The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  “Stayed on as dirt-poor sharecroppers—”

  “They were free!” Rosaria shrilled, face purpling. I’d seen some spit fly at us. The students all whispered, mumbled.

  Tim relaxed into his seat. “Right. They could starve or get lynched. And meanwhile the South gets turned into a backwards hog wallow.”

  Rosaria swung out from behind her desk and was lumbering down the aisle towards Tim. “If I were a little boy as small as you, I’d listen—”

  “I do some outside reading so I’ll know what’s what.”

  Rosaria slapped the wood of Tim’s desk. Craig cocked his chin as high as it would go, iced his eyes, and said, “Is he tryin to say slavery was supposed to be all right?”

  Lewis Epps rolled his eyes. Tim flung his head as if dizzy and said, “Craig, don’t leave your brain to Science.” Donny turned to Craig and said, “I’d chain you up in a heartbeat,” laughed. The whole class was chattering. Craig snarled, “Kiss my mother—”

  “Class!” Rosaria screamed, smacking Tim’s desk again, lines radiating from her eyes, her mouth. We got quiet.

  She continued the lecture in a more detailed, qualifying way, but Tim was uninterested now. He was toiling over two scraps of paper with two different pens. He printed one in black, the other in sloppy green cursive. Both were a jumble of misspellings, abuses of grammar, and unnecessary quotation marks. A series of racial and sexual insults, in toilet-bowl language, challenged a fight on the softball diamond at lunch.

  “Get this one onto Donny’s desk,” Tim whispered and gave it to Rusty. “I’ll plant the other one with Craig.”

  I felt guilty about it, of course. Donny was Margie’s brother, his arm was broken. And Craig was black. I stressed this in a half-sincere appeal to Tim, knowing he didn’t want to seem prejudiced.

  “Prejudiced against what? Sadistic assholes? Think about that duck screaming, think about Flynn delivering our comic book to Kavanagh. And Margie.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ll bear full responsibility.”

  When we were dragging out our English books, Tim pelted Craig in the neck with the folded note. Rusty had just delivered Donny’s.

  They read them. Craig ripped his savagely and slung it across to the wastebasket and began massaging his arms. Donny waited for a quiet moment, then blew his nose into the note. Throughout the period they reminded me of tomcats yowling from opposite sidewalks, separated by a busy street, their backs humped and electrified.

  I peeled the dried glue off finger by finger, and a cool relief filled my hand. I laid the translucent handskin on my desk. It was whorled and banded with the map of my identity, fingers spread. Stop, it seemed to be saying, or Help. With felt-tip pens, I colored it extravagantly, fingers like a peacock’s tail, a strange face on each tip. I divided the palm into green earth and blue sky, drew clouds wearing smiles and sunglasses, trees bearing rainbow fruit, skulls, crosses, dinosaurs, stars, and ringed planets.

  It blazed from my desk, and people looked. A universe shed from my hand, the brightest spot in the room.

  All the boys ate furious lunches.

  I jogged to the park. The grass was lacquered with the weekend’s rain, and the orange clay of the softball diamond had changed into soup. Donny and Craig were rolling, surrounded by shouting boys. Craig pinned Donny in the mud and sat on his chest. Both looked as if they’d been slopped with orange paint. Donny slugged Craig in the kidneys, his cast adding weight to the blows. Craig smacked him in the forehead. Black skin gaped out of Craig’s torn shirt-sleeve.

  Donny’s face contorted like he was crying, but without tears. Craig, breathing hard, studied him coldly. “Awright,” Craig said. “You give? I’ll let you up, you promise to walk away. We’re finished?” Craig poised his fist over Donny’s nose.

  “Okay!” Donny groaned, wincing. “Okay.”

  Craig got off of him. Donny sat up and wiped mud out of his eyes. Craig tried to scrape the slop from his knees, gave up, tucked his shirt in, and swaggered away towards the water fountain.

  Donny snarled and charged at him, Craig spun around and began to slip, and Donny whacked him across the eyes with his plastered arm, and the cast cracked in two. Craig grabbed Donny’s collar and the shirt ripped open as they both splattered down.

