The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (13 page)

We hauled Tim’s bike out of the infested garage, and I pedaled with him sitting on the handlebars. On the black, shiny street the tires sprayed fans of water, flung grime up the back of my denim jacket.

Tim craned his head around so I could hear. “That power line snapped loud as a gunshot. Then total darkness, except for blue fire. The lemming types came out of their houses with flashlights. Going to light up the world with those flashlights, I guess.” He laughed. “I stopped them all from watching
Happy Days
. Forced their IQs up a couple notches.”

Two blocks away, people with umbrellas were ungrouping
from the entrance to the lane. A long truck occupied the entire curb, a jagged, weathered utility pole strapped inside its bed. We coasted up into a creosote smell.

A man in a hard hat was leaning out on a belt from the top of a new pole sunk beside the stump of the old one. He snipped and tied something and slid a tool into his pouch. Across the street, a CB radio growled and hissed inside a power company truck. A man with a hard hat and a devil sunburn stepped out and stared at us, began walking over. My mouth was as dry as if I’d sucked a green persimmon. I licked rain from my lips. I pedaled us out of the light and away, turning down a different street in case he was watching.

For the third or fourth time that week, I crackled with adrenaline. I doubled back, spun into Tim’s front yard. He slid off the handlebars.

“Trouble is our only defense against boredom, Francis. You know that’s the truth.” He took the bike as I dismounted. “Look, tell your parents you’re spending next weekend at my house. My parents are having that party Friday, so all the adults’ll be occupied. You sneak away to Margie’s, gain your manhood. Saturday, we camp in tents in my backyard and leave when it’s dark to free the wildcat.” He spit noisily. “The more dangerous life is, the better. Scary equals important, right?” He laughed and rustled away in his trench coat, walking the bike into the garage.

I pounded across the street and walked calmly in the front door, trailing footprints from my squishing sneakers. Daddy was sitting in front of the TV with a beer. A tiny Johnny Carson mimed a miniature golf-swing. I stood dripping, ready. Daddy turned his fist and frowned at his watch, sucked his teeth and ignored me. I slogged upstairs, stripped, and got into dry underwear.

In the bathroom I cupped my hands under the faucet and slurped water that seemed to have gushed over sugared ice. I couldn’t get enough, my stomach swelled like a water balloon.
I brushed anchovy residue from my teeth and tongue. I had a couple of more swallows of water, then went and climbed into my bunk above Peter’s snores. Gretchen’s dog tags plinked.

The dry sheets felt wonderful and caused me to squirm, stretch. Rain pattered the window, and there was a casual boom of thunder which seemed to gather the whole world together, covering it like a giant blanket.

It rained most of the weekend, and I didn’t see Margie.

The next night, while I was attempting to go to sleep, my brothers talked to each other from their bunks. They laughed at something, and Daddy came up the stairs with a beer in his hand and turned the light on. He said we were there to sleep, and that if he heard another peep out of us he was coming back with the belt and give it to us all. Then he went back downstairs to the late show and my mother. I didn’t understand how he could’ve heard them unless he had the TV turned low and was listening out for us.

Looking back on these sort of incidents, I can only think that because their room adjoined ours it was important to them that we be asleep before they went to bed, if they wanted privacy. But all I knew at the time was that I drifted off to sleep that night with my brothers whispering, and abruptly the light was on and the sheet was stripped off me and my dad was slashing me awake with the belt. I judged him a cruel son of a bitch, Mama was guilty for allowing it, and if I was a juvenile delinquent I might as well blame it on that. The adult world was baffling and mean and I cared nothing for its laws.

We marched down Waters Avenue towards the shopping center. I had two large Rexall bags under my shirt, tucked into my pants, scratchy against my dampening belly. Rusty carried some old receipts and a ministapler to seal the bags after we’d filled them with supplies. Tim had loaned me sunglasses with tiny rearview mirrors inside each lens so that I could be the lookout. The mirrors were too small for details, but satisfied some James Bond notion we all held.

Joey, his thighs slushing each other as he tried to keep pace, panted, “Since this is my … first time … why can’t I be lookout?”

Tim said, “You’ve got to swipe something to be in the gang. It’s Francis’s turn to be lookout. All you have to do is steal five small flashlights, okay? What else do we need?”

“Something to carry water in,” I said.

Tim said, “Water’s for sissies. We’ll get some quart Cokes. The caffeine’ll keep us alert.”

Wade wanted candy bars. Rusty, beef jerky. Tim wanted to have sour pickles in the little bags with their own juice.

“Pickled pigs’ feet,” Joey added, blinking sweat behind his glasses.

“White people don’t eat that stuff,” Rusty said.

“As a gang member, if he wants pigs’ feet,” Tim said, “he’s entitled.”

Rusty snorted and dragged his shoes against the curb. The doctor said he had to wear them until they were worn out.

Tim said, “We’re going to need green, brown, and black shoe polish to make ourselves invisible when we get to the island.”

“For camouflage?” asked Wade. He tightened his triceps, peeking at his intermittent reflection in passing car windows.

“If the cops stop us,” said Rusty, “I don’t want incriminating shit all over my face.”

“Nobody’s even going to think of stopping me, because I’ll be disguised as landscape.”

The sidewalks ended and we walked on the grassy shoulder between the street and people’s fences. Joey picked his nose, and each time he saw me notice he snuffled and rubbed his face like a bear and stuffed the hand in his pocket. Then his tics took over again, and the hand returned to its plunder.

We came to where a Spanish bayonet was growing out into the street. We maneuvered around it one at a time, cars swishing past on our left sides with a gritty breeze, thorn-tipped fronds aimed at us on the right. Each time one of us passed, we folded a frond over and pinned it through its own green flesh, as though the plant deserved to suffer for barring our way with its spikes.

