More should be said about the Bodyguard.
In his junior year of college, mainly to escape the boredom of his state school abroad program, but also on coaxing from a band of Parisian scoundrels looking for a laugh at the expense of his semi-rural midwestern naiveté, he signed a contract with the French Foreign Legion.
After enduring six months of training, where daily beatings were administered depending on one's proficiency in French, he - who previously showed seemingly insurmountable trouble conjugating verbs as easy as déconfire, souffrir, and mourir - became fluent. And hardened. Thus fluent and hardened, he was shipped off to patrol the Maroni River on the border of Guyane, then to guard a strip of desert in Obock province in northern Djibouti, then to battle in the equatorial grasslands of Côte d'Ivoire.
After three years of fighting in Côte d'Ivoire he grew tired and so, buying passage aboard a Cypriot tramp freighter bound for Charleston Bay, deserted.
Repatriated, he changed his Euros and sold his uniform and metals and bought a bus ticket to Hoboken. There he found work as a bouncer. Then, after a year of bouncing, he signed with an agency that assigned him to guard the body of a once-famous female Singer.
Now he drags the body of the Bishop and dumps his body on the ashes of the pyre.
The Bookkeeper arrives.
Here's what should be said of the Bookkeeper:
After passing a correspondence course in accounting, he took a job at a discount lamp outlet.
The two men greet. After the Bookkeeper vomits on sight of the bodies and the smell, and the Bodyguard drags the body Bodybuilder and the Biomedical Scientist to lie next to the Bishop on the pyre - all while trying to keep from inhaling the fumes from the pile of worm-ridden bodies by the fence, now peppered with newborn flies - the two men chose their weapons, take the field, and stand ten paces apart.
They raise their guns. Their guns go off.
