Puff: A Novel

1

Mole

I am aware of the moles. I am aware of the moles because I am covered with moles. Why, I have no idea. Not one member of my family has even so much as a blackhead, and here’s me, a walking sheet of Braille. I am also keenly aware of the poster. The poster of the mole. The poster of the mole I see on the Red Line coming home from Catechism Wednesday nights. The poster that magnifies the mole about 350,000 times, depicting the mole in various stages of metamorphosis, with big serious black letters beneath each stage warning: SEE MOLE. SEE MOLE CHANGE. SEE A DOCTOR. I am now so aware of the moles I can practically see them changing before my eyes. Changing color, changing texture, changing size. Threatening to bubble over in hideous disease. I can feel them incubating on the small of my back like a colony of ticks. I look at them in the morning before school, with mirrors and magnifying glasses, making detailed mental notes of the slightest variations: the deepening crease on the one under my left nipple, the ever-multiplying cluster of them under my armpit, the one three inches from my navel I’ve never seen before in my life. It’s like trying to identify constellations on a chart of the midnight sky. I feel compelled to give them names. I am thirteen years old. In the prime of my life. Moleridden.

Certain I am soon to die, I spend a lot of time praying. On my knees. Beside my Roy Rogers–Dale Evans bedspread in the Wild Bill Hickock–wallpapered room I share with my brother. I pray Our Fathers. I pray Hail Marys. I pray and pray, eyes closed, trying to block out my brother’s derisive laughter from the bunk above. Why dontcha use yer rosary beads, Bishop Sheen?

Because they remind me of moles, I say, and that just about kills him. Of course, everything kills Gully. Laugh, laugh, laugh. That’s what everybody calls him too. Gully. From about the minute he was born. It’s short for Gullivan, which is our last name. Nobody calls me Gully, even though I was born first, by about two whole years. I’m just John, always John, unmistakably John. Who lives not in Boston, mind you, but about 350 feet from the sign that says:

ENTERING BOSTON, in a place called Morton, which, by Bostonian decree, is pronounced Maught’n by exactly everyone.

Our family prophecy is pretty much spelled out on Dad’s panel truck. It has GULLIVAN & SON DISTRIB. painted on both front doors and it has our phone number too. The son in Gullivan & Son is Dad. What he distribs are newspapers, everything from the Boston Globe to the Christian Science Monitor to those dinky little AFLCIO rags that always have front-page pictures of fat guys receiving plaques. Trucks start bombarding him with bundles about four in the morning at his little hole-in-the-wall news agency off Dot Ave. He spends the rest of the morning breaking the towering mess into smaller bundles, which he then carts off to storefronts and subway entrances and to the minions of paperboys who work for him. By then the afternoon mess is in.

The son part was painted on while Dad was in the navy, but he assumed the Gullivan role the day he got discharged, which, as luck would have it, was the day Granddad decided he couldn’t work anymore on account of his back. (Or on account of his zeal for the sauce, depending on which of my relatives you talk to.) Dad’s vision is that one or both of us will one day become the Son and he mentions it all the time. That is, when he’s not seething. The business he’s in goes along smoothly enough until it snows, or rains, or the Heralds are late, or he loses his wire cutters, or the truck blows a head gasket or fifteen of his snotty minions call in sick. Otherwise, he’s calm as an egg, smoking Chesterfields til the walls turn brown.

Gully thinks the whole affair’s a laugh-a-minute riot. And when Gully’s not laughing at Dad, he’s busy laughing at me. Me and the moles. Then, inevitably, somewhere between ten o’clock at night and two in the morning, the only time when Dad is asleep in his bed, old Schoerner’s dogs from the kennel next door start going at it like the Ray Conniff Singers. Dad shrieks behind his closed bedroom door. Ma picks up the phone and starts yelling. And Gully just about dies.

But I pay him no mind. That’s all he does half the time anyway. Laughs like the gull he is. I blot it out like a black first baseman at Caddigan Park. Laugh all he wants.

