“Give me a break,” Tim said one more time, giving his black-frame glasses another push.
Will nodded. Then he smiled, just a bit. “Okay,” he said.
“You’re still coming this afternoon — to the luncheonette?”
“Right after detention.” Will grinned.
Tim spun around to see Father Ed come up the hall.
“And we’d better get to fucking Latin class, Dunnigan,” Tim whispered, “or our ass will be grass.”
And for a moment, Will felt a bit better.
Detention was conducted in Father Gately’s small antechamber — a dark, windowless room done in a spooky blackish wood, filled with glass-enclosed book cabinets that held oversized books that looked as though they had never been read.
Ever.
Gately was, according to the popular wisdom, insane. What other kind of priest would make a career out of discipline?
The headmaster might run the school, but Gately, the Prefect of Discipline,
owned
it.
The seniors joked about Henkel. By their fourth year at the school, some of them could probably beat up the bowling-ball-shaped man.
But
nobody
ever joked about Gately.
And the priest with a face that made Boris Karloff look handsome had a wicked sense of torture.
Like now, Will thought. He had set D’Angelo and Will facing each other.
So Will had to sit there, look at D’Angelo, and just imagine all the things the Big D might want to do.
Gately gave orders to sit up. Nice and straight. Any slouching, and he’d have us on our feet, Will knew. Maybe with our arms out. Holding some books.
He was a fun guy.
Used to be a boxer, the rumor mill said. Before becoming a Jesuit. Good career preparation .
.
.
Will tried to look around at anything but D’Angelo’s pug-nosed face. Anything.
Is it my imagination, Will thought, or is D’Angelo breathing heavy, snorting? Making weird piglike noises.
He heard Gately typing inside his office. The minutes crawled.
And you could do nothing, Will knew. No homework, nothing.
But then — a welcome relief — the phone rang and Will heard Gately talking. The silence had been horrible. Gately spoke, a whispery garble. His voice had the vocal consistency of sandpaper.
He heard Gately push his chair away from his desk, the legs screeching on the polished wood floor. Then Gately opened the door wide to his office.
The Prefect of Discipline cleared his chain-saw throat.
Will imagined that the priest might hawk a louie in his direction.
“You may go, D’Angelo. Mr. Henkel wants you on the field.”
Great, Will thought, the creep does ten minutes’ time and I still have fifty more. Can’t let anything interfere with football. No, sir, sports fans, the big Thanksgiving game is only weeks away.
But D’Angelo made an unfortunate mistake.
As he stood up, still staring at Will, he smirked.
An ugly sight if ever there was one.
And Gately didn’t like that.
The priest suddenly moved across the floor with all the speed and grace of a leopard. With pinpoint accuracy, Gatley’s hand shot out and grabbed at D’Angelo’s hair. There wasn’t much of it. Crew cuts were out and there was a neat forelock, a sheaf of long greasy strands that Gately’s hand closed on.
For a second Will thought that the hair would just slip through the priest’s powerful fingers.
But no. The grip was much too strong. Too solid.
Gately held, and now he rattled D’Angelo’s head back and forth, faster and faster. The football star looked like Wile E. Coyote after getting hit by one of the Road Runner’s cannonballs. The small, pudgy head — not much space for a brain cavity — wobbled back and forth, faster and faster, a blur.
“Do you find something funny about this, Mr. D’Angelo?” Gately said through clenched teeth.
Bite him, Will thought. Open up your gummy old mouth and lower those vampire-priest’s choppers right on the asshole’s neck.
But Gately was content to just put D’Angelo’s brain through his own blending process. Back and forth until — when Gately let go — D’Angelo stumbled forward like a top. The fullback threw out one rhino leg to break what might turn into a fall.
His hands fluttered, helping him balance. Then D’Angelo looked up at Gately.
And Will thought: He’s going to kill him. D’Angelo is going to kill the priest!
But D’Angelo just looked down, and them mumbled the only word Gately ever wanted to hear.
“Sorry, Father.”
“Now get out of here!” Gately growled, the voice rich with phlegm and bloodlust.
What a cleric! Will thought.
And D’Angelo staggered out of the prison, humbled.
Will guessed D’Angelo would think twice about gunning for him later. Not with Gately around to mete out such creative punishment. Gately turned to Will, who made his face as flat and impassive as possible.
Maybe he’ll let me go early too, Will thought.
But Gately just shook his head in disgust.
The priest walked back into his office.
A big Regulator clock, just within Will’s peripheral vision, clicked.
It was 3:20. Will had forty more minutes of this garbage before he could leave.
To meet up with his friends.
And hear what had Kiff — crazy Kiff — so damned excited.
Not knowing how everything about this day was falling together, in a certain way, like the clock he watched, pushing him toward something that he’d regret for the rest of his life.
* * *
4
It went silent the minute Will opened the door to Koko’s Luncheonette.
One minute his friends were all laughing and talking. And the next, they stopped.
As if their actions had been frozen for some picture.
School chums. Senior year. Fall 1965.
And Will wondered if maybe he should have gone home. He let the door slip through his fingers and it slammed shut.
Mr. Kokovinis, over by the counter, talking to two men squatting in front of coffee cups, looked up.
But then Tim said, loud enough for Mr. Koko himself to look over and shake his head, “Hey, Dunnigan! Get your butt over here!”
