The Natural Order of Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

celebratory toasts have turned into drunken disputes about sacking the head coach and the almost blasphemous suggestion of replacing the starting quarterback with an inexperienced backup. It’s still early in the season, but already the team has lost two crucial games, and playoff hopes are beginning to fade.
    After he parks the delivery truck behind the main classroom building and starts to unload the kegs, McSweeney can sense the priests observing him from high atop the gothic tower. Their eyes burn past cloudy cataracts and through classroom windows smeared with the fingerprints of teenage boys frantic to escape yet another tedious lecture on heaven and hell. Though they speak of tolerance and forgiveness, the Jesuits clearly resent the fact that someone so poor, so uneducated, so utterly incapable of managing acrisis can wield such enormous power over them; that a man like Malachy McSweeney, a humble truck driver and inhabitant of the surrounding slums, can in some way be responsible for the fate of the football team and thus for the fate of the entire school. The fact that his son is the star quarterback is obviously a divine blunder, a cosmic joke. It goes against the natural order.
    Trying to ignore their stares, McSweeney rolls the kegs one by one down the steep incline into the cellar, where he places them in neat rows against the limestone walls. After completing this task, he removes his cap, bows his head, and waits for the customary blessing. He stands there for five minutes, but no one comes to greet him, not even to check the inventory or sign the invoice. Cold air roars through the baffling network of musty tunnels and sounds like a priest making a grim proclamation from the pulpit:
Failure in children can always be traced back to the parents!
    The words fly out of the dark like an assassin’s dagger; they hit their mark, strike deep, and McSweeney, fearing the mysterious power of the priests, races up the incline, climbs inside his truck, and speeds away from the school’s haunted landscape.
III
    Although the rest of his route is a familiar one, to McSweeney it seems utterly alien and uncharted. The convenient marts and liquor stores are suffused with a ghastly blue light, and the sales clerks regard him with eyes that reflect their deep suspicion of thieving humanity. As morning turns to afternoon and as the white lines in the road begin to hypnotize him, he finds himself driving past his house, which is nowhere near his next stop. He shifts the truck into high gear and turns the volume up on the radio, but still he hears, or at least imagines he does, his wife’s voice, a sharp, high-pitched, nerve-rattling squawk that rips through the paper-thin walls of their bedroom, carried aloft on the massive swells of early arctic air. Her duty in life is to remind him of his utter ineptitude and to recite an endless list of repairs—oil the hinges, tighten the faucets, sand and stain the hardwood floors, patch the cracks in the ceilings, clean the storm windows. There is also the small matter of his tossing and turning in bed, his thunderous snores, his peculiar habit of screaming in the night. Her complaints even reach him in the basement, his only refuge, where he spends his evenings on the sofa, watching television and smoking the quality reefer he manages to procure from one of his son’s friends. In the basement he can at least
pretend
to be busy changing the filter on the furnace, setting mousetraps, and sorting through boxes of nails and screws. Usually this little pantomime is enough to appease his wife, but it doesn’t prevent the house from sliding ever further into decrepitude.
    With a heavy sigh he glances at the cardboard model propped up on the passenger seat, his trusty co-pilot, and like a nervous teenager reeling in virginity, he places his hand on her knee. A sudden urge comes over him. Briefly he considers pulling over to the berm, lowering his pants, and pressing his aching manhood against