The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  “You’re a horrible little bastard,” I said. “Lucky for you, everything worked out okay.”

  “Delirious. You’ve taken three blows to the head in five minutes. I think you’re a masochist. Hey …” He passed his hand back and forth in front of my face. “Snap out of it and thank your buddy.”

  I sniffled and tasted blood. The soccer players blurred past Margie. On the diamond, the softball teams were exchanging places, tossing gloves to the field team, and trailing small rounded shadows in the afternoon. I lifted my hand and Margie waved again. It seemed miraculous.

  “You look like a junkie.” Tim picked up his book again. “I hope you can shake the fairy dust out of your head for next weekend. We’ve got to get to that bobcat before you two can live happily ever after.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Everything was nice. I spit on my hand and wiped the red off my face. It was warm, breezy, and the shadows of clouds chased bright green spaces along the field. My friend chuckled. I’d have to say I was happy. A priest with a girlfriend kicked the ball past the goalie and boys cheered. Solid against my back was the great oak, hundreds of years old, evergreen.

  Did You Think I Was Tame

  Prior to meeting Margie, I sat with my friends in Wade’s house and heard their advice and attempted to drink away my fear. I held my breath and gulped silvery watered gin, listening to Elton John on the stereo, garbled and straining in a likable way, above his heartbroken piano. The music grew lovelier with each swallow, though one speaker was blown so that the bass parts were fuzzy. The alcohol rolled over me like a warm breathable wave that edged everything with light and made my friends friendlier. The songs were melancholy, and we grew deliberately, pleasantly depressed.

  Wade’s mother was out with her boyfriend. The house was furnished in imitation Spanish, woodgrained, polished, stuccoed. You smelled burnt hair and chemicals from the garage room where she ran a small beauty parlor. We’d already been pestered for drinking by Wade’s little brother Steven, but we’d ordered him into his room. When threatened, he went.

  Wade, sitting at the head of the dining room table, copied a panel from Swamp Thing onto a piece of white cardboard, his nose almost touching it as he worked. “Margie’ll let you do whatever you want,” he said.

  I didn’t want to hear that. I had never kissed a girl. When I was nine, though, I convinced Ann Doolan to slide her panties down for me. I dropped my pants as part of the deal. We touched each other in her garage. I remember a creased blankness which didn’t do much for me. Somehow her daddy found out and called my folks, and my dad whipped me until I pretended to cry. Rusty told everybody she was my girlfriend, so I stopped talking to her.

  Tim said, “I wish girls were as easy to get as booze.”

  “They are,” Rusty said, leaning his chair back onto two legs. “You just don’t know any.”

  “I know plenty of them.”

  “They don’t know you. You’ve never even held hands with a girl. You could be a homo for all you know.”

  Tim said, “Thank you, Russell, I feel better now.” He took a huge gulp of gin and fell to doing push-ups to speed it through his bloodstream. He wobbled up and draped himself across a chair in a miniature of decadence. “I’m a hero trapped in the body of a candyass.”

  The stereo needle rasped in the run-out grooves of the record, then the arm lifted, retreated, and dropped, and Elton started bawling it out again.

  Wade blew on his drawing to dry the ink. He was outfitted in a tank top that featured his muscles and underarm hair. “I found something that feels like the real thing,” he said in his heman voice. He went on to confess a solitary act with a warm washcloth and soap, which made me uncomfortable in spite of the gin.

  Rusty, who grew hard-boiled after enough drinks to make me pass out, said, “How do you think you know what the real thing feels like?”

  “Well, I imagine that’s what it’s like. I fingered a girl once.”

  “Please tell me it wasn’t Margie,” I said.

  “Wasn’t Margie.”

  Rusty smacked his hand to his forehead. “He imagines! I can imagine I did it with Raquel Welch, but it’s still bullshit.”

  “I’ve tried that beating-off crap,” Tim said. “The only feeling I get is that my parents are watching me with secret cameras.”

  “You’re not physically mature yet,” said Wade, bass.

  “So what? I’d just as soon skip all the rude hair and pimples, thanks. And just who the hell are all these females you guys have supposedly messed with?”

  “I’m protecting the innocent,” Rusty said. “Girls get p.o.’d if you tell, then they won’t let you anymore. My sisters told me that.”

  “Just name two.”

  “Hand me that Mad magazine, will you, Rusty?” I said.

  “I’ve never touched Margie Flynn either,” he said. “So don’t cry.”

  “I can’t feel my lips,” Wade said, and giggled. “You think Salvador Dali ever gets this wasted?”

  Steven came out of his room, Famous Monsters of Filmland in hand, and said he was going to tell on Wade unless we let him drink with us.

