"It's just dead leaves," Brian said.
"Spearmint," Kuntz said. "It's good for chewing after we smoke."
"I chew bubble gum," Brian said. "It kills the smell the best."
"O.K.," Kuntz said. "That'll be your duty. You keep us supplied in bubble gum all summer."
"O.K.," Brian said.
"No, no, wait," Leo said. "I've got a better one."
"What?"
"Bring us a jar of marshmallow cream every week, ha!”
"Yeah, well, hey now, that is a pretty good one," Kuntz said.
"Oh, come on, Leo! Dad knows how much there is there, he counts the damn jars, you know that. He knows you like it. What if he catches me stealing some?"
"Tough titty, if you want to be in this club."
Brian turned on me. "What's his duty, then?"
"I got one," Kuntz said, and laughed his nasal laugh with its accompanying buzzing murmur, then the long teeth. "He can beg Hershey bars from Wilhomena. She'll give you one if you go to the back door and beg like you're starving and a fool for food. Grrrompf! 'Du Deibel, du!' she'll squeak at you. He can beg a Hershey bar every day for two weeks from her. Haw!"
Kuntz and Leo kept laughing at this and Brian said, "Oh, boy, tough duty." And then to Leo, "What's yours, I'd like to know?"
"I got to cut new branches when these get dry, the lilacs, to keep the shrine here covered up."
"Oh, boy."
"Plus the cigarettes. So you also got to do the bubble gum, guy!"
"What's yours, Kuntz?”
"I lead you on raids into the neighborhood countryside on my mighty steed, Silver!"
"I quit," Brian said.
"Good," Leo said.
Brian bowed his big head again, his wizened mouth constricted tight. "No," he murmured. "I don't quit, you guys. Please."
"Don't call us that yet!" Leo cried.
"O.K., here's the next thing," Kuntz said, and went to the shrine, reached to the back of the cloth-lined box, and brought out another glass, much larger than the other two, and scarlet-colored, with an image of the Sacred Heart, crossed with thorns and bleeding, embossed on it. "This is our sanctuary lamp. We burn our candles in here. Never in the cruets. You got that separated yet? Allus in this." He held the glass close to Brian's nose. “You know where I got this? Out of the church. Right out of the sacristy when Father was there, serving Saturday Mass one time. And the candles we burn in it? I swipe them off the church's offertory racks when I'm out on my raids."
"Yeah," Buddy Schonbeck said. "You got anything to say about that?"
"No," Brian said.
"You?" he said to me.
"No." It seemed wrong to steal from the church; just the idea of it made my watery knees feel they might have to take a leak, too.
"Maybe you'll have to help me," Kuntz said. "If we let you join in." He put the sanctuary lamp back, directly in front of the statue now.
"Start them in oh the ceremonies, Ruler Number One," Leo said.
"Yessir, yessir," Kuntz said. "O.K., now you guys watch everything we do, and if you can't learn to do it in a week, you're out, sorry, boys, that's it, but you are, boo-hoo." He passed around the cigarette halves. "Turn the raggaly end out," he said, as if aware I'd been wondering. He lit the sanctuary lamp and then lit his cigarette from it, genuflected, and then Leo came up and lit his, genuflected, and then Jerome ...
"Do we have to smoke these?" I said.
"Do you want to eat it?" Kuntz asked.
"I haven't ever smoked much and sometimes—" My vision popped out of focus and flooded with blue along its edges, while a warm sensation, like a sprawling bee sting, rose and spread over the back of my skull, and then I could see again.
"This is part of the ceremony now!" Leo said. "Don't ruin it!"
"Right," Kuntz said. "If you don't learn to smoke and inhale, boys, you're also really out. Ka-choom!"
"Inhale?"
“My big brother showed me. Watch." Kuntz sucked down a thin puff, his chest heaving with a cough, coughed hard once, bit it back, his face going violet, and said in a wheezy voice, "Like that. You have to do that in a week. Aghh! Only sissies and old ladies don't. They couldn't take what it does to you. Gough! Gough! Hee-haw, utta ka-CHOO!"