  Their faces were horrible, rage and pain, the clumsy ugliness that makes you want to stop a fight. All the boys went “Ooooh …”

  Craig and Donny locked together on the ground, panting, and traded spasms of short, halfhearted punches. Then they lay there. Donny slowly worked his elbow around Craig’s jaw, achieving a headlock. Craig pretzeled Donny’s invalid arm up behind his back with the broken cast hanging on it. Their legs squeezed, relaxed, squeezed. Donny looked as if someone had mashed berries against his lips, and Craig’s left eyebrow had a raw spot. They exchanged little punches, paused, hit.

  Tim, on the other side of the ring, stepped forward and stooped beside them. “I just wanted you two pinheads to know that I’m the one who sent you those notes.” He laughed, spit. Craig and Donny held each other.

  Then Craig writhed free and scrambled, sliding, and Tim bolted and Craig ran after him. They ran figure eights around the field, Tim in quick bursts so that the larger boy reached out and snatched air as Tim ducked and doubled back, dodged behind the cyclone fence, laughed.

  Craig stopped and bent over with his mouth wide, resting his hands on his knees. He looked at each of our gang, his yellowed eyes slit, first at Rusty, who waited with his head cocked and hands on his hips, then at Wade, as tall as Craig and flexing the cords in his forearms. Craig looked at me, straightened up, walked over. He knew I was the least dangerous.

  My blood burned. My legs shook. I didn’t know, at that age, that adrenaline always makes you shake if you don’t spend it immediately. I had never fought a black kid, and never anyone that powerful. The shaking made me feel twice as cowardly.

  Donny was hammering his cast against the metal fencepost, clang! clang! crunching the orange-smeared plaster into startling white pieces, then crumbling them from his arm.

  “Why y’all think you’re so bad?” Craig asked me.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I have a hernia.” I turned my back on him and started walking away.

  He grabbed my shirt at the shoulder and said, “I axed you a question!”

  I whipped around and my shirt pulled out of his fist, the cotton smudged rusty, and Craig began to shuffle, throwing his fists out loosely and swinging them in a circle, chanting “Rope-a-dope, rope-a-dope.” It was a silly, affected display which nonetheless gave me time to consider the thinness of my arms and the new difficulty of filling my lungs. All faces were turned towards us. Rusty and Wade stood with fists balled, but etiquette required them to stay put until I was injured. Voices urged us to fight.

  The secret baby inside me began bawling that this was unfair, ordering me to run, to beg Craig not to hurt me. I kept my mouth shut, though, and my face reasonably tough.

  I gave him my back again. He shoved me, and my neck whiplashed.

  I wheeled and banged him in the mouth, felt his teeth nick my knuckles. He touched his lips, surprised. I was shocked and exhilirated. Then I wished I had hit harder, and again, because he’d already recovered. My classmates made noises of doom.

  Curtis Simms, another black eighth-grader, stepped towards us. Rusty drifted nearer, and Wade. Blue-black Lewis Epps. Hurley, the white athlete. The black seventh-graders were coming.

  Then I was stumbling, clouds and sky vivid and whirling, Craig’s eyes crazy and his fist recoiling. The skin around my eye was swelling, kept swelling, and I feared it would burst. I pressed my hand to my cheek and felt liquid, looked at my fingers. Clear fluid, not blood. I had become biology, not me, just a body in animal peril.

  Craig grew bigger fast. “Come on! I’ll black your other eye!”

  I felt weaker, but dulled. Disgusted that this huge kid wanted to harm me. You can’t hurt me, I thought, this isn’t really me.

  Wade and Rusty
both jumped Craig, and they all fell into the mud together.

  Black Curtis Simms launched at Tim, and they fell grappling, biting, and clawing. I couldn’t stand the looks on their faces.

  Everywhere, boys paired up and fell slithering through the mud, like salamanders. Wade’s little brother, Steven, was grinding some boy’s face into it. White boys were shoving white boys. I thought I saw two blacks fighting, the clay made it hard to tell. Beside me, Joey O’Connor was tussling with an anonymous orange kid who probably weighed half as much as him. Joey was a tongue-chewer. Three pink inches jutted out between his teeth. A hard uppercut from the other kid would cause him to bite off his tongue. Joey’s eyeglasses were spattered blind. Through my confusion, I was afraid for him.

