The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (15 page)

The idea was born that day and would not leave me for years and years to come.

That night Bob came to my bunk after everyone was asleep. He jostled me and asked that I come to the room where he slept. Like a trained zombie, I pulled back the covers and followed him out.

I didn’t exactly know if they slept in the same bed or what they were to each other but there she was. “Come on,” he said, “crawl in.”

She didn’t seem to react at all. She lay on her side in the dim light, her back to us, maybe sleeping. I slid into his side of the double bed, then he got in and nudged me over so that I was in the middle. He didn’t say anything, but the movement of his hands, the way he gently turned my body toward hers told me what was happening. I understood suddenly that this was his offering. My reward.

The air, the silence, is electric. What has Bob said to her? I wonder if they’ve discussed it, made a bargain about what to do with the kid. Did he tell her I was hurt by what she said? Did he ask her to make up, be nice? Bob reaches around with one hand and guides me toward Karen. I’m excited, my mind racing, thinking:
This is it, the thing that men do
. The natural thing. The thing I’ve been waiting for. I’m erect, a sign that I’m made the right way. It’s surreal, the way she’s not really there. A lump of flesh, or like a rock, really, with an opening into which Bob slides me—small plug into a cold socket. Has he made a compact with her? It wasn’t two days ago that she insulted me, told me I wasn’t a man. I slide into her thinking, oh my God; I’m
in
a woman. That part of a woman. It, she, feels rough, sandpapery. It does not feel warm or good and I understand in some way that this holds no pleasure for her but I don’t care. All I’m thinking is how I’ll be able to say from now on that
I’ve done it
. What boys do. It goes fast. I come, thrilled at my accomplishment. My sense of power is followed instantly by intense embarrassment. Awkwardness.

When it’s over I crawl back over Bob to the edge of the bed.

“You see?” he whispers. Then he turns and makes love to his girlfriend.

An hour later I tiptoe back to the dorm and take my place among the sleeping campers. I look at Robin’s shaggy, handsome head. The thought of waking him runs through my mind. Just for a second, so I could tell him what’s happened. Not to worry, I can do it. No question. But I don’t dare wake him, dare spill this new secret, and I crawl into my bunk. I stare above at the series of thick beams—shaved logs—running the length of the room, and above them at the sloped, slatted ceiling. I wonder if the roof might fall in, crush me. I wonder why it is that I feel so terribly, terribly sad.

We are in Wyoming for three more days. The last night we’re there, very late, he sneaks in to get me and takes me to bed with the both of them again. Once more he offers her to me or me to her. No words, just nudges and hand signals. She “accepts” or, rather, holds still and receives me. Coldly, as far as I can tell, but what do I know? It goes quickly, nonetheless, because I’m hungry to prove it for a second time. Prove that I’m capable. Then everything goes a step further. With more nudges and maneuvering Bob makes it known that he wants me behind him, to be inside him while he moves inside her. I oblige. It all strikes me as weirdly inventive, that such a configuration could exist. This is something, I think, he’s been angling for all along. Attention from all sides, mastermind in the middle. How did he become this being, this thing—like a daddy longlegs weaving a big, sticky web? And how did we get here, tangled in it, like hungry prey, groping in the dark for food, for escape?

In the daylight nothing is said. Karen and I can scarcely look at each other.

S
UMMER OVER AND
back in the halls of Christ the King, my body vibrates. My bones are infused with a push that tells me I must fashion a dazzling public self. Be the best and busiest eighth grader ever. The push has always been there but now it’s a kind of panic, an incessant, living prayer:
God, do not let shame fall upon my head
. For if it were to come, if the truth of things surfaced, I would die of it. And I had no doubt that shame could kill a body.

Even now I can see, nearly feel, my small body scurrying down the halls, running for classes and extracurricular meetings. It’s a physical, an almost athletic feeling that I must jump higher, spell better, talk smoother, smile more broadly than anyone else. It’s as if my life depends on this. On performing. It lives there in my knotted stomach, this imperative. Dazzle or you’re doomed.

I run for class president and win. I know then that my picture will be placed—along with secretary and treasurer—at the very center of our graduating class photo. This is what I want, to be encased in the bright aura of achievement. Student Council. Boy Scouts. Great Books. Run. Run. The faster, the better. The quicker I move, the less any truth can be pinned down. By me or anyone else. The shinier my halo, the more I can blind them. If the arrows come (and there are awful moments when I feel sure they will, that trouble will surface), I’ll have armor so golden, so thick, that nothing will stick. Not to the straight-A superspeller likes of me. Nothing will pierce. Not the good boy.

There are many moments I enjoy. I’m good at chatting with adults and I’m generally popular with my classmates. I love the attention I get from doing well, but I know that my quick body is a blight here in the holy halls of civilized life. My fellow citizens just don’t know it yet. Every waking moment comes with the task of earning the right and making up for the wrong of being here. I knew I’d revoked my own membership, but every action I’d take would be a way of proving, of saying:
I still belong
.

It would be the odd moment cycling home or daydreaming in class that it might come to me. Like a whip-crack of dread. The thought of a news clipping, a rumor, a summons. The thought that somewhere there might be an authority investigating him. He’d be found out. And then, so would I.

Once in a while I’d get a letter from him, urging me to keep up my studies, to kick butt in the spelling bee, asking how I was and when I wanted to come visit and work on his new house. Sometimes he called.

“Marty, it’s for you,” my mom or one of my sisters would yell. I’d stand in the kitchen and speak briefly, quietly, on the phone with him—my counselor pal from camp, my mentor, my secret lover. I tried to resist the invitations, but the craving would rise up and I’d say, “Yes, OK,” and arrange to spend another few days with him. I knew that somewhere in the course of the weekend there’d be the drug, the fix, the touch—that one thing that felt true beyond any Truth. He knew that part of me, the part that craved sex. Pleasure. He accepted it. Fostered it. He wanted what I wanted.

