Conceived Without Sin (19 page)

These words reached into Buzz and held him. Buzz had no reply. Emotion washed over him, and he began to cry like a boy. He couldn't help it.

Neither could Sam. The two men hugged each other hard, sucking in sobs, already working at shutting off the faucet.

When they looked up, they saw Donna. She was crying too, but not trying to hold it in…

"Come here, Donna," Sam said. She joined
their embrace. The men stopped crying. Not in front of the girl.

The believer, the agnostic, and the tomboy.

They didn't hold each other long. For one thing, they didn't fit. Short, tall, big. Awkwardly, they collapsed onto the benches around the table.

"This is too weird, and I'm too tired," Donna said finally, yawning. "I'm going to bed."

"Thank you," Buzz said, a little late completing the
doxology.

"You're welcome," Donna yawned.

She got up and shuffled into the apartment. Without thinking, she collapsed onto Sam's bed, her clothes on, and fell directly to sleep.

"What's up for tomorrow?" Sam asked.

"I guess we come out of the closet and tell Donna we're gay."

Sam shook his head and stood up. He was suddenly dog tired. Spent.

"That's a very, very bad joke. I'm going to bed, too.
Donna's the only one with any sense around here."

"No argument here on all three points," Buzz said, getting up. "Good night."

"And Sam?"

"Yeah," Sam said, stopping at the screen door.

"Nothing."

Chapter Nine

1

Donna opened her eyes and was momentarily disoriented.

Where am I?
Then it came to her.

Down the shore.

How did I get to Sam's bed again?

Then, she remembered coming off the beach.
Oh.

She pulled herself up, leaned her back against the headboard, and began her morning offering. She began it halfheartedly, repeating the words without thinking about them. Then, she came to a halt,
realizing that she had fallen into the old habit, and remembered her resolution.

She started over–and prayed it
with normal human effort.

She walked into the living room and passed the gangly Sam sprawled over cushions on the floor. He was wearing nerdy, paisley pajamas that made her smile. Then she went upstairs to shower and change.

It was a warm, beautiful, knock-your-socks-off day.

When she
came down, feeling refreshed and chipper, she found Buzz wide awake, wearing worn-out clothes, arranging buckets, scrub brushes, rags, and cleaning fluid on the picnic table.

"What's that for?" she asked, blinking.

"This?" He held up a bucket.

"Yeah,
that,"
she said.

Sam came to the door, rubbing his eyes with one fist, and holding a glass of orange juice.

"This is cleaning equipment," Buzz said,
putting the bucket down.

"Oh," Donna said. "For a minute there, I thought it was your CD collection."

"Huh?" Sam asked, still groggy.

"Out with it, Buzz. What do we have to clean?" Donna asked.

"Nothing. You and Sam enjoy the beach. My uncle needs the windows cleaned. That was the deal," Buzz explained, hesitating. "We're not very close, my uncle and me."

"I get it now," Sam said. "Do you want
us to help you?"

"Yup. Great!" Buzz said, heading for the door. "Let's have breakfast first!"

"Uh, Buzz," Donna said, smiling. "I think you're supposed to insist on doing it by yourself a couple more times."

"Why bother? I knew you guys would help. It'll be fun, and we'll do a quick job and we'll get some beach time this afternoon."

"Buzz," Sam said, looking at his watch, "it
is
the afternoon."

"Details, details," Buzz said, already pouring himself a big glass of Tropicana Pure Premium.

+  +  +

Cleaning the windows was alternately dull and fun. Buzz started the fun by spraying his friends with the hose when they climbed the ladders.

Donna poured a bucket of diluted Top Job on his head.

Sam remained silent, grooving to the job at hand.

The Knack cranked out the boom box.
My Sharona.

Lunch
consisted of micro-dogs and Pepsi. They tasted great. There seemed to be an unspoken, casual agreement to lay off the philosophical talk for a day.

+  +  +

After the windows were cleaned, Buzz drove off alone and went to confession. He knocked on the rectory door and asked for a priest. The priest tried to get him into a counseling session, and to convince him that his sins weren't so bad. The
priest even quoted Martin Luther.

Buzz played it straight, didn't get sucked into a gabfest, and received a halfhearted absolution. He believed in the sacrament, and the priest's lack of faith in the teachings of his own Church simply proved to Buzz the need for penance.

+  +  +

The afternoon turned windy, and they didn't stay long at the oceanside. That evening, they went to dinner at Kubels,
and topped the night off by watching
Tin Men.
They laughed heartily. It felt like Sunday all day, even though it was Monday.

