by James Ellroy
I lay with the side of my face pressed against the dirt, my mouth gasping like a fish's, until Weldon found me and went crashing through the cane for help. A doctor came out to the house that night, examined me and gave me a shot, then talked with my father out in the hall. My father didn't understand the doctor's vocabulary, and he said, "What kind of fever that is?"
"Rheumatic, Mr. Sonnier. It attacks the heart. I could be wrong, but I think that's what your boy's got. I'll be back tomorrow."
"How much this gonna cost?"
"It's three dollars for the visit, but you can pay me when you're able."
"We never had nothing like this in our family. You sure about this?"
"No, I'm not. That's why I'll be back. Good night to you, sir."
I knew he didn't like my father, but he came to see me one afternoon a week for a month, brought me bottles of medicine, and always looked into my face with genuine concern after he listened to my heart. Then one night he and my father argued and he didn't come back.
"What good he do, huh?" my father said. "You still sick, ain't you? A doctor don't make money off well people. I think maybe you got malaria, son. There ain't nothing for that, either. It just goes away. You gonna see, you. You stay in bed, you eat cush-cush Mattie and me make for you, you drink that Hadacol vitamin tonic, you wear this dime I'm tying on you, you gonna get well and go back to school."
He hung a perforated dime on a piece of red twine around my neck. His face was lean and unshaved, his eyes as intense as a butane flame when he looked into mine. "You blame me for your mama?" he asked.
"No, sir," I lied.
"I didn't mean to hit her. But she made me look bad in front of y'all. A woman can't be doing that to a man in front of his kids."
"Make Mattie go away, Daddy."
"Don't be saying that."
"She hit Weldon with the belt. She made Drew kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn't flush the toilet."
"She's just trying to be a mother, that's all. Don't talk no more. Go to sleep. I got to drive back to Texas City tonight. You gonna be all right."
He closed my door and the inside of my room was absolutely black. Through the wall I heard him and Mattie talking, then the weight of their bodies creaking rhythmically on the bedsprings.
***
When Sister Roberta knew that I would not be back to school that semester, she began bringing my lessons to the house. She came three afternoons a week and had to walk two miles each way between the convent and our house. Each time I successfully completed a lesson she rewarded me with a holy card. Each holy card had a prayer on one side and a beautiful picture on the other, usually of angels and saints glowing with light or ethereal paintings of Mary with the Infant Jesus. On the day after my father had tied the dime around my neck, Sister Roberta had to walk past our neighbor's field right after he had cut his cane and burned off the stubble, and a wet wind had streaked her black habit with ashes. As soon as she came through my bed-room door her face tightened inside her wimple, and her brown eyes, which had flecks of red in them, grew round and hot. She dropped her book bag on the foot of my bed and leaned within six inches of my face as though she were looking down at a horrid presence in the bottom of a well. The hair on her upper lip looked like pieces of silver thread.
"Who put that around your neck?" she asked.
"My father says it keeps the gris-gris away."
"My suffering God"' she said, and went back out the door in a swirl of cloth. Then I heard her speak to Mattie: "That's right, madam. Scissors. So I can remove that cord from his neck before he strangles to death in his sleep. Thank you kindly."
She came back into my bedroom, pulled the twine out from my throat with one finger, and snipped it in two. "Do you believe in this nonsense, Billy Bob?" she asked.
"No, Sister."
"That's good. You're a good Catholic boy, and you mustn't believe in superstition. Do you love the church?"
"I think so."
"Hmmmm. That doesn't sound entirely convincing. Do you love your father?"
"I don't know."
"I see. Do you love your sister and your brothers?"
"Yes. Most of the time I do."
"That's good. Because if you love somebody, or if you love the church, like I do, then you don't ever have to be afraid. People are only superstitious when they're afraid. That's an important lesson for little people to learn. Now, let's take a look at our math test for this week."
Over her shoulder I saw Mattie looking at us from the living room, her hair in foam rubber curlers, her face contorted as though a piece of barbed wire were twisting behind her eyes.
