“I’m not part of your damned ‘gang,’ “Joey said. “I’m not doing anything illegal.”
The year before, we’d tried to recruit Joey because he could draw and was blasphemous and knew a lot about music. But he refused to steal or risk fights.
“Joey,” Tim sighed, “your signature’s on the evidence. You’re worse off than us because Ascension’s your aunt.”
Joey looked like he’d been stabbed. “I—I was drunk when I drew it.”
“So were we. Tell her that.”
Joey groaned and let himself collapse onto an oak root. His lower lip quivered. I always felt boy-tough in Joey’s presence, but shamefully so, like feeling good about yourself when you see somebody in a wheelchair.
“We’re going to capture a mountain lion and release it in Blessed Heart School,” Tim said.
The squeaking of Wade’s handgrips stopped. I laughed.
“Francis thinks I’m bullshitting,” Tim said.
Rusty said, “We got it worked out. Semi.”
Wade and Joey said, “Mountain lion?”
I snickered some more. Tim stared at me patiently.
“We’ll do the reconnaisance tomorrow,” he said. “On the field trip. They have panthers there.”
Rusty’s mom was class mother, and she’d arranged an outing to Marshland Island, a new educational facility that included a sort of zoo. Rusty and Tim had suggested it.
“We can steal the cat on a Saturday,” Tim said. “Then we bust into the school on Sunday and set it loose. We leave notes at the rectory and the convent saying what we’ve done. They’ll close the school down until they catch it, and by then Kavanagh will have forgotten about our comic book. Compared to a rampaging wildcat, it’ll seem like high jinks, see? It’s relative. Like if you get bitten by a snake, you forget about the mosquito bite you got earlier.”
Joey kept shaking his head, wiping sweat from his face with dirty hands, leaving streaks. He sniffled and grunted.
“The cops’ll shoot it and we won’t miss any school,” Wade said.
“No,” said Rusty. “It’s an endangered species and it’s government property. And first they’ve got to find it—we’re talkin about a fuckin lion—and that’ll take time, experts, equipment.”
“What if they don’t believe the notes?” I asked. “Suppose they have school anyway and somebody gets eaten? Jesus.”
“The island will report the cat missing,” said Tim. “There’ll be obvious signs that we’ve tampered with a door or window. Et cetera.”
“What if they catch it the first day?” Wade asked.
“Then we leave a new set of notes saying there’s a bunch of rattlesnakes in the school now, or scorpions or whatever. After a cougar, they can’t afford to doubt anything.”
I said, “Even if we could do this, it seems cruel to the animal, and a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“The problem with life,” Tim explained, “is that when you’re not in trouble it’s boring.”
“After the cat sees what’s here—all the people and concrete and cars and all—he’ll be glad to return to the island. He’ll live out his life knowing he’s in a good place.” Rusty inflated his chest and folded his arms across it.
“And this is probably the last big job we’ll ever do as a gang. After this summer, we’ll probably never see each other again. We might as well finish up with something spectacular.”
“I’m ready for it,” Rusty said. “I don’t give a shit anymore. I’ve lived a full life.” Rusty’s dad had been promoted to vice president of a lumber company whose home office was in Tennessee. After graduation, Rusty and his mom were moving up there.
“I spent a day in the juvenile home last summer,” I said. “Remember? And this is more serious than ripping off Kmart.”
“You surrendered,” Tim said. “You did the genteel Robert E. Lee thing instead of hauling ass like the rest of us.”
“Y’all are psychos,” Joey hissed. He twitched, grunted. “Forget it. Don’t even think about including me.” He pulled himself up.
“And I can’t do all the swashbuckler crap anymore,” I said. “My hernia’s gotten worse.”
“We’re artists,” said Tim, meaning outlaws. “What would Picasso do in a situation like this? This is our last year. We can’t just fade away.”
Besides Rusty leaving, it seemed Wade’s mother would marry the architect she was dating and move Wade with her to South Carolina. My parents were saving to send me to Benedictine, the local military school run by monks. Tim was going North to prep school.
“This’ll be good for all of us, and it’ll prevent us from getting expelled.”
