The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (9 page)

“Blowgun,” Tim said casually. “I bring my blowgun down here and tag the cat with an anesthetic dart.”

“Where the hell we gonna get that stuff?”

“Steal it from a drugstore maybe. Or buy it off your sleazy drug buddy.” Tim meant the orphan kid who visited Rusty’s family one weekend a month.

“This is too risky,” I said. “Joey was right.”

“Risk leads to greatness,” Tim said. “Your sweetheart will love it. Francis Doyle, lion hunter.”

“We’d have to disconnect those wires,” said Rusty. “This fence is electrified.”

“So we’ll bring wire-cutters and rubber gloves.”

“Wait a minute,” Rusty said. “How do we get the panther all the way from here to Blessed Heart? These son of a bitches weigh more than we do.”

“We borrow a car,” Tim said.

“Nuh, its gettin too complicated. Too many places we can mess up. We got to streamline it.”

“Wade,” Tim said, “if one of those cats was knocked out, could you carry it?”

Wade puffed his cheeks, weighing the cats, then exhaled. “Sure. No problem.”

Rusty hissed. “That cat weighs a hundred and fifty pounds.”

“I weigh almost that. I’ve been lifting weights. I can hold that much on my shoulders.”

“Tim’s talkin about carryin it eight miles to Blessed Heart in the middle of the night. Without attractin attention.” Rusty shook his head and grimaced like he tasted something bad. “No way.”

“We could walk through the woods,” Wade said. “I could rest every once in a while. We could take turns.”

“Not me,” I said, relieved that it was seeming less possible. “Doctor’s excuse, hernia.”

Rusty shook his head again. “Tim couldn’t lift it either.”

“Fuck you,” Tim said. “I could pull it in a wagon.”

“Nuh,” said Rusty. “It’s just not… not—what’s the word?”

“Feasible,” said Tim. “But I’ll make it feasible. I’m plugged in to this.”

We followed Paul and the others to another deck. There was a giant live oak in the center of the area.

Paul said, “There’s a bobcat up there, see?”

The limbs swayed in the breeze, moss waving, leaves rippling, and then part of a limb flowed down itself towards the trunk, flicked a short tail up, and became a cat. The trunk of the tree and the tops of the limbs were red-brown where claws had scoured the bark.

“These fellas still live in the woods all over the place,” Paul said. “But you’d have to use dogs to find them.”

The bobcat flowed back up the trunk, its stubby tail curled forward and swishing. It jumped to a higher limb and stuck quick on top like a magnet.

Tim called out, “Are they dangerous?”

Paul said, “Sure. They can kill full-grown deer. Pioneers thought they rode deer through the forests the way we ride horses. Actually, this is because they kill by jumping on the deer’s back and biting through the spinal cord or jugular.” Paul’s fingers became jaws and he clamped them on his neck. The girls
moaned. “If they don’t succeed right away, they’re in for one heck of a ride. Normally they won’t prey on people, though there have been some rare attacks on children.”

Tim was already gloating. “How much do they weigh?”

“Generally about twenty-five pounds. These lazy cats are a little plumper. There’s another one in that bush to the right.”

The new cat’s eyes floated in the green and brown.

“I can picture a rope dangling from that tree limb,” said Tim quietly. “I see us doping the wildcat and carrying it back in a pillowcase. On our bikes. Then we’re out of school, out of trouble, and have something amazing to tell our grandchildren.”

“That’s just a chicken-wire fence,” Rusty said. “No juice to fool with.”

“What about it, Francis?” Tim asked.

My palms had moistened, because I could see us doing it. I was scared because I wasn’t very scared. “Easy as pie.”

“These cats don’t look dangerous to me,” said Wade. “I liked the big ones better.”

“This is smarter, Wade. Stripped down. It reminds me of those Picasso drawings of the bull that got simpler and simpler until it was just a couple of lines. But you still saw the bull. You know the ones?”

That comparison sparked an idea in my own head. “You haven’t got to the final step yet.”

“What’s that?” Tim asked.

