Foy: On the Road to Lost

By Gordon Atkinson

Foy is a minister who can no longer make sense of the religious world into which he was born. A strange bus journey to the heart of New Orleans marks his exit from a familiar life and a rebirth into a new reality. But the secular world is a strange and lonely place for Foy. His identity as a clergyman is more deeply embedded in his soul than he thought.
In this series of connected short stories, Foy is determined to chart his own course rather than allowing others to define who he is. A series of flashbacks to his childhood and his time as an unorthodox minister give us clues to the forces that shaped this man and a glimpse at what may be in store for him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Material Media LLC
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780996753562

Book preview

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Also by Gordon Atkinson:

RealLivePreacher.com

Turtles All the Way Down

A Christmas Story You’ve Never Heard

For my wife, the three sisters, and Andrew. For my friends at Covenant Baptist Church, who gave me the space and freedom to write honestly while I was their pastor. And for all the people who read these stories online over the last twelve years and offered their enthusiastic encouragement.

Contents

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Extreme Unction

De Nada

Mardi Gras

Childhood Like a Dream

Degradation

Bearing Witness

Personal Savior

Freckles and Blue

Queen’s Gambit

Spring Break

The Sermon

F-Bomb

Singing and Putting Stuff Away

Pegasus

The Rock

Epiphany

Letting Stanley

Say Words Over Me

Cosmic Balance

Consider the Lily

Love Letter

Cold Calling

I Buy Thirteens

My Boy

What a Fool Believes

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

C.G. Jung

Extreme Unction

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San Antonio

2005

FOY PLANNED THE trip to New Orleans after Anne left him but before the divorce was final. Those were the in between days when everything ran together in his memory. Asked later about that time in his life, Foy would shake his head and say, It was just a time when I wandered around. I don’t know what I was thinking back then.

He lost his job at the church two days after he was served with divorce papers. It was hard to say how that happened. His energy had been draining away for a year or more. There was talk in the halls, people saying that the pastor was losing it. He knew what they were saying but didn’t care. He’d been fantasizing about leaving anyway. He wondered what it would be like to be a regular person.

Foy asked for a meeting of the church leadership. They gathered at the church office. Someone brought in folding chairs and a couple of people sat on the secretary’s desk. They didn’t fire him, but he didn’t exactly quit either. It was more like two lovers staring at each other and saying, almost simultaneously, We need to talk. Officially, Foy resigned for personal reasons.

He took all his toys down from the shelves in his office. The G.I. Joes, the Monty Python stuff, the pictures and the little things children had given him over the years. All the silly things that had amused and sometimes confounded church members. He put all of them into a cardboard box, sealed it with duct tape, wrote Foy’s Stuff on it, and shoved it against the wall.

He couldn’t bear to look at his beloved books. It was a damn fine library. Everyone said so. Ministers would turn their heads sideways, looking at the titles to see what he had. He didn’t want to look at the books because he couldn’t bear to face the fact that he didn’t need them anymore.

He wrote a note to Ben, one of the deacons.

Ben

We’ve been friends for sixteen years. I’m going to call upon that friendship now. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I must ask you to do something for me.

Please come to my office and box up my books and store them for me. I can’t do it. I can’t even look at them. It’s probably going to take you 25 or 30 boxes. Get Michael and some of the guys to help, maybe. I hope it’s not too terrible an inconvenience, but I need you.

I’m including money to rent a storage place for a few months. Have them bill me at my parents’ house after that.

Who knows, one day I might come back for the books. Or maybe I’ll sell them after awhile. I have no idea.

I think JoAnn has my parents’ address from that time that Jill watched our dog.

Also, there’s a big box in my office with my name on it. Get that one too, okay?

Foy.

He put the money and the note in an envelope and left it in Ben’s box near the secretary’s desk. Ben always checked his box.

