Meltdown

by Chuck Holton

  Mary had mentioned they’d be venturing into the dead zone around Chernobyl. They called it the “dead zone” for a reason—the radiation was still too high for it to be habitable. Geez, this is insane. I mean, I might actually want to have kids someday… Though that would require getting married, which was nowhere on his radar. Not for a long time.

  John Cooper had been all goo-goo since running into his old pal Liz in Lebanon, and Sweeney could already tell his once-unflappable team sergeant was whupped. He and John used to go skydiving together on weekends. Now, every time they had a few days off, John was running up to Philly to see her, like some kind of hungry puppy looking for a handout. And he stays with her grandmother…yeah, right. Though John swore on his reserve parachute that he and Liz had decided not to touch each other until—and unless—they got married, Sweeney would believe that when Hogan wore a dress.

  Sweeney had seen what marriage did to a man—besides taking up every ounce of freedom, time, and spare change, it was a black hole for one’s dignity. His own father could hardly tie his shoes without “clearing it with Mother.” Dad spent his whole life tiptoeing around his wife—and he’d taught his boys to do the same. Momma ran the house, and that was all there was to it. He caught himself shaking his head. No thanks. I’ve had enough browbeatin’ to last me the rest of my life.

  The ding everyone had been waiting for finally came—the signal that they had reached the gate. At once, all the passengers jumped to their feet.

  Since he was last off the plane, he wasn’t at all surprised at the length of the line for immigration when he entered the large, sterile reception hall. Judging from the number of people there, several other flights must have also just landed.

  Too bad I don’t get paid by the hour.

  There were five lines in all, each with at least thirty people already waiting. Sweeney caught sight of John and Rip, both in separate lines, pretending they hadn’t seen him. Maybe he was imagining things, but there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of slimy-looking men with bad suits and too much jewelry.

  What kind of man would purchase a bride? Question answered.

  He sighed and took his place in the line farthest from the other two, feeling his back pocket to be sure the Canadian passport was still there.

  Covert operations are sooo exciting.

  “Looks like this might take a while,” a man’s thick, accented voice said from behind him.

  Sweeney turned, then blinked. Then stared. It can’t be…

  Before him stood a huge man in a long black robe, a thick brown beard covering his face. He wore a brown smock and a big, easy smile. If he didn’t know better, he’d have sworn it was Buzz, pulling a trick on him.

  “Sorry, did I startle you?”

  Sweeney swallowed and tried to recover. “Uh, no. I…sorry, I was…ah…thinking of something else.”

  “That’s okay. I tend to make people look twice. I’m sure the mantle has something to do with it.” The big man held out his robe like a skirt, then guffawed.

  What are the odds?

  Despite his initial shock, Sweeney grinned. The man’s jovial demeanor made it clear he had fun wherever he went, and the Friar Tuck getup made him seem anything but intimidating. His English was perfect, though Sweeney couldn’t place the accent. Something not quite British.

  “What’s your name, son?” The man’s smile was infectious.

  Sweeney smiled back. “Bobby. You?”

  The giant stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Bobby. I’m Brother Keith Forster. I’d welcome you to Ukraine, but I only just got here myself!” He let out a laugh that had the people around them grinning too.

  Sweeney smirked. “Nice to meet you. So…you’re a monk?”

  Brother Forster wagged an index finger. “Good guess, but no. I’m a friar of the Carmelite order.”

  “Sounds sticky.”

  The friar chuckled. “Indeed it does. Our full name is the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. I live in South Africa.”

  “Ah.” That explains the accent. “So did you come to Ukraine to find a wife?”

  He immediately regretted the joke, not because the friar was offended, but because the man laughed so hard Sweeney realized they were attracting attention. He decided to cut the sarcasm.

  Brother Keith wiped his eyes. “Well, considering I’ve already taken vows of poverty and of chastity, what would be the point?”

  Now it was Sweeney’s turn to laugh. He couldn’t help but like this guy.

