The Long Run Page 6

  Rags is so easygoing. After washup each night, we line up in our pajamas, and the brother on duty inspects us. If your nails are still dirty or you missed a spot behind your ears or something, most brothers thump you on the head or give you a whack and send you back to the sink. Or worse, they grab a facecloth and scrub you till it hurts. Not Rags. “Oops,” Rags says, looking over the top of his rimless glasses. “I think I see a potato in Oberstein’s ear. Or is that a carrot the chubby cherub’s growing in there?” Which makes us all giggle like crazy. And after night prayers, Rags always tells us a story. Usually he makes one up about Chop-Chops, a cat with a missing leg, who has nine lives and who’s full of mischief. The stories make us laugh and they make us cry. Chop-Chops prowls around the Bronx, getting in and out of trouble. Once, he had a really rich owner who used to beat him. Another time, he had a really poor owner who used to give him his supper. Both times, Chop-Chops ran away. We hate it when Chop-Chops gets to his last life. We beg Rags to bring him back with another nine lives. And he always does. That’s the difference between Rags and most of the other brothers. Rags does what a real brother would do. We trust him an awful lot. Although we got suspicious when he asked if we knew anything about the wine missing from the sacristy. “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” he said. That’s an expression he uses all the time. Tell the truth and shame the devil.

  “If I find out anything about that, I’m going straight to Brother McMurtry right away,” Oberstein said, and we all nodded.

  “That’s good. I’m glad to hear that,” Rags sighed. It was like the thought of us getting caught stealing was painful for him. Anyhow, we knew Oberstein had thrown him off our trail.

  Oberstein stares at the car and says dolefully, “The monkeys have come to visit the zoo.” And I know he’s thinking of his mother and little Jack. Today, the few cars that pass come almost to a full stop to examine our little group, shivering and staring intently across Elizabeth Avenue, waiting for the figure of Shorty Richardson to appear.

  Bug is driving everyone nuts, whining that Shorty will never make it.

  “Looks like rain. It’s clouding over. That’ll slow him down,” Bug whines.

  Even Blackie’s getting pissed off with Bug. Blackie hates anyone being negative. At precisely quarter to six, Blackie directs Murphy to prepare to head to the gymnasium and get ready to con Rags. It is ten to six exactly when Ryan yells, “There he is! There he is!” We climb the chain-link fence but can see no one. Ryan yells that he’s at the lower gate, that he’s coming up Kenna’s Hill. We all look, and there he is, the green-and-white sweater draped over his scrawny body, sleeves flapping. He looks like a scarecrow in a wind storm.

  Loud cheers! Everyone races to him, slapping and hugging him. Abe kisses him and says he loves him over and over. Shorty takes off the sweater and gives it to his brother. “I told you I could do it,” he whispers.

  Abe starts to cry and laugh at the same time, hugs Shorty and says, “Jesus, I couldn’t ask for a better brother.”

  Blackie looks at his watch. “Kenna’s Hill’s a longer route. Better than a ten-minute mile,” he says. “Fantastic run! Helluva run.” His beady eyes are dancing.

  As everyone gathers around Shorty, whooping it up, I notice Blackie pulling Oberstein aside. He speaks as his eyes shift to catch what’s happening with the crowd. I can hardly hear them for all the cheering and hooting. Another loud shout goes up as I edge closer, and all I can make out as they split apart are the words “New York City.”

  Shorty Richardson beams as we raise him high on our shoulders and head to the cafeteria. It is not until Shorty is signing the Doomsday Book that we notice he’s wearing penny loafers.

  Diefenbaker meat for supper. Diefenbaker meat for supper. Diefenbaker meat again.

  We’re all getting pretty sick of Diefenbaker meat. A month ago two big transport trucks pulled into the Mount and dumped about a million tins of Spam. Rags told us it was donated by the government. Some guy had a loan from the government to open a food business and couldn’t pay back the loan so the government took all his merchandise. We got a warehouse full of Spam. St. Martha’s got a ton of canned tomatoes. Oberstein calls the Spam Diefenbaker meat, after the prime minister. Brother Walsh and a few senior boys built a huge shed out in the yard to store it. We’ll never eat it all in a million years. And they’ve sectioned off a square at the back of the cafeteria and made a storage room. Tins and tins of Diefenbaker meat, stacked to the ceiling.

