The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  We crept along the trail. When the woods began to thin out, we pocketed our flashlights and relied on the moon. We stopped at the trees’ end, trail’s exit.

  The truck was parked at the edge of a field, near the pens for the farm animals and a barn. Out in the center of the field two figures sat in the grass while an oceanic rhythm and mumbly lyrics burbled from the truck. Smoke twisted in the moonlight above their heads, and a red dot floated between them, glowed, floated, then flared, lighting a bearded face and the long hair, shoulder, and bare back of a woman.

  “They’re butt naked!” Tim said. “I think they are.”

  “Smells like they’re smokin dope,” said Rusty.

  I said, “It’s that guy Paul who showed us around the island.”

  We moved closer, quailing at every snapped twig or crunched leaf, though surely the music overpowered our noise. A few feet from the truck, which screened us from the field, Tim dug a flat metal box from his pack. He pressed a button and it snapped open into a pair of field glasses. He put them to his eyes and his mouth dropped open.

  “She’s sexy as hell,” he whispered. “Who wants to rent my opera glasses? Fifty cents per minute.”

  Rusty and Wade both snatched at the glasses. Rusty got them, looked, and said, “God almighty.” They took turns, exclaiming mildly. Wade, grinning, passed me the glasses. Mostly, they magnified the grainy haze and shadows, but whenever the nudists inhaled on the joint, I saw reddish details. Paul was muscled like a comic-book hero, his penis alert out of the lotus position. The woman was younger and had hair down to her waist, and she was rocking in time to the music. Her breasts weren’t much larger than Paul’s, but even in this gloom I saw that her nipples did a spectacular job of compensation. She was not entirely naked— she still wore panties. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should be with Margie again.

  And though I had lately smoked marijuana and spent the night with a girl, I was somehow disappointed to see Paul behaving the same way. I’d admired him, a big impressive man and champion of wilderness. I preferred my heroes to be nobler than me. Sexuality still worried me as much as it made me excited. I have never stopped being shocked that respectable people with jobs and families would peel their clothes off and indulge in the mutual friction which in public would get them arrested. I handed the binoculars to Joey.

  As Joey watched in close-up, the couple finished smoking and leaned into a long writhing kiss, her hair swinging forward, his hands rising to her breasts, and then her head dipped down into his lap and began to rise and fall. He leaned over her and began rubbing her ass.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Rusty said and took the glasses from Joey.

  We stared for a minute in fascinated agony, ashamed to look at one another. I felt I had a tennis ball jammed in my pants.

  “Let’s go,” Tim said. “I’m sick of watching other guys have what I want.”

  “Hold it a second,” said Rusty. “This ain’t somethin you can see just anytime.”

  “Give me my field glasses, damn it. Let’s go let that cat out while these two are occupied.”

  We walked stiffly around the field’s perimeter, blending against the trees, and found the continuation of the trail. In two minutes we were up on the viewing platform over the bobcat pen. It seemed we’d gotten there too quickly. I didn’t feel ready.

  “We’ll never feel ready,” Tim said. “We just have to do it anyway. Now, find me a wildcat.” He put the field glasses to his face.

  We turned on our lights (except Wade, who’d drowned his) and swept their beams through the enclosed woods. I was tense and had to make myself stop clenching my teeth too hard. I lifted my beam up into the large oak tree, to the claw-scoured limb where we’d seen a bobcat on the field trip. I traced the limb back and forth with light and was about to look elsewhere when I imagined that a bulge on the limb was a cat, decided it wasn’t, then saw it raise its head. “Found one,” I whispered, holding him in the light. He blinked.

  “I see it!” Joey said.

  “Joey sees it,” Wade mocked, but he was grinning up at it too.

  Tim loaded a dart into the mouthpiece. He inhaled, put his lips to it, then pulled away. “Wait! wait, damn. I almost ruined everything. If I dart that bobcat in the tree, he’ll either fall and break his neck or else he’ll go to sleep up there and we’ll have hell getting him down.”

  Rusty turned his flashlight onto a bush to the left of us and squinted. “I thought I saw one in here a minute ago.” Rusty waved the light a little. “See? Ain’t that a pair of cat eyes?”

  Two glints floated in the leaves, caught light like marbles.

  “Yeah,” said Wade. “It just moved.”

