Heroes by Ray Robertson Page A

years. No could do. Health insurance for a sixtythree-year-old woman with a history of heart problems does not come cheap, let me tell you.”
    After an unprecedented five-month accelerated stint at a local seminary (“I could have done the whole thing in two weeks, tops, no exaggeration”) he was ordained by G.A.R.B. — the General Association of Regular Baptists — a rigidly fundamentalist sect, and sent off to tend to his present flock, a medium-sized church in a medium-sized conservative town in the Midwest that in its beer-with-a-shot-on-the-side, workingclass heart, appeared willing to close its eyes to Warren’s public disregard of his G.A.R.B.-ordained order of abstinence.
    His mother, now an invalid in a nursing home in the suburbs of St. Louis, although well-served by the monthly cheques Warren made sure paid for the best health care she could receive, no longer seemed to recognize him when he visited, and for some reason would only talk about a torrid love affair she claimed to have had with Don Ho when she was a WAC serving in Hawaii during World War II. Warren confessed that he could not watch “Hawaii Five-O” re-runs on television without being overcome by waves of overpowering sadness of “nearly Kierkegaardin proportions.”
    When not at the church, he read like a demon at the local library most evenings (“demon” being his choice of expression), usually stopped in at Larry’s afterward in order to “wind down a little bit,” and eventually hoped to get a congregation with “a little less ... literal interpretation of the Bible,” preferably on the east coast. He also, Bayle observed, chain-smoked unfiltered Kents, lapped up his drinks with an intensity not even matched by Bayle at his own swinish worst, and, after a certain intoxicated point, would occasionally affect the English
what?
at the end of his sentences. Withinan hour Bayle couldn’t be sure if Warren was a liberal Protestant in a conservative church, a closet atheist, or something in between. Warren was, most certainly, an alcoholic mess of a mass of contradictions. He was a man after Bayle’s heart.
    â€œSo it’s agreed then that Kant’s entire theory of the Categorical Imperative — his whole system of ethics, in other words — can be clearly and indubitably attributed to the fact that he never got his rocks off.”
    â€œOkay,” Bayle said.
    â€œRight, then. So. On to less abstruse, but no-less-significant matters. Married?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAlternative lifestyle?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œGirlfriend?
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAh ha. Name?”
    â€œJane.”
    â€œJane. Hmmm. Dark and solemn, or fair and winsome?”
    â€œA little of both.”
    â€œDark and winsome?”
    â€œThe other one.”
    â€œI see.”
    A short break in the exchange while more drinks are ordered and served and Warren explicates his understanding of Plato’s theory of love as contained in
The Symposium
and Bayle once again agrees without qualification to whatever Warren says. (Bayle, when soused, believing that talking about sensation-hating Plato when one was good and loaded was only slightly less obscene than arguing about the existence of God when a beautiful woman was in the room.)
    Bayle was:
    (a) a crude materialist with a longing for subtler notions;
    (b) simply drunk;
    (c) all of the above.
    â€œPolitics?” Warren continued.
    â€œNone.”
    â€œReligion?”
    â€œNone.”
    â€œHobbies?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œHow fascinating. Breast fed, by any chance?”
    â€œYou mean recently, or as a baby?”
    â€œYour call.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo to which?”
    â€œNo,” Bayle said.
    â€œI see. Right, then. Mother and father both still alive?”
    â€œJust mother.”
    â€œBrothers or sisters?”
    Bayle didn’t answer.
    On the television, the redhead in the