Without even having done anything wrong, I felt an overwhelming urge to go to confession.
“Father, forgive me, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins.”
Unfortunately, the voice that responded to my plea reeked unenticingly of corned beef and cabbage—and when you’re anticipating the hot, lusty sizzle of paella, or the sweet musky tang of nutmeg-dusted white sangria, nothing’s more unappetizing than an Irish potluck dinner.
“I’m sorry, Fr. Tierney, I need more time to contemplate. Would you excuse me?
“Again? As yar wish.”
In my bimonthly version of “The Lady—or the Tiger or “The Laddy and El Tigre,” as Ian jokingly called it—I made the Sign of the Cross and beat a hasty retreat from the rank little booth that stank of moral suffocation. Passing the scandalized Ty-D-Bol widows, I waited patiently in line for the confessional across from Tierney’s, the booth containing Fr. Diaz—in his underwear, I hoped.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
I hadn’t even finished crossing myself and already carnal thoughts were mounting upward to the ceiling. I breathed Dentyne, nicotine, Aramis, sweat: all my favorite smells except the smell of Ian Lamb. In the checkerboard of shadows beyond the iron grating a beautiful open-throated Ralph Lauren shirt revealed a crucifix nestled in a dark nest of chest hair, a slender thumb and finger fondling Christ’s pinioned body.
“Father, forgive me, for I am sinning. Its been five minutes since my last confession, now drop your Calvins and show me your birthmarks….”
On hearing my voice as I proceeded with the more familiar but less appropriate opening appeal, Fr. Diaz scratched his chin and cupped his hands and softly lit a cigarette. He always had a postcoital air around me. Once he even offered me a Lucky through the grating. He said that it kept him from smoking too much, but really it was like breathing his breath into mine.
“Dispense with the preliminaries,” Fr. Diaz ordered. “Cómo estás, Toby? When will we play tennis? I have this new racket with an oversized head. Do you like bigger rackets?”
I told him I did.
“Good. We will play. Now, what is your trouble?”
“My mother moved out of the house, Fr. Diaz.”
I sounded so pathetic. It really was erotic.
“Your father has not told me.”
“He wouldn’t. He’s ashamed. And three days have gone by, and I know where she is, but still I haven’t told him. I swore I wouldn’t tell.”
“Has your father hurt your mother?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Have you hurt your mother?”
“I—I don’t think so.”
“And she wants to be alone?”
“For a while, I think.”
“So what is the problem?”
“I feel like a liar. Dad asked me where she was and—”
“You said you did not know.” Fr. Diaz sighed a swoony blast of Scopy lover’s breath. “Press your hand against mine on the grating, Toby Sligh. Press your hand against mine and listen carefully to me.”
A fine, slender hand came to rest against the webbing. Behind it, two eyes smoldered wetly in the darkness.
“Do you love your mother?”
“Yes.”
“And your father, no?”
“I love him too.”
“And you love yourself?”
I stuttered that I did.
“And do you love Jesus?”
“Yes, Fr. Diaz.”
“Then pray every night, and have faith in God, and faith in yourself, and everything will be fine. I have spoken to your mother. She still loves your father. I swore I wouldn’t tell you, but I’ve broken my vow. There, now! I’m a liar like you, Toby Sligh!”
I got, at that moment, the most incredible erection.
“But my heart is full of love. Do you understand, Toby?”
“Yes,” I responded, full of something else entirely.
“So keep your heart happy, hopeful, and patient. And don’t do anything hurtful or stupid. And lie if you have to, but only if you have to. Then it isn’t lying. It’s a subtle kind of truth. Will you promise me?”
“Yes.”
“We will play tennis?”
“Sí.”
“Have some cigarettes. Go.”
I plucked two Luckies through the grating.
“Didn’t know you smoked.” Juice spoke from behind his Ray-Bans, sprawling in star-spangled Speedos in his Porsche convertible. It was a gorgeous day, Juice had put the Porsche’s top down, and he lay there like a bronze god on hiatus from Olympus, his running back’s body lathered up with Coppertone.
“Juice! I can’t believe you! You want some nun to see you?”
“ ’Bout time they seed a real man,” he said, and squeezed his balls. “Gimme one uh d’em Luckies.”
“No way. They were a present.”
“Gifts make slaaaves,” Juice drawled, and rolled over. “What took you so long? I know you can’t be that bad.”
“Scoot over,” I said. I got in the front and shoved him. His body, as always, gave way beneath my touch. “The line to confession, you know, was a long one.”
“Uh-huh, I bet it was. You be jackin’ off in there.” Juice yawned, and pinched my titty, and nodded at a wad of clothing. “Gimme d’em, my Versaces. … I finna, Tobe, get dressed.”
Earlier that morning, before convocation, me and Ian had been summoned to the principal’s office and given a mildly flattering tongue lashing for the previous night’s escapade at St. Osyth’s Hospital. McDuffy couldn’t have been too upset about the matter: through the passive-aggressive length of his tepid reprimand he kept putting golf balls into an automatic gadget that spat them back at him with a gleeful clucking sound.
