Brutal Youth (8 page)

Later that morning, as the smoke still rose, parishioners celebrated holiday Mass in a makeshift chapel in the school’s basketball gymnasium. In his sermon from the free throw line, Father Mercedes, the parish’s longtime pastor and a son of the school himself, vowed that St. Michael the Archangel’s would stand again within the year. That had been four years ago.

In that time, the scoreboard and bleachers were removed. The retractable stage, previously used for school plays, became an altar, and a thin carpet was nailed over the pine flooring of the basketball court. Worn pews had been salvaged from a church in McKeesport, which was among several shuttered by the diocese as part of a series of parish closings and consolidations due to the shriveling population of the region’s faithful. St. Michael’s was not rebuilt, but it was the beneficiary of many secondhand baptismal fonts, pipe organs, choir loft risers, and assorted gilded candelabras.

Father Mercedes regularly explained to the restless congregation that he could not persuade the bishop to reconstruct their burned church when so many others were being forced to close their doors.

The gymnasium church remained, and it was there Sister Maria ended her after-hours walk.

She found she was no longer alone.

A slouching figure, clad entirely in black, knelt in the church pews.

*   *   *

His back was to her, his face turned up at a ceramic statue of the resurrected Christ, salvaged from one of the shuttered churches, suspended from the ceiling with its arms extended in the shape of the cross and a peculiar neutral expression on its face—less the throes of agony than the boredom of a minimum-wage employee at the end of a long day:
Don’t ask me, I’m going off shift.

The dark figure in the pews looked back at Sister Maria, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. His eyes were shadow pits, his thin gray hair neatly combed across his scalp, though a little damp with sweat. His face had a similar expression to the impatient Christ.

“Good afternoon, Father Mercedes,” she said.

He smiled, and the cigarette bent upward toward his nose. “Sister,” he said. “Let me guess—bad news?”

She walked toward him down the central aisle of the church. “The ceilings are leaking again—four of them,” she said. “You’ve seen the problems, I take it?”

The priest’s unlit cigarette danced as he spoke. “Oh, that and a lot more.”

He held a gold-plated Zippo in his hands, sparking the flame, touching it to the tip of his cigarette, and exhaling a corona of blue haze into the air. She despised this about him, smoking in a church. He did it all the time when no one was around—no one he cared about, anyway.

Father Harold Mercedes was only seven years older than her, but always seemed much more ragged and tired. Many parishioners found his roguishness charming. To the students, his bad habits made him a maverick, a fellow rebel—the priest who bought rounds of beer at the P&M Bar, placed bets on the Steelers, took annual vacations to Vegas and Atlantic City, and occasionally let slip a curse word. His Friday-night poker buddies would tease the priest, “Ah, better go to confession, Father!” And he would close his eyes and say: “I forgive myself.”

Behind his back, the older parishioners called him Diamond Hal. The kids called him Father Pimp.

“We’ll need money to repair the damage, Father,” Sister Maria said. She reminded him about the eroding brick and the past failures of temporary fixes. He smoked his cigarette and let her talk, not really listening. When she finished, he rose from the pew and shrugged. “Why bother fixing a school that may not exist in another year?”

The nun crossed her arms. “I don’t think that’s very funny, Father.”

The priest blew smoke through his nose. “That’s because it’s not a joke, Sister. When I ask for things, when I ask for extra
money
—a special pass of the collection plate—our parish council tends to ask two questions. First is: ‘Why are we supporting a school that only causes humiliation for the parish?’ And the second question is: ‘When will we finally rebuild our burned church?’ My answer to the second one is, ‘We can’t afford it yet.’ And so the parish council’s response is to repeat the first question—‘Why, why, why’…,” he said, exhaling smoke again. “… ‘Why are we supporting a school nobody wants?’”

In the twelve years he’d served as pastor, Father Mercedes had proved himself adept at wielding the parish council like a bludgeon. He didn’t need the panel’s approval for much, but it was always easy enough for him to manipulate them into whatever cause he supported.

The nun’s shoulder’s sagged. “Shall I control the weather in the meantime?” she asked.

