LITMIR.BIZ

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      One side of the bottom row of Blake’s teeth folded over, and Blake crumbled to the beer-soaked hardwood floor. He missed the first half of the season, and that West Side brotha who’d dropped him got his starting position back. Blake watched from the sidelines with his jaw wired shut and a pair of scissors in his pocket just in case he vomited and started choking to death ’cause there was just nowhere for all that bubbling-hot, mucus-drenched bile to go. Maybe it could erupt from his nostrils, but those two little passages were never gonna be enough.

      Blake’s son, John, was born around then. Karen moved out to Des Moines, and the two lived in a rented house with several other students. After the season, Blake, who had barely kept his GPA up high enough to be eligible to play football, just stopped doing the work. By the end of the spring semester, he’d failed out completely. He came home to Chicago and got a job as an assistant at an accounting firm by lying and saying that he’d earned his accounting degree at Drake—a degree that he’d completed about half of the coursework for in his four years there. He wouldn’t complete the degree until little Johnny was in high school.

      CHAPTER 8

      SEAGULL

      FOR SOME REASON, they’d marched the whole grammar school over to the church for Mass every week. Single-file lines of kids filtered across the school parking lot: the boys in navy-blue slacks and baby-blue, three-button collared shirts; and the girls in their army-green plaid skirts with white, button-up blouses and white, knee-high socks.

      I kneeled on the little, cushioned, flip-down bench in my pew. My chin barely cleared the top of the pew in front of me. I stretched and reached my arms up and rested my elbows on the rounded oak that’d been worn smooth by touch. I clasped my palms flat against each other and touched my thumbs to my lips. Mass continued. Thoughts flowed through my head. Jeez… I hate church… Then, I realized where I’d be if I wasn’t there. But I hate school even worse!

      Father McCale stood at the altar in his ankle-length, black cloak. His round, bald head and pudgy face beamed red in the low light filtered through the stained-glass windows above. He raised his outstretched arms, palms up.

      “We lift up our hearts,” he said, his voice booming into the massive emptiness above us children. The heads in the pews slowly ascended. The first graders up front gave way to the higher grades. The heads stepped upward all the way to the eighth graders in the rear pews. The choir balcony hung over the eighth graders. An immense, yellow and red stained-glass window prevailed above the balcony with an image of Christ with a golden crown on his head.

      I sat around half-way back through the pews with the fourth graders. Father McCale fixed his eyes in a dreamy gaze far above my head. Why does he always look up there when he says dat? Can he see God up dere or somethin’? A huge white marble wall of statues rose up behind Father McCale. It held the figures of Jesus and Mary and the prophets in descending order. Above the white statues, near the steep-pitched apex of the ceiling, two angels were painted in profile facing one another. Their skin was opaque, and their retracted, white-feathered wings were laced with gold. The wings sprouted from high on their backs, and their shape curved way up above their heads, then sleekly flowed down the length of their bodies. At their feet, the wings curled out and away. I wondered what it’d be like to fly, to levitate up out of the pews.

      I floated upward. As I did, I noticed the intricate designs in the ceiling. A dashed line ran the length of the pinnacle of the ceiling’s apex that looked like a miniature roadway. Suddenly, the room inverted, and the road was in a canyon at the base of two steep mountain ranges. I floated down into the canyon on my belly. Now, I faced the direction Father McCale stared at, and I saw why he looked there. The sunlight struck the stained glass—yellow, gold, red, two stories high and wide—and the flipped image looked like some strange, warped galactic landscape. Nebulous clouds collided. It must be heaven.

      A sharp slap struck the top of my head as I craned to see above and behind me. The shot sent me suddenly face forward again. I looked up—it was Sister Angelica. The bitter snarl on her saggy, wrinkled face let me know exactly where I was headed. She grabbed hold of my collar with her thin, boney hands and led me to the back of the church. Her hard-soled shoes clicked on the marble floor as my rubber soles squeaked across it. As we passed the eighth graders, Jan smirked sadistically at me with her chunky cheeks. My face burned red, and my stomach went hollow.