“I need to think about it,” I said. Tim grimaced.
“Not me,” said Joey. “Hell no.” He wiped under both eyes. Twin dirt smudges.
“Remember that panel you drew?” Tim said. “Kavanagh flogging Ascension’s bare ass with the cat-o’-nine-tails?”
“No! No, no, no!” Joey hustled away, thighs slapping against each other.
Rusty made a meowing noise.
Mrs. Barnes stood in the field and shook a hand bell that meant recess was over. The softball games stopped, one side cheering, backslapping, the other side swearing and abusing the equipment. Boys stuffed their shirttails in and cinched their ties and milled into a rambling line where the girls were already gathered. We collected at the rear and began to trudge back to Blessed Heart. The man with the metal detector was on one knee, turning over sod with a minispade.
We passed the sandy area where the swing sets and slides were, then entered the near field. A white duck waddled towards us from the pond on the other side. Another duck scooted after it, nipping at its neck with his bright orange bill and trying to climb on its back. The rear of the line giggled and snickered, marched towards the intersection. Mrs. Barnes and most of the students had already been ushered across by red-belted patrol boys with the power to stop traffic.
Craig Dockery, tallest of the black boys, trotted out from the line and raised a baseball bat. He ran at the male duck. The duck whirled, scampered. Craig hit the duck and something popped. The duck squawked and flung itself in circles, dragging one wing.
“Got that motherfucker,” Craig said. He laughed, deep-voiced.
It was unbelievable. We didn’t know what to do.
Rusty put his hands on his hips and dropped his mouth open. “Aw, what the hell’d he do that for?”
Therese Parker, the girl who kept a pet raccoon, ran after the duck. The duck flapped towards the pond. She followed, plaid skirt swishing.
I wanted to murder Craig, but I was suddenly very aware of my hernia, like a burr in my groin, and my knees were shaking and I felt weak. I watched Therese and the squalling duck. Something flashed beside me. I stumbled out of the way. Tim was on Craig’s back, his arm around the boy’s throat. Tim fumbled in his knife pocket. Rusty stepped over to stop him, and Craig grabbed the back of Tim’s shirt and bent over and flung Tim down at Rusty’s feet.
Tim jumped up, face flaming, and stood rigid with his fists out. Craig made a show of looking him up and down. Rusty lunged forward and Craig raised the bat. Rusty froze. Wade stood behind him, fists balled with the bandaged thumb flagging up. I realized it was just our gang and the black eighth-grade boys. The others had all gone in.
Tim panted, hair splayed out over his ears, grass stains on his back.
“Ain’t nothin but a nasty old duck,” Craig said. “It wasn’t Donald Duck, little man.”
Tim screamed a catalog of obscenities, conspicuously leaving out anything racial. The variety and combinations shocked us all. Craig’s face slackened.
“Put the goddamn bat down,” Rusty said, pointing jerkily, excited. “Mess with somethin your own size.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said.
Lewis Epps, a boy so dark his skin looked blue in the sunlight, said, “Let’s go, Craig. You’re in the wrong, man.”
Across the field, Therese was creeping tow
ards the duck, baby-talking. The duck huddled against the fence of the swimming pool.
Tim forced a short, disgusted laugh, then spit near Craig’s shoe. “Be glad I’m not carrying a gun. You’re on my list, Dockery.”
Craig raised his chin, squeezed the bat handle. “You just itchin to call me a nigger, ain’t it? That’s what you’re thinkin.”
“No I am not,” Tim sneered.
“Nigger donkey-dick sucker!” said Rusty.
“Lovely.” Tim rolled his eyes. “Let’s have a little race riot.” He pushed his hair back behind his ears and stalked off towards Therese and the duck.
Nobody said anything else. I hated Craig, and I had to force myself not to let it spread to the guys behind him and to all black people, the way you might hate all dogs, say, if you’d been bitten a couple of times. I saw it in their eyes too, something that didn’t have much to do with any of us, but did. We looked the same to them, maybe, as the men blasting their people with fire hoses in the old news films. They looked the same as the occasional boys that robbed me and called me honky or cracker boy while they did it.
I made myself think of some of the black families on my old paper route, and the ugliness buried itself a little.
