Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,18
ivy-covered trellis to my bedroom window, dark hair poking through lace curtains. Ma hung lace everywhere, her only concession to domesticity.
“Shit!” he’d say as he dropped his keys, which hit the ground with a metallic clang, followed by a tiny avalanche of gravel and dried sand from the soles of his shoes.
I’d tell him quiet, shut up, you asshole, they’ll hear you.
“Ma and Pop don’t give a flying fuck,” he’d say. “Why do you care, Collie?” He’d be panting gently, gripping the ledge with his fingers, their tips livid with exertion, hoisting himself inside, dusting himself off, careful not to make a sound as his toes touched the floor, but not for long.
He’d leap into bed beside me and tell me everything, let me in on all of it: the lawlessness, the girls, the booze, the fun. And Christ, the guiltlessness! I envied the remorseless pleasure he took in being Bing Flanagan.
By dull contrast, the only time I ever got drunk I was sixteen and made it an exercise in earnestness, hooking myself up to an intravenous of vodka. What a soppy fucking drunk I was. Bingo told me I made out with Eliot Harrigan, captain of my swim team at Andover.
“You lying sack of shit,” I said to him, propped on my elbow, leaning over him in the partial darkness, moonlight casting its silvery glow.
“Maybe,” he said, eyes laughing, “but then again, maybe not.”
A few weeks after Pop’s meeting with Sister Mary Ellen, Bingo got kicked out of St. Basil’s for the remainder of the school year. The caretaker, a creepy guy named Mario who had yellow teeth and pretended to eat worms to scare the girls, trapped a small stray dog in the yard, pulled off his belt, snapped it as if it were a whip, and ran after the little mutt, flaying him with the belt, terrorizing him and us, the black-and-brown dog howling, the little kids crying, the older kids, my friends and I, standing around shocked and numb, looking to the nuns to intervene, expecting the priest to do something.
Nobody moved. The nuns and priest went on with their small talk; only Sister Mary Ellen looked upset, her hands fidgeting with her rosary beads.
“You bastard!”
I turned around at the sound of a familiar voice as Bingo ran across the yard and lobbed a rock at close range at Mario, hitting him hard on the shoulder. Mario stopped and let loose a profusion of profanity so fluent and expressive that I thought he was speaking a foreign language. Then all hell broke loose as the nuns chased Bingo down and the priest, who reached him first, grabbed both his shoulders, and Sister Rosemary, her cheeks red as a geranium, pulled a strap from inside her habit and whacked him across the face, hitting him with so much force that her feet left the ground and her glasses fell off, cracking on the pavement.
For days afterward, Bing walked around with the shape of a strap imprinted on his cheek, his face black and blue and red and swollen, his “valorous palette,” Ma called it, “the colors of courage.” Predictably, Ma turned into a human tornado when she got the news, boring a hole into the ground with the spinning velocity of her fury.
She showed up at the school the next morning with our Caucasian Ovcharka, Lenin—or Lennon, which was what I told my friends he was called—a fierce Russian dog best described as Khrushchev-on-a-rope. She turned him loose on Mario, who had to scramble onto the church roof to escape.
I never again felt quite the same about the Catholic Church or about Bingo. Though I thought the world of Bing, I took pains to conceal it, resenting him for his bravery as much as I admired him for it.
It’s not easy coming to terms with your shortcomings. I was just an average grunt—not so pathetic that I was the movie cliché in the prison camp who loses it and throws himself into the barbed wire trying to escape his frenzy of fear, but more like the guy crouching in the dirt who sees something of himself in the aberration. I was always more of a chicken than I would’ve liked to acknowledge, but I was saved from full egg-laying status by my habit of taking my cues from the hero.
Ma knew.
“Run for your life, Collie,” she used to say to me. “The creek’s gone dry.”
CHAPTER FIVE
BETWEEN POP AND UNCLE TOM, AND THE SHEER QUANTITY OF alcohol they