Book of Mercy Read online

  Antigone turned, and Irene smacked her in the chest with the banana cream pie. Antigone blinked. The pie slid down her body, slalomed over the bump of her pregnant belly, and plopped on the floor. The only thing that saved the second lemon meringue pie—and Irene’s pristine apron—was the sure knowledge that Irene would have her up on assault charges if she dared retaliate. Bullies could dish out the pie, but they couldn’t take it. So Antigone simply marched out of Irene’s showcase house, dripping banana cream, leaving the heavy front door wide open.

  WAITING FOR HER WHEN she drove up to the house was Nancy, parked in a rocking chair on the front porch, smoking furiously. The ashtray Antigone kept on the porch just for Nancy was overflowing with butts. Antigone climbed out of the car, and Nancy jumped to her feet.

  “I’m sorry. I chickened out! You’re probably mad and disappointed and,” she stopped, sniffed. “Banana cream. Are you wearing banana cream?”

  “Yeah.” Antigone plucked the front of her sticky shirt from her chest.

  Nancy’s eyes rounded. “What happened?”

  “This is the new fragrance from the House of Irene.”

  “Wow, Irene’s famous for her banana cream pie, but I’ve never heard of her using it as a weapon before.”

  Chapter 11

  Refrigerator Rumble

  RYDER HAD MADE A friend. Now how the hell had that happened? The kid’s name was Ben, and he was some kind of freakin’ genius. Heck, he even doodled in mathematical equations. He pretty much spooked all the teachers. Ben was everything Ryder was not: white, well off, fawned over by his mother, pushed by his father, able to glide through life without a struggle. And for some unfathomable reason, he had latched onto Ryder.

  It was a late Monday afternoon in September. Ben and Ryder walked into the main office just as Mrs. Sweetings, the volunteer, was closing up shop. She threw Ryder a suspicious look then beamed at Ben. Ryder handed her Hector Bob’s official documentation. She barely glanced at it. Mrs. Sweetings made a copy of the fake birth certificate, tucked it away in his file, and returned the original to Ryder. Then she said in the cheery voice she adopted for all the students, “I hope you’ve been having an excellent school year so far, Irwin.”

  Ryder replied in a mumble, “I’m here, ain’t I?”

  Mrs. Sweetings’s smile flickered.

  Outside the office, Ben grinned, “Irwin?”

  “Don’t go there, man,” Ryder said, slinging his book bag on one shoulder and shoving open the front doors.

  Ben followed. He was a short, chunky kid with wire-rim glasses. His book bag, strapped snugly on his back like a parachute, was so loaded it dragged and bumped his butt. Ben was a learning machine, and for some reason, he liked telling Ryder everything he discovered. It was like hanging with Google.

  Oddly enough, Ryder realized he liked listening to Ben sometimes. He would never admit it, but he also liked doing homework. Man, how the mighty had fallen. In his old neighborhood, when you worked an angle, it had nothing to do with geometry.

  They passed the library, one of Ryder’s favorite places at Mercy High School, even if the librarian was a whack job. Libraries made him think of the Professor. The Professor would have been proud if he could see him now. The Professor believed in education. Wasn’t he always telling Ryder to go to school? Wasn’t he always reading books to Ryder as they sat in some cold, dirty alley? The Professor was one strange dude, but Ryder had loved him. On cold winter days, they’d taken shelter in the heated New York Public Library, like a lot of street people. But the Professor was different, and the librarians knew it. They never hassled Ryder when he was sitting at one of the long tables with the Professor. In a world where children hardly read anything more challenging than comic books and parents preferred bodice rippers to Baudelaire, the Professor with his charming smile and obvious love of books had been librarian chocolate.

  Like James Bond, the Professor, even unwashed and in rags, had an unusual effect on women. It was the accent. “I could listen to him talk all day,” one rich bitch do-gooder gushed as she stirred a huge pot of tomato soup in the Salvation Army kitchen. “He could read the telephone book for all I care.” Such was the seduction of a British accent on American women.

