Foolish Fire

by Willard, Guy

  “Guy. Telephone.”

  “If it’s Mark, tell him I’m out.”

  “It’s Jack.”

  “All right.”

  I went out to answer the phone. It had been quite a while since I’d last talked to Jack. In fact, not since the end of the school year.

  “Jack?”

  “Hi, Guy. Are you free this afternoon?” He sounded a little breathless.

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Mind if drop by in a little while?”

  “No problem.”

  I wondered what all the mystery was.

  Ten minutes later there was a roaring sound out front, and the sound of a horn. I looked out and saw Jack getting off a motorcycle. I ran outside.

  By the time I got there, Jack was standing beside the motorcycle and grinning broadly. “How do you like my new bike?”

  “It’s a beauty!”

  I admired its chrome finish, every little piece of which had been buffed until it shone with a high polish. The glittering silver contrasted with the tasteful flat metallic black of the rest of the body. The teardrop-shaped fuel tank was shot through with the thinnest piping of gold. It was a dream vehicle, a sexy symbol which was the very embodiment of tough masculinity.

  I thought of all the lucky boys at school who already owned bikes. During lunch break and at the end of each day—with an appreciative audience of younger boys looking on—they would fondle, stroke, tinker at their machines with an exhibitionistic delight. I had often dreamed of the day when I would have my own motorcycle and be allowed to join that select group of boys in their black leather jackets and boots, who wore their maleness so casually, so carelessly, like a scar earned in a knife fight.

  Jack could tell I was impressed. “Wanna go for a ride on it?”

  “All right!”

  “Where you wanna go?”

  “Anywhere. Just get me away from here.”

  He swung a long leg over the saddle and kicked up the stand. “Go ahead. Climb on back.”

  He waited as I carefully settled myself in behind him, then turning the key in the ignition, he pushed the bike away from the curb. With a press of the automatic starter button, the engine whined briefly before exploding into life.

  I felt my body vibrate in sympathetic rhythm.

  “Hang on.”

  I clutched at his waist as we shot off with a huge lurch and I felt my heart leap up with a thump. The vibrations of the powerful bike were like heavy, throbbing caresses along my thighs and buttocks. The leather of the seat felt warm and tingly between my legs.

  We shot straight through the Liddell Street intersection. As we rounded the slow curve leading past the park, I had to lean with the bike, dangerously low and close to the pavement. By now the road was a blur of gray and the scenery was indistinguishable from the giddy excitement in my heart. Memoryless, I lived only with the sensations of the immediate moment. I was intensely aware of my own body—the racing of my heart as it pumped blood through my veins, the muscles of my whole body clenching in an ecstatic spasm.

  My hands which had been clamped on either side of Jack’s hips gradually eased forward until they met and clasped in front of his stomach. In fact I was a little frightened at the eye-blurring speed with which we barreled past cars and took turns leaning over so far that I felt I could reach out and touch the pavement.

  The masterful way Jack controlled this splendid machine gave him an added status in my eyes. I didn’t feel the slightest resistance to clinging tightly to his back. The combination of the bike’s vibrations with the hard feel of his body against mine was beginning to excite me. I pressed myself even harder against his body. As we leaned and dipped with every undulation in the road, I felt at one with the machine and with Jack. One entity, we shot through the heart of the universe.

  When we finally slowed to a stop, we were at the intersection leading to the on-ramp of the freeway. I tapped his shoulder and shouted above the engine’s roar: “Where are we going?”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. Apparently my words were carried away by the wind. The light turned green and we shot up the ramp and onto the wide, windy freeway.

  As we roared down the fast lane, tears streamed back from my eyes, horizontally across my temple. I could feel the adrenalin pumping through my body, making me shiver.

  Suddenly it seemed to me I was experiencing something that had happened long ago, somewhere in another time. It might have been something in a movie. And then I remembered.

  It was all the way back in elementary school. There was a story in my second-grade textbook which, for some reason, I was never able to forget. It went something like this:

  As darkness falls, a black horse comes galloping, galloping from out of the gathering dusk. It approaches a village and halts outside a farmhouse door. A little boy comes crawling out a window, sleepily rubbing his eyes, and climbs onto its back. The horse gallops on.

  Next it comes to a town, where it halts outside another house. A little girl this time comes out, almost sleepwalking, clambers up onto the black horse’s spacious back.

  And the horse gallops on…on and on, from village to village, town to town, city to city. And at each place, children climb up onto its back, where they curl up and fall asleep. They look so safe and secure there.

  No matter how many children climb onto its back, there is always room for one more. For every child is welcome.

  And the horse gallops on and on through the night, never tiring, never slowing, inexorably onward, forever galloping, galloping towards the end of the night. And the horse’s name is Dream.

  At this moment, I felt that Jack’s bike was but another version of that fabulous horse. I could easily imagine the two of us riding off into the sunset on it, to the next town, and the next, all across America, in the night, all but invisible, going from town to town, city to city, leaving everything behind, picking up boys like me, befriending them, moving on. Jack was my heterosexual prince, come to rescue me from my fears and temptations, from my illicit desires…from Mark.