That winter my father started working regular hours, what he called "an indoor job," at the Monsanto Chemical Company in Texas City, and we saw him only on weekends. Mattie cooked only the evening meal and made us responsible for the care of the house and the other two meals. Weldon started to get into trouble at school. His eighth-grade teacher, a laywoman, called and said he had thumbtacked a girl's dress to the desk during class, causing her to almost tear it off her body when the bell rang, and he would either pay for the dress or be suspended. Mattie hung up the phone on her, and two days later the girl's father, a sheriff's deputy, came out to the house and made Mattie give him four dollars on the gallery.
She came back inside, slamming the door, her face burning, grabbed Wel don by the collar of his T-shirt, and walked him into the backyard, where she made him stand for two hours on an upended apple crate until he wet his pants.
Later, after she had let him come back inside and he had changed his underwear and blue jeans, he went outside into the dark by himself, without eating supper, and sat on the butcher stump, striking kitchen matches on the side of the box and throwing them at the chickens. Before we went to sleep he sat for a long time on the side of his bed, next to mine, in a square of moonlight with his hands balled into fists on his thighs. There were knots of muscle in the backs of his arms and behind his ears. Mattie had given him a burr haircut, and his head looked as hard and scalped as a baseball.
"Tomorrow's Saturday. We're going to listen to the LSU-Rice game," I said.
"Some colored kids saw me from the road and laughed."
"I don't care what they did. You're brave, Wel don. You're braver than any of us."
"I'm gonna fix her."
His voice made me afraid. The branches of the pecan trees were skeletal, like gnarled fingers against the moon.
"Don't be thinking like that," I said. "It'll just make her do worse things. She takes it out on Drew when you and Lyle aren't here."
"Go to sleep, Billy Bob," he said. His eyes were wet. "She hurts us because we let her. We ax for it. You get hurt when you don't stand up. Just like Mama did."
I heard him snuffling in the dark. Then he lay down with his face turned toward the opposite wall. His head looked carved out of gray wood in the moonlight.
I went back to school for the spring semester. Maybe because of the balmy winds off the Gulf and the heavy, fecund smell of magnolia and wisteria on the night air, I wanted to believe that a new season was beginning in my heart as well. I couldn't control what happened at home, but the school was a safe place, one where Sister Roberta ruled her little fifth-grade world like an affectionate despot.
I was always fascinated by her hands. They were like toy hands, small as a child's, as pink as an early rose, the nails not much bigger than pearls. She was wonderful at sketching and drawing with crayons and colored chalk. In minutes she could create a beautiful religious scene on the blackboard to fit the church's season, but she also drew pictures for us of Easter rabbits and talking Easter eggs. Sometimes she would draw only the outline of a figure—an archangel with enormous wings, a Roman soldier about to be dazzled by a blinding light—and she would let us take turns coloring in the solid areas. She told us the secret to great classroom art was to always keep your chalk and crayons pointy.
Then we began to hear rumors about Sister Roberta, of a kind
that we had never heard about any of the nuns, who all seemed to have no lives other than the ones that were immediately visible to us. She had been heard weeping in the confessional, she had left the convent for three days without permission, two detectives from Baton Rouge had questioned her in the Mother Superior's office.
She missed a week of school and a lay teacher took her place. She returned for two weeks, then was gone again. When she came back the second time she was soft-spoken and removed, and sometimes she didn't even bother to answer simple questions that we asked her. She would gaze out the window for long periods, as though her attention were fixed on a distant object, then a noise—a creaking desk, an eraser flung from the cloakroom—would disturb her, and her eyes would return to the room, absolutely empty of thought or meaning.
I stayed after school on a Friday to help her wash the blackboards and pound erasers.
"You don't need to, Billy Bob. The janitor will take care of it," she said, staring idly out the window.
"All the kids like you, Sister," I said.
"What?" she said.