Therese Parker ran past us, muddy knees, tear-striped face, and we sulked towards school, wearing identical green uniforms, but divided according to the parts that showed, hands and faces, pink or brown.
Tim joined us later at the bulletin board. He said Therese had gotten Sister Ascension to call the Humane Society and that he’d guarded the duck until they arrived in an old station wagon. They gave the duck an injection and took it away to the animal hospital.
We finished the bulletin board, but pretended to still be adding the final touches when Ascension passed us, escorting Craig Dockery and his mother, who’d been summoned to take him home early. She was smaller than Craig and wore an old flowerprint dress, sharply ironed and starched. She walked like an example of good posture, staring straight ahead. Craig swung his shoulders and puffed his chest, but looked at the floor as he passed.
Rusty flipped a bird at their backs. We talked. We invented tortures for Craig that made us feel better, revenged.
“Snip his eyelids off and drip Tabasco sauce in his eyes,” Rusty said.
“Tie him down,” Wade suggested, “stick his pecker inside a loaf of bread, and release about five-hundred hungry ducks at him.”
Joey even laughed a little.
I said, “Is anybody going with Donny Flynn’s sister that you know of?”
“Why?” asked Rusty. “You think you’re gonna get somethin off her?” They were all looking at me. I felt red come into my face.
“I just wondered if she liked anybody. She seems okay.”
“She’s strange. She tried to croak herself not long ago. Besides, she’s too good-lookin for you.” Rusty had three sisters and wasn’t at all afraid of girls.
Wade said, “I kissed her at the Christmas bazaar two years ago.”
“Wow,” Rusty jeered.
“What was she then, eight years old?”
“Ten-and-a-half. She used her tongue.”
“Bullshit,” I said, instantly sick and jealous.
“Don’t believe me then.”
“Tongue,” Rusty said. “Wow. Put a goldfish in your mouth, you get the same feeling.”
When the final bell rang (I was prepared for it this time), Margie went by with the others. She pressed a folded paper into my hand, looked at me, and walked away. The note said PLEASE CALL ME 394-7626—MARGIE.
“You lucky swine,” said Tim, then he spit gloriously out over the railing and barely missed the far wall.
The teachers lined up along the bulletin board and praised the artistry, worried over the violence. But I stopped hearing them.
It occurred to me then why the heart is always associated with love. Mine was a cannon. I had only to think of Margie, or see her, to start a barrage. And the touch of her hand and the words she’d given me made darkness close all around like when you dive into a river, and then it lightened and I surfaced standing in the hallway and listened to the boom, boom, boom of the universe.
A Discipline Problem
Every afternoon I walked my youngest brother home past Margie’s house. Today I poked, watching for her, stopped to loosen and retie my shoelaces, and stopped again to shift my pack to the other shoulder. Peter, my brother, wandered on ahead, glancing back suspiciously over the hump of his green bookbag.
Margie’s house took up the corner. Like the other houses on Victory Drive, it featured a front porch that could swallow my whole living room. Mr. Flynn, her daddy, had a construction company and nine children.
One of the Flynn boys was dribbling a basketball and whooshing it through a thrumming hoop on the side of their carport. I knew I ought to ring the bell and ask for Margie, but I dreaded the question in her family’s faces. I would call her when I got home. I picked up a rock and slung it at a stop sign, missed, left.
Our house made me want to apologize. My mother went on about the charm of a carriage house, character, but it was the smallest house I’d ever seen, ivied brick squashed right up against the lane. The only advantage was the jumbo front yard, worthy of kickball, of boomerangs.
Tim and Rusty lived across the street in regular houses.
My brothers were feeding in front of the TV when I came in. Peter, the first-grader, was naked except for his uniform pants. He forked leftover potatoes out of a bowl and packed them into his cheeks, chewing steadily. Peter’s arms and legs were thin, but his tummy was bulbed like an avocado.
John, the ten year old, was licking mayonnaise off a slice of white bread. He went to a special school and came home each day in a minibus. Many of his classmates were moon-faced with Chinese eyes, their ears and noses tiny. John’s troubles were caused by not looking both ways when crossing a street three years earlier, an incident which sunk the family in debt and brought endless, petty miseries and embarrassments. John was also the only one of us who had black hair instead of brown.
