The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  Mama stopped to trade complaints with Mrs. Doolan, a thicklegged neighbor who was always swollen with babies. Her husband worked Sundays, a cop. Margie stood beside her mother, who was talking to Father O’Leary near the sidewalk. I wanted to say something to her so badly it was like a hand squeezing the back of my neck, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound stupid or pathetic. Already, I doubted anything had been shared. I’d been looking at it all through a microscope, as usual.

  Tim and Rusty would be coming out the back way soon. I started towards the corner of the church, past the black dog licking himself shamelessly near a family that wouldn’t look at him. I turned for a final glimpse of Margie Flynn. She was looking at me. We looked down. I watched my shoes press grass, and then, as I turned the corner, I periscoped back to dare another look, and she caught me again. She smiled and raised her hand, sprinkling her fingers at me, and her fingers might’ve been brushing my heart.

  The body of Christ dissolved in my mouth, a gooey melt of starch, and I swallowed him, happy, miserable, in distant love.

  The Usual Gang of Idiots

  Homeroom next morning smelled of cough drops. Nearly summer, nobody had a sore throat. But gum was forbidden. Cough drops were classroom candy. Even the nuns sucked them.

  Sister Ascension, the principal, lumbered in and whispered to our teacher, Sister Rosaria, who bobbed her head. Ascension called the names of our whole gang—Tim, Rusty, Wade, and me—along with her nephew, Joey O’Connor, and absolved us from classes to create a final drawing for the bulletin board in the hallway. The teachers knew our gang as artists more than outlaws.

  Ascension relayed us to the library, beside her office. The librarian, Miss Harper, led us back into the supply room. Miss Harper was as old as my grandma and had a wooden leg. She rolled her right side to accomplish every other step. She never smiled.

  Miss Harper took shears from a drawer and stood beside a table mounted with a wide roll of paper. Tim and I, on each side, pinched a corner of the paper and walked backwards, unscrolling it cracklingly, just longer than a bulletin board. Miss Harper’s shears munched neatly across. Rusty and Joey rolled it up and we cut another piece.

  Her mouth tight as a slot, Miss Harper surrendered her scissors to Wade, the tallest, and a ration of thumbtacks to Joey, the fattest. Rusty and I carried the paper tubes. Miss Harper waited for us to leave ahead of her. Tim snatched a large book from one of the shelves and snuck it out to the hallway.

  “Did you ever consider,” said Tim, “that Miss Harper is about one-fourth wood? I wonder if it floats when she takes a bath?” Tim Sullivan was the smallest boy in our class, and the smartest. He’d been born here in Georgia, but lived several years up North. In his first week at Blessed Heart, he’d passed me a note that said GOD IS A LIE. REMEMBER SANTA CLAUS? Forming a gang was his idea, after he’d read The Godfather.

  We smoothed the first paper roll across the upper part of the bulletin board, sank tacks through the corners into cork, and trimmed the edge. We overlapped the paper on the bottom and did the same. We stepped back and leaned on the aluminum railing that overlooked the cafeteria-gym-auditorium.

  “It goes without saying,” Tim said, “this won’t be a normal drawing. This is our legacy to the school.” He hawked and spit on the polished floor and mashed it under his shoe, then opened the big book and tapped an illustration. “Gustave Doré. Wild, hunh?”

  In the engraving, muscular men and roundish women, all naked, writhed in a rocky pit, struggling with serpents which hid the men’s privates. It was beautiful and dark and the detail carried into the distant crags, heaped with lost souls, snakes.

  “They want religion, we’ll do it right.”

  “Isn’t this Gothic style?” I asked, showing off.

  “This guy knew anatomy,” Wade said. “I bet he dissected a corpse or two.” Wade spoke in a voice deeper than his true voice. He was tall, muscular.

  Rusty, a football player who hated his teammates, said, “I don’t think they’re gonna let us draw titties and all that.”

  Tim flipped to the index, then to an etching of the crucifixion. “Only on Mr. Jesus. Tastefully done.”

  We decided what supplies we’d need and went for them while Tim and Wade began the outline with yellow pencil-nubs. We passed a seventh-grade classroom and the word “integers” seeped out of a vent and I was happy to be in the hallway and free, though in the last row, beside an aquarium flickering with orange fish, I knew Margie Flynn was warming the seat of her desk, possibly thinking of me at that exact moment.

