They both got out of the car, two hard-faced suspicious young uniformed cops with silly Groucho Marx moustaches. “Okay, Mac,” one of them said, “what’s your story?”
“I’m going to the airport,” I said.
He looked scornful, as though he thought I thought he’d been born yesterday. “On foot?”
I looked down at the objects in question; sandal-covered, the toes getting rather dirty from all this walking in the outer world. “They’re my own feet,” I said. I couldn’t think of any other response to suit the circumstances.
The other policeman gestured at the highway noisily beside us, as though it were an important piece of evidence against me. “You’re walking on the Van Wyck Expressway?”
“Is that what it’s called?”
The first policeman snapped his fingers at me. “Let’s see some eye dee,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Identification,” he explained. Though it didn’t sound like an explanation, it sounded like an additional order.
“Identification,” I repeated, and frowned doubtfully at my bag. Would there be anything in my luggage with my name on it? My initial — B — was inscribed with laundry marker inside the neck of the robe I was wearing, but that hardly seemed sufficient for men as serious and self-important as this.
The policeman who had snapped his fingers was frowning at me more and more sternly. “No eye dee?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I could look, but I don’t think—”
The other policeman said, “What’s the bag for?”
“I’m going on a Journey,” I told him. I’d thought that was obvious.
“You’re taking a plane?”
I might have tried sarcasm, but it probably would have been lost on him. “Yes, I am.”
“You have a ticket?” he asked me, and his design finally became clear.
“Of course!” I said, delighted with him. “It’ll have my name on it!” And I dropped to one knee, unzipped the bag.
Movement made me look up. Both policemen had moved back a pace, close to one another and closer to their car. Both were staring at me with rather frightening intensity, and both had their hands hovering near their holsters.
“Um,” I said. I’ve watched enough television to be not totally unaware of the outside world, and so I understood at once that my intention to put my hand inside this bag had frightened and angered those policemen. It was incumbent upon me to reassure them; soon. “My ticket,” I said, and pointed my finger at the bag. I was very careful not to point it at them. “It’s in there.”
Neither of them moved or spoke. They didn’t quite seem to know what to do about this situation.
I said, “Would you like to do it, get the ticket? Shall I give you the bag?”
“Just get out the ticket,” one of them said, and I saw that he’d relaxed a bit, though his partner was still rigid with the suspicion that I was a bomber or a maniac or an escaped murderer.
The ticket, fortunately, had been the last item placed in the bag and was still near the top. I found it, left the bag unzipped, and handed it to the one who had originally asked to see it (and who had been the first to relax). He studied it, while his partner went on studying me, and behind them their car suddenly spoke in a squawking incomprehensible voice like a parrot. They ignored it. The policeman with my ticket said, “You’re Brother Benedict?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s this here? C-O-N-M.”
“That’s the Order I belong to, the Crispinite Order of the Novum Mundum.”
The other policeman said, “What’s that? That Catholic?”
“Roman Catholic, yes.”
“I never heard of it.” He seemed to think that fact significant.
The other one said, “You’re going to Puerto Rico, huh? Missionary work?”
“No, uhh, not exactly. No.”
“Vacation?”
“I have to see someone,” I said, “on monastery business.”
He gestured with my ticket toward the bag. “Mind if I take a look in that?” It was phrased like a question, but the toughness of their manner suggested I didn’t have that much choice in my answer.
“Of course,” I said. “I mean of course not. I mean yes, go ahead. Here.” Picking up the bag, which was still unzipped, I handed it to him.
“Thanks.” Another statement belied by its manner.
He unpacked my bag on the flat surface of the police car’s trunk, while his partner continued to beetle his brows and give me long suspicious glares and the cars going by on the Van Wyck Expressway slowed to catch a no-doubt tantalizing glimpse of this roadside entertainment. Brother Quillon’s socks, carefully rolled, rolled off the car and were retrieved by the policeman.
His partner, the starer, abruptly said, “What’s the Assumption?”
Startled, I said, “What?”
He repeated his question.
“Oh,” I said. “The Assumption. Well, in our present circumstances, it is the attitude you’re supposed to have toward my innocence, but I think what you’re referring to is Mary’s Assumption into Heaven. Christ ascended, because being God He had the power to lift Himself, but Mary, being human and without Godly power, had to be assumed, drawn up through the power of God. Are you trying to find out if I’m really a Catholic?”
He didn’t answer me. The other one, having repacked my bag, now returned it to me, saying, “We don’t get walkers out here that much, Brother. Particularly dressed like you are.”
“I don’t suppose you do,” I said.
He had retained my ticket. Looking at it again, he said, “American Airlines.”
“That’s right.”
Now handing the ticket back, he said, “Get in, we’ll take you there.”
“Thank you very much,” I said.
I rode in the back seat, holding my ticket in one hand and my bag in the other. The more mistrustful policeman drove, glaring at the other traffic and occasionally muttering to himself, while his partner spoke into a microphone. I suppose he was talking about me, but I couldn’t make out what was said, and when the parrot-voice of the car’s radio responded I couldn’t understand a word of that either.
I leaned forward toward the front seat when I was sure the radio communicating was all finished. “You know,” I said, addressing myself to the milder of the policemen, “there was a Ray Bradbury story exactly like this years and years ago. About a man walking, and being stopped by the police because walking had become a suspicious activity.”
“Is that right.” he said, not looking at me, and began flipping documents on a clipboard. And that was the last any of us said in the car — except for the radio, which squawked incoherently from time to time — until they stopped at the terminal and I said, “Thank you again.”
“Have a good flight,” the policeman said, but not as though he cared.
Did I have a good flight? I don’t really know, having no standard for comparison.
It was an experience, that’s all. I was gathered together with a great crush of people, and we were all shuffled through a “checkpoint” where my bag was searched for the second time tonight and X-ray equipment was used to discover any weapons I might have concealed beneath my robe. After that we were shuffled down a long corridor with many left and right turns, and were suddenly on board the airplane.
How did that happen? I’d been expecting a walk across concrete from a building to a plane, but the corridor ended at the plane. In fact, it was difficult to tell exactly where the corridor stopped and the plane began. I was looking around at all that when a stewardess — pleasant-acting, a bit plump — said, “Father, may I see your boarding pass?”