Ultraman and the Pagan Babies
(This is one complete story posted in two parts, the second part immediately following the first.)
Ultraman and the Pagan Babies
The tiny tin can which Sister was holding up looked like a cat food container, but instead of swimming cartoon fish, little angels and clouds floated along the sides. There was a slit on the top, just large enough to get a coin though but not nearly large enough to take it back out, in case one changed his mind.
“This is a mite box, Children,” Sister said. “Each of you will receive one. You will take it home, and any time you are tempted to buy a candy bar or a soda -- or some foolish plaything wasting your parents’ money -- you will put the coins in this can instead. When the container is full, you will return it to me on the day before Easter vacation. The funds we collect will help build and maintain our missions overseas. Now, for a need a volunteer to hand these out.”
Every student in the sixth grade of St. Hilarius’s School automatically raised an arm into the air with supersonic speed. To grab attention further, some wiggled their fingers and others cried, “Me! Pick me, S’ter!” The competition for being chosen for classroom duties did not cross over to the race for good grades.That’s why one of the smart kids always became the honoree: stuck-up Antoinette Bruno or that pickle-puss runt, Mark Sweeney.
“Mr. Sweeney, please pass out the mite boxes.” The slightly-rotten apple of Sister’s eye stood up tall as a Knight of Columbus and puffed out his chest so much that a judgmental witness might easily accuse him of the Sin of Pride. Under his arm, he tucked the cardboard carton whose print announced its former life as a conveyor of Delsey Bathroom Tissue. Going up and down the rows, he put a mite box down on each desktop, gently on those of his fellow-travelers and forcefully on those of his enemies. Since he had his back to Sister, Sweeney
seized the opportunity to lord his vaulted status over everyone: to some he stuck out his tongue, and to Hal, he hissed out a sotto voce comment as sharp as a stiletto.
Between Hal and his nemesis there had been a short history. The latest skirmish had occurred earlier in the day, on the schoolyard after lunch. Usually Hal and his sidekick would be forced to fend off basketball lobs and the sing-songy taunts that certain female classmates “liked them,” the possibility of which secretly intrigued Hal even as he publicly expressed disgust. That afternoon,however, the collective attention had been directed elsewhere – to young Mr. Sweeney, who was proudly waving around a new transistor radio for all to see. “Don't touch it!” he warned, even as he held the coveted device next to an admirer’s ear. The tinny transmission seemed foreign to these holy grounds, more attuned to the sound of church bells than do wop ditties.
“Get him! It’s not even Christmas or his birthday.”
Hal pretended not to share his friend’s envy. “His old man’s got more dough than God,” he said. “Big deal!”
His apparent lack of interest did not escape Sweeney’s notice. “Hey,McGuirk the Jerk! What're ya, jealous?”
“ Not me! Some of us are too old to bring our toys to school!”
“You dirty Commie!” Sweeney screamed, as he charged the two holdouts, fast enough to elude him until it was time to return to class. The noontime incident was forgotten until the end of the school day, when Sweeney rekindled it with the whispered insult as he slammed the little tin can on Hal’s desk: “Here you go, you filthy heathen.”
The recipients of the mite boxes treated them as novelties, a new toy rather than an aid to self-denial. They examined them closely, turned the cylinders on their sides, rolled them around the tops of their desks. It was quickly discovered that if one flicked the nail of one’s index finger against the top of the thin metal, an interesting noise would reverberate through the classroom.
“Ping!” “Ping!” Hal, himself a fan of scientific experimentation, wondered what would happen if he stuck his pencil point into the slot and then sent the makeshift projectile upward. He was ninety-nine per cent sure that he would hit the classroom wall right between the portrait of the new President --so beloved by the nuns-- and the clock, which to Hal’s delight, was closing in on three. He took aim, but Sister’s sharp voice ruined his concentration.
“Mr McGuirk! Contemplating your usual shenanigans, I see.” Mercifully, the bell rang.