But then we go to church. I have not had huge success blotting out the laughter in church. Nor, for that matter, in any public, solemn place where people sit expressionless and listen to pins drop. My brother’s gut-clutching giggling becomes as contagious to me as mumps. Which is why the two of us are kept far apart when dragged there, sitting at opposite ends of the family pew—three immaculately dressed sisters, two parents and old Aunt Fran between us. But in this dreary and sorrowful place, where white-haired monsignors drone like South Station dispatchers, where old men snore and little kids squirm and organists play selections from Frankenstein, all it takes to get Gully in gear is for the fat old guy in back to start blowing his sausage-sized nose like Tarzan summoning the elephants. By the time Dad pinch-hits for one of the ushers and proceeds to slam old lady Flambeau right in the puss with the collection basket, my brother is completely buckled over, and, sadly, so am I, drowning in hysteria with things coming out of my nose.

Ma thrashes us on the way home, it goes without saying, sometimes all the way home. Sometimes on the way to church as a preemptive strike; with anything she can get her hands on—her pocketbook, her shoe, a Sunday paper—while Dad drives with his arm out the window and smokes.

Despite all that, we were positive angels, I swear, all during our first family tragedy, Granny’s death, not two weeks ago. Not that dramatic a tragedy, I’ll give you, not nearly as heart-clawing as the ones God would throw before us in the not-too-distant future, but Granny’s, this had been our first. You should have seen how we faced up to it. Not a tear shed, not by Ma, not by Dad, not by any of us. We buried her and had people over the house. Finished and done. But the way she died, that’s what killed me. She just hobbled upstairs after not touching dinner, sat herself down on the commode in her room and dropped dead. I had never given Granny much thought—she’d been ancient and untalkative for as long as I can remember—but I felt so sorry for her there on her toilet as a houseful of firemen and ambulance guys pawed over her before lugging her body away. A dead body. Right here in our house on Knoll Road. Chilling, shocking, yes, but the next part, the part where they prepare the dead body for viewing—this is the part to be avoided at all cost, particularly if the dead body is yours. Prying eyes all over you. People who wouldn’t have given you the time of day—NOW they look at you. They practically study you, you and your withered self. And you can go without warning, that’s the thing. Watching Dragnet one minute, dead the next on the commode Dad ordered from Sears.

My dreams have been different too, not the usual trauma of being chased through jungles by soldiers, natives, spiders or wolves. Now I wake up drenched in sweat with visions of Ma laid out in that coffin, plain as day, her arms crossed like Granny’s, everybody staring, her privacy washed away like bleach. I go to her wake too, boy. I go in there swinging a baseball bat at the crummy mourners. I’ve been seeing these things for almost a week now, night and day. Sometimes it’s a different family member, but mostly it’s Ma, suddenly dead, leaving us all to fend. But then I’m reminded of my cavalcade of moles and know I’ll be the first to go.

And so today I am praying. I am really praying. I am kneeling by my bed and I am praying. Praying for a sign. Something. Anything. My sniggering brother would be struck down dumb. Anything that’ll convince me that what I am praying to is God and not just a bedspread covered with cowboys. And then my mother bursts into the room.

Johnny! she screams. That was Monsignor Burke! They want you to serve Mass on Sunday! THIS Sunday!

My brother looks up from his comic in disbelief, "You mean like as an altar boy?"

Yes! she cries. The eight-thirty tomorrow morning! Ohh, I’ve got to call Aunt Fran and tell her we’ll pick her up for the early one and I’ll shine up your good black shoes and I’ll pick up some Beau Junior to put in your hair and I’ll call Pop-Pop and Uncle Tut and ohhhh, I’m just so proud of you! And she kisses me all lipsticky on the cheek and races downstairs. My brother hangs upside down from his bunk, opens wide his arms and says, Forgimme Faddah, for I have sinned! It’s been thirteen months since my last confession!

Shut up, I retort.

"But I took the Lord’s name in vain! he rails. I took it today, twice yesterday, and fifty Christ-forsaken times last week!"

Say three Hail Marys, two Acts of Contrition and hang yourself.

He goes back to his Hulk. And laughs.

I vaguely recall signing up for altar boys. I remember taking the classes on Saturday with Father Gillipede and three or four other kids, but I never got called because I was rotten at it. I never bothered learning the little Latin responses you were supposed to say back at the priest (I just went ooby-dooby ubba-dubba). And I was never sure exactly when you were supposed to ring the little bell, or how many rings you were supposed to give it, or when you were supposed to get up and move the priest’s big hooby Bible from one end of the altar to the other, while he just stood there reading words off it, his arms upraised like some quack about to take out somebody’s gall bladder. And I never understood why the priest just didn’t move his own bible, instead of leaving it up to little scrawny kids like me—a rib cage with a cowlick—who struggled with the thing as if it was a refrigerator.

