The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (7 page)

George was sent off to paint the dining tables and Bob asked me to help him mend a section of fence next to the barn. He handed me a pair of work gloves made for a ranch hand like his, like him. Three times my size. I had to make a fist to keep them from sliding off.

“Stretch this around the post over there.” He handed me two strands of wire, then raised his gloved hand, pointed. “Pull tight.”

I dragged and stretched the barbed wire around the wooden pole and yanked it. I was glad for a next move, a duty. I watched him place nails in his mouth, wrapping his lips around them so the sharp ends were out, like silver fangs. He looped the wire through a metal bracket and I wondered if this was when we might see each other. Now that we were alone. If this was when he might say something about it. But he didn’t look up, wouldn’t look over. It was as if he was concealed under a dark cloud, or we both were. He threw off his jacket, then raised his hand and took one fang out. His eyes were crystal green, glued to the task. His combat boots sloshed and sank into the midday mud as he picked up his hammer and placed the nail where he wanted it. His arm began to swing, his muscles trembling with each blow. The nail went in, and then another, and another, the smack of it echoing across the ranch. Sweat glistened on his forehead; his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose.

“Let it go,” he suddenly commanded as he slumped against the fence post to catch his breath. I dropped the wires and watched his eyes go toward the patch of aspen tucked beside the barn. I gazed there, too, at the close-knit grove of trees, slim and smooth and elegant, just beginning to bud.

“What does your father do?” he asked.

“He’s a writer. For the
News
.” My voice sounded weak, my words slow across the vapor.

“Oh . . . a writer,” Bob sang, as though impressed.

In the noon light, the bark of the aspen had the color and texture of human skin.

“Are you close?”

I glanced over and saw that he was still staring toward the trees. The shadows were there under his glasses, under his eyes. Like smudges of misery. There was something wrong with him, I thought, and he knew it. Knew there were people who’d kill him if they saw what he was.

“I dunno . . . guess so,” I said, tapping the fence post with my boot.

“George said you’re top of your class at Christ the King.”

“No. My friend Mark Groshek is.”

“But you’re close to the top.”

I shrugged.

“I’ll bet you can do anything you set your mind to. I can tell. You’re a champ.”

I felt my face heat up. His praise was like food I didn’t know how to refuse.

“I mean it,” he said. “You’re special.”

We were quiet a long while, listening to nothing, to everything. I studied the black scars on the aspen where branches had broken away or where someone had taken a knife and carved initials. On one trunk, right under the gouged shape of a heart, I thought I saw
RC + JC
. I wondered if that could be him, Robert C—. Him and . . . Jesus?

“With some work, this’ll be a great place,” Bob said, looking out toward the meadow’s end. “One great boys’ camp.” He lifted a hand and pointed. “The archery range is going to be just over there.”

I took off my gloves and draped them over the post. I put my hand in my front pocket and walked toward him. He didn’t move or look at me. My nose came even with his bottom rib, not far above his brown leather belt. He’d missed a loop. I gazed up at his ear, at the lobe of flesh, the ridges of pink circling in toward his brain. It looked like something belonging to an animal, something you’d study at the zoo. I wanted to say something that would go in there. I had no idea what.

I was standing close enough to hear him breathe, but he seemed so far away. In a movie, in a dream. I couldn’t put together that he was the same person who’d held me the night before. He was naked, wasn’t he? Head to toe. And I was, too. He’d left sperm on me. And now we were standing out in broad day and he was over there and I was here. There are his whiskers. A shadow. Thicker today than before, when they scratched the back of my neck. That happened. It happened.

He was pretending, it seemed, to study something out there in the meadow. Making plans for his ranch, maybe?—Bright Raven Summer Camp. I reached out and, though I didn’t mean to, I made a sound like a scratch of the throat and he looked, not at me but at my outstretched hand. He stayed quiet, gazing at the contents of my cupped palm.

“Oh,” he finally uttered, like a little kid coming to. He removed one glove and carefully lifted the watch. He put it to his ear for a moment, then onto his wrist, and picked up his hammer.

