“Is it broke?” he asked.
I inspected the plastic casing and twisted the dials.
“Is it gonna work?” he asked.
I rotated the lens... and it fell off in my hand.
“Shit!” he said. “That dick weed broke it!”
“Crap...” I said, but before the grief had a chance to settle, a hatch sprung open. I scrunched my brow and poked the camera’s innards.
“What?” Whit asked. “What is it?”
I removed a black and yellow canister of film from the open chamber.
“Didja already shoot somethin’?”
“No,” I said. “The old lady must’ve.”
Whit grinned. “We gotta develop that shit. Today.”
3. SAINTLY MS. GRISHAM
Tuesday.
Mara’s variation of Amazing Grace had been stuck in my head on an endless loop. It wasn’t a bad thing–the music rocked me to sleep at night and nudged me awake in the morning–but the melody had kindled a blistering thirst that couldn’t be satisfied. When I was alone, the girl’s voice was so translucent that I swore she was hiding between my bedroom walls or serenading me from the distant woods.
I had to see her again. But opportunities were gonna be sparse.
Three days into summer vacation and Whit was already a regular at the Parker home. His parents worked all day, so the moms decreed that the bulk of our playtime would be spent at the castle. Whit’s mom even taught my mom how to assist with his nightly leg stretches.
Luckily, the castle was the perfect place to have a best friend and a mystery to unravel. Tucked behind my clothes in my bedroom closet was a secret passageway with a door small enough for a garden gnome. I told the lil’ tykes that it lead to Narnia and Cair Paravel, but the real passage was a million times cooler than some make-believe world. The walls were lined with cotton-candy insulation. There were knotty joists, archways of colorful wire, and mysterious rattling sounds that spurred my imagination. I had to crawl for the first few feet, but then the tunnel grew into a plush cavern and I could sit upright without bumping my head against iron pipes. An orange extension cord ran from my bedroom, beneath the tiny door, to a power strip where I could charge my camera batteries, play my stereo, or run a fan during the summer. The only source of light came from a naked bulb screwed between the plastic ears of a Mickey Mouse lamp. I had a personal stash of books, journals, and Batman comics stacked beneath the rectangular duct in the corner. On the opposite end of the secret cavern, the tunnel narrowed, curved right and led to another tiny door in the library. My best screenplays were written in that dusty womb beneath Mickey’s dim light.
To fit through the opening, Whit had to vacate his chair and crawl. “Your the only person who’ll ever see me do this,” he said. “It’s flippin’ embarrassing.” Although he moved a bit like a broken marionette, I retained my dignity (as Dad would say) and held back my laughter.
“I’m not a bad case,” he told me in the cavern’s musty pink fluff. “I don’t have any of the usual symptoms of spina biffida. I don’t have learning disabilities, I’m not fat–no offense–and I’m not allergic to latex.”
Whit was halfway through a book about secret codes and taught me clever ways to disguise my secrets. Our production notebook became a tome of cyphers; I would write, “Please Eat Nine Interesting Smarties, Brother. Reptiles Eat A Tiny Hamburger!” Whit would write: “All Signs Say We’re Inbred People Eaters!” then we would trade messages and die laughing.
When Mom (who upheld “sucks” as a dirty word until I turned eighteen) discovered the notes in the trash, it didn’t take her long to decipher our intricate system of words. My teeth were promptly smeared with a bar of soap and Whit was sent home with an apology letter to his parents.
We regrouped the following morning. Mrs. Conrad dropped her son off in the driveway and I carried his chair up the foyer steps. He hoisted himself back into his seat and rolled to my bedroom. When the door was closed, he clapped his hands once and declared, “We gotta make this movie!”
I stood beside my bed and stared at the tussled remains of a restless night. “We need a camera to make a movie,” I barely replied.
“We’ve been planning this thing since Christmas. Two weeks ago I couldn’t shut you up about the monsters and the castle and the fireworks. Then we run into one little snag, and you act like you don’t care anymore!”
