Brother Odd

Page 10

In the large courtyard of the grand cloister, wind rushed down the three-story walls, wielding lashes of brittle snow, whipping up clouds of the softer early snow from the cobblestone floor, thrashing between columns as we hurried along the colonnade toward the kitchen door in the south wing.
Like a crumbling ceiling shedding plaster, the sky lowered on St. Bart’s, and the day seemed to be collapsing upon us, great white walls more formidable than the stone abbey, alabaster ruins burying all, soft and yet imprisoning.
CHAPTER 12
KNUCKLES AND I DID IN FACT SEARCH THE pantry and associated storerooms, though we found no trace of Brother Timothy.
Elvis admired the jars of peanut butter that filled one shelf, perhaps recalling the fried-banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches that had been a staple of his diet when he was alive.
For a while, monks and deputies were busy in the hallways, the refectory, the kitchen, and other nearby rooms. Then quiet descended, except for the wind at windows, as the quest moved elsewhere.
After the library had been searched, I retreated there to worry and to keep a low profile until the authorities departed.
Elvis went with me, but Knuckles wanted to spend a few minutes at his desk in a storeroom, reviewing invoices, before going to Mass. As distressing as Brother Tim’s disappearance was, work must go on.
It is a fundamental of the brothers’ faith that when the Day comes and time ends, being taken while at honest work is as good as being taken while in prayer.
In the library, Elvis wandered the aisles, sometimes phasing through the stacks, reading the spines of the books.
He had periodically been a reader. Following his early fame, he ordered twenty hardcovers at a time from a Memphis bookstore.
The abbey offers sixty thousand volumes. A purpose of monks, especially Benedictines, has always been to preserve knowledge.
Many Old World monasteries were built like fortresses, on peaks, with one approach that could be blockaded. The knowledge of nearly two millennia, including the great works of the ancient Greeks and the Romans, had been preserved through the efforts of monks when invasions of barbarians — the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals — repeatedly destroyed Western civilization, and twice when Islamic armies nearly conquered Europe in some of the bloodiest campaigns in history
Civilization — says my friend Ozzie Boone — exists only because the world has barely enough of two kinds of people: those who are able to build with a trowel in one hand, a sword in the other; and those who believe that in the beginning was the Word, and will risk death to preserve all books for the truths they might contain.
I think a few fry cooks are essential, as well. To build, to fight, to risk death in a good cause requires high morale. Nothing boosts morale like a perfectly prepared plate of eggs sunny-side up and a pile of crispy hash browns.
Restlessly wandering the library aisles, I turned a corner and came face to face with the Russian, Rodion Romanovich, most recently seen in a dream.
I never claimed to possess James Bond’s aplomb, so I’m not embarrassed to admit I startled backward and said, “Sonofabitch!”
Bearish, glowering so hard that his bushy eyebrows knitted together, he spoke with a faint accent: “What’s wrong with you?”
“You frightened me.”
“I certainly did not.”
“Well, it felt like frightened.”
“You frightened yourself.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“For my language,” I said.
“I speak English.”
“You do, yes, and so well. Better than I speak Russian, for sure.”
“Do you speak Russian?”
“No, sir.
Not a word.”
“You are a peculiar young man.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
At perhaps fifty, Romanovich did not appear old, but time had battered his face with much experience. Across his broad forehead lay a stitchery of tiny white scars. His laugh lines did not suggest that he had spent a life smiling; they were deep, severe, like old wounds sustained in a sword fight.
Clarifying, I said, “I meant I was sorry for my bad language.”
“Why would I frighten you?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“I did not realize you were here, either,” he said, “but you did not frighten me.”
“I don’t have the equipment.”
“What equipment?”
“I mean, I’m not a scary guy. I’m innocuous.”
“And I am a scary guy?” he asked.
“No, sir.
Not really. No. Imposing.”
“I am imposing?”
“Yes, sir.
Quite imposing.”
“Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them? Or do you know what innocuous means?”
“It means ‘harmless,’ sir.”
