The Wanton Troopers

by Alden Nowlan

  “Come on, you slowpoke Kevin O’Brien!”

  If a pack of werewolves had come howling onto the ice, he would have run with a laugh to join them. This must be how God feels, he thought, and his throat opened in a little cry of wonder. God must live in a heaven of moonlight and ice. For, for a little while, he would be like God. And only a few hours ago he had been a frightened little boy!

  Now he was gaining on her. He suspected that she had slowed deliberately so that he might catch her.

  Strange! At all times he was called Kevin O’Brien, yet sometimes Kevin O’Brien was one person and sometimes another. There was Scampi and Kev and Namesake and young feller and Mister Big Breeches and laddie and Key-von — seven Kevin O’Briens at least, and tonight, at this moment, he could look at all of them in wonder and pity!

  Tiring, he slowed and looked up at the moon. He skated on the moon. Yet the moon still floated in the sky. In the worlds of Scampi, Kev, Namesake, young feller, Mister Big Breeches, laddie, and Key-von, this would have been impossible. In the world of this luminous, moonstruck Kevin O’Brien, nothing was impossible. In this world, the earth was liquid and the water was solid. Solid like the water that was ice. And here, he was Kevin-David. King of Israel.

  Peter had walked on the water. Now he — Kevin-David — was running on the water! This was a miracle! Oh, he knew everything now. But most of what he knew could never be told, because there were no words; even in his own mind, he could not think of it in words: it had to be felt.

  Nancy Harker turned and skated toward him.

  “I decided you weren’t ever goin’ to catch up,” she said.

  She laughed, and the sound was that of the little bell-flowers of ice tinkling on the wind-shaken willows and alders.

  “I’m a werewolf,” he said. “Did yuh know that?”

  “Oh, yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “And I’m a prince and someday I’m gonna go into a country at the other end of the world and be king.”

  “Oh, I’ve known that ever since I first saw you!”

  They laughed together, and — with scarcely any hesitation at all — Kevin O’Brien reached out and took her hand.

  Twenty-Seven

  Kevin awoke next morning with a jar of disappointment, like one shaken awake at the climax of an ecstatic and convincing dream. His first thought was that he was in love with Nancy Harker.

  Dressing beside the kitchen stove, eating porridge with milk and molasses, and trudging up the white road to the school house, he thought of Nancy, and of love.

  “Love” was a book word. No Lockhartville man ever spoke of love. Judd snorted whenever he heard the word mentioned. In Lockhartville there was only that other thing. Shuddering, Kevin remembered June Larlee on Kaye Dunbar’s bunk and recalled certain dark passages in the Bible.

  He and Nancy would never do an unclean thing. Their love would be as pure and golden as the love of the inhabitants of books. When he grew up, they would marry and — then he began to worry about whether or not he would get a chance to see her alone at recess.

  But when their eyes met in class, he blushed and hid his face in a book, and at recess when they met in the schoolyard he shuffled his feet and fumbled with his mackinaw buttons and became so hot with embarrassment that he could only mutter a few choked monosyllables and lurch away. She looked after him with strange eyes, and a few minutes later, he saw her talking with Alton Stacey.

  Alton leaned against the school house, hands thrust insolently into his pockets, a lazy grin on his choirboy’s face. Nancy stood very close to him. Kevin hoped the school house would topple over and crush them both.

  Then they both of them laughed and he reeled as though slapped. For he assumed immediately that they were ridiculing him. Nancy was a fool and a flirt and he hated her and wished that she were dead —

  When she ran toward him, the last golden glimmer of last summer’s suntan flashing on the bare skin between her wool stockings and the hem of her buoyant skirt, he felt a strange new stirring in his stomach, something that was part nausea, part hunger.

  She halted, laughing, the little curve of her breasts rising and falling . . .

  “Alton Stacey wants me to go skatin’ with him,” she said.

  Kevin glared at her. “That ain’t nothin’ tuh me,” he grunted.

  “You mean you don’t care if I go with him?”

