I could have taken Biff that evening, one on one. I might have wanted to. There was a physical, palpable feeling of impending violence between the four of us. We were lousy conspirators in that frame of mind. We, I concluded, hated each other’s guts.
“We think he’ll go for it Andy,” Willy said. “Yes sir, bide us a little time.”
“And if he doesn’t go for it? What then is the price of peace?”
“I don’t know,” Willy sadly shook his head. I could see that he was near tears now, whether from guilt or anger or dislike for me. His reactions were not appropriate.
“I guess then it will be an appeal to what? Friendship?” I laughed, almost enjoying their discomfort. If I wasn’t so deep in the forest myself.
“We will appeal to his better instincts, then,” Biff said. Biff was the one of us who had a more ‘spiritual’ outlook. He had defended, in an oblique way, Clayton’s right to a clean confession. Despite the fact that Max had great authority in the church in the rarified precincts of Salt Lake City, it was Biff who served in the bucolic trenches. The hierarchy in Salt Lake City had long gone to a kind of remote, regal sterility. It was more of a corporate entity than an ecclesiastical body. It did, however, still hold control over the implacable, almost savage worldwide missionary effort. I could not let the next question go. It was a question spawned out of my contempt for the church, and for them.
“What will the church think about all this business?” I asked around. “Will this little piece of work damage your standing here, and hereafter?”
There was not the outburst I expected, but rather a deeply solemn silence.
“We were doomed to hell the moment we walked away from Hank’s body,” Max finally said.
“Yes,” Biff said.
“Oh, God,” Willy said, knotting his work roughened hands.
“Max, may I ask how you could offer yourselves up to the service of the church for so many years knowing what you’ve done? How did you do it? I'm just curious. How can you live with yourselves?”
“That is none of your goddamn business,” Max said viciously. His curse took the breath away from me. These were dangerous waters. Biff looked as if he had been slapped.
“For myself,” Biff said after he composed himself, shadows of his former handsome self still evident in the dim light, “I thought that service, in any capacity, would offer some redemption.”
“Good works versus Grace? That old argument? ‘Man will be punished for his own sins, and not for Adam’s transgressions?’ ” I quoted. “That ought to cancel out any good works. Original sin doesn’t hold with Mormons, eh?”
“You understand nothing in your disbelief,” Max said.
“What I believe in is Clayton Bostwick’s silence,” I shot back.
”Good works mitigate,” Biff said quietly. I was already tired of their struggle.
“What if,” I said, “Clayton rejects the money, and our plea to his conscience?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “I guess it will ruin us to a man. My practice, the church, it will all be lost.”
“Not to mention my command,” I said. “I’m not willing to let that happen.”
“There is little we can do if he refuses us,” Biff said.
“Oh, God,” Willy sighed. “What will my kids think?”
“We’ll pray,” Biff said decisively, and got out of the chair and fell to his knees. I was momentarily taken aback, and then Willy slid to the floor, taking off his hat and laying it on the table. Max rose, and looked at me. There was a beseeching, a desperate reaching across the distance, and I turned my back and made for the door.
“I’ll be in my room,” I said. “I think you’d better include a word for a miracle regarding Clayton’s health. A miraculous recovery. His life, not his soul, is in more peril than he knows, is it not?”
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
Main Table of
Contents