Bones of a Saint Page 5

  The way he says it, I can’t figure if he’s making fun of me or not. The sun is creeping down to the hills beyond the barn, darkening to Foxy Roxy purple. I’ve stayed too long.

  “Indulge me.” His eyes look like something you’d see peeking over a black cape, like he can hypnotize me.

  I’m feeling a buzz from the wine. After what I done to his house, maybe I owe him one, and then I’ll be free. Being here with this old man and all his fancy stuff, and having this whole house to himself, my story comes down to the Silverstream Rocket.

  Then the story tumbles out and I’m just sitting there listening along, too. Like he reached his claws inside me and ripped out some plug.

  The Tale of the Silverstream Rocket

  and How I Toed the Line

  So, there was this kid in my class at Our Lady’s Grammar, Willy Schmidt, who was almost two years older than me ’cause his parents held him back a year so he’d be jumbo for football. I mean, he would’ve been the biggest kid even in the fifth grade, where he belonged. This one lunch he was jumping around in front of my face and yelling, “There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do!”

  Well, it did sort of fit us. We live in a rounded, silver trailer with portholes like on a spaceship. It’s called a Silverstream Rocket, and it’s about the best trailer money can buy, even if ours is like a million years old. My mom sleeps in a room at the end of the trailer, like what would be the heel if it was a for real shoe. The sibs sleep at the other end like wannabe toes. There’s this room built along the side that’s even paneled and carpeted. I sleep there, being the man of the house, only I let Charley sleep there, too.

  Anyway, that creep just kept repeating “Old Lady in the Shoe” like he was chanting Hail Marys. You know how a catchy tune can rattle around in your head over and over. And there ain’t no escaping something in your head.

  So that night after dinner, I put down the sibs and headed over to Mr. Sanders’s trailer for advice. Mr. Sanders was the smartest drunk I’d ever known. He was the smartest anything I’d ever known. But no one else knew how smart he was ’cause no one else ever came near him. Once you got used to the smell, though, it was worth going there just for his stories. Like the one about this horny rooster. Or the one about this couple that do it up in a tree. Or this one about these dudes who kill each other for this gold under a tree. He had a lot of those Canterbury stories, which is an old book if you didn’t know.

  Mr. Sanders’s trailer was on a concrete slab, not cinder blocks like ours. He had this sofa with the stuffing half gone that sat right out on the front of the slab like it was a patio. He was always sitting out there with Jack Daniels, his dog. He’d also have a bottle of the real thing. There was a sign on the side of the trailer over the sofa that he’d made that said youre hooste. It wasn’t even spelled wrong ’cause that was older English. It was supposed to mean “Your Host.” I guess that was because he personally owned Canterbury Trailer Park all himself.

  I sat on this beach chair he always got out ’specially for me. I told him all about that big fourth grader and the old lady who lived in the shoe. He just snorted, which was how he laughed. He said something like, “Sorry, but there is a humorous note to it.”

  I remember saying, “The humorous note is gonna be my fist in that creep’s face.”

  “Violence is not always the answer,” he said. Before he was a drunk, Mr. Sanders had worked with migrants for the government, something to do with housing. He’d even known that César Chávez guy. That’s all got something to do with why he bought that old trailer park. I guess he planned for that place to be something special, like a human place for them to live. Of course, it never worked that way. Well, then he said, “We’re all pilgrims. Even the bullies. All pilgrims.”

  So the next day at lunch that fourth-grade pilgrim was back in my face again. He just kept at it. “There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.” There was like an echo behind him when a couple other guys repeated it. He just kept jumping around and around and singing it over and over. And pretty soon there were five, six, seven echoes laughing and repeating it behind him. That’s when I figured it was time to do something about it right now or else it was gonna stick with me like forever.

  I got up real slick and rammed my fist up into his face. You gotta sock high when you go for the face ’cause you don’t want to split no knuckles on teeth. I had to make that first punch last ’cause any extra punches were gonna be his. He just stood there with his mouth still going only no words coming out, like some big fish. Then the gusher poured out of his nose and he ran home.

  I went back to class like it was no big deal. Everyone was just sitting real quiet while Father Speckler did that story about Daniel in the lion’s den. They were all watching me and waiting for the summons from Mother Catherine.

  And it came.

  Mother Catherine was as big as any nun you’d ever wanna see. Man, she was bigger than any nun you’d ever wanna see. If you were lucky, she’d start in with this gurgle down in her throat, and that’d build into this foghorn yell that would rattle the wood-frame windows. She’d come so close she’d almost smother you with her chest. You were lucky if you got the foghorn, ’cause that meant she wasn’t mad enough to give you no Thunder. She gave swats that rattled all the way up in your teeth.

  You always knew Thunder was coming when she started talking to Sister Phyllis instead of you. Things like, “I can’t imagine, Sister, what possessed this child to do such a thing.” That meant she was so POed she couldn’t trust herself not to take the Lord’s name, or worse.

  Sister Phyllis was like Mother Catherine’s exact opposite. She had this chirpy sparrow voice that she hardly ever used. They were always together. Always. They even had this same smell. They always smelled like maple syrup. Don’t know why. They just did.