For me to get assigned to serve Mass, a Sunday Mass at that, can only mean that an outbreak of diphtheria or something has bowled through the rest of the altar boys like a plague of hail and locusts. And to be called in now, in my darkest hour, while I’m on my knees praying to God knows what, wondering which of my two million festering moles will be the one to do me in, can be nothing less than a sign. Abandon your worries, my son, it appears to be telling me, For soon you shall dwell at the right hand of God! And I close my eyes and picture myself kneeling in church, surrounded by the stained-glass mosaics of all fourteen stations of the cross, with Jesus being ratted out in this one and spat at in that one and whipped and scorned and crowned with thorns and stuck with spears and nailed to the cross like a specimen in a bug collection—when suddenly I get it. I get it. All that thee-thou Catechism stuff that’s been crammed into me since my Christening is as clear now as the wounds on Christ’s hands. The life-after-death part. The Jesus-died-for-your-sins part. I get it. I get all of it. And, okay, I wouldn’t mind finding a fifteenth station, where Jesus jumps down off the cross, pounds his chest, bares his teeth, rips the cross out of the ground as if it were no more than a stalk of corn and beats the brains out of every last jerk in Rome with it—but I GET it. I am swelling with newfound faith and Christianity. I am ready to face my death. And the life beyond.

The newfound faith is still with me the next morning, Sunday morning, and I am up with the honk of the horn. The honk is coming from the Gullivan & Son panel truck, which is idling outside with my father in it. He generally picks up my mother and the rest of us after he’s done with the papers. Then we travel to worship in style. He’s up against it today, though, because this is the early Mass. The truck is still half-full of the Sunday edition. We all get to ride back there reclining on bundles (a vast improvement over the bare metal floor) reading Li’l Abner and Cicero’s Cat. My older sister Dee Dee is sitting on the pile right in front of me. Her name is short for Jean, which she has never been called. Oddly enough, in the back of the truck on the way to church is about the only time the Gullivan siblings actually talk. Oh, Gully and I exchange conversation a little bit with them at home, I guess, but that’s more in the way of taunting, set to song and verse.

Ma’s really proud of you, whispers Dee Dee, leafing through a Parade under one of the dome lights.

Yeah, says sister Cassie, you’d think you were being ordained.

Madgie just sucks her thumb and rolls her eyes at the very idea. Gully sleeps, his body shagged across three stacks of Globes and a twisted nest of packing rope.

I look at Ma in the passenger seat up front, her eyes on the road like a ranger, all the while fretting over the smudges of newsprint that’re likely to end up all over her daughters’ dresses. But when we stop to get Aunt Fran, Ma crawls in the back with the rest of us, stroking Madgie’s hair as she smiles at me, an Easter Sunday smile, all the way to St. Ukelele’s.

The papers have to be delivered to three different churches by half-past eight but I, luckily, won’t be taking part in the drop. I have to be at the rectory by eight to get dressed. Dad pulls up to the curb, swings open the rear doors and lets me out. And the females in the family wave good-bye. An unusually dramatic wave. A going-away-to-Princeton wave. A Johnny-we-hardly-knew-ye wave. My posture seems straighter as I turn to climb the steps, inhaling maturity with every breath of air. I decide to open a checking account on Monday.

The maturity stays with me, along with the posture and the newfound faith, carrying over to the moment that I and Floydie Simmons (another rookie) escort Monsignor Burke in an organ-accompanied procession out of the sacristy, looking for all the world like miniature monsignors ourselves, freshly scrubbed in our frilly white surplices and our long, black, buttoned-down-to-the-shins cassocks, with only part of our pant legs and wrinkled socks revealed. Amazingly, a lot of the maneuvers I thought I’d never learned in practice come back to me right off the bat in the actual Mass. I’m not entirely sure if I’m following Floydie or he’s following me—all I can tell you is that we seem to be bowing in breathtaking precision and kneeling in just the right way. Of course, young Father Gillipede’s over in the wings directing the two of us with gestures and head feints, but after a while, even he seems confident, which is good. Father Gillipede is stocky and quiet and seems invisible next to Monsignor, who breathes fire. His sermons are different too, real personal and everything. I saw him do one about this kid he used to hang with who got his lips burned off. I remembered it for two whole days. He was also pretty good at training altar boys and I can tell right now he’s smiling. Floydie and I silently pray our way over to our assigned seats off to the side, and sit quietly all during Monsignor’s sermon, just like we’d been drilled, as rigid as Buckingham guards.

