The Convict and Other Stories

But she wasn’t buying it. She’d let those guys throw pecans at her every afternoon before she’d ask for help. She was that kind, a real soldier.

“I have a nickel,” I said. “We can get a twin Popsicle at Veazey’s.”

Her face hesitated a moment, then her eyes smiled at me.

“There’s three of us,” she said.

“I don’t want one. My mother always fixes something for me when I come home,” I said.

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“I have some money,” she said. “It’s my treat today. Look at the scratch on your arm. You can get lockjaw from that. It’s terrible. Your jaws turn to stone and they have to feed you through a tube in your nose.”

She wet her handkerchief with her tongue and wiped at the red welt on my forearm.

“I’m going to get some bandages at Veazey’s and some iodine and alcohol, and then you should go to the hospital later for shots,” she said. “Here, I’ll tie the handkerchief on it to keep out infection till we can wash it off. The air is full of germs.”

The three of us walked down to the ice-cream parlor next to the drawbridge that spanned Bayou Teche. Cypress trees grew along the banks of the bayou, and on the other side of the bridge the small gray-stone hospital run by the sisters was set back deep in the shade of the oaks. Purple wisteria grew on the trellises by the adjacent convent, and I could see some of the sisters in their white habits working in their Victory garden. Rene, Arthur, and I sat on the bridge and ate ice-cream cones, with our feet hanging over the water, and watched a shrimp boat move slowly down the bayou between the corridor of trees and bamboo. I knew that long, cypress-framed ribbon of brown water eventually flowed into the salt, where I believed Nazi submariners still waited to burn and drown the good people of the world, but on that spring afternoon, with the wind blowing through the trees and ruffling the water under our feet, the red and yellow hibiscus blazing on the convent lawn, the war had ended for me like heat thunder dying emptily over the Gulf.

Small drops of water started to dent the dust on the school playground. Through the bamboo that grew along the bayou’s banks I could see the brown current being dimpled, too. We were a group of five boys by the corner of the school building, and Arthur Boudreau had a thin, cellophane-wrapped cardboard box enclosed in his palm.

“Hold out your hand,” he said. The other boys were grinning.

“What for?” I said.

“Put out your hand. What’s the matter, you afraid?” he said.

“You put chewing gum in a guy’s hand one time.”

“Well, you better not chew on these,” he said, grabbing my wrist and pressing into my hand the thin white box with the image of a black Trojan horse on it.

I stared at it numbly. Both my hand and face felt dead. The boys were all laughing now.

“This is crazy. I don’t want something like this,” I said, my voice rising, then catching in my throat like a nail.

“Sorry, they’re yours now,” Arthur said.

I tried to push the box at Arthur. I felt wooden all over, my skin tainted with something loathsome and obscene.

“I found them behind Provost’s pool hall. They got a machine there in the men’s room,” Arthur said.

I was swallowing hard and my heart was clicking in my chest. My face rang with the kind of deadness you feel after you’ve been slapped.

“You’re my friend, Arthur, but I don’t want in on this kind of joke,” I said. I knew my voice was weak and childlike, and now I felt doubly ashamed.

“I don’t want in on this joke because I’ll piss my little diapers and my mommy will be mad at me,” one of the other boys said.

Then a second boy glanced sideways and whispered, “Sister’s looking!”

Thirty yards away Sister Uberta watched us with a curious, even gaze, her body and the wings of her habit absolutely motionless.

“Oh, shit,” Arthur said, and shoved the bunch of us around the corner of the building. I tripped on my shoes and revolved in a foolish circle, my hand still trying to give him back the box.

“Gimme that,” he said, and slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans and walked hurriedly toward the opposite end of the building in the soft rain. His tennis shoes made stenciled impressions in the fine dust under the trees.

“Fling it in the coulee,” one of the boys called after him.

“Like hell I will. You haven’t seen the last of these babies,” he answered. He grinned at us like a spider.