I stepped back to my post and slid on the giant gloves and a voice came to me from the dark. It came to me from some part of my mind I’d never met, and it said:
It’s OK. This is how it is
.

“Hey, buddy, pull the third line there around the middle,” he said. “Yank tight.”

And I did. I followed instructions and pulled as tight as I could and the chores and the day proceeded. I helped rake the stalls of the barn and clear a path from behind the dining hall toward the archery range. He gave us peanut butter sandwiches and fresh milk and we worked and worked until the sun slid behind the mountain and never once did the voice leave me. It came from inside like a stab but I understood that it was here to help. There was something good in this, I thought. Good that I learn the truth of how it is.

And the day grew cold and the stars came out and the man in the Levis pointed again at the heavens, at the Milky Way and the Big Dipper and the guiding North Star. At all the fiery constellations. And this time George found Pegasus and that made him so happy he laughed. The man’s voice was sweet and tired from all our work. The moon was just rising above the mountain as we walked the trail along the creek to the porch of the cabin, took off our boots, climbed up the creaking ladder. All the same as before but all different for knowing.

There was the undressing, the keys out of the pocket and placed with the can of Coke on the beat-up bureau. There was a fart from George and a joke from Bob and the crawling into bags. Me in the center again. There was the taking off of the watch, the swapping of pillows, the wait for George’s sleeping, the wait to find out if the man would dare. If I would.

The lantern went out.

George’s dumb, innocent snore began and there came the reach of a hand, the touch of his fingers, out from behind the dark cloud. Warm and ready to talk. And the voice inside whispered:
Go, if you want. You can’t help it. It’s the way it is. . . .

And my loneliness took me on the six-inch trip over to Bob’s bag. This time I helped, a little. I scooted with my legs, slid myself over toward the heat of him and he was all there, come out of hiding. There were no words in the dark, no eyes, just the flesh getting to it. The please, the pleasure, the longing to be talked to, back to the tight curve of his stomach, the coils of grown-up hair below his navel. I was back at the center touching the source of things, him rising out of his cotton briefs, pulsing, I thought,
for me
. Better than a gold star or straight As. I was in, I was holding fast. I was forgiven.

And the wind was skipping off the roof, stirring protest through the pines, and the silent moon and stars sent down their dim, dying light. He moved his head down to my belly—
how strange
—until his lips, warm and wet, were there on me. Then he took me into his mouth. God, so this happens, too? My God . . .
so be it
. I pushed into the dark; pushed, thinking that
this
is what I prayed for all day long. Relief. And thanks be to God, if He was anywhere anymore to be thanked, the explosion came, it came and I was split right there into a million pieces, hung so far away that I vanished. I pushed and pushed and stifled the cry, spoke the prayer:
Swallow me, Oh God, Swallow me away from here. . . .

W
E LEFT THE
ranch late Sunday afternoon, the end of that weekend. The truck roared its way down Saint Vrain Canyon. The road followed the creek’s lead, twisting its way east, back toward the city. The radio played what it could catch, snatches of static and Cat Stevens. I was in the middle again, George at the window, Bob at the wheel. The three of us were quiet.

We stopped at the Arby’s in Boulder. Bob treated us to a shake and a sandwich.

“Thanks for everything guys, we got a lot accomplished.”

He passed the fries. His eyes were gone again. Gone all day behind the cloud.

We passed the green sign that tells you:
WELCOME. YOU’RE ONE MILE HIGH
. The street lamps were just coming on.

George was dropped off first. Then Bob drove around the block toward my street. I watched the squares of light go by—the glow from my neighbors’ kitchen windows. The McCoys, the Tynans, the Pecks. I had the strangest feeling that I’d been to the other side of the world and back again and that my house might not be there anymore.

We stopped at the corner of Exposition. There was no traffic, but Bob didn’t make the turn. We just sat, engine idling. I spotted Mrs. Lachada, stocky in her housecoat, kneeling in her front yard, digging. She was a crazy gardener. I’d help her sometimes with chores. Led Zeppelin was on the radio.
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters
is gold. . . .
He reached over and clicked off the music. The silence pressed me close to the passenger door.

“George smokes dope, you know,” he said.

“What?”

