It's your team or your family or your neighborhood or your church, or maybe just yourself and two other guys. But you have to be able to count on each other, or you can't count on anything at all.

My guys are Skitz Fitzsimmons, who's daffy as a box of frogs, and Hector Fossas, who could pass for Jesus' stronger, tougher, holier brother. I'd stack my guys against anybody's.

The tribe that runs everything in my parish is the Franchise: Fathers Blarney, Mullarkey, and Shenanigan. One's an old blowhard, one's a nasty piece of work, and one's the coolest priest on wheels. Except as soon as you think you know all that, you find out you don't know anything.

They're in charge of right and wrong, but it seems like they make it up as they go along.

They want to break us apart, because of what we see and what we say. So I guess the question is, can the rest of the tribe wait when one guy's falling behind?