by C J Hribal
“Had he prayed,” continued Sister Henrietta, “had he been in church where he belonged, taking our Lord Jesus’ Holy Body and Blood into his body to nurture his soul and to give him strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One, he might be alive today.” Sister Henrietta let that one sink in a little while. Her voice dropped to an excited whisper. “Do you know what happened, boys and girls? Do you know what always happens to boys and girls who do not find the strength in Jesus to resist the ways of the Evil One?” Another pause. “He drowned. The boat swung him around too fast and he lost his footing. And he was a silly boy, a proud, silly boy, and he wasn’t wearing a life preserver, and when the boat came around again, his own friends, with their boat, clunked him on the head and he slowly sank to the bottom of the lake.” Sister Henrietta paused yet again. “And we can only hope, and pray, that that dear, sweet boy, who missed Mass only that once to go waterskiing, regained consciousness enough as his lungs filled with water and as the blood vessels in his chest burst, we can only hope and pray that as he was drowning he regained consciousness long enough to pray a complete Act of Contrition before he died. Otherwise he is in Purgatory, was sent there as soon as he died, and he is still there, to this very day.” Again Sister Henrietta paused. Her voice sweet now, sugary with moral righteousness. Another group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds stricken with a deep-seated fear of God. “Can we all say an Act of Contrition, dears? Both for our own souls, that we are spared making such choices as presented to us by the Evil One, and can we also offer up our prayers today for that sweet, good boy who chose wrongly just one time, and to this very day suffers eternal torment and longing in Purgatory for that one sin he was never able to confess or wipe away with an Act of Contrition, thereby damning himself for all eternity?”
And while we prayed I kept picturing, as I’m sure everybody else did, this poor boy slowly floating to the lake bottom, his arms and legs loose in death, blood-tinged bubbles escaping from his mouth. But I thought of something else as well: that girl in the boat, what was she wearing? A bikini? A peach- or lemon-colored bikini? And did he sleep with her the night before? Did he die happy, knowing, at least, that he’d had sex with her the night before he died? And was that what God was punishing him for? Was he really being punished for that? And that girl—did she like it? Was she pining for the loss of this boy who’d maybe made her happy? Was she cognizant that every boy she’d ever be with after that would have to compete with this memory, and they would always fail, for who—ever—can compete with a ghost and win? And what about that girl, who I pictured looking like Dorie Braun—what did she look like under her bikini? Were her breasts tan and creamy? Was the place where her thighs junctured a lovely white? Would I be the boy who years later would finally wipe away the memory of that boy lost forever at the bottom of the lake? Could I be that sweet and kind and gentle, could I please her? Would she let me reach inside the cup of her peach-colored bra and palm what I found there?
It was all a tangle, all of it. There I was, contemplating sex and death, sin and salvation, touching myself while looking at a picture of my mother naked, and imagining a girl in a peach-colored bikini, a girl I would never meet, though she had Dorie Braun’s face and Dorie Braun’s body. I went back into the bathroom, where our mother had left her panty hose draped over the shower curtain rod. I took down the panty hose. I put them on. I was all scrunched up inside the panty hose and there was a tingling throughout my loins that surely had to be what that boy and girl felt when they’d pleased each other the night before he drowned.
But something was missing, too. I wanted to feel manly. So I went into the back of our father’s closet and put on one of his helmet liners and on top of that the slate green steel helmet, which was so heavy it made my neck wobble like that of one of those NFL dolls you see mounted in the back windows of Chryslers. I took his twenty-two rifle, too, the one with the scope, and I stood in front of the wardrobe mirror that had never been mounted on the wardrobe. It sat on the floor, amid the detritus of our parents’ lives, their clothes and papers and magazines, their Sansabelt slacks and terry-cloth robes, their bank statements and survivalist-spiritualist books, their Reader’s Digests and Outdoor Lifes, their catalogs and cosmetics and purses and briefcases, their shotguns and their rosaries—all the clutter that our mother would not pick up because doing so might indicate she was settling down here, and she still wanted to believe this move was temporary—and I stood there, too, in panty hose and helmet, brandishing a twenty-two, sure I could do damage to somebody.
