Snow Globes and Hand Grenades

Snow Globes and Hand Grenades

a novel
KEVIN KILLEEN

Copyright © 2015 Kevin Killeen
All rights reserved.
Published by Blank Slate Press
an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group
4168 Hartford Street, St. Louis, MO 63116

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher, Blank Slate Press, LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design Kristina Blank Makansi
Interior design by Kristina Blank Makansi
Cover art: Adobe Stock

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954929

ISBN: 9781943075126

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To our daughter Emily, who, when she was in eighth grade, sneaked off with my laptop and read the only two chapters I had of this story.
“Dad, you should finish that,” she said.
“That's the kinda book I would read.”

Snow Globes and Hand Grenades

SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

You should be out in the sun getting some fresh air, not reading this book.

But here you are.

I can see you standing in the aisle of a used bookstore years from now. Maybe it's cold out and you're just killing time. This book has been long out of print. The author died broke and mumbling.

What kind of fool book was this? Was there any heart? Was there anything real? It even smells musty.

This was a novel about the last two weeks of eighth grade at a Catholic school in mid-America in the spring of 1973. People always asked me, “How much of that stuff really happened?”

I'll tell you the truth.

It was a great time to be a liar. Nixon was in the White House. The nuns ran the school I went to. And we were always in trouble. We were always facing some interrogation by the police or the parish leaders. It usually went like this:

“Did you do it?”

“No sir.”

You could feel your blood pounding in your veins, because you really did do it. You could also feel the weight of all your sins piling up on your chest.
God was recording every word you were saying, but you had to lie with a straight face. There was great honor in lying well, in outsmarting the adults.

Under such pressure deep friendships and romances were formed. It went on like that for years, the boys in their khaki pants, the girls in their plaid skirts, all young and becoming.

And then the last bell rang and everyone left. Just like that. Eight years of criminal joy and fellowship swept away. Your friends went to high school, college, got married, moved to other towns. The teachers—kind and cruel—retired, disappeared, and then turned up on the obituary pages. How could that be? How could all those boys and girls trooping down the hallways in their parochial uniforms have marched off? What was then the present moment seemed as solid as the school cornerstone. But it turned out to be a flimsy thing to lean on. Little is left of those last two weeks of eighth grade, except the class picture, a boy's white cotton shirt with his classmate's signatures on the back from the final day—and these following pages.

If you must read on, please, read outside where you can get some sunshine and fresh air.

- Kevin Killeen

“WHAT THE HELL?” Mimi Maloney said, squinting into the sun. There was something strange about Mary, the gold statue on the church roof, and Mimi wasn't the only one who saw it. As a crowd gathered, some began to point.

It was Mother's Day, and the archbishop in his flowing purple robe had just spoken from the pulpit. “Yours is a model parish,” he said. “The children so well-behaved, the adults so devout.” Walking out the front door of the church, the archbishop saw the commotion and looked up for himself.

“What in heaven's name?” he said whipping off his sunglasses.

Something was sitting in Mary's hand, something glinting in the sun that wasn't there before. Under orders to investigate, a heavy-set usher ran panting up the steps to the choir loft, cut through the storage closet, and climbed through the trap door onto the roof. Standing on the highest peak, the usher looked like a miniature man in a dark suit beside a giant gold woman. The crowd on the lawn watched. An old man pinched his itchy nostrils. A new mom holding a baby squeezed his milk bottle so hard that formula shot out, spraying the archbishop and several startled lay persons. Mimi got it in the eye.

“Be careful,” someone shouted at the usher as he stretched farther and farther, higher and higher, longer and longer until he finally snatched something from Mary's grip. After climbing down and retracing his steps,
he bolted out the front door, and handed the object to the archbishop. Everyone leaned forward to see what it was. The archbishop turned it this way and that, but there was no getting around the fact that it was a snow globe paperweight with the words “Visit Colorado” stamped on its base. Snowy particles suspended in water swirled about a mountaintop with skiers descending on a romantic village. Without saying a word, the archbishop handed it to the usher, got in the back seat of his waiting car, and sped off.

“What does it all mean?” moaned a Mothers' Club member.

It meant that the missing snow globe someone had stolen a few days earlier from Miss Kleinschmidt's classroom had been found. A stern, cigarette-thin woman who'd been teaching eighth grade for decades, Miss Kleinschmidt was given to outbursts over sloppy handwriting and boys with un-tucked shirts. Her fondness for the Visit Colorado snow globe had driven someone to swipe it, and it's discovery in Mary's outstretched palm touched off an Inquisition that would burn through the final weeks of school.

On Monday morning, Miss Kleinschmidt slammed the door and faced her class. “Whoever is responsible for this scandal, this sacrilege,” she said rubbing her arthritic knuckles, “will find his Catholic high school acceptance letter rescinded.”

Sara Jibbs, one of the nicest girls in class who never did anything wrong, raised her hand.

“What!?” Miss Kleinschmidt snapped.

“What's that word mean, rescinded?”

Miss Kleinschmidt clapped her hands together as if popping a child's birthday balloon. “It means taken away, torn up, no longer yours. It means even though you think you've been accepted, the gates will be barred and you won't be let in.” She paced up and down the aisles, smacking her dry tongue off the roof of her mouth and looking around at the boys. “Whoever did this, will find his future scuttled in the opium den of the public school system.”

As Miss Kleinschmidt wheezed on and on, Patrick Cantwell stole a glance at Tony Vivamano, his best friend, and then stared out the window at the green grass of their last spring at Mary Queen of Our Hearts grade school. Patrick looked guilty. And so did Tony.

MIMI HOPPED on her green Schwinn with a white basket between the handlebars and rode off the school playground. She stopped on the golf course where she thought no one was watching and took off all her clothes down to her white underwear.

“Hey, what's that?” said Tony, who was down the fairway with Patrick. They had stopped on their way home to discuss the snow globe crisis and were lying on the thick grass watching the clouds drift across the sky. “Holy crap, Patrick, look!”

Patrick rolled from his back to his stomach and blinked. With her hands on her hips, chin up and her bobbed brown hair breezing above her shoulders, Mimi faced the sun like a statute of flesh and freckles.

“That's Mimi Maloney. What's she doing?” The boys lay silent on the grass next to their bikes and waited for her next move. Mimi reached into a bag in her bike basket and pulled out a green blouse. She slipped it over her head, buttoned it up, and then pulled out a red plaid skirt and stepped into it. It was a Catholic high school uniform, the kind the older girls wore at Holy Footsteps Academy, an all girls prep school. Mimi picked up her grade school clothes and stuffed them in the bag. Then she got on her bike and pedaled away.

Tony squinted in thought and looked at Patrick. “Her house is the other way. Where do you think she's going?”

“I have no idea,” Patrick said. Without another word, they got on their bikes and followed her, careful to keep their distance.