by Lee Durkee
The way she had said it, without the least hint of humor, halted the conversation. Alise blushed then massaged the scar where her ear had once been pierced. She seemed to be fighting the urge to apologize.
“It might help him be a good Christian,” Aunt Mary suggested timidly.
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Alise stood and made for the kitchen, passing Noel in the doorway. As she refilled her cup from the blue-flowered percolator, Noel was recalling what she had said about burning down the zoo. He was remembering her taking the Lord’s name in vain. He wiped his buttery mouth on his wrist and asked, “Why come you don’t want me to be a good Christian?”
“Because.” She blew steam off the coffee at her own reflection in the dark window. “Good Christians bore the pants off me.”
•••
All that summer, while Ross Altman’s corpse was being rhythmically inflated, Alise kept Noel stockpiled with balls and plastic weaponry and seemed genuinely impressed with his bloody noses and torn clothing and with whatever damage he had inflicted upon the neighborhood children. In spite of her best efforts, though, by mid-July Noel had become born again. Simultaneously the Gospel of Archie graduated from a simple laying-on-of-hands to an outright resurrection. Archie had been brought back from the dead! More than once, Noel heard himself likened to Jesus, though one afternoon Cousin Rod took him aside and warned him not to take any personal credit for the miracle but to ascribe his healing powers to the Holy Ghost. “Otherwise you’re just an ol’ sorcerer.”
Soon both Archie and Noel were receiving preferential treatment at family gatherings. Noel was showered with Jesus paraphernalia, most notably a New Testament for kids and a red T-shirt that said, JESUS, THE REAL THING! in Coca-Cola lettering. Noel liked that shirt, and when it became shredded in its very first wash cycle he suspected foul play. To get even with his mother, he took to reading the New Testament in front of her. Alone in his bedroom he placed onionskin paper over the New Testament’s color plates and traced the cruciform bodies of Christ and the two thieves, then he colored in the picture and clamped it to the refrigerator with magnets. He also began to frequent Aunt Carol’s Feed My Sheep Bookstore, where he bought with his own money a paperback called I Believe in Miracles. Late at night he cut short switchblade fights to raise the dead.
It wasn’t until late August that his salvation began to unravel. One Sunday afternoon, when he was supposed to be weeding the garden, Noel was sitting beside Ben on the love seat watching a horse race on their black and white TV. The race at Belmont, billed the “Battle of the Sexes,” pitted that year’s Kentucky Derby winner, Foolish Pleasure, against an unbeaten three-year-old filly named Ruffian. The race would run a fast mile and a quarter, which meant the network had to fill the hour time slot with interviews and highlights. One expert explained that the horses would try to break each other’s hearts, meaning they would run the entire distance at top speed until the winner cut out the heart of the loser. It was this use of language that stopped Noel from turning the channel to pro wrestling to watch his hero Dusty Rhodes, the man who had lispingly coined the expression payback is hell. The second announcer noted that in body type and margin of victory, Ruffian was the only horse to rival the great Secretariat. Then they showed Ruffian—large-bodied and thin-shinned and appearing solid black on the TV—running to a slow-motion victory in an earlier race.
“They say the lady’s never been tested,” the first announcer reflected. “But since her granddaddy is Bold Runner—that’s Secretariat’s daddy, mind you—nobody I’ve talked to today expects Ruffian to suffer from a glass heart.”
Ben gazed at the TV while spooning at a bowl of ice cream and chocolate syrup. Noel sipped from a mug of instant coffee he’d made from the stash his mother kept hidden from Roger, who did not allow coffee inside the house. He took a sip and asked Ben which horse he wanted to win. Ben blinked fiercely, a habit he had before answering any question, then he said, “The girl one.”
