Dear Life, You Suck (2 page)

She waves me out of the van and I follow her to the barn. It’s dark and shadowy inside. Holy cow—if I were a wiseguy, I’d think Mother Mary Mafia was gonna whack me.
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

She paces in front of the steel storage cages like a panther at the zoo. She massages her temples and sighs. “How long have you been here, Cricket?”

I consider making a joke, like
What do you mean? We just got here,
but decide against it since she’s more pissed than usual. “I got here . . .”

“Shut your mouth, Cricket. I was being rhetorical. I know when you got here, for crying out loud. I know darn well when you got here because I’ve been putting up with your nonsense every day since. Eight years, Cricket. Eight years.” She paces some more.

I lean against a metal cage. I have a feeling I’m gonna be here awhile.

“It was one thing when you first arrived. You were just a little boy. A hurt, scared little boy. You fought then because it was all you knew. It’s how you survived in Boston. But now, after so many years, so many lessons, so many . . .” She freezes like her brain’s overheated. She rubs her huge, leathery hands together like a mad scientist. They remind me of boxing gloves. Maybe she’s warming them up to use on me. “Well, guess what, Cricket? In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not nine years old anymore. You’re eight months away from being a man.”

Eight months. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
My chest compresses like hourglass sand is piling up on it.

“And you don’t live in the projects of Boston anymore. You live here. In Maine. In a small, civilized community among people who care about you. Have you learned nothing in eight years?”

I don’t dare answer on account of that question might be rhetorical too.

Mother Mary’s black-draped body is in the shadows, but her hands are glowing beneath a skinny beam of sunlight. She looks down at them and mumbles, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” She folds her arms and glares at me with an expression that’s wavering between furious and confounded. “Perhaps this is partially my fault, Cricket. Perhaps I haven’t kept you busy enough. ‘Idle hands’ and all that.” She taps her forehead. “For starters, during your three-day suspension, you will write a five-hundred-word essay on some topic from the New Testament. You will deliver it to me no later than Thursday morning before you return to school.” She sucks in several deep breaths and scratches her anvilithic chin. “You will also deliver a copy to Sister Elizabeth, the head of the CCD program, and one to Monsignor Dobry, the director of the Home. And you will write letters of apology to the three of us, as well as to Principal LaChance and the student you assaulted.”

Yeah, right. Hallucinate much, Mother Mary Mushrooms?

“And you are grounded indefinitely. You will not step one foot off this property, except for school. Meanwhile, I will think of other ways to keep your troublesome hands occupied.”

She walks along the storage cages, shaking each door to make sure it’s locked. At the far end of the barn, she turns. Her long black habit melts into the background, and her fiery eyes ignite, making her head look like a floating jack-o’-lantern. “In any other community, Cricket, you would have been kicked out of school permanently a long time ago. But the residents of Naskeag have good hearts. They care about the boys here. They want to help them. They want to see them succeed. And this is how you repay their generosity. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I know I am.”

She turns and exits through the rear door.

A noise overhead startles me. I look up and see Caretaker climbing down the ladder from the loft with a coil of electrical wire looped over one arm. He’s wearing denim overalls, and I can see his bulging biceps and jacked shoulders. He’s in wicked good shape for an old dude.

Once his feet are on the floor, he wipes his brow with a hankie. A cobweb dangles from his frizzy gray hair. “Damn, it’s hot up there.”

“Serves you right for eavesdropping.”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was getting some electrical supplies when Mother Mary stormed in here, so raving mad I didn’t dare interrupt her.”

“Sounds like you’re scared of her.”

Caretaker’s eyes bulge wide like eggs. “Damn straight I’m scared of her. That ornery woman of God signs my paychecks.” He stuffs the hankie into his pocket.

Caretaker takes care of the Prison. He does all the maintenance work that Mother Mary Miser can’t pawn off on me. Plumbing, heating, carpentry, stuff like that. His real name is Mr. Cockburn, but that’s just disrespectful.

“You need help with whatever you’re doing?” I ask.

“That’d be great, if you got time.”

“I’m in no hurry to go inside and face Mother Scary again.”

“I don’t blame you.” He grabs his toolbox off the workbench and hands it to me. “Come on. I’m replacing the electrical service to the boathouse. You can climb onto the roof and pass me the new line.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“And when we’re done, we’ll have a training session. What do you say?”

