trouble. That hole is like putting a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting in front of kids and telling them hands off. Denny Desmond already broke his collarbone. He fell in after B.O. Montanazza challenged him to walk the plank across the hole on the first day of summer vacation.
They’re going to get busy building the rest of the school as soon as Father Mickey has taken in enough money from his parishioners, which he’ll hand over to Mr. Tony Fazio, who I recently found out in a rude way from Fast Susie isn’t exactly a silverware salesman like I’ve been thinking this whole time. Mr. Fazio owns the construction company that’s building the new classrooms. His business partner, Mr. Frankie “The Knife” DeNuzio, will be helping him. (Fast Susie also told me in a very cutting tone that Mr. DeNuzio is also known by another nickname, “Mr. Thanksgiving,” because, “Frankie is the best there is at carvin’.”)
On the opposite side of the playground is a spooky-looking old house where the nuns live, and according to Mary Lane, torture children with dripping holy water.
Father Mickey and Father Louie live together, too, in a one-story house called a rectory that’s behind the school. Father Louie’s practically an antique, but very sweet in his personality. He plays Santa at our church Christmas party, that’s how jolly and red he is, especially in his nose. He’s not here right now. He’s been taking the summer off to go on a special retreat someplace really dry and won’t be back until school starts, so that’s why Father Mickey has been living alone the past couple of months.
I’ve never been in the rectory, but Troo has. That’s where she gets her extra religious instruction. She told me the priests have got a living room with two davenports and an office with pictures on the wall of their boss on earth, the Pope. And they have a bathroom with a tub and both the priests have crosses hanging over their beds with palm fronds the same way Troo and me do. That seemed so funny to me. How those priests are pretending to live like any Tom, Dick or Harry, when they’re not. They don’t resemble normal people at all. They’re above and beyond.
I’m still staring up at the church, trying to decide whether or not I should go tell Dave about Troo’s revenge plan, when Mary Lane comes peeling around the corner, head down, legs pumping a mile a minute and skids right into me.
“For crissakes,” she says, grabbing me up off the grass and dragging me into the familiar bushes in front of the Kohls’ house. We hide in them all the time after we go out ringing doorbells or when the Molinari brothers chase us. One of Troo’s old Dubble-Bubble wrappers is caught in the bottom of a branch. Mary Lane’s got her black high-tops on like always. And her Brownie camera is hanging off her neck. That’s kinda unusual. It’s her most prized possession. She won it in a church raffle and hardly ever takes it outta the house. She shoves me into a squat, not giving me enough time to put up a fight, which I would lose anyway.
“What’re ya doin’ here?” she says. “You’re supposed to be over at the Latours’.”
“I was on my way to the Piaskowskis’. Dave’s over there and I… I… what are
“Father Mickey… he’s after me,” Mary Lane says, wiping her leaky nose off with her finger and running it down her tan shorts. Her bare legs look like two soda straws. “For an old guy… he’s pretty quick, almost fast as you.”
It takes me less than a breath to figure out what’s going on. Mary Lane’s not here scouting out the school, thinking about setting it on fire even though she’s threatened to a couple of times. That’s just big talk. She wouldn’t really do that. I don’t think. Our little cat burglar musta been up here doing what movie thiefs always do before they break into a place. They don’t just dive right in to commit a crime. They come the night before to have a look around to see if there’s a mean dog or a night watchman.
I point at the rectory and ask her, “Were you casin’ the joint and Father saw you?”
“What?” Mary Lane says with a look on her face that reminds me so much of a monkey that’s gotten a peanut stolen out of its hand by another monkey, real astonished like that. “Didn’t Troo fill you in? Didn’t she tell ya about-”
“Over here,” someone shouts from across the street. I can’t hear the rest of what the person says, only that he sounds furious and out of breath.
“That’s him. He’s comin’,” Mary Lane says, spreading apart a couple of bushy branches. “Look.”
