The Black Mass of Brother Springer Read Online Free PDF Page B

and they'd quit, and so on. Being the Abbott was like—did you ever read The Golden Bough?"
           "I've head of it."
           "There's a legend in The Golden Bough that really fits this place. Some small Greek island had a king, and the only way you could be the king of this island was to kill the current monarch and take his sword. So no matter who was king, he had to sweat blood all of the time because at any moment some son-of-a-bitch might be sneaking up on him with a knife. Well, that's about the size of it here."
           "You seem to have avoided being killed," I remarked.
           "That's because I got down to fundamentals." The Abbott smiled broadly, opened the screen door and spat a stream of tobacco juice into a withered sparkleberry bush. "You're looking at a man who only made one mistake in his life. I've never mentioned this mistake to anybody, but maybe you can learn something from my mistake. I'm originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, and when I was a boy we didn't have many niggers up there. I went to a movie one Saturday afternoon, and I took a seat high in the balcony where you were allowed to smoke. Pretty soon a nigger girl came along and sat down beside me and gave me a proposition. She only wanted two-bits, and I was only eighteen at the time, and in Lincoln, Nebraska, nookie was hard to come by. So I gave the girl a quarter; she popped it into her mouth and we climbed to the very last row in the balcony. I dropped my pants, the girl dropped hers, and bent over the seat—can you picture this?"
           "Very well, sir," I said politely, holding my breath.
           "Well, this was the exact moment that the damned projector broke down. The film stopped, the screen went white, the houselights were turned on while they fixed the projector, and every son-of-a-bitch and his brother turned around and looked up at the little square hole in the projection room. Here I was, right under it, with my pants around my ankles, and this nigger girl with her dress all hiked up and bent over the seat, you see—what are you laughing at?"
           "I think it's funny." I wiped my streaming eyes.
           Abbott Dover scowled darkly, which made me break into fresh peals of laughter. He nodded soberly.
           "I suppose it is funny at that. Anyway, I spotted a former school teacher in the audience, two women friends of my mother's, a dentist and several boys that I knew around town. Nobody laughed at me; they were horrified, I supposed, because I had a pretty good reputation. I pulled up my pants and scooted down the stairs and I've never been back to Lincoln since. I joined the Army in Saint Louis, and I stayed in the Army until I retired in 1954. The moral of that story is never look at the projector when it breaks down."
           "It sure is a good story," I said weakly, holding my sides.
           "I didn't mean to get off the track, but one mistake can change the course of your entire life. I vowed never to make another, and I haven't. I came out of the Army a retired first sergeant, with a nice bank account, and a yen to settle in Florida. I still don't think it's safe to go back to Nebraska. This was in 1954. I'm wheeling down the highway out there in my new Ford convertible, and I spot this place. It was after dark, and I thought it was a motel, so I pulled on in. There were only three monks here then, two niggers and one white man. They put me up for the night, and the next day I saw what the situation was and took over. The place was going to rack and ruin."
           "How did you get control so easily?"
           "I told them I'd put the monastery on a paying basis. The orange grove was ready for picking, but the three monks were too lazy to get their butts out there, and they were living on goat milk and grits. The original fund was long gone; there were two years of back taxes due on the property, and the Abbott, a tall, lean ornery son-of-a-bitch