The Long Run (33 page)

“Congratulations!” Brother McMurtry says.

Oberstein stares at the fan and kimono through his perfectly round glasses with a blend of curiosity and sad surprise. Brother McMurtry snaps his fingers, and one of the older altar boys helps Oberstein into his kimono while the other boy unfurls the oversized fan.

I'll never forget Oberstein cursing all the way to the dormitory after Chapel, Bug trailing behind us, bellowing, “Mooooo.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with a goddamn kimono and a fucken fan,” he shouts, tossing them both into his locker, where they lie for months, until one day he gives them to Father Cross for materials for one of his costumes.

14

ATTENTION, SUMOS!
Leverage against force . . . The Japanese art of jujitsu was made famous by the samurai. Jujitsu uses the principle of leverage against force, redirecting an opponent's energy and harmony of motion. There are fifty-one arresting devices to help you do so. You will learn them all, like the seventy sumo moves. The object of the exercise is to disable, cripple, even kill an attacker by using his own momentum and strength against him.”

Oberstein rolls his eyes. Bug cocks his head. Dark laughter.

“Today we will use
mondo
to discuss this subject.
Mondo
is Zen repartee, using questions and answers. It will replace Monologues and Dialogues. Now then, an attacker's great advantage is momentum, force, power, speed. The victim, sumos, is aware of his attacker's great strength. This awareness is his weapon. Leverage against force. In jujitsu, the attacked becomes the attacker. Think, sumos, you are on a dark street late at night. A car screeches to a halt. Your attacker races toward you with a hunting knife. What do you do, sumos?”

Silence.

“Kellys, fight or flight?”

Silence.

“Ryans, the knife is nearer. Fight or flight?”

“Flight, Brother.”

“Wrong!” McCann's eyes bulge. He has fooled us again. “
Arresting devices
. You use an arresting device, Ryans. There are fifty-one in jujitsu. We will learn them all—tumbling, throws, restraints, chokes, kicks—all. First, you must learn to use your tumbling skills. You are all members of the Mount Kildare Tumblers?”

“Yes, Brother.”

“The hunting knife is coming toward you. The jujitsu sumo does not run. He is not afraid. He uses technique. What is your arresting technique?”

Silence.

McCann shakes his head. “It is simple, sumos. You use the first arresting technique. The tumble technique. You fall to your back, and at the last possible moment, if you are skilled, you take advantage of your attacker's strength by kicking your feet upward into your attacker's belly. Whose own force sends him crashing into his car, knocking him out. Or worse. It takes much practice, sumos, much skill.”

“Like in baseball,” Bug says, sucking up. “The faster a Whitey Ford pitch is, the more chance it has of being hit out of the park.”

McCann ignores him and claps his hands. “Tumbling, sumos, is what we will practice before the break. The first defense against weapon attacks. The first of the fifty-one techniques in the Japanese art of jujitsu.”

After the break, Yoko Loco—everyone calls McCann that now—appears in full sumo dress, his Pebbles hairdo off to one side. He is late. He waddles to the mats. Oberstein, who is the leader, the
hancho
, passes McCann a list of boys who are absent due to illness or who have assigned chores. McCann eyeballs the list and growls. “
Kiotsuke
,” he shouts, and we stand straight as arrows, holding our breath. “
Keirei
,” he screams, and we all instantly bow. Sometimes, if a boy doesn't bow properly, McCann sends him to the
dojo
, the far corner, to practice bowing for the entire morning. It's terribly boring. I had to do it once. Every second day, McCann orders Brian Carey to the
dojo
, and each time he calls Carey's name, Oberstein whispers, “Hurry, Carey,” which cracks us up because hara-kiri is a form of Japanese suicide. Once, when Oberstein and I were in the
dojo
, Bug passed us a note: How do Larry and Moe like the
dojo
? And where is Curly Joe?

“Tear him for his bad verses,” Oberstein said, “tear him for his bad verses.”

