My Secret History Read Online Free PDF Page B

Target practice.”
    “And what sort of work do you do?”
    This questioned embarrassed me, because he was continuing the conversation we had started in the confessional.
    “Paper route?” he said, pronouncing it
rowt
instead of
root
.
    “I’m a lockerboy, up at Wright’s Pond.”
    “You brought a book, I see.”
    He twisted his head around in order to get a look at the paperback in my lap.
    “Danny,” he said. “Like it?”
    I riffled the pages of the
Inferno
, not knowing what to say. I saw my underlining and stopped riffling. If he saw the ink he might ask me what I had marked, and why.
That passes shit to the bung
, one said, and another
Spews forth his stinking vomit
.
    “Hell’s shaped like a funnel,” I said at last.
    “That what Danny says?”
    His hand went to the radio.
    “It’s a classic,” he said, and then a song seemed to come out of his forehead, “Blue Skies—smiling at me—”
    Afterwards he lit a cigarette and kept driving, exhaling through his clenched teeth. I loved the smell of tobacco smoke—cigarettes especially; it lingered in my face and found its way into my head and made me dizzy. Father Furty’s brand was called “Fatima”—a yellow-orange pack with a woman’s thin face on the front.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, seeing me staring at his pack of cigarettes on the seat. “No, it’s not Our Lady.”
    Father Furty’s boat was named
Speedbird
—white with blue trim, and before we cast off he shut his eyes and put his big hands together and said, “Let us pray.”
    His sleeves flapped, he looked gray and sorrowful, the wind stirred his short hair; but when his lips stopped moving and he blessed himself and said “Amen,” he began to smile and seemed intensely happy.
    He was tidy and fussy in a boat-owner’s way, and he had the skipper’s habit of coiling every line and clearing the decks and putting things away—“Let’s stow this,” he said, and he also said “starboard” and “port” and the rest of them.
    What made all of this somewhat unusual were the women, six or so, from the Sodality—they were dressed as if for church, they wore hats and pearls, they carried black plastic handbags.
    Father Furty said, “Stow the baloney sandwiches aft,” and the women giggled. He said, “We’ll keep the sodas fo’rard.”
    The women laughed even harder at this.
    “We don’t call it soda,” I said, because I hated to see him being laughed at by those women. “We call it tonic.”
    “Tonic?”
He laughed so hard he started to cough. Whenever he coughed he lit a cigarette, always a Fatima.
    When we were under way, plowing through the harbor under a blue sky, Father Furty had a peaceful, distant look on his face. I was happy, too. On this boat everything seemed possible, the world was simpler and brighter, and Boston was not a hot dirty city but a much bigger place, rising out of the sea—with a huge and busy harbor, and islands; it was visited by vast ships. I saw that the city was also the water around it—so it was freer and had more space.
    Father Furty said, “There are so many islands in this harbor—that’s another reason you get so many strange currents running around here.”
    I thought he was going to say more. Any other priest would have. But Father Furty did not say of the islands and the currents
They’re like life
. They were no more than they seemed; they represented only themselves—which was plenty. They did not need any other significance.
    He said you had to be careful here, what with all the shipping, but that there was nothing to be afraid of.
    “She’s a sturdy boat. She’s all mahogany.” That made him more human too, calling the boat
she
.
    The Sodality women had also brought food; and it was clear that there was too much of it. Each woman had a basket or a bowl with salad or chicken or a homemade cake or cookies. Mrs. DePalma, Chicky’s mother, had a parcel of cold cuts and pickles which she arranged in a fan