The Trolls of God

Changing Planes in Chicago, Father Buddy Hovacks, a balding, crewcut priest in a black suit too small for him across the shoulders, stopped at a shelf of phones to call ahead. As his connection was being made, he noticed a proper, smooth-faced old nun on a folding stool beside the flight-insurance counter across the way. When anyone stopped to buy insurance, she would speak to him, describing her order's training school for girls in Nicaragua and asking him to take out a second policy with the school as beneficiary. As Father Hovacks watched, she was refused three times. But then a middle-aged man in a bright suit and a brighter shirt obliged. "God bless you," said the nun.

Father Hovacks made his call, picked up the scuffed suitcase with its 35-pound assortment of cheeses and headed for the departure gates. Though the Peregrine Order to which he belonged wasn't famous for its theologians, Father Hovacks rather mistrusted that "God bless you." As he boarded his plane, he looked around for the man in the bright suit and was more pleased than not when he didn't find him. Nevertheless, settling into his seat, he made a mental note to mention Sister when he got back. Father Hillman, a late vocation who had come to the order from advertising, had turned the Sunday breakfast table into an informal think-tank from which was to come the great money-making idea that would allow the Peregrine work to continue. Whenever the flow of ideas faltered, Father Hillman would hold up his left hand with the fingers half closed, as if around a bottle or a box. "Father Perry's what, Fathers?" he would plead. And every head would lean toward him across the coffee cups, as if trying to read the ingredients on a label. Father Perry's What? Well, Father Bellman would be glad to know that new avenues for raising money were still being found, even today. Not that the Peregrines could use the flight-insurance idea. The Rule of Saint Clochard forbade begging.

Saint Clochard had founded the order in the Tenth Century for the holy purpose of building bridges for pilgrims traveling beneath Charles's Wain to the sacred tomb of Zebedee's son at Santiago de Compostela. The Trolls of God, men called them, because of their custom of sleeping under the bridges they built. (Their work with tunnels and the nickname The Holy Molies were to come later.) The early Peregrines were a blunt-fingered, bandy-legged, dusty-robed crew who supported themselves and their work by quarrying extra stone for sale and took their pleasure from the hard, self-reliant life of Saint Clochard's rule. Each Peregrine bridge was a perfect creation. Each seemed to have come first and the river afterward. In fact, the Gesta Romanorum recounts a story titled "How the Dordogne and the Lot Battled to Flow Beneath Saint Clochard's Bridge at Plon and How the Saint Reconciled Them."

But stone lasts forever; and though the Peregrines turned to other routes and other shrines, by the middle of the 13th Century there were just no more rivers to bridge. The order went into a decline until saintly ingenuity led Molyneux, 12th Peregrine superior-general, to interpret the word bridge in the rule to include tunnels ("for what are tunnels but pilgrim bridges underground?"), ushering in an era of great Peregrine activity throughout Europe. Growing mushrooms for sale in the subterranean dim behind them, they pierced the Pyrenees at Gavarnie and Canfranc, the Alps at Mont Cenis and near the Little Saint Bernard. According to legend, during this last undertaking, the delving friars broke through into an unexpected valley warmed by hot springs and inhabited by a stone-gray herd of elephants of the Carthaginian breed whose elders had known Hamilcar Barca's one-eyed son. Praising God, the Peregrines had sealed up the entrance and left the beasts in peace. (Four centuries later, this incident helped inspire a famous American tall tale when Father Edmund O'Grady, 38th Peregrine superior-general, was plucked out of a seat in the bleachers at a Herring Brothers circus in Cairo, Illinois, and set down in the best seat in the house by a grateful stray from that same Alpine herd.) Under three superiors-general, the Peregrines labored at their greatest work, a tunnel beneath the English Channel to link Chartres and Canterbury. But two miles from Dover, the news of Henry VIII's apostasy caused them to down picks and shovels and march back the 26 miles to the surface, emerging as pallid as their mushrooms into hard times and religious wars. The location of the tunnel entrance was lost in the turmoil that followed. Napoleon searched for it in vain. Others believed the Peregrines guarded the secret. In fact, Buddy Hovacks' first boyhood encounter with the order was on that very day in World War Two when the self-effacing Father Andreas Bauer had been unmasked by men in raincoats who stuffed him, saluting and calling out Hitler's name, into the back seat of their official car.

By the time of the general council of the order in 1875, the Peregrines survived only in Ireland, where they built stiles over walls and followed the tinker's trade. It was then, gathered in council under a bridge across the Shannon, that the monks of Saint Clochard decided to emigrate to America.

There they found abundant rivers to bridge and mountains to breach but no shrines. A period of getting by and making do followed, during which their leader, Father O'Grady, who had more than a bit of the tinker in him even for an Irish Peregrine and was secretly addicted to circuses, had his encounter with the elephant. It set him thinking that if we are all pilgrims on the road of life, then surely circus folk are pilgrims more than most. So inspired, Father O'Grady petitioned Rome that the order be allowed to take up the task of caring for the spiritual needs of the people of the big top. Without waiting for a reply, he led the Peregrines off after the Herring Brothers circus.

