The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (12 page)

I started to tell her she was the only girl I’d ever kissed, stopped myself with another throat-clearing. Rusty had warned me about such honesty.

“Does that bother you a lot?” she asked, sounding farther away, emphasizing “that”.

“Not too much,” I said, though in my new greed I wanted explorer’s rights, my flag only in this territory.

Margie’s voice changed direction, “Oh,” and I pictured her hugging her knees with her head laid on them. The water bead slid from the leaf, a tiny explosion of lights. “Because I’ve done a lot worse stuff than that,” she said.

I waited. I made myself say, “What?”

I think she shook her head. “You’d hate me,” she said. “No fooling. It’s why I tried to kill myself.” She found my hand and squeezed it hard.

“What?” I knew she wanted to tell me—that it was somehow necessary.

“Promise you won’t hate me.”

“Of course, I promise. You can tell me.” I both did and didn’t want to be told. I had nearly decided that she’d had sex with some boy.

“What?”

Margie was all shadow. The rain sizzled. A cricket chirped inside the tree with us. Then flatly she said, “I used to let my brother Donny do things to me, you know? Everything. I wanted to, at first. Now I hate myself.”

A false soberness washed over me, leaving me without the ability to think. I felt like we were holding hands through the window of a train that was about to take her far away and forever. The nervous, stupid urge to laugh brushed past me. Then rage. I wanted to kill her brother, burn everything clean, die myself, end the world.

I was shaking. The drizzle washed the leaves.

I remembered to breathe, concentrated on that for a while.

And then the world expanded. Two kids with problems in a circle park weren’t going to bring on the locusts or oceans of fire. They wouldn’t even hold up traffic. Most of the anger breathed out of me, and my face, at least, grew used to it. I’ve never been able to stay angry. People think I’m understanding. I understand little. But I can bear almost anything, and that’s nearly as good.

“I’m sorry, Margie,” I said. “That’s about the worst thing I ever heard.”

“The first times we did it I felt like a saint, or a monster or something,” she said. “I felt smarter than everybody else, and sort of dangerous. Then it started making me sick and I couldn’t sleep and I felt like maybe I was possessed or something. I almost
asked my mom to get a priest. Like in
The Exorcist.”
She made a hissing noise. “But I knew it was me. My fault. But I can’t ever erase it. You probably hate me now, right? And I guess I’ll go to Hell about twice over.”

“I don’t believe there is a Hell,” I said. “And if there is, I’ll be there too, and so will all my friends. Who cares?”

She exhaled. “You’re nice, but I bet you already want to get away from me. I know what people must think, boys. Anyway, I deserve it.”

Actually, she was partly right. I wanted to be away from her where I could think about this and decide how I felt and maybe get used to it. I strained towards logic. She’d been very brave to tell me, and I thought she must be feeling relieved, if not actually better. She needed me, then. Amazing. And it occurred to me, goose bumps making my scabbed legs hurt, that Margie was the only person who had touched me, for years, without using a belt or extension cord or fist. Feeling sorry for myself mixed in with feeling sorry for her, and something hooked in my chest.

“I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself,” I said. “And I’m glad you’re not ordinary. I don’t care about the other thing.” That wasn’t true, yet. But I hoped it would be.

“I was going crazy from keeping it secret. I had to tell you. I’ve been practicing what to say ever since that day in church when you smiled at me and I knew I still wanted to be alive.”

She hung onto me and pressed against my shoulder, blinking back the tears. The ache in my throat spread into my face. Everything seemed so important. I pressed my lips to the damp hair over her ear and whispered that I loved her, and she clung to me harder, and then lights were shivering in my eyes.

I barely even sniffled, but Margie knew. She began to brush the hair back from my forehead and to kiss my cheeks. She stopped crying, whispered, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.”

After a few seconds, of course, I realized how I must sound. I cut a sob in half, stopped. I sat back exhausted. “Damn it,” I said.
“Man, am I embarrassed. What’s wrong with me?” I was off guard and a reflex sniffle came out like a hog-noise. “Excuse me,” I mumbled. “Don’t ever hurt yourself again, okay, Margie? You’re the only person I’m comfortable being humiliated in front of.”

She giggled through a sniffle. “I started it. I’m more humiliated than you.” She kissed my cheek. “Listen, I was too dumb even to kill myself right. I got the razor out of Mama’s Gillette. The cuts on my wrists weren’t much worse than the ones on my fingers from holding the razor. I fainted and hit my head on the toilet.”

