by John McNally
The only good thing about CCD this year was that Mary Polaski was in my class. The bad thing was that this was where she had met Chuck McDowell, a latecomer to Catholicism. Tonight, though, they were sitting at opposite ends of the room, a sight that made my palms moist, my heart thump faster. She had taken my advice and broken up with him, and now she was on the lookout for someone better—possibly me.
My CCD teachers, mostly single women, were getting more than they had bargained for. They’d taken the job because they liked kids, but they had not anticipated that kids in theory were always more appealing than real kids, particularly when those kids would rather spend their Thursday nights doing nearly anything else—drilling holes in walls, for instance, or breaking boards over their own heads. I wasn’t any better. I yawned too much, cracked lame jokes, barely listened.
Tonight, the teacher talked about Jesus baking loaves of bread and catching fish. Hoping to prove to Mary that I was a serious student of The Bible, I tried to concentrate, but all that I could picture was the Jesus who’d shown up at our school handing out loaves of Wonder Bread and cans of Starkist tuna. Before long, my brain clicked off, as if it were controlled by a thermostat, and I drifted away. My eyelids were starting to flutter when someone yelled, “Look!” and pointed out the window.
Crossing the church parking lot was Snuffleupagus, except that it was hard to tell that it was actually Snuffy. His fur was matted and his trunk seemed to be holding on by a long thread.
“What is that?” Chuck McDowell asked.
“It looks like an alien,” another boy said.
Mary Polaski said, “I’ve seen it before, but I can’t remember where.”
I wanted to announce that it was just Ralph, but I wasn’t sure that it was Ralph. Ralph might have returned the costume by now and someone else might have rented it. Or maybe the guy who’d sat on my lap, having lived up to his promise of making his own costume, now spent his nights haunting church parking lots. But it was really too dark to tell who it was.
The teacher, already irritated with us, told us to ignore him. “It’s a bum,” she said. “What he wants is your attention. If you ignore him, he’ll go away.”
The rest of spring break, I paced our house with nothing to do, feeling out of sorts inside my own body. I’d hoped Frank Wisiniewski would call Kenny and say he wanted us back for another day. I’d have done it for free, too. I was that bored.
Outside, I found half of a soggy newspaper next to a curb. It was a story about John Wayne Gacy. Gacy was in the news every day. Today’s story included a long list of items investigators had found inside Gacy’s house shortly before they arrested him. Among the suspicious items, according to the article, were an address book, a scale, a stained section of rug, and clothing that was much too small for Gacy. Inside my own house, I found an address book, a scale, a stained section of rug, and clothing that was much too small for me. There were other things on Gacy’s list, like handcuffs. I looked around my bedroom, but the only suspicious items were a copy of The Unauthorized Biography of Peter Frampton, a poster of Elton John wearing a mink coat and eyeglasses that looked like two grand pianos, and three yellow feathers extracted from an extraordinarily large bird costume. What conclusions, I wondered, would investigators draw? Who exactly, they might ask, was this Hank character?
On Saturday, a letter arrived for me, a genuine letter with a local postmark, and I was hoping it was from Mary Polaski, but it was a bill from Kenny for the damaged costume. He wanted twenty bucks. Thanks to taxes, social security, and other deductions, my paycheck was less than I had calculated, resulting in me owing Kenny even more money.
I was eager to see how much he’d charged Ralph, so I biked over to Ralph’s house. I waited by the gate, as usual, but apparently he didn’t see me. It was possible that he was staying with Kenny, which he sometimes did, but I didn’t have Kenny’s number, and I wasn’t sure I’d have called him even if I did.
When school resumed on Monday, Ralph wasn’t there, either. It wasn’t like Ralph not to be at school. He’d already failed two grades, and I knew he didn’t want to fail a third time.
Lucy Bruno was there, however, limping dramatically into class and easing herself into her chair. Mary Polaski was there, too, honking into Kleenex and drawing fresh hearts, inside of which she wrote JESUS LOVES MARY. I wasn’t sure if she meant the Jesus who’d shown up at our school or Jesus Jesus. I needed to clarify what I meant when I told Mary that she could do better than Chuck McDowell. What I meant was that she should dump Chuck for me, not for Jesus.
