Читать книгу Good Blood - K. C. Pastore - Страница 6

“Ambridge—there is a convent in Ambridge,” Mrs. Morganson stated. It seemed like she was answering a question for once. Mrs. Morganson really didn’t like questions all that much. I think it was due to the fact that she rarely knew the answers. She always, and I mean as-the-clock-tics always, read straight from the catechism, from lesson books, and sometimes pamphlets. That made me wonder if she volunteered to teach CCD for her own sake, since she appeared to know less then the rest of us combined.

“Yes, a convent in Ambridge. They are Franciscan sisters, and they run a school for girls.” She sounded fairly confident, even though she recalled the information from her very own brain.

Ah, and there it was. She reached down to a shelf hidden in her podium—a pamphlet. “If anyone is interested, you can read about them.” She flipped the pamphlet into the air and then slapped it onto Johnny Primivera’s desk.

Mrs. Morganson’s voice provoked the internal quake I got when I heard nails on a chalk board. Her nails even did that screech on the board sometimes. Not on purpose—her nails were just so long and thick that when she used a worn down chalk, they dragged along beside her script. I guess she never noticed, even though I would have thought it would feel like driving with the emergency brake on.

That sound provoked in me stomach-turning horror. Her voice sounded like that too. Loud with screechy peaks and tenebrous warbles. I found it both impossible to listen to her and impossible to ignore her.

Charlotte sat in front of me, straight-backed and attentive. Her white short-sleeved blouse had sweat stains at the base of the neck and under her armpits. A tear the length of a pin raveled down her right shoulder-blade. Light blue thread criss-crossed over it, fashioning a string of three stars. That snag happened recently, I supposed, since I hadn’t noticed any stars last week.

Charlotte twisted around and set the holy pamphlet on my desk. A smirk crept up her cheeks and her right eye winked. Charlotte made this face a lot. Her eyes seemed to know something that I didn’t know. It always made me shiver a little.

I picked up the blue pamphlet.

“School Sisters of St. Francis,” I read. Under the title, a black-and-white picture of seven solemn-faced nuns spread to the edges of the page. Four sat, and three stood behind them, all wearing robes and white collars and black hoods. I imagined them gardening together. St. Francis liked to garden. He liked to speak to the animals. I supposed that they most likely did that too.

Mrs. Morganson’s rubber-soled shoes clonked down the cement aisle. She stopped beside me and snapped a ruler on the head of Mugga’s little brother. It didn’t break, but I’m sure it stung like hell. Mugga’s little brother, otherwise known as Hog, shot up in his seat. Charlotte jumped. Mrs. Morganson proceeded to screech at him and about him for the final six and a half minutes of class. At one point I saw a tear trickle down Char’s face. I rarely saw Char cry, but when she did it likely had to do with someone getting hit. Contrary to Char, I suppressed a smirk. I figured Hog deserved it. I’m sure he, being Mugga’s little brother and all, was used to that kind of thing. He lived in, like, constant penance for his family’s doomed bloodline.

Mugga was kind of a hoodlum, similar and dissimilar to most of the damned Dagoes, who never looked like he was up to anything good. I would see him walking down the alley behind our house. Grandma saw him once. After peering out the window over the stove at him, she slid the curtains closed. One of them got stuck on the rod, so she got on her tip-toes to reach it. As she yanked, her head shifted back-and-forth, back-and-forth while she clicked her tongue. I couldn’t be sure if she disapproved of Mugga or the curtain.

Mrs. Morganson clearly disapproved of Hog. She’d constructed some reason to reprimand him every Sunday since the fourth grade, which is when she started to teach our CCD class. Her badgering didn’t end until we got our confirmation and were released from our screech-permeated incarceration.

I tried not to ignore to Mrs. Morg. Charlotte on the other hand watched closely. Another tear dribbled from her eye as she watched Hog get screamed at and hit for the hundredth time. Yet he looked unfazed by the whole shebang.

I flipped open the pamphlet. There were more pictures inside—some of girls in classrooms all dressed in uniform, one of a sister resting her hand on a baby’s head, but the last picture showed a nun looking down. A smile beamed across her face, and her hands lay clasped, resting on her chest. A string of beads trickled down the back of her hand. The rosary seemed to have been in mid-swing when the picture flashed. I wondered if she was moving into the frame or out of it.

“You are all dismissed,” Mrs. Morganson stated. She marched her rubber-soled shoes up to the front of the room.

Char and I got out the door first. We sprung down the dusty stairs out onto the pavement.

“Ah, there’s my mum.” She nodded, eyes fixed on a group of women across the street.

Mrs. Pasika stuck out like a sore thumb. Her straight blonde hair was a dead give away that she wasn’t Italian.

“You working tomorrow?” Char asked.

“Yea. Just a little in the morning. Popi wants to teach me to click.”

She laughed. “What does that even mean?”

I sneered. “It’s cutting out the uppers for a shoe. You know—the part that goes around the top of your foot.”

“Okay, well . . .” Her downcast eyes lingered and then swung up into a sudden and probably false joy. “That sounds great!”

