Cover art by Irina Tall
I wasn’t afraid of the Devil until I read those comic books in John Giordano’s barbershop. I wouldn’t have gone there except that my mother heard he gave the cheapest haircuts in town. In the August heat we parked ourselves in the seats along the wall to wait for him to sweep the floor after his latest victim. My mother immersed herself in a paperback, and on the TV high up on the wall, President Reagan babbled about things I didn’t understand. I rifled through the day-old newspapers and month-old magazines. Little packets of cheap newsprint—put there for kids like me who hated haircuts—depicted endless fields of fire wherein the worst abominations of nightmare did unspeakable things to everyone who wasn’t Catholic. My fate was assured through quotes on every page from the Bible, which I’d never read.
“We live in Quincy Estates,” my mother said by way of introduction.
“My brother lives out there,” the barber said.
That’s when my mother read his name on the business license on the wall and figured out he was Vince Giordano’s brother. I vaguely grasped that made him Lizzie’s and Nicki’s uncle, but it was more instinct than intelligence that made me recoil when he directed me to the swivel chair. Vince Giordano was an ogre with tightly curled hair and a forehead creased from frowning. John Giordano was bald with hairy forearms, an oppressive odor of cologne, and a forehead creased from frowning.
I trudged over and up into the chair. The apron came down over my head, the towel around my shoulders. John Giordano frowned and held the scissors.
I thought it wasn’t fair that Lizzie and Nicki and all the other kids I knew would get to go to Heaven. I cursed my mother for not giving me the Lord. I’d heard my mother call my father an atheist. Not knowing what that meant, the last time I stayed at his place, I asked his second wife about his religion. She said he was “baptized Catholic.” I wondered if my mother would cry and tell me how sorry she was when the Devil’s minions impaled us on their pitchforks.
“I’m gonna cut your ear off if you keep squirming like that,” the barber said.
“Paulie, sit still,” my mother said.
Cold water from the spray bottle soaked my scalp and trickled down my temples. I closed my eyes and saw the denizens of Hell with their fangs and twisted fingers. The comics couldn’t show the Devil. They said he was too hideous to depict.
“How ‘bout I just fill the kid’s ear up with water?” the barber quipped.
“Oh, no, no,” my mother crooned placatingly.
More hair came tumbling down the apron than I thought I had. The instant the apron was unfastened, I dashed out to the car. In its darkened windows I saw my stupid face, my too-straight hair, a bowl that barely touched my ears, and my puffy cheeks a mess of snot.
When we pulled up in front of our apartment building, Lizzie and Nicki stared at us from the next lawn over. They let drop the rubber ball they’d been tossing back and forth to watch us as we stepped out of the car.
The man who owned Quincy Estates wasn’t named Quincy but McSweeney, so I assumed the complex must be named for the quinces. I used to dig a hole under the fence and slip into what I knew was private property where scores of trees would drop their fruit. I’d bring them home by the armload. My mother would say, “Bless your heart,” boil them into jam, and bring me with her to the landlord’s house when she went to pay the rent. Mrs. McSweeney would let us in and I’d linger at the counter, coveting the ever-present glazed gingerbread house. I’d always wait in vain for the adults to be distracted long enough that I could stuff a piece in my mouth. Then Mr. McSweeney would step out through the kitchen, a slicked-back gray old man with glasses that smudged away his eyes, who barely spoke and never smiled. Sometimes my mother asked him for a lease, which he invariably refused. Then she’d try to save enough to move, but each time she almost did, he raised the rent again.
“Paulie got a haircut!” the Giordano sisters chanted. “Paulie got a haircut! Paulie got a haircut!”
I rushed inside and pressed my ear to the tiled floor. In the mingled sounds of feet and vacuum cleaners in the units next to and above us, I was certain then that I could hear the Devil—and for the first time, I was certain I could see him pacing through his kitchen, one like ours but underground and lightless, his face more horrible than the hemp-and-plastic witch in Sandra DeLuca’s kitchenette.
“Put on play clothes,” my mother told me. “You can play in the back of the church while Sandra and I are at the meeting.”
