“Touch your middle finger to your forehead,” he said aloud, and did it, “then to the white button in the middle of your chest, then to the left shoulder, then to the right, then start praying: Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy …”
Pussy was the dirtiest name a guy could be called. Pussy was the …
He made the sign of the cross again, pressed his hands together, made the fingers and the palm heels perfectly even, and began a Hail Mary, hopeful that the whispered rhythm of this prayer would rock him into a state of dutiful contentment, hopeful that the waves of recitation would take effect as they had in the detention home, when they had helped him behave, when prayer was the only habit he could depend upon, the only thing he had left of his mother, the only thing that everybody, including the man, thought was right, when—although neither it nor behaving gave him any joy—it kept him out of trouble, and was … the only thing.…
The prayer had passed swiftly out of his mouth in a mumble, and he stopped himself and closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the Christ and tried again:
“Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with …”
But he heard the rattle of the cans again, and he grabbed the railing, opening his eyes to keep his balance, and gasped at the sight of two large angels, with swords in their hands, hovering in the clouds of a mural on the ceiling.
Coarse layers of house paint had been brushed on by an inmate artist who, in an attempt to make them pretty, had made them look like old whores. They reminded Aaron of police matrons, too, for the harsh, manly angles of their faces were stressed by the thick smears of bright lipstick and heavy rouge; and the eyelashes, which were supposed to be pretty, were so long and thick they encircled the bulging eyes like the masks of assassins, and their busts were so large and heavily outlined in black paint that, although the angels wore flowing white robes, they gave the impression of chest armor.
Guards not guardians, he thought with disgust, and then felt guilty for thinking about angels in that way, and he tried to discover good things in the mural. But a closer inspection only made the grotesque leers on their faces more obvious and reminded him of Dominic’s when he had shouted: “Pussyyyyyyyyyyy!”
He lowered his head and rested it on the cool smooth railing to get the angels out of his sight and the thought of Dominic and that word out of his mind. But the confused feelings that the mural had aroused stayed with him, for the angels seemed a perfect example of all the confusion in his life.
Church on Sundays and prayers every night didn’t do any good against guys like the Buzzer. He had fought enough bullies to know that, and he had stomped enough guys himself to know that no sign of the cross could stop an excited gang. And when was it all right to fight and even kill? He had become hysterical when he had seen a wild-haired girl slap Judith’s face into a splotch of red, and he had thrown the girl to the ground and had started pounding on her back and didn’t know he was under arrest until the cops fingerprinted him at the city hall. And why get a Medal of Honor for machine-gunning thirty-five yellow Japs and jail for breaking a guy’s nose who messed with your girl? Cops never put Stanley in jail during the war for street fighting. They patted him on the back, called him a good soldier, told him to move on, and picked up his victim. The men in the DT didn’t like sissies either. No sissy ever became a monitor. Yet the man would toss a guy in the hole for fighting, put it down on his record, and make his sentence longer. A guy couldn’t win for losing: if he fought, he got a good rep, the man might make him a monitor, but kept him locked up. If he didn’t fight, he got beat up and put down by all the guys, the man didn’t respect him but let him go home sooner. It didn’t figure out. Nothing was what it seemed to be. Everything was like the mural.
The fingerprint grain of the wood hurt his cheekbone and distracted him, but it was just another example, like the mural, of how displeasing prayer had become since …? since …?
Mother! He could try that! It had worked on the garbage wagon! He chanted:
Mother-Mother! Mother-Mother! Mother-Mother! Mother-Mother!
But the chant sounded so ironic coming from him in church, kneeling in front of an altar that his unspoken, unadmitted, undigested grudge against God for killing her erupted inside him like the discomfort of heartburn.