  During supper Murphy kicks me under the table with his dandy long legs and gives me the double nose twitch, a secret sign we use that means he has a checker for me. A checker means that Blackie has called a meeting of the Dare Klub. A black checker means we’ll find out the meeting time and place later in the day. There’s an important meeting, but it’s not an emergency. A red checker means it’s an emergency and the meeting will take place during Saturday free time at the Bat Cave. The Bat Cave is an old American army bunker hidden deep in the woods. It’s dome-shaped and has a sodded roof, which Oberstein says was once used for military camouflage. We love going to the Bat Cave. It’s great fun. We play cowboys and Indians or light a small fire in the doorway and boil tea, roast potatoes, and tell spooky stories. There are rusty double doors, wide as the devil’s boots, at the opening of the cave, with old, rusty iron bars across them that take two boys to remove. Inside, Chris Cross has painted a huge black bat on the gray cement wall.

  Whenever Blackie calls an emergency meeting, the special members, which Blackie calls The Brotherhood, must attend. The Brotherhood consists of Blackie and Oberstein, and sometimes me and Bug. If you’re given a red checker, you don’t dare miss the meeting. If you don’t get one, you don’t dare attend. If you’re given a crown, two red checkers, it means the meeting can’t proceed without you. If someone tells you about the meeting, you don’t really have to attend. It means Blackie’s planning a boil-up or a fishing trip and is looking for a few buddies to go along.

  Murphy points to his bog juice. I stare at the milky sweet tea we have at every meal and shrug. He triple nose twitches, jabs a finger into his cup and points to mine. I gulp down the lukewarm tea. Sure enough, two red checkers sit at the bottom of the cup. A crown! The meeting can’t go ahead without me. I learn after lunch that it’s the biggest meeting of the Klub ever. There are even rumors of new members.

  Ryan, who can steal anything if you give him a few hours notice, receives a crown as well. That means there’ll be research, and I’ll be asked to act as scribe. I like doing that. Writing things down and putting them in order. Sorting out what people say and do. It’s like putting together a puzzle. Blackie and Oberstein tell me I’m really good at it. Blackie says I should become a writer. Keeping good records means there’ll be a small salary for me. Blackie always seems to have tons of money. He’ll pay you a nickel for this, a dime for that, whenever he thinks the job’s an important one. “He’s always got a few shekels,” Oberstein says. He gets his money from everywhere. He steals from the collection at Sunday public Mass. He gambles for things like comics and cigarettes and trades them for cash. New guys are always a source of quick money. Most new guys have a few bucks, and they’re usually sitting ducks.

  Everyone is really excited about the meeting. There’s something big brewing, and we’re all very tense. The last big meeting like this was months ago. It dealt with Ryan’s revenge. Greg Smith, a bigger boy from St. Luke’s, the senior dorm, picked on Ryan, and Ryan asked Blackie for a meeting to get revenge on Smith. It took hours to decide on Smith’s punishment and how it would be secretly administered. Blackie calls these meetings his trials. And he’s always the judge. Sometimes he picks a jury to help, but not very often. Rumors about the Saturday meeting are rampant. A really ripe one is that Blackie is planning a breakout. But we doubt that’s true. Not after what happened to Skinny Ryan. Bug thinks it’s about next Wednesday’s wine raid. King Kelly is convinced that the meeting has something to do with Shorty Richardson’s run.
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  “Oberstein’s been yakking about nothing since,” King Kelly says.

  “I was hoping for a boil-up,” Kavanagh says. “Shuttlecocks.”

  “Cock,” Oberstein says, “shuttlecock.”

  After supper, during free time before study hall, Blackie, Oberstein, and Bug ask me to join them for a smoke out behind the pool.

  “My last cigarette.” Blackie taps a pack of Chesterfields against his wrist until one juts out. “And yours too.”

  “Why, Blackie?” I laugh.

  “Got plans for you. For all of us.”

  “We’re going in the regatta marathon this summer,” Oberstein says, taking the cigarette.

