The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  Once, I convinced my scoutmaster that, instead of going to one of the usual scout campgrounds, we should pitch our tents on the land of a friend of mine who was building a house near Nederland. “It’s near a creek,” I told him. “In a beautiful canyon. Some great climbs around there.”

  He finally agreed, and one Friday night Troop 63 packed into two station wagons and went to make camp about a quarter mile downcreek from Bob’s house. We built a fire and roasted our weenies and said our goodnights, because we were going to get up early for a real climb. Mr. Welton, our scoutmaster, was big on hikes. His favorite piece of equipment was his pedometer, which was attached to his belt. He kept close watch on it whenever we went off on our adventures. His rule was that it wasn’t a real hike unless we’d trekked at least ten miles.

  That Friday night, after everyone else had fallen asleep, I slipped out of the tent I shared with my fellow scout and good friend, Mark, and made my way through the bushes to the creek. There was an old rope that I knew of, tied to two trees on opposite banks and suspended about two feet above the water. I knelt down and wrapped my hands, then my ankles, around the rope and shimmied across. It felt unbelievably exciting to me. The whoosh of the water just below my dangling head. One false move and I could drown, I dramatically thought. I felt like crazy Romeo risking his life, climbing the wall to get to his lover.

  In short order I reached the other side and found the path that ran along the highway to Bob’s place. I stepped through the side door of his house (he’d given me instructions by phone earlier that day) and straight to his bed. The secrecy, the adventure of it, was fantastic. It gave me such a feeling of pleasure and power. As if this secrecy was becoming the fuel of my life. My secret weapon. My hidden fire. And part of the game, the fun, was no one finding out. Second-class scout and cocksucker, straight-A altar boy and slut.

  I slept with Bob until first light and, like Romeo upon hearing the lark, I squiggled out of bed, shimmied back across the river and into my sleeping bag. Mark was sound asleep. I remember feeling thrilled when I got back to my tent. I lay in my bag listening to the birds, grinning at my own daring. My cunning. I had a whole other life that no one knew of. My own private universe, my own merit badge for sex. A warm, buzzing secret at the base of my stomach. I’d hold tight to it, even if it killed me.

  That day, Mr. Welton kept goading me. I was tired and lagging behind. He looked at me, “Come on, what’s wrong with you?” And then, looking at his pedometer: “We have miles yet to go.”

  Late one Friday night toward the end of seventh grade (it was always Fridays—after school) we were in the truck making our way up the canyon toward his still-unfinished house. We planned to work there all weekend. I dozed against the passenger door. Bob and I had already stopped to have sex at the garage in Arvada and now I was sinking into that familiar haze of regret, the indefinable and bottomless sadness that always followed the explosion of physical pleasure. I remember glancing out the window and seeing a yellow sign, a warning to climb to safety in case of heavy rain. And soon after, Bob hit the brakes hard and let out a terrible sigh. I sat up quickly.

  Standing in the middle of the road, not twenty yards ahead, was a woman with a long white coat. She wore high heels. She looked like an upscale secretary or PTA mom, utterly out of place standing alone on a dark mountain road. She stared at us, frozen in the headlights, a strangely glamorous ghost. Bob put on the hazard lights and slowly pulled up to the right and stopped not far behind her green Toyota. The woman stayed where she was in the center of the road and I watched as she wrapped her arms around herself and lowered her head.

  “Stay put,” Bob said, as he climbed out of the truck.

  As he approached her I saw what the matter was. On the left edge of the road, not far from her car, was a deer lying on its side, breathing heavily. I could see its brown fur and the white part if its belly rising and falling rapidly. There was a patch of blood spreading around its head, black as oil.

  Bob spoke to the woman for a moment, both of them looking at each other and then over to the animal. Bob took her arm and walked her toward her car. I knew the voice he must have been using, the gentle one. It looked as though he was trying to convince her to get in but she shook her head and leaned against the driver-side door of the Toyota, her hand over her mouth. Bob stepped over and took a quick look at the deer. One eye of the poor creature was visible to me, wet and shining in the beam of our headlights. Bob walked briskly to my side of the truck and motioned for me to roll down the window.

