IIIi: that evening, members of the School Board arrive at GVPD. The briefing room is arranged to accommodate the visitors, if only with a rough circling of chairs and a pan of carrot cake near the coffee urn.
FARMSWORTH: So, it’s a little odd for me to convene this meeting—I feel I’m on the set of ‘Hill Street Blues’ and haven’t memorized my lines yet.
SLUCHA: Oh, it’s pretty easy—the day’s details are passed about on paper, then some predictable banter with a few ‘what ifs’, then the quintessential “Hey, be careful out there!”
PORTER: Story o’ my life.
FARMSWORTH: Well, you’ve made this rescheduling easy, as I think it would have been a grave mistake to have your presence at the school a third day straight.
PORTER: Hey, the familiarity ain’t bad—
SLUCHA: —but we know what you mean. Your building needs a calm couple of days…
SPRINGER: Calm before the storm?
SLUCHA: Before the simulated storm.
SPRINGER: I meant the message-handling to the public. That won’t be simulated.
BOURBAN: Then again, that’s why we’re here.
FARMSWORTH: Well, yes and no. We had that as our main agenda item before, um, last night’s ruckus…
PORTER: I wouldn’t call it a ‘ruckus’, exactly.
SMITH: I was there, and I’d call it a ruckus.
DOSTUNE: Well, I wasn’t there, but I’ve had to deal with a couple students—one in particular—who might just have more on their minds than actions that transpired, or anything we’d define.
SLUCHA: What do you mean, sir?
DOSTUNE: I don’t mean to speak out of turn—
FARMSWORTH: No, go ahead—we’re not on Robert’s Rules…
DOSTUNE: Hm, those again! Well, what I have to contribute here is probably too subjective for the need to plan for Monday,
SPRINGER: We’re planning for post-Monday, at least as far as I’m concerned.
DOSTUNE: Yes, I’m with you there.
PORTER: Wait, aren’t we planning Monday?
BOURBAN: We’re planning for everything, it’s just catching us by surprise that it’s no longer a one-day operation.
SLUCHA: Which means, I think, the initial conception has already done half its job.
FARMSWORTH: You mean, we have already put this theoretical concern to a practical test?
BOURBAN: That is what I believe, and what I think is happening fairly perfectly, these recent little hiccups included.
FARMSWORTH: I’m still interested in what the counselor had in mind: what’s this thing on your mind that’s ‘too subjective’?
DOSTUNE: With your indulgence, I don’t mean to extenuate.
SPRINGER: Speak freely, Helmand.
DOSTUNE: Appreciating that, and even the cue of my name, which you all know is associated with ‘Helmand Province’ and the longest-running war involving US soldiers.
SPRINGER: I didn’t mean to—
DOSTUNE: I’m glad, actually, for this segue, as perhaps it can be fruitful. My identity is rather opaque to kids at our school and—if I may say so—not just in the ways of statistical, brown-skinned presence. Adults, more likely, wonder about my Afghan heritage and how in the world I got here, or how I’d characterize the scariness there, if rarely I’m really asked.
BREAM: I empathize, for the record.
SLUCHA: Technically, we’re off the record, Soledad, if too many times today! (clearing his throat) Um, what I mean, is…we can all chime in as need be.
BREAM: Very reassuring! But also true. Go on.
DOSTUNE: I didn’t see as much of the war in my motherland as most of my peers. My uncle lived in Turkmenistan, to the north and in the Soviet Union; from 1979 onwards I was back-and-forth between my village near Mazar Sharif and Charjou, the ancient crossroads of the ‘silk route’, if you ever want to know about that. I was a kid when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan—you know it, perhaps, from Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but it was much different from our perspective, concerned more about our local ‘bazaar’ than the stakes of the Cold War. Eventually, after the Soviets couldn’t claim a win and Gorbachev also spun into oblivion, I decided to study at the Pedagogical Institute in Charjou, named for Lenin in my first two years and Maktumkhuli in my final exams.
PORTER: Ma-tum who?
DOSTUNE: Maktumkhuli, a Turkmen poet, but that’s beside the point. I was there is the early 90’s when one day a largish Russian man came into our canteen, the place I’d eaten breakfasts and lunches by routine—porridge and bread and jam by morning, broth and cabbage and boiled meat each noon, with endless ladles of warm green tea—brings back memories!
