The Natural Order of Things (2 page)

This season the star quarterback is Frank “the Minotaur” McSweeney, a strapping 17-year-old senior whose shaved head and icy stare intimidate friends and enemies alike. At six feet, three inches tall, he strides across campus like an invincible Goliath, eager to rip the head from David’s scrawny shoulders and swing it from his fingertips like a lantern. No one can topple him. College scouts phone his house on game day to wish him good luck; on Sunday they call to find out if he has sustained any serious injuries; on holidays they call to make sure he has received the enormous gift baskets of exotic fruit and French cheeses and big tins of creatine. Local sportscasters, mesmerized by his agility and “monster right arm,” feature slow motion footage of his 50-yard passes; from high atop the bleachers, thousands of inebriated fans watch him scramble outside the pocket, eluding a phalanx of defensive linemen, to make another incredible play; and in the blustery autumn night, the dreamy-eyed cheerleaders whisper words that have a certain storybook quality to them—Notre Dame, National Football League, lucrative endorsement deals.

Things are going his way, everyone says so, but Frank is starting to have doubts. The team wins its first four games of the season, routing its opponents with ease, but during the fifth game, his offensive line is decimated. The right guard’s femur snaps during a routine play. Frank has never heard anyone scream like that before, a high-pitched shriek that continues to echo in his mind at unexpected moments and makes him rub his own leg to make sure it is still intact. During the fourth quarter, the left tackle’s fingers are horrifically mangled under a cavalcade of bloodthirsty boys in cleats. More screams. Frank is sacked half a dozen times and the team loses by three points. The next game is a total catastrophe. Without an adequate offensive line to protect him against a blitzing defense, Frank is clobbered, his ribs bruised, his nose bloodied. Another tough loss, and now there is a real danger that the team will not make a post-season appearance.

Lately he has trouble sleeping at night and has even lost his appetite for members of the opposite sex. A passing phase, that’s all it is; 17-year-old boys are prone to episodes of this kind; it’s quite natural, or so his confessors repeatedly assure him. The important thing is not to become distracted. He must concentrate. Tomorrow night is the
big game, a rivalry known throughout the city as the Holy War, a must-win situation. The game happens to coincide with the Feast of All Saints, a day of holy obligation for Catholics, an irony not lost on the priests who assure Frank that the faithful will be praying for him. “With God’s grace you will lead our team to victory.” But before absolving him of his transgressions, the priests advise Frank to say three Our Fathers and a Hail Mary, and though this is not part of their usual prescription for spiritual health, they dole out a handful of black and white pills—the school colors—to help “focus his mind.”

On Friday morning the P.A. system snaps on, and the principal’s voice, a solemn, disembodied baritone that thunders through the hallways, makes an unexpected announcement: “Men, as you know we face a great challenge tomorrow night, and I would like us all to take a moment to pray for the team and for our quarterback. He is perhaps the most gifted athlete our school has ever produced. In order to set the proper mood for the game, I ask you to keep an all-night vigil. From this moment on, remain absolutely silent. Speak to no one. Save it for the game. At kickoff time I want our opponents to hear you erupt with school spirit. Calm before the storm, gentlemen, calm before the storm. Let us begin our vigil by bowing our heads and saying the words our Lord taught us … 
Pater noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur Nomen Tuum
 …”

For the rest of the day, Frank tries to keep a low profile, avoids the smiles of admirers, the scowls of detractors, the passive sneers of losers like Edmund Campion and the other hacks who write sports columns for the school newspaper. In vain he searches for a quiet corner, an empty classroom, where he can simply stare into space and clear his head, but the Jesuits shun privacy; boys do wicked things in private, and the school is designed to keep its students under constant surveillance. Somewhere in that mystifying web of gloomy corridors, a spy is always lurking.

This doesn’t prevent William de Vere from tracking him down between classes and slinging an arm around his shoulder, not an easy thing to do since he is so much shorter than Frank, a runt really, but Frank would never say this to Will, not even as a joke.

“Hello, Minotaur. Got a minute?”

