The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (6 page)

There was a way to take it. You hold your arm a little ways from your body so the belt catches your wrist and wraps around it. There’s a painless slap. You can catch about half the strokes that way. You only have to break into tears when you want him to stop.

I couldn’t make myself cry.

I fell just outside the kitchen doorway. I curled onto the floor
and my father turned me, distributing the stripes like basting a turkey. Silhouetted in the light of the doorway, my mother was screaming.

My father slashed and slashed me. I rolled. My brothers sat terrified.
The Beverly Hillbillies
was on TV. My mother pushed herself in front of my father and caught his arms and shrieked, “Bob! Jesus Christ you’ll kill him!”

He stopped and stood over me, trembling, dangling the belt. His hair was wild. “Sometimes you just don’t want to stop …” he said, and his eyes looked drugged, dazed, the way I felt.

“I suppose you’ve convinced him to eat his dinner now,” Mama said angrily. Her anger baffled me, since she seemed to have been the catalyst.

Daddy fed the belt back through the loops. They sat.

On the living room floor I rolled up my flared pantslegs. There were the usual stripes, some bleeding welts. Mama winced. John and Peter paled like they’d taken the beating. For a moment I wished he had ruptured an artery so I could bleed to death in quiet reproach. The hernia ached.

Daddy said, “I guess you think you’re some kind of man, not crying.” He made a spitting sound.

My mother walked past me to the bathroom and returned with a tube of antiseptic. She squeezed out creamy worms and rubbed them into the welts. I tried not to flinch. Then I limped to the table (imitating gunshot heroes) and lowered myself into my chair, the way a yogi might sit on broken glass, or nails, well observed. Peter, the baby, squeezed little tears out of the corners of his eyes.

I ate the pile of onions first. They made me want to gag, so I held my breath and swallowed without chewing. Daddy looked at me, then quickly away, as if he’d just remembered why I was wolfing onions.

John pouted at his cabbage. “Why’d you hit him so much?” he asked, tactless as a four year old.

“Mind your own P’s and Q’s or you’ll get a taste of it.”

Mama said, “Your father’s been having a difficult time at work.” Daddy jabbed a square of meat into his mouth and ate reflectively.

“He’ll be having difficulties at home, too, if he doesn’t watch it.” Daddy swallowed, cleared his throat. “Francis, I look forward to the day you have children of your own. I hope they drive you as crazy as y’all have driven me.”

After dinner Mama told Peter and John to do the dishes instead of me, because I’d had a beating. I opened the front door.

“Hold on there, mister, where do you think you’re going?” Daddy was sitting in front of the TV, picking his teeth.

“Tim’s,” I said. Actually I was thinking of stealing a drink somewhere and then going to see Margie Flynn, or maybe just walking to the lumberyard and jumping a freight train, good-bye troubles.

“You stay in tonight. This ain’t a boardinghouse where you drop by to eat and sleep. Besides, the colored folks are all stirred up over that shooting. Probably be a riot.”

“Fine,” I sneered. “I’ll just hang around so you can enjoy my company.”

He sucked his teeth as if he was occupied, hadn’t heard.

I got a glass in the kitchen and stretched to the top shelf of the pantry for his bottle of Jack Daniels. My brothers averted their eyes. I poured myself a glassfull and set the bottle back. I added ice cubes and stepped into the living room.

“Even the iced tea tastes like onions to me now.” I took a big fiery swallow of whiskey right in front of my parents. My eyes watered. Daddy probed his teeth with the toothpick and made little bird noises.

The phone rang, I didn’t care, and Mama sweetened up again.

I took my whiskey to the bathroom and drank fast. I shook my head and the whole bathroom shook around me. My face was strange in the mirror, didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. The back of the toilet was stacked with cosmetics and hair curlers, spiky pink.

I rinsed the glass and brushed my teeth, twice. Combed my hair. Tucked my shirt in. All the details adults forget about which telegraph their drunkenness. The burn in my legs was fading.

I took my glass to the kitchen for my brothers to wash. Daddy was watching the network news. He burped and said, “Pardon me.”

“Do you mind if I sit on the bench for a few minutes?” I asked. The effects of whiskey are better appreciated outside, where the entire world is transformed.

“It’s getting dark. Don’t stay out there long.”

I enjoyed the shagginess of the grass. The stone bench seemed to dip and rise, raftlike. A swirl of swallows flickered in the gray between treetops, then spilled away. The moon was brightening, some stars beamed.

I lost the anger at my father. I even felt superior, a kind of martyr to his childish fury. He didn’t whip me as often now as he had when I was little, but it had gotten more vigorous. I suppose he thought I might hit him back. But that would upset the world in some terrible way, so I never considered it.

A bat dipped and fluttered crazily over the yard. I raised my hand fast and he swung past it. Suddenly I felt like crying because I wanted Margie Flynn so badly. It seemed to me she’d make up for all the rest.

I walked back to the house, trees and stars weaving above me.

The door to our bedroom was locked from inside. I smacked on the panel. I heard my brothers opening and shutting drawers. I whacked the door again and again and yelled for them to open up. I was in a bad mood, and drunk.

Daddy thumped upstairs and said, “Don’t bang on that door, son, you boys have already cracked it. Who’ll pay for a new door?” His voice was more whiny than mean now.

“They’re into my stuff again.”

