The Holy Terror Read online

  The good nun had commented that, while Haid’s story was filled with “modern-day jingoisms,” he once again showed his talent for “presenting a cohesive bonding between religious cornerstones and present-day situations.”

  “In other words,” McCoppin snickered to his friend when the sister was through yakking, “the same old happy horseshit!” That would be the last commentary on life he would make before dying in the burn ward of Lutheran Deaconess Hospital three days later.

  “Aww,” Freddy Gorshin mugged. “Widdle Fwancis is the penguin’s pet! I’d bet you’d make a great altar boy, Frankie, because you’d do anything to please Sister Sagging Titties!” The blond boy, who had been putting his father’s Wildroot in his hair ever since Charles Starkweather’s picture ran in the Daily News back in February, flashed a limp wrist.

  Haid then commented on how it looked like Freddy didn’t have any bones in his hand, and that was how the three boys came to their scientific discussion in the minutes before all hell broke loose.

  Veronica had started reading a paper by Billy “Pencil Neck” Dulcette, and Haid, bored, was looking without interest at the alphabet flashcards above the blackboard. Freddy, following on Frankie’s idea, was pushing his finger loosely into the side of his nose. Aa is for Apple, Bb is for book...

  When the fire alarm suddenly went off, most everybody held their cheer behind silent masks; with any luck, the drill would take them through the three-thirty bell and that would be all she wrote. Three dozen chairs pushed away from their desks, each scraping across unwaxed red and tan checkerboard tiles.

  Haid lost track of his compatriots almost immediately. Veronica wagged a liver-spotted finger to separate the class into proper order. Frankie took great joy in hearing the penguin babble about proper Catholic grade school discipline, and how her little cherubs would never behave like the public school hooligans at Wells or Peabody. “On the beam, chop-chop,” she droned on. “We’ll show those whipsnappers, all righty.”

  Haid was staring wistfully out the window at the deserted basketball courts across California Avenue, in Humboldt Park, and watched an old newspaper flip across the concrete three times before the penguin finally opened the door to Room 217. The hallway was a buzzing hive given direction by the sharp adult commands of Sisters Vesna and Benatrix. The squeak of patent leather shoes echoed down the halls, making Haid think of mice in a sewer.

  “Single file, as we practiced.” Veronica’s face twitched. “Billy, you and Phillip Morrow hold the double doors open for your fellow classmates. P.D.Q., boys!”

  Haid thought that the two brown noses looked hilarious, moving in a kind of duckwalk to the far end of the corridor. They opened the doors as if they were ushers at the Blackstone. Haid saw wisps of smoke like winter breaths coming up from beneath the second set of doors.

  “Okay, cherubs, on the beam!” Veronica barked as the screams suddenly erupted from below. Haid’s eyes darted around, the alarm box above his head resembled a giant red tarantula. But the siren he was now hearing was coming from somewhere outside—the fire trucks from LeMoyne Street!—made him realize that this wasn’t a drill.

  Everybody lost all rationality at this point. Haid watched the cords in the nun’s neck become more defined as she, he was sure, struggled to hold back her panic.A moment later, he could no longer see Veronica, as the second set of doors were opened and greyish brown smoke engulfed one-third of the students. He thought he heard someone whispering The Lord’s Prayer and he hoped that it wasn’t himself.

  A crowd in panic: all logic gone from every living, breathing individual. They rush and press against doors meant to open inward. In 1904, half a thousand lives were lost in the fire at the Iroquois Theater on Randolph Street, the exit doors remaining closed due to the pressing weight of the crowd. The city fire laws hadn’t changed in the fifty-four years since.

  Haid saw things like in that commercial on TV, with the pearl falling ever so slowly down the bottle of Prell shampoo.

  A boy next to him started keening like a dog. He watched a kid named Mahl shit in his pants right in front of him, twin streams of lumpy liquid streaming from the legs of his regulation, navy blue slacks. Veronica looked like The Bride of Frankenstein, transfixed as her little charges stumbled around her, arms outstretched for impending crucifixions or forming X shields in front of their round faces. They banged into lockers, water fountains, and themselves as the smoke and confusion grew thicker by the second.

