The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  I got down on the crackling floor (it seemed natural at the time) and sprawled on my back. Margie brushed some shards away with her shoe and got down beside me. I saw there were glow-in-the-dark stars pasted on the ceiling.

  “My head is so jumbled up,” Margie said.

  I nodded my head, as if I understood.

  “Don’t agree,” she pleaded. “Contradict me.”

  I tried to dredge up some wisdom to apply to this. “You never know what’s enough until you know what’s more than enough,” I said.

  Her forehead wrinkled and smoothed, and she breathed evenly. “That sort of makes sense. You mean, it’s like all the people who make up the rules to begin with, they’re the ones who went too far and know where everybody else ought to stop.” She turned towards me, a smile washing up on her face. “You’re smart.”

  “I got that from Tim, who got it from William Blake—a poet who made these religious comic books in the old days.”

  “Well, that’s better than anything the doctor told me.”

  “He was probably trying to make you regular. Some people need to learn how to be unusual, how to work on the good parts of it and not let the rest worry you. I’m not exactly regular, which is why I like you, even though you’re crazy and you’re driving me crazy, as you can see.” I swept a hand through the air, indicating general destruction.

  She giggled, after all of that.

  We lay on the carpet, staring at the ceiling. I pushed myself up and slapped the light switch off, then rolled back down and held Margie’s hand. The stars on the ceiling glowed pale green. Margie put an arm and a leg across me and, wet with tears, kissed my ear. But I tensed.

  “Margie, I really love you.” Drunk, this was easy to say. “But I think I’m too, um, messed up to—you know—do anything.” I was scared to even give it a name, especially the standard, “make love,” which you heard every three minutes on the radio.

  “That’s okay,” she said, removing her arm and leg. “It’s probably best, considering what got me into all this mess in the first place.” She kissed my cheek and sighed. “Sometimes I feel like I got my life backwards.” Then, after a while, “I see colored sparkles in the dark. Can you see them?”

  “Yeah.” I saw them every night, like private fireworks, even with my eyes closed. “I guess it’s just stuff inside our eyes. Rods or cones or whatever.”

  The cat had reappeared, slinking tentatively around us, and now I felt her tongue on my knuckles, a warm rasp against the drying blood.

  “Francis,” Margie said, “tell me the most amazing thing you ever heard.”

  I pondered, then said, “There’s this fish that lives at the bottorn of the ocean, and it has a spine sticking out of its head with a light at the tip, to lure prey. The females are the glowing ones, the males are smaller. Well—” I almost yawned. “—after the male fish hatch they bite onto a female. They’re like parasites. But after a while their bodies grow into each other, and they share the same blood and everything.” My skin pinched into goose bumps thinking about this. “They turn into one single fish.”

  “Wow,” said Margie drowsily. “That’s really weird.”

  Our heads were touching, and it seemed like her thoughts were jumping into my brain faster than they could travel to her own heart. I turned my face to her and her mouth was against mine in a very tender kiss that grew warmer, more desperate, her mouth changing from soft to loose and wet and then wide open, tongue hard, her hands squeezing my shoulder and my arm. The hair on my neck tingled. Because I knew we weren’t taking this to its adult conclusion, I didn’t mind going right up to the edge, peering over, safe against the plunge.

  I kissed her and she tilted her head back, offering me her throat, and her breathing quickened whenever I licked or nibbled. She slid her hands down my back, untucked my shirt, and eased one hand up my back and the other into the waistband of my jeans. She was squirming under me now, and I found that I was squirming too. I took tiny bites of her shoulder, and she gasped at my ear and then her tongue slid inside, an odd squishy cave-sound, and every nerve in my body stood up and shivered. We writhed against each other.

  “Ow! Stop!” she cried.

  “What’d I do?”

  “I’m on a piece of glass. Ouch. Let’s get on the bed.”

  We repositioned ourselves and started again. My hands found her bare waist and stroked up under her shirt to her small, clothcupped breasts. Her hand wriggled into my underwear, slightly uncomfortable, but I got used to it. I eased my fingers under the bra and discovered her nipples, urgently hard in the soft mounds of her breasts. She leaned up and crooked her arm around and unsnapped her bra, then maneuvered it off her shoulders and out through the sleevehole around one arm, smiling at me like an accomplice.

