“C’mon, Roy, you don’t really believe that crap that he —”
“Scuse me,” Jefferson said, picking up his lunch box. He walked to the very back of the bus before finally sitting down, as far away from Bayle as he could get.
The bus moved towards town. As the simple shock of Jefferson’s Wrightian defence began to somewhat diminish, Bayle more than once tried to make conciliatory eye contact with the janitor, but with little success. Each time Bayle would catch him looking in the direction of the front of the bus Jefferson would quickly turn his head to look out the window beside him, a hard expression of obvious distaste on his face.
Finally Bayle gave up, settled on watching the bland prairie farmland repeat itself past his own window. His mind, however, stayed stuck on the infuriating contradiction of a working-class guy like Jefferson playing dupe to, and even defending, such an obvious big business mouthpiece as Wright. Empiricus knows, Bayle wasn’t even remotely political — what kind of card-carrying sceptic was? — but it just didn’t make sense. And it bothered Bayle like hell that it didn’t. Worse, it bothered him like hell that it bothered him so much that it didn’t.
Eventually, and meant to be fortifyingly said only in his head: “He who suspends judgement about everything ...” Bayle said, attempting to calm himself, voice trailing off. “He who suspends judgement about everything ...” he said again, getting no further the second time than he did the first.
“What’s that again?” the bus driver asked, seeing Bayle sitting alone now, assuming his moving lips were meant for him at the head of the bus to hear.
“Nothing. Just talking to myself,” Bayle said.
14
I mean, of course, if you don’t mind me asking.”
The impact of being addressed in Classical Greek here at Larry’s — women’s tag-team wrestling live from Rochester, New York, on each of the room’s four big-screen televisions — was nearly that of the effect of the three rapidly administered shots of Wild Turkey. Bayle was back, but by himself this time, and only on the condition of just one quick one, and only then because he thought the change of scenery from his small room at The Range might alleviate his soul-searching procrastinating. He turned around from the bar to find a black-suited minister grinning good-naturedly and offering Bayle a duplicate of what he was drinking, vodka on the rocks.
Seeing that both of Bayle’s hands were full with a glass of bourbon and a bottle of Budweiser — Bayle’s condition of coming already broken almost as soon as he had come — “Oh, dear, I see that you’re already fully occupied,” the minister frowned. “Not to worry,” he said, broad smile of before promptly reappearing. He emptied the contents of one drink into that of the other and placed the empty glass on the bar top. “A double play!” he said, clinking Bayle’s glass, expertly sipping down a good third of the three fingers of alcohol in his own. Bayle cautiously sipped his own Wild Turkey without saying a word and seriously considered whether he had only imagined the Greek.
“So what’s it going to be then?” the minister said, his face now suddenly serious, even stern. “Knowledge or belief? Which one is it that rules your tender soul? And don’t try to sell me any of that Hegelian dialectism nonsense. As they say in my business” — he tugged at his white clerical collar — “you can’t serve two masters. Which is it?” He drank again, eyes slightly narrowed and never leaving Bayle’s. Bayle, more than a little baffled, could only sip.
“Oh, what a bloody ass I am,” the minister said, all affability again. He wiped his free hand on his black trousers before presenting it to be shaken. “Charles Warren. Actually, the Reverend Charles Warren, but I’d be very happy if you would just call me Chuck.”
Still a little overwhelmed, Bayle, by instinct, offered over his beer-holding hand.
“Ah ha, putting your best hand forward!” Warren said. He took the bottle of Budweiser from Bayle and put it on the bar beside his empty vodka glass.
“Bayle,” Bayle said, shaking-hand free now and meeting Warren’s. “Peter Bayle.”
“Oh, I know who you are, Peter. You don’t mind if I call you Peter, do you?”
“No, no, not at all ....” Bayle said, shaking his head no, as puzzled-looking as before.