“I’d prefer you control your students,” Father Mercedes snapped back. “What happened to the emergency funds I secured for you this summer?”

Sister Maria sighed. “You know the answer to that.” That money had been scattered by the Boy on the Roof. Settlements, medical bills, pain and suffering payments for the staff injured that day. Money for secret scholarships for the hurt students—secret to prevent every enrollee from claiming psychological scarring. Luckily, the child who was most seriously wounded—the boy Davidek and Stein had rescued—came from a family with a near slavish devotion to the school, and they had helped coordinate the legal arrangements to keep everything hush-hush. It was a wealthy and influential family (made more wealthy by the payments they arranged, of course), but they had helped suppress the full story in the local newspaper, shielding the school’s reputation … somewhat. That had cost a significant payout, too.

Only one student involved in the incident hadn’t returned, and he was the one Sister Maria knew she had failed the most—The Boy on the Roof, himself. Mr. Zimmer had been the one who saved St. Michael’s in that regard, and not just by grabbing the boy in the midst of his plunge. He had arranged something for the boy and his family that no one else could. He had settled the ugliness once and for all. The boy had disappeared. The boy’s family was satisfied. St. Michael the Archangel soldiered on.

But they had paid for it. Paid mightily. Now Sister Maria was asking for more money.

“So how many more deranged students should we budget for this year?” Father Mercedes asked. He stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of a pew, then looked in vain for a place to dispose of the butt.

“I thought perhaps, given the circumstances, the diocese might consider offering us a small—,” Sister Maria began, but Father Mercedes cut her off.

“The diocese isn’t going to give us any
more
money; it
collects
money. And we are becoming more valuable as real estate. Would you like to see St. Michael’s become another
community theater,
or a Taco Bell?” The dead ember in his hand wavered near her face.

“The school is St. Michael’s identity,” the nun said quietly.

“The
empty field
out there is our identity now,” he said. “St. Michael’s is the church without a church. The parish that
could not
rebuild itself.” His eyes scanned the gymnasium chapel with unmasked disgust. “If you want to keep this school, you’d better
force
these students to become something worth saving,” he said. “Frankly, a lot of parishioners believe you’re the worst principal we’ve ever had at St. Mike’s. Do you like the idea of being the
last
one, too?”

The nun closed her eyes. The priest was waiting for an answer. “No,” she said finally.

“Good.” He nodded. “Then we’re going to see some changes around here, yes?” He reached out his hand, and the nun shook it reluctantly. “Take care of that for me,” he said.

As the priest left her, the silence of the empty school returned, that great after-hours stillness she had once found calming. For the first time, Sister Maria felt lost there—and, finally, afraid.

She sat down in the pew, opening the hand that had just shook the priest’s.

In her palm was the blackened stub of his cigarette.

PART II

Our Turn

SIX

“I was dead,” said a kid at the freshman lunch table. “These senior guys slammed my tie in a locker and then put on the lock!” Davidek didn’t know the name of the boy telling the war story. School was just a couple of weeks in, and he still didn’t know everybody.

Green did: “Well, what’d you do, Mikey?”

“I was screaming for help, and the old French-teacher nun came out and made them unlock me,” the kid told the serious faces around him. “If she hadn’t come out, I would’ve been stuck there for good.”

Stein was chewing a cookie. “Or until you figured out you could just loosen the loop around your neck and slip it off.”

The boy telling the story hung his head. “I didn’t think of that,” he said quietly.

The freshman boys had finished their lunches, but no one was leaving the table. It was cool down here in the cafeteria, and safe—while outside, in the scorching September sun, the seniors had started a recess ritual of capturing freshman guys and swinging them by their ankles around the parking lot. They liked to make the human pinwheels slam into each other.

Anxiety had overtaken the newcomers. Everyone knew about the hazing, but no one was sure what to do about it, or how bad it would get. “Mr. Zimmer said if we just go along with it, they’ll get bored,” Green said. “And it won’t last long.”

“Nuh-uh, it lasts all year,” said another kid, J. R. Picklin, a self-professed graffiti artist who bragged that he spelled his name
JayArr
when he tagged objects around town. “And at the end of the year, there’s this big gathering where they put you on a stage and
really
fuck you up.”