Sandra was a giant globe of a woman with a gentle smile and the curls of a little girl. She’d let everyone know about her new liquid diet and promised all of us that until she lost at least a hundred pounds she’d take in nothing but three magic shakes in place of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes she came to meetings with my mother. On this particular evening, she begged off.
“Mi è venuto il colpo di frusta.” She came to the door rubbing her back. “I watch Paulie for you.”
I sat on the floor between the kitchenette and the daybed as quietly as I could. Most of my willpower went into not looking at the kitchen witch. Sandra had already told me the witch’s name was Epifania and that she belonged to a Christmas tradition from the Old Country. She said there was a difference between a befana and a strega, but I couldn’t shake the certainty that Epifania’s duty was to bring presents to the good children and kill and eat the rest of us. She’d beat me with her broomstick and stuff my mangled remains into her hamper to carry home and boil in her cauldron.
On the TV across the room, sad and angry people talked about grownup things in rooms that all had the same dim lighting. Sandra poured herself a plastic cup of purple stuff and munched on something solid.
“What are you eating?” I demanded with narrowed eyes.
“Cheese,” she said. “But I make up for it by not having my shake tonight.”
Desperately resisting the urge to look at Epifania, I focused on the crucifix with the weeping silver Jesus and the wooden plaque emblazoned with Dio benedica questo appartamento. The headboard of Sandra’s daybed was a macedoine of bloodstained tissues, TV Guide, and vials of prescription medication, over one of which was draped a rosary.
“You were baptized, right?” I asked her.
She grunted in the affirmative through a mouthful of cheese.
“I wish I’d been baptized,” I said.
“I baptize you now,” she said. After tossing back another cup, she heaved herself up toward the kitchenette. She wore no underwear beneath her bell-shaped mini nightgown, revealing two massive hemispheres of cellulite that rippled like the ocean when she walked. I looked across the room, where Sally Struthers pleaded that we save the children and Crazy Eddie promised his prices were insane.
Sandra sank back into her daybed with a palm-sized plastic bottle in her hand.
“Paulie Salerno,” she intoned, “Ti battezzo nel nome del Padre e del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo.”
Holy water dribbled over my newly-shorn crown, dripping down my temples, and into my collar. I didn’t dare brush any away. I let it sit as I sat watching President Reagan descend the ladder from his airplane, looking down and frowning with his hands thrust in his overcoat as he walked alongside the bald Russian leader with the odd mark on his head.
When my mother walked me back across the slope between the buildings, I couldn’t wait to tell her, “Sandra baptized me!”
“Sandra can’t baptize you,” my mother scowled. “Only a priest or deacon can do a baptism.”
* * *
In September, when I started fourth grade, Nicki Giordano and the landlord’s grandson, Eddie, both ended up in my class. No sooner had I bested the class in spelling than I made a fool of myself by asking the teacher how a person could get baptized—did you have to pay for it? The jeers that filled the room taught me not to mention it again. Before long, they forgot, and Nicki was teaching me a rhyme: Eddie McSweeney had a forty-foot weenie/He went to the lady next door/She thought it was a snake and cut it with a rake/And now it’s only six foot four. I laughed, but Eddie didn’t. He was about to tell the teacher when she came in with a sack of hair from John Giordano’s floor. For our science lesson that day, the teacher burned the hair on a camping stove so we’d know the smell of burning human flesh. She taught us that between the United States and the Soviet Union, humanity had enough nuclear armament to destroy the world seven times over. She said President Reagan was “playing a deadly game.”
“Why don’t you like Reagan?” Eddie asked.
“Reagan,” our teacher said, “Is taking money away from poor people and putting it into building nuclear bombs.”
My mother was still at work when I came home from school. I’d planned to gorge myself on Big Wheels and watch Voltron on TV, but President Reagan had commandeered all channels but the Spanish one, to warn us about something happening in Latin America.
The air raid sirens, I was always told, were just a test of the system. We heard them often enough in Opal Cliffs, beginning with their low and distant groan, then rising and hanging in a protracted wail, briefly dropping, and rising again. Somehow I sensed that one of these days it wasn’t going to be just a test.
