"Too bad about old JFK," Mickey finally said.

"Yeah," we all muttered. I nodded my head for a while as if I were a dashboard doll. My mind got thinking about how much better it'd be for traveling children if they made bobbing St. Christopher dashboard dolls. As I was standing there freezing my balls off and nodding my head, my mind got off the doll and slid into thinking about poor old Kennedy and how the damned country was going to miss him and all. Women, especially.

"Mickey? How ‘bout we take a drive down there?" I was holding the flashlight and shined it on his face. His cheeks were particularly rosey.

"Down where?" he answered.

"Dallas."

"Dallas?" Louie Plazia asked. "What the hell's in Dallas, besides oil wells and steers?"

My head was still nodding away. "Kee-riest, Louie! Well, probably just about a two-thousand, little-bitty chunks of the President's skull mixed up in the lawn, stuck onto the sides of telephone poles, on the edges of the curb, is all!"

The guys looked at each other and back at me.

"Maybe we could still find a few pieces on the road or in the grass around there or something. Probably be worth something someday."

"You serious, Kinney?" Frankie Zeretta asked. I moved the flashlight over his face and watched him yawn. I noticed if I moved the light around a little, I could almost get his zits to cast shadows. The bigger ones.

"Well, yeah. It's not too bad an idea."

"Just what would you do with them if you did find a piece?" Louie asked.

I shined the flashlight on him.

"Cut it out!"

I shined the light down onto the case of Schaffer moving it from bottle to bottle.

"Well, I don't know. Guess I'd get them framed-up and hang them on my wall and stuff." My head was nodding involuntarily now, mostly from the cold and the third-degree burns. "You know, we might be able to piece together sections—might be worth something."

"You're sick, Kinney," Mickey said.

He was right. The few swallows of the pissy beer had given me an upset stomach. I had to quit with the flashlight, too, on account of getting dizzy.

While the guys bull-shitted about the merits and demerits of my scheme, I took fake slugs off my beer and secretly emptied my bottle on the ground in back of me. I hoped there was no foam for them to see.

Nodding, I reached down, grabbed another cat-pissy beer, and had Tony Bennett pop it open.

Mickey dropped me off in front of St. Bart's.

When I stepped out of the car, crisp air filled my lungs, cooling my insides.

"I never wanted it to come to this, Mick," I said as I stood by his open window.

"Yeah, but desperate men do desperate things," he answered, sympathizing with my situation.

Just before he pulled away I called to him. "Hey, Mick!"

"Huh?" he nodded, a Camel between his lips.

I reached my hand into his window, my index finger extended. "Your ash," I said. "It's longer than your butt."

Cupping his hand under the cigarette he tapped the ash off.

"Hey, ahhh. Listen, don't mention to anyone you drove me to church. Okay?"

I knew it was a mistake—me asking Mickey to keep his trap shut.

He'd probably stop the first person he saw on the friggin' street, even if it was a kid or something, and let them know. He's like that. I should have told him to blab it around to every living soul on the planet and put an ad in the Star Ledger or something on account of it being real important that everyone was fully informed and all—even a matter of life and death—that's what I should have done to keep his big mouth shut, but I forgot.

I just plain forgot.

Either the damn cold weather was beginning to freeze my brain or my sperm cells wanted real sex and were backing up in my frontal lobe or something.

Confession started at 4p.m. and even though I was early I went in. With each step I took on the hard marble floor, the cleats on my new replacement shoes sent an echo through the building.

They sounded great.

There's nothing like the sound of cleats hammering through the halls in school, too. They announce a person's arrival before they actually get to class. I figured since teachers absolutely hated them, they had to be cool. But, as I clicked my way up the aisles, I started thinking about how maybe I should quiet it down—practice the meek and humble thing.

Gold and marble could do that to a guy.

After all, church is like a library, except a hell of a lot more holy. Hell, for all I know it's a venial sin to wear cleats in church. Catholics are pretty damn strict about what you could and couldn't do, and, believe me, there's a shit-load of things that will send you straight to the old furnace.

I slipped into a pew, knelt down, folded my hands and pretended to pray. A group of old women a few rows up and to my right were plowing through their rosaries like there was no tomorrow. They must have been pretty anxious to confess their sins. I started to smile my ass off thinking about where different age groups go to get their kicks.

The older you are the more chummy you get with the Big Guy.

So I fit in, I moved my lips and closed my eyes a little, while trying to read the lips of the rosary girls. It only took a few minutes to realize the exercise didn't exactly rank on my scale of fun things to do, so, instead, I started to study the hell out of the place. Churches have to give people a lot to look at on account of it being so hard to stay awake during Mass. The way I figure it is, a church has two options if they want to get guys like me interested: either put a big movie screen in back of the altar and play "The Ten Commandments,"or fill the place with enough junk to keep a person busy looking around for a solid hour every Sunday.

I sort of wished it wasn't a church; otherwise, it would have been a prime place for five young worshipers to visit some quiet evening. For certain we each would become multimillionaire's.

I guess the reason I made the visit in the first place is the same reason soldiers pray before a battle, or why the old ladies hung out here so much.

Safety.

Sitting around all the saints and Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all made me feel safe. Old man Cole wouldn't dare blow my brains out or whack my privates off in church, but I might be wrong.

I don't put anything past the bastard.

The old women all had old black scarves wrapped around their heads like they belonged to some kind of club and the black rags were, their ‘colors.' I thought about that for a minute, then wondered what their confessions must be like. It's hard for me to imagine what kind of sins they possibly could have committed since their last confession—which, I'll bet was 6a.m. that morning. Probably they'd only said the rosaries two-hundred-eighty times that day, and wanted forgiveness.

A terrible coughing on the other side of the church broke through the fog of prayers. I focused my gaze from the rag-head women and watched an older priest hack his way over to the confessional station. When he got there, he blasted out one more cough, opened the middle door and went inside. His coughing routine echoed through the place and since it's liable to be a mortal sin to talk in church, it almost seemed like a way for him to say, "Hey, all you sinners, I'm here to save your sorry asses from the pains of hell!"

A light popped on over the two doors on either side of the priest's cubicle. Except for the coughing episode, it had been so quiet in St. Bart's you could hear a pin drop, but that all changed on account my cleats and all when I rushed out of my pew. Thing is, I had to beat the grandmas to the confessional; they'd likely take all afternoon spilling their guts out about how friggin' evil they were.

Alligator Eyes, by J. G. Cragg

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