  “I don’t give a hoot what yuh do.” He strove to sound scornful but found, to his horror, that his voice quavered at the verge of tears.

  “If I’da knowed you didn’t care I wouldn’ta told him what I did.”

  “What?” he stuttered in incomprehension.

  “I told him I couldn’t go with him because I was your girl,” she said.

  And, her golden knees flickering, she whirled and skipped away.

  In a few days, Kevin found the words jack-knifed into the walls of the woodshed and pencilled on the door of the privy. Nancy is Kevin’s Girl. He pretended to be annoyed. But, in reality, the epithets pleased him and made him feel proud. He wanted to believe that Nancy was his girl, and the scrawled slogans assured him that she was.

  But the walls bore other legends also. In the privy he saw his name linked with hers in words that he tried not to read and, having read, tried fruitlessly to erase from his mind . . .

  On many nights and on every Saturday and Sunday in January, they went skating together. And he braved the derisive, envious laughter of Riff and Harold and the others by walking her home from school. He wished he could write her love letters like those he had seen in his mother’s magazines. And he burned with self-hatred when he stood before her in red-faced and stammering incoherence.

  “I had the most wonderful, wonderful dream last night,” she told him one day.

  “Gosh, what was it about?”

  “Oh, I dreamt that a ship from Arabia sailed up the creek, from the sea, and that the Arabs broke into the school and took us all away to be slaves.”

  “Gee, that don’t sound like a very good dream tuh me.”

  “Oh, but wait! It was, it was! Because the sheik had all of us girls stripped naked” — here her eyes frolicked and he blushed — “and he said I was the most beautiful of all his slave girls and he dressed me in beautiful, lovely, soft robes and golden bracelets and put a little golden crown on my head and made me his queen.”

  The dream disturbed him. It smacked of the darkness and uncleanness spoken of so often by his grandmother. It was indecent for a young girl to dream of being undressed by a man, still more indecent for her to speak of such a dream. And, besides, she was his girl. What right had she to dream of Arab sheiks?

  “I don’t think that was no kind of a dream a-tall,” he growled.

  “Oh, but listen! You was in the dream too. And the sheik made you the captain of his horsemen, and after we got to Arabia you rode into the palace and grabbed me and pulled me up on your horse and we rode away!”

  “Well . . .” he said dubiously. That was better. Much better. Still, he wished that she had not dreamt of nakedness.

  He was more shocked another time that she spoke of dreams. “Do you ever dream about girls, Kevin?” she asked him suddenly one afternoon as they sat at the edge of the skating pond.

  “Huh? What duh yuh mean, duh I ever dream about girls?”

  “Why are you blushin’?”

  “I ain’t blushin’.”

  “Oh, yes you are! And I know why!” she laughed and tossed her hair.

  “You’re bein’ silly.”

  “No, you do dream about girls, don’t you? About doin’ things with girls?”

  “What kinda things?”

  “Oh, just — things.”

  “You ain’t got no way a knowin’ what I dream.”

  “Yes, I have: I’n see it in your eyes. I bet you dream about girls and when you wake up —”

  “Come on!” he cried, springing to his feet, “I’ll race you tuh the other end a the pond!”

  She pouted. “It isn’
t any fun to race. I always get there first,” she said.

  “Oh, go tuh grass!”

  She laughed, and his mind shrank in despair and dread.

  Twenty-Eight

  Kevin and Nancy sprawled on the floor in front of the stove. The wail of the wind was muffled by the snow that lay on the roof and against the walls of the Harker cabin. Never before had he been so intensely aware of her femininity. He was stirred even by the scents the heat stroked from her body. She wore maroon ski pants, and when he stared at the firm little mounds of her buttocks, the sensations in his chest and belly were so sharp and strange that he wondered if he were going insane. Then he decided that he was being tempted. Many of the mighty men of God had been tempted of the devil. What was it that Isaiah had said —

  Nancy’s voice was low, dreamlike.

  “Do you ever feel as if there was somethin’ inside you tryin’ to get out?”

