Interference & Other Stories (11 page)

Little by little, those who meant never to set foot in the chapel ever again came back, bringing their hungry offspring. Soon, as the master had predicted, there was a whole new generation of devout creatures who listened, intent on not repeating the lecherous mistakes of their parents which, as they were told repeatedly, had brought about great misfortune.

Even the goat returned, but not in the flesh. No, he was represented everywhere, in story and painting, in song, in stained glass windows and pictures in prayer books: he became the tempter, the angel of darkness, the evil one. Even today you can see these representations of the archfiend with his goat's beard, cloven hooves, and horns.

As for the jackass, he is braying from the pulpit still. If you don't believe me, go and hear for yourself!

M
arty woke, sat up, and untangled the white rosary from the fingers of his left hand. His mother had given him the rosary for his nightmares. Now when he woke up frightened, he prayed to Our Lady to help him get back to sleep instead of waking his parents because his father needed his sleep to go to work at the truck plant in the morning. Mostly his nightmares were about things falling and crushing him. His mother said Our Lady would protect him, and his father told him that you can never dream you died because you always wake up right before.

He put the rosary on his night table, swiveled off his bed, and knelt to say his morning prayers. He looked up sideways at the plastic crucifix above his bed with the two brittle palm leaves thumbtacked below it and said an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be.

His fathers shoes were outside his bedroom door as they were every Sunday, and Marty, still in his baseball pajamas, came downstairs to work on them. He could never get them to shine “bright enough to see your face in them,” which was how his father said he wanted them, but it wasn't because he didn't try.

First, he spread newspaper on the floor as his father had shown him. “You don't want to get shoe polish on your mother's carpet,” he'd said. Then he took an old sock, slipped two fingers into the toe, and used it to get out a good-sized wad of black polish from the flat can. He placed his other hand deep in his fathers shoe and applied the greasy black polish thickly all over, taking special care to cover around the heel and along the sides of the sole. Then he put the shoe aside and did the other one. “YouVe got to let the goop dry on them a few minutes. That's the secret.” After the other shoe was smeared with polish, Marty waited an extra couple of minutes before working on the first one, just to be sure. When he could wait no longer, he got down to the hard work. He balled up the sock and wiped off all the extra polish. Then he got up on one knee and put his foot in his father's shoe to keep it steady so he could work with both hands. The shoe was almost big enough for both his feet. He took another sock, a clean white one with a hole in the heel, and rubbed hard at first to work the polish in, then gradually more softly until he was lightly and swiftly drawing the sock back and forth over the shoe and around the back of the heel. Finally, he spit on it—all over, not just on the toe—and rubbed that in. Then the other shoe.

The shoes were old and had been resoled. On the left one there was a bump from his father's little toe and the leather was cracked there.

He had to give up again. Was it really possible to get them so shiny you could see your face in them? His father had told him that in the army, if the sergeant couldn't see his face in your boots, you had to clean the toilets for a month. Marty's mother always cleaned the toilet; she didn't seem to mind, but he didn't think he would like that job.

Not that his father ever complained. He always told Marty that he had done a good job, and he always handed him two nickels then, one for himself, and one for the collection basket at Mass.

Marty loved the smell of the shoes when he was through with them. He held them up to his face and rubbed the side of the heel against his cheek. Smooth. He put them at the bottom of the stairs and went back to place the socks and polish back in the shoebox and put it away in the closet; then he folded the newspapers and took them out back to the trash can.

He never got dressed for Mass until his mother told him it was time, so now he had a few minutes to himself. He could hear his father upstairs in the shower. He was singing:

 

Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?

Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?

She can bake a cherry pie

quick as a cat can wink its eye.

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother.