  There had to be boys like me all across America who wanted to be rescued, and they would be waiting for us. We would roar into town to pick them up and carry them away, for there was always room for one more.

  With a slight lurch and a change in the engine’s pitch, the bike abruptly slowed down. Jack was heading for the next off-ramp. As we wound down along a curving road that led toward the far side of the Wilds, I recognized the old airport road, little used now since the new freeway bypass had been built.

  We cruised for a while down this road until suddenly Jack turned off and steered down a dirt path which gradually got more and more overgrown with weeds. When we could go no farther without damaging the bike we stopped.

  All around us was scrub grass. The sun was setting, staining everything a washed-out dust color. Gradually I began to recognize where we were.

  This was the desolate stretch of scrubland west of the city where we’d often gone exploring as little boys, so long ago. The boulders embedded here and there like monumental markers in the parched scrubland made the place look desolate. Except for the railroad tracks which sliced a shiny welt through the landscape, there was absolutely no sign of life.

  We got off the bike and Jack parked and locked it. There was a slight wind. Jack continued up the path on foot, and I followed. The tall weeds through which we made our way bent and swayed in the breeze. My light windbreaker whipped out behind me and climbed up my back.

  “Why’d we come out here, Jack?”

  He didn’t answer. His earlier euphoria about showing off his new bike had seemed to evaporate sometime during the ride. He was in a somber mood now. I stopped asking him questions and silently followed.

  After about ten minutes, we were stopped by a barbed-wire fence which had never been there before. A sign nearby informed us that it had been erected by the city to fence off a proposed land development project. We went along its side until we came to a spot where trampled we
eds left a smooth clearing. Searching the ground nearby I found a stick to prop apart two strands of barbed wire so we could climb through.

  We slid down into the dried gully bed and climbed up the opposite bank. Slipping on treacherous loose stones and gravel, we made our way up the shallow trail leading to the old swimming hole. Soon the familiar boulders loomed just ahead. As we skirted the lip of the reservoir and made toward the shadow of the huge rocks, I recognized the old nooks and caves we used to play in.

  Just ahead was the flat ledge from which we used to dive. When I spotted it I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia. Somehow it looked smaller, less forbidding than it used to, but perhaps it was because it was getting dark. I thought of that long, heart-gripping plunge and the jarring slap of water which always hit my butt.

  I peered over the edge.

  The water—so cool and refreshing in memory—was gone. Nothing was down below but scraggly weeds clumped together, their shadows lengthened by the setting sun.

  “It’s gone,” I said. “What happened to the water?”

  I lowered myself until I was sitting on the edge.

  “Remember? The city dammed up some streams to re-route them to Echo Lake in the park.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. I didn’t think it would affect this place, though.”

  Far off toward the freeway, the cars glinted, flashing their windshields in the sun like message signals as they whipped along with a dull roaring sound. In the other direction rolled miles and miles of empty wasteland.

  “Changed, isn’t it?” said Jack.

  “Yeah. We used to have so much fun out here.”

  “Didn’t we, though?” He looked a little depressed.

  I wondered what was behind his strange mood. “Did you suddenly feel nostalgic for it? I get like that sometimes myself.”

  He didn’t answer. After a long silence, he said, “You still going with Vanessa, Guy?”

  “No. We broke up.” I laughed. “Now you can have a shot at her. With this bike of yours, it’s a cinch. She’s bound to fall for you.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded tired.

  “What’s the matter, Jack? You’re acting so weird lately.”

  “I got a girl pregnant.”

  “What?” I stared at him as the usual banal questions whirled through my mind: who? when? where? But I didn’t know what to say.

  He didn’t even wait for me to ask. “It was Marybeth. Do you know her?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “I didn’t use a rubber.”

  I thought of him dancing with Marybeth on the night of the Green and White Dance. He’d looked so happy and confident then—it seemed a lifetime away, locked away in a past so distant it was like fiction. Now he seemed so adultly tired. What had happened to him had happened to other boys as well—it was the gamble they all took. All of them, that is, except me. My own worries seemed so trivial now next to Jack’s. As always, he was far ahead of me. I was still the little kid with the little kid’s preoccupations, and he was the adult. I would forever be unable to catch up with him.

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked.

  “Get an abortion. That’s the only thing we can do.”

  “Where? How?”

  “At an abortion clinic. Or somewhere. There are places where it can be done. Her parents don’t even have to know about it.”

  “That seems so drastic….”

  “Yeah. I thought about it long and hard. I actually thought of having the baby. But there’s no way. For either of us. I want to go to college, and so does she. In the end…well, we decided to go through with the abortion.”

  “Is it very expensive?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it costs can be covered by selling my bike.”

  “But you just bought it!”

  “I know. At least I got to ride it for a week….”

  “When did you find out about the pregnancy?”

  “Just two days ago. You’re the first person I’ve told. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if I was gonna tell you or not today. But I had to tell someone. It’s been hell living with it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was a dull monotone, as if he were talking to himself, as if I weren’t even there.

