Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

  Her mouth hardened. “Don’t do this to me, Larry.”

  “I miss you. Is that a crime?”

  The thing about Joanie was that she could be tough, but not for very long. All of a sudden, she looked like she wanted to cry.

  “You should have treated me better when you had the chance.”

  “I’m trying, baby. Can’t you see that?”

  “I see it, Lar. It’s just too little, too late, that’s all.”

  She circled around to the driver’s side, putting the bulk of the car between them, as if she feared for her safety.

  “I bet that priest’s kicking himself,” Larry said.

  Joanie opened her door, but didn’t get in. She sighed, to let him know she was losing interest.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I saw the way he was looking at you.” Larry grinned, daring her to deny it. “That vow of celibacy must be a real bitch.”

  This was only Larry’s third week at St. Rita’s, but already he felt like a regular. Slipping into what was rapidly becoming his usual spot—right side, fourth row from the back, seat closest to the aisle—he nodded a friendly good morning to the neighbors. The whole gang was there: the sloppy guy with the problem dandruff and the barbershop quartet baritone, the nervous middle-aged lady who wore an asthma inhaler on a chain around her neck, the straight-backed senior citizen with the military brush cut who, if the past two weeks were any guide, would weep quietly throughout the entire mass, pausing only to blow another majestic honk into his dirty handkerchief.

  He’d chosen this particular spot less out of solidarity with the misfits and loners who favored the back of the church—not that he was ashamed to count himself among them—than for the clear angle it afforded on Joanie and the boys, who made it a habit to sit on the left side of the aisle, about a dozen rows from the front, in the section of the church favored by families with young children. He liked the feeling of power it gave him, being able to see without being seen, knowing that she probably wanted to turn around and get a fix on where he was sitting but that her pride and stubborness wouldn’t allow it. Luckily, the boys had no such scruples. One or the other of them would check on Larry every few minutes, flashing him a shy smile or a quick wave that he’d acknowledge with an equally discreet thumbs-up of his own.

  The processional began, and Larry rose along with the rest of the audience. He was pleasantly surprised to see that Joanie was wearing pants, the tight black ones with no pockets to spoil the rear view, and her miracle underwear that functioned exactly as promised on the package, making “unsightly panty lines vanish!” (If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought she’d dispensed with the underwear altogether.) In any case, her ass was on full display in all its ample glory, and he’d have lots of opportunity in the next forty-five minutes to give it his rapt and reverent attention. This was probably not the kind of Sunday worship the Pope would have approved of, but Larry had a feeling His Holiness was not an Ass Man.

  Larry’s enthusiasm for his wife’s tits had waned a little over the years—pregnancy and breast-feeding had changed them, both physically and conceptually—but his admiration for her ass had remained constant, even as the inevitable middle-aged spread had begun to set in. As Joanie would have been the first to admit, her ass had expanded, but it had done so in a nice, welcoming way, becoming ever rounder and softer without losing its essential shapeliness. And for all that she fretted about it, she never tried to hide her ass the way lots of women her age did. Her pants were tight, her skirts short, her shorts even shorter. Even at church, she was happy to give the world an eyeful. And don’t think the world—or at least Larry Moon—wasn’t grateful.

  In a funny way—a sadly ironic way, really—Larry wanted her more now that they were separated than he had during the last two years of their marriage. Ever since he’d fired the shots that had killed poor Antoine Harris, he’d lost his taste for sex, among other pleasures. Joanie was always the one trying to initiate things, and Larry had been frequently unable to perform. It got to the point where she started bugging him about going on Viagra, which, in retrospect, was probably a good idea but seemed like an insult at the time. After a while he started resenting her sexuality, and even feeling a little threatened by it, which is probably why he freaked out so much when she dressed like a slut. At the same time, though, he’d taken a certain amount of pride in having such an overtly sexy wife, knowing that he’d once been man enough to win her, even if he didn’t quite know what to do about her anymore.

