The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  “Your friend studied for the priesthood?” A flicker came into her eyes, as I knew it would.

  “I guess, for a short time.” (It occurred to me that I didn’t know what was true about him, but I wanted Marion, my family, everyone to be impressed with his credentials.) “He was a soldier, too. In Vietnam.” My voice got louder and higher, as if, suddenly, I was on the witness stand defending him. “But he knows about so many different things. How to fix machines and take care of animals and how to make things grow. Real things you don’t learn from books.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Robert,” I said quietly, as if it was the answer to a dare.

  “Pardon?”

  His name got swallowed, I felt sure, down into the folds of her robe. I scooted forward, sat up. My face hot again, my body being, doing things, without permission. “Bob,” I said, a little louder.

  “Might he return to the seminary?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s doing other things.”

  “Well, it’s a real gift from God to have such a friend.” How could all of this exist in one place at one time? Her eyes and robes? My body? His name? “I imagine you would be a beautiful priest, Marty.”

  These words out of her mouth were so powerful. I felt an explosion in my chest, a fiery mixture of pleasure and embarrassment, which threatened, suddenly, to make me cry. Pleased like crazy that she could see this possibility in me and embarrassed at the thought I’d been performing again, busy all this time charming her, angling for just this blessing: to be seen as a little priest-to-be, a man of God. I said nothing, studied my feet again.

  “You must have thought about it,” she said.

  “Well, yes. Sometimes. When I was younger I did but now it’s . . .”

  “Younger? But you’re only twelve.”

  “And four months.”

  She finished her tea. Her cup trembled slightly as she placed it in the saucer. “You’ll know your calling when the time comes.”

  I stood and stuck my dirty hands in my pockets. She remained seated. We looked at one another and she smiled.

  “I’ll be back,” I said, turning to go.

  “Marty?”

  I stopped mid-kitchen and spun around.

  “He’s not disappointed in you, you know.”

  “What?”

  “To God, the darkest depths of the human heart are as clear as the pages of a book lying open in the sunlight.” Her eyes danced over to mine.

  “This’ll look sharp,” Dad said, holding up my new necktie. It was red and it was real. He stood behind me at the hall mirror in a crisp blue suit, in a cloud of English Leather. “Pretend that my hands are yours and watch how you tie it.” His grin in the glass told me he liked this—a knot for his son, a clear task amid the puzzle of being a parent. He bent his knees slightly and slid his arms through mine. I looked down at his hairy knuckles fumbling with the bright cloth. “No, look up in the mirror,” he said. “Watch the reflection of what I do, otherwise you’ll get it all backwards.” His belly was against my back, my head nearly touching his chin. It made me think of sledding in Evergreen, of the time he slid his arms under mine to guide us through the snow. The few moments like this, close ones, made me wonder who he was, how I could know him more.

  I thought of the quiet evening we sat next to each other on the back patio. I often thought of it. A cool evening the summer before, after we’d mowed the lawn. The grass looked as close cropped as the crew cuts we’d both gotten that morning from Ken the Barber. Dad had just come outside after taking a shower. He wore a fresh white button-down shirt, khakis, brown loafers. He held the first vodka tonic of the evening in his hand and surveyed what was his. A rectangle of parched land transformed into a green carpet. The just-cut smell of it perfumed the air. The sprinkler was on, I remember, hissing its rhythm, turning in jerky circles like some crazy creature chasing its tail. All was in order. A few of Mom and Dad’s friends were due for a simple, late dinner—burgers and potato salad out on the patio. This was for him, I believe, the best moment of the summer weeks. Saturday dusk, a day off from the desk, his labor in the field accomplished, his shower taken, first drink poured. Perhaps these were even among the best moments of his life—before the divorce, before the lawn yellowed, before we all grew and split. “Did you put the clippers back in the garage, tiger?” he asked, his voice as hushed as the light.

  “Yeah.” I was sitting on the edge of the patio, my bare feet buried in the grass as I kept an eye on the hose. It was my job to move it every fifteen minutes. Dad came over and sat near me. He set his drink down between us, not far from his left hip. Ice tinkled against the glass, sending a gentle chime out across the neighboring yards. He shook a Philip Morris from the pack in his front pocket and lit it. A deft, one-handed dance. “You smoke a lot,” I told him.

