The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (12 page)

“What kind of gun was that?”

“A nothing, small caliber.”

I kept thinking about it, that it had been there all along in the compartment in front of me and how quickly he’d grabbed and used it. How awful and merciful it was. And I kept wondering what he might have said to himself or to the deer before he killed it. Something private, something I shouldn’t ask.

“Did you kill people in Vietnam?”

A puff of air came out his nose, a sort of snort. It was a mile or more before he said anything.

“They gave medals for it.”

When we walked in the house, the first thing we did, even before putting the groceries away, was fall into each other’s arms. On the plywood floor, next to his half-finished fireplace, we had sex. I fucked him again. We held one another tightly and all the while I knew, I could feel more than ever, the terrible sadness. We were far away from each other. He was somewhere I wasn’t and I was somewhere he wasn’t. Our bodies were touching, groping for relief, but our thoughts, our spirits, were utterly separate. In our sex, I realized, we never made eye contact, never, ever, kissed. And this night, I began to understand in some way how we were using each other. To forget. To get out. Maybe he was trying to forget the war or the deer or the day. And I was busy trying to obliterate the very thing I was doing with him. What I was becoming. It felt dreadful and exciting and so terribly truthful, all at once.
Hold on tight, this is life. It’s really hard, so hold tight to whatever you can
. I felt I understood that his holding me had not a thing to do with me. That each of us was for the other a collection of parts. Not a whole. Not at all.

It was over quickly and we went quickly to bed.

I began to be aware of other boys, at least two who I knew were also sleeping with him—Kip and Steve. They were slim and blond and blue-eyed, like me. They were great guys, warm and smart and somehow vulnerable. Like me, I guess. He once referred to us as his Three Musketeers. There was a Saturday morning at Bob’s house that I remember still with a kind of awe and tenderness. I was talking with Kip in Bob’s kitchen as we made breakfast. We’d both come up to work for the weekend. Kip had just put strips of bacon in the pan, was turning up the flame. I was slicing oranges. We were talking quietly because Bob was still up in bed. Unusual for him; he was an early bird.

Suddenly, there came the sound of Bob’s voice calling for Kip. Kip paused a moment, his fork hovering over the crackling bacon. He turned to me and, with the slightest smile, said: “Would you cook this a minute?”

“Sure.”

He went upstairs and I slowly flipped the bacon. Very soon—I don’t remember how long but the bacon wasn’t yet done—Kip was back. He walked up silently and took the fork from me. Just then, Bob called my name. “Marty?” It felt terribly awkward. I held still. Then Kip turned to me with this comical grin and said: “You go get in the frying pan, I’ll finish the bacon.” And we burst out laughing. Two thirteen-year-olds howling at his joke, this absurd situation. I remember thinking how smart and funny this guy Kip was. How he seemed calmly resigned, philosophical, about what was happening. And how amazing it was to laugh at what we both knew was going on but didn’t dare speak of. That we were part of some secret club; a little blond, blue-eyed bordello. Kip was like some kind of sunshine that morning. His humor gave me hope. Hope that we’d get through this thing we’d gotten ourselves into, that it might not be as fatal as I often felt it was. That, in the end, we’d be OK. We finished giggling and I turned to go upstairs to Bob’s room. Fifteen minutes later the three of us were at the breakfast table discussing what work needed to be done that day.

Mr. McGruder, our seventh-grade sociology teacher, in a rare attempt to bring history alive, asked us to write an essay about a personal hero. “We’ve talked of Hercules, and General Patton. Let’s hear your idea of a real hero. Someone in your life.” We were given a week and were told we’d read them aloud to the class. I composed an essay entitled “My Friend Bob.” In it I discussed how my hero knew the names of plants along mountain trails. How he built a camp on a ranch so that young men could learn about the land and animals. About real stuff you’d never get from a book. I said how he was strong and had taught me to be strong and never to smoke and that he had served our country in Vietnam. On the afternoon when I stood to read my work, I remember how my scalp and then my entire body tingled. It was magical, surreal, to glance up at the faces of my classmates as I told them of my friend. My living hero. The telling turned me giddy. I was daring to speak the name of a love and I felt ten feet tall.

When class wrapped up that day, Lisa DeAngelis came over to me as I was about to leave the cloakroom. She hardly ever spoke to anyone but her two perfect, beautiful best friends—Jen and Marie. I was stunned when she reached out her hand and stopped me.

