Lou

Ralph was all excited, explaining the story he finally figured out we were in. It was a good one. It was called The Miracle of the Rock. It even had the Pope in it.

Sometimes, though? I don’t know for sure if we’re pretending or not. Sometimes Ralph pretends so hard it’s hard to tell. Like when we used to play army, I would shoot him and sometimes he would fall down dead and just stay dead. You could do anything, tickle him or drip water on his face or pile stuff on top of him or even kick him in the ribs, and he would just keep being dead. You had to kick him really hard, and even then. This one time I was kicking him and kicking him and he just kept laying there dead, so then I got scared because I thought maybe he really was dead—from me kicking him—and I started crying, but then he got up and yelled at me for kicking him after he was already dead. “What more do you want?”

Anyway, here’s the story Ralph said we were in: The boy and his little sister are looking for bottles in the vacant lot and find a rock that looks like Jesus. They pray to it on their knees—that’s how they are, they’re like the children of Fatima. But then Fatso comes and grabs it up, wanting to make money off of it—that’s how he is, like a fat greedy pig. But then they fight him for it and get it back and escape. So now they have to get it to Father Clay.

“Right,” I said. I already knew all that.

But then he said the reason they had to get it to Father Clay was so Father could get it to the Pope.

So that was new.

“The Pope?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Why the Pope, Ralph?”

“Think about it.”

I thought about it.

“Why the Pope?”

He gave a sigh at how dumb I was.

“Just tell me,” I said.

“So he can show it to the world, Lou. This miracle.”

“The Miracle of the Rock.”

“That’s right. Then everyone in the world will believe in Jesus, even the Russians—especially the Russians.”

“So they don’t blow us up.”

“Now you got it.”

“So...we save the world, you mean?”

“Sort of, yeah. What’s wrong with that? Don’t make that face.”

“I’m not. What face?”

“That Mom face. It’s not that goofy, Lou, okay?”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“They said the children of Fatima were goofy, too.”

“Not me.”

“Remember in the movie? How everyone laughed and laughed at the goofy children? They didn’t turn out to be so goofy though, did they.”

“I never said they were, I never said anybody—”

“Shhh.” He had his hand up.

I whispered, “What. What.”

“Shh.”

We listened.

Somebody was knocking at the front door.

We looked at each other, like in a story.