  The Professor could have gotten away with so much, but scams and grifts never interested him. The only thing the Professor wanted was his old cloth sack of books—his “personal collection,” as he called it—and to hang out with Ryder.

  There’d been so many afternoons in the library, Ryder sitting with his back against the wall so he’d have an unobstructed view of all exits, and the preoccupied Professor sitting opposite, his back exposed, a book clutched in his fingers. It was left to Ryder, thumbing through a magazine or book, to keep a casual surveillance, to watch over the Professor and his bag of books.

  Now Ryder wished he’d focused less on security and more on the books in the library.

  As Ryder and Ben rounded the corner of the library, they ran smack into a pile of smelly, teen-age flesh—Art Junior and his gang. Ben, who had been rattling on about some new species of sea creature scientists had just found, immediately shut up. Ryder automatically stood straighter and stared Art Junior in the eye. He relaxed his muscles and shifted his weight forward to the balls of his feet.

  “Well, well,” Art Junior smirked. “Brainiac and Chickenshit.” The other boys laughed.

  Ryder remained silent. He didn’t move a muscle.

  Art Junior edged his face closer to Ryder’s. “Get somebody to haul that piece of shit car out of the ditch?”

  “You didn’t even hang around to see if she was hurt,” Ryder snarled. “You coulda killed her.”

  “Who? Crazy Deer Woman? She’s nuts, you know. Came right into my house and wrecked my mom’s kitchen. She talks to those animals like Doctor Fucking Dolittle. And now she thinks she’s going to get into it with my mom.” He laughed. “I shoulda just flattened you both and done the world a favor.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Ryder growled.

  Art Junior glanced at his friends. “Ooooh. Maybe our boy’s got a thing for white meat.”

  Ryder started to turn away, then came spinning back around. He threw his elbow into Art Junior’s nose and blood spurted. Art Junior screamed. Three of his friends stepped forward, but Art Junior, doubled over and holding his face, waved them off. Ryder dropped his book bag and lifted his fists.

  Art Junior and Ryder were the same height, but that was where the similarities ended. Art Junior was a refrigerator where Ryder, after a summer of caring for the deer, was a puma—sleek, muscled, and fast. Art Junior charged with his head down. “I’m gonna kill ya, boy.” But Ryder nimbly sidestepped the lump of fury and punched him in the side as he went by. Art Junior grunted and fell. Ryder waited.

  Art Junior’s buddies were yelling for him to get up and kick some black ass, but he just laid there. When it looked like Art Junior was finished, Ryder turned away and bent to pick up his book bag. That’s when Art Junior roared to life, catching Ryder in the back and simply plowing right through, just as he’d been taught to do on the gridiron. Ryder felt Art Junior slam into him and went sprawling. Art Junior, now on top of him, started pounding, but somehow Ryder wiggled out from under the refrigerator and sprang to his feet, his fists up by his face. Art Junior slowly lumbered to his feet. Ryder was about to go for the family jewels with his foot and drop this asshole like a sack of deer feed, when the football coach came running.

  “Knock it off!” He pushed his way into the middle of the group, swatting boys aside with his cap. Quickly assessing that a third of his team was involved in this mess, Coach Mac looked ready to explode. His face was nearly as red as his hair. Teachers were supposed to report all fighting for disciplinary action. “You idiots! Where are your heads at? What use you going to be to me if you get suspended for fighting?”

  “He started it, Coach,” Art Junior groused, wiping the blood from his face with his shirtsleeve.

  Ryder didn’t touch h
is face. He let the blood drip. Breathing hard, he simply stared at the coach.

  Coach Mac eyed Art Junior with disgust. “Get to the locker room, lunkhead, and clean up. You got some laps to run. All of you. And I don’t want to hear a word about this around school. Fighting on school property is automatic detention. Detention means you’re out for the game that week, idiots. I’m not letting you assholes sabotage my season. Get outta here.” As the football players shuffled off, the coach turned back to Ryder and pointed at him with a sausage finger. “Stay away from my boys.”

  Ryder merely stared at the beefy man whose belly flopped over his sweatpants and whose hair, cut military crisp, stood up like the bristles of a hairbrush, giving his freckled face an eggplant shape. “Keep ’em away from me then,” Ryder replied.

