Hero–Type (15 page)

"What the hell is this?" he asks.

"Nothing," says the guy on my left, grinning.

Mr. Kaltenbach sighs and jerks his thumb over his shoulder. "Move it."

"Thanks," I say when they're gone.

He snorts at me in disgust. "Yeah, whatever."

Oh, good. Now even the teachers hate my guts. Hero to zero in no time flat. I think I set a world record.

***

For lunch, I don't feel like being around Flip while he crows about the magnificence of his latest Officer Sexpot scandal. Doesn't he realize his pranks are just making it harder for me?

I go to the auditorium, head backstage, and then—after a quick look around to make sure no one is watching—I scale the skinny ladder that leads up to the lighting catwalk over the stage. With the curtains down, you can't see up here unless you're actually looking for someone. And who ever looks up?

It's a shaky ladder and it always feels like it's going to crumble by the time you get to the middle (of course it would be the middle), but it's cool. And I'm skinny anyway, so I'm not worried. It'll hold. It always has.

I take a stab at eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but the jelly has bled into the bread so it looks like a massive purple bruise, which makes me think of the bruise that's probably forming on my shoulder, and I can't eat. The rest of my lunch bag is some potato chips, some pudding, and a bunch of little carrots. None of it looks appetizing. Why did I pack this junk?

Flip and the rest of the Council wander in down below and head into the janitors' office. A few seconds later, Flip emerges and roams the stage for a little while, looking for me. I can hear him whispering my name loudly, poking around, but he can't find me. I hold back my arm, resisting the urge to pelt him with the carrots, just to see if I could get him. Would that be Foolish or just foolish?

Instead, I just watch him look around, and then give up, throwing his hands up in the air before returning to the office, leaving me alone.

***

By the end of the day, the rumors that I'm clinically insane, on massive doses of antidepressants, or both are in full swing. My car has not survived unmolested today—someone keyed the passenger-side door pretty good.

I'm pretty sure that at least two cars from school follow me home. I slow down at the driveway, but at the last second decide not to pull in. Instead, I keep going, take a left at the light, and drive around a little bit more. They keep following me.

I lose one of them at a light by signaling left, then turning right.

I notice that the signs that praised me a week ago are all down now, except for the one at the Narc. At the WrenchIt Auto Parts store, the sign now reads, United We Stand! Good Faith Lutheran says, simply, God Bless America. And so on.

And man—it kills me because I don't disagree with any of that, but I know that those signs are up now because the people who
put
them up think I don't think that way. I don't have a problem with standing united. I don't have a problem with God blessing America, should he decide America's worth blessing. I just want people to think about it and not charge into things blindly and not assume that just because I don't wear my heart on my sleeve that I don't have a heart at all or that—

OK. Cool. I'm pretty sure I've lost the second car.

I head home. Dad is actually cooking something, which is weird. He usually goes to bed so early that I fend for myself, but here he is, mixing something in a bowl.

"How was school?"

"Fine."

He nods and keeps mixing.

"Hey, Dad?"

"Hmm?"

I freeze up. I was about to ask him about his discharge. I even had the sentence all prepared:
What they said in the paper about you ... it's not true, right?

But now I just can't. He seems sort of happy and content standing here, mixing stuff. I can't bear to wreck it.

"What is it, Kevin?"

"Nothing, I guess."

I don't get my dad. I'm not ashamed to admit this. Tell the truth, if he was
your
dad, you wouldn't get him either. Part of it is probably that I don't see him a lot. The other part, though, is that he's a man of few words, and I'm the opposite. Once I get going, I can't keep my mouth shut, which is how I end up in situations where it's me against South Brook and Brookdale and the whole freakin' planet.

Dad can read guilt, though. It's like a second language to him. He can tell something's wrong. "You're not involved in any of that stuff the police were asking about, are you?"

"No, Dad."

"Because I told them that you've been home with me every night, but I know that once I leave for work, you could be sneaking out of here..."

"I'm not, Dad."

He grunts and starts spooning the mixture into a pan.

"What are you making?"

"Corn bread."

Right. I don't know whether to laugh or just stand there with my jaw hanging down to my knees. Corn bread. My dad is making ... corn bread.

"You got a problem with that?" he asks, but it's not a
total
tough-guy tone. There's a little glint in his eye.

Once it's done, much to my surprise, it's good. Really, really good. Buttery and sweet at the same time, crumbling to melt in my mouth with every bite. We eat it with some mi-crowaved turkey sandwiches, and the corn bread makes the sandwiches taste better somehow.

"Where did you learn how to make this?"

Dad shrugs. "Your mom."

Since we seem to be having something of a moment, I figure I'll take advantage of it.

"Hey, Dad? What was it like in the army?"

I blurt it out so fast that I barely realize I've said by the time I'm done. It's not
exactly
the question I wanted to ask, but it's a start.

"It was fine," he says. "It was the army."

"Did you have to kill people?"

He sighs. "Why is that always the first question people ask? Saved a lot of lives. No one ever wants to hear about
that.
Not scary enough. Not
sexy
enough." He gets up and dumps his dish in the sink, and the next bit comes out in a rush, like he's forcing it out, and I don't need Mom's telepathy to understand: "People should stop worrying about what I did or didn't do and start thinking about whether or not I should have been there in the first place. Violence never solved anything."

"Yeah, tell that to Leah Muldoon." It slips out before I can stop it.