  I laugh harder. “The brothers will never allow that. You know the rules. We only compete with visiting teams. On Mount Kildare grounds.”

  Brother McMurtry brought in that rule two years ago after the senior boys’ soccer team got into a free-for-all at Prince of Wales Collegiate. Some of the PWC students wound up in the hospital.

  “Brothers ain’t gonna know,” Blackie says, rubbing his fingers. “Puttin’ some big money on Shorty Richardson. Gotta chance to make some real money. Shorty can beat anyone if we train him right.”

  “If we train him right. That’s a big if, brother,” Bug says, opening his silver case.

  “Besides the money, it’ll be a great adventure. Lotsa fun,” Oberstein says.

  “And lotsa work,” Blackie says.

  “Want you to keep a record of everything,” he says to me. “Meetings. Training schedule. You know. You’re good at that sorta stuff. Writin’ everythin’ down.”

  He passes me his cigarette. “You in?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Have a long haul,” he says, nodding at the cigarette, “it’s your last.”

  Time really drags, as it always does when you’re looking forward to something. Ryan gives me the red checkers on Wednesday. It seems like forever to Saturday.

  Thursday isn’t so bad. In the morning we go outside to clean up the grounds. In the afternoon Rags has us practicing parts from a play called Julius Caesar. He says we may perform it for the Christmas concert. During study hall Brother McMurtry asks me to supervise the little ones. I really like that because you get to sit around and read. This time I read a book Blackie stole from the library about Floyd Patterson, the famous American boxer who knocked out Gene Tunney to win the heavyweight championship of the world. I love Floyd Patterson. Blackie and I watched him being interviewed on TV one day, and I started to cry. What made me cry was what he was saying during the interview, or rather, what he wasn’t saying. He couldn’t remember things. Like the names of people. He seemed dazed. Like he’d just been knocked down. The interviewer asked him what year he beat Archie Moore, and he just shrugged and smiled that shy smile of his. He couldn’t recall. He’d just lost the title to Ingemar Johansson and couldn’t remember the number of rounds. He kept saying he was really tired. And he kept asking for his wife. “I gotta go,” he said to the interviewer. “Where’s my wife? Sometimes I can’t even remember her name.” I looked at Blackie and knew we were thinking the same thing. “All them head punches finally catchin’ up with him,” Blackie said. I thought of McCann and how he could never hit us as hard or as much as Floyd Patterson had been hit.

  I love Floyd Patterson because he’s small and shy and looks like he could be knocked down with one punch. And yet he’s the king of boxing. And Blackie is powerfully drawn to him too. He says when he gets out of the Mount he’s gonna change his name to Floyd something, in honor of Floyd Patterson. When McCann asked us once in religion class to write an essay on the man you admire most, everyone wrote about one of the saints. Oberstein wrote on Moses dividing the Red Sea. Father Cross wrote about St. Francis Xavier. His essay was called “The Saint with the Strong Right Arm.” He baptized so many people, one of the other Jesuits had to hold up his arm for days as he poured the water. I wrote about Floyd Patterson, how he grew up poor and spent a lot of time alone and got the spells a lot. The book about him said that he would go off to a dark hiding place for hours on end. I knew that was how he dealt with the spells. It was a pretty good essay. It was called “The Saint with the Mean Left.” I showed it to Blackie and Oberstein. They liked it a lot. But I didn’t pass it in. I knew McCann wouldn’t understand.

  Friday crawls along. I squirm through classes and can’t concentrate one bit in study hall. But Saturday finally comes, and when we meet at the cave, it’s the largest group ever. I collect the checkers, and Blackie swears in Shorty Richardson, and everyone knows the meeting’s got something to do with running.

  Every new member of the Klub has to be branded. Blackie is the only one who can brand a member. He plucks a homemade branding iron—two tiny metal K’s representing the Kildare Klub—from the fire and brands the new member on the heel of his left foot. The letters are so tiny you can hardly see them. Shorty screams, but only for a second. We are all branded on the heel so that our logo is always out of sight. If anyone’s is seen by one of the brothers you’re supposed to say that you walked barefooted on a dare over bits of metal out by the incinerator.