  Now that she had left him, though, and he could no longer take her body for granted—he didn’t see her getting dressed in the morning, or peeling off her rumpled uniform at night—he found himself hungering for her again, in the same simple way he’d hungered for her back when he was a bouncer at Kahlua’s, or a bridegroom in a tuxedo, or a rookie cop on lunch break, with his gun belt around his ankles. Viagra would not be necessary, he was pretty damn sure of that. But it was all moot, because she was slipping away from him, and there was nothing he could do but watch her from a distance and wish things were otherwise.

  Thus preoccupied, he didn’t notice when Ronald James McGorvey and his mother entered the holy sanctuary. They arrived late, maybe ten minutes after mass had begun, and must have walked right past him.

  Why they didn’t just take a seat in the rear was a mystery he wondered about later. If they’d just slipped quietly into the back row, maybe nothing would have happened. But instead they marched straight down the center aisle, where everyone could see them, and squeezed into a pew a couple of rows behind the one where Joanie and the twins were kneeling.

  Larry registered the disturbance they created without understanding its cause. It started as a kind of collective whisper that increased in volume until it all but drowned out Father Mugabe—Larry had finally figured out his last name—who actually pressed a finger to his lips and shushed the congregation, as if they were a bunch of unruly schoolchildren. But the hubbub only intensified, the angry buzz of voices accompanied by an abrupt surge of movement, whole families fleeing their pews as if someone had released a stink bomb, indignantly clogging the center aisle.

  “What happened?” Larry asked his neighbor.

  “Dunno,” said the sloppy guy. Dandruff frosted the shoulders of his navy suit like a light snowfall. “Heart attack, maybe.”

  The weepy senior citizen turned around.

  “Someone probably threw up,” he speculated with a sniffle. “Saturday night at the gin mill.”

  Larry leaned into the aisle to get a better view. The displaced worshipers were migrating across the aisle, their counterparts on the right side skooching over to make room. This process had left an odd hole on the left side of the church, three rows more or less vacant now, except for an old woman and a bald guy who was partially obstructing his view of Joanie.

  “Nobody threw up,” said the lady with the inhaler. “It’s that disgusting man from Blueberry Court. He’s probably playing with himself.”

  As if to assist in confirming this ID, McGorvey turned like a perp taking his mug shot, displaying his profile for Larry’s benefit. He was wearing a hideous suit, a beige polyester monstrosity with big lapels and the kind of stitching you usually saw on blue jeans. As McGorvey pivoted back to the front of the church—Father Mugabe was continuing the mass as though nothing had happened—Larry’s son Phillip turned around and waved, revealing his beautiful, innocent face to the pervert.

  Instead of flashing his customary thumbs-up, Larry gestured angrily for the boy to turn around. Phil seemed confused at first, then a little hurt, but he did what his father wanted. He whispered something to Gregory, who appealed to Larry with a quizzical expression on his broad, flat face. Barely four years old, and he already seemed so much less vulnerable than his brother, so much better able to take care of himself. Larry shook his head, waving both arms as if signaling to an airplane.

  “Something wrong?” asked the sloppy guy.

  “My kids ar
e up there. Just two feet away from that shitbag.”

  “Excuse me?” said the asthmatic woman. “Did you just say what I thought you did?”

  “Sorry,” said Larry.

  What he couldn’t understand was why Joanie hadn’t moved with the others. Why stay behind, letting a convicted sex offender feast his eyes on your children—my children! Larry thought—so he could think about them later when he went home and jerked off to some hideous fantasy. It was like she was doing it to spite him, to remind him of the fact that she’d never approved of what she called his “obsession” with Ronnie McGorvey.

  “You’ve got to let go of it,” she’d told him. “It’s not healthy.”

  “I’m just trying to protect our kids.”

  “Are you sure? Because it seems like this is more about you than it is about them.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know, Lar. Maybe if you had a little less time on your hands—”

  “Maybe I should do a little more yard work,” he proposed. “That way our lawn would look really nice while our kids are being raped and murdered.”

  “Forget it,” she told him. “Forget I even mentioned it.”

  He managed to keep his cool all the way into the homily, telling himself that he wasn’t going to make a scene, not in church, not in front of his kids. But then the priest started talking about Jesus, how He loved absolutely everyone, even the lowest of the low, the lepers and prostitutes and convicted criminals, the reviled and despised, the forsaken and friendless. The way Father Mugabe talked, you would have thought Ronnie McGorvey was a character from the Bible, a pal of Barabbas and a neighbor of Mary Magdalene.