BOURBAN: Are we going anywhere with this?
DOSTUNE: Pardon, I knew I might digress…
FARMSWORTH: No, please—I, for one, am interested.
SPRINGER: Robert’s Rules: I second.
DOSTUNE: Um, ok. Well, I brought this up for something that happened at that canteen—some things that happened, without which, I don’t know if I would have become a high school counselor today.
PORTER: What happened? And—before you say—has everyone had a piece of carrot cake? Can we pass that pan around?
BREAM: We can, Deputy, and I guess I’ll also second the motion.
PORTER: Thanks. Can I get anyone a coffee?
DOSTUNE: I’m fine.
SPRINGER: Me, too; Helmand, what was the issue with this man?
DOSTUNE: As it turned out, he was the estranged husband of one of the regular servers, a happy lady who always put some garnish on our plates—a sprig of spinach from her own little garden, or a lot more butter than we’d need, some pomegranate seeds that the canteen budget wouldn’t have factored, which she’d always coyly deny…. She was as white as mashed potatoes and seemed so happy in a job that served the sashlik-colored students: Turkmen, Uzbek and refugee me. None of that mattered, though, when this big man burst through the door, demanding something she owed him, but not so descript as money, or a key to some safe, or anything we could tell. And we weren’t trying to tell: it wasn’t our business to eavesdrop, as it were.
SLUCHA: I’m curious, naturally, what the law enforcement situation was there at that time.
DOSTUNE: I’m as curious then as now, and as clueless either way. I never saw security at the Pedagogical Institute named after Lenin or Maktumkhuli, even if I saw a thousand traffic cops along my journey there and back to Mazar Sharif. And maybe that’s where I’m going with this. The man went away after a tirade we could probably translate, but had become desensitized to—a domestic quarrel spilling to the streets, about as mundane as a drunk guy singing anthems after midnight… The energy will exhaust him, and any lost winks of sleep will not affect the next day’s dawn.
PORTER: I got issues with drunks singing after midnight, but…
FARMSWORTH: Go on.
DOSTUNE: I also don’t diminish anything as passé anymore. The guy came back a second day, this time with a knife that’s designated for Kurban Bajram, the day of sacrificing sheep. He burst into the canteen doors and yelled in Russian, ‘enough’s enough’; he pummeled into the counter where we had just been served our soup and eager for pilaf—I think that’s what was cooking that day—and, swashbuckling, he swore he’d kill someone today. At first I froze, but ethics commanded that someone would have to suppress this maniac, and I eyeballed who would be with me and realized no one looked above their bowls: they were not involved and pretended to care less, which bothered me then and still today. The guy was too fat to climb over the counter but barreled in through the side door and and bull’s-eyed for his wife, who stood and screamed with nothing more to defend her than the ladle she’d use to give us extra soup.
TIOSOOK: She continued to ladle soup?
DOSTUNE: No, she tried to run away, notwithstanding the limited pathways of the kitchen.
BREAM: Was anyone else back there?
DOSTUNE: Not that I saw, so I leaped over the counter and pushed her to go faster on one turn, then reverse on another as the husband changed course. He had some disadvantage with his red-eyed rage and lack of bearing, but he made up for that by flinging pots and picking up a cleaver.
PORTER: Shouldn’t that have been her instinct?
DOSTUNE: What’s instinct in such a situation? Hers was flight, not fight.
TIOSOOK: And yours?
DOSTUNE: Also flight…with her—I guess that’s a third category. Anyway, I yelled over the counter for some help, some bodies to shoulder the door shut after we’d get through—
BREAM: The fat man heard that, too?
DOSTUNE: Maybe, but I used Turkmen, which he likely wouldn’t understand. Anyway, he slipped on some floor grease and that enabled our breakaway. I kept shoving the lady out the main door, trusting that the shoulders of skinny students would barricade the man in. She was hyperventilating, but we managed to waddle to some administrative safe point, as silly as that seems in my imagination today.
SMITH: You saved her.
DOSTUNE: I did nothing more than what a student-teacher should do.
VAN ERDAL: You were a first-responder when others slurped their soup.
DOSTUNE: I didn’t mean to make myself the point of this, as I only said it to make a point—
BOURBAN: namely?
DOSTUNE: (suddenly struck) I..I don’t know.