The idea of Margie’s blood made me weak. We were wrapped around each other, sniffling in turn. It got abruptly dark. I assumed the streetlight had burned out. Dogs began to bark all over outside.

We talked about her parents’ divorce. Also, she had an older brother in prison. I whined about my hernia and my parents beating me. We talked for I don’t know how long. Finally she said, “Walk me home?”

We went out into the drizzle, every light in the neighborhood off. “It’s mighty dark,” I said. A flashlight beam floated over someone’s backyard, shimmering with needles of rain. “The power must’ve gone out.”

“Francis,” Margie said, “what are you doing next weekend?”

“Well, I’m supposed to do something with the gang …”

“Oh. Because Mama’s going out of town.” Margie folded herself around me from behind, arms across my chest, chin on my shoulder, one thigh slid between mine. She spent a final sniffle. “I wish you’d find a way to come over and watch for the ghost with me. See if she’s real or if I’m just crazy. Maybe it would make her go away. You could sleep in my room. I mean, if you want.”

She held me in the dark. My face was cool from the rain. A few blocks away a siren bansheed and a whirling red light swept the treetops like fire. I raised my jar and sucked down
the last burning trickle of liquor, and then I hurled the jar as hard as I could towards the street. After the burst there was a long tinkling sound as the jar disintegrated, the lid stammering across asphalt, and a long beam of light swung from a backyard towards the sound and made the pieces of glass glitter.

When I got to my yard I saw Tim hunched on the stone bench like a gnome, feet scissoring above the grass. I told him I had to go inside and get bitched out for being late. The streetlights had returned the familiar landscape, brought to mind the regular rules and punishments. My mouth was horribly dry, my clothes wet.

“I wouldn’t grovel to my parents for a while,” Tim said. “I smell booze on your breath from here.” His hair strung over his eyes and ears, dripping water onto his Bogart-style trench coat.

I sat down beside him, further soaking my corduroys.

“You look ghastly, Francis. You didn’t weep in front of that girl, did you?”

“Not so loud,” I whispered. “My folks will hear us.”

He hopped down and stood, trench-coated, and looked at the top of my head. He stretched himself, vertebrae spreading, neck thinning, until with the extra inch he was as tall standing as I was sitting. “Come on, then,” he said. “We’ll get something for your breath and hide out in my old clubhouse. You ever had anchovies?”

We shattered puddles on the way to Riner’s store. Inside, some
old men were drinking beer and shooting pool. A boy with bad acne bowed over the pinball machine in back, bumping it with his hip, slapping the flipper buttons, making bell-and-buzzer music. I slid the cooler open and pulled up a Coke while Tim ducked and shimmed a tin of anchovies into his sock. Mr. Riner, pistol holstered at his side, squinted at the fuzzy black-andwhite TV at the end of the counter. He rang open the register, took my dollar. He was bald and had fingernails thick as nickels.

Tim always said that when you stole something, you actually paid for it with fear and worry, the currency of the outlaw.

Riner chuckled at something on
Hee Haw
and trickled coins into my upward palm.

We mushed through the lane into Tim’s backyard. It was dense as a jungle. Tim’s dad called it the only natural ecosystem in the neighborhood, but he kept the front lawn trimmed for his wife and for the neighbors. Frogs were singing.

The clubhouse, behind the garage, was five squares of plywood we’d dragged from the lumberyard one Sunday and hammered together. We opened the door panel, crouched inside. We sat on warped tea crates and Tim crackled the wrapper off the anchovy tin and started rolling it open with the key. The only light sprayed through a small galaxy of holes on one wall where Tim had tested his dad’s shotgun. “So give me the filthy details,” he said.

“There are none.” My imagination was torturing me with a scene of Donny and Margie in bed, and when it got the most hideous (both of them naked and bucking, licking each other’s mouths, sweaty, groaning), that little section stuck in an instant replay mode.

“Confess, man. I set you up in that cozy Maxfield Parrish scene. Share it for godsakes. I’ll probably be a virgin until the day I shoot myself.” Hints of fish came from Tim’s corner. The buckshot holes speckled his face with light. He finished coiling the lid off the can. I recalled kissing Margie and my stomach ached.

“It’s sort of private,” I said, thinking even the good parts would spoil if exposed to another boy. “Who’s Maxfield Parrish again?”

“Private? Shit, two days with a girl and friendship goes down the toilet. Fine. Then you’ll never know why the electricity went out tonight.”

“You didn’t do that.”

