Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  * * *

  After the meeting, Father Mercedes walked outside, where the autumn winds tugged at his black topcoat and flicked his thin gray hair. His feet carried him along the edge of the parking lot until he stood at the far end of the empty church lot, looking back over the yawning emerald lawn toward the school, a solitary figure with his satchel in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other.

  Father Harold Mercedes didn’t think of himself as a warm man, but he knew he was not cruel. He didn’t wish for others to suffer, or to torment those who didn’t deserve it. But he had decided more than a year ago—been forced to decide—that St. Michael the Archangel parish could no longer support a high school as part of its normal operations.

  The question he feared above all was the obvious one: Why?

  None of them would understand. Because nobody truly knew him. Not one of them.

  The people of St. Mike’s knew his name, of course, knew his background—with a dozen years under his belt, he was the parish’s longest-serving pastor. The people here knew it was his childhood church, that he had been a student at the school long ago. They knew his birthday, knew he had a dog who died three years ago, which broke his heart, and some of them even knew his parents, though they had been deceased for close to twenty years.

  The people of St. Mike’s knew many little facts, but facts aren’t a person. They didn’t know his heart or what he thought, or what he felt, what his philosophies were, what his ambition was. Least of all, they did not know the pressures he faced.

  Pressure, that was it. Let Andrew Zimmer stand there in the hallway and rattle off tearjerker anecdotes to make him feel guilty. Let Sister Maria try to put a happy face on every degenerate act that happened in her halls. Let them call him the villain. They didn’t understand the forces converging from all sides. After the church fire, St. Michael the Archangel had borrowed heavily, at crushing interest rates, when the insurance settlement was contested and less than expected. Meanwhile, the diocese had increased funding requirements across the board, and parishes that couldn’t adequately pay to support the larger church were dissolved, folded into stronger neighboring parishes that could. The diocese was nailing boards over the windows of St. Mike–sized churches all over Pittsburgh, cannibalizing whatever assets were left behind.

  If St. Mike’s fell prey to weakness, what would the diocese’s accountants find in St. Michael’s financial holdings?

  They would find Father Mercedes’s sins.

  Everyone in the Valley knew his family as wealthy, but only because his father had lied, claiming they were distant relatives of the German automotive engineering family, and still major stockholders. Yes, the Mercedes-Benz family, they bragged. (Never mind that around 1910, more than a decade before the priest would be born, his father had simply switched their surname from the too-Woppish sounding Marcedi.)

  The lie about his heritage helped explain Father Mercedes’s enjoyment of cars, watches, jewelry, and travel—luxuries he couldn’t possibly afford as a humble parish priest. The churchgoers assumed he had inherited immense personal wealth, and Father Mercedes encouraged people to believe that.

  Except there was never enough money in the church coffers. Bake sales, pledge drives, in memoriam donations from fat Last Wills and Testaments. Where did it go? Father Mercedes had become good at making excuses. There are new wheelchairs in the vestibule! We spend more than you can imagine on electricity and water! Pipe organ repairs don’t come cheap.…

  But those weren’t the real reasons St. Mike’s languished in perpetual debt. The real reason, which nobody knew … was quite simple.

  Father Mercedes had been stealing.

  Not technically stealing, of course—borrowing. He always repaid it. Always. Except for when he didn’t. Or couldn’t.

  The weekly collection plate came directly to him, but not all those neatly sealed envelopes and wads of loose bills made it into the parish accounts. Father Mercedes had dedicated himself to God, to the Holy Roman Church, to serving the people of this parish in their brightest and darkest moments. He pledged his celibacy, his independence, his freedom—his life. Didn’t he deserve some temporal pleasures in exchange? He drove a nice automobile, but it was just a Benz. The parishioner who quibbled with him about the furnace repairs was a lawyer who drove a silver Porsche. Did the priest have to get to and fro on a bicycle, like the ascetic Father Henne from St. Joe’s, pedaling around like a fool in the hardscrabble neighborhoods of lower Natrona? And whose business was it if he had filet mignon in his refrigerator? He ate alone most nights—did it have to be bread and water for him, too?