For several years, they labored as roustabouts, tending the stock and the tents, appearing as cowled marchers in the parades through town. They worked hard, practiced every virtue and hoped to be asked about God. But they seldom were. Except for a few like Buddy Hovacks' grandmother (she had not yet met the band cornettist who would win her heart and prospect for gold), the circus people did not exchange their spangled tights and gilded uniforms for more solemn, Massgoing finery. Only Father O'Grady was blind to the order's languishing, for Louis Herring had let him understudy Werner the Human Cannonball, whose trajectory in flight, the priest reasoned, was a kind of bridge from here to there.

Then Monsignor Barducci arrived on the scene disguised as an organ-grinder with false mustaches and a monkey. Having gotten around to Father O'Grady's petition at last, Rome was surprised, for it had long believed the Peregrines extinct. Barducci had been dispatched at once in the role of apostolic visitor to look into the health and character of the order. He had tracked the Peregrines into the Deep South, where the prevailing anti-Catholic sentiment had prompted his disguise. In Greenwood, Mississippi, he left the monkey and the mustaches in his hotel room and visited a Herring Brothers matinee in the white suit and goatee of a plantation owner. He saw the Peregrines parade by with decorous, downcast eyes during the grand entrance. Resisting every attempt by a circus elephant to pluck him from his box seat and deposit him in the bleachers because of his resemblance to Scipio Africanus, from whom the Barduccis did, in fact, claim descent, he kept his place and saw Father O'Grady reappear in the Human Cannonball's white riding breeches and starred-and-striped shirt. (Werner, whose trajectory Father O'Grady so admired, was a believer in omens. He believed telegrams meant bad news and bellhops meant telegrams. When he saw an unearthly little face in mustaches and a pillbox hat peering in through his tent flap, he had decided then and there to take the afternoon off.) Unfortunately, Father O'Grady's stand-in flight proved to be a bridge from here to the hereafter with a stopover at a wayward tent pole. Following the funeral, Monsignor Barducci revealed his identity to the Peregrines and announced that the order's circus days were over.

Twenty years later (the Peregrines had spent much of the time digging wine cellars for the Christian Brothers on the West Coast), Buddy Hovacks' grandmother had deeded the order 300 barren, hilly Colorado acres containing a rambling Victorian house with two square, shingled towers and a promise of gold. Though the monks never did find The Lost Bearded Lady Gold Mine, they did uncover a substantial agate deposit. By the Thirties, they were producing those many-colored auto-gearshift knobs that (continued on page 142)Trolls of God(continued from page 78) were a bright spot of the Depression. What they earned was used to establish a pilgrims' repose, a home for aging hobos. In grade school and early high school years, Buddy Hovacks often accompanied his white-haired, patriarchal grandmother on her stately visits there. While she inspected the kitchen or the altar linen in the Quonset chapel, he would steal away to sit with Father Moss, the uncomplicated, lantern-jawed 43rd Peregrine superior-general waiting for new arrivals beneath the girders of a nearby bridge where one rail line crossed over another. Father Moss would talk of Saint Clochard and Saint Molyneux and the joys of hard work. And Buddy Hovacks would promise himself he'd be a Peregrine when he grew up. Then one or two limber old men would drop down from a freight as it slowed on the grade, hoist their knap-sacks and walk toward Father Moss's wave as sure-footed as kings. Hobos were as much a brotherhood as the monks, with their own rituals and El Dorados. They said, "Piss out the door of a moving boxcar and you'll be a hobo forever," and told junking stories of a certain mountain siding where brass axle bearings lay as thick as snow. Hearing them, Buddy Hovacks always resolved to be a knight of the road when he grew up.

But in high school he became something of a football star and after graduation, he went East on an athletic scholarship, intending to go into pro ball. But the war came along. After three years in Korea, Buddy Hovacks came home and joined the Peregrines. Religious communities thrive on war and they were the only one he knew.

The repose had grown shabby in the intervening years. Automatic transmissions and a dwindling vein of agate had reduced the Peregrines to making thick cuff links and tie clasps, which they mounted on cards and sold where they could. Bit by bit, their guests were drifting off. They didn't mind so much that the toilets didn't all flush or macaroni without end or the broken television. (As old Mr. Arnold remarked, the touch football between the novices like Buddy Hovacks and the younger priests beat television any day.) But it was getting hard for the Peregrines to hide their problems and the old men would not be burdens.

One morning, as they sat together under the bridge after having seen two old-timers off on a westbound freight, Father Moss voiced a fear to Buddy Hovacks that the situation might become worse, confiding in the young man not just because he was the grandson of the Peregrines' late-departed benefactress but also because he was a novice with a stake in the order's future. "What if everybody goes to short sleeves? What if the bow tie comes back?" It was hard for a man who was used to mining agate to find himself at the mercy of the whims of fashion.

Buddy had wanted to say, "Something's bound to turn up." But that hardly sounded appropriate to his new religious life. "The Lord will provide, Father," he said. But that hardly sounded Peregrine. Self-sufficiency was the heart of Saint Clochard's rule.

