The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  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. . . .

  9

  WE 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.

  10

  MY 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.

  I knocked softly on the door of Dad’s john. Never did that. It was his corner, his private orbit. He opened the door, a gust of steam.

  “Dad?”

  “Pull up a seat, tiger.”

  I sat, cross-legged, on the toilet.

  He was at the gray sink, wrapped in his red-checkered robe. He was putting cream on his face. The room smelled of Old Spice. I watched him scrape at his cheek, then over the summit of his Adam’s ap
ple.

  “Dad?”

  “Damn,” he whispered as a little star of blood blossomed on his throat. Quick, he dropped the razor, snatched his lighter from the pocket of his robe. There was the flick of flame and suddenly, balanced between his fingers, a tight white cigarette. No filter for this guy, up to the mouth, a direct hot hit. Threads of white drifted from his nose. Dragon smoke streamed from his lips and bounced off the reflection of his bushy brow. He looked into the glass, into his half-shaven, grown-up whiskers, and saw something far away, it seemed. Something he didn’t like. He set his cigarette down carefully on the edge of the sink, where there were two brown marks burned permanently into the porcelain. Marks I’d touch sometimes when he was gone, to see if they were still hot. He grabbed a piece of toilet paper and pressed it to where he was bleeding, then lifted and touched the Philip Morris to his lips again. The tip glowed orange as he took a deep drag. He turned his face toward me and formed an O with his lips, as though he was going to sing to me. Or kiss the air. His mouth puckered, then pulsed like a hungry trout, and from deep within his burning lungs, ring after perfect ring of smoke signals appeared, lined up like a flock of birds. As they glided over, I reached out to grasp them. They scattered.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  He coughed horribly then and Mom yelled that it was Pop-Tarts, and car pool any minute. I ran to get dressed.

  11

  INTO MY SIXTH-GRADE classroom I took: Mud from the ranch. Brown leather boots clomping across the linoleum. Shit-kicking weights on the end of my legs, making me master of myself. I’m two inches bigger in these things. Even without them, I’m taller now. Superior. In the space of one weekend at the foot of a mountain, I’ve been thrust up, eyeing things now from a new height. Adult territory.

  I bend to fix the thick, red shoelace, straighten the blue cuff of my polyester pants. No one else in my class wears footgear like this. That’s just fine. No one else knows of these things. They weren’t chosen to walk in the muck of a real barn. They didn’t have the luck, the fate, the sweet devil-joy come their way. I’m different, always have been, knew it all along.

  Just fine. Fine with me.

  What happened, what I did, what I am, stands between me and everybody else in the whole fucking world. Every body. Except one.

  And the boots are my own keepsake. They’re like the pledge—just between us—tied around my feet. And a ring of mud around each sole to recall the trail I’ve gone down. Down to the pleasure, to the wet earth smell, to the hidden world of skin on skin. The muck sticks. It’s our glue.

  But, strangely, when I think of it, it’s not exactly him I’m thinking of. It’s more the force, the thing that’s been revealed. That’s most of what I’m feeling, thinking of. The orange ball of fire at the center of it all. I’ve seen it, this grown-up truth. Contacted it. And none of you sorry sixth graders can imagine where I’ve been. How big and real it was, is. The flesh of it. None of you teachers or parents or priests with all your rules and books can possibly imagine what’s humming right now in my chest, heating up my thighs. The power of it. The hum of a holy spirit, the holy hum of sex, come to enter my life, fill the void. At long last the burning question has a solid answer. Touch.

  Our sixth-grade class is the last room at the north end of the hall on the second floor. Windows run along the west wall, opposite the clock and the crucifix. I look outside. The mountains are there, distant and clear. They are out there calling and calling and I want to go, up into the wild. I want to live as an animal. A savage. How can anything in these books be real? Anything from these churchified, city mouths? I’ve stumbled upon the one, the only thing that is real. Everything up till now has been a lie, hasn’t it? My body is all on fire with the truth.

  I turn away from the windows and up to the cross. The crucified, nearly naked corpus. He looks at me differently now and I want to tell him—How dare You, and I want to pull off his little loincloth, Mr. Son of Man, and ask him a thing or two about gods on earth. The kind with dicks.

  Sister Christine asks us to rise. She gives directions about the reading lab, about concentration, but her voice is garbled by the hum of molecules dancing between bodies, bouncing around the fluorescent lights. The gigantic chords ringing in my head muffle her words. I’ve tried twice and our eyes have met and she doesn’t seem to see someone other, someone different. It’s all easier than I thought; to make what happened seem like it didn’t. To hold it down in a corner inside and act just the same. It’s someone else’s story, all that, someone else’s body. Or, if it really is my story, well then I can hold it quietly within while I tell the stupid world another tale. The tale of the golden one. The altar boy. The tale they want to hear, the one that will protect me.