“It’s really important, you know.” I always hated when people took shoemaking lightly. That’s who we were, the Luces, the shoemakers. “It’s almost, like, more important than the sole. I pulled up my Mary Jane whacked the bottom. No body wears a shoe that doesn’t actually fit the shape of their foot.”

She nodded. “Oh, okay. Yeah, you’re right.” I knew she cared nothing for shoes. But she always treated whatever I said with an exaggerated seriousness that was never mocking.

We mindlessly jay-walked in silence. Cars never drove through there on Sundays, because it’d be stupid. Parishioners strolled freely from one side to the other all morning. The pattering feet seemed to make the cracked, well-run, downtown streets mumble.

“Can you still ride the line tomorrow afternoon?”

The line. That’s what we called our routine bike route around the west side. We made it at least once a week during the school year—Saturdays. But in the summer we biked it every day after lunch. It was just the thing we did, something to get us out of our houses. And riding the line didn’t require much thinking or planning, which was nice.

“Well, yes, of course!” I answered. “I’ll give you a ring, when I finish up. You’ll be home right?”

She nodded. “Sounds good. I’ve got a dance class in the morning, but after that I’ll just be at the house.”

“No gardening with Auntie then?”

“Good grief! No.” Auntie was obsessed with “mending the yard” and “tending the garden,” which wasn’t all that bad, but her incessant chatter and barrage of questions could tick-off even the noble-hearted Char—which I loved to point out.

We laughed. Charlotte hugged me. We parted ways to our respective surnames.

Angelo, my good brother, stood at the doors of the church, vigorously flapping to flag me down. He had been training quite a lot for the Bholvard Invitational Tri-County Boxing tournament, only three weeks away. His rigid movement resembled that of Frankenstein’s monster. To beat people up, you have to get beat up.

Once we made eye contact, he pivoted and hobbled into the sanctuary. After prancing up the stairs, two at a time, I touched the holy water and crossed myself—with integrity. After about six months without a priest, we finally had Father Piccolo, which assuaged my fear of this whole church thing being a big hoax. But we didn’t have any nuns, yet. The Mary statue up in the right corner of the sanctuary was the lone, stone, holy mother I could look to in that church. Mrs. Morganson told us that after Vatican II, many nuns left the vocation. I didn’t hear why, exactly, only that Vatican II meant something for them. She seemed convinced that that is why we don’t see many nuns anymore. But, of course, this came from Mrs. Morg’s mouth—words I always took with a spoonful of salt.

The altar boys and Father Piccolo got into formation in the vestibule. I scurried on my toes down the aisle, lest I be caught in the middle of the action. They ushered in the cross and the holy book.

Grandma reached out and yanked my arm, plunging me involuntarily into the pew. The organ blasted out. Throughout the whole stone structure, the grand pipe choir resonated. The high pitches hurt my ears. Grandma told me it was because I had real good hearing, but it still wasn’t okay to plug my ears. I learned to endure the shrill peaks of the songs by shutting my eyes and feeling my body rumble with the low, thundering booms.

As much as I actually did try to pay attention, the Ambridge convent floated around my mind for the entirety of Mass. I thought I’d really love to go to that school. The pamphlet said that the girls lived there nine months out of the year while they studied and trained with the sisters. I wondered why Dad hadn’t sent me there after Mom went away. I kind of wished he had. I mean, not that Grandma wasn’t good company and all, or that Mahoning was a bad school, for the most part. I just thought that would have been better for me, and maybe for Angelo and Nicky too.

I can’t count how many times random people said how much I looked like Mom and acted like Mom and rode a bike like Mom and talked about the trees like Mom. She’s the one that made me a pure pathetic. Even at that age, I knew I engendered a big pain in the you-know-what for Angelo and Nicky—a constant reminder of her, a remainder of someone who once loved them. I was only five when she went away, but Nicky and Angelo were old enough to remember her more. The way I understood it—they got to have a good memory of her, but I only had myself. And I think she would have been a good memory for them, except my presence wouldn’t allow it. I mean, I wandered around slightly reviving her all the time, but never succeeding. She couldn’t be a person in the past or the present.

I knew there was some reason Dad kept me around, though. Figured he just couldn’t lose two people at once. Or maybe it was because I rolled cigarettes the best.

Dad shifted the station-wagon into park, and we filed out the back left door. The right door got damaged in a wreck. It still worked, but it didn’t work well enough for us to consider it a commodity.

Nobody talked. We all just walked up the path, up the stairs and into the house. I pranced past Grandma up the inside stairs to change my clothes. I never did like dressing up that much—preferred a solid pair of shorts, a tank-top, and saddle shoes, unless I was going into the woods. Then I’d ditch the saddles for some old pair of clunkers that squeezed my toes too tight, a pain I readily endured. I’d do just about anything to keep Grandma from giving me the silent treatment.

I snatched Grandma’s Swinger from her bed table and hopped down the stairs. Grandma finally let me have a handle on the cherished camera of hers—literally the only thing I ever heard her ask for. She got it a year back, so she could “record our memories.” She really wanted this new-fangled contraption—so she could ruthlessly photograph all of us. But after her health went down hill, she couldn’t get out much, which bent her to allow me to take out the thing as long as I promised to come back with records of the places she would never get to go to anymore.