It was during his third year in the order that Buddy Hovacks received the fateful call from an old college roommate then in public relations. Saint Foy, a large Catholic college in the Midwest, wanted to start off a major fund drive with a bang. In return for a sizable donation to the repose, did Buddy think a Peregrine would agree to be shot out of a cannon at the Saint Foy home-coming? Buddy Hovacks was sure Father Moss would never permit it. This story of Peregrines shooting themselves from guns as a kind of ascetic exercise like column sitting or Hindu beds of nails just would not the and had cost the order many vocations.

Half joking, Buddy Hovacks made another suggestion. His friend was interested. Yes, a pleasant fall afternoon watching the famed Saint Foy Infidels brutalize a football team composed of sheltered, otherworldly monks might be just the ticket to get the hard-nosed, both-feet-on-the-ground alumni reaching for their checkbooks.

The idea of the young Peregrines' fielding a football team made Father Moss snort the way Spencer Tracy might have if Mickey Rooney had ever suggested they rent a barn and put on a musical. But the roof of the repose was leaking into the third-floor hall and the guttering was all gone to hell and it would be macaroni again for dinner. After a token resistance, he allowed himself to be persuaded.

The game proved to be a PR man's dream, making the wire services and 20 seconds on a network television show called Sports Oddities. Strangely enough, the Peregrine Trolls beat the Saint Foy team 6-0. No one was more surprised than quarterback Buddy Hovacks. The Infidels had played far off their game.

The win was a tonic for morale at the repose. The very next day, when Mount Saint Mungo, Saint Foy's traditional rival in the Holy Alliance, as the Catholic college football conference was called, wired a challenge to the Trolls, Father Moss accepted on the spot. Miraculously, the Tr,olls won again. That season, in exhibition games, they beat Saint Columba and Holywell, trounced Saints Cosmus and Damian singlehandedly and edged out Saint Lawrence, perennial toast of the gridiron. At every game, the older Peregrines moved through the stands selling felt Troll pennants on miniature canes. So the plumbers and the roofers visited the repose, desserts returned and the comforting gunfire of the television could be heard in the guests' common room.

For the upcoming season, every team in the Holy Alliance scheduled at least one game with the Trolls. Indeed, the fans had taken the feisty little band of monks to their hearts. The Trolls played hard, clean ball, asking no quarter and giving none. They ran out onto the field with joyful stride and returned with the contented weariness of those who had done their level best. Half times were spent in prayer or perhaps Father Moss would introduce the representative of a company whose whirlpool bath, for example, the Peregrine share of the game's receipts was to purchase and let him explain with slides how beneficial it was for old joints and muscles. After each game, a line of monks with cowls up and heads bowed would cross to the opposing locker room, where they would ask each player in turn to forgive them if they had caused him pain, and then they would give the kiss of peace all round.

Some found the Trolls' string of victories eerie. Others claimed the monks had the strength of ten because their hearts were pure. Still others saw the hand of God in the whole business. But perhaps it was Monsignor Finn, venerable sports columnist for the Boston Pilot, who came closest to the truth when, well into their third season, he suggested the secret might be plain, old-fashioned lear of bell, book and candle. The good Catholic boys the Peregrines played against were put off their game by the Church's penalty of excommunication for people who use physical violence against those in holy orders. But by the time the teams of the alliance had amended their players' thinking on this point, the Trolls had found their football legs and were beginning to attract some fine young athletes who wanted to combine sports and the religious life, among them all-America defensive linebacker Malachy Dunn, or Blessed 88, as he would later be called, and Stuart "Shoeless Stu" Timmons, an admirable kicker who joined them from the Discalced Carmelites.

The publicity had also swelled the repose to bursting. The next move would have to be a new dormitory and an addition to the infirmary. But in Father Moss's mind, playing exhibition games with Catholic colleges was even more precarious than making cuff links. Take the rumor that the Trappists were about to get three of their people onto the P.G.A. (continued on page 144)Trolls of God(continued from page 142) tour. Were the Trolls, darlings of the moment, about to be replaced in the public's favor? Haunted by the Peregrine past, Father Moss spent long hours alone or with Buddy Hovacks under the railroad bridge, trying to find a way to put the Trolls on a permanent and more businesslike basis. Later, neither man would recall who actually came up with the idea.

Father Moss quickly called a news conference in which he categorically denied that the Peregrines and Notre Dame University were negotiating the terms of a Trolls—Fighting Irish clash. That same afternoon, a puzzled president of Notre Dame confirmed Father Moss's denial, adding that however exemplary the Peregrine cause, the Fighting Irish never played against what he described as novelty football teams. His condescension spiced the debate as the national media and the sporting world questioned whether mighty Notre Dame could, in fact, beat an undefeated team of monks who many believed were playing under divine protection. Father Moss merely bided his time, closemouthed. Sooner than he expected, a telegram arrived and he was able to call a second news conference and announce the matter settled once and for all: Rome had instructed him that under no circumstances would a game between the Trolls and Notre Dame be allowed.

Shock waves and umbrage followed. Congressmen viewed with alarm this attempt by a foreign power to meddle in U. S. domestic affairs. Southern seamstresses dug out half-forgotten patterns for making burnable effigies of the Pope of Rome. As if on orders, the Seventh Fleet weighed anchor and disappeared into a Mediterranean fog bank heading in the general direction of the west coast of Italy.

