The Holy Terror (3 page)

Seeing Dulcette’s shadow through the smoke made him stop thinking about dear, departed mom. His lunkhead classmate had loosened his standard Catholic school tie, yanked his standard Catholic school starched white shirt up around his thin face. The top half of his head was smoothed by sweat.

Haid thought of Dulcette’s courage in the moments before he screamed was a true act of foolishness. He had been standing sentry-like nearest where the smoke was blackest. Who was he trying to impress? Maybe he wanted to be a martyr like the child saint that the school was named after. St. Vitus, patron saint of comedians and epileptics. What a combo. Go figure, man. Haid could see Uncle Milty on his knees at night, praying.

His left foot was firmly planted on the first of six steps to the landing—doubling back down six more to the first floor and they were almost home free—when Dulcette screamed.

He did so because a tongue of flame had climbed around the metal bannister and ignited the sleeve of his blazer. The boy, inches from Haid, made a low, wailing sound. His eyes grew to the size of pie pans, despite the smoke.

Mesmerized by the red and orange flames climbing up his fellow student’s arm like a keener version of The Blob in all its Technicolor, Haid was only vaguely aware of the gasps of terror that were spreading behind him. He could only see Dulcette, Billy Dulcette with the pencil neck, whose father worked at Buler’s and was probably tearing down Washtenaw Avenue this very second, a real cool dad who would pass out dimes to all of his son’s friends so that they could buy Archie and Casper and Flash comics from the stand up machine next to the freezers. Billy Dulcette who really wasn’t that much of a lunkhead -- hey, God, are you listening here? -- and who was now moving his jaw with a painful, counter-clockwise slowness, as if he was patiently going for the biggest gum bubble blown in Chicago grade school history. Dumb fucking listen to the penguin Dulcette, that same senile biddy who was at that second spitting up Kyrie Eleisons and Heavenly Fathers left and right and who was about to see the first death at her hands occur because Haid knew that the lunkhead kid with the really cool father was doomed even before the fifth or sixth tongue of flame ignited the boy’s hair.

He was close enough to feel the flames in his nostrils as Dulcette ignited in one great phumf! Dulcette’s slicked back hair uncoiled in wild ropes, some strands falling clear as if sheared, others were firecracker wicks ending in sputtering red. The boy moved then, doing an insanely graceful turn, just as the crowd behind Haid swelled outward like a hemorrhage about to burst.

Haid couldn’t move quick enough; the quivering mass of panicked children pushed against him in several places. His knees buckled on the threshold of the second step down. Unable to catch his balance, he threw his arms out to either side, and his right arm jabbed someone’s rib cage. His left fingers scrabbled over the red-hot railing, and he was surprised to hear his own shrieks as the flesh on his palm fused to the railing’s lower rung.

He twisted his neck to the left and saw Pat Carlson, a bookish JD whose only desire was to grow up to look like Sal Mineo, fall into the Dulcette candle and scream silently. Several students had stumbled over Haid, now in a kneeling position. He was weary, feeling like he did during summer swims at his Aunt Dot’s and had stayed underwater too long. Everything hurt him. At least, he thought he couldn’t possibly hurt any more.

Then somebody stepped on his leg and he felt, more than heard, it crack.

Broken. Going to die. Going to die. He bit his lip. Dried from the smoke, the skin split open wide. He had to think clearly now or he would be dead. He heard the urgent banging of fists on lockers as the rows of children who had stumbled over him reached the first floor.

The sound faded for just a second, like when he was listening to someone talk and he’d yawn in the middle of one of their sentences, because the railing toppled over, angling sharply towards the mid-floor landing. Haid screamed louder now, tears hot on his face, as skin from three of his fingers ripped away from the muscle. The L--shaped railing smashed above the far wall, hitting just above the ancient stencil of a ghostly hand, palm forward. Barely visible through the smoke, Haid could just make out the red sign that meant stop, the Don’t Run admonishment equally spectral. The wall cracked in several places, the palm spattering with the darker red and grey as two of the taller boys had their skulls shattered by the metal projectile.