  “Oh, well.” He looked at the little stick in his hand and grinned. “It’s like holding a bit of your own death.” He chuckled and, figuring it was another of his Irish jokes, I did, too. The sprinkler hissed. A few stars appeared. I looked over at the four-o’clocks. They were open for their second performance of the day, bright pink and taller than I against the brick outside my parents’ bedroom window. They were my favorite flowers, the way they could tell time and show off.

  “Is there something you’d die for?”

  The question seemed to just fall from his mouth. A lost thought. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right or if he was even talking to me. I turned to him. His gaze was out over his lawn, out toward the pussy willows along the back fence.

  “What?” I asked

  “Is there something you’d die for?”

  His bushy brows were raised, his blue eyes on me now. I was waiting for the pun, for the wry smile, but his face stayed serious.

  “Die for?”

  “Yes.”

  I was eleven then, there was only living ahead as far as I could see. I watched Dad take another drag from his cigarette, blow smoke toward the darkening sky. The stillness seemed to tell me that this was an important moment, just between us. He glanced at me again. I had no words, and shrugged, sure that I was failing a test, that I lacked something essential.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he said. “You’ve got to wonder what makes life worth it if there’s nothing you’re willing to die for.”

  He picked up his drink and jiggled the cubes, sending more chimes across the night.

  “What about you, Dad? What would you die for?” I wanted to know the right answer. I wanted to know the heart of him.

  He was silent. I looked for more stars poking through the purple sky; figured he was thinking how he’d put it. What he’d say about family or God or maybe . . . about me? He lifted his glass to his lips and held it there without drinking. I studied the muscles and tan of his arm, the way the smooth skin disappeared under the rolled, white sleeve of his shirt, disappeared down under with all the rest that was buttoned up and hidden. I scooted close and glanced at his face, thinking I might tell him what my classmate Maura said the night he came to pick me up at Great Books: “That’s your dad?” she whispered in my ear. “God . . . he’s to die for.” I stayed quiet. He took a sip before he spoke.

  “Tell you the truth,” he said. “I haven’t the foggiest.” Then he chuckled and raised his glass, as if to toast his patch of grass.

  “OK, loop this fat part of the tie over this, then tuck under, pull through, and tighten. Got it?”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?” He began undoing the knot.

  “Do you think Aunt Marion will like this poem? It’s not so, you know, literary. She likes Longfellow and Yeats and—”

  “Don’t worry. You’re the one she asked to be on the altar for her Mass. Now, watch in the mirror.” He started looping the tie again. “That’s what matters, not that you’ve got the exact right poem. I’m sure she’ll like it. It’s sweet.” (I’d chosen Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a story about a tree that gives everything to a
boy throughout its life until finally the tree’s just a stump for him to sit on when he’s old. A tearjerk tale of codependence.) He guided my hands until I got it right, till we both had knots up to the lumps in our throats. He moved to stand next to me, facing the glass. “It begins,” he said, his face gone serious, his shoulders thrown back. “Now you’ll know what it’s like to have a noose around your neck.” The him in the mirror wasn’t smiling. I turned to await the leprechaun grin, but the man just stood there, staring ahead, like a private awaiting his orders.

  Monsignor Mulcahey signaled for me to rise from my pew. “The first reading will be offered by Sister Theodore’s great nephew,” he said, using Marion’s chosen Maryknoll name: Theodore—gift of God.

  My heart was thumping. I scanned the faces of my family as I set the pages on the pulpit. My uncles, aunts, and cousins. They looked so pleased and proud and sure that I was up to this. It was a strange and wonderful feeling that I, the boy with a secret tucked beneath his skin, under his new suit, could stand as the one chosen to deliver. I heard the rhythm of my heart in my ears, fiddled with my tie. If they only knew who I really was, it’d be over. Yet here I stood. Things will start happening for you, she’d said. Vocation is given like a gift. I looked down at the neat column of stanzas, the simple drawings. She’d pulled me aside at my uncle’s house after dinner, before dessert. I want you on the altar at my Mass, she’d said. You choose what to read. Something that rhymes, if you want. She was in the front pew now, in her best habit, navy blue. I glanced at her for just a second. She was beaming. I began to read. Why, even with these nerves, even with this fear that they’ll see I’m a phony, did it feel so right to be standing in front of them? Reciting? Something inside my wild body, a force, a remembrance, lifted my chin, fueled my voice. The sound trembled in my chest and filled the chapel. It was the sure tongue of a grown-up I didn’t yet know. It was the sense, for an instant, that everything, even me, was good.