The chant was as futile as that chant to Him for her at that last rosary. That futile chant had floated like swamp scum upon the sweet, sick smell of scores of wreaths of flowers in the funeral home. That futile chant had rippled like sluggish waves in the oppressive, stagnant heat from a hundred bodies. That futile chant had been chanted by a hundred mourners and chanted to the monotonous thudding beat of a hundred fists on a hundred breastbones:
“Oh, my God, I am most heartily sorry.
“Oh, my God, I am most heartily sorry.
“Oh, my God, I am most heartily sorry.”
He still hated that chant. He hated—He hated—He—He was afraid to admit to himself that he loved his mother more than God. But his mother would never have killed anybody. His mother would never have let anybody die at all, if she could help it, not even … not … even … the Buzzer!
His cheek still hurt. He laid the other side of his face against the railing, searched for the warm spot his cheek had made on the wood, found it, rested his head, and regretted coming to the chapel. For he was afraid that prayer would never work for him again. He was afraid he had lost the only control he had over his life. He was afraid that the tool he had used to keep himself from hating a man who had left slap prints striped across his face for half an hour afterwards was gone. It was a tool that had helped him apologize to the man for talking back to the monitor who had whacked him with a paddle, a tool he had learned to use so well that he had become a monitor, and then head monitor, and he wielded the paddle, and he …? he …? he …?
He lifted his head as he realized why prayer had worked so well in the DT. He had prayed there, in barred light, with only one thought: to behave, to behave, to behave, because that was what was wrong. He had to pray only for what was wrong. He had to pray for one particular thing. He had to pray for the help to do that one thing. He had to pray for the will power to do it. He had to pray for the will power to do some thing, as he had there.
He straightened into a good kneeling position, determined to pray for help in finding out what was wrong between Barneyway and the Buzzer. He knocked his knees together, his anklebones, his feet, and checking behind him to see if he was still alone, he noticed the awry hang of his new shoes below him; and he tried, before praying, to make a roughly even line of determination out of the twin strips of clean orange leather between their dirty soles and heels.
Sore knees and a pain between his shoulder blades would be part of his sacrificial payment of God for His help, for the will power to seek out the cause and find an answer to the problem.
The words came haltingly at first and then began to slide with a whisper’s ease from his mouth as the discipline of recitation took effect. And although he did not expect to feel the presence of God like his mother’s hand upon his neck nor his chest to swell with an exalted sense of a purified soul, the humble habit of confession was still strong, and if he had admitted to himself his own fault in incidents which he thought were unjust in the DT, he could discover the cause of the trouble involving his best friend no matter how badly it might make him feel, and for a brief unhappy moment, he thought of Buckshot.
He stopped, and straightened his back, and decided to recite his rosary all the way through from the beginning, and he began with the conviction of a normal speaking voice:
“I believe in God, the Father almigh—”
“Jesus Christ, man! What the hell’s the matter with you?” Dominic yelled, standing silhouetted and stump-legged in the doorway. “Come on! The guys are lined up for count outside the school. Run! or you’ll spend your whole goddamned day praying in the hole. Run!”
III
Sunrays, magnified by a wall of windows, spilled in
puddles off brown desks, heated and lit every corner of the schoolroom, but converged on Aaron, who unbuttoned his shirt to the middle of his chest and spread his damp collar to cool his neck.
The scrambled conversations of the boys irritated him, too, for he was still breathing hard from the run from the chapel, and he would have liked to have rested in the shade. But there wasn’t a shady spot in the school room, and Dominic had sat down directly in front of the teacher’s empty desk, placed his books, with their worn jackets in the pool of light on his desk, and motioned to Aaron to sit next to him.
“This is the twelfth grade in here. Don’t worry!” Dominic said, stopping Aaron’s protest. “You can do the work. You watch. Math, English, History, all going on at different speeds. You’ll see.”
Every other seat in the front row was an empty, waving rib of dark, trouser-polished wood, and Aaron’s desk was so completely isolated that he was afraid to take advantage of a room filled with guys and with possible hints which might solve his problem. But the desire for a less conspicuous seat, and one from which he could pursue his intentions, proved stronger than his shyness, and he tried to find one.