"You're the only one who plays with us at recess. You don't ever get mad at us, either. Not for real, anyway."
"It's nice of you to say that, but the other sisters are good to you, too."
"Not like you are."
"You shouldn't talk to me like that, Billy Bob." She had lost weight, and there was a solitary crease, like a line drawn by a thumbnail, in each of her cheeks.
"It's wrong for you to be sad," I said.
"You must run along home now. Don't say anything more."
I wish you were my mother, I thought I heard myself say inside my head.
"What did you say?" she asked.
"Nothing."
"Tell me what you said."
"I don't think I said anything. I really don't think I did."
My heart was beating against my rib cage, the same way it had the day I fell unconscious in the sugarcane field.
"Billy Bob, don't try to understand the world. It's not ours to understand," she said. "You must give up the things you can't change. You mustn't talk to me like this anymore. You—"
But I was already racing from the room, my soul painted with an unrelieved shame that knew no words.
The next week I found out the source of Sister Roberta's grief. A strange and seedy man by the name of Mr. Trajan, who always had an American flag pin on his lapel when you saw him inside the wire cage of the grocery and package store he operated by the Negro district, had cut an article from copies of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and mailed it to other Catholic businessmen in town. An eighth-grader who had been held back twice, once by Sister Roberta, brought it to school one day, and after the three o'clock bell Lyle, Weldon, and I heard him reading it to a group of dumbfounded boys on the playground. The words hung in the air like our first exposure to God's name being deliberately used in vain.
Her brother had killed a child, and Sister Roberta had helped him hide in a fishing camp in West Baton Rouge Parish.
"Give me that," Weldon said, and tore the news article out of the boy's hand. He stared hard at it, then wadded it up and threw it on the ground. "Get the fuck out of here. You go around talking about this again and I'll kick your ass."
"That's right, you dumb fuck," Lyle said, putting his new baseball cap in his back pocket and setting his book satchel down by his foot.
"That's right, butt face," I added, incredulous at the boldness of my own words.
"Yeah?" the boy said, but the resolve in his voice was already breaking.
"Yeah!" Wel don said, and shoved him off balance. Then he picked up a rock and chased the boy and three of his friends toward the street. Lyle and I followed, picking up dirt clods in our hands. When the boy was almost to his father's waiting pickup truck, he turned and shot us the finger. Weldon nailed him right above the eye with the rock.
One of the brothers marched us down to Father Higgins's office and left us there to wait for Father Higgins, whose razor strop and black-Irish, crimson-faced tirades were legendary in the school. The office smelled of the cigar butts in the wastebasket and the cracked leather in the chairs. A walnut pendulum clock ticked loudly on the wall. It was overcast outside, and we sat in the gloom and silence until four o'clock.
"I ain't waiting anymore. Y'all coming?" Weldon said, and put one leg out the open window.
"You'll get expelled"' I said.
"Too bad. I ain't going to wait around just to have somebody whip me," he said, and dropped out the window.
Five minutes later, Lyle followed him.
The sound of the clock was like a spoon knocking on a hollow wood box. When Father Higgins finally entered the room, he was wearing his horn-rimmed glasses and thumbing through a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. The hairline on the back of his neck was shaved neatly with a razor. At first he seemed distracted by my presence, then he flipped the sheets of paper to a particular page, almost as an after-thought, and studied it. He put an unlit cigar stub in his mouth, looked at me, then back at the page.
"You threw a rock at somebody?" he said.
"No, Father."
"Somebody threw a rock at you?"
"I wouldn't say that."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"That's interesting. All right, since you don't know why you're here, how about going somewhere else?"
"I'll take him, Father," I heard Sister Roberta say in the doorway. She put her hand on my arm, walked me down the darkly polished corridor to the breezeway outside, then sat me down on the stone bench inside the bamboo-enclosed garden where she often said her rosary.
She sat next to me, her small white hands curved on the edges of the bench, and looked down at the goldfish pond while she talked. A crushed paper cup floated among the hyacinth leaves. "You meant well, Billy Bob, but I don't want you to defend me anymore. It's not the job of little people to defend adults."
