The Bighead by Edward Lee Read Free Book Online

a high-powered engine
that burns a little too hot.
    All right. Maybe it was
true. Forty-five now, and fifty seemed dreadfully close. But he’d
been an unlikely candidate for the clergy since day one. At twenty,
he’d been an Army Ranger, 5th Special Operations Group. He’d sat in
the bush behind Claymores, reading Thomas Merton and St. Ignatius
between firefights. He’d killed dozens of men, and even a woman
once—it was almost too proverbial—a pregnant woman. She’d been ten yards
away from tossing a two-kilo satchel charge into a field hospital
full of wounded. What appalled Alexander most was not the war
itself but the notion in general. There’s
no reason for this, he concluded each time
he dropped Charlie in the peep-sight of his M16. Not in The Nam,
not anywhere. It was the only thing he’d learned during his
twelve-month combat tour, and perhaps the only real thing he’d ever learn in his
life. C-rats, trenchfoot, crotch-rot; dysentery; chiggers the size
of hazelnuts under his skin, mosquito bites more like dog
bites—none of that bothered him. It was just the notion. There was
simply no reason for people to kill each other.
    He’d slummed for a year after his
hitch, working civvie jobs and doing the things that
twenty-one-year-olds do, and quite a few of those things involved
women. But the civilian world only reinforced what he’d learned in
the field. Too much of life revolved solely around itself, everyone
looking out for number one. Alexander didn’t want to be like that,
and he knew there was a way out:
    God.
    The G.I. Bill took him through
Catholic U. and a 3.9 grade-point average with a double major,
philosophy and psych. Then, two more years divided between pissant
jobs and volunteer work, mostly AIDS hospices. You knew you cared
about people when you cleaned the shit out of their pants, for
free. But…
    Would the Church take a former
soldier, a killer?
    Admission to the seminary didn’t come
easy. Talk about ballbreakers. It had been Halford himself who’d
done the preliminary interviewing for Christ The King Seminary,
upstate. “Why do you want to be a priest, Tom?”
    “ So I can tell people how
much I love Jesus. So I can draw them closer to Him,” came
Alexander’s simple yet honest answer.
    “ Not good enough,” Halford
said. “Stock answer.”
    “ I want to do things for
the world instead of for me,”
    “ Still not good
enough.”
    But then Alexander had slapped several
dissertations onto the priest’s desk. Abstracts he’d written on his
own: the modern applications of the works of Ignatius, Aquinas,
Kierkegaard, Christian philosophies made functional in the 90’s.
Alexander had graduated from the seminary first in his class at the
age of thirty-two.
    But it didn’t take him long
to realize they’d never give him his own parish. You’re too valuable as a psychologist,
Tom, had been Halford’s favorite excuse for
years. Valuable? Sometimes a priest would quit, and it was
Alexander’s job to reel them back. He generally succeeded but
always wondered if it was the right thing. Why goad a man to do
what he doesn’t want to do anymore? The rest of the time he sat in
the little office behind the Richmond Main Rectory, trying to put
broken men back together. Priests never came to him on their own,
they were ordered to psychotherapy by either the diocese or the court. He got a
lot of drunks and a lot of alleged pedophiles. Antabuse for the
drunks, behavioralist thrashings for the pedos. “You’re a
goddamn priest ,
you asshole!” he’d rail at them. “Priests don’t feel up kids! And I
don’t want to hear a bunch of liberal horseshit about bad
childhoods and hormonal imbalances. You’re a priest, and you have responsibilities! People trust you because of that candyass collar around your neck, and you
have an obligation to them. If you screw around with anymore kids, you’re gonna
go to fuckin’ jail, then you’re really gonna know what sexual abuse
is. Is that