My sheets were covered in big, primary-colored dinosaurs roaming cotton ripples and the damp stains. “I’ve been busy,” I said.
“You remember Dave-the-nose-picker?”
“Uh huh.”
“His mom got first place at The Lakeshore Celebration Art Show last year. She makes real ugly pictures; I think she gives finger paint to a toddler and calls it art.”
“So what.”
“So she won! And her trophy was huge!”
“We’re kids. We’re not gonna beat real artists with a movie.”
One of the twins blew through the door, tongue flubbering in a torrent of slobbery motorboat noises. He made a running leap for my bed but I caught him mid-air, spun him around like an airplane, aimed him at the exit, and said, “Scat!” The boy buzzed away and I slammed the door behind him.
“Why don’t you talk to Danny,” Whit suggested. “See if he’ll give you back the camera.”
I sighed and paced my bed. “Roslyn’s gone, remember?”
“So trade him somethin’ else. Your dad’s an architect.”
“So?”
“He’s rich.”
“I’ve got bigger things on my mind than a stupid fairytale.”
“Hey! I’ve been producer on this thing since–”
“Since Christmas, I know.”
“And I’m the co-writer, too.”
“Bull Shanky! You came up with one idea!”
“And it was good! The Girl gets seduced by a nasty monster–”
“We don’t have a camera!” I shouted, then snapped the little-kid dinosaur sheets off my bed.
Whit rolled his eyes. “How long till the tape comes back?”
“We sent it two days ago.”
“Crap. So another five?”
“At least.”
“You better not watch it without me. You promised.”
I balled the sheets in my arms, threw them at the hamper, and plopped down on the bare mattress.
“Think your sexy girlfriend is on the tape?”
“It’s not tape, it’s film. And for the bagillionth time, I don’t know.”
“Think we’ll see her bedroom? I love the smell of girl-bedroom.”
“You wouldn’t know a girl’s bedroom from a hamster cage.”
“Why are you so crabby?” Whit rolled to the bed and poked me in the arm. “Are you whipped?” When I didn’t respond, he sang, “James and Mara, sittin’ in a tree–”
“Grow up.”
“F-u-c-k-i-n–”
“Whit! Knock it off!”
He groaned. “Why aren’t we having fuuuuun!”
I sighed again. “I have a question...”
“What.”
“You wore diapers ‘til you were eight, right?”
Whit’s face crumpled into an angry snarl. “They fixed that. And if you tell anybody–”
“I think something’s wrong with me.”
He grabbed his wheels and jerked back. “What? What happened?”
I turned over and pressed my face in my pillow.
“James?” he said. “What the heck happened?”
“Last night,” I said. “I wet the stinkin’ bed.”
* * *
Saturday.
Dad caught me on the way to the mailbox and informed me that the USPS never ships on weekends. Crap! Our film was probably sittin’ on a warehouse shelf like the Ark at the end of Raiders. He assured me it would arrive on Monday, then drove me to Whit’s house and dropped me off.
We wasted no time devising an excuse to “go for a stroll,” then took that stroll dire
ctly to the big blue mailbox across the street from Ms. Grisham’s house.
“I don’t see Mara,” Whit said.
“Shh.”
“Think she’s inside? It doesn’t look that scary. Maybe you should ring the bell. Were all those cars here before?”
“Calm down. No, the driveway was empty.”
“Who are all those people? Looks like old-folks cars. Ring the bell. Lemme see if this girl’s as hot as you say.”
“I never said ‘hot.’”
“Prettyyy, then.”
“Beautiful.”
Whit pulled two candy bars from his backpack. “Here,” he said. “For takin’ me with.”
I considered the chocolate, then held up my hand. “No thanks.”
“Wouldja look at that? James Parker... turnin’ down food! I do declare!”
“Shh! Shut up!”
For a split second I thought the music was another realistic echo of “Amazing Grace,” but it was a different song and it was coming from the house.
My soul was complete.
“O God of loveliness,
O Lord of Heaven above
How worthy to possess
My hearts devoted love.”
CRASH!
I looked left. Whit was belly down. His chair was on its side.