I put on play clothes and ran around on the adjacent lawn. I tore across the garden and up the woodland patch till I was thwarted by the fence, then back to the patch of field in the center of the complex. In the distance, I saw Lizzie and Nicki staring in a way I didn’t like at all. I ran in the opposite direction—all the way to Sandra DeLuca’s place.
I took a step backward when her daughter Danielle opened the door.
Danielle lived with her father, somewhere far away. I’d only ever seen her half a dozen times. She was a year or maybe even two years older than Lizzie, which made her nearly a teenager. Feathered hair fell to her shoulders, mounds rose under her T-shirt, and her eyes were either blue or gray or both at once.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I ran away from Lizzie and Nicki,” I said.
“Why? Don’t you like them?”
I shook my head and repeated something I’d heard my mother say: “They’re sick.”
Danielle looked at her mother. Sandra clicked her tongue but kept her eyes on the television, a program called The World Tomorrow. Two men in suits hedged their bets on how soon the End would come, then rolled the credits over a nuclear missile burning through the sky.
I spotted a paperback New Testament on Sandra’s shelf. I asked if I could borrow it. She let me. I raced back to my apartment, hugging it to my breast.
My mother still wasn’t home. I opened the book at the kitchen table and skipped straight to Revelation. The bits I understood were made more terrifying by the utter incomprehensibility of the rest. I made a mental list of all the signs so I could know for sure when the apocalypse was starting.
Keys jingled in the doorknob. My mother walked in beaming. Sandra, she announced, was coming to the meeting that night—and Danielle would be there to watch me and the other kids.
Inside the church, a short flight of steps led to the big white room where the grownups congregated. All unsmiling with their liver spots and pockmarks and their paunches over poorly-fitting jeans, they sat at folding tables smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee out of paper cups, telling stories of how miserable they used to be. Us kids were sent to the rear of the building, which contained an office—something like a storage bunker. Our mothers made us promise not to disturb the artifacts or vestments. Meetings always ended with the grownups chanting on Earth as it is in Heaven, and the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever, amen, their deep voices resounding in the architecture. There were other words in between—something about their forgiveness of those who trespassed against them. I couldn’t help but wonder if that included me.
Both the McSweeney boys, Eddie and his younger brother Billy, somehow found their way into the back of the church. The three of us were wrestling when we plowed into a table leg beneath an urn of holy water. The canister jiggled on its perch, splashing on the carpet.
“That was a sin,” one of the little girls taunted. “You did a sin. You’re gonna go to the Devil.”
I looked across the room at Danielle, hoping she’d say it wasn’t true. But she was lost in bigger thoughts and didn’t look my way.
* * *
Eddie and Billy lived in one of the houses along that asphalt strip and parking area, in that uncharted realm of well-kept lawns and flower gardens. I rarely ventured to the other side of Quincy Estates except when my mother took me with her to pay the rent. On one such Saturday, I spied the boys near the laundry shed along the road. The shed became their fort, its two coin-operated washing machines their secret weapon against the Evil Empire. I parted from my mother and joined the boys in shooting down the missiles I’d seen on The World Tomorrow and directing Reagan’s Star Wars satellites to melt the Russians and the Sandinistas off the globe.
A man leaned against a black and violet pickup truck decorated with cartoonish orange flames and a For Sale sign inside the windshield. The three of us dashed over for a closer look.
“That’s a nice truck,” Eddie told the man.
“How many miles it got on it?” I asked, having once heard an adult ask that question.
The man stuck his head in the window and read a number from the dashboard. I nodded thoughtfully and pretended to understand.
“Where?” Billy asked, standing on his toes to peer inside the window.
“You can’t see miles,” said Eddie, rolling his eyes.
The man laughed. We knew he was laughing at us. We ran back to the laundry shed, crouched among the spider webs and clumps of lint piled on the floor, and watched our newfound enemy through the gaps in the plywood.
Vince Giordano lumbered up and shook the truckman’s hand. The two of them marched off, leaving the truck unguarded.
“Move out!” Eddie ordered us.
“We can make it so the truck can’t move!” said Billy.
“How?” I asked.
“Stand guard and watch,” Eddie said.