PORTER: What?
DOSTUNE: I thought I had something relating to what we need for Monday…
SPRINGER: Hearing what I’ve heard, I think we can all agree that—
VAN ERDAL: Quick response means everything.
BREAM: I heard other things. Quick response means something, but also some acknowledgement that common sense is not all that it’s cut out to be. Common sense often assumes someone else will step in…
DOSTUNE: Yes, and we have some mechanisms for finding that ‘someone else’—dialing 911, for instance. But that’s not what I grew up with, personally. And to some degree, the independent thinking required in a crisis is unscripted learning.
FARMSWORTH: Our dilemma exactly. The simulation is for our education—as administrators—but we’re going to have to relay a measure of what we learn to the community, including kids. Our mandatory lock-down drills will never be the same
SLUCHA: A good thing, no?
SPRINGER: Important, yes. It’s hard to say ‘good’ in the onion folds of each person’s experience.
BOURBAN: Onion folds?
DOSTUNE: That’s the fitting analogy: it was pilaf that day, and she would have topped each plateful with a boiled onion.
PORTER: Sounds delicious. Claude, pass the carrot cake, at least.
IIIii: that night, the high school roof. ONAIWAH and BARNADINE emerge from the darkness, the former lighting their way with a Bic butane, the latter, burdened with bags and a rope, holding on to her ponytail.
ONAIWAH: (whispering) Go’damn, Cole, keep up wi’ my reaso’ble pace or else find the way in by yourself.
BARNADINE: Terry, you gotta wait for a man in his prime. This was my brainchild in the first place.
ONAIWAH: Is that what we’re doin’, raisin’ your brainchild’? Holy moses, this is somep’n that’ll stop my dead granny’s heart. This means we gettin’ married, Cole.
BARNADINE: Hush, would’ya? this means we gotta mission to fulfill. No time fer jokes and public attention.
ONAIWAH: We did a bang-up job o’ that las’ night, bringing the house down.
BARNADINE: Right, my exac’ point. We already done the tomfoolery to a rave review—the cops’ report, which jus’ puts us in the back page o’ th’ news, but co’ceivably puts us in the imagination of all who want a show, ’specially something like what the Harlem Globetrotters do.
ONAIWAH: You said it right, honey.
BARNADINE: ’Preciatin’ your support.
ONAIWAH: No, I mean the name o’ tha’ team.
BARNADINE: Globetrotters? I grew up on their shenanigans. I know ’em like the back o’ my hand. More importan’ly, I think we pushed those buttons right.
ONAIWAH: C’mon here, this is where we entered the gol’ mine.
BARNADINE: We got nothin’, jus’ so you remember.
ONAIWAH: O, there’s gold there yet. You gotta have a li’l faith now, Cole.
They open a door that functions like a cellar entrance, stairs immediately going down. On the thirteenth stair ONAIWAH hits a light switch to a distant bare bulb and ceremonially blows out her Bic. They open their arms—BARNADINE dropping his armful—and smile at their surroundings, a rather vacant attic.
BARNADINE: An’ it’s jus’ that easy—you’d think they would have locked that bad boy—
ONAIWAH: All their ’tention was on us, remember? They thought we got in wi’ the reg’lar payin’ customers!
BARNADINE: It’s a matter o’ time before they do a sweep an’ lock that door—
ONAIWAH: Ever’thing’s a matter o’ time, Swee’heart. For now it’s our very own penthouse.
BARNADINE: Well, if not that, it sure beats park benches and the Dorothy Day.
ONAIWAH: Agreed—cozy as can be. So le’s get some sleep—
BARNADINE: If it all’s so easy. Gettin’ in, r’member, is not the only thing we wanted out of this.
ONAIWAH: Ok, Meadowlark, remin’ me.
BARNADINE: We got in here to get in further, tappin’ into the nest egg o’ this place.
ONAIWAH: You got th’ code for the safe?
BARNADINE: No, not exac’ly. But we did damn right getting to that gym floor and almos’ prizin’ away their charity box.
ONAIWAH: Right—almos’, like a police report away.
BARNADINE: They had nothin’ on us, we was only some stumblin’-in sideshow.
ONAIWAH: ’xactly like the Globetrotters.
BARNADINE: Not exactly: people pay to see that stuff. We were, wha’ you call it…?