Frank flinches. Only someone like Will, someone whose pedigree has made him immune to the paranoia that afflicts the middle-class students, would dare defy the Jesuits’ edict against speaking. Will is an all-around troublemaker, a wild man, a rebel. As if to confirm the point, he is sporting a black eye, a swollen lip, a bruised cheek. What’s the explanation? A fight, a mugging, a domestic dispute? Maybe the wounds are self-inflicted, part of that deranged death metal look Will is always striving for. Frank decides not to ask any questions. Probably his teachers haven’t asked either, preferring instead to gloat at Will’s suffering, praising God for this small act of divine retribution.

“Are you up for a little soiree tonight, Baby Meat?”

Frank does not possess an extensive vocabulary and finds Will’s use of the word “soirée” a bit disconcerting. Will is forever talking in code, hinting at things that are probably unlawful, certainly sinful.

“You’re cracking, Slick. It’s obvious. The stress is finally getting to you. But don’t worry.” Will leans in close, speaks quietly in his ear. “You’re the guest of honor at my Halloween party tonight. After an hour or two in Zanzibar all of your problems will suddenly vanish. Just like
that
.”

He snaps his fingers, and Frank is so startled by the sharp sound in the silent hallway that he lets out a nervous laugh and turns to make sure the priests aren’t observing them. “Aw, but I can’t. The big game’s tomorrow. If the coach ever found out he’d kill me. Hell, he’d kill
you
, Will.”

“Oh, come on, Baby Meat, you don’t have to stay long. An hour. No, thirty minutes. You won’t regret it.”

Frank has visited this den of iniquity on more than one occasion and knows Will to be a gracious host. He keeps a keg of beer in the living room for easy access and another in the bathtub in case of an emergency; he owns a large aquarium stocked with red-bellied piranha with iridescent scales (“my Jesus fish,” he calls them) that he systematically starves all week and then feeds during the party—scraps of raw meat, slops from the butcher, slimy entrails from factory farms. On special occasions he uses a live animal, a hamster or a white mouse that he dangles by its tail and then slowly lowers into the roiling water. A gruesome display of nature, yes, but one that never fails to get an enthusiastic round of applause from his drunken guests.

Frank is conflicted. This is a complicated matter. Politics are involved. He wonders what he should do: the game plan is unclear, the clock is ticking, but before he can reach a decision, the bell rings.

“Better hurry, Slick,” says Will. “We don’t want to be late to Pinter’s class.”

Bobbling their textbooks, the boys dash down the hall.

Even adolescent males have some intuitive sense of a caste system, and for this reason Frank does not consider Will a close friend. Though they have known each other since freshman year and often take classes together, they come from different worlds and have very little in common.

Will lives on a forty-acre estate with an infinity swimming pool overlooking the family’s private stables and a wooded valley. Every Christmas and Easter, he vacations in Europe—Copenhagen, Brussels, Vienna, wherever the family business takes him. Will has skied the Alps and sipped Beaujolais in Paris cafés and smoked hashish in the notorious coffee shops that line the canals of Amsterdam’s red light district. His father is the CEO of a company that manufactures and exports scales, scales of all types and sizes, scales to weigh fruits and vegetables, scales to weigh newborn babies, scales to weigh portly middle-aged men and women who look down at the fluctuating numbers and sigh in despair, even scales to weigh tractor trailers, the kind Frank’s father drives. Frank himself has weighed in at an even 200 pounds on one such scale; there are five of them in the locker room, gifts of the de Vere family.

Frank’s family has never made a donation of any kind to the school. His mother and father can barely come up with spare change for the collection basket on Sunday mornings. Perhaps that is why the Jesuits, recalling the gospel story of a poor widow who casts a few pennies into the treasury (…
and Jesus said, “For all the rich did cast in their
abundance, but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living
”), offered Frank a full athletic scholarship, without which he would be attending public school with the other working-class boys from the neighborhood. His distinction as a football star has given him rare access to the social ladder, and his parents expect him to climb it to its top rungs.

The McSweeneys live in a plain whitewashed clapboard frame house five blocks from the school, and like most of the other neglected century-old homes in that quarter of the city, theirs seems destined for certain demolition. Within the next two years the Jesuits intend to break ground on a new basketball arena, and soon the lawyers will coerce another dozen families to box up their meager belongings and move from one subsidized apartment to the next like a caravan of ragged refugees doomed to wander the badlands in search of some small, pitiful oasis to call home.

