Apple played the drums in the folk group, which helped kill the shapeless and interminable void of the mass. Holy Thursday was the second worst, longest mass of the year, just barely more manageable than the Easter vigil with its torturous Exultet. He sat behind the kit during the readings and dreamed about the rice paddy sequence. The camera would, with the aid of a sliding track they’d built from a thrown away rowing machine, pass over the miniature landscape just like a helicopter, and the miniature figures he and Fingers created from matchsticks would look up as the helicopter swept past them, not knowing they were about to be torched into nothingness by napalm, an effect that they hadn’t figured out how to pull off yet but which would, they were pretty sure, involve slow motion, a cigarette lighter, and an aerosol can of hair spray Apple had pilfered from the girls’ room. He imagined how the footage might look on the screen at the Riviera, the theater in the center of town where he and Fingers went every weekend since he could remember, no matter whether the film they showed was something great like Romancing the Stone or utter crap like Out of Africa, which he couldn’t even imagine a boring, sweater vest-wearing professor like Fingers’ dad liking or even staying awake through.
The readings ended. The folk group lit in to a dark, sinewy rendition of "They Will Know We Are Christians," which was one of Apple’s favorites. He swabbed the ride with his brush, hunched over the kit, brooding over the lumbering beat. The group drew the song down to a whisper and stopped. The priest stood, spreading his vestments as he invoked the homily.
"We tend, on this night," he said, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a stout, calloused finger, "to focus on Judas, because Judas is so clearly the prime mover in the crucifixion. We see him very boldly go up to the chief priests and offer to let them know Jesus’ whereabouts. But I’m more interested in the passage, later on, where the disciples, all of them, turn on Jesus. In Matthew 26:55 it says, ‘In that same hour said Jesus to the multitudes, Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me. But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled.’"
The priest stepped down from the altar and paced. He rubbed and scratched at his chin as he delivered his homilies, as though the emergence of his sermons required it.
"The disciples fled," he continued, stalking pensively. "They abandoned Jesus. This, to me, trumps what Judas did. They forsook him. They ran in Jesus’ hour of need. And I think this is so important because how many ways are those disciples like us? Exactly like us?"
The priest paused. "We have some special guests in our midst," he said, beckoning toward the back of the church. "Go ahead, girls, stand up so we can see you." The parishioners turned to face the rear pews. Four young dark-haired girls slowly rose in their seats at Sister Dorothy’s command, their terrified eyes like trembling moons. "I would like you all to meet the Truong family. Or rather, what is left of the Truong family. Because these girls lost their mother just a few months ago on their long journey from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Hong Kong. They traveled by night in a boat that you or I would look at and think was just junk, just a big piece of driftwood. They never knew their father, a G.I. who served in the war. They have no one to care for them. In their own country, because their father was a white man, they are pariahs, outcasts. They have been forsaken more times than you or I should ever have to endure."
Apple could not take his eyes off the girls. He wanted to bring them sleeping bags and Skittles. He wanted to make them hot chocolate. He made a list in his head of all the ways he could put them at ease, save them, become their champion.
"When we turned our backs on Vietnam we turned our backs on people, real, living, breathing people," the priest continued. The girls did not seem to follow his words. They continued to stand stiffly in their pew, holding hands with each other, rigid as the carved Stations of the Cross that loomed behind them. "Now, the parish council has volunteered to shelter these children at the parish center until a more suitable home can be found for them. Let us remember Jesus’ solitude on the cross as we help these children find their way in this country of ours, which must seem to them to be a very strange place indeed."
Sister Dorothy stood to the right of the girls, and when the priest was finished she made a patting gesture with her hand, which meant they could sit down. They nodded solemnly and disappeared behind the Yoost family’s fat, disgusting pudding heads. Apple could just see the tallest girl’s shoulder behind Gary Yoost, who was a total buttwipe who had thrown a snowball at Apple’s face from point-blank range back at the church Christmas party. The girl was wearing a pink T-shirt over a shapeless gray sweatshirt. A shock of jet-black hair streamed in a shining ribbon down her chest. He pored over the brief history of her face in his mind—her slim, solemn cheekbones that framed eyes of impossible, turbulent darkness. He tucked his chin into his chest during the recessional hymn, which was "City of God," really baring into the kit with as much abandon as he thought he could get away with in the church, and thought of the girl rising up in a summer green field, levitating in her oversized, donated clothes, strands of her hair whipping in the soundless wind like victory flags.