Noel frowned at that, but before he could correct his younger brother’s loyalties, the race had started. Ruffian broke from the gate ahead of the smaller Foolish Pleasure. The filly held her lead, about two lengths, as they circled the track, both jockeys staying at the whip. Approaching the home stretch, Ruffian was still in front when all at once the camera followed Foolish Pleasure pulling ahead into that great solitude he was no doubt accustomed to. The camera panned, trying to encompass both horses, but Ruffian was nowhere to be found. “She’s gone,” Ben whispered, which made Noel think of rapture, a phenomenon his cousins had recently explained to him. Only after Foolish Pleasure had crossed the finish line did the camera begin to scan backward in search of Ruffian. It found her staggering along the outside rail on a shattered foreleg that flapped in the air when she reared. She landed on the leg, which buckled outward, and Noel’s mind began to swim. He watched through his fingers as a squat van and an ambulance converged near Ruffian. Three men jumped out of the van to assist the jockey in settling the horse. Within seconds they had stripped the saddle and placed her leg inside an inflatable splint. Next they prodded Ruffian up a retractable ramp. The van sped away into a tunnel beneath the grandstand.
The instant replays began—the leg exploding again and again in slow motion.
•••
The world’s greatest horse specialist was flown in to operate on Ruffian. He explained that if the injury had occurred a mere six months earlier, they would have had to terminate her immediately. As it was, the operation would be precarious at best. Alise had allowed Noel to stay up late and watch the news on the condition he not tell Roger, who always went to bed at nine sharp. When the segment ended, Noel said goodnight; then, on his way upstairs, he veered into Ben’s bedroom and flicked on the overhead light. Ben was sucking his thumb through the sheets. Noel sat on the bed and could not stop himself from confiding his plan. He was going to heal Ruffian.
Ben sat up, his head cocked backward. Squinting, he asked, “How you gonna do that?”
Noel explained he would simply think about laying hands on Ruffian all night. “It’s just one lousy leg,” he pointed out.
All night long he dream-healed Ruffian. In one dream that startled him awake, he had pressed both his palms against Ruffian’s chest, as if pushing her backward, and he could feel the bucketwork of her heart. His last dream had nothing to do with Ruffian, though. It had to do with Ross Altman. Ross was standing at the foot of Noel’s bed. He was wearing a short-sleeved blue jersey with blue jays written across the chest. He had limp blond hair and sad blue eyes, and he had been watching Noel sleep. Noel woke up to find him there, and they looked at each other.
Then Ross faded away to nothing. Noel did not become scared until after Ross was gone. He told himself it was just a dream, just a dream. He was too afraid to go back to sleep, so he stayed awake until first light, then he turned on the clock radio and waited for the sports news, where he learned that Ruffian had been “put to sleep” during the night. The voice of the surgeon, after explaining that it was the humane thing to do, said that the operation had failed because, even under heavy sedation, Ruffian would not stop pumping her legs. “We couldn’t stop her from running,” he said. “She was still trying to win that race.”
After a while Noel walked downstairs and stood over Ben’s bed until he awoke of his own accord. He looked up at Noel, who told him the bad news. “She died, Ben. She died.” Ben balled a fist into one eye and covered the other eye with the flat of his palm. He said, “I know she did. I dreamed I was riding her up to heaven.”
Later that afternoon, strolling home from baseball practice, Noel came upon a dead squirrel in the road. It had no outward injuries other than a red bulb emerging from its mouth. Noel looked around then dropped his glove and squatted down and slowly placed his right palm upon the squirrel’s rib cage. Closing his eyes, he tried to envision the color plates inside
his New Testament. Suddenly he felt very observed. He sprang to his feet and glanced around wildly. Only after he was positive he was alone did he squat down again. He began to lower his left hand toward the squirrel. But at the last moment he chickened out and instead he picked up a long pine stick stripped of bark and began poking at the squirrel’s eyes and at the artery inside its mouth. He carried the stick with him the long way home past the hospital.
Noel stood outside the hospital, gazing up at the countless windows reflecting the setting sun. When the sun had set in all of the windows, even the top ones, he walked inside, into the air-conditioning and breezed through the maze of corridors until he found what he was looking for. Then he set down the stick atop the cigarette vending machine then plunged his hand deep into his pocket, full of hard change.