Two days later, just after dark, four men in black with turned-up coat collars deplaned from a Vat-Air jet at nearby Lomax Airport and, glancing left and right, hurried across the tarmac to the Peregrines' rehabilitated school bus. Minutes later, they were closeted at the repose with an awed Father Moss and a gently sweating president of Notre Dame. Monsignor Spagnoli, the debonair spokesman of the clerical visitors, apologized for their surreptitious arrival, explaining that they had grown up in the Vatican diplomatic service under the venerable Cardinal Barducci, who had always cautioned them that the Roman nose must move circumspectly in the land of the Punic elephant. Then he suggested they confront the very serious problem that had brought them all together.

Here the president of Notre Dame interposed. Might he offer a solution? Trying for a canny smile, he remarked that however uncharitable his sentiments about the Peregrines might have sounded, they had had the desired effect: Two networks had already approached him with firm offers for a Trolls-Fighting Irish game. Considering the worthiness of the cause, perhaps Notre Dame could play them, after all. He was sure a satisfactory arrangement could be made; say, something in the vicinity of an 80-20 split of the net. Having said this, he sat back and lowered his gaze modestly. Italian eyebrows made Romanesque arches all round amid an embarrassed clearing of throats. The president of Notre Dame looked up again uneasily. "Seventy-five, twenty-five?" he offered.

"Father," explained Monsignor Spagnoli with quiet firmness, "under no circumstances could Holy Mother Church allow this proposed contest to take place. It would set Catholic against Catholic, rosary against rosary and rend the seamless garment of American Catholicism. The damage would be irreparable, the threat of schism real. There can be no game. The only question before us here is how we extricate ourselves from this situation gracefully."

Father Moss watched and listened as the clerical visitors smoked cigarettes elegantly and eliminated one solution after another. Trumped-up illness or injury would only delay the inevitable. Playing to a tie was too transparent. While the president of Notre Dame's chin trembled out of control, some consideration was given to both teams' retiring from football. But it was decided that would be throwing the baby out with the bath. The silence between suggestions had grown uncomfortably long when Father Moss interrupted the gloom by slapping his knee as though thunderstruck. The laughter that greeted his solution was tired but good-natured. Only Monsignor Spagnoli tailed to join in. Shooting his cuffs, the Italian gave Father Moss a scolding shake of the head and an admiring smile, realizing that they had been led into a trap from which there was only one escape, knowing that before he and his colleagues walked back across the elephant-gray tarmac to their plane, the monks of the Peregrine Order would have Rome's permission to field a professional football team. After all, as Father Moss had observed, no one could expect the Fighting Irish to play against professionals.

•

Father Hovacks smiled out the oval window at the late-afternoon clouds. Yes, they had pulled it off. Their next move had been a sound one financially: The Trolls had joined the Seven Deadly Teams of the Pigskin League. The public outcry had been enormous. The Pigskin League was a world of rip and tear, fang and claw, tromp and fist, where brute stalked brute and padded officials with heavy-handled whips and chairs were poised on the side lines to rush out and drive slavering pig-eyed linesmen from the body of a fallen quarterback. But a Pigskin League game was like watching jackals battle hyenas. Unable to glory in the victory of one side or the defeat of the other, the public stayed away in droves. To turn all this around, the league had been prepared to offer the popular Trolls most generous terms. For their part, the Peregrines were prepared to sacrifice their winning streak for the good of the repose.

To everyone's surprise, the Trolls edged the New York Goliaths 7-6 in their first professional appearance and shut out the Houston Pharaohs 9–0 in the second. The hand-of-God people smiled wisely. Later, they would point to the miracle during the Trolls' win over the Philadelphia Philistines that figured so prominently in the beatification proceedings of Malachy Dunn to prove their case. On the night of that game. Father Moss, who was choosing more and more to stay behind with the elderly guests at the repose, was praying in the candled gloom of the chapel, when he felt a hand on his shoulder, turned and found Malachy Dunn standing there in full football uniform. Before Father Moss could ask why he wasn't in Philadelphia, where he belonged, the figure motioned him to follow and led the way across to the main building and up to a smoke-filled second-floor room whose occupant had fallen asleep smoking in bed. The apparition had even helped Father Moss shove the glowing and smoldering mattress out the window. But when Father Moss turned around again, it was gone. At that same instant, on a playing field halfway across the country, 50,000 spectators and a television audience of millions were watching Malachy Dunn and the Trolls' defense fight to stem a Philadelphia drive. And yet the Philistines' "Testy Len" Hardesty would claim that when he went charging around the right end as one of the decoys in the old hidden-ball play, he had been stopped dead not by Malachy Dunn but by an angel with a flaming sword.

Even so, as Buddy Hovacks was always quick to insist, the Philistines had actually made a first down on the play and whatever divine intervention involved had been directed at saving the repose and its guests from fiery destruction, not at winning a football game for the Trolls.

Other cases were less clear on either side. Consider that first New York game. Goliaths quarterback Elwood "Third Avenue El" Macnamara's chronic bad knees—an affliction that no Peregrine was ever visited with, which says something for the power of prayer—had caused him to develop a spectacular passing game. But as he ran out to meet the Trolls that day, Macnamara discovered that his knees were sound as a dollar. While his terrible teammates wondered what had happened to the high-flying pass strategy that was to end the monks' winning streak, Macnamara turned the game into a jubilee of new-found legs, sneaking when he should have gone for the pitch-out, running when he should have tried the long bomb and scrambling for sizable losses at any excuse.