“Sumos,” McCann barks. “
Tenko
,” which means roll-call. “
Ichi . . .
”

One of our favorite runs is a sprint from the Mount to the Bat Cave. It only takes about fifteen minutes. And we love hanging around the cave after we've run. On the way up, my running time is terrible, and Blackie really razzes me about it. “Your worse time ever, Carmichael. Gonna need good sprinters during the marathon. To run special assignments during the race. To protect Richardson and Ryan. You gotta improve your sprints or you're out.” I lie that I injured my foot and promise to practice. I almost cry, it hurts so much to hear Blackie scold me.

Ryan has scabbed a bag of toutons from the bakery, and we pass them around. Kavanagh and Brookes are playing a game in which they take turns burning holes with a lighted cigarette in a Kleenex that holds a dime suspended over a glass.

The Klub members who aren't in training for the marathon are sharing cigarettes. Rowsell's clicking his Zippo as he smokes, his moon face turning beet red with each puff. His big oily brown eyes could easily belong to a calf. He's tall and thin, a string bean. We're all teasing him about the bowl cut Bug gave him. “You got broom hair,” Kavanagh says, “like Moe in
The
Three Stooges
.” He squints and says, “Gosh, guys . . . Do I really?” He's always squinting and grinning. He's from Ship Cove, on the west coast. His father and mother were Salvation Army ministers. They were drowned at sea. According to Rowsell, they used to travel by dory to a hundred little outports like Ship Cove to do God's work, as he puts it. Rowsell's kinda religious. Not as religious as Father Cross, but almost.

“One morning, they got into the boat and rowed away. And that evening they never came back.”

Rowsell was alone for two whole days, living on peanut butter sandwiches, until a neighbor brought him to the social workers in St. John's. The social workers brought him to the Mount.

Rowsell's a really bad reader. He says the letters keep jumping on him, the same way as the numbers in math class. He says he reads the Bible once in a while in honor of his parents. He's a really naive guy. He believes everything in the Bible is 100 percent true. And he gets really upset if you tell him something's not really true. If you tell him, for example, that Jonah probably wasn't swallowed by a whale.

“Oh, it's true,” he says, his calf eyes bulging. “It's true. Yeah, Jonah was swallowed by a whale. If it's in the Good Book, it's 100 percent true. My mother and father told me if it's in the Good Book, it's the word of God, and you must believe it.”

He's so naive you can get him to do just about anything if you keep at him. Bug sends him on a wild goose chase almost every day. If Rowsell's telling you the simplest thing, like the canteen's open or Blackie's calling a meeting, his big brown eyes get bigger and he stutters with excitement. And when you ask him a question, he beams and leans toward you and strains his skinny neck as if trying to see inside your brain. One day, we used Oberstein's power of positive thinking on him. We kept telling him he was getting a bone-on until he got one.

We knew he was really naive when Bug tried to teach him to blow farts, and he said, “Gosh. Gee, guys . . . I don't think I can possibly do that. Mother wouldn't . . . Oh boy . . . She wouldn't approve of my doing that.”

There are two ways to blow loud farts. Well, three if you count the normal way. But you can't control that. You can create a loud farting sound by blowing on the bare skin of your arm, and you can create a really loud fart by cupping your hand under your armpit and pumping your arm like you're playing the Irish bagpipes. Bug couldn't even get Rowsell to blow a fart on his arm. When we all started in on one of our fart contests—softest fart is out—Rowsell covered his ears with his hands and repeated, “Gosh, guys, golly, that's really loud.”

Murphy hands him a touton and says, “I don't believe you ever read the Bible, Rowsell. You can't
read
.” He winks at us.

“Oh, yes. Gosh, golly. I can so. It's true. Father and Mother taught me to read when I was only four years old.”