I entered the Rexall first, alone, then the others drifted in, paired. I squeezed in behind the comic-book kiosk, and while Tim and Wade faked an argument at the record section, their curses drawing attention away from me, I slipped the shopping bags out of my shirt. Rusty strolled by and took them, grimacing at the designs left by my sweat.

I went to the next aisle and made a performance of reading shampoo labels, situated where I could watch half the store in the convex mirror mounted up in the corner. I saw fun-house versions of Tim and Wade wander over and accept a bag from Rusty. Then Rusty grabbed Joey’s arm and steered him towards the hardware section. They passed a poster taped to the wall in imitation of a stop sign, a red octagon that said SROP! (Shoplifting Rips Off People!). I ducked back to reading labels, tried
to decipher “hydrolized animal protein,” wondered which one of these products made Margie’s hair smell so nice.

I focused on the spy mirrors of my sunglasses. Behind me, a middle-aged woman pushed a shopping cart filled with party decorations. A boy my own age ran fingers through his feathered hair. A man, a vagrant, seemed to be staring at me. I got scared. I returned a bottle of shampoo to the shelf, then turned around. The man’s eyes snapped over to a rack of packaged combs, and he pulled one off and meandered away.

Lifting a bottle of hair conditioner, I glanced up at the big fish-eye mirror. The man was staring at it from the next aisle, balloonish face, distant pin body. An all-over sweat squeezed out of me. I carried the conditioner past the man’s aisle (he’d abandoned the comb) and walked by a twitching, grunting Joey and whispered that a man was following me. Joey blinked, shuttled over to Rusty.

I went all the way to the end of the store, into the hospital aroma of the pharmacy, and saw Tim slip a bottle of Calamine lotion into his swollen Rexall sack. He winked and left. I placed the hair conditioner on the nearest shelf. In my sunglasses rearview, I saw Rusty and Joey exit the store, Rusty laughing and flicking Joey’s earlobe. Clerks, bothered by their horseplay, forgot to suspect them of stealing. I pursued Tim.

I heard a rhythmic slapping and turned around. The man was approaching me on noisy flip-flop sandals. I turned to the shelf, reaching for an alibi. Tampons, douche, feminine hygiene sprays. I chose a box of Summer’s Eve, an outrageously flowery thing, and began building an explanation.

The man came at me, pulling from his back pocket a wallet thick as a deck of cards. It dropped open to a badge-and-ID centerfold which, through my shock, clued me he was a detective. He had a semibeard, weedy hair, and eyes so shot with red I thought of a junkie. His T-shirt was about ready for cleaning dipsticks.

“Okay, Bubba,” he said, “how’d you like to take a little trip to the office with me?” His breath was a whiff out of a dumpster, and I stopped inhaling to prevent a gag.

I imagined myself in the juvenile home. I seemed to be momentarily upside down, some kind of terrified adrenaline hallucination. Caught, I remembered that I was technically innocent. I hadn’t even
intended
to steal anything. I coughed to get my voice working. “I believe you made a mistake.”

“Right. Where’s that hair conditioner you had a minute ago?” He looked me over for telltale bulges.

I pointed at the bottle on the shelf. The man’s hands slithered into his pockets and he began to bounce on his toes, glaring from side to side. I grabbed a breath.

“Look,” he sneered, “I don’t know what you got this time and what you didn’t get.” A mother and her knock-kneed toddler ambled up and the man crooked his head at a suntan-lotion display and led me over behind it. “I know what you’re up to, okay?”

“Honest to God,” I pleaded, and I actually felt misjudged. “I’m not stealing anything. My mother sent me to buy this—” I held up the douche (crucifix at a vampire) and saw the rush of color to his ears. “I thought I might have enough left over for the conditioner, but I don’t.” I nearly took off the sunglasses, for sincerity’s sake, but didn’t want to sacrifice their insulation. The man looked at the ceiling.

Wade swaggered past and the man’s eyes tracked him. Wade walked out the door, and Tim hurried after him with the bag, yelling, “Wait, Jim, I want to buy some goddamn cigarettes!” Walking in, an elderly woman shook her head sadly.

“You know those boys?” The man wouldn’t look at me. I began to feel sorry for him.

“I’ve seen them around,” I said. “Maybe they were shoplifting while you grilled me.”

He hissed. “I don’t get paid enough for this bullshit. I ain’t slept in three fucking days. Get out of here and don’t let me see you again.”

I figured leaving now was as bad as a full confession. He hadn’t caught me in anything. I wanted to prove my honor, and also to relieve him of the feeling that I was getting away with something.

I flourished the box of douche again. “I have to buy this.”

His ears blazed.

I walked to the checkout line, the detective’s flip-flops slapping tile behind me. With my mirrors I watched him fold his arms over his chest so as to bulge his biceps, then lean against a post, watching me. I held the douche close to my leg near the counter as I waited in line. I tried to calculate the sales tax. The cashier was a pretty woman with sunflower earrings, and as I placed the box on the counter her eyes visited the detective, then settled on me. I blushed with several embarrassments. She smiled and worked the angry sounding cash register.

Twenty-one cents short. Each embarrassment was creating further embarrassment. I held out the money I had, said my mother hadn’t given me enough.

“Well, let’s see,” said the woman. She lifted a nearby cup on which was written “Got a Penny, Give a Penny—Need a Penny, Take a Penny” and emptied it into her hand. She counted nineteen cents. Beside me, a man’s arm turned a wristwatch upright. Another man cleared his throat. Others, inspired, cleared theirs. Summer’s Eve waited on the counter. Sweat trickled down my ribs like a crawling insect. “Hold on,” the woman said and lifted a purse from beneath the counter.