Charlie's Key (20 page)

The sun outside the car goes behind a cloud, and I can see it’s going to turn gray, the wind kicking up dust in the gravel pit. All of a sudden I’m cold.

“Some of the Brothers was all right,” says Nick. “Tough, but all right. But others. My god. They were the worst of what a man could be. Twisted little runts of things—never did a normal thing in their life—never went to a movie or kissed a girl, and them left in charge of a bunch of wee boys.”

Nick takes a last pull on the smoke and flicks it out the window.

“That place was like a cart full of shit nobody gave a damn about cleaning up. So long as it stayed up there on that hill, behind them walls. Those poor little lonely kids, locked inside with those twisted bastards.”

“And Brother Sullivan—the dead one—he was one of the bad ones?”

Nick gives a hard laugh. “He was a bad one, all right. He was one of the arseholes in charge of the place—a supervisor or something, figuring out who works where, who gets shipped off to another parish.”

“He was hurting boys too?”

“It were the Brothers he were screwing,” says Nick. “Blackmailing ’em. It were Mikey what found it out. I were outta Cliffside by then, living on my own in a boardinghouse over to Freshwater Road, but Mikey were still inside, sleeping on a ward.

“One night he hears some kid crying, somewheres off hidden behind a door, quiet. So he slips down the hall and listens till he finds where the sound’s to: a closet where the janitor keeps his gear. Mikey opens the door and at first he don’t see nothing, just some buckets and a mop. But the light from the hallway sparks off something bright tucked away in a corner. Eyes.”

“Who’s that?” Mikey says.

“Nobody,” comes this voice.

“Well, Nobody,” says Mikey, “you’re found, b’y, so come on out.”

“If I does,” says the voice, “you won’t hurt me, will ya?”

“Jesus,” says Mikey, “who is that?”

“It’s me,” says the kid, crawling out from the corner on his hands and knees.

“Jesus, Weasel,” says Mikey, seeing it’s Walter Puddicombe, what everybody calls Weasel, because he’s so small and quick. “What are ya doing, stuffin’ yourself into the back of the broom closet?”

“Hidin’” he says.

“From who?”

“Can’t say,” says Weasel.

“Bullshit,” says Mikey. “You’re after waking me up with yer cryin’, so you can tell me what it’s about. C’mon, now, b’y, who’er ya hidin’ from?”

“You won’t tell?”

“Get on with it, Weasel.”

“A Brother,” he says.

“What Brother?”

Weasel starts to cry, standing there in his pajamas, rubbing his hands together, staring down at the floor.

“Jesus, Weasel,” says Mikey, seeing the kid’s scared shitless. Mikey flips on the light in the closet and steps inside, closing the door behind him. He grabs a bucket and flips it over so he can sit on it. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

So Weasel starts talkin’, ’bout how one of the Brothers, Brother Alfred, he’d been comin’ to Weasel’s ward every couple of nights for mor’n a year—since before Mikey and me got sent up the hill. At first, Brother Alfred didn’t try nothing, just sat beside him—“Tucking you in” he’d say. Then he lay down beside Weasel for a night or two, rubbing his back “to help you get to sleep.” Not long after that, Brother started sticking his hands down Weasel’s bottoms, feeling round for his bird. Weasel, he didn’t like that, asked him to stop. But Brother Alfred kept coming back; he said it was all right and asked, didn’t it feel good? Weasel said it didn’t, said he didn’t like it. But he figured he was too small to stop him, so it kept going on, even when Weasel’d pretend to be asleep. Then one night, Brother Alfred comes and wants Weasel to touch his bird. But Weasel, he won’t do it. And he starts bawling so loud Brother figures the other kids might wake up, so he gets up and leaves. The next day Brother Alfred calls Weasel outta class and into the boys’ bathroom on the third floor, which hardly anybody uses because the drains don’t work right and it stinks like piss. And Brother Alfred, he tells Weasel that if he don’t like what happened last night, maybe he’d like this better. Then he takes the wood pointer he’s got and smacks him, hard as he can, on the back and on the arse, and on the back of his legs, hitting him so hard it leaves big bruises right through his clothes. It goes on for a long time, says Weasel, long enough that Brother Alfred is sweating at the end of it, his hair sticking to his forehead, his face all red.