“Yes. And you are certainly not innocuous.”
“It’s just the black ski boots, sir. They tend to make anybody look like he could kick butt.”
“You appear clear, direct, even simple.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But you are complex, complicated, even intricate, I suspect.”
“What you see is what you get,” I assured him. “I’m just a fry cook.”
“Yes, you make that quite plausible, with your exceptionally fluffy pancakes. And I am a librarian from Indianapolis.”
I indicated the book in his hand, which he held in such a way that I could not see the title. “What do you like to read?”
“It is about poisons and the great poisoners in history.”
“Not the uplifting stuff you’d expect in an abbey library.”
“It is an important aspect of Church history,” said Romanovich. “Throughout the centuries, clergymen have been poisoned by royals and politicians. Catherine de’ Medicis murdered the Cardinal of Lorraine with poison-saturated money. The toxin penetrated through his skin, and he was dead within five minutes.”
“I guess it’s good we’re moving toward a cashless economy.”
“Why,” Romanovich asked, “would just-a-fry-cook spend months in a monastery guesthouse?”
“No rent. Griddle exhaustion. Carpal tunnel syndrome from bad spatula technique. A need for spiritual revitalization.”
“Is that common to fry cooks — a periodic quest for spiritual revitalization?”
“It might be the defining characteristic of the profession, sir. Poke Barnett has to go out to a shack in the desert twice a year to meditate.”
Layering a frown over his glower, Romanovich said, “What is Poke Barnett?”
“He’s the other fry cook at the diner where I used to work. He buys like two hundred boxes of ammunition for his pistol, drives out in the Mojave fifty miles from anyone, and spends a few days blasting the living hell out of cactuses.”
“He shoots cactuses?”
“Poke has many fine qualities, sir, but he’s not much of an environmentalist.”
“You said that he went into the desert to meditate.”
“While shooting the cactuses, Poke says he thinks about the meaning of life.”
The Russian stared at me.
He had the least readable eyes of anyone I had ever met. From his eyes, I could learn nothing more about him than a Paramecium on a glass slide, gazing up at the lens of a microscope, would be able to learn about the examining scientist’s opinion of it.
After a silence, Rodion Romanovich changed the subject: “What book are you looking for, Mr. Thomas?”
“Anything with a china bunny on a magical journey, or mice who save princesses.”
“I doubt you will find that kind of thing in this section.”
“You’re probably right. Bunnies and mice generally don’t go around poisoning people.”
That statement earned another brief silence from the Russian. I don’t believe that he was pondering his own opinion of the homicidal tendencies of bunnies and mice. I think, instead, he was trying to decide whether my words implied that I might be suspicious of him.
“You are a peculiar young man, Mr. Thomas.”
“I don’t try to be, sir.”
“And droll.”
“But not grotesque,” I hoped.
“No. Not grotesque. But droll.”
He turned and walked away with his book, which might have been about poisons and famous poisoners in history. Or not.
At the far end of the aisle, Elvis appeared, still dressed as a flamenco dancer. He approached as Romanovich receded, slouching his shoulders and imitating the Russian’s hulking, troll-like shamble, scowling at the man as he passed him.
When Rodion Romanovich reached the end of these stacks, before turning out of sight, he paused, looked back, and said, “I do not judge you by your name, Odd Thomas. You should not judge me by mine.”
He departed, leaving me to wonder what he had meant. He had not, after all, been named for the mass murderer Joseph Stalin.
By the time Elvis reached me, he had contorted his face into a recognizable and comic impression of the Russian.
Watching the King as he mugged for me, I realized how unusual it was that neither I nor Romanovich had mentioned either Brother Timothy being missing or the deputies swarming the grounds in search of him. In the closed world of a monastery, where deviations from routine are rare, the disturbing events of the morning ought to have been the first subject of which we spoke.
Our mutual failure to remark on Brother Timothy’s disappearance, even in passing, seemed to suggest some shared perception of events, or at least a shared attitude, that made us in some important way alike. I had no idea what I meant by that, but I intuited the truth of it.