Doing it to myself would have been a pretty good guess. Especially since I was doing it to myself, the gun in one hand, the other inside the panty hose, and it was right as I started to spasm, my first real come, with an emission and everything, that Nomi’s face appeared in the mirror behind me. She was at an odd angle, bent over her walker, so her face appeared between my legs. “Good God!” thundered Nomi. “What are you doing?”
I could have died. I pulled my hand out of the panty hose as fast as I was able, the goop on my hand smearing on the panty hose, a dollop landing on the mirror. I had a sudden inkling of my mother putting on these son-spackled panty hose and getting pregnant by me. That was the way girls got pregnant in our high school. There was never any intercourse. Too many kids crowded in cars going to drive-ins, that was the problem. The girls sat on the boys’ laps and the boys came in their jeans, but fluids leaked through. Immaculate conceptions all. The ways of the Evil One were many and various. A warm lap now, an eternity of hellfire and damnation later, flames licking at the very laps you once so innocently sat on. Girls! Sit on those phone directories! Do not give in to the pleasures of the Evil One!
But it was too late. I already had. The evidence was everywhere—in what I was wearing, in what I was doing, in what I had expelled from my body in excruciatingly sweet and sinful relief. I cried out to Nomi, “It was an accident! I swear!”
But Nomi was already backing up in her walker, and closing the door on me as soon as she felt it was safe to do so. “I’m sure it was,” she told me. “I’m sure it was.”
I washed and rinsed and washed and rinsed those panty hose before I put them back on the curtain rod with their brethren. Brethren—should I even think thoughts like that? The little seedlings milling around in that pat of ejaculate were microscopic—ninth-grade biology told me that. What if one hadn’t been washed away? What if one made it? What rough beast, what abomination would result from that? And what ring of hell was specifically reserved for boys who knocked up their own mothers? Would it be Oedipus and me sitting in the box seats, munching on dried dung beetles and mealy worms and grubs like they were popcorn, watching the murderers and rapists at hard labor? Or would it be the other way around?
I had plenty of time to think about what I had done. I thought about it every shower, and every waking moment outside the house. Nomi had said nothing to me, bless her; but still, I knew how she’d found me. And even if Nomi hadn’t caught me, I knew what I was doing was a sin. All my bad thoughts were sins. And I was caught between the guilt of doing them and the desire to do them again, as soon as my privacy allowed me. Horror—that my blind worm could stiffen at the drop of a hat. Delight—that it was so easily appeased.
Like most good guilt-wracked, masturbating, and wet-dreaming boys of the period, I started having accidents with such regularity they no longer seemed random. It began with my bike accident. A year later, I tumbled off the barn roof and broke my forearm. The year after that, Wally Jr. and Ike dared me to climb to the top of our mercury lamppost. I slipped. A nail caught me underneath the rib cage and the nail head opened me up like a zipper. After each accident our father said to me, “You know what they do with horses, eh, Emcee?”
I knew. But I couldn’t stop it. My yearly present to him, it seemed, was somehow doing damage to my person. A leg broken falling out of a tree house, a broken nose, a dislocated shoulder—our father surveyed the wreckage of me in my hospital bed as though he were a
carpenter checking for knots or worm marks in a length of lumber. He shook his huge head, disappointed in what was obviously an inferior product. “We should have put you out of your misery years ago,” he said, chucking my shoulder, assuming my shoulder was not in a sling.
This was how our father handled Nomi’s illness as well. He was uncomfortable around Nomi, and he thought by telling jokes he could make everyone feel better. Mostly, though, he was trying to make himself feel better about things he had no control over. But a woman with lung cancer does not want to be asked by her son-in-law each time she sees him, “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?”