  Two weeks later, I returned home on a Sunday evening after spending my second weekend at Bright Raven Ranch. This time it was just him and me. We’d stopped again at Arby’s in Boulder. He’d bought me a roast beef sandwich and thanked me for my good work. When we got to my house, he dropped me at the curb. This time he didn’t wait, he drove right off. I stood in the front yard, staring at the red brick, at the square of light in the kitchen window. A heavy sickness came into my stomach—an argument, a rip, a chunk of me gone off in the front seat of a truck. And the sickness, I knew, was my own. My own doing. I walked slowly to the door and reached for the knob, assembled my face.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She was at the kitchen table, filing her nails. It was late, Mission Impossible already over.

  “A letter came for you,” she said without looking up.

  I set my pack on the hall bench. “A letter?” I took off my muddy boots, set them on the rubber mat, and walked into the kitchen. “From who?”

  “Whom, you mean.”

  “From whom?”

  She pointed her file toward the little black-and-white Zenith. On top of it sat a small white envelope. Written on the front in beautiful, blue cursive it said: Master Martin Moran, Jr. It looked like holy script. I picked it up.

  “At first we thought it was for your father.”

  Cloistered Maryknoll Sisters, it said, in the upper-left corner. Ossining, New York.

  “It’s from her.”

  Mom nodded. “How was your weekend?” she asked.

  “Busy. We did a lot of work.” I tucked the letter into my pocket, next to the five Bob had slipped me.

  “Don’t forget to take out the garbage.”

  I took my pack downstairs to my room, sat on the bed, and opened the letter.

  Dearest Marty,

  I hope this finds you well and happy, and I hope that you find time to write. (Send me one of your rhymes!) Today a tall iris opened at the very end of our garden, surprising us all with its vivid color and beauty. I thought of you.

  13

  WE FOUND WAYS to be alone. It seemed to just happen, no parental impediments, no questions asked. Sometimes he picked me up in the truck. Other times in his cream-colored VW Bug. He didn’t come into the house; he just honked the horn.

  That first summer, instead of going to St. Malo, I spent two weeks at his ranch-camp cutting hay, shooting arrows, and sneaking off for sex with him. There was a ragtag collection of nine or ten other campers there. It was strangely disorganized but we enjoyed taking care of the few horses and goats, the two milk cows, and spending time fixing things up, going for climbs. Sometimes I wondered if he was involved with any of the other boys. It seemed not. It seemed to me that I was the only one. Most of the kids appeared to be troubled cases. The depressed and the delinquent. Kids he’d rounded up, kids he meant to help—a boy from Michigan whose dad hated him, two brothers from Nebraska whose parents were splitting. A loner from Longmont.

  When summer was over and winter came, it wasn’t just off to the ranch that we sneaked. There was an apartment in Boulder belonging to someone I never saw; there was a garage in Arvada, a little log cabin in the woods outside Nederland. An old lady owned it, he told me. Someone among the many Bob had charmed, someone I’d never meet.

  I remember waking there once in a big feather bed, a huge comforter covering us, the cabin surrounded by blinding sunlight reflected off two feet of fresh snow. I had braces on my teeth by then, and little patches of hair on my body. Bob was still asleep. I slipped off my headgear and set it on the nightstand. (The orthodontist and my mother had told me I must wear it religiously or I’d always be bucktoothed and no one would take me seriously when I grew up. So at night, after our sex, I’d slide it into my mouth and strap it around my head before going to sleep.)