When Elvis couldn’t tease a smile from me with his impression of the somber Russian, he stuck one finger up his left nostril all the way to the third knuckle, pretending to be mining deep for boogers.
Death had not relieved him of his compulsion to entertain. As a voiceless spirit, he could no longer sing or tell jokes. Sometimes he danced, remembering a simple routine from one of his movies or from his Las Vegas act, though he was no more Fred Astaire than was Abbot Bernard. Sadly, in his desperation, he sometimes resorted to juvenile humor that was not worthy of him.
He withdrew his finger from his nostril, extracting an imaginary string of snot, then pretending that it was of extraordinary length, soon pulling yard after yard of it out of his nose with both hands.
I went in search of the reference-book collection and stood for a while reading about Indianapolis.
Elvis faced me over the open book, continuing his performance, but I ignored him.
Indianapolis has eight universities and colleges, and a large public library system.
When the King gently rapped me on the head, I sighed and looked up from the book.
He had an index finger stuck in his right nostril, all the way to the third knuckle, as before, but this time the tip of the finger was impossibly protruding from his left ear. He wiggled it.
I couldn’t help smiling. He so badly wants to please.
Gratified to have pried a smile from me, he took the finger from his nose and wiped both hands on my jacket, pretending that they were sticky with snot.
“It’s hard to believe,” I told him, “that you’re the same man who sang ‘Love Me Tender.’”
He pretended to use the remaining snot to smooth back his hair.
“You’re not droll,” I told him. “You’re grotesque.”
This judgment delighted him. Grinning, he performed a series of quarter bows, as though to an audience, silently mouthing the words Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
Sitting at a library table, I read about Indianapolis, which is intersected by more highways than any other city in the U.S. They once had a thriving tire industry, but no more.
Elvis sat at a window, watching the snow fall. With his hands, he tapped out rhythms on the window sill, but he made no sound.
Later, we went to the guesthouse receiving room at the front of the abbey, to see how the sheriffs-department search was proceeding.
The receiving room, furnished like a small shabby-genteel hotel lobby, was currently unoccupied.
As I approached the front door, it opened, and Brother Rafael entered in a carousel of glittering snow, wind chasing around him and howling like a pipe organ tuned in Hell. Meeting with resistance, he forced the door shut, and the whirling snow settled to the floor, but the wind still raised a muffled groan outside.
“What a terrible thing,” he said to me, his voice trembling with distress.
A cold many-legged something crawled under the skin of my scalp, down the back of my neck. “Have the police found Brother Timothy?”
“They haven’t found him, but they’ve left anyway.” His large brown eyes were so wide with disbelief that he might have been named Brother Owl. “They’ve left!”
“What did they say?”
“With the storm, they’re shorthanded. Highway accidents, unusual demands on their manpower.”
Elvis listened to this, nodding judiciously, apparently in sympathy with the authorities.
In life, he sought and received actual — as opposed to honorary — special-deputy badges from several police agencies, including from the Shelby County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Office. Among other things, the badges permitted him to carry a concealed weapon. He had always been proud of his association with law enforcement.
One night in March 1976, coming upon a two-vehicle collision on Interstate 240, he displayed his badge and helped the victims until the police arrived. Fortunately, he never accidentally shot anyone.
“They searched all the buildings?” I asked.
“Yes,” Brother Rafael confirmed. “And the yards. But what if he went for a walk in the woods and something happened to him, a fall or something, and he’s lying out there?”
“Some of the brothers like to walk in the woods,” I said, “but not at night, and not Brother Timothy.”
The monk thought about that, and then nodded. “Brother Tim is awfully sedentary.”
In the current situation, applying the word sedentary to Brother Timothy might be stretching the definition to include the ultimate sedentary condition, death.
“If he’s not out there in the woods, where is he?” Brother Rafael wondered. A look of dismay overcame him. “The police don’t understand us at all. They don’t understand anything about us. They said maybe he went AWOL.”
“Absent without leave? That’s ridiculous.”
“More than ridiculous, worse.