The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (14 page)

The man behind me said, “Here you go,” and clicked a nickel impatiently onto the counter. The register chimed open, the girl spilled in the money, gave me two cents change, and said, as she stapled the douche into a bag, that she liked my sunglasses.
I offered the pennies to the man. “Keep them for next time,” he said. I clinked them into the cup and forced a smile at the woman.

Slain with humiliation, I trudged out, the doors swinging open violently as I stepped on the plastic mat. None of the gang had lingered outside, so I headed roundabout towards Rusty’s, where I knew they’d be. Outside a bakery I passed an empty police car, windows down. I ripped the brown paper off of the box and chucked the douche onto the driver’s seat. A voice quacked loudly on the radio, sending needles into my heart. I walked half a block on dissolved knees, then jogged through the lanes.

As usual, the air conditioning in Rusty Scalisi’s house was so extreme you could see your breath. His dad was out surf casting at the beach, and his mother was shopping. Tim, Rusty, and Joey were spreading the loot out on Rusty’s bed. His room was very neat, with sports equipment stacked all along the walls. Over his bed was a big painting of dogs playing poker.

I explained what had happened with the detective, and Joey said he was glad he hadn’t been the lookout after all. “Damn,” he said, “this must be a hundred dollars worth of stuff.”

Rusty said, “I had to threaten him to get him to steal the flashlights, but after he saw how simple it was, he wanted everything in sight. Look at these comics.
Richie Rich, Archie, Romance
. Who’s gonna read that crap?”

I estimated sixty comics in the garish fan across Rusty’s pillows. Joey had simply pulled three or four random stacks off of the rack, duplicates and all.

“Yeah, you’ve got to be selective, Joey,” said Tim. “All that risk deserves better than
Richie Rich.”

“There’s a
House of Mystery”
I said. “I’ll take that if nobody else wants it.”

We helped Rusty hide the loot in his footlocker, then sat around talking and reading and getting chilly.
Richie Rich
wasn’t so bad, actually. Tim got Rusty to call the orphan drug pusher he knew, about getting some angel dust, which is actually animal tranquilizer. Rusty said we could get it on Friday.

The doorbell rang and Rusty let Wade in. He was breathing hard, his nostrils pinching and dilating. He had his green canvas bookbag.

“What’ve you got?” I asked. The grins from the others meant they knew.

Wade said, “I stole it during a funeral Mass. I walked into the sacristy like I belonged there and took it.” He turned his bag over on the bed and a bottle of sacramental wine rolled out, followed by a baggie bulging with Eucharist wafers.

Joey said, “Man, y’all are going to burn in Hell.”

“So are you,” said Wade. “But we’ll travel with trail mix from Heaven.”

Father Kavanagh had cancelled his weekly hour of Religion with our class. I suspected it was because seeing “the artists” would bring to mind images from
Sodom vs. Gomorrah 74,
in much the same way as I was afflicted by watching Margie’s brother Donny, sunken into the desk in front of mine, pulling at a scab on his neck.

We’d been ordered to read silently.
The Return of Tarzan
was open on my desktop, but the pictures in my head were of Margie, Margie and me, Margie and Donny. I squirted a third layer of glue onto my left palm, spread it with my right finger, sucked the finger clean. It tasted vaguely plastic. I’d heard it was made from animal hooves. I blew on the hand and Elmer the Cow glared from the Glue-All label.

Sister Rosaria, twirling a Kleenex-sheathed finger in her nostril, said, “All right, class. Take out your history texts.” She inspected the tissue, then dropped it with the others in the wastebasket.

The classroom rustled and scraped, books slapped. Tim laid
1984
inside his history book and continued to frown into it.

The nun piped, “Who can tell me why there’s a historical marker at St. John’s Episcopal Church?”

Two hands floated. Eric Johnson, the doctor’s boy, and Donny Flynn, his arm in a plaster cast decorated with swastikas and peace symbols. The answer to the question was undoubtedly a war. It was Donny’s only topic of interest.

Eric knew everything. Rosaria called on Donny.