“Hoodwinking nuns,” McDuffy said, “is verboten. And the ward you were at is chock-full of sick people.”
Ian again took the blame upon his shoulders. McDuffy, a stork with a tubercular complexion, heard Ian out and even chucked his dimpled chin.
“Because you two are among my best students, I’ll let you off this time with only a warning.”
“Thank you, Fr. Tony,” we said and stood to go. McDuffy waved papally. We halted at the door.
“Father,” Ian said, drawing in a measured breath, and seizing McDuffy’s clement mood by the cojones, “we need passes to complete our community service hours.”
“Passes?”
“Yes, passes. Excuses from our classes. We’ve been accepted to good colleges and—”
“Shhh. Say no more!”
With a bureaucratic flourish of his faux Cross pen, McDuffy wrote out two elaborate passes—Ian’s for morning classes, mine for afternoon, so that we couldn’t work together, crime partners that we were; but so that, if we were crafty, at our break for senior lunch, we might see each other briefly, if only for an hour.
“But Lamb, stay away from St. Osyth’s. Do you hear me? And, Tobias, get some sleep. You look horrible.”
It was true. I’d hardly slept in over forty-eight hours, what with Dad and Ian’s sticky nocturnal missions. Before chapel I’d pulled an alarmed Juice aside and begged him for a benny, but he said he’d sold them all. Then I asked him if he’d drive me to confession at lunch, and then to what I said was my first community service session, and though he agreed with affectionate suspicion, when Juice got word of our passes from McDuffy he kept muttering “Shit” all the way through convocation and casting sour glances first at Ian, then at me, as if we were privy to insider’s information, as if we knew some angle even he had never figured. “Wha’d you two do, lick McDuffy’s rectum? I hope it taste good. You wanna lick mine? I, Like all the other seniors, Juice got an hour for lunch, and it really pissed him off: here we’d snagged a half a day.
“You know how much money I’d make with that schedule?” We were driving to his cousin’s public school to score some drugs. After that, Juic
e would drop me off at my mother’s, where Ian was waiting; he’d been waiting all morning; he had parked out of sight, so Juice wouldn’t spot his car.
“McDuffy go ark han’ me a schedule like that, I could buy and sell Ian’s daddy’s stanky rich white bootie twice,” Juice declared, and hocked a loogie out the window, and mangled the stickshift, and threaded cufflinks through his shirtsleeves. “An’ what am I doin’? Chaufferrin’ you! Drivin Miss Toby! An’ can’t even bum a smoke!”
“A priest gave ’em to me.”
“Like I’m believin’ that.”
“You can ask him yourself.”
“I had enough a priess.”
Juice, it was true, had had enough of priests, had had enough of churches, had had enough of God. He wouldn’t even step inside St. Pat’s while I confessed. Religion was a joke, and I was just a sucker: “I’m a chill out in the Porsche. I be sick a sin and shit.” Juice’s mother had enrolled him at Sacred Heart High when he was small enough for her to let him take her in a fight, but Mrs. Compton was hardly what you’d call a Catholic. Valilian Compton was a misanthropic realist who managed a motel and believed in little else besides her monthly paycheck and herself and her boy Leon. The Jesuits, she claimed, had saved her son from public school, which had taken most of the men she had known, including her ex-husband, and Juice’s half brother, and prepared them well for prison—or for smaller, darker cells. Little did she know that her baby was a dealer.
Juice was clever at it; he made sure she didn’t know. He parked his Porsche convertible every night in a garage he rented from Koreans and drove a shit-car home. He tucked his fatter earnings in mutual funds and spent his funny money on fly clothes and French cologne. And he told Mrs. Compton, who had reason to believe him, that he’d won a scholarship to a Pac-10 college where he’d pursue a B.A. in Political Science with an undeclared Minor in Psychopharmacology. In fact, it was true: Juice had won a scholarship, but it wasn’t a full ride, it wasn’t even close. So Juice whipped out his American Express and with only a minimal amount of ceremony awarded himself a Leonard Compton Fellowship. Juice’s entire labyrinthine existence revolved around conducting his clandestine operations in a manner sly enough to support a clever mother without her ever guessing, without her ever cluing in. Mrs. Compton was his God; she was all of his devotion. His drug deals were the mysteries he offered up to her. “As for God,” Juice would argue, delivering the coup de grace, “in Capital, Karl Marx stuck his jimmy in religion.”
“Hold on, you lost me there.”
Juice’s beeper started beeping.
“He just opium, Tobe… . We got our own product t’ sell.”
A Puerto Rican honey in a pink body glove was waiting for Juice by a huge water tower with “TROOTH” in fat graffiti letters smeared in gold across it. She was staring at her nails, which were wet with black enamel, and puffing them dry with pouty collagen lips. Behind her, her friends were conspiring in the shadows. A coach with a whistle was approaching in the distance. A car was circling. It was a white Plymouth. The girl was very nervous. She was holding someone’s bag.