But it's like he didn't hear me. "I was nineteen. And that was the average age for the guys in my squad. We were kids, not much older than you. Give us guns and bombs and helicopter support and tell a bunch of kids to make foreign policy work." He shakes his head. "Kill people to save people's lives. Blow things up to build them up. And what's the result? Ten years, fifteen years later, we're right back there again, doing it all over again. Fucking it all up."

My dad
never
curses. Never. It's like an unwritten rule of the world or something. So hearing him drop the f-bomb so casually makes me feel like I should apologize or ask him if he really meant to say that or hide under the sofa or something.

"'Blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed,'" he says, and then shakes his head again.

"Is that ... Is that why we don't go to Mass anymore?"

It's like he suddenly remembers I'm in the room. "What?"

"Blind faith—"

"No. No. That was a quote. Something someone said at a concert I went to when I was ... God, I was your age, I guess. It doesn't have anything to do with ... Do you miss Mass? Do you want to go back?"

I shrug. "I don't know."

He gazes at me. "Be honest with me."

"I guess I miss it."

"OK. I can see that."

"Why did we stop going?"

He purses his lips like he's trying to remember how to make words.

"You know all about the priests who were molesting kids, right?"

"Duh." I have eyeballs.

"I guess that really threw me."

"Father McKane doesn't do that stuff."

"Yeah, I know. But it's..." Oh, God. Here he goes. I can tell. His brain is going into overdrive and I won't understand anything he says.

He shakes his head and then his whole body shakes, like he's cold. He chews his bottom lip. And then he speaks. Slowly. With effort.

"I couldn't go and confess my sins and hear what is supposed to be the Word of God from men who are so flawed."

"But Father McKane doesn't—"

"He's just a man, Kevin. They're all just men. No better than you or me. Sometimes worse. And I just couldn't do it anymore. Do you understand?"

"But that's like judging all of them for what a
few—"

"God, Kevin!" He makes a fist and his face goes red, but I'm not scared. He's not mad at me. He's mad at himself, for not being able to make me understand. "I'm not ... I'm not saying they
all
do it. I'm saying it made me—made me realize they're just men. Flawed. Messed up like the rest of us. I don't need or want what they have to offer. Can't you see that?"

He lets out a long, slow breath. His whole face is slack, as if it's exhausted from the effort of saying those words, of getting them in the right sequence.

"If you want to go, I won't stop you, Kevin. Maybe it was wrong for me to pull you out of church. But I thought I was doing the right thing."

"I guess sometimes I miss it, is all. I liked having someone tell me the right thing to do."

Dad leans across the table to hold my gaze. "Remember something: You can't look outside of yourself for power. Or favor. That only comes from within."

I digest that for a moment. Then—because he won't stop staring at me—I nod.

He relaxes a little. "Anything else on your mind?"

Yeah, Dad. Like, I need to know—were you a traitor to your country? Am I following in your footsteps? Oh, and Mom called and she wants me to move out to California. How about all of that, Dad?

But I just can't bring myself to do it.

Instead, I get up and give him a big hug. He stands there for a second, surprised, not moving. But then he wraps his arms around me and crushes me to him, and for a moment I'm little again and Mom's here and Jesse's crawling on the floor somewhere maybe. Just for that moment. It's a lie, but it's a short one, and maybe that's not so bad.

But after Dad goes to bed, I sit up and think about it. I
do
miss Mass, to some degree at least. I liked knowing that every week—whether I needed it or not—I was going to be drenched in all the ceremony and goofy pomp of the Mass. I sort of wish they still did them in Latin. That way it would be this totally alien experience ... but a good one. It's like you'd know that something good was happening to you but you wouldn't know the details. Which is sort of how I think about God, tell the truth.

But what I really miss, I guess, more than anything else is one sacrament in particular: penance and reconciliation. Non-Catholics just don't get it. They call it "confession" and they don't really glom on to the real meaning of it. It's not just about confessing your sins. It's about
apologizing
for them, telling God that you're sorry for not living up to expectations. And then you get forgiven for that.

That's all a lot more involved than just confessing.

So even though I used to have to stretch my imagination to come up with things worth confessing and even though it was nerve-wracking going up to Father McKane and talking about all the things I'd done, I always felt better afterward. You get it all off your chest, you get your penance, and all's right in the world.

Mom always hated the idea of me going to confession. "You're a child," she used to say. "Children haven't committed sins." But back then, Dad was hard-core religious, so I went. And I liked it. Mom didn't understand, but that was OK.

So the irony is that, tell the truth, I could
really
use a little penance and reconciliation right about now. I guess I could go to Mass on my own, but it would feel weird without Dad.

Instead, I just lay back on the sofa and stare up at the ceiling and tell God I'm sorry for all my sins and hope that he hears me and forgives me.

N
EXT DAY, LUNCHTIME
, I'
M UP ON THE CATWALK AGAIN
. I want to die. I really, really do. I figure God didn't get my message last night. Either that, or he did and the answer was "Go screw yourself."

See, this morning John Riordon got his turn on the morning announcements.

He's a lot more telegenic than I am, but you'd have to be a burn victim with Parkinson's
not
to be. Still—the minute the TV screen lit up and there was John Riordon wearing a jacket and tie and a little flag pin in his lapel, his hair swept back, his teeth shining white ... the minute I saw that image, my heart took on water and began to sink.