Said Nomi, “Wally, shut up already.”
This didn’t stop him from saying the same thing the day the sheep stampeded our mother.
Sheep are not normally marauding animals. We kept them in a pen attached to one of the sheds, but the box-wire fencing sagged with vines, and their ringleader, a dry old ram called Bucko, kept pushing it over and they’d step through. Then we’d play tag with a half dozen sheep in an open field, trying to direct them back toward their enclosure. Most of the sheep complied willingly. Bucko didn’t. He resisted herding, taking off like a spooked fire hydrant whenever one of us came near. We finally got a rope around him and dragged him back. A Massey-Ferguson tractor was equal to his stubbornness. At that point we should have sold him. Tony Dederoff told us, “Once a sheep goes bad, it’s bad. There is no rehabilitation for sheep. They become hardened criminals. They go after the cow feed, they start scattering chickens. Pretty soon they’re all hanging out at one end of the pasture, smoking unfiltered clover and making lewd baaing noises at the passing heifers.”
What we had on our hands, according to Tony, was the Cool Hand Luke of sheep. Wally Jr. had the job of feeding the sheep, and every time he stepped into the pen Bucko backed up a couple steps and charged him. He played havoc with the backs of Wally Jr.’s thighs. Bruised the hell out of them. So after the first couple of Bucko’s charges, Wally Jr. went into the pen with a scoop shovel, which he cocked and brought down like a baseball bat across Bucko’s forehead. This would stun Bucko, who’d stand there for a minute, dazed, shaking off the cobwebs, and allow Wally Jr. to break open a fresh bale of hay for the other sheep. I feared the blows were making Bucko retarded. A likelier theory was they were making him mean. Regardless, he kept breaking out and getting into the clover just beyond our garden. Wally Jr., shovel in hand, went to get him.
Our mother was positioned at the top of the rise near where the old lumber piles used to be. Sheep normally veer away from humans and, given some direction, trot docilely toward where they’re supposed to go. With the small cliff of the ruined barn on one side, and our mother on the other, the sheep’s natural course would be down the path and back into their pen. This might have worked fine had the sheep not been led by a sociopath like Bucko. He came up the rise, chased by Wally Jr., Ike, and Robert Aaron, and instead of veering away from our mother and trotting down the path, he lowered his head and charged her. It looked like a bad scene from the streets of Pamplona. Bucko bowled over our mom, breaking her forearm, and the other sheep followed. It was a sheep stampede, and all our mother could do was cover her head as the sheep ran over her and crashed through the garden.
Our father was traveling. When he came back and saw our mother’s arm in a cast, her eyes blackened, the first words out of his mouth were “This will reflect on your merit review.”
“Piss on your merit review,” said our mother.
Our father tried to keep it light. “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?”
Our mother had ingested several painkillers, and her self-editing function must have short-circuited. “Fuck your horses,” said our mother. “I want that sheep dead.”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘Hold your horses’?”
“Shoot him, Wally. Shoot that goddamn sheep.”
But our father could do no such thing. The job was given to Wally Jr. It was a reward, I suppose, for having driven the animal into criminal insanity with his scoop shovel. He walked into the pen, the infamous shovel in one hand, a shotgun in the other. He brained Bucko just as he stepped back to charge, and shot him as he was shaking out the cobwebs. “Take that, you fucker,” said Wally Jr. He used a sixteen-gauge and fired a second round into Bucko’s forehead even as the first had him sinking to his knees. Wally Jr. was taking no chances.
There was a certain zeal to Wally Jr.’s murder of Bucko that should have told us something, but we paid it no heed. Wally Jr. was defending his mother and redeeming the family honor, which had been blackened by a deranged sheep. Zealotry in defense of your mother is no vice.