Or what of the strange case of Otto "Uncle Maim" Garmish, capstone of the Pharaohs' offensive line, who hoped someday to become public executioner in his home state? Of all the night courses for the required high school diploma, geometry most threatened Garmish's dream. Crouched there for the opening play against the Trolls, Garmish wasn't thinking about geometry but of how he would convert Brother Gerard "Shy Gerard" Oglvy, with whom he was nose to nose, into a lush carpet of torn flesh and crushed bone down which Pharaoh ball carrier Lawrence "Hairy Larry" Talbot would prance scoreward. But at the snap, a light seemed to come on between Garmish's eyes and he straightened up in wonderment. Talbot ran head down and full tilt into the small of Garmish's back. The ball popped out of his arms and into the hands of Shy Gerard, who was off and running back down the field, praising God all the way. Turning, Garmish grabbed the snarling and biting Talbot by lapels of flesh and shook him, explaining, "Hey, hey, the square 'potenoose right angle triangle does equal squares other two sides."

Buddy Hovacks dismissed these stories as luck—and very good luck, at that, for Macnamara and Garmish. God, he knew, did not meddle in football games. He yearned for a defeat to silence those who believed otherwise.

Still the Trolls' winning streak continued. They turned back the Jersey Huns, trounced the Chicago Leviathans and humbled the Bay Area Behemoths. The devout found this edifying. The skeptics only shook their heads and said, "Wait till they play the Golden Calves."

The Golden Calves! The California Golden Calves! The prime of the Pigskin League! The Golden Calves were undefeated and unscored upon in human memory. Their infamous Mount Rush-more defense seemed to have been carved from a single block of stone and moved out onto the field with rollers. The back-field was peopled by snake-hipped titans and bolts of greased lightning like "Poxy" Peters, Bonar "Mr. Bones" Johnson, "Malign Sam" Withers and "Rebel" Snelgrove. But the awesome sparkplug of the team was quarterback "Unsavory Eugene" Rhadaman, who, some said, had sold his soul to the Devil for a giant's body to match his giant brain. A massive-browed, cruel-lipped genius, Rhadaman had once looked directly into a television camera and caught 40,000,000 viewers like a weasel mesmerizes its rabbit prey. He had held them with his unblinking, ice-blue gaze, read their souls and then, with a contemptuous sneer, had turned away. Since that day, he was obliged by contract to mask his eyes behind dark glasses.

A thrilling, a strange quickening around the world marked the approach of the inevitable encounter. The Trolls–Golden Calves game became the subject of a universal monomania, preoccupying every thought, word and deed. In Africa, natives began the long treks to the jungle clearings where Western missionaries, hopeful of an inspirational Troll victory, had set up television sets. In Moscow's posh commissars' clubs, posh folding chairs were being unfolded before screens onto which Red-Eye, the Russian spy satellite, would convey the game. The Vatican was a beehive of prayer.

Buddy Hovacks hadn't been able to understand the fuss. To him, it was just another game. Some you win and some, hopefully, you lose. But the next day you're out there again, doing the wind sprints and scrimmaging, getting ready for the next game down the road. Most of all, Buddy Hovacks was perplexed by the silent crowd that came to stand each day at the turnoff to the repose to watch with strained and anxious faces as the bus took the Trolls to the Lomax High School practice field and brought them back again.

At last, at last, the game arrived. As millions caught their breath and mothers everywhere covered their children's eyes, the Golden Calves spilled out onto the giant, televised egg of artificial turf. The backfield came first, supple giants in cadaverous near-green, near-purple uniforms. The stump-footed hulks of the line followed, making the ground shake.

Before a White House television set, a wide-eyed Russian ambassador, unable to contain himself, grabbed the U. S. Secretary of Defense by the upper-arm flexor and blurted, "W. Theodore, I have been authorized to tell you that we have devised a cola-colored liquid that causes the surface of the human skin to contract violently on exposure to sunlight." He cocked his head apologetically. "We had intended to add it to your drinking water only if attacked. We offer it to you now. Our people on the scene will give it to your people on the scene. When these Golden Calves run back out after what you call half time, they will all turn inside out like reversible raincoats."

Without taking his eyes from the screen, where the white-uniformed Trolls had appeared, looking like hospital attendants running to the scene of their own accident, the Secretary of Defense said contemptuously, "Viktor, we have an odorless, tasteless mist that causes marrow to liquefy and run. In two seconds flat, our enemies would be bags of hollow, brittle bones that whistle in the wind, a dead giveaway in night fighting. Can you people understand why we can't use that mist here, old buddy? Can you see it goes to the heart of our one real moral imperative: 'If you can't beat them, then you must join them'?" A telephone began to ring.