“We don’t take the cat to school at all. We just set it free. It’s reported missing, we leave the notes and bust a window— maybe leave some bobcat droppings or something. And since they won’t find the cat, it’ll take them longer to decide to reopen school. We don’t endanger students or the cat, so if we get caught, it’s nothing.”

Rusty said, “Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? Hell, why not set the cougars free too?”

“No,” Tim said. “They’re too big to live in these woods. Hell,
I believe Francis is right. It’ll be beautiful. It’ll take a minimum of effort but’ll accomplish the same thing.”

The bobcat padded out to the end of a limb and cawed, almost like a bird. The girls made kissy noises and stretched their hands out as if to be licked. Melissa Anderson wished for a bowl of milk.

“Lemmings,” Tim said. “Those cats would as soon rip their throats out.”

“It does look pretty much like a house cat,” Rusty said. “I don’t believe it’ll close the school down.”

“It could kill a first-grader,” Tim said. “Look at the size of those paws, the way it moves through that tree. It’s an economysize panther. It’s got handfuls of razors. Run up your chest and swallow your throat.”

Rusty said, “I say we train it to rip Rosaria’s head off. That’ll get us out of class.”

Tim laughed, delighted at the absurdity and gore. Joey O’Connor wandered up beside him and cleared his throat with a grunt.

“All right,” Joey said, as if finishing a prior conversation. “I’ll help y’all nab the wildcat.”

Tim said, “Forget it, Joey. We’ve given up on the plan and decided to just take the consequences.”

Joey squinted, wiped his glasses on his shirt. “No, no. I think you ought to go through with it. Otherwise, we’re doomed. I’ve worked this all out in my mind. I’ve started doing exercises.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tim grinned at Rusty. Joey would be going with us.

I enjoyed the rest of the trail. I felt almost strong, being outside among animals. Paul showed us sleepy black bears and an otter that slicked through its pond like a fish and moved easy as
a weasel on land. We saw wolves. Their den was in tree roots, but they ran around the pen constantly. I think they smelled the deer.

We watched pelicans eat. They scraped stiff fish from the concrete, slid them into their pouches with a slapping of their bills, then washed them down with a gulp of water. You saw the bulge travel down the neck. An eagle shrieked at us. I’d never heard that before. At the end, raw-headed vultures, a hawk, and a white owl watched us pass. The owl’s head swiveled all the way around until it was backwards.

We walked to the bus for lunch. Mr. Thomas was asleep with his mouth open. We sat in the field and ate while Paul lectured on ecology and played an eight-track tape of music from India. The nuns’ faces beaded with sweat because they wore the most clothes. At the end of the speech everybody clapped, cheered, and Paul smiled and told us to visit again.

This was the only field trip I’d been on that ended in a field. We had to pick up every bit of trash, even what wasn’t ours. We got back on the bus. Joey laid thumbtacks in Donny’s seat, but Melissa started to sit there and he had to stop her and remove them. Paul waved at us as we rolled away.

The back of my neck was tight with sunburn, and I found two ticks the size of pinheads on my arm. I popped them loose and flicked them out the window.

Everybody brought chicken legs to Science class. Brown paper lavatory towels were spread on all the desktops. Mrs. Barnes sent Melissa Anderson around with a box of one-sided razor blades, and we took one each. We followed along with Mrs. Barnes, slicing skin into pink muscle and peeling away tendons and silky ligaments and splitting the bones to find the squishy marrow. The classroom smelled like my dad. My hands got greasy. Eight kids cut their fingers and Mrs. Barnes sent Melissa around with a tin of Band-Aids.

In front of me, Donny Flynn used his razor to carve yet another swastika into the cast on his arm. Every desk he’d ever sat in was marked with a swastika. With equal ignorance, he wore a Confederate States of America belt buckle.

The razor blades made me think of his sister’s wrist scars. I still lacked the nerve to call her.

Tim and Rusty dared each other into eating slivers of raw chicken. The class roared. Mrs. Barnes, her eyeglasses white with fluorescence, rapped the pointer on her desk and told them not to complain to her when they got salmonella.

We wrapped the drumsticks in the paper towels and dropped them in a plastic garbage bag up front. Mr. Thomas, the janitor,
came in at the end and licked his lips archly and took the bag away.

