The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (16 page)

Without allowing myself to think, I confronted the telephone, put the receiver to my ear. I touched the phone book and remembered the Flynns’ number. I’d only managed to call Margie once before, to arrange a meeting in the park, because I was afraid Donny would answer and guess, or know, that I knew what he’d done with his sister. Each digit I twirled compounded my anxiety, and each time it rang was an electric jolt.

“Hello,” said Donny’s voice.

I hung up.

I forced myself to dial again.

Someone answered, breathed a while. “Yeah, hello?”

“May I please speak to Margie?”

“Who’s this?”

After a sick surge, like dropping fast in an elevator, I realized
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Francis Doyle.”

“Did you just call and hang up?”

“I thought I’d dialed wrong.”

“Oh. Hey, that fight was unreal today, wadn’t it? Tell Sullivan his ass is grass. Hold on.” He shouted, “Margie!” so loudly it hurt my ear. The phone clicked, slight static crackled on, an extension being picked up. A hand squeaked over a mouthpiece. A muffled girl’s voice said, “I got it,” then the hand squeaked off.

“Hey,” I said.

Margie said, “Donny, get off the goddern line!” Click. “Um, sorry. What’s wrong? I saw you running home today.”

My insides plunged again. I asked how she was. She asked about my black eye. I amplified the pain so she’d feel sorry for me. She said she’d make it all better and asked me again what was wrong.

“I have to tell you,” I said, “but I don’t want to. I’m afraid you’ll hang up and never speak to me again.” I thought if I predicted her worst possible reaction, some voodoo would prevent it. “I sort of told Tim the secret you told me. He told Rusty.”

With a little hurt gasp, she hung up. After a few centuries of dial tone, I hung up too.

Lacking any experience with girls, I assumed she was done with me forever. I dragged myself back into my room and crawled up into my bunk and clamped the pillow over my head, feeling like a dead fish with its insides scraped out, eyes clouding. The phone rang. I flung myself out of bed, catching my foot in the quilt, wrenched somewhat slowly to the floorboards and hurt my elbow, then threw the quilt off and stumbled out to the phone. I captured it on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

“I hate you,” Margie said, voice pouty, injured, but not hateful, and my heart stirred some.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t hang up. I’m sorry. I can’t think what to say. I love you.”

Then a while of breathing, a radio on somewhere in her
house, a sigh,
Gilligan’s Island
repeating downstairs, ice cubes tinkling in a glass on Margie’s end. Maybe it was only a second.

“You shouldn’t tell boys about private things between you and a girl. And you shouldn’t tell girls awful things on the phone, Francis Doyle. You’re supposed to do it in person, in case you have to make up, after.”

I considered this a stay of execution. I said I was sorry at every opportunity.

“Stop saying you’re sorry. And you can tell your friend Tim I’m mad at him too. Donny has to get a new cast put on his arm.” She was quiet for a second. “He’s still my brother.”

“Would it be okay if I met you at the park tonight?” I didn’t feel right saying this, and I was relieved when she said no.

“If you want to make it up to me, you can stay over Friday night and keep watch for the ghost.”

“Then you’ll have to say you forgive me now. That way I can forgive Tim, and then I can tell my parents I’m spending the night with him. Okay, please?”

“I might think about it.”

“You know, if you really hated me, I’d die. You’re the only thing in the world.”

“Don’t try to make me cry.”

Because she was angry and pouty and my attachment to her was in jeopardy, I wanted her badly, physically, and my pants grew snugger, warmer. I stared at my poster of Neil Armstrong planting a flag on the moon. We wrangled about who had to hang up first. I submitted.

I ate the entire bag of chocolate chip cookies. At dinnertime I pretended to be sick. Mama came up and took my temperature and gave me aspirin for my eye and knuckles. Her concern seemed larger than my condition. I lay in bed and finished the Tarzan book.

After the birds started, I got up and opened the packet of Sea Monkey eggs, little aqua-tinted crystals which had probably sat in some warehouse for years. The water hadn’t cured for twentyfour hours, but I decided to risk it.

Still in my underwear, I flipped my curtain back so a beam of sunlight sliced through the jar of water. I poured in the crystals, tapping the packet to get them all out safely. For one minute, as instructed, I stirred the water with a pencil. My brothers slept. The dog whined in a dream.

Downstairs, in the coffee-smell, the television murmured the early news update. Tomorrow’s black protest march. Watergate. Skylab. A Mexican scientist claimed a cure for cancer. Partly cloudy. Daddy coughed.

I stopped stirring, put my face close to the jar. Dozens of tiny whitish dots were flicking around in the water. Live creatures, hatched on my dresser, that minute. You can be amazed by nothing more than brine shrimp. I felt suddenly like that first sailor who stepped off a ship’s ramp onto the dried lava of the Galapagos, awed by the acres of tortoises and iguanas. I peeled the corner off the third packet and tapped out a few grains of food. They would eat. They would grow. They’d require care and responsibility. Someday I’d have to take them to the ocean, set them loose. In the jar the tiny shrimps clustered towards the spike of sunlight.