  The big man patted his briefcase and continued. “No, I’m here to teach a seminar on apologetics.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?” Sweeney was confused.

  “Oh, I thought you were making another joke!” The friar guffawed again and slapped Sweeney on the shoulder. “You know, apologetics …sorry’…get it?”

  Sweeney slapped his forehead. “Now I do.”

  “Apologetics is the art of explaining the notion that God exists.” The friar winked at him. “I call it ‘defending the obvious.’”

  Sweeney’s inner skeptic kicked in. He shuffled forward with the line. “But if it was obvious, you wouldn’t need to defend it, would you?”

  The big man gave an amused snort. “Once, when I misbehaved as a child, my mother sent me outside to fetch a switch. I knew what the switch was going to be used for, and not surprisingly, I couldn’t find one!”

  “Hmmfff,” Sweeney puffed. “But I bet your momma found one real quick.”

  “Exactly. It wasn’t that all the switches had vanished from our backyard—they were everywhere when I wanted one with which to torment the cat. It was that my worldview regarding switches had changed, and my desire to avoid punishment made them awfully hard to see.”

  “So what does that have to do with proving God exists?”

  The friar shrugged. “All I’m saying is that sometimes our motivations make us ignore the obvious. But you can’t change reality on a whim. If God exists or if He doesn’t, your belief about it does not affect the fact.”

  How’d I get roped into this? Sweeney pursed his lips and tried to see how much longer he had until he got to the customs people. “Hmm…I guess that makes sense.”

  The friar nodded. “So then how is God obvious? That’s the next step.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sweeney wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the next step. He was glad the line was moving. Two lines over, Rip was already at the passport control booth.

  The friar picked up his briefcase with one hand and made a broad gesture with the other, encompassing everyone in the terminal. “Do you realize that every culture throughout history has had a belief in the supernatural?”

  Sweeney stuck his hands in his pockets. “But they’ve all had different gods. Doesn’t that mean they’re made up in our imagination?”

  “That’s a good point. And any particular god may be just that—a made-up figure. But the concept of God is universal. Even remote tribes that have virtually no contact with other cultures worship something. It’s innate.”

  “So what does that prove, Friar?”

  The friar’s wide smile returned. “Have you ever known anyone who was an artist? And please, call me Keith.”

  “Okay, Keith. My granddad is a whittler. Does that count?”

  “You mean he carved things from wood?”

  “Yeah. He’d make toys and things for all us boys every Christmas.”

  “Fine,” Keith said. “If you were to go home and see something he’d carved, would you recognize his work?”

  “Absolutely. Granddad is really good.”

  “So, in a sense, his work would remind you of him.”

  Sweeney nodded, wary of where this might lead. “I suppose.”

  Keith spread his hands. “Well, that’s my point about God. He is evident in the things He created. And mankind has sensed that since the first cavemen. Much of human history has involved the quest to get to know this Cre
ator.”

  The guy was making sense—but for some reason Sweeney hated to admit it. Feelings that he thought he’d grown out of were waking up within him, like Santa Claus showing up in his car for a chat. He tried to throw Keith a curveball. “But isn’t all that explained by evolution?”

  “Bah!” Keith swatted the air with his huge hand. “Evolution doesn’t answer anything. It creates more problems than it solves. And it only muddies the water in the discussion about God—a convenient way for people to avoid the topic.”

  Uh-huh. Sounds like I hit a hot button. Sweeney decided he’d better bail on this conversation before it got any more uncomfortable. “Hmm. That’s, uh, interesting. I—”

  “Think about this.” Apparently Keith wasn’t going to let him off so easy. “According to evolutionists, the very first living things were some form of a primitive single-celled organism that sprang into being out of the primordial slime. This organism then multiplied and eventually became male and female organisms that had to get together in order to reproduce. Now, consider the complicated procedure required for reproduction to occur. Since those systems wouldn’t work unless they were fully formed, how did those species reproduce while their reproductive systems were forming?”

