Heroes by Ray Robertson

find a black-suited minister grinning good-naturedly and offering Bayle a duplicate of what he was drinking, vodka on the rocks.
    Seeing that both of Bayle’s hands were full with a glass of bourbon and a bottle of Budweiser — Bayle’s condition of coming already broken almost as soon as he had come — “Oh, dear, I see that you’re already fully occupied,” the minister frowned. “Not to worry,” he said, broad smile of before promptly reappearing. He emptied the contents of one drink into that of the other and placed the empty glass on the bar top. “A double play!” he said, clinking Bayle’s glass, expertly sipping down a good third of the three fingers of alcohol in his own. Bayle cautiously sipped his own Wild Turkey without saying a word and seriously considered whether he had only imagined the Greek.
    â€œSo what’s it going to be then?” the minister said, his face now suddenly serious, even stern. “Knowledge or belief? Which one is it that rules your tender soul? And don’t try to sell me any of that Hegelian dialectism nonsense. As they say in my business” — he tugged at his white clerical collar — “you can’t serve two masters. Which is it?” He drank again, eyes slightly narrowed and never leaving Bayle’s. Bayle, more than a little baffled, could only sip.
    â€œOh, what a bloody ass I am,” the minister said, all affability again. He wiped his free hand on his black trousers before presenting it to be shaken. “Charles Warren. Actually, the Reverend Charles Warren, but I’d be very happy if you would just call me Chuck.”
    Still a little overwhelmed, Bayle, by instinct, offered over his beer-holding hand.
    â€œAh ha, putting your best hand forward!” Warren said. He took the bottle of Budweiser from Bayle and put it on the bar beside his empty vodka glass.
    â€œBayle,” Bayle said, shaking-hand free now and meeting Warren’s. “Peter Bayle.”
    â€œOh, I know who you are, Peter. You don’t mind if I call you Peter, do you?”
    â€œNo, no, not at all ....” Bayle said, shaking his head no, as puzzled-looking as before.
    â€œOh, I get it,” Warren said. “I know you but you don’t know me. Gotcha. Just like poor old Job down there on the farm. Let’s grab a seat, shall we? It’s really not as mysterious as it all might at first appear. Which, incidentally, is just what Job found out in the end, isn’t it?”
    â€œYes, but what
did
Tillich mean, exactly, by Ultimate Concern? Collecting baseball cards? Sniffing women’s used underthings? Belief in an omniscient, all-powerful Being? I mean, really, Peter, let’s narrow down our terminology here a little bit, what?”
    The Reverend Warren, in his part-time capacity as the Warriors’ team minister, had heard through Samson about Bayle’s philosophical background almost as soon as Bayle arrived in town and hoped that he and Bayle could, “You know, banter on a bit about the Ontological Argument and what not” because “one does get a bit starved out here in the territories for really meaty conversation.”
    St. Louis-born one year after Bayle, Warren had attended Christ’s College, Oxford, on a full scholarship and almost completed his doctoral thesis on Aquinas after an outstanding undergraduate career at Washington University when he was called back home to Missouri during his father’s fatal battle with leukemia. His mother falling infirm shortly after her husband’s death, Warren, an only child and his mother’s solebenefactor, entered the local Baptist ministry because, as he explained it to Bayle, “First, I thought I could get paid to talk about Aquinas and Anselm all day long — Wrong! — and second, the Catholics, my first choice, though impressed by my academic background, wanted me to go to school for another five