9.9 / September 2014

Communion

Here’s a story: he goes out to play soccer with a bunch of boys. Three from his grade, the rest from other grades. The boys are late returning, and the teacher locks them out. This is when hitting a kid with a slat of wood ten times in the ass is no thing. And the Brothers (or was it a priest, that time, in Ecuador?) use the cords of their robes, which burn like crazy, though he won’t know this until he’s 14, when he truly thinks he’s invincible, and doesn’t anticipate how a rope will feel compared with the gentle give of wood against his backside.

But this day he’s 12, and he’s worried about what the teacher will say, because his father’s a cop and easy to get a hold of on his radio and he uses a leather belt. And after that there’s his mother–he covers his eyes with his hand, as if to block out the image–forget about it. Sixty lashes at least. The other boys nod sympathetically. The youngest reaches his arms back and crosses his hands over his butt, a sort of reverse of the protective stance he held earlier during the game that morning, while the other team took a free kick.

None of this, of course, has stopped any of them from pulling the girls’ hair or throwing pencils or losing track of time and getting locked out of school. He looks at the younger one standing there with his hands behind him and gives him a little shove. Everyone grows alert, awaiting the silent war. The boy drops his hands and looks back at him, and then they are all shoving and wrestling (carefully, quietly, so as not to attract attention, holding in their breath) and distracting him from his thoughts. The immediacy of the situation wanes. His father does not arrive. He relaxes, the wrestling over, rolls his foot over the soccer ball. They all stop and pant for a moment. There is still that space–the one in the corner of his brain–and as long as he can see it, he’s not quite safe.



So he and the other boys sneak behind the school, because what else is there to do? One kid pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He passes them around, and now this is a new thing, a new distraction, a new now they are all in together. The windows above their heads emit sounds of long division as they crouch down and pull out the matches, but what they don’t think about is the smoke, and it rises, up past the window and the eyes of two girls in his class, who lean forward to catch sight of the boys and their cigarettes. He sees the girls, and they see him, and he thinks of the belt. There’s a gap in the wall. The cigarette needs to be gotten rid of, where no one can see, and he’s not thinking that the smoke will linger on his clothes or his fingers as evidence or that the girls will rat him and the other boys out, or even that there are five boys standing there with cigarettes in their hands, five boys to point fingers and cut deals and send lashes at each other, unless they can secure a pact. He can only think of the white cylinder in between his thumb and forefinger, curling smoke up past the girls’ eyes that hold onto everything they see, and he sees the gap in the wall and flicks the cigarette in, a goal on the first try (score!).



The gap in the wall is a nesting place for all sorts of things. Wrappers, report cards, other butts of other cigarettes. A lizard scuttles out at his feet. Inside, the red edge of his cigarette curls the thin edge of a newspaper, and up it goes. Now the smoke escapes the gap in blooms, up beyond the window and into the sky. He tries to catch it with his hands. He thrusts his fingers into the gap and his arm goes in far– deeper below the wall, into a shallow gutter that has caught years of papers and bad deeds. The heat singes his fingers. He is amazed at how fast it is, how hungry the fire is, how much there is to consume. Nothing he does tempers the spread of its heat. When he withdraws his hand, a blister stripes his palm, the track of it following his lifeline.

The boys yank at his collar, and he hears yelling, cries of the girls inside. The teacher’s voice, herding them, and the sounds of feet running for the door. His feet move before he can think further about hesitating, before he can think about what those girls know. He is simply running, tearing through the street, away from the smoke and flame.



He knows: the smell of burning, the heat, the metallic taste of blood in his mouth when he bit his tongue, hard, to keep the fear out, to keep from crying. The cops come, rounding up the boys from where they’ve gathered outside a bodega, just the three from his grade left, plus the smaller boy, drinking coke from a bottle, holding it aloft between dirty fingernails in-between swigs. The others have gone home to risk their punishment. It doesn’t look good.

The cops drag them back to the school and point. They know. They intimate that knowledge is enough. Their belts are thick around their waists. The boys say they ran when they saw the flames, which is true; they say they ran to get help, which is not. The youngest is a great storyteller, a wizard, it seems, at covering his own ass. He speaks of crying out to the teacher, of hearing the teacher say, “Run!” Of getting lost, taking a wrong turn.

How could you take a wrong turn? asks the police officer. You’ve lived here all your life.

I’ve never been to the police station, he says, innocently. And all that smoke. It confused me.

The officer looks away from the face of this lie, and pencils a note on his pad.



