The Centaurus

“Your prayers were not with me this afternoon,” she breathes, breathless.

“Hello! Were your girls beaten?”

“Mm.” Already she pretends, and indeed slightly feels, some boredom. She gazes toward the game and makes the golden leaves of her coat swirl with her hands in the pockets.

“Do you always attend boys’ games?”

“Shouldn’t I? To learn things? Did you play basketball?”

“No, I was extremely inept as an adolescent. I was always picked last.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

“That’s the mark of a great truth.” She winces at this edge of evangelism in him, and sighs heavily, explaining, as if in response to an impatient insistence of his, “the fact is, if you teach here a while you get so you can’t stay out of the building. It’s an occupational disease. If the school is lit, you wander over.”

“You live so close.”

“Mm.” His voice disappoints her. She wonders if it is a natural law, that men the proper size must have inadequate voices. Must she always, in some tiny facet of every encounter, be disappointed? In revenge, she teases him with, “You’ve changed since you were always picked last.”

He laughs curtly, baring his quick tobaccoish teeth in an instant, as if a longer laugh would betray his position: a captain’s laugh. “The last shall be first,” he says.

This a little bewilders her, ignorant of the allusion yet aware, from the satisfied tension of his tan chiseled lips, that it is one. She gazes past his shoulder and, as always when threatened by the possibility that she is stupid, lets her eyes go out of focus, knowing that this renders more profound their sable beauty. “Why-?” She stops her lips. “I won’t ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Never mind. I forgot who I was talking to.”

“No, please. Ask, and ye shall receive.” He hopes that by sprinkling the salt of blasphemy on her tail he can hold her here, this golden dove, this sandy sparrow. He suspects she was going to ask him why he had not married. A difficult question; he has sometimes searched for the answer. Perhaps it was that war displays women unflatteringly. Their price goes down, and it is discovered that they will sell for any price-a candy bar, a night’s sleep. Their value is not pres ent to themselves, but is given to them by men. Having been forced to perceive this makes one slow to buy. But this would not be an answer that could be spoken.

In truth this was the question on her mind. Was he some kind of nance? She distrusts all ministers and men too well groomed. He is both. She asks, “Why are you here tonight? I’ve never seen you at a game before, you only ever come here to bless an assembly.”

“I came,” he answers, “to shepherd forty pagan brutes from my Sunday school. For some reason I never understood, Zimmerman showered basketball tickets like ma

She laughs. “But why?” Anything that diminishes Zimmerman makes her heart gush gratefully.

“Why?” His raven eyebrows lift in two shapely arcs above his rounded eyes whose irises, full in the light, are not black but a fleckish dark gray, as if the jelly were veiling gun powder. This sense of danger, of dreadful things he has seen, excites her. Her breasts seem to float on her ribs warmly; she suppresses an instinct to bring her hands to them. Her wet lips are framed to release laughter even before his jokes, indignant questions, are out. “Why does anything like this happen to me?” he sternly asks, slightly pop-eyed. “Why do all the ladies of my parish bake cupcakes once a month and sell them to each other? Why does the town drunk keep calling me on the telephone? Why do these people keep showing up in fancy hats on Sunday morning to hear me prattle about an old book?” Successful beyond his expectations, the warm swirl of her laughter lifting him deliciously, he goes on and on in this vein, much as a foolhardy full-blooded Sioux in his outfit used to war-dance around the spot where a land mine had been marked as buried. Though his faith is intact and as infrangible as metal, it is also like metal dead. Though he can go and pick it up and test its weight whenever he wishes, it has no arms with which to reach and restrain him. He mocks it.

And Vera for her part is delighted to have elicited this; it seems like an accelerated sequence in an old silent movie, this sketch he draws of the church as an empty house where people keep calling and nodding politely and saying “Thank you” as if the host were there. The bubbles tumble from her stomach to her lungs and explode, iridescent, in her glad throat; truly, this is all she asks of a man, all she requires, that he have the power to make her laugh. In laughter her girlhood, her virginity is reborn. Her mouth, outlined in the cerise rim of lipstick that has not rubbed off, stretches to let her gladness out; her gums show, her face, flushed, becomes numbingly vivid, a Gorgon’s head of beauty, of life. A dungareed boy on top of the stack, riding on this rickety raft the ocean of tumult, looks over the edge to find the source of this new noise. He sees below him a head of red hair like a monstrous orange fish sink with a loose twist of one shimmering coil against the horizontal slats of stained wood. Weak with laughter, Vera has lurched and leans her limp weight back. The minister’s flecked eyes melt and his crisp lips pucker bashfully, puzzled. He leans back to join her; an ir regularity in the stack makes a ledge the height of a mantel where with a remnant of his captain’s composure he props his elbows. His body thus shields her from the mass of the crowd; a bower has been made.

…and he upon thy lap oft flings himself back, conquered by the eternal wound of love; and then pillowing his shapely neck (tereti cervice) upon thee and looking up he feeds with love his greedy eyes, gazing wistfully towards thee (inhians in te, dea), while, as he lies back, his breath hangs upon thy lips.

The JV game is over. Though Mark Youngerman’s face is purple, his panting painful, and his body as slippery as an amphibian’s, Olinger lost. The buzz of the crowd changes pitch. Many leave their seats. Those who step outside discover that it is snowing. This discovery is ever surprising, that Heaven can so prettily condescend. Snow puts us with Jupiter Pluvius among the clouds. What a crowd! What a crowd of tiny flakes sputters downward in the sallow realm of the light above the entrance door! Atoms and atoms and atoms and atoms. A furry inch already carpets the steps. The cars on the pike travel slower, windshield wipers flapping, headlight beams nipped and spangled in the ceaseless flurry. The snow seems only to exist where light strikes it. A trolley car gliding toward Alton appears to trail behind it a following of slowly falling fireflies. What an eloquent silence reigns! Olinger under the vast violet dome of the stormstruck night sky becomes yet one more Bethlehem. Behind a glowing window the infant God squalls. Out of zero all has come to birth. The panes, tinted by the straw of the crib within, hush its cries. The world goes on unhearing. The town of white roofs seems a colony of deserted temples; they feather together with distance and go gray, melt. Shale Hill is invisible. A yellowness broods low in the sky; above Alton in the west a ruby glow seeps upward. From the zenith a lavender luminosity hangs pulseless, as if the particular brilliance of the moon and stars had been dissolved and the solution shot through with a low electric voltage. The effect, of tenuous weight, of menace, is exhilarating. The air presses downward with an unstressed sibilance, a pedal note, the base C of the universal storm. The streetlights strung along the pike make a forestage of brightness where the snowfall, compressed and expanded by the faintest of winds, like an actor postures- pausing, plunging. Upward countercurrents suspend snow which then with the haste of love flies downward to gravity’s embrace; the alternations of density conjure an impression of striding legs stretching upward into infinity. The storm walks. The storm walks but does not move on.