Now Is the Hour Page 12

  Get me half-naked, and it’ll happen every time.

  My teeth in my mouth grinding.

  Pull your damn pants up! Dad said. Cover yourself, for chrissakes! And get the hell out of here!

  The next nine weeks happen like one long bad dream. Tuesday nights, on one side of me out the Buick’s window, the twelve miles into town flew by at eighty miles an hour. On the other side, my mother was in one of her Joan Crawford church hats, the ripple going up and down her jaw. Things could not have been worse.

  But then there’s the universe. This time what the universe conspired was Sister Barbara Ann’s altar boy contest and Monsignor Cody’s baseball game.

  The contest was to see which altar boy could get the most points by the end of the school year. Five points for showing up on time. Five points for not making a mistake. Minus ten points for not showing up. Plus ten points for substituting.

  The baseball game came out of nowhere. Sunday morning from the pulpit, Monsignor Cody just up and says there’s nothing like a good baseball game to get the religious spirit flowing and let’s beat Saint Anthony’s.

  Mom’s novena, Sister Barbara Ann’s contest, Monsignor Cody’s baseball game. They all came together and fucked me up in a very particular way.

  Tuesday night was the night of Our Mother of Perpetual Help devotions.

  Tuesday night was the night for baseball practice.

  Tuesday night no boys showed up to serve Our Mother of Perpetual Help devotions. Except for me, which means I had to substitute for the three altar boys who were at baseball practice.

  Which means I would win the altar boy contest. But winning the altar boy contest wasn’t winning. I never was like anybody else, and during those nine weeks of the novena, I was never more not like anybody else than ever. Of course, then with what happened later on, Scardino and “Casey at the Bat” and all, I was in serious deep shit.

  And, if I didn’t know what was coming, Scardino would remind me. Every Wednesday morning, after Sister Barbara Ann announced the score, Scardino flipped me the bird and moved his mouth real slow to say: You fucking queer, you are a fucking dead man.

  One long bad dream.

  Plus, what did you win? The winner of the altar boy contest got to be the winner, plus got a black glass-beaded rosary blessed by the Pope in the Vatican.

  Tuesday, Irving Field, just three blocks away from Saint Joe’s, boys ran the bases, hit high pop flies, hit home runs, pitched, catched, boys ran around the baseball diamond having fun together, playing ball at baseball practice. Not me. In the candlelight of Saint Joe’s I was kneeling in the congregation, praying for altar boys to show up. They never did. Monsignor entered the altar alone, stood there, and waited. For me he waited because he knew everything about me. In less than a minute, I was on the altar in my cassock and ironed and starched surplice kneeling next to the Monsignor. Mom was up in the choir loft on the organ, watching me.

  When Monsignor Cody said: I who am the most miserable of all — that’s when I got up and got the holy water font from inside Monsignor’s sacristy. As Monsignor said the blessing, he shook the holy water font so the holy water splashed out into the congregation in drops. If a drop of holy water fell on me, I thought maybe God was touching me. But if God was touching me, why wasn’t I playing baseball instead of locked up in a church with a bunch of old people.

  My next job was to go into the sacristy and start the charcoal for the incense.

  Don’t burn the damn church down.

  Outside of confession, those were the only words Monsignor ever said to me. Not hi, hello, how are you, thanks for showing up, bless you, my son. Nothing. Just: When you light the charcoal, don’t burn the damn church down.

  When the charcoal was lit and the edges were turning white, I put the charcoal into the open censer with the black medieval pincers, then closed the censer, then took a deep breath and carried the censer and the burning incense onto the altar.

  Me doing it, and Mom watching me do it. My whole life’s been like that.

  The big moment of Benediction was when Monsignor turns around with the gold, spaceship-looking monstrance in his hands and points the monstrance with God in it at the congregation. Mom started playing “Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.” Miss Kasiska, Miss Radcliffe, and Miss Biddle all genuflected and made the sign of the cross. I sang too, and the censer was on the second step with the smoke coming out, and my hand was ringing, ringing the gold bells, never stopping the whole time, while Monsignor lifted the golden monstrance up through the sign of the cross.

  And there we were, all of us, even God, inside the slanted mirror up in the choir loft, and Mom watching.