Later that afternoon Hal found “the old lady” – a phrase he never used at home – in a good mood. As she ironed, she sang along to Top 40 hits playing on the radio.The fact that a mature woman enjoyed the same pop numbers he loved embarrassed him; it was an example of one of his newly-learned vocabulary words: “unseemly.” She did this stuff all the time, and Hal was sick of it.
He felt like a chicken for not telling her so, but he'd rather die than criticize his mother. One time, all he had done was repeat what the nun had told the class last year: that whenever Elvis Presley swiveled his hips, inspiring “impure thoughts,” it was a near occasion of sin. The very second Hal had mentioned it he prepared himself for the worst, flinching in dread.
But no slap came then. She didn't even yell at him. Instead she threw her head back and roared. Hal hadn't heard his mother laugh so much since the night she'd let him stay up and watch Jack Paar with her. “Sister told you that?” His mother’s shoulders were still shaking.
“Between you and me, I don't think God cares what kind of music I listen to. He’s got more important things to worry about, you know?” She broke up again, making her son feel like a damned fool. When his teachers tell him one thing and his mother tells him the total opposite,
what’s a guy supposed to do? Why did adults send mixed signals all the time? Let them say what they want about Ultraman – at least you could believe everything he said.
“Comm-ma, comm-ma, comm-ma, hey, hey, hey,” his mother bellowed.
“That was ‘Handy Man’ by Jimmy Jones,” the radio announced. A tiny cloud of steam whooshed through the hole atop the iron.
“Mom, can I have a dime?”
“May I have a dime.”
“I asked you first.”
“That’s right, be smart. And what do you want a dime for? Candy? It’s Lent.”
“I know. It’s that time again.” Hal took the mite box out of his pocket and showed her.
His mother made a face. “Oh yeah. The pagan babies. You don't need it right now, do you? Remind me when I've got my change purse handy.”
“Got cha.” As he headed for his room, his mother called after him. “Put it in a safe place. You don't wanna have to tell the nuns you lost it.”
The door to Hal’s inner sanctum opened only reluctantly; it required an Ultraman-like strength for it to surrender, mainly because the blankets from the bed he never made were nestled in their usual resting place behind his door. Hal took the little tin can and tossed it atop his dresser, already populated with various objects long waiting for a more permanent storage area. The mite box landed between the clay volcano from last year’s Science Fair project and a mostly clean rolled-up undershirt.
As a rule, Hal’s room was a shrine to chaos, but for the rare occasions when the stars were so aligned that the old lady was simultaneouslyweary of demanding that he clean
his room while sufficiently energized to tidy it up herself. That was the norm except for one shining exception, as incongruous as a picture of the Sacred Heart hanging in a gin mill. In one corner of the room there was a vertical row of cardboard file boxes arranged in chronological order. On the side of each box a label neatly announced the dates of its contents. Inside individual boxes there
was a year’s worth of Ultraman Comics, each issue encased in its own protective plastic sleeve. The copies with more recent publication dates were in the same mint condition they had been on the days that Hal had plucked them off the rack at Jerry’s Hillcrest Market. The rarer editions, albeit a bit shop-worn, had been acquired through extremely lucky trades.
The Collection was Hal’s most sacred treasure, among his belongings the most beloved: his Ultraman comic books, in every sense “his,” for there was no man, woman, or child anywhere on the planet who would be allowed to touch as much as a single page. Indeed the owner himself would seldom break into the trove, and only then as a way to assuage the emotional effects of a particularly harrowing day. Not that it mattered; Hal had long ago committed every panel, every dialogue balloon,
every issue to memory, and he could recite an exact description of any cover. Mention “Volume V, Number 4,July-August, 1945” and Hal would describe the stereotypical World War II caricatures of a menacing Nazi with eyeballs in the shape of swastikas and one of Hirohito’s soldiers with unnaturally large teeth, flanking Ultraman, whose supernaturally strong arms held each villain by one hand while their puny arms flailed and their legs kicked in mid-air. Or refer to “Volume XIV , Number 1, January-February 1956,” and the young aficionado could recreate every last detail of the flying saucer hovering over of the Empire State Building, while Ultraman clutched the spire and waited confidently with his magnificent cape billowing in the breeze.
