Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra Read Free Book Online Page B

set of rosary beads.
    “It’s gonna have to be soon,” the woman said, holding back a rush of tears. “I’m pregnant.”
    John looked at me, both hands locked over his mouth.
    “The father?” I asked.
    “Take a number,” the woman said. The sarcasm could not hide the sadness in her voice.
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I know what
you
want me to do,” the woman said. “And I know what I
should
do. I just don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
    “There’s time,” I said, sweat running down my neck.
    “I got lotsa things,” the woman said. “Time just isn’t one of ’em.”
    The woman blessed herself, rolled up the rosarybeads, and put them in the front pocket of her dress. She brushed her hair away from her eyes and picked up the purse resting by her knees.
    “I gotta go,” she said, and then, much to our shock, she added, “Thanks for listening, fellas. I appreciate it and I know you’ll keep it to yourselves.”
    She knocked at the screen with two fingers, waved, and left the booth.
    “She knew,” John said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “She knew.”
    “Why she tell us all that?”
    “I guess she had to tell somebody.”
    John stood up and brushed against the wall, accidentally sliding open the small door to the confessional. A man knelt on the other side, obscured by the screen.
    “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the man said, his voice baritone-deep.
    “So?” John said. “What’s that make you? Special?”
    John opened the main door and we both walked out of the booth, our heads bowed, our hands folded in prayer.

5
    W E SPENT AS much time as possible outside our apartments. John and Tommy—the Count and Butter—had no televisions at home, Michael—Spots—wasn’t allowed to watch anything when he was alone, which was most of the time, and my parents would often just sit and watch the Channel 9
Million Dollar Movie.
The radios in our apartments were usually tuned to stationsthat focused on news from the old hometowns of Naples or Belfast. So the bulk of our daily entertainment came from what we read.
    We pored through the
Daily News
every day, working our way back from the sports pages, letting Dick Young and Gene Ward take us through the baseball wars, then moving to the crime stories up front, ignoring all else in between. We never bought the
Post
, having been warned about its Communist leanings by our fathers, and you couldn’t even
find
a copy of
The New York Times
in Hell’s Kitchen. We read and we argued over the stories, blaming the writer if he dared offer criticism of a favorite player or gloat over the tale of a criminal we thought was being given a bum’s ride.
    We saved our money and sent away for
Classics Illustrated
comics and waited patiently for the package to arrive in the mail. What comic books we couldn’t buy we stole from candy stores outside the neighborhood, the four of us keeping a combined collection in our basement clubhouse where we stored them all—
The Flash, Aquaman, Batman, Superman, Sgt. Rock, The Green Lantern
—in large boxes, protected by strips of plastic, each carton carefully labeled.
    We collected baseball cards in the summer and traded them the year round. The cards, too, were organized and labeled, kept in team order in rows of shoeboxes. The hard piece of bubble gum which came with each pack was set aside until needed for the summer bottle-cap competition. Then the chewed gum would be mixed with candle wax and poured inside an empty 7Up bottle cap for use in the popular street game.
    None of us owned any books and neither did any of our parents. They were a luxury few in Hell’s Kitchen could afford—or would want. The bulk of the men were literate only to the extent that they could follow the racing sheet of a newspaper; the women limited their reading to prayer books and scandal sheets. People thought reading to be a waste of time. If they saw you reading,they figured you had nothing better to do and wrote you off as lazy. For me