“Oh, I get it,” Warren said. “I know you but you don’t know me. Gotcha. Just like poor old Job down there on the farm. Let’s grab a seat, shall we? It’s really not as mysterious as it all might at first appear. Which, incidentally, is just what Job found out in the end, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but what did Tillich mean, exactly, by Ultimate Concern? Collecting baseball cards? Sniffing women’s used underthings? Belief in an omniscient, all-powerful Being? I mean, really, Peter, let’s narrow down our terminology here a little bit, what?”
The Reverend Warren, in his part-time capacity as the Warriors’ team minister, had heard through Samson about Bayle’s philosophical background almost as soon as Bayle arrived in town and hoped that he and Bayle could, “You know, banter on a bit about the Ontological Argument and what not” because “one does get a bit starved out here in the territories for really meaty conversation.”
St. Louis-born one year after Bayle, Warren had attended Christ’s College, Oxford, on a full scholarship and almost completed his doctoral thesis on Aquinas after an outstanding undergraduate career at Washington University when he was called back home to Missouri during his father’s fatal battle with leukemia. His mother falling infirm shortly after her husband’s death, Warren, an only child and his mother’s sole benefactor, entered the local Baptist ministry because, as he explained it to Bayle, “First, I thought I could get paid to talk about Aquinas and Anselm all day long — Wrong! — and second, the Catholics, my first choice, though impressed by my academic background, wanted me to go to school for another five years. No could do. Health insurance for a sixtythree-year-old woman with a history of heart problems does not come cheap, let me tell you.”
After an unprecedented five-month accelerated stint at a local seminary (“I could have done the whole thing in two weeks, tops, no exaggeration”) he was ordained by G.A.R.B. — the General Association of Regular Baptists — a rigidly fundamentalist sect, and sent off to tend to his present flock, a medium-sized church in a medium-sized conservative town in the Midwest that in its beer-with-a-shot-on-the-side, workingclass heart, appeared willing to close its eyes to Warren’s public disregard of his G.A.R.B.-ordained order of abstinence.
His mother, now an invalid in a nursing home in the suburbs of St. Louis, although well-served by the monthly cheques Warren made sure paid for the best health care she could receive, no longer seemed to recognize him when he visited, and for some reason would only talk about a torrid love affair she claimed to have had with Don Ho when she was a WAC serving in Hawaii during World War II. Warren confessed that he could not watch “Hawaii Five-O” re-runs on television without being overcome by waves of overpowering sadness of “nearly Kierkegaardin proportions.”
When not at the church, he read like a demon at the local library most evenings (“demon” being his choice of expression), usually stopped in at Larry’s afterward in order to “wind down a little bit,” and eventually hoped to get a congregation with “a little less ... literal interpretation of the Bible,” preferably on the east coast. He also, Bayle observed, chain-smoked unfiltered Kents, lapped up his drinks with an intensity not even matched by Bayle at his own swinish worst, and, after a certain intoxicated point, would occasionally affect the English what? at the end of his sentences. Within an hour Bayle couldn’t be sure if Warren was a liberal Protestant in a conservative church, a closet atheist, or something in between. Warren was, most certainly, an alcoholic mess of a mass of contradictions. He was a man after Bayle’s heart.
“So it’s agreed then that Kant’s entire theory of the Categorical Imperative — his whole system of ethics, in other words — can be clearly and indubitably attributed to the fact that he never got his rocks off.”
“Okay,” Bayle sa
id.
“Right, then. So. On to less abstruse, but no-less-significant matters. Married?”
“No.”
“Alternative lifestyle?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?
“Yes.”
“Ah ha. Name?”
“Jane.”
“Jane. Hmmm. Dark and solemn, or fair and winsome?”
“A little of both.”
“Dark and winsome?”
“The other one.”
“I see.”
A short break in the exchange while more drinks are ordered and served and Warren explicates his understanding of Plato’s theory of love as contained in The Symposium and Bayle once again agrees without qualification to whatever Warren says. (Bayle, when soused, believing that talking about sensation-hating Plato when one was good and loaded was only slightly less obscene than arguing about the existence of God when a beautiful woman was in the room.)
