The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  “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.

  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.”

  What Happened to God

  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.