 

Marty got his baseball glove from the back porch and practiced his windup in front of the full-length mirror in the hall. This was the second year his father had been coaching him. “Nah, cripes, you throw like a girl, Marty,” he'd said. “Now watch. You throw from the shoulder, hard, and use your back, strongest muscles in your body in your back, that's where you get your power, and follow through, follow through!” So Marty leaned forward and made believe he was chewing tobacco and looked into the mirror for the catcher's sign. He nodded, spit to his right (although he only made believe, he would never spit on his mother's carpet) and went into his windup. “Rock back, rock back when you get your arms up,” his father had said, “then shift your weight when you throw. You can feel it. Feel it? That's when you kick your leg out. Bring it over from the shoulder. Follow through, follow through!”

The phone rang, as Marty finished his windup and delivery, ending with his right hand almost touching his left knee, back bent but with his glove up in case the batter hit a line drive to the mound. He answered it on the third ring. It was his Aunt Elizabeth.

“I'm fine,” said Marty to her question.

“Good. Now let me speak to your father, Sweetheart, okay?”

His father came down the stairs holding a towel around his middle. He took the phone, and Marty went back to the hall mirror.

After a short time, his father hung up the phone. “Hey. Dad. Watch!” said Marty, and he went into the stretch position his father had shown him and turned to his left to pick off the imaginary man at first base.

But Marty's father was standing naked, the towel on the floor, and Marty watched him slowly, very slowly, sit down on the floor and put his head down and cover his face with his hands.

Marty's mother had been coming down the stairs and now she went to his father and knelt beside him. She put her arms around him and he looked up. “My father is dead,” he told her. Marty saw that something had happened to his face. It looked like it was melting like a candle. Marty's mother covered his father's lap with the towel.

Marty stood with his fist in his baseball glove and remembered that his father had a daddy too, and he thought about how he would feel if his daddy died. He thought about what he had just seen happen to his father's face, which was now hidden in his mother's hug. Was his daddy going to die too? What if God had decided to make today the day when everybody's daddy died? And then he understood, for the first time, that it was his grandfather who had died.

He threw down his baseball glove, ran upstairs to his room, and dove into his bed, crying now. He chewed on the corner of his pillowcase, and when he was quiet for a moment, he could hear his father moaning downstairs; then he stuffed his head under his pillow and cried again because it was a sound he could not stand to hear.

Soon he felt his mother's hand on his back, and she was saying something. He didn't move. His mother stroked his back and then began to pat his bottom. He withdrew his head from the wet dark under his pillow.

“You don't have to go to Mass today, Pumpkin, if you don't want,” to.

Marty stared at the crucifix. “I don't want Grandpa to be dead.” He could feel his grandfather's scratchy face against his cheek, could smell his grandfather and taste the little swallow of beer he sometimes left in the bottom of the tall brown bottle, could see him lean from his great black chair and spit tobacco juice into the blue Maxwell House coffee can on the floor. He remembered his classmates laughing when he told Sister Eunice that his grandfather was the governor; that's what his father called him—“Howdy, Governor,” he would say. His grandfather walked with two canes because something had fallen on his legs at the truck plant; Marty could see those canes right now hanging on the back of the black chair.

“I want to go to Mass,” he said.

He walked the three blocks to the church alone, without crying, and arrived just as the previous Mass was getting over. People were coming out of the church and getting in cars parked on the baseball field next to the school. Marty went up the church steps, holding onto the black iron rail, against the crush of the colorful talkative faithful.

Inside, he could smell incense, and there were people still moving around in the choir loft, which meant that the Mass before had been a High Mass. Marty loved High Mass for the organ and the singing of the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei, but his father would never go because it took too long. He took a place in the third pew on the left, in the middle so no one would have to climb over him. He opened his missal to the prayers before Mass and looked at the picture there of an empty sanctuary with the trapezoid representing the arrangement of the starched pall covering the empty chalice and unconsecrated host in front of the tabernacle. He looked up at the altar, saw that it was so, and took heart. The Mass is the highest form of prayer, said Sister Eunice, and had been known to work miracles, even stop wars.