“That ain’t Anquanna,” Juice said, pulling over.
The girl was looking at us.
‘You Leon?” she said.
‘Uh-huh. Where’s Anquanna?”
‘She at the bloodmobile. I got what she give me.”
She handed Juice the bag.
“Who’s he?” She nodded at me. “He selling shoes or something?”
“My name is Cracker Jack.”
Juice stuck his finger in and …
“Shit!”
A prankster in the shadows set off a ladyfinger. The girl whirled around and hurled curses at the joker: “Reggie, you dumb motherfucking cocksucker! I kick yo’ butt, Reggie, you try that shit again!”
Everyone was laughing. I’d almost crapped my pants. Juice was glancing in the rearview at the Plymouth circling.
“This is half,” Juice declared, and tossed the girl the plastic bag.
“It’s like a hot potato!” she laughed, and tossed it back.
Juice pulled out an envelope and took some money from it and gave it to the girl and handed me the bag.
“Give it to Anquanna, but say it ? s only half. She better find the other half,” Juice added, like a gangster.
“Yeah, yeah,” the girl said, puffing on her fingernails.
“You hear me?”
“I hear you …”
“You don’t hear—”
“shit!”
Something suddenly exploded. Somebody blew a whistle. There was fighting. There was shouting. The Porsche was pulling g’s. I thought I heard a siren, but it was only fear as I watched the water tower in the rearview mirror, shrinking.
“How you like Sacred Heart now?” I asked Juice.
He was parked behind a billboard staring at the steering wheel.
He said, “Fuck you, Toby.”
He was shaking like a baby. He was struggling with something. He was trying not to cry.
Juice drove to my mother’s like a driving school instructor, all textbook stops and D.O.T. turns, swearing up and down someone was following us: the white Plymouth we’d seen outside the school, to be specific. He wanted to tear off, but he kept the Porsche purring until we were only half a mile from my mother’s, when he hollered, “There they is!” and put the pedal to the metal. The squealing purple Porsche plowed through a row of tinpan trashcans that clanged across the pavement like a symphony for pots, and we glimpsed through hooded eyes the white shadow of the Plymouth as Juice spun into an alleyway a few blocks from my mom’s.
“Ain’t diggin’ this, Juice—”
“It’s like a episode a Chips! How far I gotta take you?”
“I can walk to there from here.”
“Take my stash.”
We got out.
“Take your what?”
“Take my stash! If they undercover, Sligh—”
“This is bullshit!”
“Toby, please!”
I was holding the bag. It felt awkward in my hands. Juice looked at me and coughed and stuffed a gun and money in it.
“Here they come,” Juice said. “You git on up my shoulders, Toby.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“This ain’t time to fuckin’ kid!”
“But the gun’ll go off!”
“No, it won’t!”
“Yes, it will!”
“No, it won’t! It’s a old one… . Up ya go, Toby Sligh!”
And I couldn’t help thinking, “Gifts make slaves, as I mounted Juice’s shoulders and let him flip me up and over the steep wooden fence that bordered the alley where Juice lay waiting like a fugitive, trapped.
At first I couldn’t budge. I was p-paralyzed with fear. I felt the damp nose of a dog on my arm as I lay in the weeds with Juice’s stash underneath me. Through the gaps in the fence I spied Juice’s purple Porsche sticking out like a thumb someone had caught inside a car door. Juice was in the front seat chilling out to En Vogue:
I wear tight clothing
And high heel shoes,
It doesn’t make me a prostitute, no . . .
When the Plymouth pulled up, two guys in Wayfarers stepped out.
“Get outta the Porsche.”
“Wha’d I do?” Juice said.
“Get out, you fuckin’ monkey!”
Juice stepped slowly out.
I might date another race or color,
Doesn’t mean I don’t like
My strong black brother …
I could see Juice spraddled at the side of the alley as the taller guy frisked him and the shorter one searched the Porsche.
Free your mind,
And the rest will follow.
Why, oh, why must it be this way? …
“He’s clean,” they both said.
“He’s lucky,” they both said.
Can’t change your mind,
Can’t change my co-lor …
; “You treat me like a King.”
There was a sharp punching sound.
Before you can read me
You got to learn how to see me, I said.
“We don’t wanna see your nigger ass again.”
Juice was clutching his stomach. Beside me, the dog barked. I grabbed its mouth and held it. The men spun around.
“What was that?” one said.
Juice coughed. “Was a dog.”
The taller guy approached him
“You’re so fuckin’ lucky.”
“I’m charmed,” Juice said.
“You’re what?”
Juice spat.
“I said,” Juice said, “I said I’m fuckin lucky ch —!”
Then the taller guy did something and laughed when Juice shouted. It went through me like a blade—their laughter, not the shout. They left Juice lying in the dirt, like a rag. And I would have gone to him if he hadn’t started talking.
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