Read Online The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman - Free Book Online Page B

crackled through the dead leaves. The dullest of them, the mockingbirds, whistled and chirped and trilled as if they were trying to make us believe there were hundreds of them.
    Sister Ascension walked at the front with Paul, her bulk fillingthe trail by half. Paul took slow steps to stay beside her. The breeze lifted her powder-blue veil, exposing the hair on the back of her head. At the rear, the teachers and Mrs. Scalisi all said how pretty it was, smiling up at the treetops, taking greedy breaths while diamonds of sunlight slid across their faces.
    We crowded clattering onto a wooden bridge that spanned a marsh. Minnows flickered in the water holes. Rusty leaned out over the railing and turned his head from side to side. Suddenly he pointed right beneath the bridge. “There’s an alligator!”
    And then we could see it, a fat alligator basking at the edge of a water hole. The girls drew back to the other side of the bridge and clung to each other, tittering. The boys pressed against the rail, mouths open, clutching sticks. At the far end, a drainpipe splattered water out of an embankment. Charles Sapp calmly said, “There’s another one,” and aimed his finger at the marsh grass.
    A huge gator, mud-gray, lay in the sun like a crusty statue. Near the drainpipe, behind him, a squirrel buzzed and fluffed its tail, and we wondered how many of them the gators got.
    Paul began telling us about alligators, that they were related to the dinosaurs, to birds too, and like magic, like your eyes adjusting in a darkened room, a dozen of them materialized before us without any movement, sprawled in the mud, in the grass, or reduced to nostrils and eyes on the water’s skin. Two orange and yellow babies, thin as snakes, slipped into the near pool. Paul made a soft oof-sound and cupped his hands around it, and the baby gators answered in the same voice. The girls moved closer for a peek.
    Donny Flynn said the big ones looked rubber. He wanted proof they could move. He took some pennies from his pocket and cranked his arm back, enclosed in a plaster cast, but Mrs. Barnes said, “Don’t you dare,” before he could launch them.
    Paul led us to a fence enclosing a stretch of pines and scrub. A little creek fed into a pool near the fence. As we stood there, five deer appeared. If you didn’t concentrate, they vanished intothe color of the woods, and you had to wait for the slow dip of a head, a flank twitching, before you could fit the outlines together again.
    I pressed up to the fence. There was a blur of brown and tan and then the buck trotted over to me. He scraped his hooves on the ground beside the pond. He nodded and lowered the tines of his antlers through the chain-link and rasped them on metal, rolling his head. I put out my finger and touched the point of his antler, smooth, cool, and my heart hammered. The girls were cooing around me now, wanting to pet the deer.
    Rusty and Tim crowded up beside me.
    “I don’t see how my dad can shoot those things,” Rusty said. “Pretty neat, hunh?”
    Tim said, “This is wild. I’ve got spring fever or something, man. I’d like to get ahold of a girl right now.”
    “There’s about thirty of them right behind us,” Rusty said.
    “I mean girls I didn’t know before they had breasts.”
    I’d known most of the girls since first grade, like sisters. But lately they had changed shape, they wore their uniforms differently, and even their voices had changed to fit the additional curves. The difference fascinated me, especially that moment with everything warming and sun-printed and greening, and part of what I felt for Margie touched them.
    Paul rested a flanneled arm across the fencetop. “In a natural state, these deer would be preyed on. That keeps them fast and graceful, almost invisible, and prevents overpopulation. I’m sure you’ve studied that catastrophe. We’re coming up on the predators next.”
    Rusty, Tim, Wade, and I lined up across the front and walked in