  At fleeting moments I want to scream, to burst forth with the news of what I discovered. Or what discovered me. I don’t want to confess, but to boast. You see, the thing I’d been waiting for, it happened! But it passes as quickly as it comes, replaced by the sharp stab in the gut. Shut the fuck up. The stab that’s already becoming familiar.

  It’s late at night, early in the morning, when I’m all alone. That’s when I begin to feel the weight of worry. The shame like a blade sharpening itself against the core of me. Bury it. Bury it. Dig deep and bury it.

  At recess Tuesday, my first lesson since the ranch, I strum defiantly. A hundred miles, a hundred miles, I can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles . . .

  “Your fingering is strong. You practiced over the weekend, didn’t you?”

  Her auburn brows are raised, such pleasure in her face. She couldn’t possibly imagine, could she? The chords that have been plucked over the weekend, the music I’m strung out on. And I have not the least problem. I look her in the eye with an easy smile and say, “Yes, Sister. I practiced.”

  It’s so much easier than I think it will be.

  Lying.

  12

  A FEW MORNINGS LATER, I was sitting on the floor, on the gritty beige carpet of our front hall. Car pool was due any minute but I was moving slowly, lacing my boots. Dad stood at the hall mirror, wrestling with his tie. His blue tie with the tiny yellow typewriters all over it. His fingers fluttered around his throat, his hands racing the clock. Like everyone in the world, he was due at a desk.

  My eyes drifted up past the gold-framed poem my mom had nailed to the wall—Go placidly amid the noise and haste—to the crucifix hanging just left of the front door. A classic, foot-tall wooden Jesus.

  “We should take that down,” I said.

  Dad glanced at me for a second, his shaggy eyebrows taut, each rising to a sharp point—devilishly handsome. “Christ?”

  “No. The palms,” I said. “They’re dead.”

  “Burn them.”

  I looked up at the hairy fronds drooping around Jesus’s neck, dried and yellow like a ratty old scarf. I’d stuck them there myself nearly three weeks earlier, on Palm Sunday, the day we remember Jesus’s triumphant mule ride into Jerusalem. The Sunday before the Holy Thursday he’s betrayed and it all comes tumbling down.

  Three weeks, forever ago.

  “Damn,” Dad whispered. I looked over. His lengths had gone wrong. Again.

  “Why don’t you use a clip-on?” I asked. “It’s easier.”

  “Clips are for kids. Didn’t you get a real tie this year, for your confirmation?”

  “No.” I yanked at my red laces. “Fake.”

  Dad dropped his head and examined how close the tips of his tie came to his zipper fly, considering, it seemed, whether to start all over. His necktie hung flat over his white shirt, then bowed way out, following the bulge of his belly. This paunch was new, sudden, as if one night he’d sneaked out and swallowed a basketball. The one that sat unused in the garage. His slim, Korean Conflict days were gone. Slumped there, head hanging, he looked like a big Winnie-the-Pooh. A friendly stuffed thing that wouldn’t go anywhere without being carried. I looked into the mirror where his bald spot glowed. A pink moon amid a da
rk sky. He lifted his face suddenly, and the reflection of his eyes caught mine in the mirror.

  “Since when do you wear your hiking boots to school?”

  I felt my face go hot. “Since now,” I said, tying a double knot. “Since I went to the ranch.”

  “That guy’s camp?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dad pulled apart his tie.

  “Your great aunt arrives today.”

  “Who?” I stood and stuffed my bologna sandwich into the top of my knapsack.

  “Your Aunt Marion.” I stepped over and both of us were in the mirror—junior and senior. His English Leather wafted over and attached itself to my clothes; the smell of him, I knew, would stick with me all day. “She’ll be at Grandma’s the next few weeks.”

  I studied the gentle father in the glass. His pale lips, his watery blue eyes, his large ears. I’d been doing this lately, spying on his face, searching for a familiar feature. A piece of chin or cheek or bone that hinted at our relation. That I belonged to him. I had a growing feeling there’d been a mistake, that I’d come from somewhere else. I suspected he felt it, too. That he wondered what, other than his son, I might be.

  “Has she been here before?” I asked.

  “No. She’s not allowed to travel.” Dad’s hands kept busy, the hair on his knuckles a blur. We both stared into the glass, two pale Martys caught in the same square frame, like a photo of fellow strangers.

  “Why?”

  “She’s cloistered.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. She’s cloistered. She’s a contemplative.” He slid the knot tight to his Adam’s apple. A tiny Band-Aid stuck on his throat crinkled, looked as if it might fall. “She’s a Maryknoll nun . . . like a monk. She prays full-time.”

  “All day?”

  “Pretty much.” He began to button his collar. “She’s a good person to have on our team,” he said, as though we were gathering forces, gearing up for the big game against God. “Maryknoll’s let her out to celebrate her fiftieth jubilee with us.”