CHAPTER TWO
BY THE END OF THE SEVENTH GRADE, which he narrowly averted having to repeat, Noel was the tallest white boy in his class and strutted the hallways wearing flannel shirts flyaway style above white T’s tucked haphazardly into jeans and low-billing a black Cat Diesel Power cap. His straight black hair hung almost to his shoulders. During classes he rehearsed tattoos on notebook paper—guitars, daggers, UFOs, syringes, and especially the Zig Zag Man, his trademark of choice—before copying them onto his forearms using black, blue, red, and green ballpoint. Between classes he trapped kids against lockers and made them admire his latest tattoo and bragged that he was going to hitchhike to New Orleans and get this one done up for real.
Not even the blacks would fight him anymore. Like everyone else, they knew what had happened on the baseball field. Noel missed having enemies almost as much as friends. On the last day of the school year he followed the only Jewish kid in his class home, taunting him, trying to get him to fight, but instead they ended up in the mall together shoplifting. Noel’s parents, however, did not approve of this new friendship. Not only was Tim Jewish, but he did not play sports and had straight brown hair even longer than Noel’s. Tim’s mother, a nurse, was divorced and attractive. And there were rumors about her too.
Roger designed a chore chart that summer. Each day the boys had to check off boxes and sign their initials, although Noel usually cut short his yard work for baseball practice. After practice he headed straight to either Pasquale’s Pizza, where he had a job washing dishes, or to Tim’s house.
A tidal pool of junk ran throughout Tim’s household: dirty laundry, lipstick-filtered ashtrays, fast-food wrappers, snipped-out fashion magazines, bills, tabloids, and abandoned meals. Tim’s bedroom was awash in comic books, and he had a box of pornographic magazines stashed under the bed. It was there that Noel had seen his first photograph of a naked woman. That’s where it goes, he had thought to himself. That’s where it goes. But when he finally spoke, what he had said was, “Somebody took that picture.”
The only clean room in the house was the den, where Tim’s mother had hung her own artwork, thick acrylics of nude cubist women. Miss Weiss did not get home until seven each night. Most afternoons Noel found Tim in his bedroom suctioning in a new comic book. Today the Green Lantern’s ring formed an emerald sun that beamed down onto a desolate ice-locked planet. Noel studied his friend a moment—the dark complexion, the intent, slightly moving lips, the aquiline nose, and girlish eyelashes—then grabbed up an old comic off the floor and fanned the back pages until he found the ad for X-ray glasses. In it, a cartoon kid was watching the bone structure of his hand while his older brother, also wearing the glasses, whistled at a pretty girl. For the next quarter hour Noel lost himself inside this world of inadvertently naked women and wheeling skeletal birds.
Then Tim was laughing at him.
“You weren’t even hearing me, were you, Weatherspoon? I asked do you want to listen to some Richard Pryor, maybe smoke some weed?”
“You got some?”
“You know I don’t. You?”
“Yeah, but I’m running low.”
Noel had been scoring pot at work, which was pretty funny because it was Roger who had gotten him hired at Pasquale’s.
Tim led the way into his mother’s bedroom and put on That Nigger’s Crazy. The disheveled king-size water bed had a paneled stereo built into its headboard. Four peach crates, filled with jazz albums and topped with a bendable lamp and a clock radio, served as the bed table. There was a large, mostly empty bookshelf of untreated pine containing disordered encyclopedias as well as a small cache of Edgar Cayce paperbacks. They sat on the wooden floor between the bed and the open window. After turning on the fan, Tim brought out the stethoscope and unscrewed the metal drum, which revealed a perfect bowl. They removed the earpieces then inhaled hookah style through the black tubes. While they smoked, it occurred to Noel how easy it would be to spy in on Miss Weiss from the backyard. For some reason this thought unnerved him. He tried to dismiss it by examining some albums, but every so often his glance wandered outside again, and he saw himself standing in the starlit backyard spying into the bright room. Just above the tree line he could see the very top of Forest General Hospital, where Miss Weiss was now at work and where, as Noel imagined it, the robotlike breathing machines were forever crowding Ross Altman’s bed.