  “Sister Phyllis,” Mother Catherine said, “once again this young man is fast-breaking away from the Lord.”

  Then she turned to me and said the only thing she ever said straight at a kid when she was so POed: “Toe the line, buster.”

  I didn’t say nothing. I just put my toes on the red line painted on the floor, and I bent over, grabbing the foot of Jesus on the crucifix for balance. Jesus’s feet were worn smooth from kids grabbing hold. I stared under my armpit at her.

  She just brought old Thunder straight back behind her ear, swung level, never taking her eyes off the ball, so to speak, with a follow-through that lifted me clear off my feet.

  She was batting a thousand for the Lord, like she said.

  It wasn’t hard, not crying. I just aimed at the door and started walking.

  “RJ.”

  I stopped at the door but didn’t look back.

  “We love you, you know that.” But it was Sister Phyllis that said that.

  I just nodded.

  “Sure, he knows that, Sister. Now listen up,” she said straight at me. “You’re playing with four fouls, buster. The next one and you’re out.”

  Well, I should have paid her more attention.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Figment

  I’m marching home from Leguin’s, hep-two-three, along the river bottom. Cars and trucks are flying along the freeway less than a mile away. But I’m in a whole other world down here, thinking about today with the old man. It’s cool how he never butts into the tale, instead lets me tell it to the end. If there is an end. It takes a good listener to make a story whole, and he has a deep-down way of listening.

  A yellow moon floats behind raggedy old eucalyptus trees. It’s so dark in here, like that moonlight is being sucked up by the mud that’s supposed to be the Salinas. A couple more weeks of dry and it won’t even be mud, it’ll just be all cracked like that old man’s face.

  Then I see her. Even in that weird light, she looks lik
e no more than a darker shadow against the trees. Her back is to me, and I can’t see her purple toenails buried in the mud, but I know it’s Roxanne.

  “Foxy . . . Roxy?” I try to say it sort of funny, but my voice cracks.

  She turns and stares at me.

  “It took you long enough,” she says. “Jee-sus, is that blood? He hurt you?”

  “It ain’t nothing like that . . . What do you know about he?”

  A sadness seeps up from way deep inside of her, like she’s a part of that moonlight and the mud and the trees, and she don’t answer me. Maybe it’s not really her. Just a figment of my imagination.

  “The Blackjacks are just up the road,” she says.

  “What do you know about them?”

  “There’s no escaping them.”

  “Come with me,” I say. “We’ll go back to the old man’s and we can . . .”

  “Listen to me. Don’t you go back there. Ever. No matter what the Blackjacks might do. Don’t go back to that cellar. Ever.”

  “Man, it was you that locked me in there in the first place.”

  “It ain’t the same now.”

  Then she turns and climbs up the ravine, back the way I came. Back toward Leguin’s. Like a figment lost in my imagination.

  Guys used to play army down here, pow-powing and screaming and laughing. Then one day Roxanne had come charging down the bank, ambushing us like some enemy platoon. How can you play these games, she had screamed at me, after what the war did to your own father? The other boys had scattered and it had just been the two of us.

  You don’t know nothing, I had said. My dad was a war hero and then he came home and he met my mom and they had me and then he died.

  “You don’t know nothing,” I say to the trees, feeling like I just been ambushed all over again. It’s dark, but I know that river bottom, so it’s no big deal. What would my dorky ten-year-old self think if he saw me coming at him all covered in this for real blood? He wouldn’t even recognize me.

  A song drifts out of the trees: Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’ . . .

  I reach the bend and claw my way up the riverbank right smack into blinding headlights. Through my fingers I see two guys leaning against one of those old Chevy pickups with the big rounded fenders.

  Blackjacks.

  Wolfman’s voice crackles out of the truck radio: That’s the Steve Miller Band, still on the charts.

  The Ace didn’t send flunkies like Buns Bernie this time. Two big dudes with long greasy hair tied in bandanas. These are Jokers. Somewhere there’s some kid safe in bed listening to that same station. I could dodge these creeps, but what’s the point? They’d get me sooner or later.

  “What’s up?”

  The Chevy is a primer gray that matches the taller guy’s hair. Maybe they stole the truck and think if they repaint it no one will finger it.

  “Get a load of this kid. What a mess.” The gray-haired guy reaches in and punches off the radio, and then he lopes around me.

  “I’d do a cherry red,” I say. “With black pinstriping. Maybe some chrome running boards and tail pipes. Glass pack, for sure.”

  “Huh?” the other guy says. It hits me now that I’ve seen this guy from way back.

  “This truck you stole. Maybe you don’t want to bring attention on it. But no point stealing it if it ain’t gonna be cherry. And don’t you think sometimes the best disguise is right there in plain sight?”

  It’s his hair that threw me off. How does a twenty-year-old get gray hair?

  “Hey, you’re Brent Keating,” I say.

  “Shut up.”

  “You used to drive with your dad in his tow truck.” Maybe if I can get him to see me, really see me, I might get out of this. “You came to our place a couple times to jump-start my mom’s car.”