  The gin still burned inside me with the shape of my gullet, but my heart was a squirrel’s heart. I spat my gum out, began walking down the middle of the street. The sun gleamed through a bright green tunnel of trees and bushes. A single wide lawn unrolled from corner to corner of every block, squared into front yards by pink or white walls of azaleas. I passed Blessed Heart School, tried not to think about it. I tipped my head back, gazed up, and soon fooled myself that I was walking on the sky, staring down at stalagmites of moss.

  At the center of the park I swung the world right-side-up again, and now that seemed strange too, and I liked it. I inhaled the spring smell of sweet gum, grass, honeysuckle, and felt suddenly older. Like someone with a camera, I was conscious of now turning straight into memory, the past.

  The circle was half a block wide. I didn’t see Margie. Then my name floated to me faintly, like the singing you begin to hear around creeks in the woods, and I revolved, the park swirled around me, a carousel, and wisps of pink and powder-blue blinked through the leaves of a giant magnolia trailing its lower limbs on the ground. The branches there opened and Margie Flynn stepped out, and the big waxy leaves snapped fluttering behind her.

  The alcohol dizzied me then, poured through me. Carefully, I walked over, as strange as walking on the moon.

  Margie tugged down the denim at her knee and a single wrinkle at her thigh vanished. Her sweater was soft and curvy, a bright layer of cotton candy. Out of uniform, almost as startling as naked.

  “You’ve been waiting,” I said. It sounded so stupid I wanted to smack myself.

  “I couldn’t eat dinner.” Margie wrinkled her nose, freckles bunching. “My stomach felt sort of funny.”

  We stood there. I took my hands out of my pockets, looked up at the streetlamp, breathed, looked at Margie, buried my hands in my pockets, smiled. She smiled back at me. We stood there.

  “Um,” she said. “Want to walk around or something?”

  We walked the edge of the circle. Margie said she’d heard about the duck, said we were brave to take up for it, and I wished I had been. Weeds fluttered against our pantslegs, and we stepped on clover, and I snuck looks at her, and squirrels buzzed and corkscrewed up trees as we passed.

  “Your bulletin board was great,” Margie said. “Sick, but great. You’re really talented.”

  “I mostly just did the coloring. Tim Sullivan’s the real artist, he taught the rest of us. But thanks.”

  “He’s the one who sent me that note, right?”

  “Right.”

  “He sure spits a lot.”

  “Sinus problems.”

  “I think he’s trying to act tough because he’s so small.”

  “That too, I reckon. He’s smarter than the teachers, though.”

  “Are y’all in trouble with Kavanagh or something?”

  I told her about Sodom vs.
Gomorrah 74, and she laughed and said she’d heard about it, which firmed my suspicion that her brother Donny was the culprit who turned it in.

  “Are y’all really atheists?”

  She sounded maybe intrigued, so I said we were.

  “Wow. I guess you don’t believe in ghosts, then.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t got it all worked out yet.”

  “Because I believe in them,” she said. “My house is sort of haunted.” She looked at me to see if I was taking this as a joke. Dozens of houses in Savannah are supposedly haunted. There are books on it. “I think maybe it’s like film or records, stuff like that,” she said, “that takes an imprint. Or even like those poor Japanese people whose shadows got burned into the walls by the atom bomb. If something is strong enough, maybe it can leave an imprint on wood and glass and stuff. Hard to see or hear, but there, you know?”

  There wasn’t another girl I knew of that I could imagine hearing this from. She began telling me about a girl who had died in their house before her family bought it. I listened two ways, hearing a ghost story and also following her voice’s music. My arms sprouted chill bumps, and the movements of her mouth seemed to rhyme with something in my head and made me want to kiss her so badly it was painful. She looked at me and pushed her hair back, and on our third circuit I could see our trail in the weeds, yellow buds bowed towards the ground, stems at sharp angles, bleeding milk. Black grass seeds on our pants cuffs. I asked if it was a see-through ghost and felt her eyes on me, and she said she wasn’t kidding, and I said neither was I, just curious, and she told me it was as solid as a person but suddenly just there or gone. And every few seconds our shoulders brushed accidentally, the way two people work a Ouija board without meaning to, and our fingers touched a few times, with the usual acrobatics of the heart, and in a little while we were holding hands somehow and talking very easily.

  A car’s headlights spun across us, and the car sped away. I saw with the driver’s eyes this boy and girl holding hands in the park, and was able to believe it briefly. I put my free hand around her arm. She wrapped hers around mine. We locked together, trying to be one person instead of two, my pants feeling tighter and tighter.

  “Are you afraid at night?” I asked. I was no longer sure of things. There could be ghosts.

  Margie’s hand tightened in mine. I squeezed back. She said, “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  I touched, deliberately I guess, the razor scar on her wrist. My heart ached up into my throat. The wind fluttered around us now so that the park was all ripples and waves. Margie’s hair floated. We stopped beside the tree and looked at each other a long time. Our faces were so close, and the sun so low, that I was able to see the faint gray inside her pupils.

  “When you look at me that way,” she said quietly, “I can hardly breathe.”