  Meanwhile, the parishioners had become ceaseless nags: When would St. Mike’s finally rebuild its church and move out of that horrible gymnasium?

  Father Mercedes had sinned … as all men sin. And some of the sins he wouldn’t admit, not even to himself, were deeply grave. But he hadn’t harmed any person. He had never done that. But he had done damnable things.

  Father Mercedes’s worst flaw was one he had learned from his father: gambling—a thrill like lighter fluid in your veins, the rush of winning. Harness racing at the Meadows in Washington County. A few hundred, or a thousand, placed on the Steelers at the Crow Bar in downtown New Kensington, or just playing the numbers at that little barbershop across from the water authority. High-rolling vacations to Atlantic City, Vegas … When the good times spiraled, Father Mercedes was a hard loser, and hard losers kept trying and trying. That’s how they convinced themselves they’d become winners.

  He had lost a great deal of money that didn’t belong to him. He wasn’t doing it anymore, but it had happened. And when he couldn’t repay, he covered it up with a single, shameful, drastic measure. But he intended to fix that, too. A man could sin, but he could also be absolved. If he turned something like the school, which cost money, into something else, like a nursing home or a hospice, which made money, he might be able to fix the woes of this parish, the ones he had created through his own weakness. He had to make people hate the school. Then they would want it gone. But first he had to take out its protector—the naïve and gutless Sister Maria, who really had allowed the high school to become a festering embarrassment.

  When Father Hal Mercedes came to the end of his days, he intended to face his maker and say: Yes, I have sinned, and sinned terribly. But I made it right.…

  Fuck Andrew Zimmer, the know-it-all teacher. And fuck his insinuations.

  Father Mercedes stood alone, staring across the shaggy green grass of the church field, which felt like a great void, yawning open, eager to swallow him.

  He raised his cigarette to his lips and took a deep drag, but the ember had long gone out.

  PART III

  Hannah

  THIRTEEN

  The day after Father Mercedes issued his threats, Sister Maria instituted the Brother–Sister Code. “The hazing tradition can go on,” she told an assembly of students in Palisade Hall. “But seniors may no longer indiscriminately terrorize any given freshman. Each individual senior has four weeks to choose one freshman to adopt as a little brother or little sister, which will last until the Hazing Day picnic. You can have your fun, and good-natured teasing is acceptable, but from that point forward, you will be a mentor—not just a tormentor.” After some initial grumbling, the upperclassmen seemed to accept it, though Sister Maria worried when she overheard some of them referring to it as the new “Master and Slave” program.

  Afterwards, Mr. Zimmer expressed doubt they could successfully tamp down unrest in the school by “turning the freshmen into pets.”

  “The idea is to transform potential abusers into protectors,” Sister Maria said. “It’s one thing for large groups of seniors to pick on large groups of freshmen, but if they can see each other as individuals—”

  “Do we have a fail-safe if an especially cruel senior chooses an especially weak freshman to be a personal punching bag?” Zimmer asked.

  “Then we intercede,” she said. “But in
the meantime, at least he will have only one punching bag.”

  * * *

  Carl LeRose was furious. He pulled Davidek and Stein into one of the stairwells leading down to the lunchroom and slid his feet from side to side, like someone trying to figure out how to dance. “What’s with you guys?” LeRose snapped. “Ain’t you got no brains? Father Mercedes told the parish council you two told him the whole story about the parking lot fight. So he has the council members calling parents, telling them to question their kids about what really went on. The teachers got bitched out the other day. My dad is on the council. He’s pissed.”

  “Fuck your dad,” Stein said, and outrage flared on LeRose’s face.

  “When the teachers start cracking down even harder on us, everybody will blame you two dipshits.”

  “Yeah, but they can’t hurt us if we’re somebody’s ‘little brother,’ right?” Davidek said.

  LeRose chewed on a fingernail. “Okay, smart guy. How’d you like to end up with Hannah Kraut as your big sister? That’s what’ll happen if everyone else in the senior class freezes you dumb-asses out.”

  “Who’s Hannah Kraut?” Davidek asked.

