The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (11 page)

That first summer, instead of going to St. Malo, I spent two weeks at his ranch-camp cutting hay, shooting arrows, and sneaking off for sex with him. There was a ragtag collection of nine or ten other campers there. It was strangely disorganized but we enjoyed taking care of the few horses and goats, the two milk cows, and spending time fixing things up, going for climbs. Sometimes I wondered if he was involved with any of the other boys. It seemed not. It seemed to me that I was the only one. Most of the kids appeared to be troubled cases. The depressed and the delinquent. Kids he’d rounded up, kids he meant to help—a boy from Michigan whose dad hated him, two brothers from Nebraska whose parents were splitting. A loner from Longmont.

When summer was over and winter came, it wasn’t just off to the ranch that we sneaked. There was an apartment in Boulder belonging to someone I never saw; there was a garage in Arvada, a little log cabin in the woods outside Nederland. An old lady owned it, he told me. Someone among the many Bob had charmed, someone I’d never meet.

I remember waking there once in a big feather bed, a huge comforter covering us, the cabin surrounded by blinding sunlight reflected off two feet of fresh snow. I had braces on my teeth by then, and little patches of hair on my body. Bob was still asleep. I slipped off my headgear and set it on the nightstand. (The orthodontist and my mother had told me I must wear it religiously or I’d always be bucktoothed and no one would take me seriously when I grew up. So at night, after our sex, I’d slide it into my mouth and strap it around my head before going to sleep.)

I hopped naked out of the warm bed to build a fire in the wood-stove. It was freezing. Bob woke and threw on a pair of sweatpants. We began arguing about how best to place the kindling and the newspaper. “I learned this in Scouts,” I told him. “Wrap the paper tight, stack the kindling loosely.” He disagreed—paper loose, he said, kindling packed tight. Suddenly our hands were tangled inside the soot-covered stove, each of us struggling to get his way. I remember how ridiculous it seemed, how odd it felt, to be bickering, first thing in the morning. Like an old married couple. Or like two little kids. And Bob stood there, three feet taller, twenty years older, pouting like a child because I told him he was stupid and angry because I got my way. In the quiet tension of that morning, as the fire warmed the cabin and he cooked our breakfast, I remember him asking me, “Why do you always just lay there, like a fish?”

“What do you mean?” (I knew and didn’t know what he was referring to and instantly felt embarrassed.)

“Most of the time you just lay there, like you’re not interested. Except that I know you are.”

I just shrugged my shoulders and ate the rest of my oatmeal. He let it drop. I thought of it often, slowly figuring out that what he was telling me was that he was frustrated with our sex, that I wasn’t a good lover.

In fact, I did lie there like a fish. I needed to feel that what was going on, no matter how much pleasure I found in it, was being done
to
me. I meant to hide, hold back, the want. I didn’t want to let him, or myself, know that I owned any part, any desire, when it came to sex. He—it—was all happening
to me
. I had to hang on to that thought. For survival.

Sometimes, many weeks, even a couple of months, went by without hearing from him, and I’d think,
Good
. Good, he’s forgotten, and so have I, and it won’t happen again. I won’t let it. But a letter would arrive or, more often, a phone call announcing a project, offering an invitation, and I’d be ready and wanting. “I’ve bought some land of my own in Sunshine Canyon,” he said one day on the phone. “I’m going to build a house on it. Why don’t you come this weekend and help me get started.”

“All right.”

His whiskers were thick, almost a beard. It had been long since I’d seen him, two months, maybe. I remember the ache that night, sitting next to him in the truck. The pure want, the physical feeling of missing him. Of missing the pleasure of touch. Of having been shot up with him and now, most definitely, hooked.