  Then I saw that every blow being landed around me was to the body. The brawl had grown epic, spectacular, but beyond danger into wrestling. The faces had turned from ugly to comic. It was a herd of boys roughhousing in the mud.

  Lewis Epps, minus his shirt, stumbled into me hard and I shoved him off and he sat in the slop. He got up, and I made automatic fists, and he charged and hugged my ribs and hoisted me off my feet and we toppled, splashing into it. Clay squished under my waistband, my collar. We rolled, churned, then stopped and looked at each other from an inch away. There was mud on the hairs in his nose. I couldn’t recognize him.

  “What the hell?” I said, tasting clay.

  “I don’t know.” His breath was on my face. “I’m supposed to serve a funeral Mass after recess.”

  We untangled and started dragging people apart. Some allowed it, others made me feel like a hockey referee. They’d ignore you, roll over your feet, push you away. I found that if I shouted, though it hurt my hernia, they ceased. “The teachers are coming!” I yelled, cleaving apart boys I couldn’t identify.

  “Here come the teachers,” bellowed Lewis Epps.

  Boys rose, smirked, and searched for sucked-off shoes. They wiped their faces and flung clay from their fingers. My cheek was throbbing, my hand ached. Tim passed, slapping me on the splattery back.

  “Young Henry Kissinger,” he said. “Diplomat. Francis, man, you slay me.”

  Tim limped over to Craig, who was propped against the fence, straightening the tatters of his shirt.

  “Look at my clothes,” Craig said. “You’re in for it, man.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you think about me, Craig. You’re a bully. You like to hurt anything that can’t hurt you back. That’s why you hit that duck, and that’s why you went after Francis instead of the other guys. And that’s the same attitude the slave traders had when they held a gun on your ancestors and forced them into a cage. Think about that for a while.”

  “You might know books, little man, but you don’t know what’s in my mind.” Craig licked his lip where blood was hardening.

  Tim cleared his throat and spit on the ground. “You’ve got a big blob of clay on your head, Dockery.”

  “You got some on your chin.”

  They wiped clay off. Tim shrugged and walked over to me and we plodded towards our oak tree.

  A mud-covered tribe of boys was playing lazy soccer, easy softball. Rusty smiled down at his orthopedic shoes, which appeared to be finally ruined. Margie was sitting over on the bleachers. I waved. She waved.

  Tim lay on the ground with his ankles crossed, fingers laced behind his head. “Don’t worry, Francis,” he said. “She knows Donny gets beat up all the time. You ever, ever seen him without stitches or a cast or crutches?”

  “His one arm is all shriveled and small,” I said. “Reminds me of a fiddler crab.”

  “Anyhow,” said Rusty, “he got us into boocoos of trouble. I’m sorry I didn’t get to fuck him up personally. Hell, he molested his own sister—” Rusty halted, looked past me, coughed, pulled at a seedling and studied it.

  “Molested?” said Joey.

  I was drained with anger. “You promised!”

  “Well, Rusty is godfather of the gang.” Tim met my eye. “I’m sorry, man, it preyed on my mind. I had to tell, just like you had to tell, and Margie too. That’s why confession was invented.” He sighed.

  I hurried across the field, the street, into the school building, the lavatory. I got out of my shirt and soaked it in the sink. I anointed myself with water, dried with paper towels, wrung out the shirt. All the wrinkles were orange, in the shirt, my face, my elbows.

  The teachers quizzed us about the clay, black eyes, bloody lips, and we blamed it on soccer and softball. They couldn’t do anything.

  For the rest of the day I didn’t speak to anyone. After the bell, I ran home.

  Pets

  A day could be salvaged by something in the mail. A fat khaki envelope loomed out of the mailbox, and at first I thought Kavanagh had sent the awful comic book to my parents. But it was addressed to me, from TranScience Co. I ran upstairs with it, tore it open, spilling some kind of padding like minced newspaper.

  Inside, a cardboard panel showed a family of pink, smiling Sea Monkeys, and below were three plastic windows containing numbered packets. I shook the envelope upside-down and a leaflet flapped out, “It’s Fun to Raise Pet Sea Monkeys.”

  In the painting the Sea Monkeys frolicked amid bubbles and seaweed. Their backs were finny, they had fleshy crowns on their heads. In the background others waved from the parapets of a submerged castle. A boy Sea Monkey rode bareback on a green manta ray. Beside the packets, in eye-strain print, it said “Caricatures are not intended to depict artemia salinas.”