Buzz and Donna prayed a Rosary together on the deck while Sam read parts of a book he found on a bookshelf in his bedroom,
Alive,
by Piers Paul Reed. Sam had seen the television movie years before. It was the true story of a plane crash in the Andes that left a team of young
rugby players from Uruguay stranded for weeks. They were forced to eat the flesh of their dead to survive.

Sam was struck by the role the survivors' Catholic faith played in their ordeal, and tried to imagine himself in the place of several of the characters. Which one was he? Which was Buzz? Was Donna like the last woman to die?

+  +  +

After Donna went upstairs, Sam and Buzz found themselves
on the deck. They looked at the ocean.

"About last night," Buzz began. "I'm sorry for losing it."

"Forget it," Sam said. "No need to be sorry."

Buzz nodded. "Thanks."

Sam kept his gaze on the ocean; a silent
you're welcome.

2

New Jersey faded into the east with every mile as they chased the sun to the west. Ohio was hours and hours away. They were in the long, dull, concrete badlands of Pennsylvania.

"You never did tell me how you ended up going to Notre Dame. You never talk about it," Donna told Buzz. "You don't even wear Notre Dame sweatshirts."

Buzz hesitated.
There's not much to tell.

"Come on, Buzz," Sam prodded. "Were you a good student? Did you play sports in high school? Why N.D.?"

"It's a long drive. Plenty of time to kill," Donna added.

"There's not much to tell. But I'll tell you,
anyway," Buzz finally said, taking a sip of coffee. After the night of the cross in the sky, Buzz felt released inside. Now that they knew the worst–at least Sam did–what could it hurt to talk about his past?

Sam leaned back in the front seat. Donna leaned forward, and rested her elbows on the tops of the front seats, with her hands clasped under her chin…

"I wasn't much of a student in grammar
school. I was one of the zillions of kids in the middle eightieth percentile. Then Dad's company transferred him to Cleveland during the summer after eighth grade. It was one of the few jobs he kept for more than a couple of years. He told me once it was because the owner was an alcoholic, too. He used to fly in from New Jersey and go drinking with Dad every once in a while. Mr. Pat McSorley of
the McSorley Automotive Company. They made parts for machines that made engines or electric motors or something.

"I don't remember much about freshman year, just how lonely it was on the first day of school, standing in the cafeteria holding my lunch tray, not knowing where to sit, not knowing anybody, ashamed of my thrift store duds. Isn't it funny how our recollections are tied to what grade
we were in, not to years?

"Anyway, we lived in Lakewood, and I went to Lakewood Public High School. It's a big school, and I kind of got lost there, too. I got mostly Cs and Bs, and made the football team. I got cut from basketball; I wasn't very good at the time. I hung out with the guys on the football team, and did the usual stuff with girls and parties. Stuff I'm ashamed of now. But even then,
I didn't stand out. I wasn't the impulsive person you know me as. I was shy.

"Don't laugh; I really was a shy kid. Introverted. It's funny, but I never really made friends. I had lots of kids I hung out with, but I never connected. I never found that best friend it seemed like everybody else had. I was the new kid from New Jersey, too, and not used to Ohio. I never brought friends home. You can
guess why not.

"When I was a sophomore, I had this really cool English teacher. We had this assignment at the beginning of school to describe something that happened during summer vacation. I don't know what got into me, but I didn't write about my summer, which had been pretty boring. Lots of television. So for the essay, I made believe that I was a cinder block in the school wall and described
empty classrooms. I was just filling out words on the page. Weird, huh?

"Well my English teacher, Mr. Snodgrass, really liked it. I can't believe his name was Snodgrass, but it was. Other kids called him Snotgrass, of course.

"But I thought he was a really cool teacher. He wasn't nerdy, and he wasn't the kind who tried to buddy up to you, either. You could tell he liked teaching. He was creative.
He taught us how to write poetry, haikus and sonnets, and how to write speeches, and even how to write lyrics by using our favorite rock songs as examples. I remember he flipped over my rewrite of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." He wrote that my version was better than the original.

"I started looking forward to his class. He even taught me how to write fiction by picturing everything in my
mind's eye and writing it down. He was always giving me A-pluses. I was his favorite.

"It was all very subtle, though. He didn't talk to me after class and give me heart-to-hearts. He didn't single me out in front of the class. It was like we were having a conversation on paper. He was talking with his red pen in the margins, and I was telling him things with what I was writing. He changed my
life with the language.