ONAIWAH: Spontaneous?
BARNADINE: Yeah, gir’, that’s exactly what we were. A force from fantasy.
ONAIWAH: a Deus ex machina.
BARNADINE: a what?
ONAIWAH: That’s somethin’ I remember from my last year in school, good ol’ Miss Johnson and some scenes we read from Midsummer Dream.
BARNADINE: You paid attention in school? This is news to me.
ONAIWAH: Shush, you caveman, I’m wise to you and those who’d say I’m nothin’ better than a drunken Indian find her way to the safety of th’ Twin Cities. Well, I’m a birthchil’ of practically ever’thing tha’s going on, cities or beyon’, white folks, brown, schooled enough or part o’ some gover’mental ‘no child left behind’. It’s been decades ago, you know by my body (which sometimes still turns you on), I was not a bad reader, I’ll let you know. In tha’ play with Miss Johnson we untangled some stuff, Puck the untang’ler, or tangler in some sense. I forgot who was pushin’ him to do what he did, but he put certain lovers to sleep to have them wake up in their midsummer dreams—here I mean not jus’ dreams that you dream but, like, some sort of fantasy. And this Puck was the doer of all o’ that, and so they’d wake up and, well, I forgot really what the result was…
BARNADINE: Maybe that dreams aren’t what they’re cut up to be?
ONAIWAH: No, it wasn’t that easy.
BARNADINE: Broken dreams aren’t easy.
ONAIWAH: Ok, but that wasn’t what we were studying. Somehow, I ’member Miss Johnson gettin’ us to think beyond the concep’ of a dream, like not ‘what if this would happen’, but ‘what if this were happening to me’—she said it that way, ‘to me’, but looked around the class to toss it elsewhere, as if it were some sort of demon she could cas’ away, her to me and me and me.
BARNADINE: You talkin’ crazy.
ONAIWAH: No, I’m recollectin’ clearly. ‘What happens when we wake?’ she said as clear as day. And then, ‘what Deus ex machina must facilitate’… well, I can’t remember word for word, but…
BARNADINE: I think I get your point. Somethin’s gotta make sense from the stuff we dream.
ONAIWAH: No, it wasn’ jus’ that simple. Like another thing about Miss Johnson, should I tell?
BARNADINE: Tell what?
ONAIWAH: Well, about her.
BARNADINE: Why not? You got my interes’
ONAIWAH: It’s more than that. She was a real good person. Still is, I ’spect. Better than the rest of us, anyway.
BARNADINE: Not sayin’ much.
ONAIWAH: True, that, but she was a sophisticate. She told us once she wrote some article to publish about her Jaguar—
BARNADINE: her wild animal?
ONAIWAH: her car, as it turn out. She said the thing came back with some red ink that the ‘fineness’ she wanted to say about this car should have been ‘finesse’, like the fineness of the leather seats were not what her editors wanted to hear.
BARNADINE: She tol’ you as high school kids?
ONAIWAH: Yeah, she did. Come to think of it, she seemed to pass that info onto us as if we’d have a way of weighin’ in. Anyway, that day of Jaguars came an’ went, and then we had lessons on other stuff—it wasn’t at this point Shakespeare’s Puck—when one day we came to class and it was (now I remember, ‘Great Expectations’ movie version) and she blah-blah-blahed for a while before she pulled the screen down to show us what I didn’t want to see.
BARNADINE: Why didn’t you want to see?
ONAIWAH: I had read that and knew the movie wouldn’t be so good. Two orphans more in lust than love—I’d already imagine’ it too much to see a Hollywood hack-job. It wasn’t for me, and I asked Miss Johnson if I could skip the film and jus’ rely on my memory, ’cuz I read it—
BARNADINE: You read what?
ONAIWAH: ‘Great Expectations’—aren’t you hearing me?
BARNADINE: Pardon me, I guess I lost that,
ONAIWAH: an’ anyway, she said I could jus’ put my head down on my desk as she pulled down the screen, and wha d’ya think was there?
BARNADINE: On that screen? the start-up of that film, ‘Great…
ONAIWAH: No, she hadn’t started the film yet. What was there taped on the screen was a gorgeous centerfold of… care to guess?
BARNADINE: centerfold? of you, perchance?