“How does that feel?” says Brother, just before he gives Weasel a last whack and walks outta the bathroom, leaving him laying on the floor, crying. It’s a week before Weasel can walk right. As soon as he can he does a runner, taking off to the Jungle—a place in the woods teenagers hang out at, down behind the mall. The cops, they figure that’s where he’s to, because he’s done a couple of runners before and always ended up in the same place.

This time, though, he don’t come quiet. ’Stead, he starts shouting ’bout how he ain’t going back, not after what Brother done to him. The cops laugh at first, but they stop soon as he shows ’em the bruises on his legs. And this time, ’stead of taking him back to Cliffside, they drives him down to the cop shop and sit him in a room by himself. They leave him there for a long whiles, with nothing but a Mars bar and a warm orange pop to eat the whole time. Finally a cop in a suit and tie comes in and puts a pen and a pad of yellow paper on the table and asks Weasel about what happened to him—how he come to get those bruises on his legs. And Weasel, he tells everything: about the backrubs, the beatings, about getting felt up—everything, with the cop writing it all down, holding up his hand when he needs Weasel to slow down. Then he reads it back to Weasel and gets him to sign it. After that, he drives him back to Cliffside, with Sullivan there to meet them, soon as they step inside the orphanage.

“You go up to the ward, Walter. I’ll speak with you later,” says Sullivan, before him and the detective walk off to Sullivan’s office. Weasel seen the detective snooping round a bit over the next couple a days, talking to a few other boys. But there weren’t a sign of Brother Alfred—not until one night about a week after Weasel talked to the cops. It were late— gone midnight, Weasel figured. He were laying in bed, like he always done in those days, waiting to see if Brother Alfred was going to show up. And while he were laying there, looking out at the window across from his bed, he sees the shadows move like they do when a car pulls into the driveway. So Weasel, he gets up and creeps over to the window and has a look out. And who do he see but Brother Alfred, all bundled up in a big coat and carrying a suitcase, walking out to a taxi. Right behind him comes Sullivan, the two of them standing together for a bit, ’fore they shake hands. And Brother Alfred gets in the cab, with Sullivan trotting up the steps back into Cliffside.

“That’s the last I seen of Brother Alfred,” Weasel tells Mikey.

“So why you still hidin’?” Mikey asks.

“It ain’t Brother Alfred I’m hidin’ from now,” says Weasel. “It’s Brother Sullivan.”

“Sullivan’s been doing shit to you too?” says Mikey.

“It’s not that,” says Weasel. “It’s what he’s making me say.”

“About what?” says Mikey.

“’Bout how the Brothers been abusing me,” says Weasel.

“You mean he’s making you say this stuff to the cops?” says Mikey.

Weasel shakes his head. “To the Brothers. He’s making me say it right to the Brothers.”

“I don’t getcha,” says Mikey. “When did all this start—all this talking to the Brothers?”

“Just after Brother Alfred left,” says Weasel. “Right after that, Brother Sullivan, he calls me down to his office and says he heard about how Brother Alfred was doing bad stuff to me. Then he says he’s heard stories that there might be other Brothers doing the same stuff to other kids. And he asks me if I heard any of them stories. So I said, Yeah, I did—everybody heard ’em. So he says to me, ‘Well, Walter,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a plan to stop that from happening, but I needs your help.’

“What do I got to do?” Weasel says.

“In the next couple of days,” says Sullivan, “I’ll call you down to my office for a meeting with one of these bad Brothers. I’ll ask you a couple of questions about the Brother, and you say yes. No more. Just yes. Understand?”

Weasel, he says he understands, but he don’t really, because he got no idea what these questions is going to be about. But he finds out soon enough. A couple a nights later he gets told to go down to see Brother Sullivan in his office after supper. He goes in and sees Sullivan sitting at his desk, talking with Brother Burke, what nobody likes because he’s always pinching the kids when they gets an answer wrong— hard enough to leave a bruise, too, sometimes.

“Now, Walter,” says Brother Sullivan to Weasel. “Is this the man who abused you?”