  All the while Monsignor Cody was pointing God at us, every one of us, every human-being one of us was praying, praying hard to God for things we wanted to have, or for things we don’t want to have, for an old way to stop, or a new way to be, to not be sick, or not be old, or for special intentions, like my special intention, I mean my mother’s special intention for me.

  After devotions, the charcoal still burning in the censer, I opened the sacristy door, carried the censer outside and down the side stairs. Most nights it was pitch-black. When I got to the corner of the church, as soon as I stepped away from the church, the wind was cold, but I liked the cold wind because it had been so warm on the altar ringing the bells and looking at God. The wind blew my cassock and surplice, and I felt like Heathcliff in the olden days wearing those clothes, flutters of cloth, the sound of big skirts on women in the wind. This was the only good part of the night because in the dark, cold night, for a while there was no Mom, and only the stars were watching.

  I didn’t know where I was in all of this, or even if there was enough of me around to be something enough to make a differnce. I was just putting one foot in front of the other. Trying to be a good Catholic son. I didn’t see I had any choice, and I did care about being a good son, if only to keep my mother close. The rest of it I wasn’t so sure about. But how could I say no to my parents, my teachers, my priest? There were no words, no real options. What started it all, masturbating, the thing that they were telling me I did have a choice about, I couldn’t seem to make the right choice. When that feeling came up in my balls, I didn’t have a chance. Truth be told, I was worried about my soul. I didn’t want to hurt Jesus with my sin, and I didn’t want to go to hell either. Even Hemingway said it. What was immoral was what made you feel bad after. And after jerking off, I felt like shit. But it could be an hour, and there I’d go again.

  What I did have a choice about happened around the same time, and it is something I’ve been ashamed of ever since.

  It all started one Saturday afternoon about the third week into the novena. I was out in the barn, and I looked up from where I was spreading out straw in the calf pen, and there was a kid my age standing there. The light was bright from the open barn door behind him, so he was only a silhouette. Then when I got close and I was looking at his face, his face was a face I’d seen a hundred times, but nothing registered. Then it was his pale eyes behind his crooked glasses with the white tape across the glasses in the middle.

  There I was, just me with Puke Price.

  I looked around. Only the chickens and the sick baby calf were looking.

  Then it was weird. On a Saturday in the barn, alone without anybody else from school, Puke Price wasn’t that bad.

  Hey, Puke, I said. What you doing here?

  Puke always wore his corduroy pants up too high on his waist. His shirt was tucked in, and right there around his waist it was a bulgy mess of shirttails, bunched-up pants, and his brown belt cinched tight.

  Puke said: My name’s Allen.

  His shoulders went up a little, and his hands made fists.

  I want you to call me by my name, he said. I don’t call you names, he said. My name is Allen.

  Puke’s big breath of air went right up against my face and up my nose.

  Fried bologna breath. The worst kind of breath. There’s tuna breath,
and Cheetos breath, and onion breath, and boiled broccoli breath, and each one of those breaths is bad. But the worst kind of breath is all four of them; tuna, Cheetos, onion breath, and boiled broccoli breath all in one and that’s what I call fried bologna breath, and Puke had fried bologna breath real bad.

  I said: Allen. Sure, I said, Allen. What are you doing here?

  I liked that Allen smiled, but still I stepped back because I saw he was going to speak, and words and breath go together, and with Allen you had to be careful.

  My dad’s here, Allen said, shooting rock chucks. We’ll be here all afternoon.

  Allen was the one who suggested that we play Poison. How you play Poison is you get the most poisonous stuff and the worst awful things possible, and you pour them all together in one bucket.

