The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (5 page)

“She knows her alphabet that well?”

“Well,
le ordaire alphabétique
isn’t the important part. She knows something.” Hannah sounded a little wistful.

You bet the fuck I know something, thought Tabitha.

“I can’t find it. We’re going to be late. You got what you came for?”

“For my yeast infection, yes,” said Solange. “Had we better depart?” They left. Tabitha liberated a PowerBar on the way out. Lord, give me strength, she thought. On the silence of her rubber-soled Reeboks she followed her classmates twenty paces behind. They passed through a door propped open with a chair and Tabitha heard a sound of metal locker doors banging, and she saw her classmates continue through an interior door to some further station. Probably to get their assignments.

She hoped it wasn’t the E.R.

None of the lockers had locks on them. By the third try Tabitha had found Solange’s waxy white pharmaceutical bag and Hannah’s funky little pink purse advertising
Cancun!
in rhinestones. So Tabitha went back to cruise the aisles of the shop until she found what she needed. Then at the locker room she replaced Solange Lefebvre’s treatment for yeast fever with a cure for constipation. She hoped Solange’s English wasn’t so good that she’d strain to read the small print on ze package.

As for Hannah, Tabitha removed the thumbtack holding up a sign reminding volunteers to wash their hands whenever they got crap and stuff on them. With care she punctured the little flattish foil packet all the way through a half dozen times, at an angle so the little slits might not be visible in dim light. How providential, a gift from God: the condom that Tabitha hadn’t had time to insist Caleb wear. Across the edge she scrawled,
U Go To Hell
and she drew a big heart around the words. She thought of writing “from a special friend” with the hopes that Hannah would give out to some unsuspecting boy, but she wasn’t sure how to spell
special.
She slipped it into Hannah’s purse and replaced the health advisory with the thumbtack.

On the way back to find Kirk and see what the doctors were going to say, Tabitha Scales passed through a corridor where light came in through the UV-glazed windows, picking out with punishing clarity the bad art that someone had forced the hospital to hang on display. Angels and little stupid flowers and, for some reason, a fire hydrant. The constant pinging of the hospital PA system paused for once, allowing airtime for a half-dozen measures of some weary song that had been played too often all year long. What was it? Oh, right. “Believe,” by Cher.

Tabitha experienced a certain lift. Mom was comatose and Caleb was waiting offstage.

For the last day of October, the sun was curiously strong. She thought that she might be blushing, though maybe that was the aftereffect of the idea of blowing the football team in alphabetical order.
(As if.
Not even close.)

She had all of her life ahead of her. She felt almost special.

A LATE OCTOBER sun can seem like a trawler seen from an undersea slope. The way it hovers in that cellophane blue, the way it drags shadows across the terrain like dark nets. This year the trees had husbanded their leaves with a kind of greediness, but their grip was slackening.

Morse Hill Road felt like a sluice through brown rapids.

Jeremy pulled into the lot at Bozo Joe’s, more colloquially called Unfriendly’s after the fast-food franchise that, like so many other chains, had abandoned Thebes and unloaded the decommissioned building at a loss. Fixtures too: the mock Colonial-style booths upholstered in Wedgwood-blue vinyl, the ice cream flavors painted on the slats of a display panel shaped like a window shutter. But the unplugged freezers by the take-out windows now housed brown paper napkins. The menu featured your basic burgers and grease. Bozo Joe wasn’t in the business of fulfilling anyone’s culinary dreams. This was Thebes, New York, after all.

Jeremy sat in the car, fiddling with his car keys. He’d hoped the others would arrive earlier, so he could get away with ordering only a cheap coffee. But no sign of Marty’s car—Babs, the Chariot of the Odds.

Irresolute, staying put until he got too chilly, he watched the late afternoon Sunday patrons come and go. He’d been in Thebes for how many years now, and still he felt he had only a feeble grasp of what made it tick—what made it refuse to die. Around here, most guys his age had been married a good decade. They were saddled with dead-end jobs in the sand and gravel industry or with failing family farms too far from anything to sell to developers. The men tended to drink themselves to sleep most nights. Their wives, according to the oracles of the faculty lounge, did the same. And to judge by Jeremy’s own workload, their kids were prematurely soured underachievers, blanched and neutered by their daytime TV habit.

