Being around somebody as ruthless as Lucky goosed my faith.  Perhaps it was mike who first wondered aloud why I seemed to waste so much time praying.  So far as I know, mike never hassled anybody about being a prayer addict, but he didn’t view it as praiseworthy.  In all my life, I never saw him pray.

I tried to explain that I lived a risky life.  “What?  The Fielding and Bart are still beating you?”  They did and do, but why mention it?  It’s not as if bashing me is a habit either of them is willing to stop.  I was their Cornpone, but they weren’t as earnest about teaching me manners as Lucky was.  I too was lucky.

To be honest, mike probably moderated the Bart-Fielding beatings I got.  He is Buddhist and dislikes violence, even if I cannot recall Gandhi laughing when he noticed somebody had taken a licking and, like a Timex watch, kept ticking.  

Besides, mike mentioned that he drove on I-44 4 or more days per week.  “I’d not bother God, if there were a god, about keeping me alive on that stretch of road.  It doesn’t work that well.  In California, there used to be a stretch on the Monterey Highway near San Jose called ‘Blood Alley.” I drove it many times.  It was an undertaker’s paradise.  California also had a stretch of highway going from LA county into Kern County in the central valley called the grapevine.  They called that stretch the ‘Windowmaker.’  If God gave so much as a fart about drivers, those roads would never have been built.  If God existed, I dare say we’d not have the carnage on US highways that we do. And we’re not even the best at killing other drivers.  Asians don’t joke about “Driving while Asian” for nothing.”  

I hated it when mike got in his logic-chopping mode.  Why can’t a kitty pray in peace?  I like to think of my prayer sessions as my experiments in Methodism.

To be fair, I kept mike and Roberta in the dark about my adventures with Lucky.  Chaucer, on the other hand, could care less what I did to preserve myself provided I got him the results he coveted.  

Still, mike liked telling me that “petitionary prayers” were beggars’ prayers.  According to him, sophisticated Christians practised “contemplative prayer.”  It’s a way to being with God, a way, as Jesuits say of coming to see God in all things or of learning how to make one’s life a prayer.

Let me call mike out on this rubbish.  I don’t need “presence” I need safety.  If God isn’t going to deliver the goods when I ask, what good is He?  I want a lucrative salvation with safety guaranteed in the here and now. All this thinly veiled eroticised union with God ought to make so-called sophisticated folks like mike suspicious of their own fancy, pompous, smart-boy pretentions. And I’ve seen Roberta fiddling with her Rosary.  What makes mike so sure she’s not dreaming of billions when she’s hard at doing the Rosary?  Besides, “the Our Father” is petitionary prayer.  Ditto, for Hail Marys.  Mike should think about that.  He’s had some rabid mystic bite in the past.  And as Father Newman once said, “Mysticism begins with Mist and ends in schism.”  So, I plan to keep asking loud and clear for God to hand over what I want.

The reason I was surviving Lucky was my prayers, so screw mike.  Being wise, I rush to admit how needless it is to share my ever thought with mike.  Let him feel rather than be right.

I prayed for protection.  As you see, my prayers were answered.  If they weren’t, you’d not be reading me now.

I went back and forth to Waynesville.  Lucky had eased up on Cornpone.  The fat man began to walk again.  Maybe he got enough Early Times in him that he didn’t notice any pain.  

He would take me to the Hub.  Nothing put him in better spirits than the Hub’s Hunter Schnitzel, a breaded, fried pork tenderloin (Yum!) with portobellos and a side of Hunter Gravy (Jaeger Sosse).  If we had money from Lucky, I could always him into buying me broiled salmon with drawn butter.  The butter is to die for.  

These feasts helped us get on better. When he wasn’t too drunk, he wasn’t a bad guy.  

Lucky continued to prod him for details about all things Wolverine.  One day she put of a spike of fear into me when she asked him what he knew about Ice-10.  I wondered what she must know about Ice-10 to ask the question.    How did she know?  Obviously, she suspected Wolverine had a role.

Around that time, I heard Wolverine had met with Lord Caligula and Peregrine about another test of the stealth bomb. They needed something that would divert Emperor Xi from Munitions Galore and also confuse Putin

Peregrine said the next test should surprise the world.  He suggested using it on the Lapps or if that was too small a target on the Lithuanians.  Lord Caligula asked if the Lapps weren’t some tribes of primitives living somewhere in Borneo or Sumatra.

Geography was not a strongpoint in his Lordship education.  If you want to learn something at Eton or Cambridge, you sometimes must stop beating up the other boys long enough to read a few pages.  Admittedly, if you’re rich enough, that’s optional.

Peregrine troubled to explain the Lapps were a people living in Finland who depended on reindeer to survive.  “Why freeze them?” asked his Lordship. “Aren’t’ the already frozen or damn near it?”  He glared at both Peregrine and Wolverine.  After a few moments, he asked, “And who are these, what did you call them, Lithzanias?  Some sort of stone users, perhaps? A bunch of wogs if I recall.”

As Peregrine and Wolverine stared at each other in disbelief, Wolverine attacked his Lordship’s indomitable ignorance. “They’re a small country on the Baltic Sea.  The Russians occupied it after the war.  Lithuanians are very fair.   Linguists like to study them because their language is in many ways the closest language now used to Indo-European.”  

“Indo-European?” choked his Lordship, “They might as well chatter in Sanskrit.  Why aren’t they already extinct? Why was a fair race too stupid to progress?”  Staring at him, Wolverine said, “Especially since we have such an outstanding example of fair race accomplishment at the table.”  Lord Caligula scrunched his face.  He was puzzled.  

Peregrine then pointed out that Lithuania is a convenient easy target that few, if any, outside it would care what happened in it.  

When Peregrine gave me the lowdown on all this, I’ll admit I never figured out where Lithuania was until mike showed me on a globe.  When I asked, he said he didn’t know if they liked cats.  Perhaps like the silly Germans, they prefer dogs.