  LeRose closed his eyes in a prayer for patience. “You’ve never heard anyone talk about Hannah Kraut?”

  “We’re not exactly on anyone’s need-to-know list,” Stein said.

  LeRose ran thick fingers over his face. “Let’s just say if you got a mentor who beat the crap out of you every day, life would be bad for the next few months. But if you get Hannah … Jesus, man, I don’t know what to say. Life’s gonna be bad for you permanently.”

  Stein asked, “She one of those Sasquatch-looking girls hassling Lorelei for cigarettes?”

  “She doesn’t, uh, hang with a group,” LeRose said. “She’s nobody, you know?… She’s nothing. She’s a void. She’s fucking antimatter. Do you get what I mean?”

  Davidek nodded obediently, although he had no idea. Stein was more direct: “That’s nice poetry, fat boy. Can you translate what the hell you’re talking about?”

  LeRose looked around nervously. “Hannah has this thing she does.… She’s a listener. An eavesdropper.” The sophomore lowered his voice, like she might be hearing them right now. “She’s been doing it for years. You’re standing there talking with your friends, or your girlfriend or something, and all the sudden you realize she’s been hovering around and picked up the whole conversation.”

  “Oh, I know who you mean,” Stein said, snapping his fingers. “She was in that movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? Turns invisible, hangs out in trees. Laughs like this—mwaah, ahh, ahh, ahh.…”

  LeRose squinted. “Let’s see if you’re laughing when she walks up to a group of your friends and just blurts out some horrible secret thing about you. She’s done it before. That’s why you don’t mess with Hannah—you avoid her. And you definitely don’t talk about anything important if she’s around. Shit, there are people in her class who won’t tell you what time it is if Hannah Kraut’s in the room.”

  Stein’s smart-ass smile faded a little, which made Davidek nervous.

  “This is her final year,” LeRose said. “Everyone’s scared about what she’ll do now that she’s saying ‘fuck off’ to this place forever. You worry about some big guy shoving you around? Try having Hannah spread sick, stupid stories about you for the rest of the year. Doesn’t even matter if they’re true. By the time you’re a senior, even the visiting grade-school kids will be making fun of you.”

  “So what does she look like?” Davidek asked. “How do we avoid her?”

  “I dunno.… She’s a goddamned shape-shifter. Always switching her hair and shit. She doesn’t have a single friend in this school, so I can’t even tell you who she’d be hanging around with. But one thing about her—?” LeRose shook his head like even he didn’t believe this part. “She has one blue eye, and one green eye,” he said, laughing nervously. “I shit you not. She’s fucking hell spawn, man.”

  * * *

  LeRose was right about most of it, but wrong about one thing: Hannah Kraut wasn’t completely friendless at St. Mike’s. The mysterious and loathed girl did have one confidant, though LeRose didn’t know this. No one did.

  Mr. Zimmer had noticed her right away when she was just a knobby-kneed freshman with electrostatic waves of curly black hair hanging around her head. The other freshmen said she looked like a Halloween decoration, the first of many insults. As they absorbed their share of torment from the seniors, they dumped it back on Hannah, who accepted it meekly, as if it confirmed something ugly about herself she’d always suspected. As if she deserved it.

  Zimmer admired her grace, while secretly longing to see her haul off and sucker-punch one of those little jerks. He knew from a decade of teaching that you can’t protect a vulnerable student all the time, but you could extend your own friendship. Zimmer tried to talk to her about her hobbies, which she didn’t have, and movies or books or music she liked, but she wasn’t really into any of that either. “Living doesn’t seem to be your thing,” he joked to her once, immediately regretting the words. But that had actually brought out a little half smile, and her dour eyes brightened a little. It was only then that Mr. Zimmer noticed that odd little defect, if you could call it that—her one blue eye, and one green eye.

  “It’s genetic,” she told him. “Not even that rare. You’d be surprised.”