As the weeks passed, winter’s grip became increasingly weaker as spring took her first shy steps; it was no longer dark in the late afternoon when the old man got home from work. His cold weather habit of removing his shoes just inside the front door was still in effect, however.
“Damn! I meant to pick up a pack o’ Luckies,” he said. “Hal, make yourself useful and duck down to Jerry’s, will ya?”
Hal was loath to tear himself away from the tv, even though he had already seen that particular Ultraman syndicated episode a number of times. On the other hand, Hal had run enough errands to know that never in his entire life had he been asked to “bring back the change.” Every trip to the drugstore, to Woolworth’s, and especially to Jerry’s always came with a tacit tip. It wasn't a chore; it was a windfall. His father reached into the oil-stained pockets of his overalls and came up with a number of
quarters in his callused hands. “Here. I think that’s enough.” Bingo.
Suppertime was never the best time to shop at the Hillcrest Market. Some of mothers in the neighborhood often found themselves scrambling to come up with a main dish, hence the tiny store would be packed with customers all waiting for Jerry to finishing wrapping Mrs. Mariani’s ground beef or hacking off a couple of “nice pork chops” for Mrs. O’Neill. Even so, Hal never minded waiting, for it gave him the opportunity to take a look at the latest periodicals on the wire circular rack in front of the soap flakes shelf. He ignored the side that displayed the current copies of Look, Life, and
The Saturday Evening Post and carefully revolved past the side containing the local newspaper,
The Daily Racing Form, and the Armstrong until he reached the comic books. It was the usual stuff: Scrooge McDuck, Little Lulu and. . .could it be? Yes, a brand-new Ultraman, Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (May-June, 1961), with, as was the custom, the publication date slightly ahead of the real-time curve. Hal knew he'd in for edge-of-the-seat action written by Dave Bregman and as for the other half of the creative team, Harry Kohl,just one glance at the cover art was enough to convince him that the Issue was an instant classic. Dominating the majority of the frame was the titular hero in full flight, drawn in two dimensions but so dynamically you'd would swear it was in 3-D.
What appeared to be miles beneath Ultraman’s horizontal body was a landscape of despair, with the Iron Curtain represented as a wall topped with barbed wire and painted here and there with blood-red hammers-and-sickles. Under one arm Ultraman had tucked two little kids, a boy and a girl, both blond and vaguely Teutonic, probably East Germans. Ultraman’s other arm was stretched outward to propel the flight toward the West, depicted by a glorious sunset fronting an American flag unfurling in the sky. Though Hal’s school lessons hadn't yet touched on the literary concept of symbolism, he knew what he saw, and he knew what it meant.
Ultraman and the Pagan Babies pt. 2 of 2
Already in a quasi-mystical mode, Hal felt he was touching on a religious experience, right then and there in the store, with the ladies whining about the price of milk, with Jerry’s complaining about how the shopping center being built on Central Avenue would put him out of business. Never mind. Soon Spring would arrive, and there’d be pick-up baseball games in the lot over on First Street.
Once in a great while, life sends a guy an unexpected reward, like a Skybar or a Dreamsicle. A kid could buy orange Creamsicles often and Popsicles all the time, but a Dreamsicle, the frozen confection with the raspberry shell, that was as rare as a no-hitter. Whenever you were lucky enough to find Dreamsicles in stock, it was like stumbling upon a rainbow’s pot of gold, like discovering a new Ultraman. Something like that could renew a guy’s faith. “Don’t worry,” it seemed to say,” God really does care about you.”