I abandoned my cover, flipped the chair to its wheels, then darted to Whit. I slipped my arms beneath his pits and pulled him back to his seat. “Are you okay?”
“Listen!” he said.
“So sweet Thy Countenance,
So gracious to behold
That one, one only glance
To me were bliss untold.”
The song finished and the house expelled a round of muffled applause that reminded me of locust wings. I pulled Whit back behind the mailbox and peeked over the hump.
“You were right,” he said.
“About what?”
“Her.”
I raised my hand to shield the sun. A minute later the front door clicked three times, opened, and spewed a dandy parade of canes, walkers, floral print, society hats with sagging brims, and uniform bibles with purple leather covers. The women filtered onto the grass and dabbed their eyes with hankies. Leading the gaggle was Ms. Grisham, less curmudgeonly than the night we met, basking in hugs and handshakes and nods of approval from her blubbering flock of groupies.
“I don’t see Mara!” Whit said.
“She’ll prolly stay inside. What do those pins say?”
“Pins?”
“On their lapels.”
“I can’t read ‘em from here.”
“Go check.”
“You go check!”
“Ms. Grisham doesn’t know you. Just roll down the sidewalk and find out where those ladies are from.”
Whit accepted the challenge. He wheeled away toward the dead end of the cul-de-sac, followed the curve by the woods, then slid past the house as the women worked their keys into the locks of their cars. No one paid the boy any attention except Ms. Grisham; she watched the rolling rodent like an owl with yellow eyes and a detached neck.
Whit didn’t look back, but scooted along with surprising self-control.
When the women were gone and Ms. Grisham was back inside, I left the mailbox and ran to catch up. “Well?” I asked.
“The pins were all the same,” he replied. “’The Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Dunes, League of Catholic Women.’”
“Geez o’ peets!” I said. “How’d you remember all that?”
Whit grabbed my wrist.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I wanna meet her, James.” He pulled me closer. “I wanna meet that girl.”
* * *
Sunday.
Political correctness didn’t exist in 1994. Livy was “black,” Whitney was “handicapped,” Danny B. was “deformed,” and my new chum Dominique was “Mexican” even though his parents were from Puerto Rico. If Dom had been an alter boy ten years later, the PC Police would call him an “alter server.”
He was a tiny boy with a smooth face and a gap between every tooth. He looked seven years old but swore he was ten. “I figured it out last year,” he told me in the opulent seclusion of the cathedral’s cry room. “There’s a vent above the second stall in the boy’s bathroom–”
“You crawl through the vents?”
“Heck no! They’re too small. But one day I’m hangin’ a rat in that stall and I hear voices, so I finish up and stand on the seat. And what do I hear? Mrs. Crenshaw is confessing her sins. She’s tellin’ Father Stevenson how she got bit by a snake in the Walmart garden center–which is already big gossip in the congregation–and that she was the one who put the snake in the rosemary plant and jabbed it ‘til it bit her.”
“Why would somebody do that?”
“To sue the pants off Walmart!”
“What does this hafta do with–”
“It’s hard to stand on the toilet and I can only hear every other word, so when Mara came along–” Dominique paused and traced a cross on his chest, “–I figured she’d hafta confess eventually, right? So I get the idea to use my super-sonic listening gun that came with the science kit I got for my birthday. I sneak it in under my robe, then stand on the toilet and push the microphone way back in the vent, then I put on the headphones and pretend like I’m peeing. And boy oh boy, I can hear it all! Just like I’m right beside ‘em in the confessional.”
“Did you hear Mara?”
“It’s two months before she makes a confession on a Sunday that I’m serving. But then I see Ms. Grisham shove her in that box with Father Stevenson so I hang up my robe, hook up my super-sonic hearing gun, and listen to the whole sha-bang.”
“Un-stinkin’-believable,” I said. Although my fairytale was still on hold, I had convinced my parents that–whenever I found a new camera–I would need a scene in a medieval church. On the first Sunday of summer vacation, Dad dropped me off at The Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Dunes on his way to morning coffee.