"Sister, the newspaper said—"
"It said what?"
"You were in trouble with the police. Can they put you in jail?"
She put her hand on top of mine. Her fingernails looked like tiny pink seashells. "They're not really interested in me, Billy Bob. My brother is an alcoholic, and he killed a little boy with his car, then he ran away. But they probably won't send my brother to prison because the child was a Negro." Her hand was hot and damp on top of mine. Her voice clicked wetly in her throat. "He'll be spared, not because he's a sick man, but because it was a colored child he killed."
When I looked at her again, her long eyelashes were bright with tears. She stood up with her face turned away from me. The sun had broken through the gray seal of clouds, and the live oak tree overhead was filled with the clattering of mockingbirds and blue jays. I felt her tiny fingernails rake gently through my hair, as though she were combing a cat.
"Oh, you poor child, you have lice eggs in your hair," she said. Then she pressed my head against her breast, and I felt her tears strike hotly on the back of my neck.
Three days later, Sister saw the cigarette burn on Drew's leg in the lunch-room and reported it to the social welfare agency in town. A consumptive rail of a man in a dandruff-flecked blue suit drove out to the house and questioned Mattie on the gallery, then questioned us in front of her. Drew told him she had been burned by an ember that had popped out of a trash fire in the backyard.
He raised her chin with his knuckle. His black hair was stiff with grease. "Is that what happened?" he asked.
"Yes, sir." Drew's face was dull, her mouth down-turned at the corners. The burn was scabbed now and looked like a tightly coiled gray worm on her skin.
He smiled and took his knuckle away from her chin. "Then you shouldn't play next to the fire," he said.
"I would like to know who sent you out here," Mattie said.
"That's confidential." He coughed on the back of his hand. His shirt cuff was frayed and for some
reason looked particularly pretentious and sad on his thin wrist. "And to tell you the truth, I don't really know. My supervisor didn't tell me. I guess that's how the chain of command works." He coughed again, this time loud and hard, and I could smell the nicotine that was buried in his lungs. "But everything here looks all right. Perhaps this is much ado about nothing. Not a bad day for a drive, though."
Weldon's eyes were as hard as marbles, but he didn't speak.
The man walked with Mattie to his car, and I felt like doors were slamming all around us. She put her foot on his running board and propped one arm on his car roof while she talked, so that her breasts were uplifted against her blouse and her dress made a loop between her legs.
"Let's tell him"' Lyle said.
"Are you kidding? Look at him. He'd eat her shit with a spoon," Weldon said.
It was right after first period the next morning that we heard about the disaster at Texas City. Somebody shouted something about it on the playground, then suddenly the whole school was abuzz with rumors. Cars on the street pulled to the curb with their radios tuned to news stations, and we could even hear the principal's old boxwood radio blaring through the open window upstairs. A ship loaded with fertilizer had been burning in the harbor, and while people on the docks had watched firefighting boats pumping geysers of water onto the ship's decks, the fire had dripped into the hold. The explosion filled the sky with rockets of smoke and rained an umbrella of flame down on the Monsanto chemical plant. The force of the secondary explosion was so great that it blew out windows in Houston, fifty miles away. But it wasn't over yet. The fireball mushroomed laterally out into an adjacent oil field, and rows of storage tanks and wellheads went like strings of Chinese firecrackers. People said the water in the harbor boiled from the heat, the spars on steel derricks melting like licorice.
We heard nothing about the fate of my father either that afternoon or evening. Mattie got drunk that night and fell asleep in the living room chair by the radio. I felt nothing about my father's possible death, and I wondered at my own callousness. We went to school the next morning, and when we returned home in the afternoon Mattie was waiting on the gallery to tell us that a man from the Monsanto Company had telephoned and said that my father was listed as missing. Her eyes were pink with either hangover or crying, and her face was puffy and round, like a white balloon.