We stopped at the garage in Arvada on the way to Boulder. It was an auto-repair shop of some sort. It was after hours and no one was there. Bob had a key, said he worked there sometimes. Who knew? His doings, his life, his past, were all so vague. (I still told people he’d once been a seminarian, though by now I knew that not to be true. How or why he’d ever been hired at Malo, I didn’t know.) There were cars, two or three of them, jacked up on the silver columns of hydraulic lifts, wheels off, engines dismantled. The smell of oil and electrical wire lurked everywhere. Bob said he had to gather some tools, and I went to the toilet to pee.

The next thing I knew he was standing behind me. I remember feeling embarrassed, for an instant, that he’d just walked into the john while I was standing there peeing. But the embarrassment vanished quickly. There was little in the world, I think, that could shock me by then. Or so it seemed. Something had changed: my reticence was gone and my want, fierce. His fingers on me were a drug, electric, and I remember how I reached behind and grabbed him, squeezed him with both hands, then cupped my palms around the mound of his penis. Like finding the root of a tree right below the faded cotton of his jeans. Like rediscovering, holding on to, my own secret. Nothing timid now. I was admitting, holding, the shape of my very own desire. And I could tell this surprised him. I wasn’t being a cold fish now; I’d show him. We moved, tumbled to a bench. There were greasy work boots and sneakers lined up below us in neat little pairs. I studied the stains and shoestrings, thinking:
Yes, it’s happening again
. There’d always been one small part of me that wondered, each time I was planning to see him, if perhaps
this
would be the time it stopped. This time it wouldn’t happen and we’d simply be friends, do normal things. We wouldn’t end up naked and out of control. But it always, always happened. I could never, didn’t know how to, stop it. It was happening again and this time I
knew
how much I wanted it. This night, head dangling over the dirty work boots of the absent mechanics, I felt any reservations I might still possess melt away. Utterly. And I wanted, I tried, to please him. I gave him what he desired. He spit and I entered him for the very first time and I squeezed him for dear life, for all the many weeks I’d grown older and hadn’t seen him. I fucked him. And after, as he rolled tools into a rag and I tied my boots, I felt more lost than ever. Riddled with shame, terrified that there was no going back now. Ever.
Seventh grade and my fate is sealed
, I thought.
I’ll never be other than
this.

Once, I convinced my scoutmaster that, instead of going to one of the usual scout campgrounds, we should pitch our tents on the land of a friend of mine who was building a house near Nederland. “It’s near a creek,” I told him. “In a beautiful canyon. Some great climbs around there.”

He finally agreed, and one Friday night Troop 63 packed into two station wagons and went to make camp about a quarter mile downcreek from Bob’s house. We built a fire and roasted our weenies and said our goodnights, because we were going to get up early for a real climb. Mr. Welton, our scoutmaster, was big on hikes. His favorite piece of equipment was his pedometer, which was attached to his belt. He kept close watch on it whenever we went off on our adventures. His rule was that it wasn’t a real hike unless we’d trekked at least ten miles.

That Friday night, after everyone else had fallen asleep, I slipped out of the tent I shared with my fellow scout and good friend, Mark, and made my way through the bushes to the creek. There was an old rope that I knew of, tied to two trees on opposite banks and suspended about two feet above the water. I knelt down and wrapped my hands, then my ankles, around the rope and shimmied across. It felt unbelievably exciting to me. The whoosh of the water just below my dangling head.
One false move and I could drown
, I dramatically thought. I felt like crazy Romeo risking his life, climbing the wall to get to his lover.

In short order I reached the other side and found the path that ran along the highway to Bob’s place. I stepped through the side door of his house (he’d given me instructions by phone earlier that day) and straight to his bed. The secrecy, the adventure of it, was fantastic. It gave me such a feeling of pleasure and power. As if this secrecy was becoming the fuel of my life. My secret weapon. My hidden fire. And part of the game, the fun, was no one finding out. Second-class scout and cocksucker, straight-A altar boy and slut.