  What about Holly Colapinto? he wanted to shout. Jesus sure had a funny way of showing His love for her.

  He tried to distract himself by examining the stained-glass windows, but his eyes strayed to one of the stations of the cross, Jesus bent double under the weight of His terrible burden, being jeered by the soldiers. That’s the problem with these people, he thought. They worship suffering. They want the worst to happen.

  “So please ask yourself,” Father Mugabe intoned. “Am I truly loving my neighbor as myself? Is my heart open to the grace of God, or is it sealed shut by the glue of anger, the nails of vengeance?”

  Larry stood up to leave, he couldn’t bear another word of it. But just as he was rising from his seat and stepping into the aisle, Phillip turned again, smiling so sweetly that Larry couldn’t help but mirror the expression, which would have been perfectly fine except that Ronnie McGorvey turned at the exact same moment, so that Larry found himself smiling, with a heart full of love, right into the face of the child killer. As if to mock him, the child killer smiled back.

  Don’t you dare, Larry thought. Instead of heading for the vestibule he found himself moving forward, toward the altar, toward his family, toward the grinning pervert.

  “Don’t you dare fucking smile at me!”

  Larry hadn’t wanted it to come to this. He’d asked McGorvey to leave in a polite voice, but the son-of-a-bitch refused. Then the old lady started in, telling Larry he should be ashamed of himself, disrupting mass like this, violating a holy sacrament. And then Joanie joined the chorus, pleading with him to stop, to not do anything stupid in front of the boys. As if I’m the problem, Larry thought bitterly. He’d taken hold of McGorvey’s arm, but the pervert had resisted, squirming out of his grasp and diving to the floor. Now he was cowering at his mother’s feet, his arms wrapped tightly around the kneeler.

  “Stand up like a man,” Larry told him. “Don’t make me come and get you.”

  “Just leave him alone,” said the old lady. “He never did anything to you.”

  “Really,” said Joanie. “This is not the time or the place.”

  Larry had no choice but to squeeze into the pew and grab hold of Ronnie’s legs, down by the ankles. He squatted and pulled, but McGorvey’s grip was tenacious.

  “Please,” the old woman squealed. “Please don’t hurt him!”

  “Ushers!” the priest was shouting. “Remove this man.”

  Larry wasn’t sure which man they were talking about. He pulled even harder.

  “Lawrence Moon,” Joanie said, employing that overly rational tone favored by people talking to lunatics or very small children. “You need to stop this right now.”

  Larry glanced up at his wife.

  “Not now, Joanie.” He gave another pull, and felt the pervert’s grip start to loosen. “I’ve almost got him.”

  “Oh my God!” the old woman screamed, an edge of hysteria entering her voice. “You can’t do that!”

  Larry shifted his attention back to the business at hand, suddenly understanding what had gotten the mother so worked up. It wasn’t Ronnie’s fingers that had given way, it was his pants. They were sliding down right in front of his eyes, revealing the hairy crack of the pervert’s ass, the blasphemous pallor of his butt cheeks. Larry twisted his neck hard, averting his gaze from the grisly spectacle.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he groaned, loosening his grip so abruptly that he almost lost his balance.

  Ronnie scrambled awkwardly to his feet, yanking up his pants, his face flushed with embarrassment. He looked at Larry as if he was about to cry.

  “You’re the pervert!” he shouted. “You trying to rape me or something?”

  “Shut your goddam mouth,” said Larry.

  He glanced sheepishly at Joanie, who was staring at him in stern disapproval, hugging the boys close to her body. She’d actually placed her hands over their eyes, as if shielding them from some unspeakable horror.

  “I’m sorry,” he explained. “I wasn’t trying to pull his pants down.”

  Larry felt a hand on his shoulder. It was one of the ushers, an old man with a frightened expression.

  “Please,” he said. “Please just leave.”

  “We’ll both go,” Larry said.