  TranScience Co. was betting that most kids didn’t even know what “caricature” meant, let alone the Latin words. Artemia salinas was the animal, whatever. I didn’t really expect any kind of monkey for $1.35.

  The handbook revealed they were brine shrimp.

  Shrimp filled Savannah’s creeks every summer. Some grown man in a tie had probably spent weeks devising an ad campaign to trick kids into buying shrimp to raise in a jar. Adults can legally screw children out of their money, and are considered successful businessmen.

  I found a pickle jar we’d been using for a glass and measured some water into it. Our dachshund, Gretchen, followed me around the kitchen, laying her paw against my leg whenever I was still. She wanted treats.

  The handbook informed me that to create “Instant Life” I must let their “Water Purifier” act on the water for twenty-four hours. I opened the packet and poured what I suspected was standard sea-salt into the water, clinked a spoon around in it.

  I investigated the pantry and located a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies on the top shelf behind the box of electrical fuses and batteries. I slipped a cookie to the dog, then carried the bag upstairs with the jar of water. I sat the jar on my chest of drawers. My middle brother, John, came up and peeked in the doorway. “Sea Monkeys,” I said, and his eyes got wide, and I walked out as he walked in and went to the jar to try and see them.

  Without allowing myself to think, I confronted the telephone, put the receiver to my ear. I touched the phone book and remembered the Flynns’ number. I’d only managed to call Margie once before, to arrange a meeting in the park, because I was afraid Donny would answer and guess, or know, that I knew what he’d done with his sister. Each digit I twirled compounded my anxiety, and each time it rang was an electric jolt.

  “Hello,” said Donny’s voice.

  I hung up.

  I forced myself to dial again.

  Someone answered, breathed a while. “Yeah, hello?”

  “May I please speak to Margie?”

  “Who’s this?”

  After a sick surge, like dropping fast in an elevator, I realized I wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Francis Doyle.”

  “Did you just call and hang up?”

  “I thought I’d dialed wrong.”

  “Oh. Hey, that fight was unreal today, wadn’t it? Tell Sullivan his ass is grass. Hold on.” He shouted, “Margie!” so loudly it hurt my ear. The phone clicked, slight static crackled on, an extension being picked up. A h
and squeaked over a mouthpiece. A muffled girl’s voice said, “I got it,” then the hand squeaked off.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Margie said, “Donny, get off the goddern line!” Click. “Um, sorry. What’s wrong? I saw you running home today.”

  My insides plunged again. I asked how she was. She asked about my black eye. I amplified the pain so she’d feel sorry for me. She said she’d make it all better and asked me again what was wrong.

  “I have to tell you,” I said, “but I don’t want to. I’m afraid you’ll hang up and never speak to me again.” I thought if I predicted her worst possible reaction, some voodoo would prevent it. “I sort of told Tim the secret you told me. He told Rusty.”

  With a little hurt gasp, she hung up. After a few centuries of dial tone, I hung up too.

  Lacking any experience with girls, I assumed she was done with me forever. I dragged myself back into my room and crawled up into my bunk and clamped the pillow over my head, feeling like a dead fish with its insides scraped out, eyes clouding. The phone rang. I flung myself out of bed, catching my foot in the quilt, wrenched somewhat slowly to the floorboards and hurt my elbow, then threw the quilt off and stumbled out to the phone. I captured it on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

  “I hate you,” Margie said, voice pouty, injured, but not hateful, and my heart stirred some.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t hang up. I’m sorry. I can’t think what to say. I love you.”

  Then a while of breathing, a radio on somewhere in her house, a sigh, Gilligan’s Island repeating downstairs, ice cubes tinkling in a glass on Margie’s end. Maybe it was only a second.

  “You shouldn’t tell boys about private things between you and a girl. And you shouldn’t tell girls awful things on the phone, Francis Doyle. You’re supposed to do it in person, in case you have to make up, after.”

  I considered this a stay of execution. I said I was sorry at every opportunity.

  “Stop saying you’re sorry. And you can tell your friend Tim I’m mad at him too. Donny has to get a new cast put on his arm.” She was quiet for a second. “He’s still my brother.”