  Just when things were supposed to get a lot better for Hannah Kraut, they got a lot worse. At the end of her freshman year, during the Hazing Picnic, she had been spared any of the ritual humiliation that befell the other freshmen. A senior named Cliff Onasik, a genial burnout, had ended up with Hannah by default when the seniors divvied up freshmen for the picnic’s “talent show,” the event freshmen feared all year long. While her other classmates were paraded up to the park’s band stage as targets for ridicule—in one case literally, as five freshmen were pelted with eggs and tomatoes from the audience—neither Hannah nor Onasik could be found when it was her turn up on the stage.

  No one could figure out how that was possible until a rumor began circulating, one far more vile than lame old jokes about her Wooly Willy hairdo. It wasn’t until Hannah came back as a sophomore that the ridicule reached an intensity even a teacher could detect. Zimmer pieced together the story from fragments of overheard conversations, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. That didn’t matter. The kids did.

  “Hey, Hannah, how was the hot dog–eating contest?” they’d ask her in the hall.

  Hannah didn’t seem to know what they were talking about, though the teasing got much more direct as time went on. “How long did Cliffy Onasik make you blow him before letting you off the hook, anyway?” Bilbo Tomch said one day in the lunch line. (He had asked her out on a date some weeks before, but she had said no. Bilbo didn’t take the rejection like a gentleman.)

  “She wasn’t ‘off the hook,’ man! She was sucking on his worm!” laughed one of Bilbo’s pals, maybe Prager, as the boys high-fived. Hannah slouched away when Mr. Zimmer came over to ask what the problem was.

  It didn’t make any sense, Zimmer thought. Why would she do that rather than just appear onstage for the lame song-and-dance teasing all the other kids got at the Hazing Picnic? Cliffy Onasik wasn’t around anymore to confirm or deny. The rumor became that Hannah hadn’t been coerced—she had offered.

  Zimmer couldn’t bear to think about the name they called her in the hall, right to her face, whispering it as they shoved past her. He’d handed out at least two dozen detentions, though that hadn’t killed it. The upperclassmen told the new freshmen, too green and scared to know better, to walk up to Hannah and bark it at her before running away. Zimmer couldn’t even think the word without feeling his jaw tighten:

  That poor girl with the wild black hair. The one who couldn’t bring herself to look people in the eye or answer their questions with more than a mumble. That was the name she carried with her down the hallways, shorthand for a scummy li
ttle sex rumor that would never let her go.

  Fuckslut.

  Zimmer never asked her if it was true. He didn’t care, and didn’t want to know, really. Like any high school, St. Mike’s had seen its share of girls with slutty reputations, and most were sad, lonesome cases, filling a self-esteem void with attention from sleazeball boys like Cliffy. All Zimmer could do was try to be kind to Hannah, and protect her when he could, which wasn’t often enough. Hannah appreciated his help, and a friendship blossomed between them. She began asking for after-school tutoring, even on subjects Zimmer didn’t teach. That was okay by him. He liked Hannah, and he knew what it felt like to be her.

  Sister Maria had been one of his only friends when he was student, and in many ways she still was. After school sometimes, they’d hit the Capri restaurant down the street, sharing a pizza and a pitcher of beer, and in the summer they’d catch a movie or Pirates game down in Pittsburgh. Not long ago, Sister Maria asked why he didn’t find a nice girl to share such times. Zimmer hated that question. If the answer wasn’t obvious, he didn’t want to say it out loud. “I guess they’re not interested,” he told her, but Sister Maria said she doubted that. “Come on, Sister, I can’t even date blind girls,” Zimmer said, running a hand across his pockmarked cheeks. “In braille, this face says: ‘Danger—Keep Away.’”

  Zimmer had gotten used to solitude, what Stein might have called being happy with his unhappiness. He had been an ill child, prone to lung and vision problems, thanks to a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. It also accounted for his stretched appearance and long limbs. Though Andy Zimmer grew tall, his father still thought of him as a weakling.

  Both his parents—heavy smokers, bad eaters, high-stress personalities—had died while he was in college, just two years apart. Their family home was now his alone. He used their old silverware, their dishes, their towels and bedsheets. The TV was new; the couch was not. The little white Subaru was his mother’s last car, and his first.