ONAIWAH: that flatters me. No, this was far more photogenic, a Playboy fold of Miss Johnson, who pulled the screen upon herself, looked upon the awkward laughter, then jimmy’ed the full screen up into its sleeve before she thought a while and said, “that was fifteen years ago, when I was studying at Oxford, and bills bein’ what they be, this photoshoot paid plenty.”
BARNADINE: Really? She said that?
ONAIWAH: Really only that. I remember feeling like we could’ve spoke much more on what we’d seen. It wasn’t pornography.
BARNADINE: What was it?
ONAIWAH: It was a teacher breaking free. She tol’ us it paid for university. But more than that, she seemed content that we’d seen it, well, maybe not content…
BARNADINE: ‘resigned’? Is that the way she seemed it?
ONAIWAH: She seemed larger than the stuff we were reading.
BARNADINE: What did the boys say what it seemed?
ONAIWAH: Does that really matter? They were tight-lipped like everyone, as the circumstances should have been.
BARNADINE: So you were right at home in school—
ONAIWAH: Miss Johnson’s class, anyway. And, if we fas’ forward, this pen’house is pretty nice.
BARNADINE: Long as it lasts.
IIIiii: the following morning, after mass at St Margaret Mary Church. Father Faye addresses a modest gathering with routine announcements.
FATHER FAYE: Thank you for celebrating our Lord’s feast at St Margaret Mary’s today. Our services tomorrow are, as ever during the school year, at 8am and 10:30. Wish summer would comply with due attendance, but… God has other plans with you in that vacation time, I trust after all these years. Monday is Presidents’ Day, an unexpected little vacation if you like, and thus our offices are closed. So, that also means choir and AA won’t meet that evening, regretably, if I may editorialize. (smiling at the hint of chuckles in the shadows of the sanctuary) Ok, I shouldn’t editorialize. And vacations are indeed a human effort to ‘remember the Sabbath’, made for man, as Mark chapter 2 reminds.
SERENTINO: (clearing his throat and inching up his right hand) Father, if I may?
FATHER FAYE: Of course, Anthony, that’s what this time if for.
SERENTINO: (again clearing his throat, swiveling to the dozen or so assembled) We usually have after-school events at the high school during a holiday—that’s just how tradition has gone—but I feel it should be known that, be it basketball practice (tapping his chest twice) or, if I recall it right, adult literacy on Monday nights or something else—
GREEN: First aid course, ongoing.
SERENTINO: Yeah, knew it was something else, those won’t be happening this Monday, due, um,.. to, well, they won’t be happening this Monday.
FATHER FAYE: (waiting some seconds) Ok, things unfold and, in this case, stay folded. First aid returns the following Monday, shall we say?
GREEN: Absolutely, ongoing.
FATHER FAYE: Great. God’s will be done. Are there other announcements?
RACINE: (also clearing his throat) Not an announcement, but a prayer request—
FATHER FAYE: Ok, here or privately, as is always welcome…
RACINE: Can’t be really private, as a couple thousand lent witness—
SERENTINO: (under his breath) Tim, you don’t wanna—
RACINE: (perhaps not hearing) Thursday’s basketball game was not, how should one say, the most neighborly thing on display. I also don’t want to, as you suggest, Father, editorialize, but if we can pray for cooler heads to prevail when things get hot—
SERENTINO: If you’re talkin’ about Billy, just please leave that to—
RACINE: I’m not talking about a student, per se; as you know me, I’m about the general peace and good standing.
FATHER FAYE: Indeed, well noted, and—
SERENTINO: that’s not in doubt, Tim, but when a minor is concerned, you should think about protocols.
RACINE: —protocols of prayer, Tony? or public relations?
SERENTINO: What’s that supposed to mean?
FATHER FAYE: Gentlemen, please… Our service of mercy and grace continues.
RACINE: Pardon me, Father.
GREEN: It wasn’t so bad, in my opinion.
SERENTINO: C’mon, Petra, you see we’re not in a closed-context here.
FATHER FAYE: (raising both arms to the few dozens assembled) We’re a family of faith, and, as we close every mass in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (signing the cross accordingly), go in peace, serve the Lord,
CONGREGATION: thanks be to God.
SERENTINO: (leaning a couple rows toward RACINE) Crisis averted.