* * *
The next day was Good Friday, which meant that from noon until three you couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio because those were the hours Jesus hung on the cross, so Apple went out back to the hammock, because it was ridiculously warm out and Bradley and Hugh were in the boys’ room whaling on each other. He lay in the hammock and read A Clockwork Orange, which Fingers had given him for Christmas. He followed the story all right, even without consulting the Nadsat glossary, but his thoughts kept tumbling sideways toward the memory of the girls in the back pew.
"What part are you at?" It was Fingers, peering through the bushes that separated Apples’ yard from the Wilcoxes.
"How long have you been back there?"
"Have they given him the Ludovico treatment yet?"
Apple looked at the book’s cover, which was just the words "A Clockwork Orange" in orange on a black background. "I don’t know."
"How could you not know?"
"I just."
"You either know or you don’t."
Apple had his mouth open but nothing came out.
"Pussy," Fingers said. And then, "Hey, come with me to the lawyer."
"The lawyer?"
"Yeah. To settle this name dispute."
"Where do you–how do you have a lawyer?" Apple put the book down. He started to quake with the old nervousness, that sense, deep within his system, that Fingers was about to get them into something knotty and troublesome.
"I’m a son-of. They have to see me."
"It’s Good Friday."
"Numbnuts, it’s a college. They don’t give a crap about Good Friday or Happy Tuesday or Suckass Thursday. It’s all the same bullshit to them."
Apple looked back at his house, which seemed empty and desolate from where he sat. "I probably."
"You probably should come with me because we’re going to get our title back," Fingers said, and started walking toward the convenience store parking lot. Apple tucked the book under his arm and crawled under the chain link fence that ran around his backyard.
The college was just the other side of Main Street. Gargantuan college kids were out storming the quad, hurling Frisbees and kicking hacky sacks. A hairy girl in an Indian print dress lay on her stomach, listening to Jackson Browne while she underlined passages in a thick textbook with a yellow highlighter marker. Apple hadn’t ever been beyond the perimeter of his yard during the time between noon and three on Good Friday. He had assumed that people everywhere were sitting in communal silence, contemplating Jesus’ suffering.
They approached a low, serious building on the other side of the quad. "This is the place," Fingers said, holding the glass door open for Apple. They went inside. The receptionist gave Fingers a look.
"Yeah, I’m going to need to see Mr. Lightman."
"Do you have an appointment?"
"Not really."
"Are you a student?" she asked, a sort of condescending doubt clouding up the phrase.
"I’m a son-of."
"Pardon?"
"A son-of," Fingers repeated. "Son of a professor. Of the university." He looked at her with small, piercing eyes.
The receptionist stood without responding and went behind a fake wood door.
"I made some more NVA regulars last night," Fingers said, nodding, his arms crossed as he stared at the flimsy, brass-handled door, like he might set it on fire with his gaze. "A whole platoon of them, practically. Very convincing. Maybe my best work yet. I made their hats from those little paper circles you get when you use a three hole punch?"
"Cool," Apple said, swallowing hard. He was waiting for campus security to show up, like the time he and Fingers had taken a brown bag filled with Twinkies into the woods by the student union. Out of nowhere two sedans came skidding into the parking lot, lights flashing, like they were on a mob raid. "Put down the bag and step away," they’d called through a megaphone. Apple was just shy of pissing himself, but Fingers chortled and put the bag on the pavement with a flourish. "Step away," the guards shouted through the megaphone. Fingers and Apple went and sat on the curb. The guards came slowly out of their cars and approached the bag. One of them carefully jostled the mouth of the bag open with his baton. They looked at each other. "Go on, get out of here," they shouted. Apple shot up and sprinted for the convenience store but Fingers stayed put. "Watch out—Next time it will be full of shit," Apple heard him say to the cops. Apple kept running until his lungs seized. He collapsed behind the big Korean War memorial rock in the quad. He didn’t see Fingers until a few days later. He’d never asked what had happened, and Fingers never told him.
The receptionist returned to her desk. "Mr. Lightman has only a few minutes before an important call," she said bitterly.
"Sweet," Fingers said. "Come on." He cuffed Apple on the neck and pushed him through the door.