  He stirred uneasily, thinking of the little, nervous, gnawing pains he felt sometimes in his loins and nipples. But these were things not to be spoken of: dark, shameful things of which one tried not to think.

  “I guess so, mebbe,” he answered aloud.

  “That’s how I feel all the time. I feel just like a butterfly startin’ to flutter inside a cocoon. Up till now I’ve been a caterpillar but pretty soon I’m goin’ to be a butterfly with beautiful shiny wings.” She smiled and waved her arms as though she were already flying.

  Then: “Why don’t you ever kiss me, Kevin?”

  He sat up, scowling. “Why duh yuh have tuh talk about kissin’ all the time?”

  “Other boys would like to kiss me. Alton Stacey — I bet he’d jump at the chance to kiss me.”

  “Go ahead and let him kiss you, then.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Go ahead — see if I care a hoot.”

  For a long moment there was silence except for the crackle of firewood and the muted wail of the wind.

  “Kevin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think it would be a sin to kiss me?”

  “I ain’t never thought nothin’ about it,” he lied.

  She came so close that he edged away.

  “Kiss me, Kevin.”

  “I don’t want tuh.” He hated the sound of his own voice, petulant and timorous.

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “Gee whiz, sure I like yuh. But —”

  “Kiss me, Kevin.”

  Before he could escape, she had cupped his face in her hands and kissed his lips.

  “Oh, golly, yer silly,” he muttered stupidly.

  “Did you like that?”

  “Don’t ask so many stupid questions.”

  “Would you like to play a game with me?”

  “Huh? What kinda game?”

  But he was ready to play anything, so long as it had nothing to do with kissing.

  “You’ll be scared.”

  She gave him a sly little smile.

  “No, I won’t. I ain’t scared a nothin’.”

  “All right. Put your hand there.”

  “Aw, this ain’t no kinda game a-tall. This is jist some more a yer —”

  “Put your hand there, I said.”

  He hesitated, blinking.

  “Scaredy cat!”

  “I ain’t scared!”

  “Put your hand there, then.”

  He obeyed. Her flesh was soft, warm, stirring.

  “Do you like that?”

  “I don’t know.” His lips were quivering.

  She laughed. “Now, I put my hand there and — why are you blushin’? Are you scared?”

  “No,” the word was a croak.

  “Now, this will be ever so much nicer —” Too astonished and frightened to resist, he let her put his hand between the buttons of her blouse.

  “Madge calls them my little pears,” Nancy laughed. “She says I’m a little ripe pear tree. Do you like that?”

  He groaned.

  “Oh, I bet your belly feels all funny and stirred up like creek water! That’s even better than skatin’, isn’t it? Do you remember that first night we went skatin’ and you said it was like runnin’ across the moon? Well this is just as if you’d swallowed a little piece of the sun and it was shinin’ all bright and warm inside you —”

  “Don’t,” he whispered. She was unfastening buttons. “Don’t do that!”

  He wrenched her hands away.

  “Kevin! You’re hurtin’ my wrists!”

  “I better go home.”

  He would not have been more horrified and disgusted if her face had turned to a fleshless, grinning skull before his eyes. He thought of June Larlee and of Delilah and of Jezebel. He thought of how Eve had tempted Adam. In his mind there rose the figure of the serpent — a wriggling, hot, obscene thing . . .

  Her blouse was half-open. He wanted to — No!

  “What’s wrong, Kevin?”

  Her eyes were hurt, scornful.

  “It’s a sin!” he shouted.

  “You liked it! You liked it!”

  “No! That’s a lie. I couldn’t never like no sin. It’s terrible wicked sin. People go tuh hell fer doin’ things like that.”

  She drew her blouse together.

  “Don’t look at me that way, Kevin.”

  She sprang to her feet.

  “Kevin, I wouldn’ta let any other boy in school touch me like that! I thought you wanted to, Kevin.”

  He pulled on his mackinaw. And after they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they knew that they were naked and they were ashamed . . .

  A moment ago she had been on the verge of tears, pleading with him. Now her voice rose in contempt and rage.