At lunchtime we trooped downstairs to the cafeteria, into the oily crusty smell of, yes, fried chicken.

“Coincidence my ass,” Rusty said. “These cheap bitches don’t waste a thing.”

We cut past all the seventh-graders in line and took plates of chicken and butter beans. It wasn’t the dissected chicken, but I still didn’t want it. So much trouble and change was occurring that my stomach had rebelled.

Tim had brought a coconut for lunch. He punched holes in the soft parts with a ball-point pen, then sucked out the milk through a straw. He cracked the shell open on the floor and peeled out pieces of white meat.

We huddled at the end of our table and talked about the Wildcat Caper. Rusty, Tim, and Wade shared sly looks that made me think they had a secret from me. I only ate about half my chicken. My hands still smelled like the raw stuff. Tim gave me some coconut, and on the way out I bought SweeTarts at the candy window.

All of us walked to the corner and waited for the patrol boys to stop traffic, then crossed over to Daffin Park where we had our recesses. Wade and Rusty bounced a soccer ball between them. Tim drummed a ragged copy of Orwell’s
Animal Farm
on his leg. We passed our old merry-go-round and the swings and the ladder tower, all of them made of smooth dirty pipe that smelled the way dimes taste.

On the other side was the community swimming pool, empty inside a locked fence, and beyond that the pond, its surface carpeted with green algae. White ducks, minus the injured one, drifted across in search of picnickers likely to fling bread.

Father O’Leary was waiting in the field already, a whistle dangling below his Roman collar. Rusty tossed the ball to him and he kept it in the air with little kicks.

The young priest coached us once a week now. Before that, we sometimes played a version of rugby whose only rule was you couldn’t touch the ball with your fingers. The players obeyed this by carrying it in their fists, and you could do anything, even punch a kid in the mouth to get the ball from him.

Father O’Leary taught us soccer rules, sportsmanship, positions, the way they did it in Ireland. He talked about organizing a school soccer team.

I couldn’t do all the running and kicking anymore because of the hernia. Tim sat out sometimes to keep me company and to read. He was always one of the last picked for a team anyway, because he was so small.

We sank down at the field’s edge, on the roots of a giant oak. I could feel the little scabs on my legs pull, from the whipping. I munched my candy. The others scurried across the field, kicking the checkered ball, shouting. The seventh-grade boys gathered farther up, on the red clay of the softball diamond. Steven, Wade’s younger brother and also the tallest in his class, tossed some poor kid’s glove up and popped it into the outfield with an aluminum bat. He laughed wildly, slung the bat after it. Wade claimed their parents’ divorce was responsible for this behavior. Behind the chain-link of the batting cage were some old bleachers where the girls were pairing up to gossip. Margie Flynn, I knew, sometimes stayed in the library after lunch.

Rusty hustled across the field, Wade beside him. Rusty kicked the ball along, ran after it, kicked again. Father O’Leary, on the other team, ran out to block him, the stringed whistle bouncing on his black shirtfront, and Rusty hooked the ball with his orthopedic shoe and it swished out sideways and Wade kicked it at the goal line. Donny Flynn flung himself vainly at the ball and thumped to the ground, plaster cast first. “Motherfucker!” he shouted.

Father O’Leary squinted towards the pond as if he hadn’t heard. Donny raised up on his belly with a “so what?” sneer.

O’Leary was slight and dark with a droopy mustache like a
bandito. He had devilish pointed eyebrows and smiled a lot, but he was shy. I’d heard my mom whispering to Rusty’s mom on the telephone that he had a girlfriend in the parish and might leave the priesthood. I hoped not. He was the nicest of our priests. He would’ve already forgiven us for
Sodom
vs.
Gomorrah’ 74
.

Donny fetched the ball and hurled it back. Way across, on the bleachers, a couple of girls had pulled yarn and needles out of shopping bags. Others were playing games in notebooks, Hangman probably. And there was Margie Flynn, sitting alone at the end, hands folded in her lap. I couldn’t see her eyes at that distance.