  The coach shook his head, slammed his cap back on, and stomped away.

  Ben pulled out a white handkerchief and handed it to Ryder. Ryder looked at it for a moment then took it. He dabbed at his nose and the corner of his lip. His cheekbone felt like it was on fire, his nose was tender, and he could already feel his lip swelling. “You go get the coach?”

  “I memorized the school policy handbook on my first day, especially the part about detention,” Ben said.

  “Of course you did.”

  “I figured the coach would value his team more than the rules,” Ben continued. “A winning football team is a big deal in Mercy. Art Junior’s an asshole, but he’s an asshole who can play football.”

  Ryder nodded. Maybe having a genius in his corner wasn’t so bad.

  “You think I’ll clean up good and no one’ll notice?” he asked Ben.

  “Not a chance.”

  Later, when Ryder let himself in through the kitchen door, Sam was waiting for him. “Star said there’d been some trouble. She was vague about the details.”

  Psychic tattle-tail. Now Sam was going to give him crap about fighting at school. But Sam just handed him a bag of frozen peas for his lip, said “Call Star. She’s worried,” and went back to the garage.

  Chapter 12

  The Secret

  RYDER, BEN, AND STAR huddled on the back porch step and eavesdropped. Through the kitchen window slammed the angry voices of Sam and Antigone. Ryder had grown up in an apartment that had seen more fights than Madison Square Garden, but he had never heard one like this in the Thorne household. It made his skin crawl. His leg jiggled. He had to be ready, he told himself, the first crash of a dish hitting a wall or the smack of a hand on a cheek and he was going in. He didn’t care if Sam outweighed him by forty pounds.

  Antigone was determined to speak at the school board meeting the next night and call out Irene in public for banning books. Sam was against the idea.

  “I don’t know why you have to get involved,” Sam yelled.

  Antigone’s voice rose with each sentence. “Because Nancy’s my friend and she asked for my help. Because what Irene and her club are doing is wrong. Because I don’t want my baby growing up in a world without books. And because that maniac threw a pie at me!”

  “So you’re going to march into the Mercy High School Auditorium and tell the whole world your deepest, darkest secret.”

  Ryder and Ben exchanged looks. They turned to Star, who pointedly refused to meet their eyes. “What secret?” whispered Ryder. She shrugged.

  Silence. Then Sam’s voice again, soft and gentle. “Haven’t I kept your secret? Even though I think you could shout it from the rooftops and nobody would care.”

  “You’re not the one who can’t read,” Antigone said.

  What? Ryder couldn’t believe it. How could that be? She owned businesses. She was smart and pretty. He knew she was educated just by the way she talked. How could this be true?

  Ryder dropped his face into hands. Now a few things were beginning to make sense. The way Antigone always told him to go to Sam for help with his homework. How sometimes he saw her studying the label on a jar as if it were written in some kind of code. And how weird it was last week to walk into the kitchen and find Sam, who is not your cake-decorating kind of guy, carefully writing “Happy Birthday, Ryder” with a pastry tube on his birthday cake. Ryder had watched him for a moment then sneaked back out of the kitchen. A birthday cake was a whole new experience for Ryder, and just the thought of it still made him feel funny inside. But the image of Chef Froot Loops was even weirder.

  Sam’s voice carried out the window, “It’s your choice, your secret. I just don’t like seeing you forced to do something you’ve always avoided.”

  “It may be the only way to convince them.”

  “Convince them?”

  “That you can’t take books away from kids,” she said. “They need them.”

  Silence.

  “Sam, this whole thing gives me that feeling inside.”

  “What feeling?”

  “The one I used to get when I was a kid,” she paused, searching for the words. “Locked out.”

  “Locked out?”

  “Yeah, when you want something so badly and it’s just on the other side of the door. The words are always on the other side of the door, Sam. And I rattle the knob and bang on the door . . .” Ryder squeezed his head harder. “When I was a kid, I was desperate to know the secrets in books. They had to be full of secrets, didn’t they? Because they were so incomprehensible to me. Mysteries. I pestered my parents to read to me all the time.”

