The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2 page)

Her fingers slid away, and she drew back and turned towards the altar. My eyes fell from the golden hair, along the bare shoulders and down the new curves of her hips to the whitestockinged, rounded calves. I bunched my hands in my pockets to disguise the embarrassing extra. I wanted to run out alone and spend hours thinking about her, carve our initials into something. Her actual presence seemed like too much to bear for now. Every time I looked at her, my heart went off.

My mother was smiling at me. I frowned. We chanted with the priest, “Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us,” three times, rapping our breasts at each mention of the lamb. I was vigorous, producing a healthy thump.

Kavanagh unclipped his microphone necklace, causing electronic thunder.

The folk musicians began the Communion hymn. It was a popular folk song that I liked, and they played so well it startled me. The plump guy’s fingers rippled at the keyboard, the bearded men started strumming, chords chiming in and out of the wood with the piano’s sweet notes rolling all around it, then one man began to sing crisply, the girl rang the tambourine against a swaying hip, and behind the singer the other three mouths moved with a single shape and harmony, and I thought, God, what wonderful creatures humans are. My neck hair rose like a thousand needles.

And then something ran past our pew. A black dog.

This large, slippery-looking mongrel padded up the aisle along the wall. The ushers were surprised out of their hands-behindthe back poses and began to walk after the dog. The dog slipped through rainbow pools of light, tags clinking, then rolled near the altar rail and paddled its ribs with a hindleg. It was obviously male. The priests and deacon ignored it. The heads were all bobbing, and I could see between them, the dog panting, cartoon eyes wide. His tongue melted out over his teeth and slobber trickled off. Rusty and Tim’s cheeks hollowed and their lips disappeared.

An usher with an overgrown mustache grabbed for the dog’s collar, and the dog torpedoed down the center aisle, pausing halfway to insert his snout under a woman’s dress and throw his head. The usher’s mustache stretched in amused apology. He genuflected at the altar rail and came towards the dog, the others following, bent over as if that made them invisible. I watched Margie watch them. Her eyes narrowed into bright slices.

The dog leapt past the crouching ushers and ran towards the altar again, and the men turned like a wave. They would’ve had to sprint to catch him. The dog slunk under the altar rail, swinging his head back to watch for them. Father Kavanagh and young Father O’Leary stood over the dog, ready to give Communion. People began to rise. The dog put his nose to a railing post and snuffled, spun around, crooked his hindleg, and the priests skipped aside, and the dog squirted a glittering stream that spattered the marble, darkening a circle into the creamy carpet beneath. He stared gloomily out at us, mouth open. The congregation hung back. There was nice music underneath all this.

Tim jammed a fist against his mouth and sputtered behind it. Rusty turned his back, vibrated. Kavanagh shifted the chalice, stepped forward, and swept his hand back like a bowler and slapped the dog’s rump so hard that the animal jumped
the railing and slid into the aisle yelping, popping his eyes, and bounded past the ushers and out the doors. The ushers closed them behind him and the wind died.

Father O’Leary’s eyes slid towards Kavanagh. Kavanagh’s jaw was rigid. O’Leary squeezed the smile from his own lips.

I laughed in an excruciating whisper, the edge of my watery gaze on Margie. My hernia was aching. I opened my mouth and breathed. My mother was peering over a missalette, eyes huge, then she snorted and pressed it around her face. Margie’s hands were steepled over her mouth, hiding, I was sure, a grin. The musicians had used up all their lyrics and were playing instrumental. The first-row people began to kneel along the altar rail as a line formed in the aisle.

I rose, leaving two craters in the cushioned kneeler, and squeezed past my mother to follow Margie up to Communion. A man wedged between us, poisonous with after-shave. Twice I saw the corner of Margie’s eye, as if her attention was directed back at me. The people kneeling left a gap, marked by the deacon’s handkerchief, where the dog had puddled. I shuffled up and kneeled one place down from Margie and tilted my face up. Like a celebrity, her presence made everything else small.

Kavanagh sidestepped to me, held the Eucharist out like a tidbit, and said, “The body of Christ.” Rusty, holding the paten under my chin to catch holy crumbs, had blanked his face, but his neck swelled with plugged-up laughter. I said, “Amen,” and the priest laid the wafer on my tongue.

I followed Margie back to the rear. Her style of walking made me feel weak. I kept my head bowed while an usher slid the second collection in front of me, full of paper money and envelopes with families’ names on them. Mama had dropped our single quarter in the first basket. Daddy, broke, had stayed home with my brothers in protest of the church’s materialism.

I held the Eucharist in my teeth, away from tongue and saliva. We played this game to see how long we could keep it from dissolving.
A strange thrill resulted from keeping the alleged Jesus trapped in your teenage mouth.

The folk song ended with the guitar picks scratched slowly across the strings, and a final chord shimmered out and died beautifully with the piano trembling down around it into a final humming that seemed to make sense out of the world. The microphone whined briefly. Margie’s shoulders lifted, with a breath, and relaxed.

Kavanagh sliced a cross into the air with his hand, blessing us in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost (younger priests always said Spirit). Two-hundred voices amened. I didn’t, because I still had solid Jesus in my mouth, breaking all my records.

“The Mass is ended,” Kavanagh said, “go in peace.” Then he hugged the podium and made announcements, asked for money and volunteers. Rusty and Tim carried cruets of water and wine into the sacristy. Out of sight, they’d suck down most of the wine. They’d be pouring a few innocent drops into the storage bottle when Kavanagh got there.

The musicians began to play “Dominique,” a silly tune from the movie
The Singing Nun
, but instead of singing the words they exchanged guarded, ironic looks.

The rest of the day belonged to me. It was paid for now.

Everybody paraded towards the doors. They dipped two fingers each in the font of holy water at the vestibule and dabbed themselves with the sign of the cross: forehead, breastbone, left shoulder, right. I reached into my pocket and palmed my rabbit’s foot, dunked it into the water as I passed, increasing its magic and trade value.

Outside was so bright my eyes ached. Sun blazed up from honeysuckle shimmering with bees, from yellow brick and palms and old grass, and in front of me, Margie Flynn’s hair bouncing with each click of her heels on pavement.

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.

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?”