  Oddly, Haid thought of a passage Veronica had read aloud just the week before, on how, in the 1300s, French townspeople celebrated the festival of Saint John the Baptist by dancing in near delirium, until they fell to the ground, their limbs flailing uncontrollably. This spectacle came to be known as Chorea Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus Dance.

  That’s what it looked like everybody was doing. Only it was much more refined: the rigors of Catholicism did not mean that the children would conform to the actions of the French peasants. Janet Mandeen puked onto the lockers to her right, the lunch hour meal of fish sticks and green Jell-O not yet digested. The vomit stuck thickly to the tan and silver doors. Others beside her were crying, snot coming out of their noses like opaque soap bubbles.

  He was crying now, too. And he hated crying, because it reminded him of being a baby and how his mother would pull the bars on his crib higher and tie the pillowcase loosely around his face so that he wouldn’t cry out when she let the mailman in.

  Thinking about Doreen Madsen Haid—his mother, the slut—made him forget the panic that was rising up within him, so he stayed with it. The hate he felt for his dead mother was that strong. His mother would bed down with the mailman or the kid who delivered sandwiches for Ricky’s or just about anybody while his dad was out driving an armored car for Thillens.

  Dad had cleared out after he eventually figured things out, and he and Mom had moved into his Uncle Vince’s two--flat on Potomac Street, just a few blocks away from the school here on Crystal Street. Haid had despised her so much that he could have cared less when she drove her Chevrolet Biscayne into a Division Street trolley. Now, even though Uncle Vince Janssen made Frankie do some things that he really didn’t like doing, he still called him Father.

  He tried thinking of his new Father, of the way he smiled when he gave Frankie his bath, lathering him up good, and then the first set of doors were beside him. Their rubber wedges were still in place. Haid kicked one of them and the door loosened. A crayon-scrawled snow scene adorned a tattered sheet of white construction paper in one corner of the beveled glass. Frosty the Snowman kicking his heels up, real jazzy like on the cartoon Frazier Thomas shows on Garfield Goose and Friends. The kid who drew the scene had used orange crayon on the trees in the background, as if Frosty was running from the sunlight. One vertical edge of the paper drawing had begun to curl up the way his mother’s L & M’s had. She had never bothered to take the cigarette out while scolding him.

  Seeing Dulcette’s shadow through the smoke made him stop thinking about dear, departed mom. His lunkhead classmate had loosened his standard Catholic school tie, yanked his standard Catholic school starched white shirt up around his thin face. The top half of his head was smoothed by sweat.

  Haid thought of Dulcette’s courage in the moments before he screamed was a true act of foolishness. He had been standing sentry-like nearest where the smoke was blackest. Who was he trying to impress? Maybe he wanted to be a martyr like the child saint that the school was named after. St. Vitus, patron saint of comedians and epileptics. What a combo. Go figure, man. Haid could see Uncle Milty on his knees at night, praying.

  His left foot was firmly planted on the first of six steps to the landing—doubling back down six more to the first floor and they were almost home free—when Dulcette screamed.

  He did so because a tongue of flame had climbed around the metal bannister and ignited the sleeve of his blazer. The boy, inches from Haid, made a low, wailing sound. His eyes grew to the size of pie pans, despite the smoke.
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br />   Mesmerized by the red and orange flames climbing up his fellow student’s arm like a keener version of The Blob in all its Technicolor, Haid was only vaguely aware of the gasps of terror that were spreading behind him. He could only see Dulcette, Billy Dulcette with the pencil neck, whose father worked at Buler’s and was probably tearing down Washtenaw Avenue this very second, a real cool dad who would pass out dimes to all of his son’s friends so that they could buy Archie and Casper and Flash comics from the stand up machine next to the freezers. Billy Dulcette who really wasn’t that much of a lunkhead -- hey, God, are you listening here? -- and who was now moving his jaw with a painful, counter-clockwise slowness, as if he was patiently going for the biggest gum bubble blown in Chicago grade school history. Dumb fucking listen to the penguin Dulcette, that same senile biddy who was at that second spitting up Kyrie Eleisons and Heavenly Fathers left and right and who was about to see the first death at her hands occur because Haid knew that the lunkhead kid with the really cool father was doomed even before the fifth or sixth tongue of flame ignited the boy’s hair.