  “And now we’re going to be parents,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, we are.”

  Ryder felt Star’s hand on his knee, trying to calm his jiggling foot. He forced his foot to be still.

  “What if, heaven forbid, Irene and her club are right?” Sam asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now, hear me out, Tigg,” Sam said. “As parents, we have a right to say we don’t want our children exposed to smut and pornography and vulgar language. Not every book is good.”

  Wrong move, Sam, Ryder thought. He heard the simmer in Antigone’s voice. “Do you want Irene Crump deciding which book is good enough for our child?”

  “Of course not, Irene’s a nut case.”

  “Not to mention a pie thrower.”

  Silence, then Sam again, an almost pleading voice.

  “Don’t you get it, Tigg? I don’t want my child reading dirty books or watching violent television shows or listening to rap music that tells her to have sex whenever she wants.”

  “I want what’s best for our baby, too,” Antigone cried. “But wanting to preserve my child’s liberty doesn’t make me a bad mother.”

  “I never said you were a bad mother.”

  “Then what—.” Antigone’s voice changed. “This isn’t about my telling people I’m dyslexic at all. You don’t want me to speak against censorship—period. You agree with Irene.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You want to control what our child reads.”

  “Of course, I do. I don’t want books filling her head with ideas that frighten me, ideas that will take her away from me.” Sam’s voice exploded in frustration. “Do you really want our child to read sex manuals?”

  “If she has the parts, she needs to know how they work.”

  “Guidebooks to terrorism? Accounts of devil worship?”

  “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

  “You’re willing to throw the doors to our child’s mind open to every pervert with a pen,” he snapped.

  “I’m protecting her by protecting her rights!”

  Silence.

  “You’re afraid of losing her,” Antigone said, finally figuring it out.

  A chair was shoved aside, and Ryder leaped to his feet. “You’re goddamn right, I am!” Sam shouted and then Ryder heard Sam stomping out of the room, not in their direction but toward the front door. The slam of the door shook the house.

  Ryder tiptoed to the kitchen window and peeked inside. He saw Antigone bent over, hugging her pregnant belly, crying.

  Chapter 13

>   A Paine in the Neck

  THEY WERE IN STAR’S backyard. She and her mother lived in a bungalow, two stories, small rooms, nice deck. Earthly Sims liked to barbecue and owned a gas grill that looked smart enough to cook the meat itself. When Ryder was in a mood for a charred-black hotdog, Earthly was his source.

  A wooden bench ran the length of one side of the deck. It was there Star lounged, legs tucked under her chin, eyes following him as he paced up and down the yard. Ben sat on the other end of the bench, back straight, eyes unfocused.

  At first, Ryder was angry that Antigone was in pain and he couldn’t do anything about it. Then he began to feel something else, the calm that used to come over him when he had to face one of the Boyfriends, the men who plunged through the turnstile of his mother’s life. Users disguised as lovers. His mother had a weakness for beefy hotheads. When Ryder went up against them, he usually got the shit beat out of him. But that’s sometimes what you had to do to protect your mother and your sister.

  “Art Junior and his jerks are going to have a field day with this,” he said to Ben and Star. “I can’t let her do it—gettin’ up there and makin’ a fool of herself. We gotta stop her.”

  “How?” asked Star.

  Ryder stopped in front of Ben. The guy was already mumbling his genius talk, and they didn’t have time for that. “Is it the obligation of the liberal to guard the rights of the racist?” Ben muttered to himself.

  “Ben.”

  “Is it the responsibility of the close-minded to protect the free thinker?”

  “Ben, knock it off.” Ben blinked at him through his thick glasses, a far-off look in those innocent blue eyes, so like the Professor’s. Not another one, Ryder thought and felt like kicking something.

  “Thomas Paine wrote . . .,” Ben said.

  Ryder’s hand sliced the air. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Paine said, ‘He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition.’” Ryder grabbed Ben by the sweatshirt and lifted him to his feet, nearly shaking him, but Ben kept talking. “‘For if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’”