Read Online Sham Rock by Ralph McInerny - Free Book Online Page B

bombed.”
    â€œThen I’m driving.”

    â€œOf course you are. And I’ll take care of the approach shots.” His eyebrows danced like Groucho’s.
    â€œDo you still golf, Casey?”
    â€œOnly twice a week.”
    â€œYou must be looking forward to retirement.”
    â€œI’m looking forward to Junior.”
    They drank to that. They drank to lots of things. Dave went back with them to Siesta Key and his cot in the third bedroom, sleeping in his shorts, feeling like an undergraduate again. He would check out of the motel in the morning.

13
    ROGER KNIGHT WAS IN A MEDITATIVE mood, his thoughts crowding one another for position, all of them having to do with the materials Greg Walsh had received at the archives, with Father Carmody’s suggestion that those materials be consigned to the dusty oblivion of the archives and forgotten, and with David Williams’s odd reaction to the news that he was the recipient of a regal bequest from a former classmate, now a Trappist monk, who moreover had committed to paper a supposedly fictional account of the disappearance of a classmate, his rival for a St. Mary’s girl. The spot where the hatchet was supposedly buried might contain something more gruesome. Roger had told Jay that he had met his father.
    â€œHe’s giving a building to Notre Dame. A new ethics center,” Jay said.
    â€œWe already have an ethics center.”
    â€œBut they don’t have a building.”
    To Roger the proposed building meant being deprived of a parking space for the golf cart in which he got around campus. Ah, the convenience of being able to wheel almost to his office door, take a few steps involving only one stair, and a minute later lower himself into the welcome embrace of his huge specially constructed desk chair.
    Jay was difficult to understand. He had come to Roger’s seminar
as the guest of the lovely Amanda, and he had hardly settled in before he began to ask questions, doubtless meant to impress her. Jay had that strange confidence of the almost illiterate, a philosophy major—but that seemed redundant. His manner was that of an amused onlooker for whom Roger and what he had to say seemed to constitute evidence of some crime. It was tempting to make Jay the target of the discontent he felt at the loss of his parking space.
    There is a kind of student whose curiosity bespeaks incredulity, as if any response to a question would add to the ridiculousness of what was being discussed. So it had been with Roger’s account of the ancient theory of the elements and their origin in the pre-Socratics. Empedocles had summed it up in his theory of the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, with love and strife to generate activity, but Roger had driven the theory back to Thales and water, Anaximenes and air. Heraclitus and fire. Roger had suggested continuity with the modern periodic table of elements.
    â€œOur current view,” he had remarked. “Perhaps destined to go the way of these ancient views.”
    â€œTell us about air,” Jay had urged, and Roger, feeling manipulated, obliged to feed Jay’s skepticism. Doubtless he had overstated the resemblance between those ancient views and the table students of chemistry nowadays memorized.
    â€œThe theory is essentially the same. However many, there is an alphabet from which the things of our experience are composed.”
    Jay Williams smiled with tolerant incredulity, and Roger felt pusillanimous in noting Amanda’s impatience with her admirer’s attitude.
    She had sought him out, apologetic. “I thought Jay would enjoy the course.”

    â€œAnd so he does.”
    â€œHe’s a philosophy major,” she said, as if in exculpation.
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    It was the fact that the father, David Williams, was a financial adviser that had captured Roger’s attention.
    â€œYou must explain the current chaos to me,” Roger had said to him.
    â€œI