Tim smacked his lips. “Goddamn, these are tasty. Here, have an anchovy, get rid of that booze breath.” He passed me the tin.

“What did you do to the lights?” I peeled a greasy strip out of the can and laid it in my mouth. I crunched prickly little bones. It tasted like a minnow half-dissolved in salt and oil. I gave them back to Tim and dug out my housekey and pried the cap off my Coke. I guzzled some, burped. “Those fish are corroded,” I said. “Okay, I kissed her under the big magnolia tree again. We made out a little.”

“And you started crying?”

“I didn’t say that.” I gulped more Coke, wiped greasy fingers on my knees. “It was part great, part awful. I can’t say any more.”

“Aw,” he said. “My heart bleeds like a pig for you.” He wadded a tiny fish into his mouth, snorted at me. “ ‘Can’t say any more.’”

Rain drummed onto the flat wooden roof and dribbled down the inside walls, reviving the mildew smell. The frogs got louder.

“It’s weird,” Tim said quietly, chewing. “I’m not afraid of jackshit. I’ll take any dare, fight guys twice as big as me, I don’t care. But the few times I’ve talked to a girl I liked—” He sucked a piece of fish from between his teeth. “—it’s like my mind turned into a Hallmark card. And I get clumsy.”

“Whatever’s the most important is the most scary, I guess.”

“Yeah, so,” Tim said. “Are we going to trade secrets?”

“I can’t.”

“Please. It might be helpful to me.”

“It’s not. It’s not a regular secret. Not normal.”

“Oh, Jesus, now you really have to tell me. Come on.”

“It wouldn’t be right.”

“Fuck! We’ve been best friends for three years. I taught you every interesting thing you know. I’m going to tell your mom you showed us her copy of
The Sensuous Woman
if you don’t tell me.”

“You would not, you bastard, you’d be ashamed.”

“Please, I swear I won’t tell.”

“Not even Rusty?”

“Nobody. I swear. On William Blake’s grave.”

Telling it, I grew exhausted again and ashamed and then relieved, like going to confession myself. I meant to hold back the worst part, knew Margie didn’t want it told, but it heaved itself up and then it was out in the clubhouse and sitting on Tim’s back too. We were quiet. Tim took a deep breath and let it out whistling like a falling missile.

“You’re right. You shouldn’t have told me that,” he said. “Are you bullshitting?”

“I wish.”

The rain crashed for a while. Then Tim asked questions, shaking his head, studying me. He said, “It’s one of those goddamn sick Southern things. You know, Edgar Allan Poe did it with his own teenage cousin. I forgive him, of course, he was a genius. Donny’s just a putrid slug. Shit, you people.” Tim crunched the final anchovy, swallowed, spit, held his hand out for the soda. I told him to finish it.

He turned it up and gurgled, passed the bottle back. “You can have the backwash.”

I turned the bottle over and foam spattered into the dirt. I let the bottle thump to the ground. “What a world.”

“Hell, you can comprehend it, though. Listen to those frogs. They’re going to mate. You think they agonize about who’s related to whom?” Tim creaked forward on the tea crate. “Let’s say you’re her brother—you’ve got this beautiful sister, you’re comfortable around her, sleep in the same house—”

“Hush, man. Come on.”

“Sorry. I’m willing to avenge this thing, just say the word.”

“She avenged it on herself. Let’s bury it, okay?”

“I envy you anyhow, you lucky bastard. Very romantic. Dark secrets, kissing under the lotus blossoms, ghosts … and what about this private pajama party you’ve got scheduled?”

“Tell me about the electricity now,” I said. “What happened?”

“Oh. Nothing. I was bored. I took my axe and chopped down a utility pole. It didn’t take two minutes.”

“Jesus! Aren’t we in enough trouble? Are you taking pills again?”

“Fuck!” Tim shot up and his head banged the ceiling and the clubhouse hopped and particles of something rained down my neck into my shirt. He swatted his leg, stomped, cradled his head, cursed.

“What?” I said, crouching up. “What!”

“A fucking big roach ran up inside my pants!” He peeled his jeans up over one knee, battered the door flat onto the grass, and tumbled out into the rain. I got out too. The clubhouse had shifted slightly, showing some bare earth and a stream of glistening cockroaches panicking into the grass towards the garage. “Gag a maggot,” Tim said, standing, shaking out his trench coat. “You could rope and ride those sons of bitches.” He unrolled his pantsleg. “Let’s book on out of here and go see the wreckage.”