make my heart race and to make me worry that I’d have to return Bobby’s
jeans with urine stains.
“You! You!” he said more angrily than ever and seemingly with more
surprise, too, as though my appearance in his dusty attic were so
outrageous and improbable that his astonishment would grow at an
ever-accelerating rate until his brain went nova.
He swung at me again. He would have missed this time even if I hadn’t
wrenched myself away from the bat. He was a priest, after all, not a
imija assassin. He was middle-a,ed and overweight, too.
The baseball bat smashed into one of the cardboard boxes with enough
force to tear a hole in it and knock it out of the stack into the empty
aisle beyond. Although woefully ignorant of even the basic principles
of the martial arts and not gifted with the physique of a mighty
warrior, the good father could not be faulted for a lack of
enthusiasm.
I couldn’t imagine shooting him, but I couldn’t very well allow him to
club me to death. I backed away from him, toward the lamp and the
mattress in the wider aisle along the south side of the attic, hoping
that he would recover his senses.
Instead, he came after me, swinging the bat from left to right, cutting
the air with a whoosh, then immediately swinging it right to left,
chanting “You!” between each swing.
His hair was disarranged and hanging over his brow, and his face
appeared to be contorted as much by terror as by rage. His nostrils
dilated and quivered with each stentorian breath, and spittle flew from
his mouth with each explosive repetition of the pronoun that seemed to
constitute his entire vocabulary.
I was going to end up radically dead if I waited for Father Tom to
recover his senses. If he even had senses left, the priest wasn’t
carrying them with him. They were put away somewhere, perhaps over in
the church, locked up with a splinter of a saint’s shinbone in the
reliquary on the altar.
As he swung at me again, I searched for that animal eyeshine I’d seen
in Lewis Stevenson, because a glimpse of that uncanny glow might
justify meeting violence with violence. It would mean I was battling
not a priest or an ordinary man, but something with one foot in the
Twilight Zone. But I couldn’t see a glimmer. Perhaps Father Tom was
infected with the same disease that had corrupted the police chief’s
mind, but if so, he didn’t seem as far gone. as the cop.
Moving backward, attention on the baseball bat, I hooked the lamp cord
with my foot. Proving myself a worthy victim for an aging, overweight
priest, I fell flat on my back, drumming a nice paradiddle on the floor
with the back of my skull.
The lamp fell over. Fortunately, it neither went out nor flung its
light directly into my sensitive eyes.
I shook my foot out of the entangling cord and scooted backward on my
butt as Father Tom rushed in and hammered the floor with the bat.
He missed my legs by inches, punctuating the assault with that
now-familiar accusation in the second-person singular: “You!”
“You!” I said somewhat hysterically, casting it right back at him as I
continued to scoot out of his way.
I wondered where all these people were who supposedly revered me. I
was more than ready to be revered a little, but Stevenson and Father
Tom Eliot certainly didn’t qualify for the Christopher Snow Admiration
Society.
Although the priest was streaming sweat and panting, he was out to
prove he had stamina. He approached in the stooped, hunch-shouldered,
rolling lurch of a troll, as if he were on a workrelease program from
under the bridge to which he was usually committed. This cramped
posture allowed him to raise the bat high over his head without
cracking it against an overhanging rafter. He wanted to keep it high
over his head because he clearly intended to play Babe Ruth with my
skull and make my brains squirt out my ears.
Eyeshine or no eyeshine, I was going to have to blast the chubby little