Then Kiff would start talking to them. Arguing with the Germans about —
unbelievable!
— the Nazis. Asking them flat out:
What did you do during the war, Wolfgang?
On some Mondays, Kiff showed up at school with a black eye. Sometimes he laughed about it.
Sometimes he didn’t.
Kiff — the Kiffer — scared Will. He was out of control. Wild. Dangerous.
“Guys,” Kiff announced breathlessly, scooping up the last fry. His tie, speckled with stains, dangled from his neck, knotless. His too-bright red hair was askew, totally wild and uncombed. Kiff had, Will guessed, about two minutes to get his tie on before he’d catch hell from his homeroom teacher.
“Guys, you won’t fucking
believe
what I’ve found.” He leaned over the table, his loose tie trailing through a puddle of Coke, a dollop of ketchup. But he was flying. He didn’t care.
“Go on,” Tim said. “Stun us!”
“We gotta go,” Michael Narrio said. The quiet, dark-haired boy started pushing against Will, urging him to slip out of the booth.
Will checked the clock. “Oh, yeah,” he muttered to Narrio. But he kept an eye on Kiff as he got up.
Kiff backed away, brandishing his fry. “Hey, don’t you want to hear what I found? It’s going to blow you guys right out of the water.”
We have to hurry, Will thought. We’ve got to get moving.
St. Jerry’s wasn’t a place where you screwed around. They’d suspend you even if it was a week before graduation.
The Jesuits were tough. Soldiers of Christ. God’s storm troopers.
“Sure, Kiff — but hell, can’t it fucking wait until lunch?” Tim said.
Kiff finally popped the last shriveled fry in his mouth. He reminded Will of the scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz
. He always looked as if he were ready to fly apart, all loose stuffing and wobbly legs.
“Yeah, sure, Hanna. But I
can’t
tell you this shit at school.” Kiff leaned down close to them all. “It’s too fuckin’
cool
to tell you there. Some schmucks might hear it.”
Will picked up his books, held in a tight bundle by a rubber book buckle that looked stretched to the breaking point.
Kiff was always coming up with weird tales. Like the time he told everyone he was screwing some housewife in his apartment building. He swore he was doing it, swore it on a stack of Bibles, honest to God ..
Nobody believed him, though.
Certainly not Will.
For a lot of reasons.
They all started for the exit. Mr. Kokovinis moved to their booth, muttering to himself, pissed off at their slobby mess, but too interested in the four or five bucks they dropped there every day.
“I’ll tell you here, right here, after school.” Kiff grinned. The toothy smile revealed less than gleaming teeth. His stringy red hair looked as though it needed a wash.
Tim Hanna pushed open the door. “Sure. There’s nothing happening this afternoon.”
He looked at Will.
“Is there, Dunnigan?”
Will shook his head.
Kiff grinned some more. He clapped his hands together. “Timmy .
.
. Will .
.
. guys, you won’t fucking believe it .
.
.”
And of that fact, Will was reasonably sure.
Will started hurting toward the end of the English class.
He felt sick.
Not that this particular class was bad. If anything, their teacher, Mr. Scott, had made Will’s four years bearable. He could survive Latin, Greek, and even the religion classes knowing that an English class with Scott was coming up to save the day.
Scott seemed old, almost ancient. He was like a morose Falstaff, larger than life, with a slurred accent like sounded vaguely British, but always impressive.
Mr. Scott heaped scorn on his students, and that only seemed to make him more popular.
“Mr. Hanna,” Scott bellowed out now, slouched dramatically in a chair, his black robes covered with a fine dust of chalk. “Would you be
so kind
as to read us the third stanza of the Donne?”
“Right,” Tim said, smiling. And Will saw that his friend was momentarily lost. Will tilted his book up and pointed at the right poem.
“Er, yes,” Tim said. “‘Batter my heart, three-personed God —’”
“Stop,” Scott bellowed.
He stood up. The teacher’s eyes were blue, filled with a fire that seemed half mad. “Now, what exactly do you suppose John Donne is asking God for here?”
The teacher waited.
Scott could wait for a long time.
Will looked at the clock.
He felt even sicker.
“Mr. Dunnigan. Would you be so kind as to favor us with
your
answer?”
Caught coasting in the ozone, Will thought.
“It means — well — Donne’s asking for help, to be made strong .
.
.”
Scott favored Will with a Cheshire-like grimace. “Yes. And do we know why?”
The teacher looked around the room. A farmer searching for errant sheep.
A few hands shot up. Tim looked over at Will.
He made a fist and worked it up and down. Will didn’t catch on. And then he did.
The universal symbol for choking the chicken. Or self-abuse, as the padre in the confessional referred to it. Will grinned.
“Mr. Syzmanski,” Scott said.
Charles Syzmanski gave his answer in a high-pitched, almost feminine voice.
Syzmanski’s announced plans were to enter the priesthood.
Not everyone was sure that would be such a great idea for old Charlie .
.
.
“He’s asking for release from his sexual obsession,” Charles sang.
“Very good,” Scott purred. “Sex, gentlemen. A great romantic poet, and here he is devoting his brilliant talent to warding off the demons of
sex
!”
Scott shook his head, his great mane of white hair flying. “What a
waste
of his gifts … and I’m sure that you gentlemen have no such problems …” Scott made a sardonic grin.