Weasel ain’t sure what to say to that, because if Sullivan means, is this the man what pinches you when you can’t figure three into twenty-one, then yes, it is. But if he means is this the man what comes to him in the night, then it’s no, because Brother Burke, he never done nothing like that to Weasel. Weasel’s trying to figure it out when Sullivan says, “Remember our talk from this afternoon, Walter?”

Then he know the answer Sullivan wants, and he gives it to him. “Yes.”

Brother Burke, he gets outta his chair, shouting what a damn lie that is, but before he can take a step toward Weasel, Sullivan gets between the two of them.

“Enough!” he shouts, putting his hand right in Brother Burke’s face. Then he turns round to Weasel and says, soft and quiet, “Are you willing to sign a paper saying that, Walter?”

Weasel knows the answer to that too. “Yes.”

Then Sullivan gives Weasel a little shove into the hallway and closes the door behind me.

“This happened more than once?” Mikey asks Weasel.

“Lots of times,” says Weasel. “Sometimes it’d be Brothers I knowed, and sometimes it were Brothers I never seen before. Them was the worst—specially the last one—a Brother what looked like he mighta been one of the kids, he were so young. I come in and says my yes, and all of a sudden this Brother, he falls over, right there in Brother Sullivan’s office, right onto the floor. It were after that I told Brother Sullivan I weren’t going to do it no more, which he don’t like. Except ’stead of yelling at me, which I can tell he wants to, he gets all nice and quiet, and starts talking ’bout how it’s really God’s work we’re doing, protecting the boys from the bad Brothers.

“You wouldn’t want to go against God’s work, would you, Walter?” he says. “Anyone who does that suffers the flames of eternal Hell, Walter. And you don’t want to spend eternity gnashing your teeth in hellfire, do you, Walter?”

Weasel might not know how to put three into twenty-one, but he’s smart enough to know he don’t want to be in hellfire forever, so he says no. But then he asks Sullivan if it ain’t wrong to tell a lie? And Brother Sullivan, he says telling a lie for God isn’t a lie at all, so Weasel shouldn’t worry about it. But he do worry about it—all the time, specially at bedtime, when he gets pictures in his head of what hellfire must be like, with devil eyes staring outta it, right at him. Forever. It’s so bad he can’t fall asleep. So he lays awake thinking Brother Sullivan is coming to get him to go down to his office again. Which is how come he ended up in the closet, hidin’.

“Jesus, kid,” says Mikey when he hears the story. “No wonder ya can’t sleep. Listen, come on out and get back to yer bed, and let me keep an eye out for Sullivan tonight.”

“What about the devil eyes?” says Weasel.

“I’ll watch for them too,” says Mikey.

Next day, Mikey gets a message to me for to come over to Cliffside and meet him round back, where the fence is after falling down. Soon as I get there, he tells me Weasel’s story.

“Jesus,” I say. “Blackmail.”

Mikey nods. “Gotta be. Tells the Brothers he’s heard stories about ’em messing with the kids. Tell’s ’em he got a witness. They pay up, he keeps it quiet—sends ’em away somewheres else. They don’t, and him and his witness call the police.”

“Wonder how much he squeezed outta them?” I say.

“How much can you get outta them Brothers?” Mikey asks. “They don’t got much money.”

“Their families does,” I say. “Richest in St. John’s, some of them. You bet they’d find a few thousand to keep their Mass-going son outta jail.”

“So where d’ya figure he got it stashed?” asks Mikey. “A bank?”

“Too easy for the cops to track,” I say. “Pro’bly got it hid in his apartment, behind a wall, or somewheres out in the country where nobody’d think to look. Me and thee’ll have to have a look,” I says, which we done—twice. Snuck into Sullivan’s place, looked in every cupboard, under every pillow, opened every drawer except one, what were locked. I wanted to bust it open, but Mikey, he said no.

“If we crack it open,” he says, “Sullivan’ll know somebody’s been pokin’ round, and he’ll move whatever’s in there someplace we’ll never find it. What we got to do is confront him, face to face, get it outta him that way.”

“You figure he’s just going to hand over the cash because we ask him to?”

“Some of it anyways,” says Mikey. “We’ll make a deal with him—split it with us, and we won’t say nothing to the cops.”