  The bucket was a gallon bucket of oil-base paint with about an inch of slimy red in the bottom. The weed killer was in the saddle room under the bench in a gray five-gallon bucket that said POISON on it. It was a white powder. The skinny piece of an old cedar shingle was what I used to stir the white into the red until it was pink. Next, the bucket went to the gas pump. Three seconds of gasoline into the bucket. Allen stirred the gasoline in with the pink. It smelled awful. The creosote came from the vat where Dad was soaking railroad ties. Inside the bucket it was the color of dark blood. The rat poison from the toolshed. A white powder in a red and yellow can like Kraft Parmesan cheese. Holes in the top of the can so you can shake out the rat poison. Allen sprinkled the rat poison onto what was in the bucket. The Malathion and the DDT came from in the corner of the machine shop where the sugar beet planter was. Both the Malathion and the DDT were in quart-size brown bottles with screw-top lids. The ant spray and furniture polish were from under the kitchen sink. Allen and I held our noses, and Allen sprayed the ant spray into the bucket and I poured in the Olde English furniture polish. Bluing, Clorox, and ammonia from the closet in the washroom went in next. A scoop of phosphate from the Simplot’s bag. Then drops of Mercurochrome, gentian violet, Merthiolate from the medicine cabinet. Strychnine, tiny pellets in a little blue bottle from in the saddle room, from inside the cabinet Dad kept under lock and kept the key above the saddle room door. I found that key when my dog Nikki died. Battery acid from a battery from the pile of dead batteries in the weeds next to the wood granary. Really slimy gray and white chicken poop. A dead baby chicken. A mother spider and her million babies in the web in the chicken coop window with the eisenglass. A can of Del Monte lima beans. Mush would have been good in there, or a fried hard egg or a soft-boiled egg, but Mom was in the kitchen so we couldn’t get to the mush or the eggs. A piece of Kotex with blood splotches on it from inside the big garbage burn barrel outside. Allen, not me, held the Kotex by one of the white flaps. One of my father’s crusty socks.

  I thought of asking Allen to puke into the whole mess, then thought better.

  That’s when Allen said, Let’s piss in it.

  Allen had a look. His upper lip curled up a little. Then, before I knew it, there he was, Allen Price’s dick hanging out of the zipper under the bunched-up waist of his corduroys. His dick was really white, like the rest of him, and big. Well, not big. For Allen Price, big. I mean, you’d think he’d have a real tiny one. Then his white dick started peeing.

  For a moment, I was a little amazed so I just watched the yellow pee from his dick dribble out and then up full force into what was in the bucket. I didn’t know what to do. I just knew I couldn’t let Puke Price get the best of me, so I undid my Levi’s buttons and pulled my cock out.

  My cock is a lot like me. It doesn’t do what it’s told right off. I have to wait. And there’s no telling sometimes how long I have to wait, so I just wait.

  Allen’s dick quit peeing in spurts. He left it hanging out when he was done. That’s when Allen’s dick started getting bigger and bigger and pinker and poking out right at me.

  What you doing, Price? I said.

  Allen said: What you doing?

  I followed Allen’s pale eyes down to my own cock hanging out. It should have been no surprise, but it was a surprise. My cock was sticking straight out too. That’s when Allen suggested we put another one of our body fluids into what was in the bucket, but the thought of that, the thought of jacking off with Puke Price into what was in the bucket, was just too gross, so I quick put my cock in my pants, turned around, and walked out of the barn, across the yard, and into the house. Allen zipped up right behind me. The screen door slammed.

  Mom was in the kitchen, hair flying out, bent over some bowl. The kitchen smelled good.

  Oatmeal cookies? I said.

  Peanut butter, she said. Go wash your hands first.

  After our peanut butter cookies and glasses of milk and before Allen went home with his dad, Allen and I crawled up the ladder to the granaries, then jumped down between the granaries into the secret place shaped like an hourglass.

  I reached in my pocket and pulled out two Viceroys. Allen acted like it was every day that he and I smoked cigarettes. He leaned back against the corrugated-steel granary, inhaled, and didn’t cough.

  Out of the blue, Allen had a book in his hands. I don’t know where the book came from, and I don’t remember it before that moment when I was looking at it there in his hands.

  It was a Nancy Drew mystery. The Mystery of the Brass-bound Trunk. Allen handed me the book.

  Here, Rig, he said. Take a look at my book.

  The book was blue-green and the regular size of a Nancy Drew mystery. It was usually in the upper right-hand corner of his desk at Saint Joseph’s School. Allen always kept the book next to the inkwell, in the upper right-hand corner of his desk.

  I read this one, I said. But it’s the only one I’ve read.

  I like the Bowery Boys better, I said.