  “Open the glove compartment.”

  I pressed the silver button and the lid fell open. Bob reached in, took out a pair of work gloves, and slid them into his back pocket. He reached in again and found a chammy cloth. Wrapped inside it was a handgun. From a little cardboard box he then took two bullets, slid them into the pistol’s chamber. It all happened so quickly—a weird dream. He walked over, knelt down in the road, and put his hand on the deer’s neck, leaned over its face. His lips moved. I wondered if he was talking to himself or the animal. The deer’s nostrils were moist, widening and shrinking with each breath. Bob stood suddenly, pointed the gun, and fired. The shot echoed up and down the canyon. That was it. After checking the animal’s neck again, for a pulse, I supposed, Bob grabbed the gloves from his pocket, put them on, and dragged the small thing to the runoff ditch on the opposite side of the road, leaving a long streak of blood across the tarmac. He spoke to the lady for a moment, touching her arm once with his gloved hand. She nodded and got into her car. Bob hopped in the cab, took out the extra bullet, and put it and the gun away.

  We followed the lady for a couple of miles until she slowed, put her hand out the window to wave, and turned off the main road. “I told her to call the highway patrol,” Bob said. “To pick up the animal.”

  We drove for a while in silence, picking up speed as we came to a clearing, where there were houses along the creek. “We can start work on the railing for the deck tomorrow, until the roofing supplies come.” Bob sounded calm; we were getting close to his two acres, his half-finished, two-story house, the first real thing he’d ever owned, so he said. And he was obsessed with making it perfect—skylights and fireplaces and a great deck stretching out over the creek.

  “What kind of gun was that?”

  “A nothing, small caliber.”

  I kept thinking about it, that it had been there all along in the compartment in front of me and how quickly he’d grabbed and used it. How awful and merciful it was. And I kept wondering what he might have said to himself or to the deer before he killed it. Something private, something I shouldn’t ask.

  “Did you kill people in Vietnam?”

  A puff of air came out his nose, a sort of snort. It was a mile or more before he said anything.

  “They gave medals for it.”

  When we walked in the house, the first thing we did, even before putting the groceries away, was fall into each other’s arms. On the plywood floor, next to his half-finished fireplace, we had sex. I fucked him again. We held one another tightly and all the while I knew, I could feel more than ever, the terrible sadness. We were far away from each other. He was somewhere I wasn’t and I was somewhere he wasn’t. Our bodies were touching, groping for relief, but our thoughts, our spirits, were utterly separate. In our sex, I realized, we never made eye contact, never, ever, kissed. And this night, I began to understand in some way how we were using each other. To forget. To get out. Maybe he was trying to forget the war or the deer or the day. And I was busy trying to obliterate the very thing I was doing with him. What I was becoming. It felt dreadful and exciting and so terribly truthful, all at once. Hold on tight, this is life. It’s really hard, so hold tight to whatever you can. I felt I understood that his holding me had not a thing to do with me. That each of us was for the other a collection of parts. Not a whole. Not at all.

  It was over quickly and we went quickly to bed.

  I began to be aware of other boys, at least two w
ho I knew were also sleeping with him—Kip and Steve. They were slim and blond and blue-eyed, like me. They were great guys, warm and smart and somehow vulnerable. Like me, I guess. He once referred to us as his Three Musketeers. There was a Saturday morning at Bob’s house that I remember still with a kind of awe and tenderness. I was talking with Kip in Bob’s kitchen as we made breakfast. We’d both come up to work for the weekend. Kip had just put strips of bacon in the pan, was turning up the flame. I was slicing oranges. We were talking quietly because Bob was still up in bed. Unusual for him; he was an early bird.