I glance out at the packed house before me. Aside from my beaming red parents and my grandfather, sisters, aunt, uncle, and softly giggling brother in the third row, I recognize none of these gloms. (We never go to the eight-thirty Mass.) I’ve seen a couple of them around town, I guess, but never here, all gussied up in their caked-on makeup and their ill-fitting suits. Monsignor’s monotone rasp, though, early or late, still sounds like botulism. When he leans over the pulpit with every inch of his lengthy frame, with furrowed white brows that look capable of ringing your neck all by themselves, and hisses, My dear friendzzzzz in Chrissssszzzzt… it sounds like profanity. All of which makes my eyes wander further, darting from pew to pew to pew, before screeching to a halt at the sight of a woman, an enormous mahogany-haired woman, all by herself in the very first row. Stuffed into a bathroom-wallpaper-print dress (pink and green amoebas against a navy blue background) with a huge necklace of skeeball-sized pearls pinching her gargantuan neck, and a pocketbook as big as a mail sack at her side. But her face, her sweet angelic face, is as pretty and kind as a kindergarten nun. She glimmers with bracelets and brooches and earrings, and, at first, I mistake the thing sticking out of her neck as more of the same. But wait a minute, I say, how can a piece of jewelry stick out of a neck? I steal another glance, and another, and another. My body and my head remain motionless, staring straight ahead, fixed on nothing but Monsignor. Only my eyes move, returning again and again to the thing, which was REAL, which was attached to a STEM, and which quivered each time she exhaled. My God, it hits me, the damn thing’s a MOLE! A swollen, pinkish, peach-fuzzed monstrosity the size, shape, and color of a Boston Baked BEAN! On a STEM! In MOTION! My peripheral vision tells me that my brother is in convulsions, but I don’t look at him. I just look at the lady. I just look at the mole. I can hear the Monsignor drone on. I can feel Floydie Simmons fidget. But I can’t take my eyes off the mole. Then a thin ray of sunlight filters down from a crack in the stained glass to a spot on the tip of my freshly shined shoe. I am certain I’m receiving a sign. And the sign says, My son, you are going to live! You shall go forth and enjoy a long and prosperous life! For it suddenly makes crystal-clear sense to me that if this poor unfortunate woman can sit here, right in front of every clod-hopper in town, and survive to a reasonable age with a thing on her neck like a dart from a pygmy’s blowgun, then none of my puny little moles are gonna amount to anything. I can hear my brother squeaking and tittering and desperately holding his sides, but it has no effect on me at all. I feel like a weight has been lifted. I feel pious. I feel saved. I feel I may enter the priesthood. Stone-faced I sit there, as if my portrait’s being done, feeling the Savior all around me—as Monsignor honks and honks, Floydie picks his ears, and my brother laughs and laughs.

I move effortlessly through all the other parts of the Mass, lugging the Monsignor’s hooby old book like it’s nothing and giving old Floydie the heads-up when it’s time to ring the bell. I recite Latin-like gibberish that almost sounds like Latin, and when it’s time to pray, I pray bowed over, like a Turk in some mosque, my genuflections sweeping, majestic acts of adoration. And when it’s time to serve Communion and I accompany Monsignor to the railing to assist him in the serving of it, I see my family lining up; I see the wet-eyed pride in my mother’s and Aunt Fran’s faces; I see the Vatican in my future.