  Holding a cigarette for a long time in your mouth makes you cough. I was coughing. Allen took a drag on the Viceroy like he’d been smoking all his life.

  Do you notice anything unusual about the book? he asked.

  I turned the book around, flipped it over, patted my hand against the cover.

  No, I said. It’s just a Nancy Drew mystery book.

  Allen pulled his legs in and sat like meditating Indians do. Then before I knew it, Allen raised his chin and was speaking right into my face. Cigarette smoke and fried bologna breath going up my nostrils.

  If I told you a secret, Allen said, would you promise not to tell?

  Something in his right cheek started twitching.

  Sure, I said.

  Promise? he said. I’ll show you a secret, but you have to promise.

  I sucked the smoke into my lungs, let the smoke stay inside for a while, then spit the smoke out at the same time I said: Promise.

  Allen stubbed out his Viceroy onto the steel-plate floor.

  Say the whole thing, Allen said.

  What? I said.

  Say: I promise I won’t tell anyone your secret, Allen said.

  A gust of wind blew up and into between the granaries. I stubbed my cigarette out, kept the filter, picked up Allen’s, stubbed out his filter too.

  I promise I won’t tell anyone your secret, I said.

  And that you won’t call me Puke anymore, Allen said.

  The filters went into my shirt pocket.

  I won’t call you Puke anymore, I said.

  Promise, Allen said.

  I promise I won’t call you Puke anymore, I said.

  Allen set the book on his crossed legs. He opened the book and turned the pages of the book, one by one, slowly, slowly.

  Page forty-two, Allen said.

  Allen opened the book for me to see.

  The book had been hollowed out where the words had been on the pages. Only the borders of the pages where there were no words was left, and those pages were glued together. Inside in the secret carved-out hollow space of the book, there were three glass radio tubes. One short one and two long ones with skinny red parts in the filaments.

  Allen’s hands
shook a little when he closed the book. What he said next, he said real slow.

  Now remember, Rig, Allen said. You made a promise. You promised me you wouldn’t tell.

  There’s one more thing the universe conspired on. Mom and I almost got ourselves killed by a naked man. It happened on the last of the nine Tuesdays. We were in the Buick on our way to church. It was raining. Rain like you never see in Idaho, coming down in buckets. The swipe of the windshield wipers were back and forth, back and forth, fast as they could go, but still the wipers weren’t fast enough. Soon as the wipers swiped, for a moment it was clear and you could see the road, but then, splash, it was just like we were driving underwater.

  Outside my window, past the barrow pit, past the barbwire fences, the harrowed spring fields were expanses of dark brown dirt filled with shiny puddles of water. Rain splashing up on the puddles of water.

  It was weird too because over there where the sun was setting it wasn’t raining. Down low in the west the sky was blue, then yellow, then gold, then pink. Sun shining through all the rain coming down made each raindrop into a tiny ball of light.

  There we were, Mom Klusener and Rigby John in our Buick Special speeding eighty miles an hour through a mystery shower of light and shiny rain. When we got to the cottonwoods on Philbin Road, the rain let up some, but the cottonwoods, just newly leafed out, had more of a surprise for us. The line of cottonwoods, big old grandpa trees, so big around three people with their arms out couldn’t circle one, one grandpa after another after another alongside the road reaching up their big arms, lumpy, graceful, fifty feet and higher into the sky, the rain shiny-slick on the bark, the yellow-gold sunset light against the wet. Not just the trees. Everything was glowing. The yellow-gold light onto the Buick, the road in front of us, the fat drops slow falling through the air from the leaves of the cottonwoods, onto the road, onto the blue hood of the Buick, onto the windshield.

  The glass of the windshield glowed, the angle of the wipers, inside the Buick even my hands were glowing yellow-gold. Mom’s face, those little lines around her lips, the way she held her chin up and gritted her teeth, the light on Mom’s face. Everything slowed down so slow, one long breath in and out. Mom’s almond-shaped hazel eyes, one pitched south, the other east, and my eyes. My eyes looking into her eyes, that moment. Mom and I, we weren’t us, and nothing was familiar. Mom and I were just there, alive and breathing in the rain and glowing light.