All the other desks were taken, perhaps fifty in all, but once he had turned and had seen that he was not the center of attention, he began to study the room from his seat.
The guys were big and many showed blue stubble on their cheeks. This was important because Barneyway was smart in school and the big guys might pick on him for it, call him a show-off. Just as he, himself, didn’t like to use the paddle to keep the home group quiet when the big guys were in the DT dayroom for movies, because he didn’t want them to consider him a smart punk.
There were a few white shirts in the back rows, too, and he recognized the blond guy who had shouted orders in the dining room and whose weasel expression made him a natural suspect as an accomplice to the Buzzer. The guy’s drooping eyelids twisted slyly at the corners and his lips had the same droop and twist to them and contrasted sharply with the square brown features of the big Mexican in white kitchen uniform who sat next to him.
Aaron was then surprised to see the Buzzer sitting in the very last row, the black skin fold corkscrewed on his twisted neck, speaking to Rattler, who was across the aisle from him.
“What’s the Buzzer doing here?” he asked, curious, but hoping that the answer would provide some kind of a clue, although conscious, also, of a vague sense of deceit.
“Still worrying about him, huh? Forget the dude and, anyway, after you’re sixteen, if you don’t go to school, you either got to work or learn a trade, and the Buzzer don’t like those dirty shops any more than I do. He don’t do nothing here. Pretty quick, he’ll have a reason for going out and he won’t come back. Wait and see.”
Conversation dropped to a low hum as a young dark-haired man came into the room, strolled up the center aisle with casual steps, leaned one hand upon his desk, seemingly pivoted upon his long fingers toward the class, and waited for silence.
Full cheeks, closely shaved and pale-sheened, seemed to swell with impatience. A thick eyebrow arched into a tight curl on his forehead, wavered, but the conversation continued and the soft body sagged visibly within the blue suit and the eyebrow drooped and a soft voice said, “All right, boys. All right, boys.”
Small black hairs quilled the tattooed H of hate on Dominic’s crooked right pinkie, and he smirked so Aaron would understand the signal; and Aaron sat up, attentive, certain this meant something, searching the man’s soft face for further signs.
The conversation hummed indifferently on.
“All right, boys,” the man said.
Hum of conversation.
“Boys!” the man yelled, and his voice squeaked. “Let’s begin with English!”
There was a resentful hush in the room, and the resentment, the heat, the glare, the odor of crowded sweating flesh made Aaron wish he was outside, where he could find some tranquil place in which to figure out some type of plan. He despised the man for not making the boys respect him, blamed the man for not protecting Barneyway, and disliked the man even more because his own resentment found expression in the word “pussy,” which was loaded with the incriminations about Barneyway he hoped to disprove.
“Which of you boys in the top group have finished reading the story about Joan of Arc?”
The man’s voice grated upon Aaron’s nerves like the squeak of chalk on a blackboard.
“And who knows who condemned her and where?”
Dominic raised his hand.
A quick leveling of the arched brow acknowledged the hand, but the brow arched again, touched the tip of the curl as the man looked around the room seeking the answer elsewhere. He repeated the question, and Dominic slid down on his seat into an indifferent slouch and stared arrogantly at the ceiling as if he were sure he would be called upon. Aaron was amused by his conceit, especially since it was intended to offend the man, but he didn’t risk a smile, which would have relieved his own feelings, because Dominic looked too touchy.
“Well, what’s the answer, Dominic?” the man asked, wearily.
“A council of French churchmen at Rouen,” Dominic said, speaking to the ceiling, raising his voice with the Rouen to prove how easy it all was. He then bore down on the seat with his hands, and let his body swing free between his arms, his legs together, his toes sticking out beyond the desk, pointed like a gymnast’s, before dropping down again, with a thump, upon the seat, massive chin at desk level, and he so filled Aaron with admiration for him, for a guy so tough he wasn’t ashamed to be smart, to be single-o, to pick and choose his own way, that it took an upward tilt of the chin to alert Aaron to the man.