While the two of them squatted near a tire and bickered about what to press to let the air out, I stood in what must have been plain sight. Vince Giordano spotted me.
I called out to my comrades. They bolted. I ran in the opposite direction.
Vince followed only as far as it took to make us scatter and didn’t try to catch us. I ran across the field behind the far apartments, a continuous conjoined stretch of single-story units that spanned the grassy distance from the road leading to the landlord’s home to the road leading to my own. I ducked into a recess where the lawn pitched downward toward a basement door to catch my breath. When I stepped back up onto the grass, Danielle and Lizzie were looking down at me from behind a concrete parapet.
“We can see and hear everything from here,” Danielle told me. “Eddie and Billy are always starting trouble. Just like all the boys around here. Except you, Paulie. I like you.”
I listened, but I couldn’t meet her eyes because they were blue and gray at once, and she was wearing tight black parachute pants. I glanced at Lizzie once. She stared blankly back. I fixed my gaze across the field, past the far-spaced trees with branches placed too high to climb, toward the creek that partitioned Quincy Estates from a different neighborhood. Then I took my leave, taking the long way back, through a patch of woods along the road where I imagined myself a soldier in the jungle far, far from home.
Vince and Lizzie caught me on the way, just when I came in sight of my apartment building.
“Don’t try to run away,” he warned me. “We just got the truth from Eddie and Billy. Tryin’ to let the air out of my truck was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“No,” I said.
“Don’t lie. They told me how you put ‘em up to it. You better stop makin’ problems and start tellin’ the truth.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I hope you get hit by a car for lyin’.”
I ran, with Lizzie chanting at my back, “Poor baby has to go home! Poor baby has to go home!” In the shapes of paths and buildings blurred by tears, I could almost see the first pale rider draw his sword. In my heart, I begged the sky to sound its numbered trumpets and send down its fiery storm. If there were justice in the universe, the Giordanos would be judged according to their works, and the whole miserable family cast into the lake of fire.
The first weekend of winter recess, my father came to pick me up and told us he had a talk with Vince.
“He was out there loadin’ up his new fruity-lookin’ little truck,” he said. “I jumped up into the bed, and he looks at me like, ‘Where’d this kid come from?’ I says, ‘Hi. I’m Paulie’s father.’ I told him what’s what, and I think we came to an understanding.”
“Thank you, Joe,” my mother crooned.
Then my father drove me back to his place to eat chocolate chip waffles for breakfast, which his second wife always said were too sweet but that he and I always drenched with syrup. I told him I thought the Devil must look like Epifania. He said that sounded reasonable.
* * *
By the middle of December, I began to wait for snow. I raced outside expectantly the first thing every morning, but the skies were always clear. The holidays brought Lizzie’s and Nicki’s cousin Cody from somewhere far away to stay with them through New Year’s. The few times he interacted with the rest of us, we looked up at him with awe: he was a teenager. I’d seen him in a car once with sunglasses on, leaning out the window on his elbow. I heard from Nicki that Danielle had turned 13, which made her almost Cody’s age. I also heard from Nicki that Cody talked a lot about sex. I ran into him alone once, somewhere between the field and woods, and tried to get him to talk to me about it. All I got was, “I know more about sex than you know about your age, kid.”
Then came the blizzard that swallowed up the complex. I piled onto plastic toboggans with Eddie and Billy and the other boys, barreled down the steepest slopes, and rammed invariably into the pines before we reached the bottom, knocking all of us into the snow banks. When the afternoons turned too dark to play, I sat in front of the TV to nurse my itchy thawing toes and listen to “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” followed by a test of the Emergency Broadcast System with its long and sinister beep and cryptic bars of color.
My father and his second wife gave me a giant box of plastic soldiers representing the Axis and Allied powers. From my mother, I got a block of modeling clay and a set of alphabet magnets for the refrigerator. I was playing with all three gifts when my mother went with Sandra to a meeting and left Danielle to watch me. At first, I was too engrossed in spelling to notice Lizzie, Nicki, and Cody had wandered into the kitchen.
Nicki sat beside me, saying, “I bet I know more words than you.”