What is a vice is trading places with your mother because you are scared shitless of Bucko, and she offers to take your spot on the ridge, and you get her spot at the pen, ready to close the gate once the runaway sheep are inside. So what happened to our mother was my fault. Everything was my fault—I had gotten my mother’s arm broken, shot my father, nearly given my grandmother a heart attack at the sight of me, cross-dressed and ready for battle, pumping my little stem into spasms of ecstasy and panty hose spackling that might very well result in my having knocked up my own mother.
Not to mention that the true object of my little spasms didn’t even know I was alive. Dorie Braun’s interested disinterest from when I’d smashed up my face had settled into plain disinterest. She was entering Patty Duckwa territory now, off with older boys—a boy named Calvin Brodhaus, mostly—and she was leaving me behind. Not that we’d ever been an item, but she knew I liked her, and that should have counted for something. It didn’t, of course—she was forgetting I existed at an alarming, almost a record, pace—but I’d show her, I would.
I ran for class president. I lost, badly. I joined the cross-country team, figuring to impress her with my Emil Zatopek–like accomplishments. I may as well have been running on the far side of the moon. In an ill-fated bid to demonstrate my masculinity, I briefly joined the wrestling team. In practice I was matched up with Calvin Brodhaus, even though he outweighed me by a good fifty pounds. Calvin pinned me in six seconds, a record that I believe still stands at our school as the fastest pin ever. The only way Dorie would have noticed me at that point was if she owned a copy of that imaginary book A Short History of the Geeks, in which contributions by people like me to the records set by people like Calvin were duly noted. It was no use and I knew it.
The only thing that saved me from making a complete ass of myself was the fact that I’d already done so. Two years previous, when it was first becoming clear to me how little Dorie noticed me, I had concocted, with the curious logic of a twelve-year-old boy, what I was sure was a can’t-miss method for making her mine. I would root for the Chicago Cubs. I’d will them to victory, and the mystical power I wielded would imbue me with desirability, at least as far as Dorie Braun was concerned. Never mind that year after year the Cubs swooned better than a femme fatale in a Jimmy Cagney movie—that year it was going to be different. I could tell. There was an air of inevitability about the ’69 Cubs. They couldn’t lose. Our father said they were cursed, they’d fall apart, it was just a matter of time, but this was their year. Santo, Williams, Hundley, Kessinger, Beckert, my beloved Ernie Banks, plus a pitching staff that included Ferguson Jenkins, Bill Hands (a pitcher named Hands, believe it!), Ken Holtzman, even the submarine-throwing Ted Abernathy—it was a team of destiny, a team of greatness, a team that had a nine-and-a-half-game lead on the hated, pathetic Mets and it was already August. I’d always believed in the Cubs; now I became them. Their drive to the pennant would redeem me in Dorie’s eyes. I would become the boy I’d always hoped I’d be. My shaky status in the male gender would solidify; I’d become accepted, manly. Dorie Braun would notice the change in me. I’d be a winner.
Our father would come into the living room after one of his sojourns to the Dog Out and look at the TV for several minutes. Then he’d announce, “They’re losers. You watch. They’ll tank. They’ll choke
. They’re no good.” The way he spat it out he may as well have been saying it of me. Of course he had no idea how closely I identified with the team. How could he? He was never around. But his pronouncements made me will them to victory all the more. I’d show him. They were so good. They were the forces of light, battling the forces of evil. I—they—we would triumph. Over history, over adolescence, over the various demons bedeviling them, me, us.
History has chosen to record the success of the Amazin’ Mets of ’69 more so than the late season collapse, the total breakdown, of the Chicago Cubs, who in a matter of some six or seven weeks, managed to blow a nine-and-a-half-game lead and finish the season eight-and-a-half games behind the Mets, finishing, in fact, in third place. They weren’t even runner-up. This is as it should be. The Mets were winners, and history is written by the winners. And our father was right. The Cubs were losers. Choke city. Complete collapse. “They’re bums. They’re looooosssss-eeeerrrrs.”