Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

What has this to do with the Jews, their songs? You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace , sure, but first you will undergo great hardship. This from the prophet Isaiah, a truly mystifying figure, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, come onto the scene at a pivotal point in Israel’s history. Twenty years after Isaiah accepted his prophetic mantle, the Assyrians crushed the Northern Kingdom, and the better part of ten of the twelve tribes were taken into exile. (Twelve years old, and I know these things. They teach us these things at my school.) And not long after that, Jerusalem itself found the fearsome army of Sennacherib at its walls, and despite King Hezekiah’s recent embrace of what Isaiah had called a “covenant of death” with a political faction that wanted Israel to be more like the Egyptians who had once held their ancestors as slaves — worship their idols, sleep with their women — Yahweh (YHWH; He whose name cannot be uttered on pain of death) delivered the city, and Sennacherib could only brag like a loser. I shut Hezekiah up in his cage like a bird , reads the famous inscription; not Jerusalem is mine .

Like all the prophets, Isaiah was both trouble and troubled, his destiny sealed when the seraphim cleansed his lips with a burning coal; and then, no doubt blistered and in great pain, he said, “Here am I, send me!” And then he wrote great, painful, angry poems of warning: Your country is waste, your cities burnt with fire; Your land before your eyes strangers devour —and— the desert owl and hoot owl shall possess her, the screech owl and raven shall dwell in her —and— Take a harp, go about the city, O forgotten harlot; Pluck the strings skillfully, sing many songs, that they may remember you .

I am twelve years old, standing beneath the starfruit tree, on the asphalt path, both hiding from and waiting for my daily beating. I know it is coming, because this morning the other science teacher, Mr. Guy, showed the filmstrip from Answers in Genesis about the fossil record — the dinosaur tracks with the human footprints embedded in them; the fragments of the Cro-Magnon man shown to be a hoax in a side-by-side comparison with a baboon skull; satellite imagery of the petrified remains of a massive seagoing vessel found lodged in the side of Mt. Ararat, in contemporary Turkey, where the Ark of Noah was said to have come to rest — and after class my head is so full of possibilities — a trip, perhaps, to Muslim Turkey, undercover, perhaps smuggling Bibles. . perhaps even long hours under the sunlamp so I could pass for a Turk, following the example of the author of Black Like Me . . and a daring climb with a Sherpa guide who would be proud when I bestowed upon him the Anglicized name of Henry. . and a dig through snow and ice and earth to uncover, in person, what the satellites had already suggested: the Ark of Noah, proof beyond doubt, real archeological evidence of the worldwide flood that created the Grand Canyon, the Seven Continents, the washing-away of the Garden of Eden and, at last, rest for the angel who had been guarding it with his shining sword for all those many centuries. . and also refutation of all the theories, the lies, that modern science has been serving up to support its religion of secular humanism — the Ice Age, Plate Tectonics, maybe Evolution itself—. . my head so full of possibilities that I forget to go the long way to my math class, around the front of the gym that faces the administrative buildings, instead of the short way, around the back of the gym, near the locker rooms where Drew McKinnick and his boys lie in wait for me at this time every day. A careless, careless mistake that could have been so easily avoided, but I don’t give one thought to it until I pass the pale green locker room door and forget to notice if it is cracked open or not, and then — WHACK! — McKinnick makes a weapon of the wooden door. It hits my arm with a velocity I could not begin to measure, and sends my body hard to the concrete, and — I have good reflexes; I’m used to this sort of thing — I manage to twist at the last moment, to wrench my body around so I land front-first rather than flat on my back, and hands-first rather than head-first— bruise the hands, cut the hands; protect the head . A teacher — good, Mr. Sanders, a good man — comes running from behind, and McKinnick is standing in front of my body — I see him up there, scratching his head, feigning concern, and feigning it in a manner that makes very clear his utter lack of concern — and Mr. Sanders says — he yells, really—“Why did you have to go and do that?” and McKinnick says, “I had no idea he was standing there,” and Sanders says, “I doubt that sincerely,” and McKinnick says, “On my honor, sir. I feel as bad about it as he does.”

I know better. I know better than to say it. But I say, “No one feels as bad about it as I do.” McKinnick can’t help himself — it’s only a moment; the slightest moment; the slightest of slightest moments — he smiles, flashes those dog teeth. In those teeth I see real pleasure, and it’s not the first time, not by dozens. And then the smile is gone, and what’s back is feigned regret. Sanders has his number, but who is Sanders? What can Sanders do? Sanders is already on thin ice for wiping boogers on the blackboard — to make us laugh; to make us feel better about ourselves; compassionate boogers — and before that, Sanders was already suspect, because Sanders moonlights as the school nightwatchman, because they don’t pay him enough money, because he doesn’t have a wife or children so he gets less than the other teachers, and sometimes he watches reruns of Star Trek on a black-and-white television at midnight in the principal’s office, his feet up on the desk — he was caught once, and everyone knows — and another time he was caught falling asleep at two o’clock in the morning, and another time at five. They— They —say that Sanders jogs home at six-thirty every afternoon after coaching the junior varsity soccer team and sleeps until eleven-thirty, takes a quick shower, eats some Frosted Mini-Wheats, then humps it back to campus to nightwatch until dawn. That’s Sanders, and what’s Sanders next to McKinnick, whose father is the mayor of the village of Golfview, a veterinarian wealthier than God who paid for half the new football bleachers? And what’s Sanders next to McKinnick, varsity linebacker in the eighth grade, second-string already, a mean two-twenty, putting hits on twelfth-grade running backs that they’ll remember into their old age? McKinnick, who can crush a baseball, hit a three-hundred-fifty-foot shot to left-center. McKinnick, who could crush Sanders more ways than one.

The locker-room door cracks open. Jones, Dodd, Graves — McKinnick’s boys. Sanders sees them. He says, “You boys get on to class.” They pause for a minute. “Now,” Sanders says, and they go, and McKinnick starts on his way, too, but Sanders says, “No, you wait,” and I want to tell him. . I want to tell him that what he is doing is a very bad idea. That it’s a very bad idea for me. But I can’t tell him. I can’t say anything, because no matter what I say, it will make matters worse for me later. So I keep quiet. It’s very hard to keep quiet.

“So what you’re going to do right now, right at this very moment,” Sanders is saying, “is apologize to Mr. Minor here.”

McKinnick makes a sound in the back of his throat — the gathering of spit and phlegm — and then he turns his head and spits for distance in the direction of the hedges that line the sidewalk outside the gym and locker rooms. The spit lands a few feet from the hedges, and — I can’t help myself — I say, “Airball,” and then his eyes flash like they can, the way I imagine the eyes of killers must flash in the moment before they become killers — and, be advised, I believed, then and now, McKinnick, given the right circumstances, fully capable of killing a man, or a boy, especially a boy, with his bare hands.