Read Online The Natural Order of Things by Kevin P. Keating - Free Book Online

will turn this disastrous season around, but history has shown that even God needs a little convincing, and to appease him the Jesuits have ordered the students to pray on their knees, to petition the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Armies, to lead their beloved team to victory.
    Kaliher intends to do his part, too. As head coach, he has access to the athletic department’s bank account for discretionary funds and has already made a sizable withdrawal. His bookie insisted on having the cash up front this time, but Kaliher has every intention of returning the money before the Jesuits even notice the transaction. He has done it before. Sometimes he bets small amounts on professional sports—a hundred here and there, nothing of great consequence. Big bets are strictly reserved for his own team, a thousand dollars on the opening game, thousands more in the weeks to follow.
    After tomorrow’s triumphant win, he will beg God’s pardon for violating the trust of his players—the sheer stupidity of his mistakes, the magnitude of his financial indiscretions. Even when faced with the prospect of eternal damnation, he will not deny his culpability … with this one small caveat. God must give him an unequivocal answer to a question that has haunted him for many months: why do so many men have an almost instinctual urge to sabotage their own lives?
    He can’t think of these things now. Only twenty-four hours remain until the big game, the infamous Holy War, and there is still much work to be done, grand strategies to map out, small but crucial tactics to perfect. Defeat is no longer an option, victory the only possible means of escape.
III
    No matter how many times he submits to this monthly ritual, he is shocked by the vulgarity of Mrs. O’Neill’s bedroom talk and the rough manner in which she shoves his face into the swampy valley between her sloping breasts, down to the impressive rolls of fat that have congealed around her navel, across the rugged terrain of her thorny snatch, ever lower,
lower
, all the while rasping her sinister commands with pitiless glee: “That’s right, Coach, go on, work it,
work it
. Now, suck my toes! Suck ’em like you mean it.”
    Taking direction like a trained seal, he sweeps his tongue over the tough meat of the sole, up and down the swollen arch, heel to toe, heel to toe. He recoils from her foot, trying hard to control his gag reflex, but Mrs. O’Neill digs her claws into the back of his neck. Finally, he opens his mouth to accept the five little piggies and uses his teeth to gently nibble on the thick stumps that look like a man’s knuckles—large, hairy, simian.
    “That’s a good boy …”
    The apartment smells faintly like a sewer; its rooms are drafty, poorly insulated, the walls cracked and bubbled from years of rain and snow, but these things do not prevent Mrs. O’Neill from sweating through the sheets. Using the advantage of her weight, she pins him to the mattress, parts her legs and slowly envelopes him in her clammy flesh.
    Thirty minutes later, the tentacled creature squirts her ink over his abdomen, and the unspeakable ordeal comes to an end. She releases him from her grim embrace, fires up another cigarette, last one in the pack, and says, “Okay, Kaliher, you can stay one more month. But you’re a real awful lay, do ya know that? Truly despicable. Now I understand why yer old lady left ya.” She coughs, forces up a gob of green phlegm, then swallows it. “A little friendly advice. Either come up with some cash or improve yer skills in the sack.”
    With that she stands up, pulls the bathrobe around her thick torso, and plunges into a pool of black shadow, Grendel’s mother, glutted on warrior blood, diving into the heaving depths of her sinister fen somewhere in the misty moorlands. Kaliher, marveling at the terrible strength of this tusked and taloned tarn-hag, wonders if she ever had children of her own, stillborn things sent straight to Limbo.
    Before limping out