Crazy by William Peter Blatty Read Free Book Online Page A

sure, this is Gotham City but not everyone gets rescued by Batman, maybe only Father Causey and only if Batman is Catholic and thinks Causey and Huerta are the only two priests in the city. So anyway, I teamed up with Foley that Friday in church and we both aimed our laser-beam stares at the back of Winifred Brady’s head when out of the corner of my eye I detected a strangeness, a long thin shadow that was swinging back and forth on the door to the tabernacle on the altar, and with my eyes opened wide in some excited, dumb schoolboy surmise, I poked Foley with an elbow and pointed at the shadow as I hissed at him in wonder, “Hey, Foley! Look at that! ” An altar boy, Foley followed my point, and then he turned to look back at me with this oddly appraising and possibly borderline infuriating stare as he explained to me that while I had my head down fervidly praying that I’d get Causey, another priest had come out on the altar and had opened—and then a few seconds later closed—the tabernacle door and left the key in the lock so that the “occult” phenomenon I thought I was seeing was the shadow of the lazily swinging chain to which the key to the tabernacle door was attached.
    “You thought that was something supernatural, El Bueno?”
    It wasn’t what he said, but that smile of bemused superiority that did it as I wanted to punch Foley in the mouth right then and there, but I was afraid I’d get Huerta for confession and he’d ask me if all I ever thought about was punching people. In the meantime, this “El Bueno and the Mys terious Swinging Shadow” episode turned out to be a blight on my reputation. Foley spread the word that not only did I break under water torture in the East 23rd Street public pool that past summer, but I would believe almost anything and had an incredulity threshold about thirty levels higher than Pope Leo III’s when he met with Attila the Hun in the middle of a river and Attila explained to him his concept of “eminent domain.” And then I made things worse, I guess, when egged on by envy of Timmy Lyons, who had held us all spellbound as he breathlessly told us that he’d had a dream of Christ in which the Lord had walked up to him and said, “Be a priest!” and then further, “When I woke up, I vomited,” Lyons offered as vivid and multicolored proof that the dream was not a dream but a “visitation.” My competitive nature aroused, I responded on the very next day with a made-up dream in which Christ not only said to me, “Joey, be a priest!” but as he said it he “put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed .” I won the battle but lost the war, inasmuch as whereas Lyons was held in awe, who got the bad press for telling stories? Me. So I did a big turnaround. I couldn’t take the giggling and the sly little smiles and began a campaign to become known as “El Bueno, the Ravager of Bullshit,” which by now in seventh grade I had finally achieved. It made me sad.

6
     
    Right after my discussion with Mr. Heinz of Plato’s Phaedra and its possible echoes in the Catholic existentialism of Gabriel Marcel, I wandered down to the East River walkway and sat on a bench just like any other kid who’s been cow-kicked by a monkey for the very first time, only maybe just a little on the downcast side and hoping hard that maybe Jane would walk by. Instead, who comes along and plops his lank down beside me with a long-toothed, jagged grin and rigged out in full Boy Scout uniform with merit badges splashed all over this sash that he wore but the leader of my Scout Troop, “Upright” Olsen, which is what we all called him on account of him being so tall and with this honest open face and him always quoting stuff from the Boy Scout Oath about having to be “upright” and “morally strong,” although anyone could see, just the same way I was looking at them now, these tiny numbers you could write on rice on both his thumbnails and all of his fingernails, which was how