Bayle was:
(a) a crude materialist with a longing for subtler notions;
(b) simply drunk;
(c) all of the above.
“Politics?” Warren continued.
“None.”
“Religion?”
“None.”
“Hobbies?”
“Nope.”
“How fascinating. Breast fed, by any chance?”
“You mean recently, or as a baby?”
“Your call.”
“No.”
“No to which?”
“No,” Bayle said.
“I see. Right, then. Mother and father both still alive?”
“Just mother.”
“Brothers or sisters?”
Bayle didn’t answer.
On the television, the redhead in the Supergirl costume pins, and then bites on the forearm and refuses to be detached from, the stocky woman in the Daniel Boone coonskin hat, cheekless leather chaps, and pink thong. The bartender asks, “Another round for you and slugger here, Rev?” and a vodka on the rocks and Jack Daniels arrive though both are, at the moment, not yet needed.
“To repeat,” Warren said. “Brothers or sisters?”
Bayle didn’t answer.
Warren finished his drink. “Don’t worry, you always get a second chance with all the really important questions.”
Bayle looked up from his own drink. “Really?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just made that up.”
A little before eleven Bayle suggested they cut out for somewhere else, having remembered Davidson saying that was when he usually dropped by Larry’s. Bayle felt a little guilty for having turned down cold the old man’s afternoon invitation for a drink later at the bar and then showing up there just a few hours later. “Any other places around here worth checking out?” Bayle said.
“No need,” Warren said. “Ample refreshments back at my place. Vehicle’s in the lot out back. Just let me settle up my tab with Jake, what?”
Paying Warren as little notice as he did anyone else in the bar, Jake, the bartender, presented Warren with a white slip of paper which Warren only perfunctorily scanned over before hastily initialling and handing back. Warren turned to Bayle beside him at the bar. “Are we off, then?” he said.
But in the three or four minutes it took them to leave the air-conditioned bar and make their way through the parking lot’s maze of mostly pickups red, white, and blue and reach Warren’s red Ford Ranger, they both decided it was pretty late and to call it an evening and promised to get together again before Bayle left town the next week. Warren sat inside his truck but didn’t turn on the ignition, both hands hanging loose over the wheel, staring straight ahead at Kellog Avenue and the blue neon of the Bunton Grocery store across the road. Bayle stood beside Warren’s driver’s side window.
“Bake sale at nine a.m. for the Christian Women for the Restoration of Capital Punishment Fund,” Warren said. “Counselling at eleven.” Bayle didn’t know whether to say he was sorry or simulate some sort of interest. Instead, he watched with Warren the traffic on Kellog roll by through the evening muck of warm black damp.
“It wouldn’t be so bad, you know — the counselling, I mean,” Warren volunteered. “It’s just that... I mean, everybody carries around their own pain, God knows I know that. And talking about it can sometimes help, I know that too. It’s just that, well, it’s just that’s it’s, well ... so fucking boring. I mean, if there was something I could really sink my teeth into, just one person I could really reach, one person I could really help ....”
Whoosh, a passing automobile on Kellog. The air conditioner sticking out of the side of the cinder block cement wall of Larry’s hummed and dripped. The “B” in the Bunton Grocery sign across the street flickered and buzzed. As if with reluctance, Warren started up the truck, put it into gear, and slowly backed out of his parking space. He stuck his head out the window.
“I say, Peter,” he said. “Kept meaning to ask you all night: What’s all this slugger business Jake referred to?”
For a second or two Bayle honestly didn’t know what Warren was talking about. Then, remembering the evening before with Davidson, “Oh, that,” he said. “Just had too much to drink and took a swing at some guy when I was here with Harry last time.”
“Because?”
“Because?”
“Because why?” Warren said, head still hanging out.