He held onto the concrete steps as well as he could, his entire body numbing in pulsating waves. His dead left hand spasmed as another body fell forward out of the swirling grey and sprawled across his forearm. His fingers curled under the step, the blackened tissue caressing a molten piece of old chewing gum. Through the black motes clutching the corners of his vision, Haid saw the fused mess of Dulcette and Carlson and a dozen gaping faces framed in the grid patterns of support as the railing crashed down upon them. The first and last St. Vitus dance raged on.

The landing broke apart in chunks. The ceiling, aflame, caved in and Haid was falling through space, madly imagining death singing a Buddy Holly tune to him: All of my love, all of my kissin’, you don’t know what you’ve been missin’, oh boy...

He landed ass-first amongst the bodies and the rubble, the steaming railings and demolished lockers, nearly unconscious in the first row of the Buddy Holly After-Life Concert.

After an unknown time, he opened his eyes. The lids felt as if lead weights were attached to them. Everything was fragmented for a moment, making Haid think that there were stitches in his retinas. The railing, along with the severed door of a locker, was wrapped around his lower legs. His next thought was that he would be crippled.

A still, dead form of a blond-haired girl lay near him. Their eyes met. Haid thought that there was something wrong with the way her lifeless eyes stared him down. He felt as if he was being accused of something. The sirens, the fire alarms, the quiet moaning of the survivors; all had become muffled and Haid realized that there was a wetness in his ear. He was hypnotized by the girl’s stare. Much of her white blouse had burned away; a gilded chain that read Jesus Loves lay on her underdeveloped chest. Her nipples resembled uncooked pepperonis.

He wondered if much of his own skin was missing. On the way back from his Auntie Emma’s house in Shelbyville a few summer’s back, he’d memorized a road sign for shaving lotion. He lit a match, to check gas tank, and now they call him, Skinless Frank. BURMA SHAVE. He looked at the girl again and understood what was different about her stare.

The dead girl’s eyelids had burned completely off.

Haid stared into the clear, beautiful, unseeing blue of her eyes, spoiled only by specks of dust in the whites, following their curvature until he could see the rinds that were the upper ridges of her sockets. He did this again and again until the wetness from his ear dripped onto his jaw.

Then he passed out again.

* * *

He awoke to sounds of mild weeping. Soft prayer. The ceiling above him had split into a gaping V, tiny blots of plaster rained down on everything like hail. He could feel a dozen things pressing against him. Hard as metal, soft as flesh.

The girl with no eyelids and the Savior’s name on her chest—yea, right! Tell me another one, J.C—would still be on his left, near the first set of lockers. He turned his head and an ice pick skipped across the hollow of his collarbone. He fought off the greyness again.

One of the toppled lockers was open, its door swaying slightly the way Haid’s new Father let his arm swing from the bathtub when the two men took their “Friday Night Soaking.” A boy’s tempera paint printing read I LOVE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Somebody a semester later had blacked out the last word in marker, replacing it with the word CUNTS. Not any more, you don’t, Haid thought, looking at a bloodied hand.

Several of his teeth were loose, he discovered when he tried to laugh. His head fell back down with a thump, the same sound his Father’s Biblija Swieta made when it was closed shut on the end table. Plaster fell and settled onto his face.

Far off, he heard sirens and brakes and shouting. A piece of cardboard fluttered down from above and he wondered if anybody was alive up there. The cardboard was a blue and white sign that read ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK. CLEANLINESS IS NEX with the rest burned off for all time. The janitor’s reminder hit Haid’s arm and he barely felt it.

He heard approaching footsteps. When he had the strength and the curiosity to look at the girl again, she was gone. He had dreamt her being there. Simple as that.

Then he heard a sigh that wasn’t his own. Someone else was alive. He turned toward the direction of the voice. Past where the girl he had dreamt about lay.

“Father’s come.”