  Suddenly, there came the sound of Bob’s voice calling for Kip. Kip paused a moment, his fork hovering over the crackling bacon. He turned to me and, with the slightest smile, said: “Would you cook this a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He went upstairs and I slowly flipped the bacon. Very soon—I don’t remember how long but the bacon wasn’t yet done—Kip was back. He walked up silently and took the fork from me. Just then, Bob called my name. “Marty?” It felt terribly awkward. I held still. Then Kip turned to me with this comical grin and said: “You go get in the frying pan, I’ll finish the bacon.” And we burst out laughing. Two thirteen-year-olds howling at his joke, this absurd situation. I remember thinking how smart and funny this guy Kip was. How he seemed calmly resigned, philosophical, about what was happening. And how amazing it was to laugh at what we both knew was going on but didn’t dare speak of. That we were part of some secret club; a little blond, blue-eyed bordello. Kip was like some kind of sunshine that morning. His humor gave me hope. Hope that we’d get through this thing we’d gotten ourselves into, that it might not be as fatal as I often felt it was. That, in the end, we’d be OK. We finished giggling and I turned to go upstairs to Bob’s room. Fifteen minutes later the three of us were at the breakfast table discussing what work needed to be done that day.

  Mr. McGruder, our seventh-grade sociology teacher, in a rare attempt to bring history alive, asked us to write an essay about a personal hero. “We’ve talked of Hercules, and General Patton. Let’s hear your idea of a real hero. Someone in your life.” We were given a week and were told we’d read them aloud to the class. I composed an essay entitled “My Friend Bob.” In it I discussed how my hero knew the names of plants along mountain trails. How he built a camp on a ranch so that young men could learn about the land and animals. About real stuff you’d never get from a book. I said how he was strong and had taught me to be strong and never to smoke and that he had served our country in Vietnam. On the afternoon when I stood to read my work, I remember how my scalp and then my entire body tingled. It was magical, surreal, to glance up at the faces of my classmates as I told them of my friend. My living hero. The telling turned me giddy. I was daring to speak the name of a love and I felt ten feet tall.

  When class wrapped up that day, Lisa DeAngelis came over to me as I was about to leave the cloakroom. She hardly ever spoke to anyone but her two perfect, beautiful best friends—Jen and Marie. I was stunned when she reached out her hand and stopped me.

  “I liked your essay,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I replied as I pulled on my parka. “Thanks.”

  I watched as she reached for her ski cap and coat. Her bright blond hair fell below her waist, nearly, neatly, to her tailbone. “Didn’t the guy you wrote about,” she continued, “didn’t he used to be a counselor? At St. Malo?” She turned toward me and slid the blue cap over her lustrous head, tidied her hair over her little ears.

  “Yeah, that’s where I met him.”

  She leaned forward and unveiled her perfect teeth. “My older brother said he’s a queer.”

  She walked away, the swish of her skirt a dare, a warning.

  I stood in the half-light of the cloakroom for a long time, listening to the thud in my chest.

  Permit.

  Permutation.

  Pernicious.

  Sister Joan was feeding me spelling words from one of her many lists, preparing me for the Rocky Mountain Spelling Bee. We were sitting in the front den of the convent on a Saturday morning in April. I’d never been inside before. There was a couch and two large, comfortable chairs. Gold drapes hung from the sun-filled windows. This was the part of the house where guests were received, and it felt very special to be there and rather strange that it was just the two of us sitting not far from where she, our principal, slept and took her meals. She wore oval glasses with tortoiseshell frames and, though stern, had a soft face, smooth cheeks with hints of blush. She was always impeccably put together. A small nun in her mid-thirties. She was beaming this morning. I’d done well in the archdiocesan bee and I knew she was counting on me to place in the big one in May. That’s why she was taking extra time with me. “Spelling will sharpen the good brain God gave you,” she often said to me.

  “Pernicious?” I repeated. “Definition, please.”

  “Wicked.”

  “Could you use it in a sentence, please.”

  She’d taught us spellers to ask all we could about a word, even if we felt sure we knew it. “Definition, derivation, use in a sentence—these are your guides, your tools. And asking gives you time to think,” she always reminded us.

  “Alcohol may have a pernicious effect on your health.”