“I liked your essay,” she said.

“Thanks,” I replied as I pulled on my parka. “Thanks.”

I watched as she reached for her ski cap and coat. Her bright blond hair fell below her waist, nearly, neatly, to her tailbone. “Didn’t the guy you wrote about,” she continued, “didn’t he used to be a counselor? At St. Malo?” She turned toward me and slid the blue cap over her lustrous head, tidied her hair over her little ears.

“Yeah, that’s where I met him.”

She leaned forward and unveiled her perfect teeth. “My older brother said he’s a
queer
.”

She walked away, the swish of her skirt a dare, a warning.

I stood in the half-light of the cloakroom for a long time, listening to the thud in my chest.

Permit
.

Permutation
.

Pernicious
.

Sister Joan was feeding me spelling words from one of her many lists, preparing me for the Rocky Mountain Spelling Bee. We were sitting in the front den of the convent on a Saturday morning in April. I’d never been inside before. There was a couch and two large, comfortable chairs. Gold drapes hung from the sun-filled windows. This was the part of the house where guests were received, and it felt very special to be there and rather strange that it was just the two of us sitting not far from where she, our principal, slept and took her meals. She wore oval glasses with tortoiseshell frames and, though stern, had a soft face, smooth cheeks with hints of blush. She was always impeccably put together. A small nun in her mid-thirties. She was beaming this morning. I’d done well in the archdiocesan bee and I knew she was counting on me to place in the big one in May. That’s why she was taking extra time with me. “Spelling will sharpen the good brain God gave you,” she often said to me.

“Pernicious?”
I repeated. “Definition, please.”

“Wicked.”

“Could you use it in a sentence, please.”

She’d taught us spellers to ask all we could about a word, even if we felt sure we knew it. “Definition, derivation, use in a sentence—these are your guides, your tools. And asking gives you time to think,” she always reminded us.

“Alcohol may have a pernicious effect on your health.”

“A
wicked
effect?”

“Let’s be more exact,” she said, lifting the magnifying glass that dangled from a silver chain around her neck. She put the glass to her eye, then quickly bent her nose to her beloved Oxford dictionary. She loved nothing more, it seemed, than dipping down like this, like a bird digging at the root of things. She flipped through the pages. “It’s from the Latin, of course:
Pernicies
—destruction. The first definition is, ‘Irreparable harm through evil.’ ”

She sat up and looked at me, letting the glass fall to her chest, where it tangled with her crucifix. I felt a little grin grow across my face and, comfortable and alone as we were in the nun’s inner sanctum, I felt emboldened to ask a question unrelated to spelling.

“There really isn’t such a thing as the devil, is there?”

She closed the dictionary and looked at me with grave blue eyes. I wiped the smirk off my face.

“Marty, make no mistake. The devil exists and he is here among us. And we must be vigilant. Vigilant in our prayers and our actions, because he’s always looking for ways to tempt us. To corrupt us.” She took up the list to continue our drilling, then let it fall back to her lap. “He was an angel, you know, at the right hand of God. Innocent and loving as a babe. There’s no worse fall than the fall from such a height. He wants us there too, proud and fallen from grace. Make no mistake. The devil exists.” She kept her eyes on me until I nodded. She suddenly seemed worried what, other than a speller, I might be. My tongue felt thick, the pit in my stomach deeper.

“
Pernicious —
P-E-R-N-I-C-I-O-U-S.”

“Correct,” she said.

I asked Sister Christine the same question the next day during my guitar lesson. Hoping she would be less solemn. Smiling, I asked, “C’mon, Sister, there’s no such thing as Satan, is there?”

She went deadly serious on me. “Oh yes, he exists.”

And I thought,
What does he look like?
And I thought,
My God, I’ve met him
.

I stood in the main john of our house, in front of the mirror, glaring at the red, raging zits on my chin. I reached up and pinched one that was coming to a head. I felt the pop, the pus. I glanced at my finger and saw blood. It was a lousy habit but I couldn’t seem to stop it.

“You’ll have scars for your whole life if you keep doing that,” my sister Chris said. “Stop picking.”

“I can’t help it.” I smeared some Clearasil on my face. Chris had lent me her Oxy 5. Nothing was working. Zits kept sprouting. “Why do I have all these goddamned pimples?”