In art class, when Mrs. Richards gave each of us some chicken-wire, papier-mâché, and a small coffee can full of water for dipping, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, shaping chicken-wire until my fingers were raw. I stuffed newspaper inside the chicken-wire sculpture, and I started slapping down one strip of papier-mâché after another, trying to finish my project by the end of the hour. I was making Big Bird’s beak, as the guy on my lap had suggested, and I was doing a pretty good job, too. It looked like a beak, except that it wasn’t painted and it wasn’t attached to the rest of Big Bird’s head. Still, it was a beak, and when I finished making it, I tried getting Mary Polaski’s attention.
“Psssst,” I said. “Hey, Mary. Psssst.”
Mary glanced up, her hands draped with strips of gooey newspaper. She looked like the Mummy starting to unravel.
“Mary,” I whispered. “Does this look familiar?” I held up the beak, hoping she would make the connection and understand what I had meant.
Mary stared at it, but there were no burning signs of recognition in her eyes.
“Remember?” I asked. I held it up as an extension of my own mouth.
Mary smiled, but there was a faraway look in her eyes. Around her neck hung a gold cross I’d never seen before. The beak had been my last chance to win her over, but it was too late. Mary Polaski, for all practical purposes, was a goner.
I spent the better part of recess kicking a lumpy chunk of concrete from one end of the blacktop to the other until a crowd began gathering at the far corner. I figured Jesus, released from jail for loitering, had returned to Rice Park, so I wandered over to catch a peek, hoping to see what sort of stunts he was going to pull today, but it wasn’t Jesus. It was Ralph.
Ralph was standing by the monkey bars, where Jesus had stood, only no one knew that it was Ralph because he was wearing his Snuffleupagus costume. But no one recognized him as Snuffleupagus, either. The head was crushed on one side; his trunk appeared to have been severed, doing away altogether with the idea that he was an elephant; both eyes were gone; and patches of fur were missing, as though he had mange. To confuse matters further, this new, haunting Snuffleupagus had a cigarette dangling from its humongous mouth. Ralph had somehow rigged it so that the mouth now opened and closed, actually allowing him to smoke.
Mr. Santoro rushed over to see what was going on, and when he saw Ralph, he quickly lifted the bullhorn to his mouth. But then he squinted and cocked his head, as if unsure what he was looking at, and lowered the bullhorn, waiting along with the rest of us to see what would happen next.
I was about to yell out to Ralph when a wall of feedback hit us, causing everyone to jump back and clutch their ears. Next came a voice through a P.A. system, but the words sounded slow and warped, the way Ralph spoke to me when he was irritated, carefully pronouncing each syllable, as if I were an alien. The problem today, I decided, was with Ralph’s portable cassette player and the size-D batteries inside that were quickly running out of juice. Even so, the effect was haunting. The voice, distorted and amplified, said, “You. Want. To. See. Something?”
We waited, looking around. When nothing happened, someone said, “See what?” Then the voice came back, louder this time, answering the question.
“Watch. This.”
With one mittened paw, Ralph removed the cigarette from his huge mouth and threw it into a nearby bush. The bush burst into flames. The amplified voice said, “Do. Yo
u. Know. Who. I. Am? Well. Do. You?”
No one knew, not even me. I knew that it was Ralph, sure, but beyond that I didn’t know what Ralph was doing or who he was supposed to be. And there was no way to know, either, whether or not he was getting the reaction he wanted, but every last one of us stared at him in horror. No one doubted that what they were seeing was something otherworldly, and I suppose at first it could have gone either way—Ralph as angel of mercy or Ralph as messenger from Hell—but the longer we stood there watching Ralph squirt the burning bush with lighter fluid, flames so high that the tree branches over his head were catching fire, the clearer it became from which sad and unholy world this visitation had come.
