Works and Days

Chapter Twelve

Our Lady of the Sacred Marlboro

Russell Lewis was late for school that morning, and if second period had been anyone but Mr. Cordino, Russell would not have gone to class at all..

They were talking about the Franco-Prussian War, which meant Mr. Cordino was lecturing, and everyone else was half asleep. Ralph Balusik and Jason Lorry eyed him, Russell ignored them. They were all in blazers, white shirts, their fathers’ ties. Russell’s shirt was from the Salvation Army, two sizes too big, his corduroy jacket with the elbow patches swinging over his shoulder, and his returning red hair pushed back. Ralph, he did not understand. Jason, half Indian, black haired with a bit of a five o’clock shadow, had been in the cool group of kids,. He’d started out soft voiced and kind, but one day began calling Russell a faggot, and to Russell, who didn’t know what he was, and found all sex a mystery and had hoped the handsome Anglo Indian would be a friend, this felt like treachery. His grey green eyes smirked at Russell, and Russell made his own expression flat, like he didn’t give a shit. He wished he didn’t give a shit.

“Hey, Russell, nice to see you decided to come to class,” Jeremy Rusk hissed.

Russell flipped him a disinterested bird.

“Is there something you want to share with all of us, Jeremy?” Mr. Cordino asked.

Jeff Cordino, a friend of Russell’s family, was twenty-five. His voice shook a little, and sounded fuzzy, and it shook more when his kids talked through his lectures. He was a good man, but a nervous one, and Russell suspected he wouldn’t always be a teacher.

Jeremy cleared his throat, but in time to turn a wry mug to whoever might see his embarrassment, and said, “No, Mr. Cordino.”

“Good. Now, Russell, can you tell us some of the results of the Franco-Prussian War?”

Russell was at first put off. There were sniggers about the room. There shouldn’t have been. They all should have known better. And Russell opened his mouth and began to elaborate. His mind was not with his mouth. It was roving over the twenty or more boys in blazers in the white painted cinderblock room with those five windows over the long shelf of a heating vent that looked over Lincoln Street.

“Very good, Russell,” Mr. Cordino beamed. Russell wondered how he did that. He knew it was his teacher’s way of saving him, to show he had a brain. Russell wondered how much saving it really did.

He felt a wet spritz and turned to his left.

Ralph Balusik was spitting between his teeth, another jet of saliva landed on the back of Russell’s left hand.

“Lewis,” Jason Lorry, behind Russell, leaned into his ear. “Can you tell me what Cordino’s dick taste like? Does it taste like an Italian sausage? Do you put Ragu on it and slurp it off?”

Russell Lewis hated high school.

 

Russell had discovered the second story bathroom his freshman year. Naturally, everyone discovered it freshman year, but Russell discovered it in a different manner. This restroom was to Our Lady of Mercy High School what the agora was to ancient Athens. All manner of trade, legal and illicit went on in the second story lavatory. Here, copied papers were passed on and paid for, the undesired parts of lunch were exchanged. Marijuana, test answers, and condoms were sold, cigarettes smoked. Between classes, during lunch hour, the Breckenridge boys of the water polo team straightened their ties and touched up their hair, the Blacks and Mexicans of Westhaven tried to be as ghetto as deeply middle class minorities whose parents could afford to send them to Catholic school in Geschichte Falls, Michigan wished they really were. Boys with acne stuffed chewing tobacco under their lips and drooled into the toilets.

But during classes, and even during lunch hours, the lavatory was a place of quiet. It was a long room of unusual cleanness that smelled only faintly of disinfectant and was filled with eastern light. Russell walked down it, the line of urinals to his left, the line of red painted doorless stalls to his right and perpendicular with the line of windows overlooking the gymnasium’s gravel roof was the dome over the, swimming pool that had been added to the old school. Beyond were the last houses of Salem Street and a glint of the broad river. He would look out of the window, let the wind hit his face, stare up into the sun until he was blinded by this light. When he had had enough, then Russell would go out into the false fluorescent light of the narrow halls of Our Lady of Mercy. Russell believed that, in the end, the world was a good place, but the goodness was hard to find, and if Russell thought about most of the adults he’d known or the way his parents had been until recently, then he thought it was easier to live a bad life than a good one. Easier to walk in false light.

Russell came to the chapel because he was sure it needed him. Large and beautiful and largely empty, he got the feeling that the chapel had been lonely. No one ever came inside. And Russell had to admit that this was him as well. He was lonely too.