  “Hmm…good question. But I’m not an expert on this stuff. Somebody probably knows the answer.”

  “That’s what most people say. But now consider this.” Keith’s smile turned more clever. “What caused the impetus for reproduction in the first place?”

  Sweeney furrowed his brow. “What?” He was now officially in way over his head.

  “I mean, in the case of the single-celled protozoan, if its very existence was a complete accident, what reason would it have to continue living, much less reproduce? What would drive it to do so?”

  Sweeney shrugged again. “I don’t know. It just did.”

  Keith snapped his fingers. “Exactly. Even if that’s the way it happened, and I don’t believe it is, God is evident in the impetus—He’s the ‘reason for being’ even for the lowliest single-celled creature. That’s why I say evolution answers nothing. It only confuses the question.”

  “Huh.” Sweeney didn’t know what else to say.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Sweeney turned to see a uniformed police officer.

  “Hey, ty nastupnyi, ruhaisia!” The man was motioning to the waiting passport control officer. Sweeney had been so engrossed in the conversation that he hadn’t noticed he was next in line.

  “Better get up there or they might make you stay here talking to me!” Keith said, adding yet another hearty laugh.

  “Uh, right. Nice to meet you.” Sweeney headed for the booth, digging in his back pocket for his passport.

  The immigration official looked a little like Michael Moore, only without the baseball hat. He took Sweeney’s maroon-covered passport and flipped through it.

  “What is the nature of your visit to Ukraine?”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  The agent eyed him over his glasses. “To find a nice girl, perhaps?”

  Sweeney shook his head. “Nothing like that. Only sightseeing.”

  The immigration official’s dubious look said, That’s what they all say. Sweeney had to keep from rolling his eyes. Instead, he just blinked at the man. After holding Sweeney’s gaze for a moment, the official grabbed his stamp and slammed it down on the passport like he was trying to kill it. Then he handed it back. “Enjoy your holiday,” he said with a smirk.

  Sweeney bypassed baggage claim, having brought only his day-pack as a carry-on. When he finally emerged from the airport ten minutes later, the air was crisp, though the sun was shining brightly.

  Pretty girls stood like sentinels around each airport entrance, holding signs advertising what appeared to be matchmaking services. Several approached him, but he waved them off before they could even ask if he was interested. That they would lump him together with the leisure-suit Larrys he’d seen in the airport was enough to make him want to puke.

  He pulled a slip of paper from his wallet with the name of his hotel, the Lybid. He made a beeline for the first taxi he could see, parked just behind a row of buses. The driver was leaning on his car and smoking a cigarette. When Sweeney showed him the piece of paper, the man crushed out his cigarette with a sigh, as if taking the fare was a severe imposition. He motioned to the passenger door and, without a word, climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Friendly guy. I should introduce him to Brother Keith.

  The drive into Kiev lasted thirty minutes, during which time neither he nor the driver spoke. Sweeney was actually grateful for the silence. The more he thought about his discussion with the friar, the more it irked him. It wasn’t so much the talk about origins and man’s search for meaning that bothered him, it was the assertion he’d made at the beginning of their conversation. “Sometimes our motivations make us ignore the obvious…” Something about that idea put a bad taste in his mouth.

  Sweeney was the son of a preacher. But there had come a time when he’d decided that if the religion of his parents were true, there was no way he could ever make it to heaven. He just wasn’t good enough at obeying rules.

  And so he’d decided to believe it was false. Now, the story of a boy looking right past perfectly good switches was stuck in his head. Maybe because it was only so much psychobabble. Or maybe because it hit too close to home.

  Or maybe you are jetlagged out of your mind and just need a hot shower and something to eat besides airplane food.

  When the taxi arrived at the hotel, Sweeney used some Ukrainian money to pay the driver. He went inside the hotel and presented his passport to the clerk. Five minutes later he stepped from the elevator on the fifth floor and found his room.