  He was close enough to feel the flames in his nostrils as Dulcette ignited in one great phumf! Dulcette’s slicked back hair uncoiled in wild ropes, some strands falling clear as if sheared, others were firecracker wicks ending in sputtering red. The boy moved then, doing an insanely graceful turn, just as the crowd behind Haid swelled outward like a hemorrhage about to burst.

  Haid couldn’t move quick enough; the quivering mass of panicked children pushed against him in several places. His knees buckled on the threshold of the second step down. Unable to catch his balance, he threw his arms out to either side, and his right arm jabbed someone’s rib cage. His left fingers scrabbled over the red-hot railing, and he was surprised to hear his own shrieks as the flesh on his palm fused to the railing’s lower rung.

  He twisted his neck to the left and saw Pat Carlson, a bookish JD whose only desire was to grow up to look like Sal Mineo, fall into the Dulcette candle and scream silently. Several students had stumbled over Haid, now in a kneeling position. He was weary, feeling like he did during summer swims at his Aunt Dot’s and had stayed underwater too long. Everything hurt him. At least, he thought he couldn’t possibly hurt any more.

  Then somebody stepped on his leg and he felt, more than heard, it crack.

  Broken. Going to die. Going to die. He bit his lip. Dried from the smoke, the skin split open wide. He had to think clearly now or he would be dead. He heard the urgent banging of fists on lockers as the rows of children who had stumbled over him reached the first floor.

  The sound faded for just a second, like when he was listening to someone talk and he’d yawn in the middle of one of their sentences, because the railing toppled over, angling sharply towards the mid-floor landing. Haid screamed louder now, tears hot on his face, as skin from three of his fingers ripped away from the muscle. The L--shaped railing smashed above the far wall, hitting just above the ancient stencil of a ghostly hand, palm forward. Barely visible through the smoke, Haid could just make out the red sign that meant stop, the Don’t Run admonishment equally spectral. The wall cracked in several places, the palm spattering with the darker red and grey as two of the taller boys had their skulls shattered by the metal projectile.

  He held onto the concrete steps as well as he could, his entire body numbing in pulsating waves. His dead left hand spasmed as another body fell forward out of the swirling grey and sprawled across his forearm. His fingers curled under the step, the blackened tissue caressing a molten piece of old chewing gum. Through the black motes clutching the corners of his vision, Haid saw the fused mess of Dulcette and Carlson and a dozen gaping faces framed in the grid patterns of support as the railing crashed down upon them. The first and last St. Vitus dance raged on.

  The landing broke apart in chunks. The ceiling, aflame, caved in and Haid was falling through space, madly imagining death singing a Buddy Holly tune to him: All of my love, all of my kissin’, you don’t know what you’ve been missin’, oh boy...

  He landed ass-first amongst the bodies and the rubble, the steaming railings and demolished lockers, nearly unconscious in the first row of the Buddy Holly After-Life Concert.

  After an unknown time, he opened his eyes. The lids felt as if lead weights were attached to them. Everything was fragmented for a moment, making Haid think that there were stitches in his retinas. The railing, along with the severed door of a locker, was wrapped around his lower legs. His next thought was that he would be crippled.

  A still, dead form of a blond-haired girl lay near him. Their eyes met. Haid thought that there was something wrong with the way her lifeless eyes stared him down. He felt as if he was being accused of something. The sirens, the fire alarms, the quiet moaning of the survivors; all had become muffled and Haid realized that there was a wetness in his ear. He was hypnotized by the girl’s stare. Much of her white blouse had burned away; a gilded chain that read Jesus Loves lay on her underdeveloped chest. Her nipples resembled uncooked pepperonis.