RACINE: What? You got something sensible to say?
SERENTINO: I always do. I sense what’s sensible and, by the way, stay silent when that’s the wiser way.
RACINE: Huh? Silent on the need to prevent riots?
SERENTINO: You’re outta line, Tim, to talk details of your own department’s ongoing investigation—
RACINE: And you’re looking to stack the deck in the favor of your athlete that caused the trouble. I was just askin’
FATHER FAYE: Guys, this isn’t the place—
RACINE: for community calm, and, since we’re in God’s house, the prayer that should go with it!
GREEN: The request was forwarded like that, you gotta admit.
SERENTINO: I don’t ‘gotta admit’ anything. You wanna paint folks into corners, then call it an exercise of community good will. Well, I know your game—
RACINE: You’re thinking of Gus: you know his game—
SERENTINO: Oh, ok, so you’re now going to play the wise ass—
FATHER FAYE: Gentlemen, please—why don’t we go into my study?
SERENTINO: to pray for what’s been been made a bigger mess?
RACINE: Yeah, I guess that’s a good way of expressing it, Tony. And you well know that a ‘bigger mess’ is in the scheme of things this week.
GREEN: What? Would you macho yourselves down a bit and be true to the reasons you came here today.
SERENTINO: I came to worship and know my place in the Kingdom.
RACINE: Yep, exactly. All of us too.
FATHER FAYE: Jesus challenges the sense of ‘place’ often enough: “the first shall be last, the last shall be first”…
RACINE: and healing on the Sabbath, as you alluded to—
SERENTINO: What, now you’re a priest in training?
GREEN: He listens well. I quite like that bit about Sabbath made for man, even as a woman,
SERENTINO: and a nurse, right, so the ‘healing’ bit got ya.
GREEN: Why not? What bee is in your bonnet, Tony?
SERENTINO: Ok (looking around to ascertain the congregation has largely left), since we’re hashing things out between us, I do have a bee in my bonnet, folks, and it’s this: a couple of drunks and an paranoiac exercise is threatening my season—
RACINE: your season?
SERENTINO: our season if you’re so into communal harmony, Tim: our season as a God-blessed varsity boys’ basketball program—
GREEN: coinciding with girls’
SERENTINO: Yes, why not?
GREEN: ’cause that where your up-and-arms happened, remember? And I don’t see Coach Jenkins having existential problems.
FATHER FAYE: Who is Coach Jenkins?
SERENTINO: Yeah, why do you wanna bring her into this ‘prayer concern’?
RACINE: Funny you should ask, as she barely made an impression on Thursday. You and your star were front and center, and Jenkins and her squad just huddled up like it was an extended time-out. Perhaps she was, in her own way, praying the situation through…
FATHER FAYE: which is possible. Is she Catholic?
GREEN: Not that I know of. Then again, what do any of us know?
SERENTINO: I know that, as Father fully said, there’s public and there’s private and there’s protocol for both.
RACINE: Right, exactly. So what I did what bridge that divide in the safety of this service.
SERENTINO: Really? You want to be on the record for such altruism? Taking the law beyond the courts?
RACINE: I was off-duty on Thursday night, I’ll have you know.
SERENTINO: Oh? so you’re in it for citizen’s arrests and vigilante stardust?
RACINE: No, I’m in it for ‘prayer requests’, as I stated at the beginning.
GREEN: We’re in it for the health of kids—let’s be honest here.
FATHER FAYE: I’d say yes—how could anyone disagree—but where are the kids in what’s being argued about?
SERENTINO: There’s just one kid at stake, Father, and Tim knows exactly who I’m talking about.
RACINE: I really don’t, Tony; Petra probably does, but I didn’t bring up this whole concern for what you have on your mind and—frankly speaking—active roster. You’ll need to take that up with your admin and counselor—what’s his name? Dosulm? Dosulem?
GREEN: Dostune. Helmand.
RACINE: Oh, a Muslim. So, that’s interesting, Coach There’s-Nothing-Here…
SERENTINO: I resent what you imply.
RACINE: I’m sitting here as a fellow Catholic, Tony. I don’t imply a reason to divide.
SERENTINO: You do. You think I have some prejudice somehow. Against the homeless bums that started this fiasco, the some narcissist that runs my team, the counselor that Golden Valley High School hired to keep ‘Katie by the door’!