And it was all there, in Tim’s words, his tone of voice. An acceptance, a sense of
moving on
, past whatever had happened that day. Will smiled, trying to pick up the mood tossed off by Tim as if it were a gently lobbed tennis ball .
.
. to be picked up and returned.
He walked over to the booth, which was engulfed by a cloud of smoke.
“What the hell happened?” Tim said. “Old Gately make you stand on one leg?”
Will grinned and he sat down beside his friend. “No, but he sure the hell let D’Angelo off the hook.” Will shook his head. “Football practice. But at least Gately gave D’Angelo’s head a good rattle before letting him go.”
“The Deadly Gately Blender! Great.’”
Now Will looked up at the others. Narrio was smiling, listening. Mike never had much to say. But Whalen still wore his usual disgusted look that seemed less a pose and more the outward sign of one nasty kid. Will looked around, over to the counter and Mr. Koko, then back to the others.
“Where’s Kiff?”
Whalen took a drag on his cigarette and sneered., “Gone to check something. Told us to wait here. For
you
.” Whalen rolled his eyes. “Who knows what the hell he’s up to .
.
.”
Narrio nodded. “I have to go soon.”
It seemed as though Kiff’s great surprise was petering out. But then Tim tapped his arm.
“Whoa. There he is,” Tim said. Will turned around and there was Kiff, dodging the traffic on Ocean Parkway. He looked demented, waving at them in midstream, grinning a giant smile surrounded by his mess of freckles.
A strange-looking guy, that was for sure.
A car nearly hit him and Kiff banged on the hood — they all laughed — and Will saw him yelling something, his mouth open.
“What an animal,” Whalen muttered.
Then Kiff ran the rest of the way, up to the door, and on into the luncheonette.
He came over to them, barely able to contain himself, so excited because of his secret.
“Will, Tim, Whalen, Mikey .
.
. great! You’re all here.”
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here and all that good shit, Kiff,” Whalen said. “Can you please get on with it?”
Kiff raised a finger — a lecturer pausing in mid-thought. “Let me get a Coke.”
He flew over to Mr. Kokovinis, who looked spooked by Kiff. He recognized a crazy person when he saw one. The man went to the fountain, pulled up a Coke glass that was still wet from a recent washing. (If plunging the glass into semi-soapy water and then dunking it under something almost equally soapy for a rinse could be called washing.)
Mr. Koko pulled back on the spigot and Coke gushed out.
“I can’t believe we’re sitting here, waiting for him,” Whalen said. “Watch, it will be nothing.”
Kiff grinned at them, then his face looked surprised. He dug into his pants pockets, pants held up by a belt but still the cuffs dangled to the floor, scraping at it. Kiff went over to the jukebox.
Tim slapped Will’s arm. “What? He’s going to play music?”
And sure enough the machine — normally quiet — kicked into life and the Beatles’ “Help” thumped out of it.
“Oh, groan,” Whalen said.
Kiff picked. up his drink from Koko and swooped toward them, sending some of the Coke sloshing over the side.
And Kiff sat and licked at his hand.
“What’s with the fucking music, Kiff?”
Kiff took another lick at his wrist.
“God!” Tim said in mock disgust.
Kiff reached out and squeezed Will’s wrist, and then Tim’s. And that made Will think about some of the things he thought about Kiff. Some of the things the others said about him, half joking, when he wasn’t there.
Will wondered just
how
strange Jim Kiff was.
Kiff grinned, feigning shrewdness. “I don’t want anybody else to hear this, guys.” His face looked serious all of a sudden. “
Anybody
.
.
.”
Kiff’s face looked just too weird, like the guy in Dracula who gets to feed on bugs, overjoyed at discovering an errant moth.
Will turned and looked out the windows of the luncheonette. The sky had turned cloudy, thick with gunmetal-gray clouds. It might rain, he thought. Maybe I should get going, hit the subway, beat the storm.
But then Kiff began his story.
“I was at Scott’s home for my advisor’s meeting-”
Will nodded. Every senior met with one of the three advisors for college counseling, career guidance, and all that other bullshit. The lucky ones got Mr. Edward Scott. The others got somebody else.
“Hope you kept your fly zipped while you were there,” Tim said, his voice louder than even John Lennon’s wailing.
“Oh, fuck you, Hanna,” Kiff came back.
In the great world of post-pubescence, Will knew, everyone was suspected of being homosexual .
.
. especially a male teacher who lived alone.
“Anyway,” Kiff said, struggling to regain the momentum of his story, “old Scott got drunk.”
“What else is new?” Whalen said.
Kiff turned to Whalen. “He was plastered. You saw him. You were there just before me,” Kiff said.
Whalen nodded.
“Get on with it, Kiff,” Tim said. Will saw Mike Narrio look at his. watch. Narrio’s parents were Old World. Real garlic eaters, Tim joked. And they liked their Michael
home
, doing homework, practicing his trumpet.
Will and his friends were doing their best to be the bad influence in his life.
“I mean, he was blotto, gang. I was pretty well wrecked too .
.
. Jeez, we were mixing sherry and brandy.”
“He let you drink with him?”
“Sure, he was too far gone to care.”
Whalen spoke again. “All right, so you had a few drinks with old Scott. Tell us something that we haven’t all done.”
Will looked at Whalen. Thinking: I’ve never had a drink with Scott. There was something about Scott that scared him. He might not be homosexual, but he was pretty damned eccentric.