My function in this last part of the Mass involves a tray—this small, flat, gold-plated dish the size of a Ping-Pong paddle that you’re supposed to slide under the chin of each communicant as they kneel at the railing and open their mouths to receive. You steady the tray there to catch any crumbs or drool that may come spewing out, and right down the line you go. Nothing to it. Floydie’s down one end with Father Gillipede and I’m over here with Monsignor. Easy as pie. But the tongues. I am not prepared for the tongues. I have not, in fact, up to this point, ever had a solitary thought about tongues. Or, if I’d thought about them at all, it was always the Th-Th-That’s All, Folks! model that stuck in my head, the happy-as-hell fire engine–red kind with the dazzling white highlight. But these pale, pockmarked abominations before me now, wriggling hungrily out of the mouths of one seventy-five-year-old parishioner after another, are making my hair stand on end. Put those despicable slabs of uncooked octopus meat back in your yaps! I want to shout. "You remind me of birds in a nest waiting for worms!" I begin to shake. Sweat. Hyperventilate. And each tongue we come upon is more disturbing than the last! Tongues. Tongues. A chorus line of papillary slime! And I am in this particular frame of mind when we arrive, the Monsignor and I, at The Lady With The Mole.

Her eyes being closed, I am able to study the atrocity in minute detail. My God, I inhale, it’s actually furry! But, like the stroke of a harp, an unexpected serenity comes over me. A quieting. And although my brother is waiting his turn at the railing right behind her, tears of hysteria glistening on his cheeks, I am oblivious. The tray, which had been shaking in my trembling hands, was now still. I had been calmed by the thing on this sweet large lady’s neck.

But then, as she opens wide her jaw to receive the precious host from Monsignor’s steady fingers, something extraordinary happens. The mole, suddenly, sharply, and without warning, disappears! Slaps itself against the side of her neck as if on a hinge. Conceals itself behind her ear like it never existed. And as she closes her mouth to chew, I stare in wide-eyed disbelief as it comes swinging back out like the sign at a railroad crossing, quivering like a willow in wind.

Jesus Christ! I gasp, loud enough to be heard. The mole has a life of its OWN!

Looking back on it, I knew it was wrong to just stand there, jaw dropped in stupor, arms hanging at my sides. I knew it was wrong for the Monsignor to have to nudge me in the shoulder, trying to snap me back to business. I knew it was wrong to release my grip on the tray’s handle, sending it clanging to the rug in front of my parents and all creation. But I knew it was very, very wrong to even think about gazing in the direction of my brother, who was helplessly pissing his pants and whimpering, four or five feet away. But gaze I did. His eyes met mine. And all was lost.

2

Ten Years Later

The van is a splotchy, bathtub-colored Econoline with one bumper, two cracked mirrors, a flame-charred roach clip dangling from the engine hub like a cowboy necktie and a speedometer stuck on twelve. The cargo space in back offers no windows, no lighting, and basically two options for seating: the spare tire—which sits on its side collecting refuse like a giant clam—or the couch, this black vinyl embarrassment we lifted out of the K of C Hall and normally set aside for the random skank one of us may chance to seduce off the seawall at Wollaston Beach. At the moment, though, my brother’s crapped out on it by himself, with his feet in the air, ignoring the motion of the couch, which, depending on acceleration or braking, scrapes back and forth along the van’s ribbed metal floor like furniture on a sinking ship. I know. I rode back there last week, during Gully’s most recent attempt at a driver’s license. Which brings up the central dilemma that Gully has lived with: he is drawn to machinery, all machinery, but is virtually incapable of operating it. Something to do with depth perception. All motorized craft seems to him much larger than it actually is and anytime he has a steering wheel in his fists he feels all the world’s power unleashed. A girl he sometimes goes with, Gina Sookey, who also happens to be Ma’s twice-a-week caretaker, lent him her car for his first try at a license. The car, a ’67 Galaxy that started up like a cattle drive and spewed black smoke out of both exhausts, shook so violently that the Registry cop giving the test spilled coffee on his pants, got mad, and canceled the whole thing.

And that was fine with me, said Gully. "Driving that fucking bomb woulda been like landing a fighter on the SS Kearsage."

For my brother’s second attempt, we took the van. I sat on the vinyl couch and ate Fritos as he started her up and adjusted the mirror, the cop checking off boxes on a clipboard. Okay, Steverino, pull out of the parking lot and hang a right onto Pearl.

Gully yanked the steering column nervously into drive and eased slowly toward the street. He came to a gradual stop. Looked to his left, looked to his right. Looked again to his left. Unless you counted the two cars about a half mile in the distance, he had the road to himself. Apparently he was counting the two cars in the distance, though, because he just stayed put and studied them, casually looking again to his right, then back to his left. Good, I said to myself, he’s being cautious. Maybe