RACINE: Hey, you’re saying it, not me.
FATHER FAYE: And no one should be saying ‘it’, especially here in the afterglow of mass we’ve shared together.
GREEN: While I agree, Father, I see a need to get these issues out.
RACINE: Amen. That’s why I voiced the thing—
SERENTINO: the ‘thing’ that costs you nothing.
FATHER FAYE: No one has to suffer here. I continue to absolve the sins that need the full confessional.
RACINE: I’ll stay here, Father, as long as I’m off-shift.
SERENTINO: Oh, that’s rich! I’ll stay, Father, three times as long, as I’ve got this stupid day-off to compromise the simple season I always try to make take shape.
GREEN: You’ve been underway for two months, Tony…
SERENTINO: Oh, so now you’re on their side, Princess P.
GREEN: I have no idea what are sides or angles or faces or…
SERENTINO: middle school math. You’ll get my Billy or another in your office soon, after Dostune minces as he will. The ‘holiday’ for presidents stands before a crucial showdown with Jefferson, if you get my drift.
FATHER FAYE: from Bloomington?
SERENTINO: exactly so. That’s our greater neighborhood.
RACINE: I don’t deny that, Tony. I only wanted to weigh a prayer concern—
SERENTINO: in the way you wanted it…
GREEN: Isn’t that the way of any prayer?
FATHER FAYE: That’s one way of looking at it… Since no one has another thing to say… I’d suggest a human hiatus, letting sleeping dogs lie, so to speak…
SERENTINO: Are you serious?
RACINE: Tony, yes he is.
GREEN: You’ll answer for a priest?
FATHER FAYE: We answer, all, for God.
IIIiv: later that afternoon, at Wesley Park. The high barometer makes for blue skies and crisp late winter temperatures. Four players shoot a game of lightning and then gather around a boom box as if it were an oil drum fire. ‘Computer Blue’ plays as a sort of background, though players chug water and swap tidbits unconscious of the music.
KING: So, Becky, that’s what I’m talking about—
TILLINGER: posting higher, then fade-aways?
KING: Maybe, if it fits, but more generally spreading out your skill set.
URSKINE: like an eagle, baby..
TILLINGER: watch it, Billy, or I’ll tell Tracy—
URSKINE: See if I care—I’m on death row anyway…
TATE: You idiot, there’s no death row in Minnesota—not even metaphorically.
KING: Don’t even play with that, Gavin.
TATE: Why, would we’d miss something in translation?
KING: Yeah, ’cause we’d do just that. Witness our own idiocy the other night.
TILLINGER: I have to say that was so funny, with that Uncle Sam guy—
URSKINE: Really? You gonna go there?
TILLINGER: Yes, why not?
URSKINE: That whole fiasco shut us out of the gym today—‘Closed for Security Protocols’ on every door—
TATE: So what?
URSKINE: So the riff raff invades our space and makes us pay and nobody but me was standing up to it.
TILLINGER: You know, Billy, you got a lot of tactical shit to figure out.
URSKINE: Umm.. betwixt.. posers and.. a true patriot?
TILLINGER: No, it just isn’t that complicated. Between—or ‘betwixt’—you and me, for instance, with or without the witness of these alums. I don’t imagine I’d beat you in a given game, but I don’t really care. I got a sense of self worth that eclipses yours.
URSKINE: Meaning what, exactly?
TILLINGER: Meaning you’ve got this ‘lord it over’ arrogance that doesn’t stand a chance with me. Or Tracy, for that matter.
KING: Tell it, girl! Fems against the men, 11 by 2, no make-it-take-it.
TATE: Agreed. You in, Hotshot?
URSKINE: What’s the point?
TILLINGER: The point is your pouting problem. You got game but no common sense.
URSKINE: Ok, so you got the balls to prove your own sense of game?
TILLINGER: I don’t need balls, Billy, just one to grind like Darling Nikki.
KING: —two Darling Nikkis, as it were.
TATE: Sounds sexy.
TILLINGER: Bear in mind I’m underage, like Billy-boy.
URSKINE: Let’s just get on with it.
They play a heated 2-on-2, with the rest of ‘Purple Rain’ to drown out the smash of rebounds and kick-outs and URSKINE’s slam dunk to punctuate the final point, despite KING’s formidable defense.