  “Eureka,” said Tim. “I’ll simply estimate where the rump is and put him under.”

  We lined up along the railing above the fence. Rusty, Joey, Wade, and I jacklighted the hidden bobcat. Tim took a breath and aimed, then jerked back like it had stung him.

  “Wait a second,” he said, frowning. He spit, rubbed his eyes, and shook out each hand, shifting the weapon. He sighed, then lifted the blowgun and readied himself again. He filled his cheeks. He stared at the bush, not breathing.

  Tim’s cheeks hollowed with a hiss. The bush shook violently and a cat sprang from each side of it, one slipping straight into an adjacent bush, the other pouncing and snarling up along the chicken-wire fence, a yellow dart-cone stuck to its haunch.

  The cat leapt into the hollowed-out front of a stump. Tim lowered the blowgun and leaned limply against the railing. “Perfect shot,” he said. “I can’t begin to tell you how hard that was on me.”

  “Now what?” Joey asked.

  “We get things ready while we wait for the drug to take hold. Wade, let’s hang that rope, man.”

  After several tosses Wade got the rope over the nearest limb of the oak tree, but we couldn’t retrieve the dangling end, even using the blowgun to hook it, in order to fasten it. The bobcat in the tree paced and growled. Finally we pulled the rope back and tied it to the railing so that it hung down inside the fence.

  “Nothing ever works out as spectacular as you want it,” Tim said, yanking to test the knot. “It’s not Robin Hood, but I guess it’ll work. We’ll leave the rope here to convince them we really did it.”

  “What about fingerprints?” Joey asked.

  “I don’t think they can take fingerprints off this rope. I wore gloves when I made the notes.”

  “Anyhow,” Rusty said, “our fingerprints ain’t on file.”

  “But if they suspected us,” I said, “then they might take our fingerprints.”

  “So what?” Rusty said. “This ain’t mass murder. It’s about the same as stealin the mascot from the enemy football team.”

  Tim said, “We’ll shift that critter to the outside, go deliver the notes, and bust a window, then get drunk and watch the sun come up in my backyard.”

  Tim, wearing leather work gloves, stapled a note to the railing, a patchwork of letters and words sliced out of newspapers. He put one foot over the rail and rested it on the top of the fence, gripped the rope, paused, and stepped back onto the deck. “Wade, since you’re biggest, you go on down first. I want to see what those other cats do. Take my machete.” He unsheathed it and gave it to Wade. “I’ll keep you covered with the blowgun.”

  Wade hopped over and slid down the rope. He stood and turned in a circle and looked up at us, white eyes in a leafy face, and shrugged.

  Tim laid down the blowgun. “Now for the easy part,” he said, and slipped down the rope and landed in a crouch, swashbuckler style. He threw his hands onto his hips and looked around, tried to spit but only produced the noise. His dad’s fatigue shirt hung on him like a cape, and his hair waved around the shadowy pen like a flag of surrender. “You all keep your lights trained on those other cats until we’re out of here. Rusty, we’ll hand him up to you.”

  I lit the treed bobcat pacing angrily on his limb. He slowed, tail switching. Joey, unable to discove
r the third cat, played his light around the habitat like a prison guard spotlighting from a tower.

  Tim handed his flashlight to Wade and crept towards the hollow stump. He squatted in front of it, and for a moment the night was so quiet I heard his knees click. Wade stood alongside, shining the light for him, machete raised.

  A growl upset the silence, and I said, “Watch it!” and Tim fell back, looking everywhere, and Wade raised the machete higher.

  “It was only my stomach!” Joey said defensively. “It was my stomach growling.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and giggled nervously.

  Tim stood before the stump again and said over his shoulder, “Rusty, that five bucks you owe me. If I get killed, give it to Francis so he can take Margie to the movies.”

  “If the cat kills you,” Rusty said, “I’ll use that five bucks to get him stuffed and put in the trophy case at school.”

  Tim chuckled, then lifted his foot and eased the toe into the hole of the stump. He nudged. Then he squatted again and put both hands inside. I was wincing, teeth gritted with anxiety. Then Tim stood and turned, a sagging bobcat in his arms, its tongue out.

  We said, “All right!” and “Son of a bitch!” and laughed, finally surprised that the Wildcat Caper had succeeded. I believed then that we were capable of anything.

