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the dean's office at Loyola. His restless fingers jitterbugged on his knees. To his great regret he was still
wearing the threadbare shirt and trousers he had changed into at the slaughterhouse, not having dared take the time to go to his room. Not the rancid overalls he'd worn to and from the blood pit, true, but not the suit and tie he usually wore to night school either. He was nobody's idea of a professional-in-training now. The skin on the backs of his hands and on his face glowed even more from the ruthless scrubbing he'd given himself in the shower again. If he'd scraped away whole layers of skin, exposing nerve endings and pores, perhaps that was the reason for his strange, unsettled sense of vulnerability. He saw himself as a rube, hadn't felt so ill at ease in years. How long had it been since he was publicly rebuked by a professor. "Get out!" the man had screamed. "Get out!" As if Dillon was an obnoxious janitor come too early to clean the classroom.
    Dillon's eyes went from the dean's secretary's vacant desk to the wall behind it where a clock showed that it was nearly eight, which was when his classmates would finish the exam. He'd found it impossible to explain himself to his stern professor, and the dean would be worse. If he told him the unvarnished truth—lifting the swollen, rotten corpse had been like lifting a mass of congealed lard—would the Jesuit think him mad? What would justify tardiness, even to a final exam, if not such a grotesque event? But Dillon had sensed shame in Hanley, and he knew he was uneasy now because, however unaccountably, he felt ashamed too. Why? For being one of a species that would do such a thing? The poor bastard had been stuffed into the blood pipe like a cork.
    He focused again on the crucifix which hung on the wall directly opposite his chair. He had never beheld the sacred object as a source of consolation, and in the seminary that had come to seem like a failure of faith. Always the corpus's gnarled boniness—the ribs like teeth, the knees like fists—had seemed a rebuke to him for his not being in pain. The figure's hollow eyes were grottoes out of which accusations flew. Turning away from the crucifix, in fact, had been like turning away from the sight, on the street, of the desperate characters whom the years had reduced to human offal. That Dillon had long ago given up even imagining that he could help them had come to seem like both the height of his new realism and, still and always, the serious sin a pious boy sees in his furtive omission. He had concluded that the most insidious thing about the Depression was the way in which people who were barely scraping by—most of the people Dillon knew—felt that their survival, such as it was, came at the expense of those—the rest of the people he knew—
who'd been chewed up by the age and spit out.
    The man in the pipes: Why do I feel ashamed? Someone else did that, not me.
    He remembered Moran's reference: Whose mark was it, the shredded skin of a flogging?
    Dillon shook the questions off, but he was still unable to look away from the cross. What the cross proves, he thought, is that if you befriend a leper, as Jesus did so famously, you become one. No wonder the religion could be so bitter. The cross was pure warning, a clenched, stingy gesture. No wonder most of what it promulgated served mainly to keep people in their cramped, dark corners. Normal Catholic piety had been impossible for Dillon since before he'd abandoned his vocation to the priesthood, and doubly so since.
    The dean was a priest, and he could blast him the way Professor Corrigan had, but the dean would know no more about what had mattered at the yards than the dandruff-ridden torts professor had.
    "Tort," Dillon recited to himself, "any wrongful act not involving breach of contract, for which a civil action will lie."
    Wrongful act, as in walking out on a helpless friend. Dillon would simply explain about the cross, that other cross, the poor