Hal put his father’s pack of cigarettes in a back pocket , but he’d made Jerry put the Issue into a paper bag. It wasn’t Kraft paper as in the squared-off grocery bags, but one of those flimsy thin things , a tad too short. The top of the Issue poked out the top, but it would do. At least Hal wasn’t the kind of guy to roll up a periodical in to a tube. Doing that to an Ultraman was a sacrilege. In any event, he wanted to hurry home, so he could begin reading and memorizing. As he left the counter and headed toward Jerry’s front door, Hal literally bumped into Mrs. Sweeney, whose aisle-blocking bulk was unavoidable. The little mama’s boy accompanying her snarled: “Why don’t you look where you’re going, you oaf!”
“Now, now, Mark. Hello, Harold. How’s your mother?”
“She’s fine, Mrs. Sweeney, thanks for asking. Sorry, I gotta get home, my Dad’s waiting.”
“Then I won’t keep you. Please tell your parents I said hello.”
“And tell ‘em I said their son’s a jerk!”
“Mark!” came Mrs. Sweeney’s warning bark, which Hal knew had no bite. He was willing to bet that not only would she forget her l’il darling’s rudeness, she’d probably even buy him a Dreamsicle, the lucky stiff.
Hal’s old lady was miffed. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going downto Jerry’s? I wanted you to pick up a couple of cakes o’ yeast before it’s all sold out.”
“What, is there some kind of run on the market for yeast cakes, Ma?”
“It is during Holy Week. Palm Sunday is coming up this weekend.”
Because of his general carelessness as well as the excitement over the new Ultraman, it had completely slipped his mind that the next day, Friday, was the last day of school before Easter Vacation and then – a sudden realization that made his stomach sink. He raced to his room and pushed against the door so violently that it surrendered entry without a fight. In crazed rampage, he yanked objects off the top of his dresser: a pair of socks and empty potato chip bag, the Science Fair project and three 45 rpm records were all thrown down to the already-cluttered bedroom rug. What he was seeking he did not find.
Finally with more anger than determination, he grabbed hold of the back ofthe dresser and pulled it away from the wall. A number of items that had been missing-in-action revealed themselves: a rolled-up undershirt, streaked with gray fuzz, five baseball cards, a crumbled loose-leaf sheet which contained half of a completed math assignment and there it was. Suddenly dislodged, it mobilized and started rolling. Hal reached down and stopped its trajectory toward the blackness
under his bed before it would be lost again.
The mite box had undeniably changed from its immaculate condition. The clouds had become as black as thunderheads and the angels had developed the proverbial dirty faces. A layer of fine dust had also discolored the original shine of the tin, and the coin slot was clogged with a substance Hal didn’t immediately recognize. He blew across the top of the mite box, lightly moistened it with a little spit, and rubbed it up and down his sleeve. But one feature of the mite box hadn’t changed: it was still as empty as the day teeny Sweeney had slammed down on his desk.
The frenzied search was not over. He flung open the closet door and rifled the pockets of every jacket and pair of pants he owned. Nothing. Same with the recesses between the couch cushions; any loose change that may have been hiding there at one time had by now been suctioned up by the old lady’s trusty Kirby. Asking his mother and father at the last minute was completely out of the question. They’d give him money for the mite box, all right, maybe even pack it full. But it just wasn’t worth seeing the look on their faces, which wouldn’t be able to disguise
their disappointment with their negligent and irresponsible son. Hal likewise dismissed the gambit of playing sick in order to stay home. Even if he were legitimately ill, he’d still have to go to school. “It’s Friday– you can tough it out.” That went double for the last day before vacation. Like it or not, next morning he was going to school, even though the prospect of becoming the laughingstock of the entire school nauseated him. He’d rather face a firing squad.
When the class lined up to hand in their mite boxes, it almost looked like a Communion procession. “Thank you Mr. Krause, thank you, thank you – why, Miss Bruno, this mite box is so heavy I can hardly hold it!, thank you, thank you, just a minute, is this yours? A little light, isn’t it, Mr. McGuirk?”
“I’m sorry, Sister.” Hal tried to fake a sheepish grin, but it wouldn’t come. “I’m a little short this month.” The excuse was a phrase he’d overheard his father often used, and it usually proved successful, at least as a time-buyer.