  Tim plucked the dart from the cat’s hide and its tongue slid up into the mouth and it swallowed.

  Rusty said, “He’s alive all right.”

  “Wade,” Tim said, “take this dart and wipe the prints off of it, then lay it down where they’ll be sure to find it. Also, see if you can locate some bobcat droppings and stick them in the baggie.”

  Wade stuck the machete in the ground and wiped the dart on his shirt.

  Tim looked at the cat in his arms and held it up at me. “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” He grinned.

  “William Blake,” I said.

  Tim looked at the cat’s underside. “Hey, this is a female.”

  I glanced up at the oak limb where I’d been holding the light, but the bobcat had disappeared. I lit the other limbs, suspicious bulges, clusters of leaves. I heard an exhalation below.

  Tim’s painted face was turned up at me, mouth stretched, forehead squeezed, and his hands were up behind his neck. The limp bobcat lay in the grass. Tim’s knee buckled and he half turned. The other bobcat was on his shoulders, jaw clamped at the base of his skull. I threw light on him. Wade looked over from the far side of the pen. I shouted as loud as I could and felt my hernia tearing open, and from the top of the oak tree a huge white heron rose and flapped slowly into the darkness.

  Rusty leapt into the pen, hitting the ground hard. I threw myself onto the rope and slid down it, my insides tearing more with the effort and bulging into my pants, and I fell to the ground and kneeled up and screamed at the cat as it jerked Tim’s neck and Rusty and Wade kicked at it.

  The cat pounced away. Wade pulled the machete out of the ground. We watched, in the trembling pool of Joey’s flashlight, as Tim’s eyes shifted panicky from Rusty to Wade to me, then lost focus and drifted. I found I was holding my hand against the pain in my groin and praying for Tim not to die. We stayed there confused.

  “Bring him up!” Joey shouted. “Get out of there!”

  We looked around for the cats. There was electricity around my heart, but I was hurt too bad to escape quickly.

  Rusty said, “Wade! Get up there and I’ll hand him up to you. Joey, shit, I guess you better go get that guy and tell him what happened.” He spun his light around the enclosure.

  “What if they’re still screwing?” Joey said, and turned and ran into the woods where the trail was.

  “We’re in big trouble,” Rusty said. “Help me get him up.”

  “I can’t,” I gasped, and even the effort of speaking stabbed at my groin. “My hernia’s busted wide open.”

  Rusty slung Tim over his shoulder and passed him up to Wade. Then they did the same to me. I felt terribly weak and was glad to surrender myself to stronger people.

  I sat on the deck with my knees pulled up tight against me, beside Tim. I prayed helplessly. I counted six little punctures on the back of his neck. There was some blood, but I’d seen him lose much more than that in fights and still be able to laugh at it. I stared down at the planking between my shoes. I didn’t look at Tim after that. Rusty tore the note off of the railing and stuffed it in his pocket.

  I heard an eerie voice in my head, like the voice of my adult self in years to come, scolding me: Now you’ve done it, boy. Now you’ve really done it.

  Paul Steatham crashed out of the woods with a lantern flashlight and thundered up onto the platform, squeezed Tim’s throat, and said, “The ambulance is coming.” Then Joey appeared with the girl. She said she’d opened the gate. She stood behind Paul, wearing a tie-dyed shirt now, hugging herself as if it was cold. Every few seconds someone coughed or sighed or called on God.

  Paul said, “Let’s carry him to the building to save time.” He took Tim under the arms and lifted, and Rusty took his legs, and Wade supported him in the middle, and they carried him down the trail. I hobbled and gasped behind them.

  “Are you hurt too?” the girl asked.

  I said I was, a little. She held onto me, trying to help. It made it more awkward, but I was glad to have a woman’s arms around me. We heard the siren of an ambulance wailing onto the island like a banshee in the dark.

  The ambulance left as the girl and I came out of the woods and the police cars were pulling in. The gang was sitting on the porch of the building, between the giant white columns. Mr. Doolan, the policeman from our neighborhood, got out of one of the cars. Two other cops headed down the trail with Paul, carrying long flashlights. I watched all this from inside a thick, quiet bubble. I was calm and shaking. Mr. Doolan came over, but he didn’t recognize us with our faces painted. Rusty identified us.

