The Natural Order of Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

coffee on his head. He clutches his face and collides into the cinderblock wall. Edmund Campion, the school’s photojournalist, is there to snap a picture to commemorate his suffering. A portrait for the ages. In the locker room, Frank limps to the nearest toilet stall and dry heaves. Hot tears coarse down his cheeks and drip one by one into the bowl. He marvels at the simple beauty of the rippling water.
    Stunned by yet another humiliating defeat, his teammates shower, get dressed, and leave the stadium without speaking to him. Coach Kaliher doesn’t make an appearance at all.
    Alone and trembling with pain, Frank collapses on a bench. The silence is kind to him. He closes his eyes and sees his teachers, the principal, the wealthy philanthropists like Will’s father, and somewhere far away, he hears a voice—soft, kind, gentle, just Christ-like enough to lend irony to this diabolical display of commerce. Or is it Pilate’s voice that he hears? It’s difficult for him to distinguish between the two: “Parking fees, concessions, seat licenses, television revenues, book deals, increased enrollment …”
    Secretly, Frank is glad he has done this terrible thing, glad he has brought this machine to a grinding halt, but he also knows that he will never get away with it. There are consequences in this life and in the next, or so he has been told, and when he leaves the stadium, he expects to find an angry mob waiting under the luciferian light, but no one is there, not even his parents, and as he walks home through the labyrinth of streets and listens to the brittle leaves scattering along the pavement, he can sense a dark presence.
    Behind him the gothic bell tower rises stately and imperturbable above the evening, above the decades and the centuries, and somewhere within its shadow, the eyes of a thousand angry souls watch and wait, never letting him out of their sight.

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    On a Monday morning in early October, three weeks before the big game, Malachy McSweeney paces back and forth on the loading dock of the Burning River Brewery, going round and round with the automated speed of a conveyor belt. The first stinging winds of autumn come whipping off the lake, kicking up dust and leaves and scattering cigarette butts across the parking lot. Somehow the icy air shrivels his already haggard face and drains his cheeks of color like the crabapples that litter the ground. His coffee quickly turns tepid and tastes acidic on the tip of his tongue. To keep warm he pauses beside a steel barrel where he vigorously rubs his hands above the dying embers. His fellow truck drivers huddle beside him, and in an oddly lyrical low-life patois fused from the slang of a dozen different languages and never heard outside the perimeter of these wretched streets, the men grumble about the impending winter imprisonment with their nagging wives, unappreciative children, and disobedient dogs; dreaded months of sleet and snow when an epidemic of cabin fever sweeps through the city, making the men do things so desperate and despicable that many seek the guidance and mercy of the Jesuits.
    Like a squadron of soldiers in a defeated army, the men form a disorganized line and await further orders. They fart and yawn and pick their teeth. They cough and wheeze and drum their chests with clenched fists. They stomp their heavy, black boots in time to the rhythmic scuff and scrape of forklifts against wooden pallets and the sharp percussion of robotic arms clanking against longneck bottles of beer. Then from out of this cacophonous canticle of machinery comes a booming voice that commands them all to “Shut it!”
    Cloggy Collins emerges from the sweltering inferno of his small, windowless office and stares them down. Already chewing his first cigar of the day and perspiring profusely through his white collared shirt, Cloggy trundles across the loading dock, cradling what at first appears to be a large cardboard sarcophagus stuffed with human body