  It was about as luxurious as an old Motel 6, with light gray paint and cheap pressboard furniture. He poked his head in the bathroom. By the looks of the tile and fixtures, it had last been renovated sometime around 1970. But he really didn’t care as long as there was hot water. He was reaching for the tap when there was a knock at the door.

  John and Rip were grinning at him when he looked through the peephole. He exhaled, then flipped the lock and swung the door open. “Fancy meeting you here. Are we allowed to be friends yet?”

  John pushed his way inside and flopped down on the bed. “I don’t know. It looked like you were having a great time with that big dude at the airport.”

  Sweeney ran a hand through his blond hair. “Yeah. Nice guy.”

  Rip spoke up. “Man, ese. Maybe I’m loco, but to me, he looked kinda like Buzz.”

  John nodded vigorously. “I thought so too. Except for the man-dress.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Sweeney said.

  Rip sat on the edge of the dresser. “So what now?”

  John dug in his pocket and produced a cellular phone. “I just got off the phone with Phoenix. We’re supposed to meet her at a park near here in an hour. That gives us time to grab a bite to eat before we go.”

  Sweeney groaned. The shower would have to wait.

  5

  ALEXI TRIED TO LIFT his head, but it was too heavy. The pounding made it impossible to concentrate on anything. One minute he was trying to focus on his surroundings, the next he was back at home during a happier time.

  “Quickly, Alexi. We’re going to miss the wedding!”

  Alexi had stuck out his stubbly chin so he could get at it more easily with the straight razor. “Yes, Mamo. I know. But I don’t think Vasyl’ will be on time either. If I know him, he will still be drunk from the party his friends threw for him last night.”

  Mother shuffled into the small kitchen where Alexi was finishing his shave. “Ech. I don’t know what Galia sees in that durnyk. You should have married that one, Alexi.”

  “If she’s dumb enough to marry Vasyl’, why would I want her? Besides, she has bad teeth.”

  “Feh!” his mother spat. “You will never get married at this rate. Too picky!” She crossed h
erself and lifted the cheesecloth off the korovai she’d made for the wedding.

  Truth be told, his mother’s special bread was nearly the only reason he went to weddings anymore. At fifty-three, he was too old to dance with the girls. And besides, he hated to be away from his animals.

  It wasn’t that Alexi didn’t want a wife. He’d always planned to marry and raise a family of his own. But he knew he wasn’t much to look at, and social grace had never been his strong point, especially among the ladies. His animals were much less complicated. They were always there for him, listening, never judging. Caring for them and for his mother became the focus of his life. A wife would have simply gotten in the way.

  “Are you coming, sonechko?” She was standing by the door, tying a colorful scarf around her head.

  “Tak, Mamo. Just let me get my tie.” Alexi picked up the worn pink towel that sat on the table next to the shaving mug and brush. He wiped the rest of the suds from his face as he rose out of the creaky wooden chair. “You go ahead. I’ll cut through the woods and meet you on the road.”

  “All right.” His mother looked up at the icon of Saint Nicholas, the miracle worker that had watched over their kitchen for as long as Alexi could remember. She crossed herself, kissing her fingertips in the old way, before picking up her bread and shuffling out the door.

  Alexi remembered arriving on time at the wedding. It was held at the church, though neither the bride nor the groom ever attended services. Friends and relatives stood to observe the ceremony, since there weren’t any pews. Everything went smoothly, except that the groom arrived late and already drunk, something that surprised no one. Afterward, the bride and groom went to leave their wedding bouquet at the war memorial in the center of town, while everyone else made their way the short distance to the klub for the reception.

  Alexi followed, looking forward to the feast. The father of the bride was known for making excellent mead. And there was sure to be plenty of pork, chicken, borscht, and maybe even caviar. Not to mention Mother’s beautiful wedding bread.

  He slipped out soon after the dancing started, however, and not just because his cow was due to give birth anytime. In truth, he felt lonelier around all those people than he did when he was alone. He made his way home and went to the shed where the heifer was tied up. He made his bed there, intending to watch her through the night.