And also there was, during those long, winter weekends, the simple companionship. The holding of a hammer, the time spent together sawing wood, making things. He still had lessons he wanted to teach.

I remember coming home from one of these weekends to find that my minibike had been stolen. It was my prized possession. A shiny red, fifty-horsepower minibike. I was in shock. My dad could barely look at me; he felt so badly, his head hanging low. Turns out he’d taken it for a ride to visit his friend and have a bit of a nip. Innocently, he’d left it out front and someone nabbed it.

My motorized bike was months and months of paper route money. It cost way more than the guitar I bought. It was, at the time, the world to me. I could barely speak. Something so big, that I’d worked so hard for, gone. Vanished. I was numb with anger. I didn’t know what to do.

I called Bob.

Gently, he calmed me. “God has reasons, plans larger than we could ever know. Look, Marty, you may never understand why. You’ve just got to figure that someone out there needed that bike more than you did.”

It was one of the strangest notions I’d ever heard, but, even so, there was something undeniably wise in his words. A larger kind of thinking. And what he said sunk in, comforted me. The last thing he told me before hanging up was, “Marty, you’ve got to forgive your father. That’s important. He meant no harm.”

Eighth-grade weekends with Bob meant Karen too. She had an apartment in Boulder and sometimes we’d sleep there Friday nights before heading, just the two of us, up to the unfinished house where we’d work (and sleep) alone in sleeping bags. Or sometimes in the almost-finished bedroom with the fancy skylight, where you could lie on the futon and practice celestial navigation.

On those occasional nights in her apartment in Boulder, the three of us had sex. By now I was demanding that I get my moment with her, my chance to prove myself. Then Bob and she would do whatever it was they liked as I hovered on the edge of the action.

On one of those mornings, I remember Karen waking very early, with a start. She let out a sort of gasp, threw back the covers and dashed to the bathroom. There were large drops of blood all across the linoleum of her small studio, leading to the bathroom door. I felt a jolt of terror, thinking she’d cut herself or had a nosebleed or that she’d been hurt somehow. I noticed that there was blood in the bed too and in a panic I jostled Bob.

“Jesus,” he said.

“What happened?”

“She’s got her period.”

“Oh,” I said, sort of putting it together with the little I’d gleaned at home from my sister and mother about menstruation. Bob explained a bit more and calmed me down. Said it was something normal. Eventually Karen emerged, pale and upset, and with a wad of paper towels she cleaned the floor.

We spent that morning together packing up her studio apartment. She was moving across town, somewhere cheaper. In the midst of loading boxes into Bob’s pickup truck, the two of them erupted.

“You live like a pig. You’ve left the place such a mess!” Bob yelled.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Everywhere you go, you leave a mess. Why didn’t you clean up?”

“I’m working two damn jobs. What do you expect?”

Suddenly, Bob lashed out and smacked the passenger door of the pickup with his fist, leaving a dent. He bent over and cradled his hand against his chest. That could have been her face, I thought. I’d never seen this violent side of him, though I realized I always suspected it was there. That he did his best to keep it from me.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, throwing a broom and then himself into the back of the pickup. I sat up front, wishing myself invisible.

“He’s crazy,” Karen kept repeating as we drove down the dirt road. “He’s fucking crazy.”

There was one time my parents confronted me about the mountain trips. I came home very late one Sunday. Karen and I had gotten lost riding some horses, transporting them from one ranch to another. We were to meet Bob but we’d gone down a wrong trail and it was well after dark when we finally found a highway and a phone. By then, Bob had called Rocky Mountain Rescue and had rangers out looking for us. It was a school night, my parents were concerned, and when I got home my mom made my dad say something. It was a short and vague sort of lecture, Dad sitting in the armchair in his pajamas, smoking a cigarette.

“Come in here and sit down.”

“OK.”

“You can’t be going off like this and coming home so late. What about your studies? What’s
going on?
What are you doing up there?”

“I’m helping out.”

“Well, you can’t just go off and come home so late,” Dad said.

My mother nodded. I had the feeling that she wanted to know, to ask, more. But she didn’t. Nobody pressed.

“I’m sorry,” I said, seeing how honestly upset they were and how caring. And how powerless. Everything was too far along now for them to stop it, for them to have any grip on me. I looked at my dad across in the chair and Mom sitting on the couch. The seven feet between us was vast. I was barely aware of their preoccupation with making ends meet, with negotiating a crumbling marriage. And they hadn’t a clue what I’d gotten myself into. There might have been an inkling beneath (I recall one occasion when they’d suddenly insisted on driving me to the ranch instead of Bob picking me up. “We want to have a look,” they’d said.), but the conscious thought would never have been allowed to blossom. That a tall and charming man, a guy associated with St. Malo, a fellow I’d said was once a seminarian, was a pedophile. Unthinkable.

“Well, don’t be home so late,” Dad said, stamping out his cigarette.

“OK.”

We all went straight to bed. That was the last of it. The closest we’d ever come to a showdown.

Sometimes I felt scared and I liked it. All the concealment was a kind of strange power. An entire and buzzing inner life. A fourteen-year-old on a three-speed Raleigh, getting it every which way. I was getting away with murder, with pleasure, with crimes, and I was pulling As, I was pulling focus for all the right reasons. I got second place in the televised Rocky Mountain Spelling Bee (a joyous occasion, a prize TV!). I was spokesman for the class, top of the Catholic heap. I was oh so nice. Naughty and nice. My face was the frantic mask of a chipper boy. I was expert shape-shifter. Secrecy, my engine. A machine so loud it makes it nearly impossible to listen for what’s in your soul, to hear what’s authentic.