  Rusty, Joey, and I returned with the materials. We watched Tim and Wade. They skewed the angle of the drawing so it gazed up at Jesus from one side. Tim drew everything on the diagonal instead of amateurishly head-on. Joey wedged his bulk between Tim and Wade and began to rough in the motto Ascension had assigned (Christ has Died, Christ is Risen, Christ will Come Again). Tim trailed his pencil across the paper, glancing at the book every few seconds. He slowed down for the heads and hands, frowned at the point of his wriggling pencil.

  He sketched in graceful streaks that became the folds of gowns, the hewn edges of crosses. Rusty and I moved in and boldened the outlines with Magic Markers. Tim fetched a wastebasket from the lavatory, turned it over, and stood on it to draw the crown of thorns. Bloodier than the original.

  We swarmed the paper. All else vanished. Pencil lines became ink, ink grew into shadow, raw paper remained as light. Color squeaked in from markers and crayons and chalk. The lettering thickened, spiked with points and tails. We molded cross-hatching to the curves of the figures.

  Father Kavanagh approached from the glass bridge, bringing the world back to us. He stopped and slid a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, shook one out and lit it with a square, silver lighter that plinked when he closed it. He watched us. He blew several tight smoke rings and tapped a manila envelope against his thigh. Then he turned and walked down the hall and knocked on our homeroom door and went inside to teach Religion class. The last smoke ring dilated and kneaded itself into wisps.

  We worked. The paper got heavy with ink and sagged. We refastened it. Tim ran back and forth between the bathroom and Jesus, checking the mirror, drawing his own face beneath the beard. We gave the soldiers the faces of Kavanagh and the nuns. We made ourselves the disciples. Giggling, Joey crucified the pope next to Christ, as a thief. Wade hung Alfred E. Neuman, Mad’s idiot coverboy, on the third cross. Beards and helmets kept it from being obvious libel.

  The smell of sizzling burgers rose humidly from the cafeteria. My stomach rumbled. Joey’s rumbled louder.

  Rusty said, “We’d best slow down or we’ll be finished before Second Lunch.”

  We stood back and looked at what we’d drawn, dark against the white painted cinder block. Down the way, Ascension walked across to our room and came out with Craig Dockery, a mean black kid, and took him into her office. Craig reemerged with a giant, empty bottle from the water cooler, slapping it like a drum. He stopped near us, lifted his chin, and cocked his head. “Y’all can’t draw black people?”

  Tim said, “This is Jerusalem in the year 33.”

  Craig said, “They had them back then.” He swaggered slowly into the stairwell and it echoed with the boom of the big bottle.

  Tim made Judas look like Craig.

  When Craig came back, arms bulging with the weight of a full water bottle, he laughed through his nose. “You all right, Tiny Tim.” He took the water into the principal’s office.

  Tim, who did not like being called tiny, said something vile. He turned back to us and said, “This is the last bulletin board. It needs magic.”

  Tim reached into his back pocket and took out a small knife. He opened the blade and it locked into place, click. “Got your lighter, Rusty?”

  Rusty produced a butane lighter, flicked his thumb, and a flame spurted up. Tim turned the blade in it, then pulled it back and shook the heat out.

  The bell rang above the bulletin board,
jangling me.

  Tim folded his left hand to his shoulder, raising the elbow. He pressed the knife to the skin underneath the elbow and pulled the blade across. I winced. No blood. He sliced again, then milked the skin and a couple of beads oozed out. “Eek,” he said. He stepped up on the wastebasket and dabbed specks onto Christ’s thorn-punctured head.

  Voices echoed into the cafeteria, then filled it, as the younger kids arrived for First Lunch, hundreds of shouting mouths. A few tilted their heads back, watched us for a moment, nudged their friends, and pointed, then returned to their burgers and screaming.

  Tim passed the knife to Rusty. Rusty’s scalp and ears lifted slightly. But then he held his hand up and casually jabbed the web between thumb and forefinger, pressed it to the nailed hands, and smeared a thin line like cough-drop drool.

  I couldn’t cut myself. Tim offered. I closed my eyes and pinched my thigh to divert myself while Tim sliced behind my elbow, producing a token dribble. I made my mark on the skewered feet.