“That’s all right, young man. Our Lord understands. He said that the poor would always be with us. . .”
“I’m really sorry, S’ter. I’ll make it up to you, I swear. I’ll say a Novena for the pagan babies or something. I just don’t have any money right now.”
“That’s a stinkin’ lie!” Sweeney was nothing if not an opportunist. “I saw him buying comic books in Jerry’s last night!”
“Is this true, Mr. McGuirk?” Technically , no. Not comic books in the plural.
“I’m sorry, Sister.” His head hung so low it looked as if he were apologizing to his shoes.
“Words can not express how sorry I am, Mr. McGuirk. Now I’ll need a volunteer to go fetch Father. Not you, Mr. Sweeney. “
Being humiliated in front of the whole class was bad enough, but nothing compared to what was to come once the school principal was informed about this latest screw-up. Hal still felt the sting of his last confrontation with Father,which almost got him thrown out of St. Hilarius. God only knew what kind of punishment was in store for him this time.
A minor-league classroom pet, a second-stringer, had been sent to summon the principal. When the staccato footsteps echoed through the halls, Hal thought he heard one of his fellow class clowns sound the warning signal for the imminent appearance of Father Roche: “Raid!”
He took command at the front of the class. “Good afternoon, boys and girls.”
“Good afternoon, Father!” everybody chimed.
“First I want to thank you for your obedience in participating in our annual fund-raising for our missions overseas.” Though Hal was quaking in fear and still scarlet with embarrassment, he still was able to notice Father’s tone of voice, squarely in-between the churchly one for delivering a sermon during Mass and the palsy-walsy one he used for the Friday night CYO canteens, during which the priest sat at the upright piano and crooned songs popular two decades ago, making Hal believe that Father had seen the same old Bing Crosby movies Hal and the old lady watched on the Late Show on non-school nights. On this morning, however, Hal wondered how long Father would go on, prolonging the inevitable punishment yet to come.
“You may learned in your history lessons that this beautiful world which Our Lord made has created before been so threatened by an evil, and that evil is Communism. That is why it is so very important that we build our missions all over the world to and help feed, clothe, and shelter the people in foreign lands. But the most important task our missions undertake is to teach young children the Word of God, and to christen them so one day they can share with us the glories of Heaven."
Sweeney raised his hand. Sister silently shook her head, but the shrimpy troublemaker ignored her.
“Excuse me, Father, what happens to kids who don’t fill up their mite boxes? Because somebody, somebody right here in this classroom . . .”
“I hope I’m mistaken, son, but are you accusing a fellow classmate of failing to fulfill his obligation?”
“I sure am, Father!” Sweeney pointed at Hal. “He was supposed to put money in his mite box, but he bought comic books instead!”
“Well – “ the priest began, and Hal braced himself. Uh-oh. Here it comes. “We have to ask ourselves: what’s more important, comic books or our immortal souls? On the other hand, one of the Commandments is “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor.” God wants us to follow the letter of the law, and He also wants us to follow the spirit, regardless of whether the person really did something bad or not. I can’t say for sure, but nobody likes a squealer. Perhaps not even God.”
The entire class, including Sister, laughed. “ Thank you again, Children, for your generosity.” The priest waved his hand in blessing, and then he was gone.
Talk about “relief!” But Hal’s conscience continued to bother him, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe he should go ahead and really do something for the pagan babies, Hal thought, just to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t Ultraman do the same thing? Hal tried to picture his idol installing baptismal fonts inside the doorways of grass huts consecrated into churches or flying to the Arctic to place crosses on icy igloo steeples. No doubt he’d would
leave catechism lessons to the experts, and it would never ever occur to Ultraman to tell a kid that he was going to Hell.
As tough as he was on villains, Ultraman seeming willing to cut the regular joes some slack whenever they screwed up. Let’s face it, nobody’s good all the time. There’s only one Ultraman. And say what you want about him – he was no squealer.