“What do they make you do?” said a small voice. It was a girl, the only one at an empty table next to the one jammed with boys. The girl was tiny and abnormally thin, with a narrow wedge-shaped face that almost put her eyes on opposite sides of her head, like a fish. Her whitish blond hair fell in short, straight lines and she breathed through drooped lips. A small gold cross dangled from her neck, like the bell you’d attach to a cat.

JayArr shrugged at her. “It’s some end-of-the-year picnic thing. I heard from my older brother that they march you out in front of the crowd, and everybody’s chanting and yelling shit at you, and throwing stuff. And you’re, like, the entertainment.”

Stein asked, “So what? You sing a song or tootle on a kazoo, or something?”

“That’s not scary. Just sounds lame,” Davidek said.

“Yeah, but then they pull down your pants or make you wear girl’s underwear or put ants down your shirt while you’re doing it,” JayArr emphasized. “My brother says there’s no mercy.”

“They can’t do any of that,” Davidek said. “The teachers wouldn’t
let
them do that.”

The fish-faced girl spoke softly again. “They did it to Jesus on the crucifixion.…” But the weird religious invocation just made everybody squirm.

“All seniors got their asses decapitated when they were freshmen, and it boils in them for years. Now they’re gonna give it
back,
” JayArr said. “My brother and his friends got stomped all year long. Then came the big finale—this picnic, which is so bad, they need to have it at a park away from school grounds, just so St. Mike’s can’t get sued, or something. The teachers pretend they don’t even
know
about it.”

“So what exactly did your brother say happened?” Davidek asked, wondering what his own brother, the marine deserter, could have told him about all this—if he were around.

“My brother and some other guys got covered in chocolate sauce and whip cream and had cherries dumped on their head. The sicko seniors turned them into a damned banana split! I’m not joking. All the people in the audience were pelting them with fruit and nuts and shit.”

JayArr crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair. “And when
my
brother got to be a senior, you better believe he and his friends did the exact same thing to their freshmen. It’s called
revenge,
dudes.”

“Except the guys your brother squirted chocolate sauce on weren’t the guys who did anything to him,” Stein pointed out. “Sounds to me like he got his
just desserts.
” He leaned back, smiling proudly, awaiting accolades from the table for his cleverness—but nobody got it.

“I think you’re getting hung up on the banna split thing,” JayArr said.

Stein rolled his eyes. “No, I mean, what your brother did to those freshmen is not revenge. It just means your brother is a dickhead, same as the guys who did it to him for no good reason. Karma just happened to catch up with him ahead of time.”

JayArr squinted. “What the hell’s
karma
?”

Stein considered explaining, then shrugged. “You’ll know it when you see it, pal.”

At the head of the table, the large blue-eyed boy who always sat in the back row of class exhaled a loud, bored sigh. He was usually silent, his head hung—maybe listening to the others, maybe not. Davidek heard teachers say his name a couple times. Jim, or Jeff, or something.

The hulking boy’s icy eyes glittered. “You know … I knew pussies had lips, but I never knew they could talk so much,” he said.

The table went silent. Not only was the blue-eyed boy a head taller than most of his classmates, but he was also broad-shouldered and muscled in a way that made his thin-armed, scrawny-legged fellow freshmen look like stick drawings. The buttons of his shirt seemed taut, as if he had outgrown it that morning, and his rolled-up sleeves constrained python arms. He reminded Davidek of his old action figure toys: G.I. Joes were one size, and
Star Wars
toys were just a little smaller. You couldn’t fit a big G.I. Joe in the little seat of a
Star Wars
X-wing fighter, and that was how the blue-eyed boy looked to him now: a bigger toy stuck into the universe of a smaller playset.

“You sissies whine and cry,” the blue-eyed boy said. “But you’re only scared because you can’t protect your own self like—”

“Like what?” said a voice from behind him. It was an older boy, a grinning senior orbited by other upperclassmen who’d come in from the parking lot in search of their absentee prey. Davidek recognized him by the dime-sized pucker scar in the center of his cheek: it was Richard Mullen, the kid he’d seen stabbed through the face with a pen.