Brian and I went and lit our cigarettes, genuflected, and started hacking up smoke, and I saw as from a distance my perceptions narrow to this white column in my hand, the talisman to master before I could enter this club, and all of the possibilities it evoked.
"After three drags, we put them out like this," Kuntz said. "He spat in his palm and rolled the sputtering cigarette end around in it. "Bleck! And then we put them back down here on top of my gospel chair."
Kuntz and Leo knelt down, side by side, in front of the shrine, Jerome and Buddy knelt in a pair behind them, and Kuntz told Brian and me to kneel behind those two and leave plenty of space in between. "Also," Kuntz said, "you got to keep your eyes closed during this. It works the best." Into the dizzying darkness, where echoing sparks and spheres colliding in brown and blue and beige outbursts threatened to pull me off balance, Kuntz's quavering voice came and said, "Well, I guess you'll have to keep them open for a while until you see how we do this, guys. Pardon me. What a dummo! A goof! Gorp, yawlk!
"Allah!" he cried in his commanding voice, and everybody lifted their arms above their heads and then lowered them, outstretched, to the ground, bowing as the turbaned men bowed in the Sabu movies shown in serial form every weekend at the Town Hall, and then everybody rose and did a thumping and a mea-culpaing of their chests, which Brian and I joined in on on our private drums, and then we lifted our arms up to the outcry of "Allah," and prostrated ourselves again. We continued this for eleven times, as I counted it, and I kept parting my lashes to peek and see if any variations were being added (none were) and confronting the soles of the shoes and above them the close big bent butts of Buddy and Jerome, bowing, bobbing down, and once when I glanced over at Brian, to see how he was doing, his eyes were open also, and he stuck out his tongue.
We were done with that, then, apparently, and Kuntz once more handed around the cigarettes (was this mine, I wondered, staring at the damp-ended butt), which were lit as before from the sanctuary lamp. "O.K.," Kuntz said. "Now you kneel there and smoke the whole thing down as far as you can, and inhale it three times while you stare at Our Lady of the Black Forest. Now, you can't look at anybody when they're smoking and mess up what they're thinking about, and you also gotta sorta examine your conscience real hard. This is serious."
"Examine my conscience," Brian said. "What the hell for?"
"Confession," Leo said. "You've got to think of things so awful you did, you wouldn't even tell them to Father. Go to it, guys!"
I tried to smoke and stared at the statue, which took motion under my stare or from the smoke crossing between. My eyes burned, my throat was so swollen it was hard to swallow, and my skull was pulsing as if receiving directly the rhythms, currents, and contents of my heart, burgeoning, so displaced I kept having to shift my knees to remain upright, while the scarlet-colored sanctuary lamp cast streaks of red and yellow across the statue, which changed color and location and shape with the changing flame, a wide red one quavering up and down as it contracted, lenslike, blue-white along its edges, and then disappeared and was replaced by a yellowish band wobbling lopsidedly at a lower level, then the red reappearing in a lighter shade, pink-crimson, salmon, rose, rising as high as the Virgin's neck and tilting back and forth there, and then flowing down the folds of her gown and tilting at a lower level, until I was filled with the fears and fantasies that had troubled me since I'd seen, through a split panel in the door between my room and the closet off our bathroom, my mother with raised dress and sagging pants put inside a white harness a big wide cottony bandage up between her thighs: legs in front of pink curtains, turning to catch the light; legs with flowery tops on their stockings, sheathed or unsheathed; the way certain women's breasts were right for you no matter what age; the red
-blond or coppery-black spiky fur fringing the outer edges of the inner band of their swimming suits, and more in a more blossoming and a more melodious way that—
"Yesterday I saw my sister's buzzooms," Kuntz said. "It was right after she washed them off and, boy, did I want to diddle around with them! Mama!"
"I went upstairs when my mother was dressing and caught her in her pants and tittycups," Leo said. "A mama mia, too!"
"I put my head down on the ground right in the grass underneath Susie Eichelburger so I could watch the piss come out of that little hole she's got up in there," Buddy said. "You know, right?"