15
Duke’s was where my dad took me to pick up the best Italian beef and Italian sausage sandwiches on the southwest side of Chicago. The building wasn’t much bigger than a hut, but the lines sometimes snaked out its two side doors. Once you were within reach of the counter, ordering food turned from a spectator sport into a competitive event. The men and women who worked the counter would yell out, “Hey, YOU. Whaddaya want?” or “Who’s next? Are YOU next?” Sometimes they pointed randomly and yelled “YOU” over and over until someone claimed to be the YOU in question.
The closer my father and I got to the counter, the harder my heart pounded. I hated being pointed at or yelled at, but at Duke’s the chances were pretty good that both of these would happen to you, possibly several times, even after you’d ordered. And once you were picked, you’d better know what you wanted, and you’d better know how to order it. Ordering had its own language, and it took years of listening to my dad to understand what all of it meant.
“Gimme two beefs extra juicy, a sausage, make it bloody. Gimme two dogs.”
“What’ll it be on the dogs?”
“The works.”
“You want the beefs dipped?”
“Yeah, soak ‘em.”
“You want peppers on those beefs?”
“Yeah, gimme peppers.”
“Hot, mild, or both?”
“Both. Extra cukes on those dogs.”
“You got it.”
One time, a really fat guy in line ordered about half the menu. By the time he left, he was sweating like mad, three bags in each hand, forcing everyone to smoosh together so that he could reach the door. As soon as he was safely out of earshot, everyone looked at each other and sort of snickered and shook their heads, partly because he was so fat and partly because he’d ordered so much food, but mostly out of admiration for a guy who could eat that much.
“Must have an appetite, that guy,” someone said, and someone else said, “I wonder how much he spends on groceries, huh? How much you think a guy like that spends?” and then a few people whistled and one guy added, “I wouldn’t even want to guess.” This was how conversations unraveled in Chicago: one minute you’d be standing in line with a few dozen people you didn’t know; the next, everyone would be laughing and talking. All they needed was a topic, but once that topic revealed itself, there would be no stopping them.
My father never pitched in. He never added anything. He wouldn’t even smile or look at the people talking.
On our way home, I said, “Man, that guy was fat.”
My father said, “You,” and poked me in the shoulder with his forefinger. “You know better.”
“Whaddaya mean?” I said, but my father didn’t have to say anything. I could hear the answer in the tone of my voice, the way I’d shot back my reply, and it scared me.
The next time we went to Duke’s, the fat guy was there again. We went to Duke’s the same time every week, so our schedules must have started overlapping. I watched the fat guy order. I watched him dig through his pants pockets for money, then pay for his food. I watched him make his way out the door, mumbling “Excuse me,” as people pressed into one another to make room.
I always wondered who would be the first person to speak up, who would get the ball rolling, and so when no one stepped forward, I decided to give it a try. I cleared my throat. Louder than I meant to, I said, “Man, that guy was F-A-T fat!” I looked around. When no one responded, I said, “Did everyone see that fat guy? Whew!”
I had expected someone to echo what I had said, to add to it, to spin off of it and start their own riff, but no one said a word. They exchanged looks, or they glanced from me to my dad and then back again. Beads of sweat appeared on my dad’s forehead. I tried picturing the man from last week who had called the fat guy fat, but then I couldn’t remember anyone actually calling him fat. What they’d said was that the guy had an appetite. But what was the difference? Wasn’t saying that a guy had an appetite and then laughing about it the same as calling someone fat?
Outside, my father and I each carried a sack of food. I could hear distant birds, the low squawks of their approach, but when I looked up the sky was clear, not a bird in sight. I turned and saw that the noise was coming from Duke’s, from the men and women inside, and I knew that fat wasn’t the topic. I was the topic. I wanted to go back inside and protest, I wanted to make my case, but I knew it wouldn’t help. Everyone’s turn eventually came. Yesterday it was the fat guy’s. Today it was mine. The next day it might have been my sister’s or my mother’s or my father’s. It could have been anybody’s, really. It could have been yours.