  I felt like I was risking my life. My head grew impossibly heavy and dipped a little. She slanted her face and lifted her chin and brushed her lips across mine, then opened her mouth. It happened fast, like accidents do. I remember a flash of panic such as in my dreams of smothering, and then, with a bird in an unseen fury above us, the sensation almost of eating, filling myself with warm gravy, and a loosening inside beyond what I knew could happen to me.

  Then her face pulled away and I was as dazed as if I’d been punched. My stomach shivered. I held Margie and she laid her head against my chest. “Your heart is so loud,” she whispered into my shirt. “Hey, next time bring me some of whatever you’ve been drinking.”

  The gum had failed. “Really? You drink?”

  “Hell yes. Girls do a lot of regular things. Did you think I was tame?”

  I relaxed all the way to my bones, farther. “Damn, I like you,” I said, tightening around her thin, thrilling softness.

  She nuzzled against my chest, giggled. “Damn, I like you too.” Then she lifted onto her toes, and her eyes traveled down my face, and her mouth opened and the underside of her tongue pressed against her front teeth, and the mouth said finally, “Love you,” and opened again over my mouth, and I felt it warm, soft, everywhere at once.

  Southern Gothic

  The next day must’ve happened, but I don’t remember it. Waiting and boredom don’t leave much to recall.

  A slight drizzle began that evening, and it grew cooler, and I was able to justify the denim jacket I used to hide a quart of beer and carry it out of Riner’s store. I drank it fast, with Margie, under the big magnolia in the park. We both still felt awkward, though. I suggested we sneak by my house and pick up some whiskey I had hidden.

  When we got to my block, I let go of her in case any of the neighbors were spying. We walked down the lane, angering dogs, squares of light suddenly creating kitchen windows with wary silhouettes. Passing some yards, you smelled what the families had eaten for dinner. Inside my gate, a clothesline billowed with dampening laundry, my underwear dangling helpless.

  “Carriage houses are so neat,” Margie said.

  Home suddenly looked fine, old brick, ivy.

  I took hold of a pipe bolted to the rear wall and pulled myself up, hand over hand, ignoring the ache of my hernia, my sneakers grinding lichens off the brick. I crawled through my window and dug my whiskey jar out of the closet. I climbed halfway down, then dropped, Errol Flynn, absorbing the shock by bending my knees as I landed, Margie gasping at me.

  We walked back down the lane. I unscrewed the jar, passed it to her, felt the voltage of her hand. She held the jar to her nose. “What is it?”

  “Different whiskies, gin, vodka, Tia Maria. Whenever my dad opens a bottle, I skim some. For emergencies.”

  “Am I an emergency?” She held her hair back on one side, still smiling at me, and took several cat-sips, then pressed the back of her arm to her mouth, blinked slowly, surrendered the jar. “You’re sweet,” she said. “But that stuff tastes kind of gross.”

  I took a big gulp to impress her. Putting my lips on the threaded glass where hers had been gave me an excited, intimate feeling. I settled my arm around her shoulders, the hell with the neighbors, and she leaned into me and slid her arm around my waist and looked up like someone who trusted me completely. I felt the opposite of how I felt with boys. Her hair smelled wonderful, shampoo or perfume. Walking was difficult, but I didn’t care.

  “If you ever need a drink,” she said, “you can come over to my house. We have a bar in the den with stools and all. Since my parents split up, they let me do whatever I want.”

  We swayed together to the park, the lighted mist like a shower of sparks in a foundry. Chills surged through me, and a pleasant drowsiness.

  We crept inside the magnolia, a cave sweetened honey-andlemon by the huge fleshy blossoms. The drizzle muffled everything. We sat against bark. Margie was dark shades of gray now, her face almost invisible, and my mind detailed the shadows so that she was even more gorgeous, unbearable. I told her she was beautiful.

  “You are,” she whispered back, face coming towards mine, and our mouths opened together, and I might as well have been beautiful, I don’t know, I couldn’t have summoned my own name just then. I couldn’t have said who Margie was, other than an eager mouth burning against mine, making tiny moans that stripped me of any thoughts at all, and I began to forget to be careful where I put my hands.

  I eased away and sat back stunned and panting and unashamed against the tree trunk. Margie smoothed her sweater, flipped her hair back.

  “I’ll never be able to think about anything else.” My voice seemed thunderous. I lifted the jar, sipped.

  “You’re all I ever think about. Kiss me again, please.”

  I was already moving towards her body heat.

  After a while we just held hands. I felt so good that my mind sought something to worry over. This was habit. There must be something. Then it hit me, and I cleared my throat. “Margie?” Already sorry, I finished it. “Did Wade Madison kiss you at the Christmas bazaar?”

  She sat up, and her hand went away. A drop of water smol
dered on the tip of a hand-sized leaf, distillation of the streetlight.

  “I was only ten. We didn’t go together or anything. It was just once.”

  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.