  He grabbed Ronnie by the ear and yanked him out of the pew, surprised by his sudden lack of resistance. Twisting the cartilage between his thumb and forefinger—just like the nuns used to do—and moving at a brisk pace, he led the cringing pervert down the aisle like a misbehaving child, past the startled but not disapproving faces of the parishioners. As he approached the vestibule, he saw his own neighbors—the sloppy guy, the asthmatic woman, the sad old fellow—nodding with quiet satisfaction as he ejected the evil man from the Lord’s House.

  “Some Christian,” Ronnie muttered, contorting his head in what looked like a painful way to make this observation.

  “That’s where you fucked up,” Larry told him as he kicked open the exit door. “I’m no more of a Christian than you are.”

  The sunlight seemed harsh and baleful after the dimness inside, and Larry was suddenly at a loss. You couldn’t just drag someone out of church by their ear and then simply release them as if nothing had happened. You needed to do something—or at least say something—that would bring a sense of closure to the situation, do some kind of justice to the drama you’d just enacted. But his mind was blank. He stood paralyzed at the top of the stairs, squinting into the merciless glare.

  “You wanna let go of my ear?” Ronnie inquired.

  “Not yet,” Larry said.

  They stood like that for another moment or two, Larry distracted, McGorvey bent double, bearing his pain and humiliation without complaint. Even his patience was annoying. For lack of anything better to do, Larry twisted the ear a little harder, amazed by the flexibility of human cartilage. Ronnie gave a soft whimper, his knees buckling.

  “That’s for little Holly,” Larry told him.

  This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, he thought. McGorvey finally in his power, just the two of them, man-to-man. He had a lot to say to him, stuff he’d been saving up for months. But for some reason, all he could think about was his father’s funeral.

  The sun had been blinding that morning, just like it was now. Larry remembered how lost he’d felt, stepping into t
he cruel brightness after the funeral mass, seeing the hearse at the curb, the driver in his dark suit standing so casually by the open back door. The desolation of that moment had imprinted itself on his skin and gotten absorbed into his blood. It was permanent now, as much a part of him as his hair or his teeth.

  “I’ll let you look at my ass again,” Ronnie offered.

  Larry didn’t remember pushing him, just a flash of anger and the blur of Ronnie tumbling down, the sad whump when he hit the sidewalk. And the awful way he lay there, face to the concrete, not moving, the arms and legs at all those weird angles.

  Larry barely had a moment to absorb the shock of what he’d done—OhmyGod, not again—when he was distracted by a surge of activity at his back, the church doors flying open, the people spilling out, the oppressive sensation of being surrounded by an angry mob, an accusatory chorus of gasps and exclamations, Father Mugabe grabbing him angrily by the shoulder and demanding to know what he’d done.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Larry said, and the words sounded lame even to himself, worse than dishonest. He’d said the exact same thing in the mall, staring down at the awestruck face of Antoine Harris.

  When he finally worked up the courage to turn back around, he saw, to his amazement and immense relief, that Ronnie was not dead, or even very badly hurt. He was sitting on the sidewalk with his legs splayed out, his right arm dangling limply from its shoulder, falling across his chest as if he were reaching for a sword. He grabbed the injured arm by the elbow and raised it slightly, the palm upraised, as if making some sort of offering to the spectators. He appeared to be in terrible pain, but not so terrible that he couldn’t muster a smile.

  “I am gonna sue your ass so bad,” he told Larry. “When you get outta jail, you can come visit me in my mansion.”

  Reasons It Might Be True

  KATHY’S FIRST REACTION WAS RELIEF. FOR OVER A WEEK, SHE’D been obsessing over this mysterious Sarah, mother of Lucy, and the possibility that Todd was having an affair with her. But the moment her imaginary rival limped into the house with her daughter clamped to one leg and her much older husband at her side, Kathy’s fears seemed misplaced and exaggerated, the product of an overheated imagination. Despite the many warning signs—there were six, to be exact; she’d listed them yesterday during a lull at the VA Hospital—it was hard to believe that Todd could be cheating on her with such a plain and frazzled-looking woman. It just wasn’t like him. His entire romantic history—she’d made it her business to know this—had consisted of one stunningly pretty girl after another after another (herself included, she wasn’t ashamed to admit it), and she was convinced that old habits like that died hard.