If only Jeremy were laid off from his part-time tutoring job, or fired, he’d have to quit choir directing because he couldn’t afford to live on church income alone. And then something else would have to happen. A chain reaction knocking him toward good luck, maybe.

He caught himself stalling, avoiding even this little conflict of ordering ahead of the others. Acquiescence as a virtue? Hardly.

He settled in their regular booth, feeling like the first actor on the set for a gay knockoff of
Seinfeld.
Avoiding the waitress’s eye, which suited her fine as she was avoiding his, Jeremy looked out the window, saw the guys arriving in the Dodge Dart with the pushbutton transmission. Marty Rothbard had bought it for ninety dollars from some old geezer over in North Derby. It was older than Marty. He called it Babs because its headlights were out of kilter and peered inward at each other.

He studied his friends as if he hadn’t seen them before. This, he knew, was his songwriter’s habit, a kind of voyeurism. The regular plundering of his friends’ emotional lives to create something new because his own experience remained so slight these days.

Jeremy waved, but they didn’t see him in the window. Russet-cheeked, ferret-eyed Sean Riley had a long red scarf wrapped two or three times around his neck, and a bright blue knit cap with a white pompom. Marty Rothbard was trim and meticulous, in a leather bomber’s jacket that emphasized his hard-kept waistline. Marty looked full of stage cheeriness and Sean withdrawn. A little more rawboned, maybe.

With fuss and fanfare they made their entrance. Sean sank onto the opposite bench, lounging, and Marty Rothbard slid in next to Jeremy. “I think you’re nuts,” said Marty. “Jeremy, he’s nuts. I think he’s got the deliriums already.”

“I’m just saying,” said Sean. “Think about it.”

“Think about what you want, Svetty’s on her way.”

A hefty woman who looked about fifty or twenty years either side of that, Svetlana came pitching menus at them. “Boys.” Her Slavic accent made the word a kind of sonic implosion.

“Vhat’ll you vant, boo-oys.”

“Svetlana darling, we want you and only you. But fries on the side would cheer us up.”

“Meck id sneppy. Boss in shit mood. Business dead.” Svetlana Boyle—she had married the unlikely Finbar Boyle, probably to get her green card—scratched her ear with the rubbery end of her pencil and flicked a speck of Soviet-era earwax onto the floor. “Coffee?”

“Do you have something good for us?” asked Sean.

“You vait. Bozo Joe joost like KGB tonight. Mebbe if it get busy he help, he on floor, ve discuss. Or not. Coffee?”

Three coffees. Jeremy didn’t order a burger. Svetty Boyle glared at him as if he must be responsible for everything wrong in her life. As if his buying one burger could improve the economy of Thebes, her marriage, and her accent. As she shuffled away, Sean yawned.

Marty lit right in. “Break up our tie vote. What do you think, Jeremy? Instant death or long slow painful decline? Which would you choose?”

“Are those the only choices?”

“I know you intend to be assumed bodily into heaven, but for the sake of conversation.”

“This is a cheery subject,” Jeremy said. He dared to arch his eyebrows questioningly at Marty, since Sean’s head was lowered as if he was studying the pattern in the Formica.

“That flight that went down last night. In the Atlantic,” said Marty.

“Egypt Air,” intoned Sean. “990. This morning, actually.”

“Oh,” said Jeremy. “Yeah, we prayed about that in the petitions today.”

“Everyone dead in a matter of moments,” said Sean. “A better way to go, or not? You’re off on a holiday, something goes wrong, fifteen minutes later you’re dead. No muss, no fuss, no endless scenes, no long good-byes, no drawn out pain, no expensive therapies.”

“You’re sick,” said Marty.

“That’s my point. Accident is preferable to sickness, as long as it’s quick and fatal.”

“It’s not all about you, though, is it?” said Jeremy. “I mean, even your own death isn’t only about you. It’s about everyone else you know, too. That airliner—can’t even think about it.

But what about all those relatives today? In New York and Cairo? No one got to say good-bye.”

“I think
that’s
sick,” said Sean. “Prolong your suffering so you can prolong their suffering? If they wanted to say good-bye they coulda got their asses in the goddamn car and driven to the airport.”

Some other patrons came in—several corpses in white powder and high collars, blood dripping from their mouths. They sat across from the guys and grinned at them, as if newly emerged from graves to lend a fresh perspective to the discussion. Next, a mother with some kids dressed in prefab drugstore costumes, who sat as far away from the adult ghouls as they could.