“He has a rough time without a mom. That’s why he needs good people, like you.” He was gripping the wheel as if we were speeding. “Do you?”

“What?”

“Smoke dope?”

“No.” I grabbed my knapsack from the floor and stuck it on my lap. My eyes moved to the sticker on Mrs. Lachada’s station wagon:
AMERICA, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
. She’d stuck it there after she lost her son in Vietnam.

“Good. I’m glad you don’t. I hope you never do, because you’ve got talent coming out your ears.”

He shoved the stick and made the turn. I wrapped my fingers around the door handle. We passed all the silent, rectangle houses. The Fosters’ house, the Starmans’. . . .

“This is it,” I said. I glanced at the kitchen window; relieved no one was looking out.

“Thanks again for your help.”

I nodded and pushed open the door.

“Marty?”

I stopped.

“I’m glad George invited you. I hope you’ll come work again, soon.”

The cab rocked gently.

“Marty?”

I turned but couldn’t find his face. He was staring at the dash, and the glow of instruments made his cheeks green, his eyes empty sockets.

“Our friendship—it’s different, you know. Because it’s—”

I took a quick look at the house. No movement there but the flickering blue light from the den window.
Wonderful World of Disney
or
Mission Impossible
, that’s where they must be. Sunday-night television. Dad on the floor, curled around his vodka tonic, smoking his filterless Philips. Mom on the couch, adding up household receipts. Little brother, sisters. I’ll say a quick hi, take out the trash (my Sunday chore) and go straight to my room.

“In another time and place,” he whispered, “what we shared is good. It’s all right. Everything’s OK. You know why?”

I stared ahead toward the sign near the corner:
CHILDREN AT PLAY
.

“Because there’s love, you know? And, it’s between us.”

I looked at his drooping, unshaven cheek and something like hate took hold of me. I hated that he used the word
love
, and I had a sudden sense he’d said all this before to someone else. To others. And I realized that he was scared of what I might do and I felt a mean rush of power and for an instant then, our eyes met as he reached over to take my shoulder. But before he could touch me I was out of the truck and moving toward the house, toward the flickering blue light. I could hear the engine stuck there, idling, but I didn’t look back. I kept walking. I opened the yellow front door of my house and there came from the den a deep, commanding voice. The one you’d hear every Sunday after the fireworks of
Disney
were finished, just before the top-secret assignment self-destructs: “Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it . . .”

“I’m home.”

And I heard the truck pulling away, and then the sizzling sound of fire as I entered the room and found my family gathered, staring at the Magnavox, where the secret agent’s impossible mission was going up in smoke.

M
Y LITTLE BROTHER
, David, was still asleep, his breath steady in the bunk overhead.

The sun had just appeared, ricocheting around the window-well and through the dirt-stained glass of our basement window, throwing light across the lemon-colored walls, the orange shag carpet. The colors were Mom’s, her scheme for the boys’ room: blinding cheer. I lay there with a storm in my chest and began to do for myself what he’d taught me over the weekend.

“Boys!” my mother yelled down. “Breakfast. Car pool will be here soon!” I stopped to listen as she closed the door at the top of the stairs, as her slippers slid across the linoleum. I closed my eyes—there was the lifeguard at the JCC, his red swim trunks . . . then Bob, the buttons on his faded Levis. The explosion came fast, rising through me like a mushroom cloud, blowing my head off.

“You’ll be late.”

“OK, Mom. OK!” I shouted.

Every morning at Mass, Father says: “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.” I’d knelt and whispered my faults—made-up and real—through the fuzzy screen of the confessional. I’d bowed my head, prayed my Hail Marys, asked forgiveness for fibs, for swiping quarters from Mom’s purse. I’d asked for the stains to be washed away. But what happened, what did you do, when the sin was so big it was
you?

Lamb of God you take away the sins of the world, have mercy . . .

My brother stirred in the bunk above, crawled down the ladder, and left the room. I listened as he climbed the basement steps, then I sat up, slipped off my briefs, and wiped my stomach. I knew it all along, didn’t I? That there might be this, a Bob in the world, a body that would betray me.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world . . . please, take this body
.