Suspecting the Giordanos didn’t own many books, I thought that highly unlikely. I spelled what I could remember from Sandra’s New Testament. Prophecy. Martyr. Witness. Repent.
“Don’t you wish you were baptized?” Nicki asked. I nodded. She leaped up and whispered something in her sister’s ear. I watched the grin spread over Lizzie’s face. Powerless to stop secrets being told about me, I retreated into concentration on the plastic letters.
Judgment.
Testimony.
Loathsome.
Blasphemous.
The phone rang. Lizzie looked at me. I picked it up.
“Is this Paulie Salerno?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“This is Santa Claus. Do you like the presents I gave you?”
The near certainty that it was some sort of practical joke was muddled by the bewilderment at who could possibly be playing it. “My presents aren’t from Santa Claus!” I said. “They’re from my mom and dad!”
I heard a sound like scraping, and the line went dead.
When I looked across the room, Nicki had deliberately jumbled all my soldiers together. She and Lizzie watched me, snickering, as I separated them out by country.
“You like Danielle,” said Lizzie.
“I do not.”
“I’m gonna tell her.”
I frowned and lined up my Germans and Americans so their guns faced each other. I took a step back and saw there weren’t nearly enough of them for an entire battle. I pounded bits of modeling clay against the kitchen floor and shaped them into cannons.
I ignored the sounds of Cody and Danielle laughing just outside the window.
As soon as the door swung open, Lizzie went to whisper something in Danielle’s ear. A grin spread over Danielle’s face and Cody met my eye to twirl his finger round his ear as if to say, Man to man, these girls are crazy. I insisted on knowing what the secret was. Lizzie burst out laughing at something behind me.
I turned around to see that Nicki had smashed my artillery into a pointy, drooping mass of clay affixed to the refrigerator beneath magnets spelling Cody’s boneless cock.
I laughed along, but Lizzie sneered, “You don’t even know what cock means.”
“Yes, I do!”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s poop.”
Both sisters choked and lapsed into cachinnating so loud it took us a minute to notice the phone was ringing again.
Lizzie was the first to pick it up. “It’s for you,” she said and handed me the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Paulie.”
“Who is this?”
“This is God, Paulie. I want to help you save your soul.”
All three girls were watching me with poorly stifled laughter.
I mimicked the voice on the telephone, hoping they’d let me laugh along. Something felt very wrong. I scanned the room in vain for Cody, though I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t really on my side. “I don’t need your help,” I said. “You old lady.”
Suddenly Danielle stopped laughing. “Don’t make fun of Santa Claus,” she warned. “Bad things can happen to kids who do that.”
“He can send you to the Devil,” Nicki said.
I stood there listening to the dial tone as Cody waltzed in through the door. Nicki came to me and asked in confiding tones, “You don’t want to go to Hell, do you?”
I shook my head. “But how do I know if I am?”
“There are signs,” said Cody.
I wasn’t going to ask him what they were. I unstuck Nicki’s piece of artistry from my refrigerator and rolled all my clay back into a lump. Then I gathered my soldiers into their bags, ignoring everyone else, and eventually, Nicki and Lizzie went away.
The doorbell rang. I opened the door to find a kitchen knife laced with cotton from a jar of vitamin supplements.
“Now you’ve done it,” Danielle intoned.
Cody widened his eyes. “That’s part of Santa Claus’s beard.”
Paulie, the female voices chanted in unison from the darkness of the garden. Paulie, come outside. I stumbled out the door and halfway to the woods behind the building. From somewhere in the thicket, those same voices cried together, You’re going to the Devil. You’re going to the Devil. You’re going to the Devil.
I ran across the garden and toward the road. My mother’s headlights moved closer from the crest of the hill, but I already knew she couldn’t save me.
In the distance rose the low, slow siren’s groan. I looked into the starless sky, the moon a formless haze. A stain of smoke had crossed the sky. The flakes began to fall. I raced toward Sandra’s place, but everything was spinning. I didn’t see the creek. The sirens gained in pitch and hung. I tumbled headlong into the icy water. I jumped out, screaming. I cursed myself, cursed the world, and looked up again, hoping in vain to hear the trumpets.