"We also have a saying, W. Theodore," insisted the Russian. "We say: 'If Ivan's samovar makes better tea, then you must buy your glass from him.' "

Laughing at this pitiable adage, the Secretary of Defense picked up the telephone, listened, frowned and put the receiver down. He turned to the third man, sitting in an easy chair. "Mr. President?" he asked gently. The President of the United States acknowledged his Secretary of Defense by drawing a set of raw knuckles from his mouth. "Mr. President, the Golden Calves have arranged jet-helicopter transportation to take them to the United Nations Building afterward."

The President whimpered and cramped the knuckles back into his mouth. On the screen, "Bad News" Bailey, so called because he traveled so fast, had just run the Trolls' kickoff back 85 yards for a touchdown.

Though the Golden Calves' arrogant try to run the ball in for an extra point failed with Poxy Peters pulled down on the one, a Peregrine hanging from every limb, Buddy Hovacks soon knew who were to be the masters of the field that day. He was sacked repeatedly, his passes batted down by a moving palisade of colossal hands, his running plays stopped dead by the deep-rooted Golden Calves' defense. That the Golden Calves didn't score again gave him no satisfaction. It was clear Unsavory Eugene was toying with everybody, keeping the game on the ground to wear down the Trolls and build up the crowd's hopes. As the second quarter drew to a close, the monks were mauled, exhausted and visibly slow off the snap. Their vaunted knees were beginning to buckle.

Then, all of a sudden, the Golden Calves were hit with a pair of penalties, one for biting the official who brought the two-minute warning to their bench, another when three Golden Calves, crazed by the smell of fresh blood, started a fight in the huddle. With 30 seconds to go, the Trolls found themselves within field-goal range. Shoeless Stutrotted out and did his stuff. The half ended Golden Calves 6, Trolls 3.

The crowd was still singing We Shall Overcome and dancing with wild abandon when the two teams returned at the end of half time. The Golden Calves appeared refreshed, thicker and taller. But the Trolls had risen stiffly from their prayers. The seesaw battle of the third quarter seemed calculated to maintain the crowd's fever pitch. First the Trolls would fight the good fight almost into field-goal position, paying dearly for each inch. Then the Golden Calves would push them back again. Halfway through the fourth quarter, a superhuman Trolls drive petered out on their own 45. Shoeless Stu's desperate kick fell to earth short and to the left. The groan was universal.

With purposeful stride. Unsavory Eugene led the Golden Calves' offense back onto the field and into a long huddle. In the silence, the stadium flags and pennants snapped like laundry while neckless heads rose up out of the bunched Golden Calves to leer and drool at the worn little band of monks. A fearful stirring moved through the crowd when Unsavory Eugene stripped off his dark glasses and crushed them into black powder in his fist. Then he sauntered over to the ball, grinning left and right at the stands, like an amiable wolf, and held up all ten fingers. On that play. Mr. Bones carried the hall ten yards, no more, no less. Had he chosen to continue, there was little the Trolls could have done to prevent him. Watching from the side lines. Buddy Hovacks knew the game was over. But he was proud of his teammates. Like true Peregrines, each had given his very best.

The quarterback of the Golden Calves was holding up ten fingers now, then five more. His pointing right up the middle of the Trolls' line was reminiscent of Ruth's famous home-run gesture. At the snap. Rebel Snelgrove kneed and battered his way up the center through the lead-limbed and blear-eyed monks to carry the ball exactly 15 yards to the Trolls' 30.

In no hurry now. Unsavory Eugene looked around, hands on hips, despising the hushed crowd. In his own good time, he mimed a pass and raised ten fingers. ("Ten," said the crowd, as if they knew more would follow.) He flexed his fingers. ("Twenty," said the crowd.) He flexed them again. ("Thirty," said the crowd.) He added one more upturned middle finger and showed it all round, making the crowd moan. At last, the merciless cadence began. Blessed 88 and the Trolls' defense waited for the assault.

Suddenly, the wind turned chill. High on the rim of the stadium, a desperate group of spectators who had clambered up there intending to throw themselves to their deaths in the parking lot below was cheering and pointing westward. A moment later, a slanting shadow fell across the gridiron and a seething blue-black pillar of cloud rushed into view. As Unsavory Eugene cocked his passing arm, the lightning flashed. As Malign Sam, having outdistanced the stumbling monk defense, reached up out of the end zone, a mighty thunderclap made the ground shake. The ball seemed to joggle in the air and bounce off the tips of his fingers. Fearful of Unsavory Eugene, who had never thrown an incomplete pass before. Withers kept right on running out of the stadium and was never seen again. Red as a boil, Unsavory Eugene called down curses on the cloud and struck out angrily with his forearm at his nearest linesman, Axel "Poleax" Grabowski, crushing the man's helmet like a pecan shell. (In Washington, the Secretary of Defense and the Russian ambassador were dancing in a circle in each other's arms, while the President, kneeling with clasped hands before the television set, promised fervently that he'd be good.)

The cloud hung motionless in the stadium sky, daring with lightning, threatening with thunder. Unsavory Eugene had to drive his teammates back to the line of scrimmage with his fists. The crowd cheered hoarsely or shed tears of silent joy. Loving the cloud with their eyes, they waited for the Golden Calves to be turned back again. The whistle surprised them. Everyone had forgotten the Trolls, praying in their defensive huddle. Everyone except an official. The call was delay of game. The thunder disapproved. The official could only repeat the delay-of-game signal to the cloud and then scamper for the side lines with a stitching of short lightning bolts between his legs. The stadium rang with relieved laughter. What did five yards matter now?