He went back into his office again and looked around. He thought he should feel sad, but he felt nothing. He took the key to the church off his key ring and laid it on the desk. Possessed by the strange idea that there was a casual place on the desktop for a key left by a departing pastor, he slid it around with his index finger, trying one location and then another. The absurdity of this rose into his consciousness and he dragged the key to the geographic center of the desk and left it there, suppressing his instinctive dislike of such a symmetry.

When Foy stepped outside, the sun reflected off the sidewalk and made him squint. It seemed like a scene from one of those movies where some guy gets out of prison. But there was no one there to pick him up.

He had nothing to do and nowhere to go. The absence of obligations or expectations was disorienting. Everything seemed strange. Cars passed and a woman stepped off the curb to cross the street. It felt odd that no one else noticed the abrupt shift in the world. When was the last time he had been this free? He remembered walking along the base of Sleeping Lion Mountain on the way home from school in Fort Davis. He was always looking for arrowheads but never found one. Sometimes it would take him two hours to get home.

Foy realized he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the church staring into the street and had been for some time. How long had he been there? He hadn’t made housing arrangements yet and thought maybe he would spend a couple of nights with Tim. Or maybe with Adrian and Cynthia.

Yeah, sleep on Cynthia’s couch. Get a good meal in me. Then take a trip maybe. Go somewhere. Maybe New Orleans. Never been there. Isn’t Mardi Gras sometime soon?

He felt in his pockets for his sunglasses, took them out and started to put them on but didn’t. He stared at them a moment then tossed them into a trash can by the curb. They were the overlarge type old people wear over their glasses and he hated them. He lost his prescription sunglasses when he took the church kids to the beach that time.

Stupid ocean, he said.

Then he whirled around and went back to the church door. It was locked because everyone was gone for lunch. He grabbed his key ring and flipped through it for a few seconds before he remembered that he didn’t have the key to the church anymore. He cupped his hands on the window by the door to look inside. He tapped on the glass a few times. No one was there.

Damn.

He went around the corner and found the side door unlocked, as usual. He went back to his office and ripped open the cardboard box. He rummaged through it until he found a little wooden vial that a certain Father Christopher had given him. It held a tiny container of rose oil used for anointing the sick. Foy opened the vial and smelled the heavy, floral scent. Impulsively, he put his finger over the opening and turned it upside down. He touched his finger to his own forehead. A short laugh burst out of him.

Jeezus, I must be losing my fuckin’ mind.

He dropped the vial into his pocket, kicked the box back against the wall, and left through the side door.

De Nada

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San Antonio

2005

YEARS LATER, FOY would wonder why he decided to go to Mardi Gras. He never did come up with insightful or satisfying reasons. It seemed like he went because he wasn’t a minister anymore, and he could go if he wanted to. None of the ministers that Foy knew ever went to Mardi Gras or any place where people got drunk and acted crazy.

He imagined himself walking down the streets of the French Quarter at night with people all around him laughing and drinking and having a good time. He wanted to sit at an outdoor cafe smoking a cigar while he watched people walk up and down the street. Foy didn’t smoke cigars, but he thought he might start in New Orleans.

He decided to take a bus because of Midnight Cowboy. He loved the bus scenes in that movie. Not so much the one where Joe Buck rode the bus from Texas to New York, but the one in the end, where he threw away his cowboy clothes and rode the bus to Florida with his dying friend, Ratso Rizzo. People in the movies were always taking a bus somewhere, especially when important stuff was happening in their lives.

Foy put some books into a knapsack, then packed a change of pants and several shirts into an old duffel bag. He wanted to travel lightly. When he thought about traveling he remembered his wife’s luggage and all the kids’ stuff and how he used to pack a lot of suits and nice clothes if he was going to do a wedding or a funeral. There was so much stuff, and he couldn’t bear thinking about it. He just wanted everything to be neat and tidy and in one bag.

He zipped up the duffel the night before the trip and tossed it over by the door. One bag, he said out loud. I don’t know what all the fuss was about. A person doesn’t need all that much.