  “You’re just a baby! You don’t know your — from a hole in the ground. I shouldn’t never a had anythin’ to do with you. I shoulda told Alton Stacey I’d be his girl — or Riff Wingate. You just wait until Monday, you’ll see me with Riff and when you go by I won’t even spit on you. You little —”

  Blind with humiliation, he opened the door.

  “Kevin! Don’t be mad at me, Kevin! I won’t really go with Riff. I promise, I won’t. I —”

  He lurched outside and stumbled along the narrow footpath to the road. The windblown pellets of frozen snow were like coarse salt hurled into his face.

  Twenty-Nine

  Judd had worked two weeks for a farmer, cutting and peeling pulpwood. But when he asked for his wages, the man told him impatiently that he could pay him nothing until spring. So Judd quit and went back to his futile wood chopping on the crown lands south of the creek. And, a few days after Kevin’s twelfth birthday, Biff Mason informed Judd that he had reached the limit of his credit at the store. In relaying Biff ’s words to Mary, Judd howled with fury and muttered dark threats. Some morning, he predicted, Biff would wake up to find that his store had burned to the ground.

  Martha urged him to seek help from the township overseer of the poor. The suggestion made Judd spring to his feet and shake his fists like a madman. “I’ll fry in hell a-fore I’ll ask for help from any man!” he roared. “We’ll live on what we got or we’ll starve tuh death. One thing’s certain: Judd O’Brien ain’t never gonna ask nobody fer nothin’!”

  The pantry contained almost a barrel of flour and the cellar held a bin of half-frozen potatoes. So, three times each day, they ate butterless bread or biscuits and the wizened, green-tinged, bitter-tasting potatoes that were edible only when drowned in lard-and-flour gravy and drenched with salt. Judd affected to relish this fare. “Ain’t nothin’ puts meat on a man’s bones like taters,” he grunted as he dug his fork into the mud-coloured porridge before him. And every night he padded to the pantry in his socks and came back with a cold, dry biscuit which he covered with salt and washed down with water. As he ate, he smacked his lips and sucked his teeth like one enjoying a rich and hearty repast. Kevin was almost convinced that Judd ate such food through choice.

  Mary refused to eat at the table. At me
altime she sat, chin in palm, in the chair by the window and stared at the naked lilac hedge and at the rose bushes, which the weight of the snow had borne to the ground. Two or three times a day, she stole into the pantry and nibbled a biscuit in secret. And, Kevin knew, her letters to her imaginary correspondents were filled with descriptions of banquets.

  In mid-February, Judd sold the second cow to meet a payment on the house. Otherwise, he said, he and his family would be thrust out in the snow. As the cow was led out of the yard, Grandmother O’Brien stood at the window and watched, her brick clutched to her waist.

  “It jist seems tuh me that God’s put a curse on this here house!” she said. “It jist seems like God’s tryin’ tuh punish this here house fer some awful sin that’s a-goin’ on in it.”

  “Judd being out of work for three months has a helluva lot more to do with it than God has,” Mary snapped. Kevin looked up in amazement: his mother almost never swore.

  “Curse an’ swear as much as yuh please, me girl. There ain’t a sparrow falls without the Good Lord a-knowin’ about it. And the Good Lord allus punishes sin. When a house is fulla sin, the Lord jist naturally reaches out His hand an’ smites it —”

  “Oh, what do you know about it! You aren’t God!”

  Grandmother O’Brien’s voice was a whiplash of scorn, “No, I ain’t God! I never said I was! But I know sin when I see it! I ain’t blind, me girl — these old eyes is tired but they ain’t blind. I know about the wicked, ugly, unclean sins a the flesh! I’n see ’em right under my nose! I know that God will punish an adult —”

  “Shut up! You shut up your dirty old mouth! You foul old woman! Ever since I’ve been married, you’ve been sitting around here blatting about sin. To hell with you and your sin! I’m sick and tired of hearing about it.”

  Grandmother O’Brien turned to Kevin, who sat trembling in a chair by the table.