  Everyone goes through a special ritual on branding day. Once you’re branded, everyone sits down in the cave and Blackie swears you in. He puts on his poncho, a gray blanket stolen from the infirmary, and we place a white sheet around the boy getting sworn in. Blackie never looks so serious as when he sits with his hands stretched out on the arms of his log throne. Like the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Oberstein says. He points to the drawing Chris Cross made behind the throne, a huge drinking glass, half-full, with our motto—Poculum Semi Plenum, the glass half-full—written in large golden letters beneath it. Blackie calls out, “How full the glass?” And we all chant, “The glass half-full.”

  Blackie then reads from a scroll, asking you to be faithful to the Klub’s Magna Carta, which is what Blackie named it. It’s a list of ten rules he reads out. Oberstein calls them the ten commandments. They’re written on the wall of the cave, five on each side of the half-full glass. Then Blackie asks you to promise to protect all members of the Klub, even if it means placing your life in danger. He asks you to repeat Jesus’ words from the Bible: “No greater love hath any man than to lay down his life for a friend.”

  Once the swearing-in is over, everyone takes a sip from a bottle of wine stolen from the sacristy. Everyone except the new member, who is given a half-glass of wine to drink. Shorty swallows the wine in one gulp as we chant his name over and over. “Shorty, Shorty, Shorty . . .” When he’s finished, he puts his shoe on his branded foot, and as we chant his name again he stamps on the glass until it is broken into tiny pieces. A Jewish custom Oberstein read about.

  Shorty then signs the register, which is kept in the vault, and we all line up in front of Blackie’s throne and shake hands with Shorty, Roman-style, the same way they do it in the movies. Blackie is always the last to shake hands, and he always finishes by placing his right hand on the new member’s head and extending his left hand toward the painting of the half-full glass, saying, “All welcome the new brother. What half the glass?” We all chant in unison, “Welcome, Brother. The glass half-full.” Then Blackie looks at our new brother and asks, “Shorty, what half the glass?” And Shorty answers, “Poculum semi plenum.” Then Blackie slaps him on the cheek, the way the Archbishop does at confirmation, only it’s a much harder slap.

  Then the business of the meeting is conducted. The bosun whistle sounds, and Blackie waves the speaking stick, a knotty Newfoundland birch, and passes it to Kavanagh, whose turn it is to be the treasurer. After the treasurer’s report, I take the stick and read from the minutes book.

  1. “New shirt for Ryan! Action: Father Cross, by today’s meeting.”

  Blackie waves and the stick is passed along to him. “Ryan, you okay?” Ryan nods yes. Blackie returns the stick to me.

  2. “Fines! Murphy—twenty-five cents. Brookes—thirty cents. All fines received in full.”

  3.
“Slugs! Receipts from pop machines—eleven dollars and thirty cents, including sales of soda pop.”

  Slugs are small metal discs the size of quarters that we obtain from construction sites. They come from electrical panels and, when filed down by Father Cross, work perfectly in pop machines. A slug gets you a free pop and fifteen cents change.

  Kavanagh waves for the stick and passes it to Oberstein.

  “Brookes was caught last week putting a slug in the pop machine at the Golden Eagle Gas Station. He told the attendant it was a mistake and paid him a quarter. Recommendation: No slugs ever be used again at the Golden Eagle Station.”

  Blackie waves for the stick. “Motion?” Every hand goes up. “Golden Eagle off the list.” He stares at Oberstein. “Any other incidents?” Oberstein shakes his head. Blackie returns the stick.

  4. “Lost! Bradbury’s cigarette case—found and returned by Kelly.”

  After the reading of the minutes, Blackie waves the speaking stick and asks if there is any news to report. He means about the wine stealing. Oberstein says that one of the little ones, Ian Smith, told Rags that he stole wine. “Happened after Mass,” Oberstein says, “when little Smith was collecting the hymn books. He said he took it from the cruets ’cause he already drank silver and wanted to know what it would be like to drink gold.”

  “Rags say anything?” Blackie asks.

  Oberstein says, “Nuthin’. Just laughed.”

  Blackie waves the speaking stick again and announces the reason for the gathering. He tells the Klub members he’s got a big job for us, one the brothers must not find out about. He tells us he has a plan to make a lot of money.