  “Blood brothers to Jesus,” Tim said, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “I’m not doing it,” Joey said. “Forget it.”

  “So save your blood,” Tim said. “Who asked you?”

  Wade sliced his left thumb, then looked shocked. Blood ticked to the floor. He cursed. He trickled blood on the nail holes, the crown of thorns, and the wounded side, then stepped back and flung droplets at the paper. “Damn! It’s still coming out!” He sucked air through his teeth to show us that it hurt.

  “Another day of Art,” Tim said. “You better let the nurse take a look at that.”

  Wade went and told the nurse he’d gotten a freak paper-cut. He returned with his thumb padded in gauze and surgical tape.

  Joey slid his chubby hands into his pockets.

  Kavanagh emerged from the classroom, lit a cigarette, and wandered towards us. He stood at our backs and we stopped joking and exaggerated the drawing process. Kavanagh coughed. I peeked at him under my drawing arm. He was holding the manila envelope.

  “You boys are the artists,” he said, smoke cascading from his mouth, some of it threading back up into his nostrils.

  Everybody turned around.

  “Yes, Father,” said Wade in his enhanced, deep voice.

  “You are—Mr. Madison, correct?” Father Kavanagh pinched the cigarette to his lips and his cheeks caved in. The cigarette reddened and half an inch of ash grew there.

  “Yes, Father.”

  “And Mr. Doyle?”

  “Yes, Father,” I admitted.

  The steely haired priest nodded at us several times. He huffed out a cloud of smoke and unclasped the big envelope. “I’d like your opinion on this.”

  He slid out a sheaf of paper divided into bright comic-book panels. I’d colored them myself. I got the hot, giddy feeling of being in serious trouble, like just before a whipping.

  “Is this familiar, Mr. Scalisi?” Kavanagh passed it to Rusty, who accepted as if it were a loaded rattrap.

  We’d spent an entire weekend devising Sodom vs. Gomorrah 74, a spoof of our torments at Blessed Heart. It had disappeared from Wade’s desk a few days before. We’d suspected Donny Flynn, Margie’s brother. The last page showed the priests defiling fat, nude Sisters of Mercy on the church altar while our comic-book selves watched in horror from the choir loft.

  We traded Death Row grimaces. Kavanagh’s face was vague with smoke. I swallowed a horrible urge to laugh. We’d be expelled from school in disgrace, we’d have to run away from home.

  Rusty, his face a struggle between shock and hilarity, slowly crumpled the pages in his fist while he stared out over the railing behind Kavanagh. The priest took it from him. “Oh no, don’t destroy it. One of your classmates thought enough of it to drop it in the rectory mail slot.” He smoothed out the crimps, ashes tumbling from his cigarette, and returned it to the envelope. Kavanagh’s name was scrawled on the outside.

  “What will your mothers think, I wonder? I believe it meets even the legal definition of obscene.”

  The hallway changed. The floor tilted like in a fun house, but instead of sliding I floated, unable to feel my body. The cafeteria chimed with forks and knives, trays rasped on tabletops, elfin voices enclosed us. Kavanagh’s collar, between black bands, was bone white, radiant. He put the last of the cigarette to his lips and it glowed fiercely. He dropped it to the floor and pressed his toe on it. He exhaled smoke for a long, long time, and it lingered, curling and billowing in tendrils that finally became a haze.

  Joey began clearing his throat, overdoing his usual nervous tics, snorting, grunting. Though not officially in the gang, he’d participated.

  “Did you boys learn this sort of thing from magazines? Rock songs?” asked Kavanagh.

  “No, Father,” Tim said, discarding a fine excuse. The nuns thought “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was brainwashing us to shoot heroin. Things like that.

  “Where then?”

  Everyone stood paralyzed for a few seconds.

  Then Rusty dropped his chin to his chest and said, “I guess we just picked it up off the street.”

  “You should’ve left it there.”

  I looked through the railing grid down into the cafeteria. The teachers were lining the children up, marching them outside.

  “I ought to be shocked,” said the Irish priest.

  Tim asked—and I wanted to fling him over the railing— “Would this be a mortal sin, Father?”

  Kavanagh’s mouth was hard, as if he had nipped something in his front teeth, then he relaxed into a faint cynical smile that I’d never seen before. “Venial,” he said, accompanied marvelously by smoke, though the cigarette had been dead a full minute. “In all probability, venial.”

