Butterfly Winter by W.P. Kinsella Page B

of this town from my own sinners. Sin needs no spies, Esteban.”
    The priest was immediately sorry that he had named the man in the confessional, but Esteban didn’t seem to hear.
    “My own brother, my twin, engages in immoral acts with young women.”
    “I don’t want to hear,” shouted the priest, covering his ears and turning away from the fence.
    ESTEBAN LEARNED TO READ from a Bible supplied by one of the elderly priests who lived behind the chain-link fences at the edge of town. Esteban taught Julio to read.
    “I am more interested in mathematics,” said Julio. “I will need math in order to count the millions I will earn as a pitcher. Being Courteguayan, I will need math to count the women who will fall into my bed.”
    Esteban rolled his eyes toward heaven. He was reading Immanuel Kant. Each afternoon for an hour or so he would question the priests.
    “I feel that the value of Kant’s work, as an instrument of mental discipline, cannot easily be overrated,” he said, quoting from
Critique of Pure Reason
. He had been reading a faded, falling-apart copy of the book that one of the priests had hidden away from Dr. Noir’s book burners long after the churches had been closed. “I believe today I would like to ask a few questions concerning pure reason as the seat of transcendental illusory appearance.”
    “You are only eight years old,” said the priest.
    “Which means you are not able to answer my questions. How about a simple discussion of opinion, knowledge, and belief? I will ask no questions, we will only speculate.”
    “At your age you should be playing baseball instead of worrying about such weighty matters.”
    “I am about finished with Kant. If you please I would next like the book of Descartes that you have buried beside the outhouse. I wish to meditate on this business of thinking in concepts.”
    The priest shrugged. “What do you think opinion, knowledge and belief have in common?”
    Esteban gave a fifteen-minute answer that left the priest shaking his head in admiration. The priest dug up other hidden books:
Science and Moral Priority
,
The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas
. Esteban devoured them. He always read between innings at the baseball ground. Julio, on the other hand, watched the stands, the crowds. His followers consisted of little girls his age in communion dresses, teenagers shrieking at his every pitch, to groupies three times his age. The adult women frightened off the first two groups; there were sometimes hair-pulling matches, and occasionally a beribboned woman with a wasp’s waist and overflowing breasts would pull a knife andsend her opponent scuttling underneath the stands. The winner would wait, smiling redly, her arm extended to Julio as he appeared in his street clothes after a game.
    “ I HAVE A VERY RICH INNER LIFE ,” said Esteban. “I do not claim to be clever, but I am methodical and questioning. Always questioning. When, before we were born, Julio and I resided in that gauzy hinterland where I was eternally in the catcher’s crouch, clothed in the tools of ignorance, the ethereal game of catch we played did not entirely hold my interest. I speculated about the world we inhabited, and the other world we would soon inhabit. If Julio had thrown the sidearm curve four times in a row, I would rouse myself from my reveries long enough to demand a fastball, then drift away again.
    “Julio had no such spiritual inclinations. In that way we have always had of communicating, telepathy some would call it, we simply read each other’s thoughts. I did not always understand Julio’s thoughts, though I could read them clearly. He joked with me about sexual things that I would not comprehend for many years, and even then would not find them essential to my life.
    “I must have been five the first time I wandered down the hill to the compound where two or three moth-eaten priests were caged like old bears in a dilapidated zoo.
    “ ‘What do you believe