One of the deacons drove him downtown to the San Antonio bus station. He was very amused that Foy was taking a bus, and he joked about it. They shook hands and Foy said, I’ll see you when I see you.

It was his first time in a bus station, though he had seen plenty of them in movies. He was fascinated by the mix of humanity he saw there. These are bus people. They know what they’re doing.

Most of them were Mexican families headed south to cross the border at Laredo. They sat on the floor among piles of luggage eating tamales and tacos wrapped in tinfoil. Homeless men straggled in and out with plastic grocery bags dangling from their arms. There were a number of older men who looked like they had been at some kind of World War II convention. They all wore blue baseball caps with the names of various ships or veterans’ organizations on them. Several young Latino men were slouching on the benches wearing starched clothing and dark sunglasses. Their heads bobbed up and down while a soft buzz of Tejano music leaked out of their headphones.

Foy wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a new beige t-shirt with nothing on it. He didn’t like words on his t-shirts and went to some trouble to find plain ones. No one even looked at him. It was like he was invisible.

It turned out there was a considerable wait for the bus due to a delay near San Angelo, so he walked outside to see if there was a place to eat. Across the street was a cheap BBQ stand that seemed popular with the bus crowd. There were people sitting on the sidewalk with their luggage, eating BBQ sandwiches and sipping beer from bottles. He let his eyes drift to the left, and he spotted a sandwich shop a little ways down the street. Foy chose the sandwich shop. He had a muffaletta with extra olives and a Diet Coke while he sat at the window, happily watching the people stream back and forth from the BBQ stand to the bus station.

When it was time for the bus to leave, Foy threw his duffel into the cargo area and found a seat by a window. He put his knapsack in the aisle seat and hoped no one would sit there. He needed to check something before he could relax, so he peeked inside the knapsack and saw that his books were there. Satisfied, he leaned his head against the window and stared out, waiting for the bus to leave.

In that moment, with the details of transportation out of his mind, he began to feel wrong. Like the trip wasn’t going to work. Like Mardi Gras wasn’t going to make him feel better. Anxiety bloomed in his gut and he began bouncing his heel up and down on the floor. He could feel himself sinking into hopelessness. He shook his head angrily and whispered, No!

He exhaled loudly and turned his attention to a young Hispanic woman trying to settle herself and her two small children into their seats. She was a frenetic bundle of energy, somehow holding a baby on one hip while she helped a young boy into the seat by the window. Her arms were full of bags and toys. The baby was fussing, and the little boy began hanging over the back of the seat, picking his nose and staring at the woman behind him who was pretending not to notice.

Foy stared at the woman, fascinated and amazed. She would never be done. The children would cry and squirm and need to be fed and changed and comforted every waking moment for the entire journey. Meanwhile, he would be indulging himself with reading and staring out the window at the passing scenery, a thing he loved to do. While the woman fished around in the diaper bag for something, the little boy began licking the window with long, careful tongue strokes that left a blurry film on the glass. He was very methodical, as if he was trying to cover as much of the glass as possible before his mother noticed him.

Oh my God, Foy whispered. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me not be her.

His spirits lifted a little. However bad things were, at least he wasn’t taking care of small children on a bus trip. He didn’t have to care about the woman with the children, either. She was not his to care for. He didn’t have to care about her or anyone else. He could smile at the woman, mildly empathetic, across a vast emotional chasm.

Just then the woman spotted the boy licking the window and barked at him in Spanish. She lunged toward him and a bottle fell out of the diaper bag, rolling down the aisle until it stopped near Foy’s seat. He started to retrieve it for her, then stopped himself. Someone else can get it, he thought.

But he couldn’t keep his eyes off the bottle. He kept looking at it and wondering if anyone else would notice. No one did. The bus people seemed oblivious to anything happening outside of their own seat. Foy wondered how they did that. He was always looking at the people around him. He noticed everything.

He felt an urge to