The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Read Online Free PDF Page B

start a barrage. And the touch of her hand and the words she’d given me made darkness close all around like when you dive into a river, and then it lightened and I surfaced standing in the hallway and listened to the boom, boom, boom of the universe.

A Discipline Problem
    Every afternoon I walked my youngest brother home past Margie’s house. Today I poked, watching for her, stopped to loosen and retie my shoelaces, and stopped again to shift my pack to the other shoulder. Peter, my brother, wandered on ahead, glancing back suspiciously over the hump of his green bookbag.
    Margie’s house took up the corner. Like the other houses on Victory Drive, it featured a front porch that could swallow my whole living room. Mr. Flynn, her daddy, had a construction company and nine children.
    One of the Flynn boys was dribbling a basketball and whooshing it through a thrumming hoop on the side of their carport. I knew I ought to ring the bell and ask for Margie, but I dreaded the question in her family’s faces. I would call her when I got home. I picked up a rock and slung it at a stop sign, missed, left.

    Our house made me want to apologize. My mother went on about the charm of a carriage house, character, but it was thesmallest house I’d ever seen, ivied brick squashed right up against the lane. The only advantage was the jumbo front yard, worthy of kickball, of boomerangs.
    Tim and Rusty lived across the street in regular houses.
    My brothers were feeding in front of the TV when I came in. Peter, the first-grader, was naked except for his uniform pants. He forked leftover potatoes out of a bowl and packed them into his cheeks, chewing steadily. Peter’s arms and legs were thin, but his tummy was bulbed like an avocado.
    John, the ten year old, was licking mayonnaise off a slice of white bread. He went to a special school and came home each day in a minibus. Many of his classmates were moon-faced with Chinese eyes, their ears and noses tiny. John’s troubles were caused by not looking both ways when crossing a street three years earlier, an incident which sunk the family in debt and brought endless, petty miseries and embarrassments. John was also the only one of us who had black hair instead of brown.
    “Did I get any mail?” I asked. I’d sent off for Sea Monkeys (The World’s Only INSTANT LIVE PETS!).
    They shook their heads no, hypnotized by
Bonanza
on our black-and-white TV. Little Joe and the bad guy were walloping each other’s faces, each punch bomb-loud, on and on.
    Spicy corned-beef steam wafted across from the kitchen. Mama had put a brisket on the stove between coming home from college and leaving for work, so it would be ready when Daddy arrived. I climbed the stairs, ducking to avoid the overhang.
    Gretchen, our dachshund, was curled in the linen closet. She raised her head and patted her tail on the dirty laundry.
    I shed my pack and my uniform and got into some corduroys and a T-shirt. I climbed up to my bunk and did my homework in an hour.
    I popped some looseleaf from my binder and began a letter to Margie, but it got so corny I held a match to it until it was ashes, then flushed it.
    The telephone in the hallway worried me. It might erupt at any moment with Margie’s voice, or Father Kavanagh’s.
    I took
The Return of Tarzan
from my shelf and opened it to where I’d stuck a Baby Ruth wrapper. Trees heaved up in the room, unraveled vines in huge loops. Birds whistled. Roaring echoed off the ceiling. My muscles swelled and hardened, and I was the ape-man. To my Jane, I added tragic little wrist-scars. I jumped to the floor and smacked fists on my gorilla chest. I lifted the receiver and cleared my throat, but that only seemed to thicken whatever was in it. I stood and growled towards an acceptable voice. A drink of water worsened it. I decided to wait.
    I trudged downstairs. My brothers were staring at the local news. Savannah’s only black newsman stood on a downtown street talking to the camera