As he steps through the back door, desperate for a moment’s peace, Frank is ambushed by his parents, who wait for him at the kitchen table.

“There he is, number 17 himself!” says his dad, crushing out a cigarette. “The future Heisman Trophy winner.”

“Let me have those things.” His mother takes his varsity jacket and book bag and hangs them in the closet.

“How’d it go today, Frank? Teachers weren’t too tough on you, were they? They cut you a little slack, I hope. Remember, son, those people owe you, they owe you big time. This is national exposure we’re talking about. Enrollment is up, salaries are up—”

“Would you give it a rest,” says his mother.

His dad laughs, a little louder than he should in such a tiny house. Normally his dad mutters a quick hello and then disappears into the basement, where he sits on an old sofa and licks his self-inflicted wounds until he falls asleep in front of the TV with a fresh cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Frank has never questioned him about this routine, mainly because he suspects that his dad has secrets to keep, a million private miseries that might come to light if he gets too curious and begins to snoop around. It’s for this reason that father and son avoid eye contact—neither wants to see the guilt concealed in the other’s eyes.

His mother pulls a tray of cookies from the oven. “Frank, a reporter from the school newspaper called. Says he’s putting a big story together. He wants to ask you some questions, take a couple of pictures.”

His dad glowers. “Jesus, Maggie, he doesn’t need to eat garbage before the big game.”

“Oh, he can have a few. They won’t kill him.”

“His body is a fine-tuned machine, and you’re tampering with it. All that butter, oil, sugar. It’s poison.” He searches his pockets for a book of matches, another cigarette.

His mother slams the tray down on the table.

“What do you take me for, Malachy? Do you think I’m some kind of idiot? Do you really think I would poison our son? Do you think I would feed him anything that might harm his body? I know he’s a
fine-tuned machine
.” She mocks him with a high-pitched voice. “How do you think he got that way? The power of prayer? No! For the past four years I’ve scrimped and saved to buy only the finest ingredients, only the best. Whole wheat, flax seed oil, spirulina, green tea, organic raisins, egg whites from free range chickens …”

Frank sighs. What would life be without scenes like this? He’s thinking of it now, wondering if these repetitious dramas, now so much a part of his daily routine, are worth rescuing from the bulldozers and backhoes and dump trucks. He walks to the closet and grabs his book bag.

His father gives him a miserable look. “Frank …”

“Just remembered, Dad. I have to go back to school to submit a term paper. And then I’m off to a friend’s house. Gotta study the playbook, you know.” It sounds like a lie, Frank is aware of this, but there is some truth to what he says, and what’s more, he
wants
it to be true, he wants to be the responsible member of the household.

“Glad to hear it, son. You study your ass off. I’m counting on you. We all are.”

This is nothing new—Frank’s father counting on
him
. Long ago Frank had given up on asking his dad for advice, for a way to help him out of these confusing situations he now finds himself in.

His mother presses a plastic container of warm cookies into his hands. “Go on, go on, take them. They’re
good
for you. Prickly pear cactus, dragon fruit, wheat grass, soy lecithin granules, mountain bilberry, a handful of walnuts …”

Before any serious shouting can begin, Frank takes the cookies and hurries out the door into the swirling October wind. Through desolate alleys that glitter with shattered beer bottles and down brick lanes that permeate with the evil stench of urine, under clotheslines that stretch from the rusty railings and trellises of an old apartment building and swing like an enormous tangled web, Frank makes his way toward the school and its iconic gothic tower. After traveling a few blocks he hears panting, padded footsteps, the faint click of nails, a menacing snarl of animal anger. He can smell filth rising from wet, matted fur, and when he turns the corner he is confronted by a large, shuddering mass that bars his path. A dozen yellow eyes stare at him in stoic solidarity. Frank steps into a pool of dead afternoon light. In exchange for safe passage he slides the plastic container of cookies across the ground, but the dogs know the ways of this neighborhood, they are not so foolish as to accept gifts from the menacing figures that pass through its shadows. With a chorus of low growls and a flash of their teeth, the dogs warn him away. Big as ponies some of them—mastiffs and Rottweilers—that hobble on legs that have been twisted and crushed and broken.