"I pretended to fall against the bathroom door when my dad was in there and got a look at his dingus," Jerome said. "It's like the sausage of a horse!"
"Did you want to diddle around with it?" Kuntz asked.
"Oh, come on, Kuntz, that's enough!"
"I stold mash— Crap. I stold marshmallow cream from my dad's store," Brian said.
"No good," Leo said. "It doesn't count! Tell him why, Kuntz."
"Well, I wouldn't ever say that to Father in the confessional!" Brian cried.
"Think of something else," Kuntz said. "You got to have something new every time we meet, hot diggity, a rarf! rarf!"
"The other day I wanted to pick up a rotten knife and stab Leo in the back with it!" Brian cried.
"That's good," Leo said. "That's a good one, Fititzer."
"I saw Susie Eichelburger with her pants off," I said.
"No go," Leo said. "Schonbeck already used her."
"I saw Susie's mother with her pants off," I said. This was a lie, but I'd seen enough of my mother to say it; the white of her thighs naked in the darkness.
"You saw Susie's mother with her pants off?" Kuntz said.
"Yes."
"Was there fuzz on it? Did it look like a beaver?"
"Yes."
"Did your peterdink get stiff?"
"Yes."
"Real long?"
"Well."
"Did you want to jump out there and diddle around with it?"
"Sure."
"Oh, wow!"
It seemed Kuntz's eyes wouldn't be small again, and also that this part of the ceremony was at an end for now. Buddy gathered up the cigarette butts and dropped them down a hole in the top of a fence post. Kuntz leaned against the dead tree, yawned, and said, "O.K., now you can just relax and enjoy the club, guys." I stretched out on my back on the ground, copying other members, and slipped my hands under my head. There was only the sound of the leaves in the trees above us. Kuntz mentioned the prank he'd played on Mary Liffert last Halloween; defecated in a paper bag, put it on her porch, set it afire, and then banged on the door. "And she came out with her jiggly legs going all over, kicking around and hopping and dancing, screaming, 'Fire! Fire!' and then started stomping up and down on the bag like she was going to give it the kibosh, and I wanted to say I was sorry it was such a wet one. Wawk!"
There was a quiet wave of laughter in the clearing, beyond civilization now.
"Did you hear what old man Ianaccona did last Halloween?" Leo said. "The high-school guys were always tipping his crapper, so early Halloween night he moves it ahead a little, and when the guys run up to give it the push, whoosh, they all fall in the hole, ha! Imagine both your legs all the way to the top in that mob of dead guts. Phew!"
There was a lighter scattering of laughter among the leaves.
Jerome said, "When we were living at our old place, once when Dad was out in the can there, dumping, he heard voices and then the can started to go, so he yelled, 'Hey-ey, at least wait till I'm done in here!' It must have been some of the kids he taught, and then it got around school, because nobody ever bothered that can again."
"Wasn't that the one that was wired down?" Leo asked.
"The owner of the place, Peter Schommer, did that."
"It just makes the guys want to tip it over all the more," Leo said.
"I know," Jerome said. "That's the way it seems sometimes."
Again there was only the sound of the leaves. I was still dizzy, vertiginous, displaced, and felt I was being rocked by the branches above me, cradled and rocked, and wondered what it was like before, once, when there was ground beneath. The subdued conversation moved to the topic of parents and older people, and all the mistakes they made, and we agreed that when we grew up our lives would be different from theirs; we'd never get married or have children, or worry, or go to church all the time, or have a job you had to go to every morning and always complained about, but actually liked because it got you away from the house, or have headaches, or have to lie down and rest, or drive a car that was always breaking down either where there were no other cars close to help or else out where everybody could see, or go to parties because you were expected to and people might gossip if you didn't show up (and the leaves above us swayed with the wind and clashed together, saying. Yes, you will live like this, yes, yes, you will, yes), or do any work to merely do work and please others, but instead spend our energies on ourselves, moving from place to place in search of pleasure and others like us, and our parents would be surprised, and then envious, because we'd be living lives that they'd only dreamed about, if they'd gone that far, and ours would be the happiest lives that had ever been lived—the trees and brush taking on the density of a real forest, with branches stilled and back-turning a webwork of limbs within the core of memory, shielding us from the village and its inhabitants, who'd never understand us and all of these sinful desires we had.