The next few days were what we called Machine Gun Days. Those are days when you wish you could take a machine gun
and wipe out everybody you see. Tim and the gang left me alone. Thursday night Margie called me, and while my little brothers listened on the kitchen extension, she blessed me with her official forgiveness, and I forgave the rest of the world and surrendered my machine gun attitude.

Friday morning, as planned with the gang, I skipped school. I shrugged my uniform on, swallowed milk, walked Peter schoolward, and then navigated the lanes back into our house. The dog was the only witness to my return. I cocooned myself in bed and went back to sleep. A racket at the window scared me awake, and I rolled over and shoved my face through the curtain.

Gravel spattered the metal screen. I jerked back. Tim was standing in the lane, hooking his arm for me to come down.

I stumbled below to the kitchen and opened the back door. Tim stepped in, then backed out, and held a one-second finger up. He hawked and spit, followed me upstairs.

My mouth tasted garlicky, and I felt empty and irritable.

“We’re the only ones skipping,” Tim said. “Rusty has to serve the school Mass this afternoon. Get dressed for adventure.” Tim’s hair was shagged out over his ears, and he wore cuffed jeans and a sweat shirt he’d silk-screened with a Picasso bull. He tapped my jar of Sea Monkeys. “These are just brine shrimp, you know.”

“What makes you think I want to speak to you?”

“You came downstairs in your underwear and let me in. Besides, you’re not capable of staying mad more than a couple days.
By the way, I saw Kavanagh walking into the principal’s office with the dread manila envelope yesterday. I hope we haven’t waited too long.” He opened my closet and rummaged. “Where’s your whiskey jar?”

“Margie and I drained it.” I dragged yesterday’s corduroys off the dresser and yanked them on. “You’re not drinking this early?”

“If I give myself a liquid lobotomy by 10 A.M. I might Have A Nice Day like all the other idiots. It keeps me from throwing firebombs.”

I pulled a T-shirt on, mumbling through fabric, “You won’t live long.”

“Adulthood doesn’t interest me. My only worry is drinking’ll stunt my growth.”

I went into the bathroom, flipped the light on, and a transistor radio hummed awake on the back of the toilet. This entertained my mother during the hours she spent concocting her face and hair. The music, all strings and choruses, tried eerily to be soothing.

The mirror reminded me that my blackened eye had faded into bluish yellow. My hair stood up like a flame because I’d used my pillow that morning as a substitute for nighttime. I stroked it down with a brush, but it rose halfway again. I doused it with water.

Tim peeked in. “When you finish fagging-off with your hair, we’re thumbing out to Ferguson House to buy the angel dust.”

Ferguson House was the boys’ home out in the country. Tim said we were going to meet with the orphan kid who stayed with Rusty’s family one weekend a month. The boy would sell us PCP, an animal tranquilizer.

“They use it in Jellystone—I mean Yellowstone,” Tim said, “to knock out grizzlies.”

“Why are we thumbing all that way? Let’s ride bikes.”

“It’s easier to avoid the cops on foot. You can’t hop fences with thirty pounds of bicycle.”

In the lane we picked wild blackberries, tiny thorns dragging at our fingers like kittens’ claws. We ate them, and the seeds revenged themselves between our teeth. Tim spat purple. We crossed the street to Riner’s store. I stepped on the exact spot where my brother John had bled onto the sidewalk after the car hit him. For weeks afterward, kids had made pilgrimages to see the stain. Now it was just indifferent concrete.

Tim said, “Let’s rev up our nervous systems with a Coke. My treat.”

I waited outside so Mr. Riner wouldn’t mention truancy next time Daddy was in for a six-pack. On the door was a handlettered sign Riner had posted when blacks moved into the neighborhood: ONLY 2 STUDENTS ALLOWED IN STORE AT I TIME. Riner trusted our whole gang, however, and we stole from him with friendly regularity.

Tim stepped out, shoving the door open with his foot. He handed me a sweaty, uncapped bottle. I turned it up, swallowed many times, and belched vigorously.

“If only we could harness that as a source of energy,” Tim said. He took small sips because he didn’t know how to burp.

We walked along Waters Avenue, wary of police cars. We finished our Cokes, leaving a finger of backwash, and hid the thick emerald bottles in a bed of ivy, for when we needed change.

We talked movies, books, school. I stuck on the topic of Margie Flynn so long that Tim asked me to shut up. The day was warm and green, with birds singing at the edges. Each time a car approached, Tim aimed his thumb down the road.

A Lincoln Continental, going the opposite way, slowed past
us. It U-turned and overtook us, slid up on the shoulder and tooted. The car had vents on each side like the gills on a shark.

“Oh hell,” Tim groaned. “Is that somebody’s dad?”

We jogged over, and the passenger door swung out, and a man ducked towards us. “Can I give you men a lift?” He was almost my dad’s age, but had a mustache and short hair crowned with a medallion of naked skin. He wore an alligator shirt. Tim and I glanced at each other. Cool air poured out at us.

“Thanks,” Tim said as he opened the back door and slid in, obliging me to sit up front. The man wiped a stack of mail from the passenger seat as I got in, then checked the rearview and spun out onto the road. He smelled clean, alcohol-sweet, in the manner of wealthy men. “Where headed?” he asked.