  “You know, it’s not an easy choice to make. It’s harder for the girl, of course, but it’s also hard for the boy. And we used to joke about it, too, before…. It’s terrible just to think of it. Do you know, they actually scrape away a part of the uterus? It’s permanently damaged afterwards. She’ll never be the same. And the baby. It’s a living thing they kill. A human being.”

  He was looking down at the ground and I felt helpless.

  “Damn,” he muttered as if to himself. “One little shot of pleasure and you have to pay for it the rest of your life.”

  “Take it easy, Jack. It can’t be that bad. It happens all the time. You hear about it all the time.”

  “Yeah, to other people. This is me. I’m talking about me.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looked hard at me. “Listen, Guy. Promise me one thing. Promise me you’ll always use a rubber when you fuck a girl. Okay? Don’t do like I did. It isn’t worth the extra pleasure.”

  “Sure, Jack. I promise.”

  “That’s all I wanted to say, I guess. That, and showing you my bike.”

  I thought how little likely it was that I would ever have to fulfill the promise, for I was protected by something so much more powerful than a mere rubber sheath. He would laugh himself silly if he ever learned.

  “It’s getting dark. Should we head back?”

  “All right.”

  Without another word we walked back to the bike and returned to town.

  *

  As he was about to drop me off in front of my house, I noticed two boys walking down the sidewalk. Jack, too, was peering in their direction.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “One of them looks like Mark Warren.”

  “Who’s the guy with him?”

  “Guy named Alex Benniker.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Plays basketball for St. Mary’s. Good player, too. I didn’t know he was one of ‘them,’ though. Just goes to show—you never can tell.”

  “Yeah.” We’d pulled up in my driveway, and I got off.

  Mark and his friend seemed to be looking our way.

  “Look at those faggots,” said Jack musingly. “In a way, they’re lucky, I guess. They can fuck each other all they want and not worry about anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I almost wish I was a faggot myself.”

  “No you don’t, Jack. Don’t say that.”

  “I know. Well, see you later, Guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  He pulled out of the driveway with a wave and shot down the street, roaring.

  By now Mark and his friend were getting close. Alex was a tall boy with curly brown hair and he was bouncing a basketball lazily as he walked along, occasionally twirling around, feinting past imaginary opponents and shooting at phantom baskets. Beside him Mark was dangling a gym bag and laughing at his antics.

  My first thought was to duck into the garage to avoid having to meet them. But after Jack’s confession, everything to do with Mark seemed so silly; my fear of his tempting me seemed so immature, so childish. Some of Jack’s sad maturity had rubbed off onto me, making me feel superior, above it all. I wasn’t afraid of Mark anymore.

  As they approached me, Mark’s face froze and he stared straight ahead, looking right past me as if I weren’t there. Alex noticed this change in him and became cautious. This gave me confidence.

  “Hi, Mark,” I said in an exaggeratedly friendly manner. I looked at Alex, then back at Mark in what I hoped was an insinuating manner.

  Mark didn’t answer. As they walked past me, I noticed the glance they exchanged, and the subsequent look of suspicion Alex cast toward me. They continued on w
ithout a word, as if nothing had happened.

  I looked after them, smiling, but felt a sudden surge of anger boil up inside me. My limbs ached with the desire for violence.

  I wondered when they’d become friends. Mark had never mentioned Alex to me before. But of course it had nothing to do with me anymore. Mark was free to find a new friend with whom he could play his games. A new friend he could tempt in his bedroom.

  The lousy faggots.

  I felt the blood drain from my face.

  I went into my house and locked myself in my bedroom. After I felt enough time had passed, I came out to the living room. I still knew Mark’s telephone number from way back in junior high school.

  Mark answered the phone after a couple of rings. “Hello? Warren residence.”

  “Mark? This is Guy.”

  “Oh. How have you been?”

  I winced at the fake syrupy tone of his voice; the irony in it sounded so contrived that I felt embarrassed for him. “I’ve been just fine, Mark. As if you didn’t snub me today.”

  “Who’s the one who refused to answer my calls for the past two weeks?”

  “I was busy.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Since when were you friends with Alex Benniker?”

  “Alex? What’s it to you?” He suddenly sounded defensive.

  “Just curious. It’s just that I didn’t realize Alex was ‘like that’.”

  “You don’t even know Alex, and here you are making accusations about him. I’m surprised at you. I thought you were the one who was so open-minded about people’s sexual preferences. Alex and I are just good friends.”

  “Well, even if he’s not queer, I’m surprised he isn’t afraid of being seen with you.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Listen. I’m only telling you this for your own good. You shouldn’t be making yourself so obvious. A lot of guys in school would beat you up just for that. You’re taking a big risk.”

  “I’m not worried. They’re just jealous, that’s all. Most bullies are just that—jealous. Like a certain bully I knew back in the eighth grade.”

  “You’d better stop your insinuations—if you don’t want me to beat you up myself.”