And again there was a long silence. The afternoon light was leaving in the lifting way it leaves the plain, as though tilting over in the air toward the sun, which then draws it on forward and out, and we all felt hungry in the numbing one-minded way in which boys that age get hungry at that hour, while the village smells of mingled cooking drew around us. This was no Black Forest to us now. We got up, replaced and hid the shrine, said goodbye to one another in a solemn manner, and then all of us, once out of sight of one another—Jerome and I were no different from the rest—took off on a dead run toward home.
*
A week later Brian and I became members of the club that met in secret in the Black Forest, but Brian barely so; Leo voted against him and got Buddy Schonbeck to do the same, but Jerome and Kuntz wouldn't listen or be moved by him. The rituals went on for a week without change and I sensed everybody becoming like I was: listless and defiant of rules and orders, of Kuntz and Leo, and more violent in their fantasies; most of the women in the village had been seen naked or in some form of undress, and Father Schimmelpfennig was discovered in the dark of his back yard, "taking a tinkle like a lady because priests they aren't allowed to have a pecker, you think, right? Ah, hee, hee."
It was during this time of unquiet, boredom, and barefaced lies, on an afternoon as I lay under the enveloping leaves, that I knew for sure, as I'd always sensed, that somebody watched every detail of everything we did. I'd see a pale patch above the stone wall. Or a form would go in a running retreat down the alley at times. Or there'd be a flash or a shimmer of light. I thought it was a scout from another club, one formed by the public-schoolers in town, a minority, a group that didn't mix much with the Catholic kids, and wasn't welcome to.
I mentioned the possible scout.
"Oh," Kuntz said. "That's only Ribs. He's allus hanging around."
"Oh."
Everett Ritter, or Everribber, or Ribs, as he was called, due to his physique, had big brimming dark-brown eyes and blue-black hair, and a delicately modeled brunette woman's face—caves, bone, and shadows of rest and prayer. A few years ago his father had been found dead on the road with the pickup he'd been driving crashed a hundred yards ahead of him, and it was never known for sure whether he'd accidentally leaned on the door handle and fallen, or thrown himself out. Ribs lived with his mother and sisters at the edge of town in an unpainted house with shells of abandoned automobiles around it. His father had been a mechanic and Ribs spent most of his time in one or anot
her of the cars, his hands on its wheel as if driving— Where? His mother did washing and ironing to support them, and Ribs wore worn and patched hand-me-downs from nearly every family m town, so you'd sometimes find somebody else—"Oh, Ribs, excuse me"—inside the shirt of an old friend. He never spoke on his own and when he was spoken to, when he was delivering clothes, or picking up groceries from the Red Owl, he answered with a single word or a shrug, or just lowered his eyes and walked on.
"Hey, listen," Kuntz said. "What should we do about him?”
"Make him a member," Brian said. "And then give him the old initiation treatment!"
"How so?" Leo said. "He ain't Catholic."
"He could learn the stuff," Brian said, "I did. It's easy as pie. Look at me."
"You haven't even learned half of what you think you have," Leo said. "And you still look like a goddamn pumpkin on legs."
"We could use him as a spy," Jerome said.
"Hey, that's good," Kuntz said. "We could find out it anybody else in town has a club and raid the buggers, clop, clop, hocka pa-tchew!"
"Right," Leo said. "Wreck the place!"
"Let's fake like we want him in with us," Brian said, "and then everybody pile in on him."
"What a stupid idea," Buddy said. "I've never heard such a stupid idea! Fititzer, you're so stupid!"
"What's your bright idea, limp lips?"
"Watch out who you're calling what or you’ll be out! Buddy cried. "How do you think you got into this club in the first place?"
"Not by no help from you. You voted me out.
"I did not!"
"Leo told me." , ,
"I did not! I voted you in!" Buddy's face was red and thrust so far forward on his neck the cords of it bulged, and there was spittle on his big lips.
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