Sleepers

'The bathroom's free now if you still need to use it,' she said to him softly.

'Thank you,' John mumbled.

'We're very sorry,' I said.

'I know,' she said. 'Forget it happened. I already have.'

'Thank you, Sister,' I said.

'I'll see all you boys in church,' she said, turning to leave.

'Bet on it,' Tommy said.

'What a peach,' John said, watching her as she walked up the street back to the Convent on 51st, her long white skirt swaying at her feet.

'And not a bad lookin' ass, either,' Michael said, winking at me.

'Fuck do any o' you know about ass,' Fat Mancho said from behind his counter.

'I'm go

'Watch now,' Tommy said to me. 'This time he walks in on your mother coppin' a squat.'

'That happens,' Michael said. 'He might as well just throw himself out a window.'

'He should throw himself out a window anyway,' Fat Mancho said. 'Useless fuck.'

'Go wash your mouth out with shit, Fat Man,' Tommy said.

'Set yourself on fire,' Fat Mancho said. 'All of you. Burn till you die.'

We all looked over at Fat Mancho and laughed, walking away from his store, toward the fire hydrant and a dose of wet relief from the heat of the day.

SIX

Father Robert Carillo was a longshoreman's son who was as comfortable sitting on a bar stool in a back alley saloon as he was standing at the altar during high mass. Raised in Hell's Kitchen, he toyed with a life of petty crime before finding his religious calling. Carillo left for a midwestern seminary three weeks before his sixteenth birthday. When he returned ten years later, he asked to be assigned to the Sacred Heart parish.

As far as we were concerned, he wasn't like a priest at all. He would spring for pizza after an afternoon pick-up game or twist a few neighborhood arms and raise money for new sports equipment for the gym. He was a friend. A friend who just happened to be a priest.

Like us, Father Bobby had an extensive comic book and baseball card collection, was an avid boxing fan and favored James Cagney over any other actor. He had a small office near the back of the church, lined with books and old blues albums. At its center was a huge framed picture of Jack London standing on a snowbank. If I was ever tempted to steal something from Father Bobby's office, it was that picture.

Despite the criminal bent of the neighborhood, the church exerted considerable influence and its leaders were visible members of the community. Priests openly recruited boys for the priesthood, presenting the clerical life as a way out of Hell's Kitchen. Nuns often took girls aside to talk to them in frank terms about sex and violence.

The priests, nuns and brothers of the neighborhood knew they served a violent clientele and they were there to tend to our physical and psychological wounds. They listened to battered wives who came to them for solace and gave words of comfort to frightened children. They helped when and where they could, careful not to stray outside the established framework of the neighborhood and always aware that there were a number of situations over which they held no control.

The clergy knew the rules of Hell's Kitchen. They knew some people had to break the law in order to feed their families. They knew the clothes many of us wore were bootlegged and the meat most of us ate came from stolen trucks. And they knew not to butt heads with someone like King Be

Father Bobby cared for us in a significant way and as much as we were capable of loving an outsider, we loved him for that care.

He knew the problems my mother and father were having, of the beatings she was handed and the debts he incurred. He tried to balance that by talking to me about books and baseball and verbally guiding me away from the fast money and easy times offered by King Be

He understood Michael's instinctive resistance to any outsider, even one from the neighborhood. He saw in Michael a boy who was given very little reason to trust. He sensed the loneliness behind his tough talk and the fear hidden by his swagger. Father Bobby knew that Michael was a boy who merely longed for a father who did more than lash out at his only son. He gave Michael distance, leaving a book he would like at his desk rather than handing it to him after school. He fed his streak of independence instead of fighting it.

He joked with John, keying in on a sense of humor built around insults and fast comebacks. He traded comic books with him, giving up valued Flash editions for mediocre Fantastic Four exploits, ignoring the sucker snickers after the deals were completed. On John's tenth birthday, he gave him a Classics Illustrated edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, a gift that moved John to tears.

He encouraged John's quiet desires to be an artist, sneaking him an endless supply of pencils and paper. In return, John would give Father Bobby original illustrations from a comic book series he was working on. John was also his favorite altar boy and Father Bobby made it a point to work as many masses with him as possible, even if it meant pulling him out of an early class.

'John would have made a good priest,' Father Bobby told me years later. 'He was filled with goodness. He cared about people. But he had a knack, like all you boys did, of being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. A lot of people have that knack and seem to survive. John couldn't.'

But of all of us, Father Bobby was closest to Tommy.

Butter never adjusted to having a father away in prison and, while he never talked about it, we knew it gnawed at his otherwise happy nature. Father Bobby tried to fill the paternal void, playing one-on-one basketball with him on spring evenings, taking him to James Bond movies on winter nights, helping him manage the pigeon coop Tommy kept on the roof of his building. He made sure Tommy was never alone on Father's Day.

Father Bobby had the soul of a priest, but the instincts of a first grade detective. He was a vigilant neighborhood presence, the first to take our class on outings and the first to question our outside involvements. He knew my friends and I did work for King Be

He wasn't worried about the pocket money. He worried about the next step. The one where they ask you to pick up a gun. He didn't want that to happen to us. He wanted to get to the damage before it got started. Before we saw too many-things we shouldn't be seeing. Unfortunately, there were things even Father Bobby couldn't prevent.

The school auditorium was filled to overflow with balloons, poker tables topped with pitchers of beer and bowls of pretzels. Paper ba

It was a neighborhood wedding reception, open to all.

The bride, a tall, dark-haired girl from 52nd Street, was five months pregnant and spent most of her time locked inside a bathroom off the main stairwell. The groom, a Mobil mechanic with bad teeth and a black beard, drank boilermakers and munched peanuts from a paper bag, well aware of the talk that said the child his wife carried belonged to someone else.

Outside, the night was rainy. Inside, large corner fans did nothing to still the heat.