“Nothing. Because nothing. Hey, listen, I’ll give you a call before I ship out back north, okay?” Warren waved goodbye and left Bayle to the short walk back to The Range he said he needed to clear his head.
Walking alone through the dark, unfamiliar streets, Bayle wondered about nothing. Wondered about nothing all the way home.
15
A WEEK after Bayle and Patty had gone downtown together to the library they never made it to, Bayle’s mother called him up wanting to know what had happened. Bayle thought she was talking about Patty and him staying out all night and Patty not coming home until the next day, so he reminded her that they’d called to say she was staying over at his place and not to worry.
“I know that, Peter,” his mother said. “I’m the one you woke up at two in the morning and told, remember? But what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Something happened.”
“What do you mean? Nothing happened,” Bayle said, moving the cursor up a paragraph on his computer screen. He was basically done his final paper for his seminar and just needed to go over it one more time before presenting it tomorrow morning at nine.
“All I know is that maybe she wasn’t one hundred percent herself before then, but since that night with you she’s ... it’s like she’s not there, Peter. And she won’t see me. She won’t. She must go to the bathroom when I’m in bed asleep because I swear I haven’t... I haven’t seen my baby girl in ....”
Bayle’s mother lectured, cajoled, harangued, hectored, and told-you-so’d, but she didn’t cry. Bayle’s mother did not cry. That just wasn’t something she did. It was one of the things Bayle had always liked about her.
“Look, I’ve got to go,” Bayle said. “Patty’s going to be fine. I’ll come out and see her soon.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“When, Peter? There’s something’s wrong with her, something’s —”
“I’ve got to go. I’ll come as soon as I get this essay I’m working on done.”
“Something’s wrong with your sister, Peter.”
“Quit saying that. I’ve got to go.”
“Come and see her, Peter.”
“I’ll come as soon as I can.”
Bayle’s nine o’clock seminar the next day came and went with him being granted a twenty-four hour extension. Upon re-reading his paper after he’d gotten off the phone with his mother the night before, the section on Hume had seemed to him a little confused. He spent the next thirteen hours in the Robarts cafeteria drinking bad coffee and reading and making notes on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natura
l Religion, and then another eight more at home drafting pages of new material he eventually decided not to use. He finally made it to Etobicoke two days after his mother’s phonecall, but Patty wouldn’t let him in her room to see her.
Bayle came into the kitchen, a cold pot of tea sitting on the table in front of his mother. He sat down.
“Well?” she said.
“She told me to go away,” Bayle answered.
“I told you. She won’t see anyone,” his mother said. “She’s been like this for over a week now.” Looking up at Bayle, “Peter, I don’t ....” The choke in her throat cut her off. For the second time in three days Bayle’s mother was on the brink of doing what she didn’t do.
Bayle got up from the table and stormed down the hallway, pounded on Patty’s bedroom door.
“Cut this shit out, Patty, and open up the damn door.”
Patty didn’t answer and the door didn’t open so Bayle pounded again, harder and louder. His mother came down the hall to see what was going on.
“Go back in the kitchen!” Bayle yelled.
His mother put her hand to her mouth and suddenly looked every one of her fifty-nine years. “Peter, what’s —”
“Oh, just go back,” a weary voice, Patty’s, managed from behind the still-closed bedroom door.
Bayle put his arm around his mother’s waist and walked her back down the hall to the kitchen. He poured her a cup of tea and kissed her on the top of her head.
Back at Patty’s door he could hear the lock in the bedroom door turning. He waited for it to open and Patty to let him inside. And the door did open. But Patty stood in the doorway with arms folded across her chest in her housecoat, bare feet, and with hair so dirty it positively gleamed in the light of the hallway. Bayle’s scalp itched just looking at it.
Forcing a smile, and as cavalier as he could, “So what’s with the hibernation act, sis?” he said. “You’ve got your seasons mixed up, you know. Winter is for sleeping. Summer is for going boy crazy and hanging out at the mall all day.”
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