I slept with Bob until first light and, like Romeo upon hearing the lark, I squiggled out of bed, shimmied back across the river and into my sleeping bag. Mark was sound asleep. I remember feeling thrilled when I got back to my tent. I lay in my bag listening to the birds, grinning at my own daring. My cunning. I had a whole other life that no one knew of. My own private universe, my own merit badge for sex. A warm, buzzing secret at the base of my stomach. I’d hold tight to it, even if it killed me.

That day, Mr. Welton kept goading me. I was tired and lagging behind. He looked at me, “Come on, what’s wrong with you?” And then, looking at his pedometer: “We have miles yet to go.”

Late one Friday night toward the end of seventh grade (it was always Fridays—after school) we were in the truck making our way up the canyon toward his still-unfinished house. We planned to work there all weekend. I dozed against the passenger door. Bob and I had already stopped to have sex at the garage in Arvada and now I was sinking into that familiar haze of regret, the indefinable and bottomless sadness that always followed the explosion of physical pleasure. I remember glancing out the window and seeing a yellow sign, a warning to climb to safety in case of heavy rain. And soon after, Bob hit the brakes hard and let out a terrible sigh. I sat up quickly.

Standing in the middle of the road, not twenty yards ahead, was a woman with a long white coat. She wore high heels. She looked like an upscale secretary or PTA mom, utterly out of place standing alone on a dark mountain road. She stared at us, frozen in the headlights, a strangely glamorous ghost. Bob put on the hazard lights and slowly pulled up to the right and stopped not far behind her green Toyota. The woman stayed where she was in the center of the road and I watched as she wrapped her arms around herself and lowered her head.

“Stay put,” Bob said, as he climbed out of the truck.

As he approached her I saw what the matter was. On the left edge of the road, not far from her car, was a deer lying on its side, breathing heavily. I could see its brown fur and the white part if its belly rising and falling rapidly. There was a patch of blood spreading around its head, black as oil.

Bob spoke to the woman for a moment, both of them looking at each other and then over to the animal. Bob took her arm and walked her toward her car. I knew the voice he must have been using, the gentle one. It looked as though he was trying to convince her to get in but she shook her head and leaned against the driver-side door of the Toyota, her hand over her mouth. Bob stepped over and took a quick look at the deer. One eye of the poor creature was visible to me, wet and shining in the beam of our headlights. Bob walked briskly to my side of the truck and motioned for me to roll down the window.

“Open the glove compartment.”

I pressed the silver button and the lid fell open. Bob reached in, took out a pair of work gloves, and slid them into his back pocket. He reached in again and found a chammy cloth. Wrapped inside it was a handgun. From a little cardboard box he then took two bullets, slid them into the pistol’s chamber. It all happened so quickly—a weird dream. He walked over, knelt down in the road, and put his hand on the deer’s neck, leaned over its face. His lips moved. I wondered if he was talking to himself or the animal. The deer’s nostrils were moist, widening and shrinking with each breath. Bob stood suddenly, pointed the gun, and fired. The shot echoed up and down the canyon. That was it. After checking the animal’s neck again, for a pulse, I supposed, Bob grabbed the gloves from his pocket, put them on, and dragged the small thing to the runoff ditch on the opposite side of the road, leaving a long streak of blood across the tarmac. He spoke to the lady for a moment, touching her arm once with his gloved hand. She nodded and got into her car. Bob hopped in the cab, took out the extra bullet, and put it and the gun away.

We followed the lady for a couple of miles until she slowed, put her hand out the window to wave, and turned off the main road. “I told her to call the highway patrol,” Bob said. “To pick up the animal.”

We drove for a while in silence, picking up speed as we came to a clearing, where there were houses along the creek. “We can start work on the railing for the deck tomorrow, until the roofing supplies come.” Bob sounded calm; we were getting close to his two acres, his half-finished, two-story house, the first real thing he’d ever owned, so he said. And he was obsessed with making it perfect—skylights and fireplaces and a great deck stretching out over the creek.