Brian and Allen were brothers but they didn’t look it. Only separated by a year, Brian was short and skinny and Allen was tall and fat. Like I had been at the time, Allen was intent on becoming a priest. They had a corner lot with a yard that wrapped around their house on three sides, like a cupped hand holding an egg which would have been the house, only the house was of red brick, one story with a basement. I played with Brian, throwing an undersized kiddie football. We played a simple game where each of us tried to make the other drop the pass by throwing as hard as we could at close range, maybe fifteen feet, each targeting the chest, daring the other to let the ball slip through hands into the body. I didn’t have a good arm, but for a small kid Brian did. But I had beautiful soft hands, and caught pass after pass from Brian, frustrating him no matter how hard he threw, until he threw straight at my face in an effort to intimidate. My hands, however, proved impenetrable, perfect. Not a thing could get beyond them. I dreamed of being an NFL tight end, catching passes from Bart Starr, when I wasn’t blessing my congregation, or presiding over the miracle of transubstantiation. I had the body for either, long arms to raise the Eucharist and a thick trunk for blocking linebackers. I threw a little off balance, maybe two feet to the left of my target, and Brian tipped the pass incomplete, then accused me of cheating. “No, no,” I said, “I won. I won.” Allen popped his head out the screen door and invited us into the basement. “It’s time for Mass,” he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
In the basement, he’d set up an altar, complete with a tablecloth that hung down over each end of the fold out table and a chalice he’d decorated himself out of a goblet. His mom had made him a vermillion vestment that he pulled over the top of his head, and with his long sleeved t-shirt, he did indeed look like a priest as he set about his interpretation of the sacred ritual. At the end of Communion, he drew actual hosts out of the goblet and placed them on our tongues. Where he got them I’ve no idea: They tasted the same, looked the same, broke the same. He must have asked our pastor or bought them from a catalogue or from the Diocese. For the wine, he used grape juice, and he drank several times in between invocations, the way he’d seen Father Ray do after the distribution of the hosts. He said we could do this whenever we wanted, but I never returned to his basement. I still consider it sacrilege.
There was a kid who lived a couple blocks away, more Brian’s size, shorter, thinner. I’d go over to Brian’s house and his mom would tell me he was off playing with the new kid. She instructed me to go to the new kid’s house. I finally went and found them rolling marbles up a sharply pitched driveway up toward a crack that was their target. They were playing Old Fashions with irregular clay marbles, spotted and of various colors, first one into the hole got to keep the opponent’s marble. But Tomas, the new kid, wouldn’t let me play, said he didn’t like me. Walking home, I thought of Brian. Why didn’t he stand up for me, insist I played, at least give me a chance?
One night over the Summer I heard that Brian and Tomas were heading off Okauchee Lake to fish. I said a prayer over and over. I closed my eyes and wished as hard as I could for God to intervene. I thought of the water, of sharp winds, perhaps a storm. When Brian came home, I heard Tomas had been underwater for twenty minutes and been shipped off to the Emergency Room. Days later we learned he had died.
I didn’t tell Brian about my prayer, but when I asked him to play catch in his yard, he refused, said he didn’t want to play with me anymore. Years later, after we’d both grown and started dating a pair of twin sisters, he explained to me he’d been offended because I’d started calling him Brian the Brain. Apparently he didn’t think the transposition of letters had been clever at all. I remembered Tomas and my prayer. The stigma of God’s intervention still played upon my conscience. Was I responsible? Had God granted me the accident and the opportunity to experience shame? I knew I hadn’t caused Tomas’ death but had willed it, willed it when my own insensitivity, not his intervention, cost a friendship. I resolved to have a place for selfishness, inside the box in the basement with the ghost that wanted to kill me, the ghost I’d met when I was six, who chased me in and around a white maze in my dreams. Every six months or so when the box got too big from the ghost beating on it from the inside I’d shrink it down once again inside my head to a pinhead size and hide it in the corner of the basement where the floor was broke out in the dirt among my fears. After thirty years we moved away and I forgot about it and the ghost escaped. But by then I was too big. The ghost couldn’t smother me. I smothered the ghost, and the shame I consumed, digested and incubated into respect, forgiveness and remembrance. I remember Tomas now and wish him well where he may be.
Mark Putzi received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee in 1990. He has published fiction and poetry in numerous small press magazines including The Cape Rock, the Cream City Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Meniscus and Griffel. He lives in Milwaukee and works as a retail pharmacist.