"I started to notice things outside of the classroom. For example, I was watching television one night, and I looked over to the outlet on the wall, and noticed that the third hole for the grounding prong looked like a sad, tiny mouth and the top slits in the socket looked like two eyes with a big wide nose. Look at an outlet sometime. You'll see a face. I wrote about the
face on the electrical outlet in class, and Mr. Snodgrass liked it.

"Then, I started to listen to people talk. To their accents, how they formed their sentences. What they
meant
as opposed to what they
said.
Nobody knew this was going on. I barely realized it myself. I looked at what people were wearing. I liked cars, and I tried to guess what kind of cars their parents drove, right down to the
year and color, just from what people wore and talked about.

"This might sound strange, but I fell in love with the world. I remember when my daughter Jenny first started talking. It was like that. She looked at everything for the first time, and was filled with wonder. One time I showed her the engine of my Volkswagen bug, and she flipped out. It was her first engine. Something that bores us
to death was a whole new world for her. I can picture the excitement in her eyes now.

"So I was discovering the
wonder
of the world, like a little kid. I had found my calling: to wonder about the world. Except for becoming a Catholic, of course.

"I think Mr. Snodgrass is responsible. He helped me pay attention. I started to try to put words to things that don't have any words.

"If we want to get
really deep, maybe I was relating to those things I was discovering. You know, I was unseen and un-noticed, too, like the guy in the electric socket. Do you ever feel that way, like you're there, but nobody sees you? Lots of things are like that. I like those things. I've never wanted to be anything; I probably never will want to be anything. I just want to really see the world.

"So Mr. Snodgrass
changed my life. I can see now that he had an agenda for me: to open my mind. Maybe he saw the things that don't have words, too. I don't know. In red pen in the margins, he suggested I read a few books. Novels, mostly. Not profound stuff like Moby Dick, but stuff you couldn't stop reading, like Stephen King and Watership Down. Did you ever read Watership Down?

"No? It's about rabbits. It's great.
There's a rabbit called Bigwig in that book that reminded me of myself. Stupid and strong, and loyal.

"I started reading more and more. I couldn't afford books, so I went to the library. I started picking out my own books. I read slowly, and methodically, night after night, after school. Sometimes I even read during classes. Compulsively. Winds of War and War and Remembrance blew me away. I got
into Robert Heinlein but got sick of him after a while. Lucifer's Hammer, about an asteroid hitting the world. All my favorites come back to me.

"I know what was going on then because it's still going on. I was escaping the
now.
I was escaping the world, even as I was falling in love with it. Maybe it kept me out of trouble. Slowly but surely, in my own, quiet way, going to parties and listening
to the trite conversations and making out with ditsy girls, and–well, I won't get into that–all that stuff became pretty dull compared to travelling the world with heroes like Natty Bumpo, or Stu Redman and Nick Andros from The Stand. I read that book over and over, every few months. It was my favorite. Good good guys, bad bad guys. I swear I might have married Sandi because she reminded me of
Frannie Goldsmith, a character in that book.

"Am I boring you guys?

"No? You want me to keep going?

"Okay, here's what happened. My grades started to go up in other classes. By the end of sophomore year, I even got a couple of As. Somehow, I got straight As in the first semester of junior year. It was like the stars were lining up when that happened. Easy classes, along with the discipline of
playing football, and Dad having a good year–all helped me catch my stride. Even algebra, usually my toughest class, just seemed easier.

"I wasn't thinking about going to college, or even
applying
myself to my studies, as the counselors were always prodding me to do. Getting good grades came with the same amount of effort. I think Mr. Snodgrass was talking me up in the teacher's room, because
teachers started looking at me funny, and giving me the benefit of the doubt with grades.

"Before senior year, guidance counselors started trying to get me to take honors classes. I avoided tough classes in math and science, but did take honors English. I gave it a little more effort, but not much. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, but it was easy, especially with teachers pulling for you. Lakewood
High wasn't a great school. I kind of resented the special treatment from the teachers, but I took the good grades. I didn't want to
study;
I wanted to
read.

"When they sent my report card to my dad, he gave me twenty bucks. That was a fortune for me. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I spent it on Oh Henry chocolate bars and a hard cover of The Stand. I still have it. But I ate the Oh
Henrys." Buzz snorted.

"Then I saw Mary on top of the Golden Dome at Notre Dame, and I knew I had to go there. No, it wasn't for religious reasons. I was long since out of the faith. Dad halfheartedly tried to get me to go to Mass when he went–which wasn't very often, but I had rejected the Church. It seemed to be all guilt and rules. Or all sappy love stuff.