  I touched her in ways that seemed dangerous at first, then became automatic and necessary. I lifted her shirt, heart thundering at the view, and stroked her and kissed the dark rings at each tip, took an entire breast into my mouth. She tugged her shirt off over her head, underarms white, vulnerable looking, and sloping to shoulder and breast in that smooth exciting connection that makes every part of a girl’s body look delicious. I got some cat hair on my lips and had to stop and take it off. I asked Margie where she learned all the things she was doing.

  She moved a hand to my shirt and dipped each button out of its slot, opened the shirt and pulled me against her. She whispered, “I read Mama’s copy of The Sensuous Woman.”

  Completely lost now, I pressed my middle against hers, thrilled that she ground back against me, all the time running my hands over her soft rounded chest and the cotton panties at her hips where the dress had hiked. I shifted, ran my hand down the front of her miniskirt, Margie staring up at me like a victim, mouth wide, belly muscles jumping, and then, with my heart threatening to kill me, I placed my hand in the shockingly soft, hot, damp pout between her legs. She closed her eyes, reached down and squeezed me through two layers of cloth.

  I smelled her beneath the perfume now, an odd familiar scent that reminded me of baby powder. She pulled away from a kiss to pick some cat fuzz from her mouth. I found the elastic of her panties and slid my hand under and down into the short coarser hair, the plump junction of thighs, belly, and ass, and my finger slipped across the hot slippery mouth, unbelievable to me in its hungry warmth, and then inside of her. Margie moaned and unsnapped my jeans, yanked the zipper and tugged my underwear down and wrapped her fingers around me, pumping. “Not quite so hard,” I said, breathlessly, “and a little faster.” With her other hand she guided the heel of my hand against her, above my plunging finger, and I understood to press small circles there.

  “Easier,” she whispered into my mouth. “Not so fast at first.”

  I was all heart and blood and motion. Our mouths sucked together, hands working each other’s secret middles, making us breathe harder, sweating now, Margie exhaling little noises like a dove, me forgetting to be quiet as I felt the sweetness rising, her hand moving faster, and then I was dissolving from the center outward because of her, my body moving by itself, shuddering, as she pushed loose flesh up and down over my veiny stiffness, and I felt the trickle burning towards her fingers, and then I grasped her elbow to stop her because it was too much, almost hurting, and I suffered momentary shame, like wetting the bed, which passed when I saw how excited it made her.

  For several sleepy, thirsty minutes, I continued to kiss her and stroke her with my finger, her cries shrinking higher, and then she thrashed and moaned loudly into my mouth and I felt my sliding finger gripped in slipperiness, and she shuddered and lay there panting, shivering.

  The room seemed very warm. We kissed for a while, told each other I love you. The cat vibrated against my thigh.

  An urgent bladder and sponge-dry mouth woke me in the night, and when I realized where I was, my stomach sparked and my eyes scraped open. Alert on the surface, I was slack at the core, as if some vital string had been cut, couldn’t tighten. Margie breathed slow
ly beside me.

  Something moved in the corner beside the bookcase. I raised only my head, jugulars pulsing, stomach muscles gathering with a twitch of the hernia, and watched a woman sneaking along the shadows flatten beside the closed door. With a drowsy anxiety, I supposed Margie’s mother had come home, discovered us, and was trying to escape unnoticed. I lowered my head and pretended sleep, deciding to creep out at dawn so that this whole night would have the quality of a dream, something one could dismiss without too much worry. A guilty hangover was already parodying the evening’s dizziness. I heard no movement. And then it occurred to me, a feeling like a scalpel inserted into my belly and dragged upwards, slitting me open, that this was the ghost.

  I regulated my breathing, ignored my body, hid deep in my own mind. In imitating sleep I must’ve drifted back into it, because before long the earth rolled over and stuck a headache sun in my face and I remembered it all again, but the woman was gone and the door, in the blue prelight, was still latched. Maybe I hadn’t been awake the first time. The things that live in your mind are as real as anything else.