Grandma already had the water boiling for spaghetti. Sunday dinner was at 3:00 p.m., so I had several hours to just fiddle around. I swirled past Grandma as fast as I could, lest she force me into helping her. I opened the back door and, lo and behold, there was Mugga, his back to me, sitting on the step.

He rotated his head and grinned, contorting his mouth to keep a cigarette from falling out. “Hey Rosie!”

While trying to decide if I was going to go back in or just get on my bike and out of there as fast as I could, I just stared at him.

“Where’re your brothers?” He looked back to the ground.

“Inside. I dunno what they’re doin’” I skimmed past him and straddled my bike.

He snuffed out a couple of breathy laughs. “Maybe you outta go’n check on’em. Tell’m I’m back here waitin’.”

“You can knock on the door, ya know,”

“Rather not,” he stated, bluntly. There was a pause. He reached back and knocked two knocks on the door. His eyes glared at me.

I cycled away, around the shrubs and onto Cascade. And then something odd interrupted my journey. Just as after I rounded the corner, a whisper came from behind me, “Rosie.” I spun around. No one. So I proceeded ahead.

“Rosie!” The whisper came again.

This time I saw a little shrub shivering. A white plump hand shot out. “Help me outa’ere.”

I shifted my eyes from side to side. No one else was around except Mr. Primivera rocking on his porch a few houses down. My bike clanked down onto the cement. I grabbed hold of the hand and yanked.

“Ah!” I grabbed ahold of his forearm with both hands, and using my entire one-hundred and five pounds of flesh and bones, I broke a short rather portly human out through the branches.

“Hog! What the heck you doin’ in the Lombardo’s shrubs?” I demanded.

“Listen here, Rosie,” he whispered. He pulled me down, close to his face. “Been followin’ Mugga. He’d been goin’ house to house all mornin’ and then started up again after mass.”

“So, what’s it to you?”

“Don’t know, yet. He’s been talkin’ to all his friends, but none’a dem been comin’ out with’m.”

I didn’t know Hog all that well, only from school and CCD. He and I were in the same grade and had ended up in the same class the previous year—the “B” class. Char was in the “A” class, the one with all the smart stuffs. But, me and Hog, we weren’t good enough. Actually I was surprised to see Hog even in the “B” class. He always had a kind of dumb look about him, not to mention he slept in class all the time, but regardless, when he was awake, he took a liking to talking to me. Couldn’t say I really liked him all that much, but then again I barely knew him.

Hog’s family was big time in the “biz” as he called it. They were real “big time.” I could tell Hog wasn’t lying, because on my way to Char’s I’d biked past his house on Baker Street—the less steep, though rather lack-luster route up Union hill. And Hog’s dad always had the latest cars. I mean he, like, changed out cars two, sometimes three, times a year.

“Listen here, Rosie,” Hog still whispered, “I gotta feelin’ Mugga’s up to no good.”

“Mugga’s always up to no good, dummy.”

He tilted his square head to the side and glared his puppy eyes at me.

“Go home, you spud.” I swiveled and kept on down Cascade.

I only walked my bike about three yards before hearing short-gaited pattering feet rush up behind me. “Rose, listen here.”

“Damn it, Hog. Get outa here and stop snooping around my house.”

“I’m on’verge of a real breakthrough, ya see. I think Mugga’s turnin’ up a new business, been goin’ around tryin’ to employ people. Been’ fixin’ up dis garage by r’house, bought a dump truck and all. Been haulin’ wood chips and all that for the past week.”

“Oh man, well, that’s re-e-e-ally something, Hog.” I pointed. “Did’at shrub tell ya all that?” I swiveled my eyes forward. “I got to get to the shoe shop. Popi’s expecting me to take inventory.”

“All right, Rose, all right. I know ur’ lyin’ cuz its Sunday, and ya just wan’me outa ya hair. Just know ’dis ol’Moon, he came over two nights ago. Gave Mugga a real hard time and ripped his crucifix right off’is neck.” Hog patted two hard thuds on my back and raised his eyebrows initiating a cunning wide-eyed gaze.

Unimpressed, I stared at him. “What’s that got to do with me?”

Hog wrapped his arm around my back and leaned close. “I seen ya, Rose.” His eyebrows wiggled up and down. “Eye’n up that very same gold chain . . . at the reunion.”

“What’r ya talkin’ about Hog?” My eyes darted back and forth between his left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye, left eye. The smell of pie. The baby blue dress. The flicker of sunlight. To tell you the truth, I should have just asked Hog right then, who those guys were and what they were up to, but for some reason I found it necessary to lie.

“I seen ya. And, you know what I’m talkin’ about. You even asked ur Grandma ‘bout the crucifix. I seen ya point at it.”

“I don’t care about the chain,” I lied.

“Yea, well. I’m goin’ down to the Joint to check on the location of that very chain.” And with that, he stomped his way across the street and down the next alleyway.

The wind picked up. It felt like a nighttime breeze, though it was awfully early for that. But nighttime breeze or not, the way it weaseled through my hair relaxed me. I mean that’s the only sane reason I can come up with to explain why I followed him down that alley.