In fact, everyone has been to the police station. They all knew its location by the time they could pickpocket. They knew which way to turn so as not to raise suspicion, where the patrols were, how to duck between buildings in alleyways and behind the laundry hanging from windows, how to step lightly so as not to leave tracks. Especially because of his father, who is legend for his interrogation tactics, particularly of juveniles. He shows no mercy. Not a boy has been in there and not come out with tears in his eyes. They don’t swap war tales of confession, of the methods that made them give up their friends; it’s only salt in the wound. The shame they share is enough to bond them together.

His father is not there today. This is a bigger case, a possible arson. His father deals with petty criminals. As if they suspect some attempt at upward mobility, the cops turn from the younger boy to him. How old is he? What TV does he watch? Do they smoke cigarettes in those TV shows? Does he want to be a police officer like his father? Maybe a detective? No? What then? This one’s a lawyer, I bet. Does he have respect for his father? For his family? Is he trying to prove he’s a man?

There’s no proof. The teacher’s not talking, perhaps worried he’ll be held at fault for locking the boys out. It’s better to let suspicion hover. It’s better not to clear the air. The cops are frustrated, loosening their belts. Their handcuffs stay empty, their holsters snapped closed. No one goes to jail.

But on the way home, as he drags his feet through the dirt, those girls’ voices hover behind him.

We saw you! one calls.

We know what you did!

He turns, and feels the cinch of fear around his chest.



The girls are swift in their negotiations. They see an opening, a quick buck to be made. He and the other boys are to pay them their daily allowance. Even the little one. Nevermind who notices. Nevermind what they’ll do with it.

What, you want your own cigarettes? he asks. We can get you those.

The girls laugh. You think we don’t already know that? We would just take them from you if we wanted them, they say. Plus your money.

But what are they going to do with so much money? These, the girls whose hair he has pulled, the girls he tormented in class. He asks them about it, curious.

Use your imagination, they say, knowing he won’t. Knowing he finds ways-pulling hair, smoking cigarettes-to distract him from that very thing.

They have found their revenge.

He fails to hide the flush that floods his cheeks.



But what happened? I ask.

You laugh. This is only an anecdote, a tale to pass the time. It’s dawn on a Saturday. We’re on the way to the airport. The city hunkers down, not believing the sky’s rays of pink. It has been such a long winter that none of us feel like believing in anything. Two days ago a fire consumed a New Jersey forest, and the smoke hovered over the low buildings of Brooklyn as though coaxing her back to sleep. I was awake, awake and remembering my own childhood, gazing out a car window at a brushfire along the I-5 freeway, the wily dancing light of flame on a tumbleweed.

I still see those girls, you say. They threaten to tell the teacher whenever I go home.

You hold up a finger and shake it, to demonstrate. I imagine pigtails and glasses, although maybe, with all the extortion, they can afford more stylish haircuts.

How long did you pay them? I ask.

For a whole month.

A month! How’d you get them to stop?

One day, I told them enough. I said I’d tell the teacher and the cops they knew all along and said nothing.

And that worked, huh?

Yup. Nobody had to pay them anymore after that.

Did your parents know?

You blow out a long breath, as though I’ve named a ghost, and shake your head.
Nooooooo.

So you avoided trouble after that, I say, feeling as though I know too much now, as though the plastic slat between our seats is the confessional, and this story has defined our roles in it. I want to be on more even ground.

Hah! I still got into loads of trouble, you say. Nothing really bad. Not like kids today, with their video games, all the shooting people. I don’t get it.

No, I say.

But those girls. You laugh again. It was so crazy. They knew and they never told.



And now I know. I authored nothing, offered nothing of my own. Your hands were full of stories as they coaxed your black SUV along the highway. You said you went to your brother’s in Pennsylvania, last week, awoke early in the morning, and were surprised when a man awake on the road greeted you. No one does that anymore, you said. Not in New York. Everywhere, I said, tucking my phone in my pocket.

The terminal at Kennedy appeared through the windshield. We wished each other well, and I was surprised at how happy I was for the company. And yet.

Why did I not offer you my story? I felt it rise up in me, and I swallowed it, held it down, though it billowed and spread across my thoughts like smoke. I cannot withstand those words in my mouth.

Teach me. I hold the heat of my own shame.


Elisabeth Hamilton received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has been published in Five Chapters and Necessary Fiction. Currently, she is at work on a novel about California, where she grew up. Find her on the twitter at ouibet.
9.9 / September 2014

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