  I hopped naked out of the warm bed to build a fire in the wood-stove. It was freezing. Bob woke and threw on a pair of sweatpants. We began arguing about how best to place the kindling and the newspaper. “I learned this in Scouts,” I told him. “Wrap the paper tight, stack the kindling loosely.” He disagreed—paper loose, he said, kindling packed tight. Suddenly our hands were tangled inside the soot-covered stove, each of us struggling to get his way. I remember how ridiculous it seemed, how odd it felt, to be bickering, first thing in the morning. Like an old married couple. Or like two little kids. And Bob stood there, three feet taller, twenty years older, pouting like a child because I told him he was stupid and angry because I got my way. In the quiet tension of that morning, as the fire warmed the cabin and he cooked our breakfast, I remember him asking me, “Why do you always just lay there, like a fish?”

  “What do you mean?” (I knew and didn’t know what he was referring to and instantly felt embarrassed.)

  “Most of the time you just lay there, like you’re not interested. Except that I know you are.”

  I just shrugged my shoulders and ate the rest of my oatmeal. He let it drop. I thought of it often, slowly figuring out that what he was telling me was that he was frustrated with our sex, that I wasn’t a good lover.

  In fact, I did lie there like a fish. I needed to feel that what was going on, no matter how much pleasure I found in it, was being done to me. I meant to hide, hold back, the want. I didn’t want to let him, or myself, know that I owned any part, any desire, when it came to sex. He—it—was all happening to me. I had to hang on to that thought. For survival.

  Sometimes, many weeks, even a couple of months, went by without hearing from him, and I’d think, Good. Good, he’s forgotten, and so have I, and it won’t happen again. I won’t let it. But a letter would arrive or, more often, a phone call announcing a project, offering an invitation, and I’d be ready and wanting. “I’ve bought some land of my own in Sunshine Canyon,” he said one day on the phone. “I’m going to build a house on it. Why don’t you come this weekend and help me get started.”

  “All right.”

  His whiskers were thick, almost a beard. It had been long since I’d seen him, two months, maybe. I reme
mber the ache that night, sitting next to him in the truck. The pure want, the physical feeling of missing him. Of missing the pleasure of touch. Of having been shot up with him and now, most definitely, hooked.

  We stopped at the garage in Arvada on the way to Boulder. It was an auto-repair shop of some sort. It was after hours and no one was there. Bob had a key, said he worked there sometimes. Who knew? His doings, his life, his past, were all so vague. (I still told people he’d once been a seminarian, though by now I knew that not to be true. How or why he’d ever been hired at Malo, I didn’t know.) There were cars, two or three of them, jacked up on the silver columns of hydraulic lifts, wheels off, engines dismantled. The smell of oil and electrical wire lurked everywhere. Bob said he had to gather some tools, and I went to the toilet to pee.

  The next thing I knew he was standing behind me. I remember feeling embarrassed, for an instant, that he’d just walked into the john while I was standing there peeing. But the embarrassment vanished quickly. There was little in the world, I think, that could shock me by then. Or so it seemed. Something had changed: my reticence was gone and my want, fierce. His fingers on me were a drug, electric, and I remember how I reached behind and grabbed him, squeezed him with both hands, then cupped my palms around the mound of his penis. Like finding the root of a tree right below the faded cotton of his jeans. Like rediscovering, holding on to, my own secret. Nothing timid now. I was admitting, holding, the shape of my very own desire. And I could tell this surprised him. I wasn’t being a cold fish now; I’d show him. We moved, tumbled to a bench. There were greasy work boots and sneakers lined up below us in neat little pairs. I studied the stains and shoestrings, thinking: Yes, it’s happening again. There’d always been one small part of me that wondered, each time I was planning to see him, if perhaps this would be the time it stopped. This time it wouldn’t happen and we’d simply be friends, do normal things. We wouldn’t end up naked and out of control. But it always, always happened. I could never, didn’t know how to, stop it. It was happening again and this time I knew how much I wanted it. This night, head dangling over the dirty work boots of the absent mechanics, I felt any reservations I might still possess melt away. Utterly. And I wanted, I tried, to please him. I gave him what he desired. He spit and I entered him for the very first time and I squeezed him for dear life, for all the many weeks I’d grown older and hadn’t seen him. I fucked him. And after, as he rolled tools into a rag and I tied my boots, I felt more lost than ever. Riddled with shame, terrified that there was no going back now. Ever. Seventh grade and my fate is sealed, I thought. I’ll never be other than this.