“We might be in luck after all,” said Marty. “A couple more tables and Bozo will have to inch his butt off the stool and help, and we’re cooking.” But for the time being Svetlana traversed the floor on her own, a Volga tugboat in plimsolls.

Jeremy changed the subject. “Let’s get down to business. Any luck?”

“If we could do without the piano,” said Marty, “there’s any number of choices.”

“Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it. We need a piano. That’s the point.”

“We need a piano, Marty,” echoed Sean. “We need to perfect our fatal harmonies. Hey, that’s a good name for us. The Fatal Harmonies. Better than the Off Nights.”

“I know it’s Halloween,” replied Marty, “but enough with the fatality tonight, will you?

Just because you have the lowest T-cell count, you’re claiming unfair advantage.”

“You ever come to mass,” said Jeremy, “I’ll show you fatal harmonies. Peggy Mueller has a soprano voice like a short-range missile. When she turns devoutly to the figure of Jesus on the cross, singing to it, it looks like she’s going to open her mouth and flay Jesus all over again using only her tremolo.”

“See, Jeremy’s showing his hand: he’d prefer a long drawn-out death, not instant annihilation,” said Marty. “Flaying, Jeremy, please. Don’t get me started.”

“They’ll have to augment the historic agony of Christ by inserting another Station of the Cross between numbers ten and eleven. Station Number Ten-A. Peggy Mueller Lacerates Jesus with an Obbligato.”

“I stay away from church for ten commanding reasons, I don’t need any new ones,” said Sean. “You can’t reconvert me.”

“Convert me,” said Marty to Jeremy. He stroked the lapels of his bomber jacket as if they were mink and then undid a top shirt button. “Maybe you can make me a Jew for Jesus if you’re passionate enough about it. I’m open to try.”

“I’ll send you a pamphlet. Come on, guys. Focus. We can’t hold our pitch well enough to work
a cappella,
and the guitar and bass just isn’t varied enough.” Jeremy was all business. “We need a place with a piano, and a place large enough for guitar and bass. Any other thoughts?” Marty said, “There must be a piano in the Mildred Cleary Elementary Prison, isn’t there?”

“Of course. A spinet about a thousand years old. It hasn’t been tuned since the invention of central heating. But we couldn’t get our foot in the door there. Three gay men in a grade school? There’d be a mob. There’d be a riot.”

“Even after hours?”

“You come from some bizarre Jewish tradition where people regularly exercise the faculty of reason. This is upstate New York, Marty, not Park Slope. Children are our precious resource.”

“We’re not necessarily a gay group,” said Sean, examining the bowl of his spoon as he spoke. “Couldn’t we, like, just not mention we’re a gay group?” Jeremy and Marty glanced at each other. Sean hadn’t come out to his family and he was still living with them, so his reticence was second nature by now. But really. With HIV and AIDS incubating right there in the booth with them, like holy ghosts—well, that kind of timidity just wasn’t on any more. There was no time.

“You were going to look into the meeting room in the rectory, weren’t you?” said Marty.

“Weren’t you going to ask your priest today?”

“I got sidetracked. Some woman from Cliffs of Zion fell down the stairs or something. I never got to see Father Mike.”

“Suicide attempt? ’Fess up. Show and tell.”

“Pretty much a non-story. Somebody named Scales.”

“I know them,” said Sean, who had grown up in Thebes. “I mean I know who they are.

You mean the Scales family on Papermill Road? There’s a mother with three kids, ages sort of straddling late-high school and early-career-in-fast-food?”

“Sounds like the one. Mrs. Scales came into Our Lady’s and a statue fell on her head.

There was a lot of to-do so I never got to see Father Mike.”

“Well, let’s keep looking,” said Sean, “because I’d curl up my little leprechaun feet and wither if ever I set one of my ruby slippers in a Catholic church again.”

“Oh come on. We’re only talking the rectory. The church building isn’t heated during the week and it’s too cold at this time of year to practice there. Your T-cell count being what it is.

No, I’m still waiting to hear from Father Mike about the rectory. I talked to Sister Alice, his staff assistant.”

“The privacy of the confessional still applies, I hope.” Sean’s parents were staunch churchgoers.

“I wasn’t confessing anything,” said Jeremy. “Anyway, until Vatican III happens, you don’t confess to nuns. It really
has
been a long time since you’ve made your Easter duty, Sean.”