Over the years Noel had taken to bragging about the home-plate collision, telling teammates, Yeah, and now he’s brain-dead! But he had never told anybody about the dreams that had haunted him for years now and that were turning him into an insomniac. In these dreams Ross Altman appeared in his bedroom and called Noel by name. Nor had Noel told anybody about his recent visit to the hospital room and the dehydrated corpse with the Ouija board on it.
Although he had not told Tim about that visit, he did half expect Tim to ask about it, because as soon as he had left Ross’s room that afternoon, he had run into Tim’s mom in the hallway.
“Noel, what were you doing in there?” she had asked.
The whiteness of her uniform had paralyzed him for a moment. Then he lowered the bill of his Cat Diesel Power cap and told her that he’d just wanted to see what he looked like, that’s all. “He’s from way out in Petal. I’d never even met him before. . . .”
“And?” she asked. “What did you think?”
“He looked like he’d been buried and dug up.”
She nodded and knelt down and adjusted her white shoe, using her finger as a shoehorn. She was wearing white hose, and the knee that stuck out when she knelt was white too. Still on one knee, she had looked up at him and said, “Between me and you, Noel, I wish someone would come along and unplug that poor boy.”
Noel blew more cannabis smoke toward the hospital, and for a moment he thought he heard Ross call his name again. That was how Ross always woke him up at night, by calling out his name all forlorn and wind-carried. Noel. The same name as his dead father’s. Properly pronounced in one quick syllable, never two, except by older boys looking for trouble and trying to make it sound like a girl’s name or something to do with Christmas. In Noel they often found trouble. He’d fight them, no matter how much bigger they were, then he’d pick himself up and fight them again.
“You ever seen a ghost?” he asked Tim.
“A ghost?”
“Yeah. There’s this girl at work says her dad comes and visits her at night. He got stabbed to death when she was a baby. She says it’s not scary. He just likes to watch her sleep.”
“A ghost,” Tim repeated, even more sarcastically.
Tim’s tone dissuaded Noel from pursuing the subject.
“Your mom listens to a lot of black people,” he noted.
“Are you seeing ghosts these days, Weatherspoon?”
“Nah. But I kinda believe in them, don’t you?”
Tim just smirked and turned his head away, staring at the stereo speaker as if it were a TV. Chastened, Noel picked out a Fats Waller album and began to read the back. The album felt weighted wrong, though. He looked inside it and found a bu
lky envelope stashed there. He took out a rubber-banded deck of Polaroids. At first he tried to conceal this discovery, but Tim leaned over and touched the Polaroids, as if to jerk them away. But he didn’t; instead he too sat mesmerized by the chlorinated colors of naked women.
Most of the women had thick bones and short hair, and they were all posing somberly naked on the water bed. Noel sorted the deck top to bottom, allowing about ten seconds for each photo. The very last Polaroid was of Miss Weiss. She was smiling and naked on the water bed, her hands thatched behind her raised head, her legs raised and bent so that the soles of her small feet were pressed together prayerlike.
Tim snatched away the photos. Then he recrated the album and shunned the room, calling back sharply, “Come here. I got to show you something.”
But Noel lingered, gazing at the water bed. When Tim called again, Noel followed the voice into the garage, where he found Tim perched on a cinder block, a Virginia Slims cigarette protruding from his mouth. Tim lobbed a small green disc across the garage at Noel and said, “Worm dirt.” Noel caught the disc, opened it. He held the tobacco to his nose. “You go first,” he said, but Tim was already pointing with both index fingers to the cigarette duckbilled in his mouth.
“Hey, I’m not the one has asthma attacks every time he lights up these days.”
“Hell, son, I taught you,” Noel muttered, but he went ahead and tucked in a large pinch of the Skoal. Tightening his bottom lip, he mumbled, “Them pictures—”
“Don’t spit on the damn floor.”
Tim handed over a large McDonald’s cup, then streamlined smoke toward a cardboard box. “Look inside there,” he said. Noel did and removed two pairs of boxing gloves stitched out of stained crimson leather.
“They used to belong to my dad.”
“He was a boxer?”