  “A wicked effect?”

  “Let’s be more exact,” she said, lifting the magnifying glass that dangled from a silver chain around her neck. She put the glass to her eye, then quickly bent her nose to her beloved Oxford dictionary. She loved nothing more, it seemed, than dipping down like this, like a bird digging at the root of things. She flipped through the pages. “It’s from the Latin, of course: Pernicies—destruction. The first definition is, ‘Irreparable harm through evil.’ ”

  She sat up and looked at me, letting the glass fall to her chest, where it tangled with her crucifix. I felt a little grin grow across my face and, comfortable and alone as we were in the nun’s inner sanctum, I felt emboldened to ask a question unrelated to spelling.

  “There really isn’t such a thing as the devil, is there?”

  She closed the dictionary and looked at me with grave blue eyes. I wiped the smirk off my face.

  “Marty, make no mistake. The devil exists and he is here among us. And we must be vigilant. Vigilant in our prayers and our actions, because he’s always looking for ways to tempt us. To corrupt us.” She took up the list to continue our drilling, then let it fall back to her lap. “He was an angel, you know, at the right hand of God. Innocent and loving as a babe. There’s no worse fall than the fall from such a height. He wants us there too, proud and fallen from grace. Make no mistake. The devil exists.” She kept her eyes on me until I nodded. She suddenly seemed worried what, other than a speller, I might be. My tongue felt thick, the pit in my stomach deeper.

  “Pernicious — P-E-R-N-I-C-I-O-U-S.”

  “Correct,” she said.

  I asked Sister Christine the same question the next day during my guitar lesson. Hoping she would be less solemn. Smiling, I asked, “C’mon, Sister, there’s no such thing as Satan, is there?”

  She went deadly serious on me. “Oh yes, he exists.”

  And I thought, What does he look like? And I thought, My God, I’ve met him.

  I stood in the main john of our house, in front of the mirror, glaring at the red, raging zits on my chin. I reached up and pinched one that was coming to a head. I felt the pop, the pus. I glanced at my finger and saw blood. It was a lousy habit but I couldn’t seem to stop it.

  “You’ll have scars for your whole life if you keep doing that,” my sister Chris said. “Stop picking.”

  “I can’t help it.” I smeared some Clearasil on my face. Chris had lent me her Oxy 5. Nothing was working. Zits kept sprouting. “Why do I have all these goddamned pimples?”

  I caught my sister’s crooked smile in the toothpaste-splattered mirror. “It’s just the evil in you coming out,” she said.

  14

  THE SECOND SUMMER I was with him, Bob took
his camp on the road. North, to Wyoming.

  There’s a Teton there with your name on it, he wrote in a letter. You should come and see it. We’ll raft the Green River.

  Where he got the idea, the big yellow school bus, or the girl friend, I don’t know. We were just there, suddenly, that hot July between my seventh- and eighth-grade years, speeding up Interstate 25—pied piper Bob, thirteen campers, and Bob’s nineteen-year-old cowgirl-friend, Karen.

  The wind whipped across the rubber rafts roped to the top of the bus, creating an incessant banging overhead. Bob had his can of Coke propped on the dash. Each time he moved his hand from the wheel for a sip, he’d reach across the aisle to caress Karen’s arm.

  “If you’re gonna keep speeding, you should switch lanes,” I heard Karen say as she yanked at the brim of her cowboy hat. “I know how the fuzz around here thinks; my uncle was a cop.”

  I sat four seats back, behind Bob. I turned to the window, to the featureless flat, the endless tumbleweeds. This state was depressing as far as I could see, and so was I, I felt sure, with my face full of zits, my mouth stuffed with braces. My toes were hot and pinched in a pair of boots he’d handed me for the trip. They were cowboycool but way too small. I didn’t tell him that when I tried them on. I gave a polite smile, said my thanks, figuring he must not notice that my feet, like the rest of me, were getting bigger. In the fifteen months I’d known him my bones had thickened, my hair grown long, my voice dropped.