“You’re lucky to have any stuff. You boys ruined all my things ages ago. I can’t keep nothin around here.” He leaned his ear to the door and rapped, large-knuckled, three short authoritative cracks as from a tack hammer. “Open this door, boys,” and then in the Air Force voice, “I’m counting to three and if this door doesn’t open, y’all are going to get it. One …”

No matter that he couldn’t have whipped them through a locked door. It clicked open and John peered out guiltily. Peter dangled his legs from his bunk, casually peeling a scab from his elbow. One of my comic books jutted from the corner of a drawer, squashed. I kept my comics in mint condition. My art collection of sorts.

I charged over and unpinned the comic, started reorganizing. “Why don’t you at least keep them neat?” I asked. “That way I wouldn’t find out and I wouldn’t get you back.”

“There won’t be anybody getting anybody back,” Daddy proclaimed. “These are your brothers. John, Peter, if Francis is so selfish he won’t share with you, then you have to play with your own toys.” He walked to the stairway and glanced back. “Now, I mean it.”

His steps moved off into the living room. I looked at my damaged comic. It was an old
Vault of Horror
from the 1950s, a treasure I paid thirty dollars for back when I had the paper
route. The cover was torn now, the whole thing rippled like an accordion.

I grabbed John’s throat and his hands jumped up and caught my wrists. I didn’t squeeze. I knew I was drunk and stupid. I let go of him. Where my hand had been was an old scar, a small pink fold of skin where the doctors had opened his windpipe after the accident.

I tore the comic in half, crumpled it, and jammed it down in the wastebasket, surprised at how good that felt. This terrified my brothers. “Next time,” I said, “ask first.”

We vaguely said the Lord’s Prayer and pledged allegiance to the flag, opened English books and raised hands and feared Sister Rosaria. Margie Flynn was in my head like a bad cold, blurring everything. It was a new kind of loneliness, a hurt I couldn’t stop picking at.

I saw her brother Donny plastered into his latest broken arm, sowing thumbtacks into Joey O’Connor’s seat when Joey went up to collect his spelling test. Joey was fat. He sat down hard and wrenched up with five silvery disks stuck to his bottom. He plucked out each tack and dropped it into his breast pocket and glowered through his glasses at Donny, like he was saving those tacks for revenge.

Tim was slumped in his seat, hungover apparently, drawing. He never studied. His dad was a college history professor. The Sullivans’ house contained so many books and paintings I didn’t know what the walls looked like.

At eleven, the class lined up according to height, Tim humiliated at the front of the boys’ line, Wade towering proudly in the back. We collected our bag lunches and marched downstairs with the other half of the eighth grade.

We stood on the sidewalk. The caution-yellow school bus
waited at the curb, BLUEBIRD chromed into the grille. It was a new bus, and you could smell the fresh rubber. Mr. Thomas sat in the driver’s seat and sipped orange juice from a squat carton. Mr. Thomas was also the janitor and handyman and had six children on scholarships at Blessed Heart.

Mrs. Barnes, our other eighth-grade teacher, stood beside the door. A honeybee was threatening her hairdo. She avoided it with casual little nods, because she was a science teacher. Her eyeglasses blazed. They always held light so you couldn’t tell if she was watching you. Marty’s mother was talking to her. Sister Rosaria moved down our line collecting permission slips, in case anyone got mauled. Some of the boys had forgotten to get them signed, but we fixed them up with forgeries at a quarter apiece.

Rosaria tucked the slips into a folder and waddled up to the bus. “I expect maturity from every one of you this afternoon,” she said, small and frowning, beaked nose, a scallop of gray hair squashed where the veil sat. Mrs. Barnes said, “Let’s go, people,” and herded us in. Mr. Thomas winked and held his palm up as if expecting a fare. Tim slapped his hand, giving five the way the black kids did, then the four black boys did it, and at the end everybody was slapping Mr. Thomas’s hand, a sound like slow applause.

Sister Ascension, our principal, climbed inside and heaved herself onto the seat beside Rosaria, who was a dwarf in comparison. The cushion flattened, sighing. She smiled all around, thick-lipped and cheerful.

I sat next to Tim, behind Wade and Rusty. The bus hummed and its brakes hissed and we began to roll. Tim moaned. He was paler than usual and his slicked-back hair was dull and stuck out in spikes as if to prove he felt bad. The skin under each eye was like a frog’s throat.

“I guess you got drunk last night too,” I said.

“Genius,” Tim said. He spat yellow gunk out the window. He rustled a can of Coke from his lunch bag. He’d frozen it the
night before so it would stay cold for lunch. The top and bottom of the can were swollen, and the seams were unfolding. Tim put his mouth over the outline of the tab hole. He lifted the tab and a burst of gassy slush exploded into his mouth. He choked. Caramel-colored mush ran out his nose. He gulped, opened his mouth, and leaned forward, a move I’d seen him make over toilets and sinks, and I swung my feet out of the way.

“I’m only trying to burp,” he said. “After thirteen years of drinking sodas, you’d think I’d know how. My throat muscles won’t coordinate.” Tim leaned back and sucked at the cola slush. He patted a rectangular flatness in his lap, beneath the green uniform pants. “I’ve got another interesting ‘bladder infection.’”

“What is it this time?” Last week he’d smuggled in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. He’d been suspended once for bringing
The Communist Manifesto
.

“Poetry,” Tim said from the corner of his mouth, gangster style. Rusty turned around in the seat in front of us. “William Blake.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. Dangerous stuff.”

Rusty dangled his arms over the back of the seat. “Right. Like they’re gonna burn you at the stake for readin poetry.”

“This guy raises your consciousness higher than most people can handle. It could give you a stroke, Russell.”

“Hit me with a couple lines. I’m tough.”

Tim glanced at the teachers, pulled the book out of his pants. “Blake was a prophet. He drew these pictures too.”