Donny dropped his arm pow! on the desk and said, “It was General Sherman’s headquarters.”

Rosaria bared coffee-stained teeth. “That’s right. Yes. Good.”

To compensate, Donny slouched back again in the juvenile delinquent mode, arms hanging.

Rosaria slipped on her harlequin glasses and then wrote WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN on the green chalkboard behind her. “During the Civil War, Sherman marched his troops here from Atlanta, setting fire to everything along the way until he came to the sea. He spared Savannah because of its beauty and gave it to President Lincoln for Christmas. That’s why we have so many Victorian houses left.” She clapped beige dust from her hands, sat.

We’d studied the Civil War already this year. I believe Rosaria was trying to nurse race relations, because of the purse-snatcher killing, and the duck.

Rosaria asked who’d read
Gone With the Wind,
or seen it, and a sudden crop of right hands sprang up. I’d sneaked into the movie a couple of years before with Tim and Rusty. I enjoyed Vivien Leigh’s bosomy gowns, but the story wearied me like the soap operas. It was a tourist-shop picture of the South, unreal to me.

I ignored the nun’s whiny praises of Margaret Mitchell. I stared around and imagined various girls out of their clothes. Angie Sipes chewed on her pen, licking at the cap between little bites. My stomach ached to think of the activities you might get a girl to agree to. I was scheduled to spend Friday night with Margie, but I found I couldn’t imagine anything carnal between us, as if she was too pure to be thought about that way. Odd, especially since I couldn’t help but picture her with Donny.

Rosaria droned. Beside me, Tim and Rusty exchanged pellets of paper. Behind us, Wade had his head close to the desktop, sketching a wildcat with muscles so well-cut it looked skinned.

The windows were cranked open and from time to time bees wavered inside, hovered, then streaked down and across the street to where the azalea bushes were exploding lavender, pink, and white, and the bees became specks darting in and out of the blossoms.

“Let’s open our texts to page 161,” Rosaria said, and a general scrape and the faint crack of book spines resulted.

A generic watercolor adorned that page, soldiers in blue conquering soldiers in gray. But the figures on my copy dangled giant penises drawn in black ink, and several had painted lips and long lashes. They exhaled balloons filled with vile dialogue. I flipped the page so Rosaria wouldn’t see. Across the next two pages, in bold Magic Marker, were the words ROSARIA SUX HIPPO DIX. I rested my arms across the words. Rusty and Tim snickered.

Slowly, I tore the pages out with my unglued hand, hoping to finish before Rosaria strolled the aisles. I wadded the pages into my pocket.

The nun said, “Francis Doyle,” and my pulse stopped. I grimaced up at her and she said, “Please read aloud beginning on 161.”

“I can’t, Sister,” I said. “My pages are missing.”

She made me bring my book up. She soured her face over it, ran her finger along the serrations. “It looks as if someone deliberately tore this,” she said. I was reflected mite-like in her glasses.

“I bought it secondhand.”

“All right. Look on with someone else.”

I scraped my desk over beside Tim’s.

Rosaria said, “Not with Tim Sullivan.”

I scraped back against Rusty’s desk. Rosaria stared disgustedly, but allowed it.

The same pages were torn from Rusty’s book, and the next two were psychedelic from squiggly lines he’d used to camouflage what Tim and Wade had drawn there.

“Chuck Spinnett,” Rosaria said, “you have a nice reading voice. You begin.”

Chuck commenced. He had a mild speech defect, due partly to the wires and rubber bands on his teeth. He slurred through
Manassas, Antietam,
and
Shiloh.
After, Rosaria said, “Class, this was the bloodiest war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, ten times as bad as Vietnam. Now why was our country divided against itself in 1861?”

The air boiled with hands. None of them belonged to our gang. It was such a recycled subject that even Joey O’Connor abstained. I noted that the mood rings on the Kelly twins’ fingers had turned different colors.

Rosaria called on Craig Dockery, Negro, breaker of duck wings.

“The Civil War was on account of the people didn’t want to free the slaves like Lincoln say they had to.”

“Said,” corrected Lewis Epps, the darkest boy in the school.

