Roy, the Viper and Jimmy Boyle were sitting on top of the back of a bench at Heart-of-Jesus Park drinking grape Nehis after playing a football game. Their team had lost that afternoon to Our Father of Fearful Consequences, a school from Kankakee, and they were not happy about it.
“We shouldn’ta run the ball so much,” said Jimmy. “We needed to throw it more.”
“Three yards and a cloud of dust,” said Roy. “Except we could only get two.”
“It’s what worked in ancient times,” said the Viper, “when Coach was playin’, but not no more.”
It was a little windy and cold, but the boys didn’t want to go home yet. Stan Yemen, the park janitor, came out of the field-house carrying a long-handled rake and walked over to them. Yemen was in his midthirties and had been a janitor at Heart-of-Jesus ever since he had dropped out of high school at sixteen. He always wore a dark brown windbreaker zipped up to his neck, dark brown trousers, white socks and dark brown clodhopper shoes. He never wore a hat, even in winter and even though he had a crewcut. Yemen’s most outstanding feature was his missing left ear. His family was from Arabia and Yemen said they were desert people. He had lived over there until he was nine.
The Viper had once gotten up the nerve to ask him how come he didn’t have a left ear, and Yemen said, “When I was seven, an elder of our tribe tried to circumcise me, but I dodged his dagger and he sliced off my ear instead.”
The boys didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but all Yemen had where his ear should have been was a small lump of congealed flesh that looked like somebody had thrown a mud-ball at his head and part of it had stuck there.
“Hey, fellas,” Stan Yemen said.
“Hi, Stan,” said Jimmy Boyle. “You see our game?”
“No, I had to work. Lots of leaves to clean out of the gutters and rake up this time of year. I heard you tried to run on ’em and got beat.”
“Tell the truth, Stan,” said the Viper. “You really lost your ear when they tried to circumcise you?”
Yemen smiled at him. The janitor had big brown eyes that matched his clothing; they jiggled in their sockets as he spoke.
“All Arab boys are expected to submit to circumcision in order to pass into manhood,” he said, “but I had witnessed this ceremony performed on my two older brothers and seen and heard their suffering, and I vowed then not to allow it to happen to me.”
“Didn’t your father or mother try to make you?” asked Jimmy.
“Not really. They had already decided to try to leave the country, and my mother, especially, was not a true believer in many traditional Muslim customs. It is thanks to her, not Allah, that I still have my foreskin.”
“What about your ear?” Roy said.
Again, Stan Yemen smiled.
“I confess,” he said, “about that I lied. The truth is, it was bitten off by a lion one night when I was sleeping in the desert. In fact, on the same night I ran away from the circumcision ceremony to hide.”
The janitor walked away, holding his rake over his right shoulder like a rifle.
“No way,” said Jimmy Boyle. “A lion would have bitten off his whole head, not just an ear.”
“You think he can hear out of the left side of his head,” said the Viper, “even though he don’t got an ear there?”
The wind picked up and suddenly the sky darkened. Roy jumped off the bench.
“Ask him next time,” he said.