  Paul took us into the building to call our parents. I was hunched over and every step felt like a kick in the groin. Mr. Doolan saw and then helped me out to his patrol car and got in. He held the microphone to his mouth and told the dispatcher he was taking me to the emergency room. Suddenly I was afraid that this was the car I’d tossed the douche into a few days ago, and I regretted every wrong thing I’d ever done.

  “Everything’s gonna be okay, Francis,” said Mr. Doolan. He shoved the car in gear and we heard popping noises from the woods, and my soul sank deeper into its terrible self. He turned on the siren and screamed towards the hospital at such speed that I was able to get scared again.

  Underground

  The hospital was near our neighborhood. Attendants were waiting at the curb with a wheeled stretcher, and my parents materialized as I was lying down. “We’re here,” Mama said, and followed beside us as I was rolled through the sliding glass doors. They behaved as if they’d done something wrong and needed me to forgive them.

  In a curtained-off area in a white room, a black man wearing glasses helped me strip and wriggle into a gown. He tried to converse with me about baseball while he soaped me and shaved off my pubic hair. I looked down once and saw a bulge on the right side of my groin the size of an egg. Then the man put a tube inside me and filled me with liquid and slid a bedpan under me to take it back. A nurse entered and gave me a shot in the thigh that hurt beyond what I thought I could stand. She told me not to tense the muscle, to relax.

  Men pushed me into a room lit brightly in the center, and placed me under the light, shining with steel, surrounded by darkness. I was cold. I kept my eyes closed. A nurse brought hot towels and spread them over me, and when they cooled she brought more. People gathered around me, and a man all in cloth except for eyeglasses and rubber gloves slipped a mask over my nose and mouth and I breathed a sweet, heavy gas. He told me to count backwards from ten, and I began to say the muffled numbers. Someone worked a needle with plastic wings into a vein on the back of my hand, taped it there, connected to a tube running up into a bag of clear liquid, hung
from a metal gallows. I couldn’t breathe. I felt sick, and I was going to tell them to take the mask away, and then everything grew numb and quiet except for a thudding inside my head.

  Someone far away and invisible said, “It’s all over, Francis. You’re fixed and sewn up and ready to heal.”

  Later I heard women talking. I felt injured and nauseated and was moaning softly every few seconds. Someone laid a damp, cool cloth on my forehead. I was too sick to open my eyes and afraid to throw up because even the tiniest movement was like a knife plunging into me. I understood that the women talking, more quietly now, were nurses.

  “D.O.A.?”

  “Mm hmm. Had been, a while.”

  “It’s awful to say,” one whispered, “but it’s probably for the best, with his spinal cord the way it was.”

  One walked over and pressed my wrist for several seconds. Something plastic was around my wrist, loose. She said, “You want some chipped ice to chew on, honey? It’ll make you feel better. We can’t give you anything else for pain yet.”

  All I could manage was a moan.

  She placed something beside my head. “I’ll leave this basin here in case you want to get sick.” She walked away and sat down on a creaky metallic chair.

  For a long while I stayed helpless in a delirium of nausea and pain, but I heard everything they said.

  “You should’ve seen the flirt-face she gave Billy when he picked me up after the eleven-to-seven.”

  “She is a pure b-i-t-c-h.”

  My stomach pushed up into my throat and I grabbed for the basin and retched into it, turning painfully, the tube pulling at my hand. I gagged more, then swallowed a vile sourness. The nurse emptied the basin and gave me chipped ice in a washcloth. I sucked at it feebly, like an animal.

  For days after the accident I felt sleepy and stupid and like I was wrapped all over in warm blankets. I hardly remember anything about the funeral. I had to wear my school uniform because I didn’t have a suit, and I walked bent over where my flesh was tightened with prickly thread and stiff, iodine-stained bandages. The chapel was almost full with people I knew, and I tried to cry but I couldn’t. I accidentally caught a glimpse of Tim’s profile in the coffin, which was somehow confusing, because I had this notion that he was in the back somewhere, slouched against a wall and rolling his eyes like the patron saint of boredom. I’m sorry I saw him that last time, because I carried it with me for years—hair trimmed, not pale enough—like a touched-up souvenir photo.