  He wondered if much of his own skin was missing. On the way back from his Auntie Emma’s house in Shelbyville a few summer’s back, he’d memorized a road sign for shaving lotion. He lit a match, to check gas tank, and now they call him, Skinless Frank. BURMA SHAVE. He looked at the girl again and understood what was different about her stare.

  The dead girl’s eyelids had burned completely off.

  Haid stared into the clear, beautiful, unseeing blue of her eyes, spoiled only by specks of dust in the whites, following their curvature until he could see the rinds that were the upper ridges of her sockets. He did this again and again until the wetness from his ear dripped onto his jaw.

  Then he passed out again.

  * * *

  He awoke to sounds of mild weeping. Soft prayer. The ceiling above him had split into a gaping V, tiny blots of plaster rained down on everything like hail. He could feel a dozen things pressing against him. Hard as metal, soft as flesh.

  The girl with no eyelids and the Savior’s name on her chest—yea, right! Tell me another one, J.C—would still be on his left, near the first set of lockers. He turned his head and an ice pick skipped across the hollow of his collarbone. He fought off the greyness again.

  One of the toppled lockers was open, its door swaying slightly the way Haid’s new Father let his arm swing from the bathtub when the two men took their “Friday Night Soaking.” A boy’s tempera paint printing read I LOVE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Somebody a semester later had blacked out the last word in marker, replacing it with the word CUNTS. Not any more, you don’t, Haid thought, looking at a bloodied hand.

  Several of his teeth were loose, he discovered when he tried to laugh. His head fell back down with a thump, the same sound his Father’s Biblija Swieta made when it was closed shut on the end table. Plaster fell and settled onto his face.

  Far off, he heard sirens and brakes and shouting. A piece of cardboard fluttered down from above and he wondered if anybody was alive up there. The cardboard was a blue and white sign that read ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK. CLEANLINESS IS NEX with the rest burned off for all time. The janitor’s reminder hit Haid’s arm and he barely felt it.

  He heard approaching footsteps. When he had the strength and the curiosity to look at the girl again, she was gone. He had dreamt her being there. Simple as that.

  Then he heard a sigh that wasn’t his own. Someone else was alive. He turned toward the direction of the voice. Past where the girl he had dreamt about lay.

  “Father’s come.”

  Uncle Vince? Was that really his Father? No, it didn’t sound like him, no, it was a fireman, it— He focused in on a man bending over a burnt boy. “Father’s come to take you home.”

  That wasn’t his Father, but now he knew that he’d be saved. They would all be saved.

  The man lifted the boy, the skin in tatters. The boy looked like a pile of filthy shag carpeting and he was still breathing! The fireman’s build
was large, and he was spattered with gore. But his chest was strangely dry and it seemed to glow softly. But this was only Haid’s delirium. Or so he told himself.

  “Come to God,” the man spoke softly.

  The pain heightened. Haid grimaced, trying to remember the hate he held for his mother, the defiance he had once had, saying the word pussy in the school yard that very first time.

  The man’s beard was white, clipped neatly the way Mitch Miller wore his. Father watched SING ALONG WITH MITCH every Friday night. Haid would watch it with him later, when he got home. The bell would ring soon.

  “Many are the sufferings of the just,” the man began reciting, holding the broken boy closer to his chest. “And from them all, the Lord has delivered them; the Lord preserves all their bones, not one of them shall be broken.”

  The man made the sign of the cross by bobbing his head. He began squeezing the boy in his arms, and Haid wanted to cry out, but blood slid down his throat instead.

  He was pushing the boy into his chest—into his goddamn chest! Like something out of CREATURE FEATURES! Haid wished he had tears left to cry.

  (gone the boy was gone like the girl like Gorshin and the penguin, oh, for chrissakes)

  Wanted to cry, because the man stood, his knees cracking, and began to come towards Haid.

  “No,” Haid managed to croak.

  “Thou shalt have no dogs befoul me,” the man whispered, and it made no sense at all.

  Had he heard it right? The man’s face trembled to Haid’s shudders.

  “Come to God.” The man’s touch was warm, like Father massaging his thighs in the bathtub. He felt a sharp tingling in his crotch. He was getting an erection, so why was he afraid?