“Very good, Craig,” said the nun.

Donny Flynn stood up, unasked. “The South wanted to succeed from the unions but the Feds wanted to control everything.” Craig cut his eyes at Donny.

“Yes, there was a matter of secession. But slavery is a stain on our past. The Confederacy was a lost cause even before it began.”

Donny Flynn sneered. Craig Dockery elevated his chin at Donny.

Rosaria continued. “God inspired men like Abe Lincoln and U. S. Grant to look into their hearts and do what was best for mankind.”

Tim said, “If God was on the Union side, why’d it take them four years to slaughter an army they outnumbered four to one?”

Rosaria blinked. “God doesn’t interfere with free will.”

“Oh. Maybe you should mention the part where Lincoln offers
Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, but Lee turns it down to defend the South, even though he doesn’t own slaves, or that Grant was an alcoholic and a corrupt president—” Tim had folded his arms across his chest and was speaking rapidly in his Northern preemptive fashion, with Dockery and Flynn both muttering, then Tim raising his volume, “—and Sherman was insane, which made him good at setting fires and exterminating American Indians—”

“Well, I didn’t want to bring all that in at an eighth-grade level,” barked Rosaria, hoisting herself up and scowling like a beacon. “In fact, Lee and Grant were both gentlemen—”

“But weren’t the slaves freed in the North mainly so they could fight?” All the heads swung to Tim, straining forward in his desk. “And Lincoln was willing to let Southerners keep their slaves if they’d give in to the Union—”

“That may be partly true!” All heads swung back to the screeching nun. She raised herself onto her toes and tilted forward, leaning on the desk. “But let’s not stray into conjecture! Everyone’s father isn’t a history professor, Mr. Sullivan! The slaves were freed and—”

“Stayed on as dirt-poor sharecroppers—”

“They were free!” Rosaria shrilled, face purpling. I’d seen some spit fly at us. The students all whispered, mumbled.

Tim relaxed into his seat. “Right. They could starve or get lynched. And meanwhile the South gets turned into a backwards hog wallow.”

Rosaria swung out from behind her desk and was lumbering down the aisle towards Tim. “If I were a little boy as small as you, I’d listen—”

“I do some outside reading so I’ll know what’s what.”

Rosaria slapped the wood of Tim’s desk. Craig cocked his chin as high as it would go, iced his eyes, and said, “Is he tryin to say slavery was supposed to be all right?”

Lewis Epps rolled his eyes. Tim flung his head as if dizzy and
said, “Craig, don’t leave your brain to Science.” Donny turned to Craig and said, “I’d chain you up in a heartbeat,” laughed. The whole class was chattering. Craig snarled, “Kiss my mother—”

“Class!” Rosaria screamed, smacking Tim’s desk again, lines radiating from her eyes, her mouth. We got quiet.

She continued the lecture in a more detailed, qualifying way, but Tim was uninterested now. He was toiling over two scraps of paper with two different pens. He printed one in black, the other in sloppy green cursive. Both were a jumble of misspellings, abuses of grammar, and unnecessary quotation marks. A series of racial and sexual insults, in toilet-bowl language, challenged a fight on the softball diamond at lunch.

“Get this one onto Donny’s desk,” Tim whispered and gave it to Rusty. “I’ll plant the other one with Craig.”

I felt guilty about it, of course. Donny was Margie’s brother, his arm was broken. And Craig was black. I stressed this in a half-sincere appeal to Tim, knowing he didn’t want to seem prejudiced.

“Prejudiced against what? Sadistic assholes? Think about that duck screaming, think about Flynn delivering our comic book to Kavanagh. And Margie.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ll bear full responsibility.”

When we were dragging out our English books, Tim pelted Craig in the neck with the folded note. Rusty had just delivered Donny’s.

They read them. Craig ripped his savagely and slung it across to the wastebasket and began massaging his arms. Donny waited for a quiet moment, then blew his nose into the note. Throughout the period they reminded me of tomcats yowling from opposite sidewalks, separated by a busy street, their backs humped and electrified.