An altar boy came from the sacristy bearing a golden staff that ended in a small cone used to extinguish the candles. It was David Corcoran, the best pitcher on the school baseball team. Marty watched him put out the candles from the High Mass, one by one, leaving only the two that flanked the tabernacle. The smell of the curling smoke reached Marty, and he thought of the white roses in his backyard. Sister Eunice said that the altar candles were made only from pure beeswax, and Marty thought of the white roses not only because of the smell but because he liked to watch the fat, heavy, furry bees fumble over the roses and think that they were making the wax for the candles to worship Our Lord. He noticed that, under his cassock, David Corcoran was wearing worn gray high-top Converse sneakers.

Marty looked at the life-sized painted plaster crucifix above the altar. Jesus' body hung heavy and exhausted, blood running from his wounds, his eyes sunk in shadow, his loins draped with a cloth. He looked real except for a chalky spot where one toe had been chipped, and Marty tried hard not to look at that.

People filled the pew on either side of Marty. On his right was Mr. Lazzaro whose first name, Marty knew, was Gabriel, like the angel. He was said to be some kind of inventor, but Marty's father said he was a drunk who couldn't hold a job. An old woman with flabby, speckled arms knelt on Marty's left; leaning her rump on the seat, she was saying her purple glass rosary in a loud murmur.

The woman who knelt in front of Marty was wearing a stole made of three dead animals. Their snouts were flattened, and their paws hung detached from the surrounding fur. Marty could tell that their eyes were not real.

He wanted his grandfather back, but it was because of what had happened to his father's face that he wanted the miracle. He wanted his fathers face, composed and serious, coaching him, showing him how to grip the ball across the seams. He wanted his father's voice, “Follow-through, follow through! Attaboy!” Not what he heard in his room and on the way out the door to Mass: his father's cries and moans, his mother comforting him.

A bell rang, and the priest and altar boys entered the sanctuary. Marty followed the words of the priest in his missal, the Latin the priest was saying on the left-hand page, the English on the right.

 

Et introibo ad altare Dei,
   And I will go to the altar of God,

ad Deuni qui laetificat
       God who gives joy

juventutem tneum.
               to my youth.

 

The priest was Father Baxter who took over for Sister Eunice every Thursday morning to instruct the class in the catechism. Marty studied hard and tried to impress him because he was also the school baseball coach, and Marty's father had said that he'd be ready to go out for the team by the fifth grade. And even though that was two whole years away, Marty had set his sights on it already.

Marty had to move from the Ordinary to the Canon, in the back of the missal, to pray along with the priest who was saying the Introit in Latin, then back to the Ordinary with its pictures of all the priest was doing, then back to the Canon for the Epistle. He didn't want to be one of those Catholics Sister Eunice said merely attended Mass and didn't pray along with the priest. Soon everyone rose for the Gospel.

“From the Gospel of Luke,” said Father Baxter, “Chapter 11, verses 33 through 36. And Jesus said to them: ‘No man when he has lighted a candle, puts it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick…'”

Marty's face grew hot and his hands shook. The Gospel he had turned to was the wrong one. That meant that he had also read the wrong Introit and Epistle! He had turned the pages to the wrong Sunday. He'd been praying the wrong Mass.

Now there would be no miracle. His father's face as he had seen it when he sat on the floor, naked, holding his knees, would never disappear from his memory. The old woman on his left nudged Marty and said, “Shh,” because he was grinding his teeth.

From the pulpit Father Baxter was saying, “…and for the soul of our dear brother, Edgar Mueller, who died quietly in his sleep last night.”

It was like retching, as if something was being pulled up out of him, out of his belly, and Marty made a loud sound that he himself didn't hear until Mr. Lazzaro put his arm around him and pulled him close. Marty flailed at him and broke away. The woman in the fur stole had turned around and was reaching toward Marty's eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief but couldn't reach him. One of the animals' heads hung down, and Marty could see the sharp little teeth in its mouth. He stood up.