URSKINE: and one and game, amateurs!
KING: bloody hell! I just watched him take the open lane—
TATE: don’t be so hard—
TILLINGER: I should have slid over.
URSKINE: Wouldn’t have mattered. The game was in the bag.
TATE: 11-8 isn’t a rout.
URSKINE: I’d like to travel back to the era of hand-checks. Gary Payton style of play. Then it would’ve been a rout.
KING: (dropping her head in amusement) That’s rich, Billy. Hand-checks!
URSKINE: Gotta like ‘The Glove’!
TILLINGER: I’ll play you that way, no problem.
URSKINE: Not today—it’s too cold to keep going. Unless you want to break into the gym—
KING: Right, that’s gonna happen.
URSKINE: It’s been done already, and I’m no dumber than Uncle Sam.
TATE: Holy shit, I think I see him!
URSKINE: Who?
TATE: (pointing to BARNADINE, taking a leak beside a tree) Hey! Uncle Sam!
URSKINE: Can’t be serious! (yelling over) Old Man, get your ass outta here!
TILLINGER: Billy, cut it out—
URSKINE: I can’t fuckin’ believe it. It is him, minus the outfit.
KING: Where’s the other one?
URSKINE: (starts to run) Don’t care—I’m seein’ red.
BARNADINE: (not quite done) Wha—? hey, hold on there—hey!
TATE: (running after URSKINE, with KING and TILLINGER) Don’t touch him, Billy!
BARNADINE: I recognize you!
URSKINE: (diving at him and punching wildly) Scumbag! Intruder!
BARNADINE: Ho, police! Help me for a change!
KING: (joining TATE in the scrum to get URSKINE off) Stop! Get off him!
TILLINGER: Billy, you’re crazy! There’s nothing worth—
URSKINE: fighting for? My scholarship’s in jeopardy.
TILLINGER: an’ this is getting it back?
TATE: (picking up URSKINE in half nelson) Knock it off, already!
KING: Mister, are you alright?
BARNADINE: (panting and feeling his jaw and nose) Uh, um…
TILLINGER: Let’s call an ambulance.
BARNADINE: No, I’ll survive. Been through harder fights than this—
KING: We are so sorry, Mister—
TILLINGER: Say so, Billy: apologize!
URSKINE: Fuck, no.
TATE: Beth, you stay here. Becky, help me drag this brat to—
URSKINE: (grimacing) to common sense?
TATE: Yeah, for a start!
The three leave with URSKINE now in a full nelson. KING kneels and reaches for BARNADINE’s wrist.
KING: I’ll take your pulse if you don’t mind.
BARNADINE: What’ll that do? I said I’m alright.
KING: Sometimes shock sets in.
BARNADINE: I’m only shocked a person cares. Well, beyond the abstrac’, that is.
KING: I liked what you were trying to do the other night, at school.
BARNADINE: Stealing from a charity?
KING: Getting me and Gavin back on our home court.
BARNADINE: Wasn’t our objective, truthfully.
KING: Where is Mrs Sam, anyway?
BARNADINE: Left her home so I could hunt and gather.
KING: So you do have a home? Sorry to presume, but… I wouldn’t have guessed that, stealing from a charity and so forth.
BARNADINE: There’s houseless folks and homeless folks and all those in between. I’ve slept lovely summer nights in this park and most in Minneapolis. Know the lay o’ the land pretty well. What I don’ know is how to cultivate. Make a picket fence and weed a garden. Pay the ’lectric bills. Keep my nose clean, so to speak. Is it bleeding, by the way.
KING: A little. Mostly snotty, actually, if that’s ok to say.
BARNADINE: You’re asking my approval? Hm. You are an angel, if that’s ok to say.
KING: Let’s just get you on your feet. And probably you should zipper up, in case you forgot how this all started.
BARNADINE: (blushing, and complying) Is that what got his goat?
KING: I can’t imagine, honestly. I barely know the kid. In fact, I probably know him less than I know you.
BARNADINE: That’s either not saying much or—
KING: saying too much? Yeah, I’m one of those folks in between.
BARNADINE: Was my pulse ok?
KING: You’re good enough to go.
BARNADINE: You too, I guess. Tell him no hard feelings.
KING: I just hope that little hand-checker finally learns to feel.
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