  I was in love with the girl beside me. I was in danger of being kicked out of school, planning crimes to prevent it. I tensed awake in the sharpening sunlight, so alive I could barely stand it.

  I wanted to stay in Margie’s room forever.

  I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, back to the safety of my friends.

  Another Color

  I leaned over to help Tim unfold one of the tents and my nausea slid, stomach to head, like poison in a test tube. I sat down fast, sweating, in the monkey-high grass of the Sullivans’ backyard, my senses so wide open I smelled the staleness of my own sneakers.

  Wade tugged nylon up into a sudden tent-shape, like opening a pop-up book, and said, “Margie wore him out. He can’t even stand up.” He giggled, voice higher than what he allowed for talking.

  Joey O’Connor grinned bashfully, tossed another stake beside a corner of the tent, and Rusty set the stake in an eyelet and sank it with two hatchet blows, then shifted to the next one Joey had thrown. “They didn’t do nothin but watch TV, so he claims.”

  “If you failed at sin,” Tim said, “we still deserve to know specifics.”

  I moaned. The grass around me was bristling, and when I looked at the white clapboards of the garage, they bristled too. My hands tingled. It felt like punishment for last night.

  Tim said, “Buddy, you ought to be eating grass like a dog. I puked earlier and I feel fine now.”

  I crawled to the bushes and pressed a finger to the root of my tongue, causing that throat-clutching convulsion that feels like the last horror before death. My body squeezed, overheated, and I urped fiery juices, felt better, got sick again like a spigot, hernia wrenching, and then spit strings for a while. The air seemed cooler then. I knee-walked into the bluish gloom of an almost finished tent, laid down, and then I heard myself snoring before I was quite asleep.

  When I came out of the tent, I drank lots of water from the hose.

  We readied our bikes, oiling, tightening, pumping air. Wade tied his pack onto his handlebars, and Joey hung his on his sissybar. Tim unscrewed his blowgun into two pieces and taped them to the bike frame alongside his machete. Rusty had an English Racer (the rest of us drove Spiders), and he loaded his supplies into the totebags on each side of the rear fender.

  We squatted into the old clubhouse to initiate Joey. Tim produced a picture of Saint Anthony, one of those wallet cards the school distributed on feast days. He persuaded Joey to poke his finger with a pin and scrawl his initials on the card with blood. Rusty read the ceremony out of a paperback book which purported to give the actual Mafia swearing-in formula. Tim held a lighter to the card as Joey parroted the oath, and our surrounding faces flickered green from the burning ink. Rusty pronounced him a member, and we all slapped Joey’s back. He actually looked proud.

  We wasted the rest of the afternoon playing Hide the Belt, which resulted in beatings as painful as the ones I got from Daddy, but somehow it seemed hilarious when done in the name of sport.

  Around seven, Mr. Sullivan stoked the grill and left us to cook our own hot dogs. In the cooling dusk, surrounded by friends and meat smoke, crickets purring, birds roosting, my hangover passed completely away and left me happy. On the grill, my hot dog split with its own sizzling juices, and I speared it off and worked it into a toasted bun squiggled with red and yellow. We chewed like savages. The smoky meat tasted delicious.

  Mr. Sullivan wandered out wearing shorts and a luau shirt stenciled with volcanoes and pineapples. He carried four beers and some cups over to the tray beside the grill, then popped the cans and poured about half of each into a cup. We looked at one another. Mr. Sullivan said, “We’ll just pretend this is Europe.” We thanked him desperately, as if we’d arrived from across a desert, then took small, responsible sips. Mr. Sullivan took a mustache-frosting chug from the can he’d reserved for himself and said, “I think I’ll mosey on in and watch “All in the Family” with Linda. You all are welcome inside if you get tired of the wilderness.”

  “Thanks anyway,” said Tim.

  Mr. Sullivan walked up onto the porch and said, “Please don’t pee in the vegetable garden, fellas. That’s the cat’s job.” He wiped his feet and went inside.

  “Wow,” said Rusty. “Your dad’s cool as hell.”

  “When we have company.”

  Tim convinced us to pour a mouthful of beer onto the ground as an offering to the gods, before we left for our mission.