  I had a moment’s scared affection for him, as I sometimes had for my own father.

  Metal doors crunched shut, and the last of the children’s voices ceased. The awful silence tightened my shoulders and back, made me want to yell, run. The lunch bell clangalanged just behind my head and I jerked like a live wire had touched me, ducking and throwing my hands up, and all the others jumped and even Kavanagh was halfway to protecting his face. The bell stopped and left me shaking. I was thankful I hadn’t cursed. The hallway narrowed with the opening of doors and our classmates poured out noisily and the teachers bunched together and I stared amazedly at Margie Flynn’s face as it smiled past mine, became the back of a beautiful head, and turned the corner. The gang affected poses of relaxation. Kavanagh looked towards the teachers, held the envelope behind his back in both hands, waggling it. Joey blinked like a machine, grunted, sniffed.

  “I’ll ponder this over the next few weeks, regarding your graduation,” Kavanagh said. He slit his eyes at the bulletin board. “It’s hard to believe he’ll rise after a crucifixion that gory, boys.” He nodded at the teachers, then walked to the glass bridge, and the manila envelope was the last thing to disappear.

  Joey pounded into the lavatory.

  Tim, Rusty, Wade, and I gaped at one another. Faces pale, or red. Eyes wide or squinted. And then we began to laugh wildly, and the teachers scowled at us as they paused to survey the drawing, and Rusty doubled over in an agony of compressed laughter, farted like a buffalo, and the teachers pretended not to have heard and drifted away. Our laughter stabbed in breathless spasms as our classmates flowed around us.

  Rusty and Tim were eating from paper cones filled with french fries, mustard-slathered. I sat across from them and stared at my hamburger. My stomach was queasy and I began to think about burgers, beef, cows in the slaughterhouse spilling out their bowels, and my thirty-five cents was wasted. Wade poured barbecue potato chips into his mouth from a large bag he’d brought. Joey was still upstairs in the bathroom, locked in a stall, moaning.

  Every minute or so Tim and Rusty would titter and then everybody would catch it, laughing convulsively, mouths filled with mush. Finally we became exhausted. Wade folded his potato chip bag into a football and flicked it into a dive across the aisle and into
a trash barrel. Margie was sitting down there on the girls’ side. Our gazes crossed and something jammed in my stomach and then spread, that pleasant ache.

  I looked up above her, into the other dimension of the hallway, and saw our mural of the gothic Christ, his wounds brownsmudged with our blood, the same that beat confusedly in my own heart.

  “We’re going to be thrown out of school,” I said. “Margie’s going to think I’m trash, a pig.”

  “I have a plan to save us,” Tim said. “We’re going to be legendary.”

  Miss Harper was slowly hobbling past our mural. She did not look at it. She leaned on her cane, rolled the leg forward, stepped. Suddenly I felt tremendously sorry for her, and my throat tightened and I had to blink.

  All the boys were playing softball. Our gang, though, was sprawled around the big oak tree, for a meeting. Every few minutes I looked up to see Margie, far away on the bleachers, talking to another girl. I invented their conversation, inserted myself as topic. On the soccer field an old man swept a metal detector in front of him, a wire running from the disk, up the handle, and into his earplug. Birds peeped above us.

  Tim slid his fingers behind his ears and flipped longish blond hair out over them. He beat the regulations by slicking it back. He laid down his copy of The Call of the Wild, then growled and spit. “Goddamn allergies,” he said. Then, “There’s Joey. Hey, Joey!”

  Fat Joey O’Connor ambled over, his eyeglasses blinding me until he entered the shade and I saw his eyes twitching behind the lenses. Sweat blotched under his arms, hair stuck to his brow in slashes. He shook his head, astonished.

  “I’m dead. We won’t graduate,” he moaned. “I just had a bad episode in the bathroom.”

  “Have a seat,” Tim said. “We’ve already got an exit from this situation.”

  I was arranging green cubes of bottle glass into a mosaic in the dirt. Rusty, slumped against the trunk, methodically scraped his orthopedic shoes on a big root that looked poured onto the ground like lava. Wade squeezed a pair of handgrips, his forearms bulging and vein-etched, his thumb-bandage stained.