But no. That didn’t seem like the right word, and the more Russell thought about it, lonely was the inappropriate word for God’s house, painted with his saints and angels, the shadows filled with the smell of incense from morning Mass. Once, his father had shown Russell some photos of a trip he and his friends had made to Mexico one summer during college. Several shots had been of an Aztec Temple, empty, abandoned of worshippers, a pile of stones, and it had the same effect as this place. This chapel was not lonely. It was waiting.

And I’m waiting, too.

Though for what, Russell could not say.

So one day, during the times when Russell was eating and waiting, Gilead Story came in and sat down across from him. He nodded to Russell, Russell nodded to him and both went eating their lunches. It took about three days for Russell to be the one to break the sacred silence.

“I thought you had the lunch period after me,” Russell said.

“I did,” he said. “But it got changed.”

“Well, do you mind my being here?”

“No,” said Gilead. “Not at all.”

It was the most Gilead and Russell had spoken this semester, really. Half acquaintanced, but in full approval of each other, they’d gotten out of the habit of talk now that they no longer had mutual classes. And Russell hardly ever spoke in school, and when he did he still felt as if he was talking too much. Between some people there was always that need to talk as if the moments of silence were gaps urgently needing to be filled. With Gilead in the chapel between history and gym it was not like this. The silence was good, the words few and far between.

“You’re going to be a senior next year?” Russell said one day, and Gilead told him, after swallowing a bit of chicken sandwich, “Yes. I will.”

“Most people,” Russell began, taking a swig from his juice box, “get excited when they talk about their senior year.”

“Well,” Gilead said, “I’m not most people.”

Then, sensing that there was going to be conversation, Gilead got up and crossed the chapel and sat in Russell’s pew.

“When I started high school, my mother told me how much fun it would be. She told me how it was the best time of her life.”

“Mine too. And my Dad.”

“Exactly. Well,” Gilead made a gesture about the chapel with what was left of his sandwich, “Three years later here I am and it hasn’t been fun yet. It’s all these awful tired people talking about how much they hate being here and they all hate each other and then they’ll go right from high school hating life to college where they’ll hate life some more, and into a career and then they’ll be—we’ll be—our parents. As bad as high school is, what comes after doesn’t seem a hell of a lot better.

“I mean think about it. Everyday my mom comes home. I love her—well, actually,” Gilead noted with a tilt of his head, “I’m sort of indifferent to her, but I lean more on the love side than anything else. Anyway, when she comes home she just talks about how much she hates life and how bad work is, and then—”

“She sits in front of the TV all night talking back to the sitcoms, goes to sleep and does it all over again the next day,” Russell guessed.

“I guess white people and black people are dull in the same way,” Gilead reflected, then said, “I see you’ve been there, and frankly, if that’s what’s next, I’m actually a little terrified.”

“Gilead?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you a question?” 

“It seems to be what you do best.”

“Do you think our parents are stupid? I mean, they tell you that wisdom comes with age. But I look around and most of our teachers—there are the good ones and all—but most of them, and the priests and my relatives... it seems they don’t know any better than me. It seems like most of them are doing it wrong. Like... they really are stupid.”

“Well, I’ve never met your parents,” Gilead said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever met mine. But, I’ve met a lot of dumb old people, and then there’s you. You’re like a Socrates.”

“I am not!”

“I don’t throw out compliments,” Gilead told Russell. “I think if you’re already wise, you’ll get wiser, but if you’re young and stupid—unless something major happens to you—you’re probably gonna stay stupid. Or get dumber.”

Gilead finished his sandwich and wiped his fingers off on the napkin he wadded it into the paper bag which, in turn, he also wadded. He reached into his pocket for some gum, and handed a stick to Russell while he stuck one in his mouth.

“Aw, Gil,” Russell drew his feet under him and sat back in the pew. “Do you think we’re the only ones?”

Russell wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but Gilead seemed to know.

“No,” Gilead shook his head. “I used to think that I was alone and everyone else was in this big company, this big secret. Everyone else had friends and was never lonely and it was just me. And then I realized it was everyone. Just because we’re different, Russell, just because we go through a lot of stuff quicker and let less people in, it seems like we’re all alone against the rest of them. But just look out in the halls. They’re all lonely, they’re all lost, they all think it’s useless. Why do you think everyone’s so mean or so phony or so needy? Why do you think that one boy killed himself last year?”

“You think it’s all useless?” Chills went up Russell’s back, especially as he looked around the chapel at the painted saints staring out of the shadows,

“I said most of us think it’s useless,” said Gilead. “That’s what I said.”

“But you don’t think it’s useless?”

“What’s IT?”

“Life,” said Russell, at last.

“Life?” Gilead repeated.

“No. But the way most of us live it—my parents, your parents, the people we go to school with, our teachers? Yeah.”