The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (5 page)

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 scene 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.

“Gretchen! Get down! Here now.” He pointed his toe to keep the dog off his clothes. His jacket was folded over his arm.

Daddy brought the stink of dead chickens inside. He was an accountant for a poultry distributor and had to tally thousands of dead birds each day.

“Howdy,” he said, and he flipped on the lamp so the TV wouldn’t ruin our eyes. He went to the kitchen, kissed my mother’s cheek.

“Hello, lamb,” she said, turning, winding herself in the phone cord, then laughing into the mouthpiece, “Oh no, not you! Bob just walked in. Mmm hmm.” A fork clicked on a pot. The refrigerator peeled open, sucked shut, and a beer can cracked.

Daddy stepped into the doorway. “Everybody do okay in school today?” He cranked his tie loose and sipped some Old Milwaukee. “What’d you learn today, Peter?”

“About mammals,” Peter said from behind him, near Mama.

“Great. John?”

John smiled painfully and looked around for clues. “Uhh …”

“Did you work on your reading?”

“Yeah. We read
Cat in the Hat
and stuff.”

“Fantastic.” Daddy sipped more beer. “What about you, Francis? Or are you too grown up now to learn anything?”

He was making me out to be a teenager again. “We drew a bulletin board all day. I didn’t learn anything,” I said obligingly.

My mother bye-byed and hung up the phone. She wrapped her arms around Daddy’s neck and kissed him again, wrinkling her nose at the chicken smell.

He leaned his head back and said, “Kitchen smells good.”

“Corned beef and cabbage,” Mama said, then quickly, “on special this week.” Of course she’d peeled off the price sticker when she came from the market Saturday. Also the stickers on the artichoke hearts and smoked salmon. (“Where the hell does the money go to?” Daddy had to ask at each month’s end.)

To others, my parents must have seemed like they’d just stepped off the top of a wedding cake. Daddy was handsome, thin as a razor, dependable. Mama was pretty, sociable, pretentious. They were publicly affectionate. Both came from broken homes, so they were determined to endure their own marriage. They only argued over money, and had matching, savage tempers, but they directed them at us, never at each other.

“Petey,” Dad said, “let’s go put a shirt and shoes on, son. This ain’t Africa.”

They climbed the stairs. Daddy came down wearing a T-shirt and dingy bluejeans, stretched out at the knees. The poultry smell was tolerable now. Peter returned, civilized.

Mama and Daddy exchanged days. I watched TV.

“The taxes are a mess,” Daddy said. He sipped beer at the kitchen table. “I’ve got a pile of paper this high. I laid awake all night worrying about it.”

“I’ve got to cram for Statistics,” Mama said. She sat down at the table. “And all the babies at work have chicken pox. It reminded me of when the boys were tiny.”

Peter, raised above the rank of baby, smirked.

“Carlos is at it again,” Dad said. “He planted a quail carcass in the secretary’s desk. If he weren’t Mr. Hamm’s pet he’d be begging on the streets by now.”

Something sizzled urgently.

“What’s burning?” Daddy asked.

“Oh shit!” Mama jumped to the stove and blistered her finger flipping a lid off. She dashed a cup of water into the pot and prodded inside with a wooden spoon. She told us to wash up.

We sat around the little table and my mother dropped a knitted potholder in the center and placed the pot on it. Daddy said grace, then he worked knife and fork inside the pot and slid a wedge of cabbage and some meat onto each of our proffered plates. The dog squirmed between my feet.

Slivers of onion stuck to all the food, and the meat was scorched on one side. I scraped off all the onions I could and sculpted them into a little pyramid at the edge of my plate. Daddy watched me. He chewed slowly, the muscles at his temples pulsing.

“Eat up, son, that’s good food.”

I nibbled. It tasted like burnt onions with some beef flavor added.

“Francis must be thinking about his girlfriend,” Mama said. “It’s difficult to eat when you’re in love, isn’t it?”

The meat went down my throat like a golf ball. Girlfriends had never been mentioned before. My dad never, ever talked about women or sex, except for one antiseptic lecture when I was twelve. It was part of their big secret and accounted for years of whispering and locked doors. More recently I’d discovered a hidden spermicide applicator, some frilly, useless underwear, and a copy of
The Sensuous Woman
tucked between mattress and box springs. I didn’t want to be included in this.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

My mother smiled. “The little Flynn girl seemed quite taken with you at church yesterday.”

Peter and John looked at me funny. Dad chewed.

“It’s none of your business,” I said. Dad’s eyes swung to me. I cut another piece of meat and chewed it.

“I just think it’s cute,” she said, and my ears stung. “You two would be sweet together.”

With my mouth full, I snapped, “Would it be cute if I watched through y’all’s keyhole during one of your ‘discussions’? We could talk about that at dinner.”

“Francis!” she gasped, faintly smiling.

“That’s enough of that talk, mister.” A speared chunk of meat was poised at Dad’s chin. “Eat your supper.”

“It’s crawling with onions.”

“That’s perfectly good food, mister. This ain’t a cafeteria. You eat what we have.”

My mother sucked her burnt fingertip. She said, “Pick them off, Francis. I can’t cook just for your tastes.”

“I’m not eating this charred crap!” I shouted, dropping my fork in the plate and spitting out mangled meat.

“Apologize to your mother,” my dad growled, slow and scary, a voice he must’ve learned in the Air Force. His teeth were clenched. He began to tremble. “Apologize or I’ll tan your hide!”

Something gave way in me, like the weightlessness of sliding
off the edge of a roof. I slapped the table, the plates jumped, and I hollered, “No!”

My father bolted up, his chair scraping back and slamming the wall, and he shakingly unbuckled his belt.

The belt was thick, black, and stamped with a series of horse heads. A relic from when he hosted cowboy movies at the TV station. He had quit when my mother got pregnant with me, because back then TV was new and didn’t pay him enough to feed a whole family.

He yanked the chrome and turquoise buckle and the belt fluttered slapping through the loops, a familiar sound, but paralyzing like the rattle of a snake.

Mama said his name, touched his arm, and turned to me, perplexed.

The dog slithered out from under the table and floundered up the steps.

My father, a caricature of shuddering rage, stepped over and grabbed me by the arm. My brothers bowed their heads and peeked up from underneath, careful not to get implicated.

“Stand up there, boy!” He pulled me to my feet and swung the belt back up over his shoulder, then slashed it across my legs and whipped it backhanded across my butt. Back and forth, teeth gritted, eyes crazy, whipping, burning, his left hand locked on my arm like a trap. The belt buzzed through air, slapped, buzzed. Slapped. I lifted one leg, then the other, in a kind of reflexive jig.