Good Blood. K. C. Pastore
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“Plunder?”
“Ol’Moon, he gave that to Mugga ’bout a year ago. Wasn’t ever really Mugga’s.” He paused. “I ain’t doin’ this out of no “what’s rightfully ours” kinda thing. Take it, Rose.”
“I am not stealing.” I had no intention of taking anything.
“It’s not stealin’.”
“Sure it is. And, stealing’s a sin.”
“Nobody’s gonna know.”
“Sure will, haven’t you heard of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, you spud?”
“And.” He wobbled his head back and forth and tossed the crucifix back. “What make’s dis a sin?”
“Stealing’s a sin, cuz you gotta confess it. You do go to confession, right?”
The men joshed back and forth below—throwing rocks and dunking each other like a pile of kids after rain. Then I saw one of them stand on the bank and pull his jeans up onto his waist.
“You goin’, Rocky?” one of them yelled.
Hog whisper-yelled at me, “C’mon! They’re gonna be finishin’ up!” He scooted backward on his hands and knees and pivoted around, cracking a stick, bumping into a tree, and getting slapped in the face by slender branches and elderly weeds.
The hoard of guys swam toward the bank. I froze.
I heard Hog behind me, “Grab it and run, Rose. We gotta split!”
I lifted the crucifix. The man on the cross wasn’t looking at me, but I felt like he was. What would Father Piccolo say? Me, willfully sinning, giving into temptation.
“Stealin’s not stealin’ if the person your stealin’ from stole it,” Hog told me.
“What?”
“Listen here, Moon stole that chain from a nun.”
A nun? This was stolen from a lady of the church, a sister? I lifted the clasp with my left hand. The kind-faced nun appeared before me. Anger bent my stomach in half. I must. I shoved the crucifix into my pocket. Damn him. I must deliver this chain from evil. I grabbed the Swinger and raced toward the fence where Hog was waiting by my bike.
It was good that I stole that crucifix, I figured. At least I would respect it. I saw the holiness in it, the blessed hands of the sister on it.
Hog and I strolled home, unseen by the ragazzi, completely at peace. This time Hog led us out onto the street. The safety of society’s concrete slabs wrought order. My heart slowed from the threat. The brassy boom of a train’s whistle resonated through the thick air signaling the release of yet another shower of soot to settle in the cracks of our sidewalks and pockets of our pants. Whether from the black train-clouds or the luminous plumage of the steel mill chimneys, all this dirt kept us Luces in business. A little shoeshine here or there really does add up in the end.
We approached my house. I headed to the front door, but Hog split at the corner of Elm and Cascade—heading back toward the shrubs from which he came. He said he didn’t very much like walking on Elm, always felt like somebody was watching him out there. I had no idea why. Cascade’s the street where all the old folks sat out on their porches, house after house after house. I guess what he meant was on Elm he felt as though he was being watched, but on Cascade he knew he was being watched. Taking out the “maybe” and replacing it with “definitely” lends some comfort, but I hoped we weren’t ever watched.
When I tromped onto the grass, the pungent aroma of freshly sliced blades and newly released chlorophyll burst around me. I loved that smell, although it made me sneeze.
I knew that if Hog ever told anybody I took that crucifix, I’d be dead. I’d be as doomed as a nightcrawler on a sun-baked driveway.
Dinner was as lively as ever. Once you got few a glasses of wine into Popi and Dad, they’d get rowdy. They’d start telling stories and bickering over the parts the other was leaving out. The stories had a tendency to transform themselves from week to week to month to year. I often figured they were quite manipulated, untrue by that point.
We finished the spaghetti. Dad and Popi were going on harassing each other. Angelo and Nicky had even started up. Grandma teetered around the table, inconspicuously delivering elderberry pie onto each empty plate. After she reached around me to pour some wine into my glass, the rosy liquid sloshed into it and swirled to a halt.
Good grief, what have I done? I wondered. My heart still pounded. I ran my fingers over the crucifix, concealed by the material of my shorts and one layer of the inside pocket. It barely formed a lumpy cross. Meanwhile, the stories floundered on from one to another, but I couldn’t listen anymore.
And I couldn’t bear looking into Grandma’s knowing eyes. I wondered if she could see in them the grave sin of which I had willing partaken. I worried that the impossibility of telepathy was insignificant with her. I supposed she always knew what kind of secrets we kept, but rarely did she actually shame me, and never in the presence of the whole family.
After a nerve-ridden train of moral-logic and self-deprecation, I concluded that I must go to the church in the morning and return the crucifix. The likelihood of finding the actual nun was minimal, but indeed the church was her family, a sister of God, so in that respect the piece did belong to the church just as much as it belonged to her.
The conversation unwound. Grandma and I cleared the table and began our ritualistic dishwashing routine: stacking on the right, Grandma washed, Grandma dunked in the clean left-side water, I pulled out of the water, I dried, I stacked in a reasonable configuration. But all the while, though my hands cleaned the dishes, my mind lingered on what I had taken. Grandma dismissed me early; she’d put them away herself.
The night dragged on. Though unconscious, all save about a half-hour, I knew what solemn business awaited me at the coming of dawn. So within a half-hour of its arrival, I peed and then escaped sudden death.
My nimbleness had faltered on the way back from the bathroom. Having memorized all of the squeaks on the stairs, I had placed my feet, meticulously in the various safe-zones. In this manner, I sneaked back up to my room. But suddenly I froze. It had dawned on me that I’d forgotten the eleventh stair. After dissuading the shame, I gathered my memory had failed me due to the nighttime hours and puffy sleep that weighed on my eyelids. I took a deep breath and guessed the best that I could. But of course I stepped exactly on the epicenter of a squeak. And the noise I made was instantly followed by another, right when I made it to the top. Popi had swirled out of his bedroom in a half-wakened haze, and I’d heard a click. His pistol pointed straight at me. My hands swung up above my head.
“Popi!” I whispered, “It’s me, Rosie.”
He didn’t flinch.
“It’s me!”
The pistol vibrated in his hand. Then he dropped it to his side. I slowly approached him, careful not to startle. He stood, stiff as a board, staring at the floor, evoking a kind of sleep-walking aura. I took his elbow, pivoted him around, and led him back into his room. After nudging him inside, I shut him in there.
Chapter 4
I made it to St. Mary’s by six. And to my total shame, I’d stepped on a squeak—again. I just had to leave it all up to fate.
This wasn’t the first time I had made a pilgrimage to the parish at this hour. I liked to pray before anyone else stirred. Grandma taught me how to do that. Though she didn’t do it anymore. Her knees got bad enough that she couldn’t handle the walk to church, even as flat unadventurous as it was.
I passed through the large stone entry way, entering the Notre Dame of our city, and glided down the center aisle. I heard a wet sucking sound billowing from the walls, only to realize that sound was coming from my own foot. The echo bounced around the four corners of the empty sanctuary disguising for four steps that I had a clearly