I caught my sister’s crooked smile in the toothpaste-splattered mirror. “It’s just the evil in you coming out,” she said.

T
HE SECOND SUMMER
I was with him, Bob took his camp on the road. North, to Wyoming.

There’s a Teton there with your name on it
, he wrote in a letter.
You should come and see it. We’ll raft the Green River
.

Where he got the idea, the big yellow school bus, or the girl friend, I don’t know. We were just there, suddenly, that hot July between my seventh- and eighth-grade years, speeding up Interstate 25—pied piper Bob, thirteen campers, and Bob’s nineteen-year-old cowgirl-friend, Karen.

The wind whipped across the rubber rafts roped to the top of the bus, creating an incessant banging overhead. Bob had his can of Coke propped on the dash. Each time he moved his hand from the wheel for a sip, he’d reach across the aisle to caress Karen’s arm.

“If you’re gonna keep speeding, you should switch lanes,” I heard Karen say as she yanked at the brim of her cowboy hat. “I know how the fuzz around here thinks; my uncle was a cop.”

I sat four seats back, behind Bob. I turned to the window, to the featureless flat, the endless tumbleweeds. This state was depressing as far as I could see, and so was I, I felt sure, with my face full of zits, my mouth stuffed with braces. My toes were hot and pinched in a pair of boots he’d handed me for the trip. They were cowboycool but way too small. I didn’t tell him that when I tried them on. I gave a polite smile, said my thanks, figuring he must not notice that my feet, like the rest of me, were getting bigger. In the fifteen months I’d known him my bones had thickened, my hair grown long, my voice dropped.

I didn’t know any of the other boys on the bus—a pair of brothers who lived on a farm in Loveland, some kids from Boulder who seemed to know each other from school, and a few others from out Nebraska way. Kip and Steve and the few other Bob-campers I’d met along the way were elsewhere this season. It seemed I was the only repeat camper from Bright Raven the summer before. How we’d all come to be here on a school bus in the middle of Wyoming was another mystery in the vague life of Bob. There’d been no fliers that I could remember, no real brochures, no parental permission slips. The whole adventure sprung from the seat of his pants.

Long after a lunch of peanut butter and jelly, well after dark, we were still driving toward Jackson, toward some ranch he’d lined up as our base camp. I could see that, despite all the Coca-Cola, he was sleepy at the wheel. Karen yelled out at one point when he nearly swiped an abandoned car parked along the shoulder of the road. Those who were dozing were startled awake.

“Let me drive,” Karen said.

“No,” he snapped. “You don’t have a chauffeur’s license.”

A few miles later, Bob yanked the wheel and drove the bus right into the tumbleweeds, where he came to a halt next to a barbed-wire fence. He acted as though he knew exactly where we were, as if this was a campsite he’d reserved.

“Everybody grab your sleeping bags and get out.”

We stood in the weeds and watched as he crawled atop the bus and untied the blue tarp that covered the rafts. Then we helped him lay it on the bumpy ground. We peed near the fence, then unfolded our bags and lined them up in two rows, tight as sardines, along the square of plastic. I glanced up at the shifting pattern of clouds and starlight.

“What if it rains?” I asked.

“Oh, for chrissakes, think positive,” he said.

Bob and Karen took a walk after all us boys laid down. When they returned, Karen went to sleep somewhere inside the bus—the floor? I wondered—and Bob squeezed his bag in next to mine. As we drifted to sleep, the only sound was the occasional, rocket-like whoosh of semitrucks approaching, then racing past, on the nearby interstate.

His hand awakened me. My eyes opened to sagebrush and tumbleweeds bejeweled with dew, our sleeping bags wet and shimmering with first light. It was cold and the sky clear. His fingers worked the zipper, wandered toward my belly. I had wondered if it might stop, now that he had a girlfriend, now that I was older, but I guessed not and answered his reach, scooted silently into his cocoon.

His warmth surprised me, surprises me still. The texture of skin, the way our bodies fit together. His lotion was stashed in his bag; he snapped open the lid and in no time was pumping between my thighs. The routine. I watched the sky, the last stars folding away into chalky blue. And then, as if called there, my gaze landed three sleeping bags away, square into the bright, brown pierce of Robin Hedrick’s eyes.