The penalty walked off, the Trolls followed Blessed 88 back to their huddle and stayed there. In a minute, the official was obliged to blow his whistle again. With an abject grin and a shrug at the cloud, he led the monks back another five yards. On the third whistle, the crowd stirred uncomfortably and Unsavory Eugene stroked his scowling jaw. Standing on the side lines. Buddy Hovacks understood and approved. No, this was no place for pillars of cloud.

As if it grasped the Trolls' impertinence, the cloud swelled with anger, blotting out the sky. A kettledrum darkness fell and an icy, sharp-edged wind howled and rushed about the stadium. The spectators crouched and trembled behind the seats. The Golden Calves pawed the withered polymer and crowded together, ham to ham. as rhinos do in snowstorms. But the Trolls only bowed their heads in prayer. Twice more, armed with flashlights and leaning against the wind, the officials marked off the penalties.

The Trolls were back to the five before the thunder stopped, the wind fell and the cloud, realizing it wasn't going to get its way, glided off as quickly as it had come. The fans atop the stadium waved shirts and coats like castaways trying to hail a passing ship. (In Washington, the Secretary of Defense and the Russian ambassador clasped each other in horror while the President, shuffling forward on his knees, grabbed the television set in a bear hug and smashed it down onto the floor again and again.)

The game resumed in sunshine on the five with four minutes to go. Dark with rage. Unsavory Eugene shook his fist in the direction the cloud had gone and began his count. He intended to settle the Trolls' hash then and there with a quick hand-off to Peters and straight up the middle. But as Peters reached out to take the ball. Unsavory Eugene caught sight of Blessed 88, who. asking everyone's pardon and excusing himsell as he went, was charging around the left end. Then blood filled Unsavory Eugene's eye. Straight-arming the astonished Peters, the quarterback of the Golden Calves decided he would break this fair-playing fool, this monkish freak who cared less about winning than about how he played the game. When, with an apologetic smile. Blessed 88 launched himself for a tackle, Unsavory Eugene seized him by the throat in mid-air and held him there in a monstrous clutch of fingers, resolving by sheer brute force to drive the football up the Peregrine's nose. Again and again, he drove the leather missive into Blessed 88's face. Then, made clumsy by rage, he smashed the ball against his enemy's helmet and it popped out of his hand. At just that moment. Shy Gerard, who for the entire game had been delving away at the Golden Calves' offensive line like the true Holy Moly Peregrine he was, saw daylight. As the miraculous cornflower breaks through the densest tarmac, Shy Gerard pierced the Golden Calves' line and there at his finger tips was the ball. He tucked it away and was down the field for a touchdown before anyone realized what had happened.

The rest is history. It looked like Bad News Bailey was going all the way with the kick return until he slipped on a patch of Blessed 88's blood at the Trolls' ten. With time for only one more play, Unsavory Eugene rifled a pass to Rebel Snelgrove as he charged across into the end zone. But the shadow of the Goodyear blimp passing across the sun made Snelgrove start and look up, afraid the cloud had come back. The football bounced off his chest. Without breaking stride, Rebel Snelgrove followed Malign Sam Withers' footsteps out of the stadium. He did not even wait to hear the gun sound to end the game.

Later, when the Trolls visited the Golden Calves' locker room deep in the bowels of the stadium to ask forgiveness and give the kiss of peace all round, Unsavory Eugene flew into such a rage and stamped his foot so hard that he vanished right through the floor in a sulphurous cloud. The Golden Calves disbanded after that, the members going north of the border to play in the Canadian league.

For the next few years, the repose and its building program prospered. True to the if-you-can't-beat-them-join-them spirit, the players on the other teams experienced religious conversions of one kind or another. Testy Len Hardesty, for example, published a ghostwritten book on angels and Uncle Maim spoke regularly at youth rallies on behalf of the Deity who made "all squares 'potenoose equal squares other two sides." Nevertheless, it wasn't long before the Pigskin League went into a fatal decline. Some connected this with the untimely death of Blessed 88, who contracted blood poisoning rehearsing a razor-blade commercial. But Monsignor Finn may once again have put his finger on the reason when he observed in the Pilot that while good football teams are all alike, at least each evil football team is evil in its own way. Even jackals and hyenas are better than Alphonse and Gaston. The league foundered in the milk of its own human kindness.

The Trolls attempted to return to Catholic college football but discovered that their place in the fans' hearts had been taken by the Sisters of Lambretto, a daredevil motorcycle team composed of Italian nuns. For a while, they survived by playing exhibition games with schools like Southern Methodist, Texas Christian and Brigham Young, which were prepared to pay out good money for the satisfaction of whipping a team of Papist monks. But soon enough, even those games were hard to come by. Back at the repose, the ghost of Father Perry's What walked abroad in the shadow of the half-finished social center and through the weedy foundations of the planned geriatrics clinic.