“Sure. Anything to delay the inevitable.”

He chuckles.

The boathouse is a cool place. Caretaker’s been renovating it for as long as I can remember. It’s got tons of tall, round-top windows and high vaulted ceilings like a chapel. The building’s bigger than most of the houses in Naskeag. It’s even got tracks in the floor so that boats can roll out the back door and right into the ocean. Caretaker told me that before the Prison was a prison, it was the private residence of some wicked rich lumber baron.

Caretaker set up a gym for me in the boathouse after he witnessed my first rough-and-tumble schoolyard brawl eight years ago. Unlike Mother Mary, he didn’t have a problem with me fighting, but he did have a problem with me “fighting like a goddamn street urchin.” I’m not sure which of my street-fighting tactics bothered him more—my bashing my opponent in the forehead with a brick or my biting my opponent on the ass when he tried to crawl away.

Caretaker’s a purist. He boxed in the army. Everything I know about boxing I learned from him. He says he won a bunch of titles when he was younger, and I don’t doubt him, ’cause he whips my ass every time we spar.

I remove my ring and rub the thick gold letters.
BC.
I stuff it in my pocket. Training’s the only time I take it off.

“All right, let’s go, Shirley.”

Caretaker calls me girls’ names when we train. I guess he figures it motivates me, but all it does is make me think of an interview I once saw on TV. A sportscaster asked George Foreman what he thought about all the trash-talking that goes on before a boxing match, and George said, “I don’t care what you call me, just don’t call me late for dinner.” That cracked me up. I completely agree.

Caretaker waves his arms in the air like some mystical swami trying to hypnotize me. He’s wearing training gloves that look like catcher’s mitts. They’re for taking hits, not doling them out, but that doesn’t stop him from hitting me with them. And the edges are hard, so they hurt. Hell, Caretaker’s shots would probably hurt even if he had stuffed animals strapped to his fists.

He starts jabbing half-speed shots at my head. It’s fun to watch Caretaker shuffle and weave when we spar. He’s smooth and graceful and powerful all at the same time. The way he wiggles and waggles makes me think he’s got gummy-worm bones.

He pops me in the forehead with a jab. “Pay attention, Peggy Sue. Remember what we practiced all summer. Deflect my shots with shoulder rolls. Roll right when I throw right, left when I throw left. C’mon, Dorothy, roll. Buster Pitswaller is one big-ass son-of-a-bitch. You can’t take his punches straight on. Make him miss, make him pay.”

Buster “Pitbull” Pitswaller is a football jock who bullies my younger Prison roomies when we’re all at school. I don’t tolerate anyone picking on the Little Ones, so it’s only a matter of time before we come to blows. His only redeeming quality is his angelic girlfriend, Wynona Bidaban. What she sees in him I’ll never know. But she looked at me like I was a mass murderer when I dunked Burke the Jerk’s head in the fish tank this morning, so she must be against his bullying.

Caretaker throws lefts and rights at my head. I twist left and right, trying to catch his punches on my shoulders instead of my chin.

“Pivot your whole body, not just your shoulders. Toes to nose. C’mon, shuffle your feet, Sheila.”

I try to shuffle my feet, but I feel like a giraffe on roller skates compared to how Caretaker moves.

“Jesus, Cricket, you’re so clumsy, you’d trip over a cordless phone.”

I try not to laugh as his glove whizzes past my head.

“Bend from the knees, not the waist. You bend from the waist, what’s gonna happen?” He pops me in the chin with an uppercut. “That’s gonna happen. Slip back and right, then forward and left. Thatta girl. Up and down, not just side to side. You just go side to side, what’s gonna happen?” He pops me in the forehead with a straight right. “That’s gonna happen.”

We spar for half an hour and Caretaker never shuts up. And he never stops throwing. Like I said, he’s in wicked good shape for an old dude.

“All right, that’s enough for today, Lucy.” He smacks me on the side of the head. “Jesus, I’m sweating worse than a whore in church.”

I take my gloves off and rinse my mouthpiece in the sink.

Caretaker unbuckles his overall straps and towels off his upper body. His stomach sticks out but not in a fat way. It looks like he’s hiding a dozen cookie sheets under his chocolate skin.

