The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (3 page)

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.

“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.