In desperation, the Peregrines had started a flock of goats, aging a moldy cheese deep in the shafts of the agate mine. Father Hovacks—he had been ordained five years before—had been chosen to carry the first samples to Denmark and the Piebald Fathers, a religious order originally from Schleswig-Holstein that marketed a brand of cheese worldwide under the Laughing Monk label. But the Piebald Fathers weren't looking for an American blue. Loading Father Hovacks down with an assortment of their product, they sent him on his way.

•

The old school bus was waiting in the Lomax Airport parking lot with Wayne Zuch, the farmer neighbor's boy, behind the wheel. Father Hovacks' thoughts were too deep in the frustrating realm of Father Perry's What to wonder why. While the familiar scenery hurried by on both sides of the darkening road, he tried to prime his imagination by running down a shopping list of others' things: Trappist breads and jams and jellies, Oka cheese and Chartreuse, green and yellow; Benedictine benedictine; Christian Brothers wines and brandies. He found no inspiration there.

Hitting the door lever, the Zuch boy said, "Goodbye and good luck, Father-hovacks." Not being a Catholic, embarrassed to call the priests Father, he ran all their names together like that. When Father Hovacks stood up, he found that they had stopped at the side of the highway a half mile beyond the Peregrine mailbox.

"And goodbye, bus, hello, chicken house," added the boy, as though the priest would understand the joke.

Through the open doorway, Father Hovacks could see a group of figures beneath the railroad bridge. When he stuck his head out the door, one of them—was it Father Moss?—waved and gestured him on. With a vague goodbye to Wayne Zuch, he maneuvered his suitcase out through the door. As the bus tottered back onto the highway, Father Hovacks stepped high over the thickly painted cables of the guardrail and took the gully-like path down through the weeds and high grasses. As he went nearer, he saw that all the Peregrines and the 20 or so guests who remained at the repose were waiting there under the bridge.

Father Moss came forward to meet him, as if to hurry him on. "Two bologna sandwiches and a pear," said the old priest, handing him a brown-paper bag.

"Meaning?" said Father Hovacks. Just then, those under the bridge who had been sitting got to their feet and the guests began checking knapsacks like parachute instructors preparing their jumpers.

"Meaning the keys are in the mail," said Father Moss, pulling him along. The others were all trotting for the tracks. "Lomax First National Farmers doesn't know it yet, but it just got itself a worked-out agate mine and a half-built home for knights of the road and foolish monks."

A slow freight came into view around the bend. The men along the tracks began to jog ahead up the grade.

"Just like that we hop a train?" demanded Father Hovacks breathlessly, for the suitcase was awkward to run with.

Father Moss pressed his lips together and nodded. "Mr. Arnold and his people have kindly consented to teach us the ropes if we're quick learners." The two of them had reached the tracks. Ahead and behind them, men were throwing their gear into the darkness of the empty boxcars and climbing in after it.

"But a train to where?" panted Father Hovacks.

Squatting in an open doorway, Mr. Arnold reached out skillfully, grabbed Father Moss by the wrist and helped him up beside him. "Anywhere," said Father Moss, watching the young priest struggle to keep up with the train. "It's time to get the show back on the road. It's headquarters in the saddle for the next Peregrine superior-general or three." Father Hovacks had managed to keep abreast of the door. But then the gravel turned soft underfoot and he started to drop back. Father Moss nodded at the suitcase. "Chuck it," he suggested.

"Cheeses," gasped Father Hovacks. Impressed, Mr. Arnold swung out spryly on one arm and, when the priest hoisted it. he grabbed the suitcase. Now the young priest was able to lunge ahead, get his chest on the floor and pull himself into the car. He sat back against a wall and fought to recover his breath.

"Glad we didn't lose you there," said Father Moss dryly. "You're wearing the black suit. I didn't say we'd never need it again." He sniffed the air appreciatively. "Smells like elephant," he said. "A good omen. And thousand-mile paper, too, eh, Mr. Arnold?" He gestured at the large paper tatters hanging from the walls, evidence that the car had recently been used to carry grain. At Mr. Arnold's nod, Father Moss parroted what he'd learned, explaining that that kind of paper was sought after as ground sheeting. Some was heavy enough to last only 500 miles.

"And Rome?" ventured Father Hovacks hoarsely.

"When you gave us the word on the Piebald people, I wrote to Monsignor Spagnoli and asked for a favor, one and done. I asked him to misfile the Peregrine packet. God willing, it'll be years before anyone over there even thinks of us again."

"But what will we do?" asked Father Hovacks. But the question was half-hearted. All of a sudden, he had realized that he was perfectly content to be where he was with everything that had been disappearing behind them in the growing darkness.

"We stick together until we get to the yard in Tatlock," said Father Moss. "Then we break up into gangs, two parts us, one part Mr. Arnold's people. We've got a lot to learn. When the next generation comes by to ride the rods, we'll show them how and give what help we can. We'll live by junking and eat wild strawberries from along the track. And once a year, we'll come together in council under a bridge to be determined later." He shrugged and stood watching the shadows race by. "Who knows what to do? But the world is too much with us, Father," he declaimed loudly. "Late and soon, getting and spending, Father, we laid waste our powers." 'Then he unbuttoned his fly and, continuing in the same voice, said, "Piss out the door of a moving boxcar and thoushalt be a hobo forever."