“Did I get any mail?” I asked. I’d sent off for Sea Monkeys (The World’s Only INSTANT LIVE PETS!).
They shook their heads no, hypnotized by Bonanza on our black-and-white TV. Little Joe and the bad guy were walloping each other’s faces, each punch bomb-loud, on and on.
Spicy corned-beef steam wafted across from the kitchen. Mama had put a brisket on the stove between coming home from college and leaving for work, so it would be ready when Daddy arrived. I climbed the stairs, ducking to avoid the overhang.
Gretchen, our dachshund, was curled in the linen closet. She raised her head and patted her tail on the dirty laundry.
I shed my pack and my uniform and got into some corduroys and a T-shirt. I climbed up to my bunk and did my homework in an hour.
I popped some looseleaf from my binder and began a letter to Margie, but it got so corny I held a match to it until it was ashes, then flushed it.
The telephone in the hallway worried me. It might erupt at any moment with Margie’s voice, or Father Kavanagh’s.
I took The Return of Tarzan from my shelf and opened it to where I’d stuck a Baby Ruth wrapper. Trees heaved up in the room, unraveled vines in huge loops. Birds whistled. Roaring echoed off the ceiling. My muscles swelled and hardened, and I was the ape-man. To my Jane, I added tragic little wrist-scars. I jumped to the floor and smacked fists on my gorilla chest. I lifted the receiver and cleared my throat, but that only seemed to thicken whatever was in it. I stood and growled towards an acceptable voice. A drink of water worsened it. I decided to wait.
I trudged downstairs. My brothers were staring at the local news. Savannah’s only black newsman stood on a downtown street talking to the camera while behind him a group of black people, mostly men, shouted some slogan. The younger men had bushy afros and were punching their fists overhead. The announcer said a black kid suspected of snatching a purse had been shot to death by a white policeman. A shaky sce
ne of paramedics serving the body into an ambulance was followed by the pastor of the First African Primitive Baptist Church calling for a march through the city.
Peter crawled over and switched channels to Green Acres. Arnold the pig grunted at Mr. Ziffel. The television laughed.
Our front door opened, my mother arriving from the daycare center. “Peter, honey,” she said, “lock up Mama’s bike. She’s got to fix your daddy’s supper.” Her keys hung in the lock, dangling a huge chain of beaded tassels which didn’t prevent her from constantly losing them. She was the only mother I’d heard of who rode a bicycle.
From the kitchen, metal rang on metal, the familiar illusion that Mama was angry. If she was really angry, though, pots would be clanging off the walls. She had a demonic temper. She was a bad cook too. Most of her household attention went to the phone and the bathroom mirror.
Peter tramped into the kitchen to adore my mother and to set the table. Gretchen rocked downstairs with a prolonged clicking of toenails and stationed herself under the table. The phone rang—the illegal phone Daddy had wired into the kitchen— and Mama answered with a hello so sugary it sounded like a cartoon character. She began talking, laughing about a Statistics test. I relaxed, figuring she’d tie up the phone now with one of her admirers from school.
They visited on weekends. Mama would drop American Pie on the stereo and burn a cone of incense and they’d sit around. Professors’ daughters who smelled like marijuana. A young man with girl’s eyes and a piercing laugh. Men who got serious with Daddy about politics. A woman who drove a motorcycle. They’d sip martinis and grasshoppers and fog the room with cigarettes.
Mama passed the doorway with her ear pressed to the receiver, her shoulder raised to hold it, a cabbage in one hand and an onion in the other. I hated onions as much as it’s possible to hate a vegetable.
Shortly, the Volkswagen putt-putted out front and my dad arrived. The mailbox creaked open as he checked to see if we’d missed something, then he creaked it shut to keep lizards and roaches out. His shoes whisked the mat. The screen door groaned open, keys jingled, Gretchen shot out from under the table barking for Daddy, for supper, jumping against the door, rattling it, tags clinking, and the lock snapped around and the door swung in.
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Page 3