Jesus Out to Sea

But she wasn’t listening now. She walked past me toward the red light at the corner, her habit and beads swishing against my arm. She smelled like camphor and booze and the lichen in the alley she had bruised under her small shoes.

Two days later, the same ritual repeated itself. Except this time Sister Felicie didn’t empty just one short-dog and head for the convent. I saw her send the black man back to Cobb’s for two more bottles, then she sat down on a rusted metal chair at the back of the alley, a book spread on her knees, as though she were reading, the bottles on the ground barely hidden by the hem of her habit.

That’s when Mr. Dunlop and his son Vernon showed up. Vernon was seventeen and by law could not be made to attend school. That fact was a gift from God to the educational system of southwest Houston. Vernon had half-moon scars on his knuckles, biceps the size of small muskmelons, and deep-set simian eyes that focused on other kids with the moral sympathies of an electric drill.

Mr. Dunlop was thoroughly enjoying himself. First, he announced to everyone within earshot he was the owner of the entire corner, including the drugstore. He told the Cheerio yo-yo man to beat it and not come back, then told the kids to either buy something inside the store or get off the benches they were loitering on.

His face lit like a jack-o’-lantern’s when he saw Sister Felicie emerge from the alley. She was trying to stand straight, and not doing a very good job of it, one hand touching the brick wall of the drugstore, a drop of sweat running from the top edge of her wimple down the side of her nose.

“Looks like you got a little bit of the grog in you, Sister,” Mr. Dunlop said.

“What were you saying to the children?” she asked.

“Oh, her ladyship wants to know that, does she? Why don’t we have a conference with the pastor and hash it out?” Mr. Dunlop said.

“Do as you wish,” Sister replied, then walked to the red light with the cautious steps of someone aboard a pitching ship.

Mr. Dunlop dropped a Buffalo nickel into a pay phone, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His head was shaved bald, his brow knurled, one eye recessed and glistening with pleasure when someone picked up on the other end. “Father?” Mr. Dunlop said.

His son Vernon squeezed his scrotum and shot us the bone.

The Cheerio yo-yo man did not come back to the corner and Sister Felicie disappeared from school for a week. Then one Monday morning she was back in class, looking joyless and glazed, as though she had just walked out of an ice storm.

That afternoon, Benny and his girlfriend pulled into my driveway while I was picking up the trash Vernon and his brothers had thrown out of their attic window into the yard. “I can’t get the atomic bomb right. Get in the car. We’ll pick up your friend on the way out,” he said.

“Way where?” I said.

“The Shamrock. You want to go swimming and have some eats, don’t you?” he said.

“I’ll leave my mom a note,” I said.

“Tell her to come out and join us.”

That definitely will not flush, I thought, but did not say it.

Benny had said he couldn’t pull off the yo-yo trick called the atomic bomb. The truth was he couldn’t even master walk-the-dog. In fact, I couldn’t figure why a man with his wealth and criminal reputation would involve himself so intensely with children’s games. After Nick and I went swimming, we sat on the balcony of Benny’s suite, high above the clover-shaped pool of the Shamrock Hotel, and tried to show him the configurations of the atomic bomb. It was a disaster. He would spread the string between his fingers, then drop the yo-yo through the wrong spaces, knotting the string, rendering it useless. He danced up and down on the balls of his feet in frustration.

“There’s something wrong with this yo-yo. I’m gonna go back to the guy who sold it to me and stuff it down his throat,” he said.

“He’s full of shit, kids,” his girlfriend said through the open bathroom door.

“Don’t listen to that. You’re looking at the guy who almost blew up Mussolini,” he said to us. Then he yelled through the French doors into the suite, “Tell me I’m full of shit one more time.”

“You’re full of shit,” she yelled back.

“That’s what you got to put up with,” he said to us. “Now, teach me the atomic bomb.”

Blue-black clouds were piled from the horizon all the way to the top of the sky, blooming with trees of lightning that made no sound. Across the street, we could see oil rigs pumping in an emerald-green pasture and a half-dozen horses starting to spook at the weather. Benny’s girlfriend came out of the bathroom, dressed in new jeans and a black and maroon cowboy shirt with a silver stallion on the pocket. She drank from a vodka collins, and her mouth looked cold and hard and beautiful when she lowered the glass.

“Anybody hungry?” she said.

I felt myself swallow. Then, for reasons I didn’t understand, I told her and Benny what Mr. Dunlop had done to Sister Felicie. Benny listened attentively, his handsome face clouding, his fingers splaying his knotted yo-yo string in different directions. “Say all that again? This guy Dunlop ran off the Cheerio man?” he said.

It was almost Easter, and at school that meant the Stations of the Cross and a daily catechism reminder about the nature of disloyalty and human failure. When he needed them most, Christ’s men bagged it down the road and let him take the weight on his own. I came to appreciate the meaning of betrayal a little better that spring.

I thought my account of Mr. Dunlop’s abuse of Sister Felicie and the Cheerio man had made Benny our ally. He’d said he would come by my house the next night and straighten out Mr. Dunl

op and anyone else who was pushing around kids and nuns and yo-yo instructors. He said these kinds of guys were Nazis and should be boiled into lard and poured into soap molds. He said, “Don’t worry, kid. I owe you guys. You taught me the atomic bomb and the Chinese star.”