      Sister Angelica led me through the open doors into the entrance corridor. She made me kneel on the cold, hard marble floor near a gray porcelain fount filled with bubbling holy water. The only light was a gray-blue glow that seeped through the edges of the oak doors of the main entrance.

      “Twenty ’Our Fathers’ for not paying attention to Mass!” she hissed in a cutting whisper. Father McCale’s voice boomed on in the giant vault beside us.

      “Our Father, who aren’t in heaven,” I began as she loomed behind me. Her golden crucifix tapped on her green, fuzzy sweater, and after I had said a few “Our Fathers,” Sister Angelica edged back to the doorway of the main room to watch Mass. I waited until she was just out of ear-shot and settled my weight down on my feet to take the pressure off my sore knees. Then, I looked up into the darkness above the fount.

      “Our Father, who aren’t in heaven, why the heck did you name her Sister Angelica anyway? She should be named Sister Sourpuss. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, with going to church and school, so I could play all day with my friends and not have to do multiplication tables. And why did you make Jan’n’Rose so big and strong and mean? And why did you let Dad punch Richard and knock him out? And why did you let Lil Pat kill somebody? Why’d the Assyrian guy have to die? Why couldn’t he have lived? Does that mean Lil Pat has to go to hell? What about me, do I have to go to hell, too? And why did you let Lil Pat become a junky? And what’s a junky, anyways? And why did you make Da sick, and why can’t you make Da better?” Suddenly, a chill swept through me like the wash of a cold wave at Loyola Beach. My eyes got itchy, and a lump formed in my throat as the thought of what death was slowly set down on me. It became heavier and heavier until it clamped down on my throat from all angles like a massive iron vise. I realized Da would die and be gone forever, and I realized I was going to grow old and die one day, too. Or maybe, I wouldn’t grow old at all. The sudden horror of that dark, inescapable contract sent tears rolling down my cheeks that splashed my light-blue shirt. By the time Sister Angelica led me back to my pew, my face was puffy and damp, and there was no question that I’d cried. As I passed, a fifth grader named Marty Espinosa giggled, so later at recess, I slugged him in the mouth and gave him a fat lip. Then, I called him a wuss when he started to cry.

      •

      I REMEMBER FISHING on the stardock at Montrose Harbor where Da kept his small white sailboat. I cast a minnow lure into the big circle at the center of the dock. The lure jerked and twisted in the greenish water. The shadow of a seagull cut and slashed through the lure as I lazily reeled it in. Da and Grandma were on the boat cleaning and getting ready to take it out. There was a sudden shrieking cry from above and an explosion of feathers in the place my lure was.

      “Ahh, no!” Da yelled from the helm of the boat.

      I reeled as the seagull flapped, clutching the lure in its beak. It tried to fly and got a few feet out of the water before it wound and twisted in the line and plunged back into the lake. It cried there in the center of the circle of water, and I dropped the rod at my side. Da rushed beside me and snatched the line with his hand and pulled the bird onto the dock beside him. He unfolded his pocket knife and knelt over the squawking and writhing bird. He cut the line furiously as it wound and entangled him. He slit his own palm. Blood lifted up on his dark-brown skin. The bird wouldn’t hold still and bit Da’s wrist and chest and smacked him with its wings. He cut the line where it wound tight on the bird’s neck. Feathers plumed up everywhere. The three prong hooks of the lure clung deep to the bird’s beak, face, and neck. The seagull screamed like a child. Da delicately unhooked them as the bird’s wings fluttered intensely with the pain. Then, it was free, and it flapped and awkardly flopped back in the stardock’s center. It swam around in a slow circle, squawking angrily as Da stood beside me watching. Then, it tried with a great slow flap and rose low out of the water, cut between two sailboats, and soared

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