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Show Acting Alone Page 4?2 When the communion came, he whispered over the cup, "It's no prize you're getting." Polly was in just sanguine enough a mood to interpret that as yet another joke. She tried not to laugh as she ingested the body and blood of Jesus Christ; she tried not to gag each of the two species back up into her sinuses. For the sake of her respiratory system she had to turn her head in order not to see the funny face Sammy was pulling at her with his thumbs up his nostrils. She peered through the permanent haze of light grey carbon dust, through a bashed-open place in the wall nearest her. She saw the strange black-suited workmen chopping at the granite and sod behind the white picket fence of Mother Pudentiana's grave/shrine; and she thought she saw a boy running serpentine across the aspen clearing behind and beyond them. Whatever few minor misgivings Polly may have had about her papal dispensation were dissolved away now in the Christlike glory of her new man. Joyful, she stayed Bopp's hand and took another big mouthful of spring-cold Liebfraumilch. She told herself-that she knew exactly what she was doing, and that she didn't mind that nauseating stench as much as everybody else apparently did, judging from the gags and coughs - everybody, that is, except Sammy, who was blissfully unaware of anything either pleasant or unpleasant in the air, with his multiply-destroyed, non-functional nose. The mysterious death-stench was mixing now with the odors of the questionable food being prepared over open campfires for the reception. Almost choking on the black miasma that was gradually filling up the open spaces of the chapel, Father Wagstaff Bopp turned, completely out of synch with the rest of the service, and, apropos of nothing, admonished the couple in a loud voice. "You |