It was imperative that Mara didn’t catch me spying–I needed to distinguish myself from the real zombies–so I had ducked behind a plaster column and eyed her from the back of the church. The girl sat in the sagging crook of Ms. Grisham’s arm in the first row. She wore an ivory gown with an ivory sash, and her hair was crimped in rosy waves that tickled the hymnal on the back of her pew. Behind her, a boy leaned forward and sniffed her neck.
I first noticed Dominique as he shuffled down the center isle in a delicate procession of boys in white robes. Some held brass spears with candles and crosses; Dom swung a smoking bowl from silver chains like a pendulum. They all wore wooden crosses around their necks and red sashes over their shoulders.
The congregation watched the parade in silence.
As the altar boys approached the front of the sanctuary, the little Mexican began to fall out of sync. He veered to the left and his fancy bowl began to swing faster and faster in a whirl of white smoke. He swayed right to rejoin the procession, but his head was turned and tilted. I followed his eye-line across the church; sure enough, he was fixated on the little girl in the first pew.
The other boys lifted their feet for the two steps up to the pulpit, but Dominique–too distracted to notice–bumped his toes into the bottom step, dropped his bowl with a clang and puff of soot, and knocked over the kid with the cross.
Somewhere in the frazzle that followed, Mara and Ms. Grisham made their escape.
When Mass was over, I ran outside, found Dad waiting in his car, and asked for ten more minutes to look around. Being a tremendous supporter of the arts, he agreed.
Back in the sanctuary, the clumsy delinquent was scrubbing dust and incense from the burn holes in the carpet. To get his attention, I whispered a password that would unlock countless secrets from tight-lipped boys: Mara.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff.” Dom continued while glancing nervously around the empty cry room. “None of the other boys like this job, but I d
o. And if I get busted twice in one Sunday, I’m gone.”
“There’s nobody here. And I won’t tell a soul.”
“Cross your heart?”
“And hope to die, stick a needle in my–”
“I trust you.” He lowered his voice. “So I’m sitting on the pot listening to Mara and Father Stevenson.” He crossed himself again. “She tells him that she has bad thoughts about her aunt, but that she prays for her every night.”
“Ms. Grisham...”
“Yeah. I have bad thoughts about her too. She’s always got Mara–” (another cross) “–under her ugly arm, and whenever Mara–” (another cross) “–talks to a priest, that geezery old lady paces back and forth outside the confessional.”
“Then what happened?”
“So Father Stevenson tells Mara–” (another cross) “–that her aunt means well, but that the old bat isn’t worthy of raising such a special Little Madonna.”
“Madonna?” I asked and imagined Mara sticking pointy birthday hats under her shirt.
“Our Holy Mother.”
“Oh.”
“Then he tells her that Mary was only a few years older when she gave birth to Christ.”
“What a weirdo.”
“Mara–” (another cross) “–says she’s been having bad thoughts about boys too. Father Stevenson asks if they’re wrathful thoughts, or a different kind of bad. She says she doesn’t know... they’re just bad. So then he asks, ‘Is it the same as the last time you had these thoughts? With Trevor?’ and she says, ‘No Father, I don’t think so.’ Then he tells her that her aunt is as crazy as a naked blue jay and that she’s a perfect child who doesn’t need absolution.”
“So what?”
“So that never happens! I’m in catechism so I know a thing or two about the Good Book. It teaches that everybody does bad things once in a while. Heck, Mrs. Crenshaw got twenty Hail Mary’s for gettin’ bit by that snake.”
“Geez.”
“Don’t blaspheme.”
“Huh?”
“So when Mara’s finally done–” (another cross) “–Ms. Grisham steps in–”
“Oh boy!”
“–and she totally skips the whole ‘Bless-me-Father-for-I-have sinned’ part and flat-out calls Mara a demon!” (another cross).
“A demon? Why?”
Dom inched closer. “There’s somethin’ else strange goin’ on.”
“What?” I whispered.
“Ms. Grisham had that pretty little girl baptized three times.”