“Don't believe it, Rowsell. Reading a few words in the Bible every now and then is not really
reading
. Let's see if you can read from a book you've never seen.” Murphy pulls a paperback out of his pocket. The cover has a black-and-white sketch of a man in a top hat and cape chasing two housemaids. Stamped at the top in Gothic red letters are the words
Sam the Ram from Notterdam
. “Here, start reading from the top of page seventy-eight.” Murphy passes Rowsell the paperback and winks at us as we crowd around Rowsell's chair.

“Okay. Sure, sure. From the top of the page
. . .
”

“Top of the page,” Murphy says. “
Read
, Rowsell
, read
.”

Rowsell reads:

Sam bristled at the thought of the housemaid, Louise, telling Lady Wentworth of their secret meetings. But he pushed the thought to the back of his mind and replaced it with a picture from the previous evening—the first time his eyes drank in the sight of her . . . ample naked bosoms . . .

“Ahh . . . Gosh, guys. Gee, gosh, I dunno if I can read this. Oh, boy . . .”

“Sure you can,” Murphy says. “You're a good reader, Rowsell. You can do it. Can't he, guys?”

“Sure. Yeah. Of course.
Read
, Rowsell.” The voices can barely contain their laughter.

“Well, gosh. Okay, guys.” His big eyes bug out as he reads: “‘He remembered how her . . . cleavage had caused him to stiffen.' Gosh. Gee, guys, I dunno.”

“
Read
, Rowsell,
read
.” Murphy leads the chant, and we all join in. A loud chorus. We are in stitches.

“Gosh, okay, guys. ‘Her hard brown . . . nipples . . . reminded him of bullets.' Oh, boy.”

“Read, Rowsell, read!”

“Gosh . . . ‘He could feel his member . . . throbbing again
. . .'
Omigod . . . ‘as it had the night before . . . when he
. . .
' I dunno about this, guys. Oh, boy.”

“Read, Rowsell, read,” howls the chorus.

“‘When he buried his head in her
. . .
' Golly . . . ‘bare bosoms.' Gosh, I don't think I can
. . .
” Rowsell's face is turning really white. He doesn't know whether to laugh, shit, or go deaf.

“Enough, Rowsell,” Blackie laughs. “Rowsell reads better than all of us.” He takes the paperback from him and tosses it to Murphy. Too late. Our laughter is out of control. Ryan and Bug are on the ground. Bug's about to have a seizure.

“Gosh. Golly, guys,” Rowsell repeats, his big innocent eyes growing wider than ever.

We're all having a pretty good time laughing it up, and Blackie settles us down by asking Oberstein to interpret a dream. Oberstein started dream analysis, as he calls it, after reading the story of Joseph and the coat of many colofrs in the Old Testament. He just loved the part where Joseph tells the pharaoh that the seven lean cows eating the seven fat cows means seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Every time he tells someone about it, his eyes turn into big blue saucers. When he finishes, he shakes his blond hair like crazy and says, “I had no idea there was another world you could go to. One more real—and safer, more reliable—than this one. The world of dreams.” He wants to know every detail of everyone's dreams. He's even analyzing one of Rags' dreams about meeting President Roosevelt.

Oberstein is going on about how Bug's dream of being stuck in an elevator with Marilyn Monroe, which we all know is a lie, didn't have anything to do with Marilyn Monroe.

“Had to,” Bug insists. “She's there in the elevator with me. Plain as day.”

“Dreams don't usually mean what they seem to,” Oberstein says. “In fact, they usually mean the opposite, or something very different.”

“Tell me mine, Rabbi,” Blackie says, and goes on about how he's in Africa in his dream, training to become chief of an African tribe, and the medicine doctor who's training him dies from drinking one of his own potions. “What's it mean, Rabbi?” Blackie asks. “And it better be good, or it'll be just like in the movies. Off with his head.” Blackie flashes a cutthroat grin and karate chops his neck.

“I'll need some time to think about that one, Blackie,” Oberstein says. “Straight off, it sounds like it might have something to do with the marathon, a warning maybe.” He looks at Blackie, and Blackie's eyes bug out. “Or it could be an omen of some special scheme you're gonna dream up. Let me chew on it for awhile.”