He throws his stinky towel at me. “I’m going home. See what the ol’ lady whipped up for supper. I’m so hungry, I could eat the ass out of a rag doll.” He pats his tin pan belly and laughs. Caretaker always laughs at his own jokes, even when they’re not funny. He pulls his overall straps on and leaves.

I hang out in the boathouse to kill time until dark. I’m in no rush to see Mother Mary Malice.

I jump rope and imagine Wynona Bidaban sitting cross-legged on Caretaker’s workbench, twisting her black hair around her finger like she does in math class. She’s ogling me with a quizzical expression like I’m an unsolvable trigonometry equation. I drop the rope, pull her in to my sweaty body, and answer her question with a kiss.

I wait until ten p.m. before sneaking down the fire escape. The nuns are always zonked by then. I pull my hood on and walk downtown to my friend Grubs’s apartment. Grubs and I met at school three years ago when I was a freshman and he was a junior. He dropped out his senior year to work full-time as a mechanic. Well, that’s what he told people. He actually dropped out to commit more time to his real career—dealing drugs. Grubs recruited me to help him collect money from his younger customers after he watched me pound the piss out of a football jock who had harassed one of the Little Ones. We’ve been hanging out ever since.

He lives in a one-room attic over the garage where he works. His front door is at the top of a rickety staircase attached to the side of the building. When I walk in (
sans
knock and
sans
lock), he’s watching
The Three Stooges
on his tiny tabletop TV. He doesn’t say anything, just nods. The place smells like a potpourri of oil, exhaust, and dirty socks. I grab a lukewarm Budweiser from the mini-fridge and flop onto his grandma-print sofa.

He yanks his shirt sleeve up. “Check out my latest ink.” On his upper bicep is a tattoo of an orange and black tiger. The tiger’s head is surrounded by red and purple flames that spell the name
Toni
.

“That’s awesome. She must be happy,” I say.

“She ain’t seen it yet. I was gonna show her tonight, but she’s being a bitch, so I blew her off.”

“What’s her problem?”

“She’s raggin’ my ass about having dinner with her parents. She’s pissed ’cause I ain’t never met ’em and we’ve been dating for like a year.”

“That bitch,” I say, grinning.

“I know, right? And if it ain’t that, she’s naggin’ me about buying her a fucking engagement ring. Like we’re supposed to get married or something. You believe that shit?”

“So why’d you get a tat with her name on it?”

“I thought it’d shut her up about the ring.”

We both laugh.

“I can’t believe she wants you to meet her parents.”

“Seriously. I’m the kind of guy you sneak out of the house to hook up with after your parents are asleep, for Christ’s sake.”

“I ain’t even met Toni. You guys should buy me dinner before her parents.”

“I hear ya, bro.”

I grab a half-smoked doob from his ashtray and fire it up. I take a long hit and pass it to him.

“You should get a tat,” Grubs says.

“Yeah, the nuns would love that.”

“You could get a religious one, like boxers do. A giant cross on your back or a portrait of Jesus on your chest.”

“Or an altar boy on my ass.”

Grubs laughs. He takes a hit and points his beer bottle at my face. “You should have my man Angel ink up your scar. He could do each slice a different color—one red and one black, like two serpents battling it out for facial domination.”

“You’re fucked in the head, dude.”

Grubs shrugs and chugs his beer.

I wonder what Wynona would think if I got a tattoo of her name. Would she be flattered or offended? Not like I’ll ever know.

Grubs snags a paper bag from beside the couch and drops it onto my lap. Inside are a bunch of videotapes, some weed, and a bottle of vodka. It’s my “paycheck” for helping him with collections.

Grubs could rough up his customers himself if he wanted to, ’cause he’s a badass. But some of his clients are underage, and even though he has no beef about selling ’em stems and powder, he has this thing about roughing up a kid. Personally, I think he hauls me around more for show than dough. Makes him feel big-time in this small-time shithole.

“Thanks, man.” I check out the most recent acquisitions from Naskeag Video courtesy of Grubs’s five-finger discount.
Monty Python. Rebel Without a Cause. The Hustler. Easy Rider. The Public Enemy. Citizen Kane.
I watch movies on a contraband twelve-inch TV and 1980s yard- sale VCR I’ve got stashed in my closet at the Prison.