16
Rumor had it that Styx, the greatest band of all time, was going to perform a surprise concert in our city’s reservoir. The reservoir was bone dry, used these days only for drainage, the perfect spot for a full-blown rock concert. Members of Styx had grown up on Chicago’s South Side, and the word on the street was that they wanted to pay back a little something to their hometown fans. The only mystery now was the concert’s date.
Every night a procession of cars crept slowly around the reservoir, watching for the arrival of Styx’s road crew. Our classmate Wes Papadakis had vowed to camp out until Styx arrived, and some nights you could hear the faint reverberations of “Come Sail Away” or “Lady” floating up from the very bottom of the reservoir’s concrete basin where Wes, clutching his boombox, lay like a castaway atop his bicentennial inflatable mattress, waiting. It was a foregone conclusion that Wes was going to fail eighth grade.
I went over to Ralph’s house to see what he knew about all of this, but when I got there, he was on top of his mother’s garage, peering through a magnifying glass. I made my way around to the alley, found the ladder, then climbed to the top of the garage. “Ralph,” I said, tiptoeing across the lumpy tar, afraid of falling through. “What are you doing?”
He pointed at Mr. Gonzales, his next door neighbor, and said, “I’m trying to set him on fire.” Mr. Gonzales was sitting in a chaise lounge and drinking a beer, naked except for a pair of Bermuda shorts. He was unemployed that year and was almost always outside, as naked as you could get without actually being naked. Crushed beer cans decorated his lawn, glinting in the sunlight, while a tiny speck of light from Ralph’s magnifying glass seared into the man’s bare shoulder blade.
“Why?”
“Shhhhh,” Ralph said. “Watch this. Here it comes.”
Mr. Gonzales twitched a few times, then reached up over his shoulder and swatted the dagger of light, a phantom mosquito.
“Wow,” I said. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Two weeks,” Ralph said. “I put in at least an hour a day. Some days, two. Every once in a while I think I see smoke.”
“But why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to set him on fire?”
Ralph reached into a grocery sack and pulled out three Big Chief notepads, a thick rubber band holding the batch together.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s my revenge list,” he said. “It’s a list of everyone I’m going to get even with.”
“Really!” I said. I removed the rubber band, eager to read the list, expecting to find our teachers’ names sprinkled among Ralph’s school work and doodles
, but what I found was a much more frightening and detailed accounting. On each page were twenty names—I saw Lucy Bruno’s, Gina Morales not far from Lucy—and each notepad, according to its cover, contained a hundred pages.
“Ralph,” I said. “There must be six hundred names here.”
Ralph jammed his magnifying glass into his back pocket. He said, “Look. I’ve met a lot of people since I was born, okay?”
The pages were filled with everyone I knew, including my parents—everyone, as far as I could tell, except for me and my sister Kelly.
“Geez, Ralph. Who’s not on this list?”
Ralph shrugged. “Are you done reading that yet?” he asked. He snatched the notebooks away and stuffed them deep inside his grocery sack.
I liked Ralph, but danger always lurked close behind him. Sooner or later he was bound to drag me along with him into the swamp of low-life crime, and I’d been meaning all year to break off my friendship with him, only I couldn’t figure out how to do it without repercussion. His revenge list now confirmed what I’d feared all along, that Ralph wasn’t going to make it easy for me.
“Styx,” he said after we had climbed down from the roof and I had told him why I’d stopped by. “You want front-row tickets to the reservoir concert? I’ll talk to my cousins, see what I can scare up.”
“Great,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
My sister, Kelly, had her first real boyfriend that spring, a skinny buck-toothed kid named Unger. Unger was not at all the sort of future in-law I had ever imagined. I suppose I made my feelings clear to him by pulling out my Mortimer Snerd ventriloquist doll each time he came over, settling the doll onto my right knee, and yanking the string that opened his mouth, out of which came, “Hi, my name’s Unger,” or “Boy, my girlfriend, Kelly, is one hot babe. I can’t imagine what she sees in me,” or “What’s an orthodontist?!”