A different kind of Easter

by Spinifex

"We were slipping and sliding around hairpin corners, slithering through the slimy ooze of the half-made Andean mountain track," he intoned seriously, "and the attention of the entire bus was hostilely directed towards me!" The professor sniffed loudly and looked around impressively. "We'd been travelling at hell-bent speed around treacherous corners, teetering over precipitous drops overlooking a tiny thread of a river three thousand meters below, powering through drizzle and mist and splashing mud."
Quietly, to myself, I sniffed in return and sneered. He did so like to dominate a conversation. It was of no concern to me that Boof hung on his every word, munching popcorn and slurping down great draughts of altar wine, his most recent favourite imbibement during this religious festival. What did worry me most was the adoring way that Miss Kitty looked over at him, coiled up on the couch, propped up on her long, fishnet-stockinged legs. How long had this been going on?
The gravity in his voice kept his dual audience rapt and even me, the Doubting-Thomas lent a little further forward to catch every word. "The bus-drivers over there are all macho-boys who think that if they don't drive like maniacs they have no balls and so everyone of them goes harder and faster than the rest to prove they're the best bloke on the block." He chuckled to himself condescendingly at the foibles and failings of another, less superior race and the other two chuckled knowingly along with him.
"The bus was full of what you'd expect over there - hick farmers with pigs under their arms and chickens roosting in their hats, snake-oil salesmen ready to rip-off the ignorant back-block dills, village idiots coming home from a visit to relatives in the big city who'd got sick of them and kicked them out. Just the normal outfit of religious-crazed loonies. They're all crazed by religion over there, you see." He sniffed triumphantly again. The other two nodded. They saw.
"And there were about four or five nuns as well and just one scruffy little mountain priest going back to minister to his minions in the mountains." He fluffed up at his lovely turn of phrase. "He was in a thread-bare black coat, his round little face was flushed with religious fervour and his balding pate made him look a lot like Elmer Fudd." He laughed at the memory.
The Professor was skiting about his travel exploits again, topping every story I could come up with and every minute looking bigger and better in the eyes of Miss Kitty, whom I had worshiped for so long from afar. What a hide he had. He'd even topped my story about bathing topless at Woy Woy in 1975 and now he was telling an Easter Story to fit in with the religious holidays we were currently observing.
"Our dear Father had some smattering of English and had engaged me in joyous conversation so I'd hit him with the usual Ozzie stories. You know the ones, killer wombats, dust storms that topdress ovals overnight, crocodiles so big they swallow ships whole, how to turn a kangaroo stampede. Just the normal run-of-the-mill yarns." Boof nearly fell over himself laughing at the thought of those. They'd keep him entertained for a month or so.
"The priest had, in stumbling English, then asked me how I had celebrated this most wonderful day of miracles, Easter Sunday, when Our Lord had arisen from the dead, the greatest miracle of all." He chuckled at the memory and the other two toadishly chuckled along with him.
The Professor continued. "I'd just had a hard night on the local mountain juice and was feeling particularly uncharitable towards the world so I'd replied that if Our Lord was so good at miracles and was so omnipotent, why couldn't he create a rock too heavy for Him to lift or invent a puzzle too hard for Him to solve?" He paused dramatically and went on. "I roared at him that I didn't believe in his cantish ramblings, in his ideologically-driven drivel and his so-called miracles. All his rosaries and Hail Mary's and the crossing of oneself were just superstitious clap-trap."
"The worthy Father, that venerable mountain priest, did his best to conceal his dismay at my heresy. The whole bus though got a slow but outraged translation into Spanish from some gangly, pimply youth, rejoicing no doubt in his ineptitude with the English language and the power it gave him over his normally insignificant existence." The arrogance of the man. He'd begun to sound like me!
"I noticed others among the passengers make the Sign of the Cross or gesture defensively towards the Satan figure that I no doubt represented to them." Again he paused dramatically and polished his little round glasses. I felt like polishing his nose with my fist.
"And then it happened! We'd slipped and slid and skidded all afternoon but had somehow got around the corners without taking the big drop!" He paused and looked around to see if we were paying attention. We were.
"You know that all through the South American countries they put up little shrines to mark where people died on the road? Or little crosses on the side of the road to show the same thing?" We nodded. They're here in Australia too. Someone's trying to ban them somewhere.
"Well," he continued, "we'd been passing them all afternoon and everybody had been studiously ignoring them. The driving had been so hairy and in fact down-right terrifying that any distraction was grabbed at. That's why they listened to me so attentively." He looked a trifle disheartened at that admission.
"And there we were on the outside of the road, with a ravine a kilometre deep just there at our right shoulder, we're doing a hundred kilometres an hour and all of a sudden there's a truck coming around this bend straight at us and there's nothing we can do because the mud's so thick and the road's so greasy and we're slithering to our doom and the driver's swinging the wheel and screaming and crying and we're going, we're going, we're sliding to the edge and the wheels aren't gripping and everyone's screaming and crying, me as well and then, as I looked out of the window, the right hand tyres over the edge, we gripped, the left hand tyres gripped and we're revving and roaring and moving forward and we're not falling, we're not falling, we're not dead, there's still tomorrow and some more life to see and experience."
He paused and we all drew a breath together, although I noticed Boof threw back almost a half litre of altar wine in sheer relief at not going over that cliff with the Professor and then he started in again.
"And we slid around the corner and slowed right down and there, just at the corner, just as we came out of the jaws of death was a stand of them, there must have been another bus go over right there, they were fresh and white, newly painted, it must have happened just a few days ago. There they were. Sixty or seventy white road death crosses. And do you know what?"
We shook our heads. We didn't know what.
"Every single person on that bus, from the driver to the farmer to the village idiot to this long-haired, bearded disbelieving gringo, me that is, we all stood as one and crossed themselves there and then and meant it." He paused for a long time this time.
"Maybe there are sometimes, just sometimes, the odd miracle that happens."