“Now, let’s look at John Donne after he’s
undone
. Page three-twenty-one, gentlemen .
.
.”
Will looked at the clock.
This was worse than the dentist, this awful waiting. He supposed that some of the danger, some of the fear, was just in his head.
Yeah, that’s probably all it was, he tried to reassure himself.
But no. Not after what had happened last week.
Not after last week’s gym class.
They’re out to get me, Will knew.
Though I’ll be damned if I know why.
What the hell did I do?
And though he wished the clock would slow to a crawl, the minute hand seemed to fly to the 12.
Then — a horrible moment — the period bell rang, loud, absolutely piercing.
And Will had five minutes to hustle to his locker and then get down to the gym.
High noon had arrived.
Henkel, the gym teacher, didn’t like him.
At least, that’s what Will supposed. The squat, bald-headed man — surely he doesn’t have a
real
college degree? — always had one beady eye open for any sign of Will Dunnigan screwing up.
Those moments were not too hard to find.
Will lived with the fact that he wasn’t fast, wasn’t strong, wasn’t coordinated. “Sports” was a nightmare word to him. Sports equaled failure. And gym was his own personal arena of embarrassment.
Even Tim and Mike Narrio seemed to distance themselves from Will in gym class. He was too sorry a case to get tangled up with, Will knew. Later they’d talk and laugh, but not about gym class, not about his pathetic performance and the incessant way Henkel picked on him.
Henkel was also the football coach. He was married, rumor had it, though no one ever saw a Mrs. Henkel. Will imagined the little Mrs. with a matching bowling-ball head and even beadier eyes. .
Now, it wasn’t long before Will had his blue and white gym outfit on, and his sneakers — cursed shoes — before Henkel was screaming at him during the class’s warm-ups.
“Come on, Dunnigan. Can’t you do even one good push-up?”
Cue laughter.
Everyone laughed.
Even, Will knew, his friends.
And there were ropes to climb. Nearly everyone climbed up these cargo ropes, climbing and kicking as if they were monkeys, as if there were
nothing
so damn easy in the whole world.
While Will, tall but without any real strength in his arms, kicked at the rope, feeling the rough strands dig into his hands. I’m a dead weight, he thought.
He grunted. He felt the sweat pouring out of him. Inside his head — inaudible to Henkel — he cursed Henkel and this forty-two-minute period in hell.
But he didn’t move.
And then — within moments — Henkel was there, screaming in his ear, nice and loud. The old marine drill instructor in him coming out.
“
Come on
, Dunnigan, move it. Move it! You’re pathetic! Use your legs, pull with your arms.”
And then, just to heighten the embarrassment, Henkel would fit his palm under Dunnigan’s ass and shove.
“Too many Twinkies,” Henkel grunted, playing to the other boys. “Gotta trim down, Dunnigan, if you want to get up the rope.”
Dunnigan nodded. And took it. I
have
to take it, he knew. What else can I do?
It never occurred to him that he could do anything to stop Henkel’s torment.
But as bad as Henkel was, there was something worse about gym.
Though Will eventually figured out that — in some sick way — they went together.
There were jocks in the class. A bunch of gorillas from the football team, already working toward the big hubba¬hubba Thanksgiving game with Brooklyn Tech. Half of them couldn’t get
their
big asses up the rope, but Henkel didn’t bother them. No way. They did practically nothing during the class. They threw a few baskets, sat on the stage.
And they watched Henkel work on Dunnigan.
And that was the bad part.
They watched, and they waited until later.
Because after the class, everyone stripped down and went into the showers. Everyone was bare-assed, the jocks clustering together, so damn easy for them, laughing, grunting, proud of their animal noises.
While Will tried to get in and out as fast as possible. Just a sprinkling of water.
Last week, he had felt them watching him. D’Angelo, a hairy monkey who was bounced out of the regular classes in his sophomore year, started taunting him. Called him “Candy-ass Dunnigan.”
D’ Angelo got some of the others going too.
And with the water streaming off his face, Will thought: I could be in deep shit here. They could be out to —
What?
He didn’t know.
And he didn’t want to find out. He ran out of the shower, tufts of soap suds still clinging to his ears.
Dunnigan remembered that fear. And now he slid off the ropes, giving up any hope of climbing them.
“Laps, Dunnigan!” Henkel screamed at him. “Give me some laps.”
Will nodded. This he could do, even if he’d feel the air burning his lungs as he padded around the gym floor, feeling kids watch him. His friends — suddenly distant. And the others .
.
. just watching.
Smelling fresh meat, he thought.
And all he could think about, as he went further and further into oxygen debt, was the showers.
When suddenly, beady-eyed Mr. Henkel wouldn’t be around.
Will wanted to get to the showers fast, hoping to get a free nozzle close to the lockers, close to escape.
But Henkel had him do one more lap while everyone else trudged away.
And is it my imagination, Will thought, or are D’Angelo and the rest hanging together, looking at me?
Will felt as if he might just be able to keep running. Anything would be better than going into the lockers.
“All right,” Henkel shouted disinterestedly. “That’s it.”
Now Will had to follow his class.
And by the time he got to the showers, he saw that there was only one nozzle free. All the way in the back.
I’ll make it fast, Will thought. Just get myself wet, get my hair wet, so Henkel doesn’t get pissed off and send me back in.