“Your name, please?”
“Huh?”
“Your name?” the man asked again, smiling, and someone snickered from the back of the room, and Aaron blushed and appreciated Dominic’s quick rescue:
“Are we going to discuss the battles Joan of Arc fought?”
“I’m not sure yet,” the man said, the arched eyebrow quavering with annoyance.
“I’m ready to now,” Dominic said. “You said to have it done.”
“We’ll get to that,” the man said. “Now just keep your pants on, Dominic. There’s—”
A snicker cut him off. He dropped his arms, stood stiffly, and tried to threaten the class with a no-nonsense stare. But his eyebrows were too finely plucked, his cheeks too smooth and pale, and his eyes too soft to scare. There was silence, though, and he began to question Aaron again, but with a persistence that made Aaron feel as if he were on the witness stand, with the whole courtroom watching for a mistake.
“What grade are you in?”
“The tenth.”
“Do you know your grammar?”
“Pretty good,” Aaron answered, wishing he were on the garbage wagon, wishing the man weren’t so friendly with him, beginning to fear now that the guys might compare him with the man, that the guys might think he, too, was pussy.
“Ha-ha!”
“What’s a noun?” the man asked, pretending he didn’t hear the laugh.
“The … the name of something.”
“Very good,” a voice said and the class giggled.
The man slapped his arms to his side and stared at the class until the giggling stopped. Then he asked, in a very dignified tone:
“What’s the subject of a sentence?”
“It’s … it’s … it’s what’s being talked about,” Aaron answered, cringing as he waited for the next smart remark to explode in his ears, all thought of solving Barneyway’s problems gone.
“Very good,” someone said.
“Very good,” said someone else.
“Verrr-ryyy goooood,” added another voice, and Aaron recognized the Buzzer’s drawl as the class started laughing, and recognition sapped the last shreds of his confidence, and he sank down, his thin body huddled into his big shirt, his face enflamed by a hot blush.
“I see no reason for any wisecracks,” the man said,
putting his hands on his hips, pursing his mouth, trying to present a grim appearance, but he was so ineffectual he made Aaron feel worse.
“This boy is only answering my questions and very well, too. We’ll have no more smart-ass remarks,” he said, primly, brushing at the curl on his forehead, and he waited until the class had become quiet before he asked another question.
“What is a verb? I mean, give me an example of one.”
Aaron was positive that the grins were as sharp and poised as knife blades behind him.
“A verb?” the man asked, and Aaron, ears ringing, dreading the next remark, but wanting to get the ordeal over with, tried to answer:
“It’s … uh … It’s, uh.… An example is …”
He peered at the man from below his flushed brow, feeling disgraced forever in front of Dominic, sure that Dominic would think he was pussy, too, now.
“Come ownnnnn, kisssss-aaasssss, what’s thuh ansuh?” the Buzzer cried, and the class burst into laughter again.
“All right … that’s enough,” the man said. “That’s enough! That’s enough!”
But the laughter only became louder, and the man sat down in disgust, pouting, eyebrow sagging, and Dominic shook his head with a contempt which Aaron felt was meant for him, too.
“Come-ownnn, kisss-aaasssss,” the Buzzer said, and Dominic’s irises sliced to quarter-moons in the corners of his glancing eyes, and the glance triggered Aaron into action, and he sat up, jammed his chest against the desk edge, stuttered as he tried to answer, and then shouted his answer, shouted it as loud as he could, to prove he wasn’t pussy:
“Scare is a verb. Pray is a verb. And love is a verb.”
“Verrr-ryyy good. Verrrrr-ryyyy goooooooooood,” the Buzzer said.
“Very good,” Rattler said.
“Very good,” said another guy.
Tattoo the Wicked Cross Page 8