  I strapped my canvas bookbag on. We set out on our bikes, without hurry, gliding serpentine between the curbs. Passing a cluster of young women, Wade reared up his bike and rode half a block on the back tire. Rusty steered without hands. We felt dangerous and invulnerable, like a small army, like Hell’s Angels.

  We rode laughing into a usually idyllic neighborhood. But the elderly couples were not in their porch swings, and the younger ones weren’t pushing their baby strollers or pulling Irish setters. We heard a nearby chanting, like a pep rally, and saw that a crowd was passing a few blocks ahead.

  “What’s that?” Joey asked, stopping and bracing out with one foot.

  “The protest march,” said Tim. “It was supposed to finish up at City Hall at eight.”

  “Spear-chunker parade,” Rusty cracked.

  Tim told him not to act retarded. “I don’t want to cross through,” he said. “It’s like crossing a picket line, sort of.”

  “And I’m not in the mood to get beat up,” I said.

  “I don’t think they’d harm us,” Tim said. “But we’ll just detour over a few blocks and avoid the whole thing.”

  Six blocks over we discovered a neighborhood of newly moved-in blacks and uneasy rednecks whose leases hadn’t yet expired. A white woman stood on her porch shrieking at a black woman holding a baby across the street. Our gang clustered. A police car prowled past the end of the block, escorting the marchers. The city’s population was fifty-fifty, black and white, and it looked like most of the black people were marching and most of the whites were locked up in their houses.

  “We’re gonna have to cross through them,” Rusty said. “Might as well get it over with.”

  We coasted to the intersection and stopped. Rows of black people filed past, singing and shouting. Cars had stopped all along the intersecting streets. On the hood of a stranded Mustang, a thick-armed white boy sat drinking beer and glaring at the marchers. They were singing “We Shall Overcome” or chanting “No more lynching!” Some, though, were laughing and yelling, taunting the few white onlookers. Some of the male marchers were drinking from bagged cans or bottles. I heard the standard racial insults and the word “motherfucker” repeated.

  A gangly black man leaned out of the crowd into my face, and I flinched back, and he said, “Give me five dollars, white boy! “ I stared. I hadn’t had five dollars at one time since my last birthday. He said it again and threw out his open hand. A tiny woman took hold o
f his shirt and pulled him along, singing. Rusty and Wade rode around the corner along the sidewalk to see how far the crowd extended. These looked mostly like stragglers and troublemakers. Maybe the serious people had gone home. I looked over at Tim. An older black kid with plaited hair had a grip on his handlebars and another was circling around behind the bike.

  “Go on,” Tim whined. “I already told you no.”

  “For real, brother,” said the one behind him, and he sniffed like he had a cold. “Me and my partner need to rest our feet a minute. You my tight-man, ain’t it?”

  Tim said, “Let go, man. I’m not stupid enough to let you steal my bike and I’ve never done anything to deserve this shit.”

  The one in front stuck his chest out. “You think all a nigger can do is steal, is it?”

  The rear one sniffed. “We done axed you nice, now, motherfucker. Hop off the motherfuckin bike or I’ll help you off.”

  Tim’s jaw was clenched and his eyes were glistening. I was boiling with outrage. Our teachers, my parents, and Tim had taught me to think of black people as disadvantaged by history. After a while you began to think of them as a martyred, saintly race, and this was easy enough to sustain because there were only a couple of dozen black kids at Blessed Heart, and only a few black guests at our parents’ parties, and they were middle-class educated people with good intentions and a sense of themselves as ambassadors. But to believe that all black people were virtuous and fair seemed as ignorant to me as thinking they were all demons. Poor and desperate people are subject to all the ugliness that poverty bequeaths them. Plenty of blacks hated whites indiscriminately, and were violent, foulmouthed, and cruel. Color doesn’t make people predictable. I was always sorry when I forgot that.

  I saw no way out of our situation, which was complicated by feeling a complex and foolish sort of pity for these two boys. We could fight them, flee, or give them what they wanted, but whichever we did, they had already won. And any violence in this instance would likely be drastic. The boy behind Tim must’ve seen the fury and frustration in my face.