Father Mickey is ripping across the school playground, hollering at two boys who are working hard to keep up with him. When he comes to a stop across the street from us, he checks up the block one way, then the other, and now he’s staring where we’re crouched and he’s so close. That look on his face… it’s the same look Bobby Brophy used to get when we’d play chess together at the playground, when he was planning his next capturing move that I never saw coming. I can’t help it, I groan.
Mary Lane slaps her hand over my mouth and whispers, “Shut your trap. He’s got really good hearin’. You recognize the boys?”
I couldn’t at first, but now that they’ve caught up, I can see that it’s Larry Montgomery and Hank Holzhauer. If Mary Lane wasn’t cat-burglaring around, then there’s only one other reason I can think of why she’d be getting chased by Father and the boys.
I take her fingers off my mouth and say, “I know what you did. You peeped in on one of their overnight parties.” The altar boys brag about how they bring sleeping bags over to the rectory and stay up to all hours of the night snacking and playing games, and it drives Mary Lane right up a wall that there aren’t any altar girls. “What were they doin’? Playin’ checkers and eatin’ jujubes?” (Her favorites.)
I’m waiting for her to launch into some no-tripper story about how they were doing something else that priests and altar boys would never do. There would be kidnapping gypsies involved and maybe that man, Ed Gein, she told me about would stop by with a blood-dripping woman, but she doesn’t. She says, “They were sittin’ around in the livin’ room with all the shades drawn. I could barely see ’em.”
“Oh, they musta been watchin’ a movie and needed it dark.” I know all about that. I am the visual-aids girl in our classroom.
Mary Lane says, “The only thing they were watchin’ was Father Mickey shakin’ his fist at ’em.”
That doesn’t sound anything like the kind of fun sleepovers I heard they have.
From across the street, Father says, “Did either of you get a good look at her?”
None of the boys answer him.
“Hank?” The priest is singling Holzhauer out because he is the head altar boy.
“No, Father.”
When the church bell starts ringing, Father Mickey checks his fancy watch and says, “It’s getting late. I have an appointment. Go back to the rectory and tell the boys I want to see them at the same time tomorrow night.”
Hank and Larry say, “Yes, Father,” and scoot after him across the playground the same way they follow him down the Communion rail with their golden skillets in case he should accidentally drop the Host.
I wait until I can’t see them anymore before I begin belly-crawling out of the bushes, but Mary Lane’s got another idea. She grabs me by my braid and reels me back.
“Seein’ that Troo hasn’t gotten ya up to speed yet, I guess I will,” she says with a first-place smirk. The two of them. Always trying to one-up each other. “Whatta ya think of when you hear those two boys’ names?”
Oh, this is such bad timing. Not the time to play the name game at all. But Mary Lane, just like me, has a lot of stick-to-it-iveness. She’s never going to let go of me until I answer, so I tell her, “Hank is really superstitious. He’s always throwin’ salt over his shoulder at lunch and knockin’ on Woody Anderson’s head for luck and Larry is the captain of the basketball team.”
“Not their first names, their last,” she says impatiently.
“Ah… Holzhauer is a Kraut and Montgomery… I don’t know what he is. Can we go now?” I gotta get back to doing what I was doing before Mary Lane ambushed me. Trying to decide what to do about Troo. Should I or shouldn’t I tell Dave that she’s coming up with a scary revenge plan?
“Holzhauer and Montgomery.” Mary Lane gets me by the shoulders, brings her face in real close to mine. I can smell her banana breath when she slowly says, “Montgomery and Holzhauer. Conner. Livingston. Jenkins. Put on your thinkin’ cap, Sal. What do those names have in common besides all of them bein’ altar boys?”
The split second after I say, “I don’t know,” that’s when it comes to me. “Holzhauer and Montgomery, all the others… those families have all gotten robbed!”
Mary Lane rocks back on her heels and says, “Give the little lady a cigar,” but when I don’t say anything else, she blows up. “Don’t you get it? The altar boys… they’re the cats. They’ve been takin’ stuff from their own
