• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I played forward two years with the Mary Our Mother heavyweights in the Catholic High School League, and I’m going to try out for the Council team next season. Basketball is a great game, and in the Christopher League you’ll see some of the fastest and snappiest basketball that’s played anywhere in this city.”

That fellow in the red robe, though, was smart, acted as if he might be a lawyer. If he wasn’t one, he sure ought to be. Some of those who had been questioned had given the right answers from the catechism, and this fellow had tripped them up with questions until they changed their answers to the wrong ones. Studs smiled, remembering how the fellow had lit into those who had denied their right answers. What a wicked tongue he wielded.

“I wanted to go to high school myself, and play baseball, but my old man worked in a machine shop and lost his hand. They said it was his own fault, and he didn’t get much dough out of the accident, and so I had to go to work when I graduated from Saint Catherine’s grammar school. But the Order runs a commercial school, and I think I’ll go to it nights and take up accounting, if it doesn’t cost too much. I was good at percentage in grammar school, and I figure I ought to get on in accounting. I’ve got no hankering to spend the rest of my life running a machine in a button factory.”

“There’s not much doing in accounting. Better stick to what you got.”

“Well, the way I figure is, that a little ambition won’t hurt anybody.”

He wished that his name had been called out this morning and he’d have been given a catechism question he could answer, like what are the attributes of the Church? And they would have all known that the fellow named William Lonigan couldn’t be tripped up easily when he knew something. But it was sure damn clever. Getting them all in a dark, spooky room, questioning them on the catechism to show them that a member of the Order of Christopher should know something about the faith. Would the next degree in the initiation be as clever and as interesting?

“I’m getting fed up waiting,” a young lad beside Studs said.

“I don’t care what they do as long as they make it snappy,” Studs said, his legs aching, that stiffness in his side from Martin’s punch bothering him.

“It’ll go on in time,” a puffy-cheeked fellow, whose breathing caused a little whistling noise, said.

Studs thought that there was lots to the guy who breathed like an orchestra, lots of deadness, and he turned the other way so he wouldn’t have to talk to the dope. Several feet away he saw a priest, surrounded by fellows, all butting in to get a word and show off. He sneered at such show-off bastards, thinking how he wasn’t that kind of guy, blowing out crap by the pound to make himself look big. Still he’d like to talk to the priest. Most priests were human, and interesting to talk to, like Father Doneggan of Saint Patrick’s had been. But gee, he never knew that Father Doneggan had hit the bottle, and it sure had been a surprise to him when he’d heard that Father Doneggan had left the priesthood.

“Hell, you don’t call Art Shires a ball player, do you? He’s just a jaw artist.”

Perspiring, he felt his shirt stick and his arm pits a bit clammy. And the air was getting worse. How long, oh, tell me how long, must I wait. Can we get it now, or must we hesitate?

“You can’t convince me, if you jabber till doomsday, that with the resources behind the Order of Christopher, it has any excuse for not supplying us with a better waiting-room than this crummy hole.”

“Bah, it’s the same as everything else, a racket. We pay our ten bucks, and then, what do they care,” a blond fellow of about twenty-five said.

“Just a minute, young fellow, you’re making serious charges against the Order,” a gray-haired, sunken-jawed man countered.

“Well, why shouldn’t I? Do you think I forked out my initiation fees to be plunked in here all afternoon without even room to wriggle my ears?”

Studs wanted to tell the fellow to wait and see, because if the Order put them in here, it must have a reason, and the