  “That piece-of-shit station wagon.” I see by the twist of his face that I’ve just made things worse, maybe ’cause it reminds him that his dad is in prison now for jacking car parts.

  “Get a load of all that pig’s blood.” The blond guy circles me in the opposite direction. I don’t know him by name, but he’s one of those older creeps I avoided in school.

  “What were you doing at the old man’s?” Brent asks.

  “Cleaning up. He caught me.”

  “That’s what the Ace figured.” Their circle closes around me. “You didn’t say nothing about the Blackjacks, did you?”

  “No. He never asked.”

  “How can we be sure?” He thumps a fingernail against his teeth, pretending to think.

  “I . . .”

  “Shut up!” He slams me against the hood of the truck, needles shooting through my brain, my face against the warm metal. “Just listen. And don’t screw up this time. Ace wants you to steal something from that old creep. Something valuable. One of those antiques he’s got.”

  He slams me again, like that’ll help me remember.

  “Now pay close attention, just like your life depended on it. You’re gonna steal something real valuable from that old man’s house and you’re gonna bring it to Camp Roberts. To those deserted barracks. Now for the good part. Just so you know we’re serious.”

  Then they start pounding on me. Maybe it’s this pain of each thud on flesh and bone that makes me forget, but they never say when. Never.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Double Cross

  I’m sitting on my sofa bed in the room that Charley’s uncle built that runs the length of the trailer, staring through the screen at my sister Amy. She stands in the field behind Canterbury wearing her pleated uniform skirt even though school is out for the summer. Yellow ribbons tie her pigtails. The air reeks of baked dirt and dead weeds. She rocks on her heels with her hands behind her back as she watches her cat, Peabody, torturing some dying creature. It is Amy’s favorite game.

  That song drifts from somewhere across the trailer park and brings me back to the other night: Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future . . .

  The Blackjacks have upped the game. But they never said when I have to deliver. This not knowing when, it’s the worst. Charley bounces onto my couch, jolting my back. I can’t hardly keep track of the days since the beating, but the deep, purpled pain that is now dulling into soreness is the truest measure of time. They could of done worse, but they want me around.

  Slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ . . .

  Mr. Sanders, with his Canterbury Tales, he taught me about pilgrims that lived in a past that went back hundreds and hundreds of years. And Father Speckler, with his New Testament, he preached about a future that won’t come until forever and ever, amen. Neither way does me any good now, against the Blackjacks. All I can do is live in my own here and now.

  “Mom is gonna be mad for what you done with StevieandSuzy.” That’s about as long a speech as Charley ever makes.

  He’s right. Why do I do stupid stuff like I did with the twins today? I just get these ideas. What Mom calls bugs up my butt.

  “Go check on Peanut and see if she’s awake yet,” I say.

  I hear the engine of Mom’s old station wagon, shuddering and turning over a couple times before it finally stops. She must be filling it with low octane, which means she is having trouble making ends meet again.

  “I picked up the twins from practice.” She’s so big she blocks out the sun as she stands at the screen door. She folds her arms across her white waitress blouse, and her eyes drill through me. “You have anything to say for yourself?”

  I stay seated with my left side away from her even though she’s already seen the bruises. She made one big fuss, which is her way, and then dropped the subject unless I want to bring it up, which I don’t. She’s seen me with plenty of bruises before from fights or other stupid stuff. No way I want the Blackjacks and my family in the same world. No freaking way.

  The
twins peek from behind her. Suzy wears Stevie’s peewee baseball uniform, and it is dirty like it never is when he wears it. The cap hides her ponytail.

  “How did ‘Stevie’ do?” I ask Suzy.

  “He got a double,” she says.

  “Wow, his first hit of the season, and it’s for extra bases.”

  Stevie smiles just as proud as if he’d made the hit himself.

  “StevieandSuzy, go get out of those clothes.” She turns to me: “Well, kiddo?”

  “Stevie, he’s been saying all along that he don’t want to play. He hates hardball. I tried and tried to get him over it, but . . . And then there’s Suzy. She wants more than anything to play hardball, but the coach won’t let a girl on the team. And you, Mom, you’re too busy to even notice.”

  She sits on the sofa, the springs groaning, and absentmindedly grabs for the big bead necklace that isn’t there ’cause she can’t wear it at work. If she starts chewing her hair like a little girl, then I’m home free. Instead, she brushes down her skirt with her big hands, draws a breath, and lets it out real slow.

  “It don’t change the fact you did wrong.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, I’ll phone that coach tonight. He’ll change his tune.”

  “It might help if you tell him it was Suzy who crushed that double. Stevie has struck out every at bat.”

  “Help, indeed,” she mutters. “Go on, get out of here, kiddo. Go over to Manny’s and have a good time.”

  I head out through the screen door, imagining the delicious smells coming from Abuelita’s kitchen. But I won’t be going to Manny’s today. The Blackjacks expect me to steal something from that old man, and time is slipping. So I’m headed to Leguin’s place for a double cross more dangerous than anything I pulled with the twins.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Rip-Off

  I’m making a lot of noise going up Leguin’s front steps, not wanting surprises. It’s almost dark. The lights are off, but the door is open.