Uncle Vince? Was that really his Father? No, it didn’t sound like him, no, it was a fireman, it— He focused in on a man bending over a burnt boy. “Father’s come to take you home.”

That wasn’t his Father, but now he knew that he’d be saved. They would all be saved.

The man lifted the boy, the skin in tatters. The boy looked like a pile of filthy shag carpeting and he was still breathing! The fireman’s build was large, and he was spattered with gore. But his chest was strangely dry and it seemed to glow softly. But this was only Haid’s delirium. Or so he told himself.

“Come to God,” the man spoke softly.

The pain heightened. Haid grimaced, trying to remember the hate he held for his mother, the defiance he had once had, saying the word pussy in the school yard that very first time.

The man’s beard was white, clipped neatly the way Mitch Miller wore his. Father watched SING ALONG WITH MITCH every Friday night. Haid would watch it with him later, when he got home. The bell would ring soon.

“Many are the sufferings of the just,” the man began reciting, holding the broken boy closer to his chest. “And from them all, the Lord has delivered them; the Lord preserves all their bones, not one of them shall be broken.”

The man made the sign of the cross by bobbing his head. He began squeezing the boy in his arms, and Haid wanted to cry out, but blood slid down his throat instead.

He was pushing the boy into his chest—into his goddamn chest! Like something out of CREATURE FEATURES! Haid wished he had tears left to cry.

(gone the boy was gone like the girl like Gorshin and the penguin, oh, for chrissakes)

Wanted to cry, because the man stood, his knees cracking, and began to come towards Haid.

“No,” Haid managed to croak.

“Thou shalt have no dogs befoul me,” the man whispered, and it made no sense at all.

Had he heard it right? The man’s face trembled to Haid’s shudders.

“Come to God.” The man’s touch was warm, like Father massaging his thighs in the bathtub. He felt a sharp tingling in his crotch. He was getting an erection, so why was he afraid?

The man was lifting him slowly, like a baby needing to be burped, and Haid’s shoulders touched the man’s warm and dry chest.

“God wants you home, son. He’s in here.”

Haid felt his body relaxing with a final hitch; the fireman was going to make him okay. He stared down, his one cheek against the man’s rib cage, his grey parka smelling freshly-laundered...

A bloody tear ran down his forehead, hitting the man’s jacket. It fizzled like a candle flame winking out when you pressed your fingers against it. The bloody tear was gone.

Like the broken boy and the girl with no eyelids.

Gone to God.

He heard screaming then, without ever knowing if it was his.

Others ran over towards him. They would save him. He wasn’t ready to go to God yet. Why was this man pretending to be someone good and killing the kids who survived? What right did he have to play—

“At rest in the fields of the Lord,” the man whispered, as if he had heard Haid’s thoughts.

“Who are you?” Haid spoke with blood bubbling out of his mouth.

“I had tried to take you home, as I had been taught by Him before me. Jesus wept.” The sounds of the men from the LeMoyne Street fire house were closer now.

The man who would be Frankie Haid’s savior turned toward the others. “I was passing by and saw the fire,” he simply said. He turned back to Haid and whispered. “I was called, as you will one day be.”

“We need all the Good Samaritans we can get,” the fireman replied.

The man in the windbreaker smiled at that, and no one paid much mind when he left. Perhaps it was good, he thought. Because of the interruption, he had not taken the boy’s true pain away and shown him to gloryland. But he had held onto him long enough to release the power of God within him. The same had happened to him so long ago, when another nameless man, another Good Samaritan, had found his own body in the wreckage of a theater, barely breathing...

Yes, it was good that he had passed the power of God on to the boy. It was the right thing to do.

Jesus wept.

Haid was crying watery tears free of blood now and the real firemen couldn’t understand why some of the burn tissue looked pink and healed. Bone shards still protruded from his leg, but the skin under his burned shirt was fresh and new...

God wants you to do his work... Son.

Haid passed out for the final time that day.

* * *