Alter Boys

by Chuck Stepanek

  9

  Gus was now fully planted. The sensation of manic sperm, all searching for an escape route, was maddening in his scrotum. He concurrently thrusted with his body to increase the sensation and withdrew with his mind to prolong the experience. He tried to think of benign things: Baseball scores, balancing his checkbook, last night’s “I Love Lucy” episode. He had learned to flick these images through his mind to help savor the sensation. But the boy. The boy and his perky bottom would win over his mental stopgap. “A light?! Just a l-l-light?” The tone was no longer harsh; it was desperate. “Heaven.” Thrust. “The angels.” Thrust. “You h-have to see th-the angels.” Thrust.

  And now the boy squealed. Really squealed. Both from pain, and, had he been older and known the word, from mortification.

  10

  The 13 steps had been quick work. It was just a matter of pushing the snow under the railings and over the side. Daddy paused and relived the conversation with the priest. The priest had clearly said ‘sidewalks.’ He had not mentioned anything about the steps or the driveway. So that meant that daddy had done his job and had even done a bit more. He could go back to the rectory and tell the priest that he was finished but he would not mention that the snow on the back of the quad had been deposited on the grass and not curbside. It wasn’t that he intended to be deceitful, it was more a reflection of his inability to form the words to describe his totally justifiable actions.

  Turning away from the church, he throttled the shovel by the neck, stamped his feet twice and began walking toward the rectory.

  11

  Corky was openly sobbing. Gus had made a few breathless attempts to get the boy to stop his sniveling (It was clearly distracting from the padre’s pleasure) and then he relented after determining it was a lost cause. Besides, he was almost there.

  12

  The human mind is an amazing thing. The lobes of the brain that control pleasure and pain are separated by a thin membrane. The same applies for the sensations of happiness and sadness, courage and fear, desire and repulsion. When any of these senses get over stimulated, impulses can jump the membrane and trigger a reaction from the opposite side. You can laugh until you cry. Cowards under great duress have been known to perform amazing acts of bravery. There’s even pain induced pleasure.

  Until this night, Corky’s mind had been trained to lie dormant. He had the intellectual and psychological makeup of a small soap dish. Now there was a conflagrating electrical storm exploding in his skull. Synaptic impulses of pain, fear, repulsion and sadness shot across his brain. Bolts of serotonin flooded his pleasure and desire sensors. And in his mind’s eye the images whirled, separated and swam together again. The beautiful angels in heaven, his screaming pooper, Father Gus, omnipotent, beastly, the awful hard thing inside him, baby Jesus, hands and nails gripping his buttocks, blessed Virgin Mary, the telescope, the spider from the incredible shrinking man, Casey, cartoons, crying. The pulses whipped back and forth in his mind, the thin membrane no match for the onslaught, melting in resistance.

  He was racing down an endless dark hallway where portals, doors and iron grates exploded out, waggled violently on their hinges before slamming back into place. Windows, shutters, drapes, curtains and sashes opened and shut, danced and waved. Behind these he caught brief glimpses of garish figures: Satan’s torso with the head of baby Jesus, a gigantic spider with telescopic tentacles violating the Virgin Mary from behind, Casey the engineer haling him but not with the traditional trainman’s lantern but with a red hot pitchfork upon which was mounted the head of Harry the Happy Hobo. Harry looked none too happy in this scene. His eyeballs had been removed and squirming white grub worms and maggots filled his sockets and spilled across his cheeks.

  And then a final door opened. But this was not a phantom door in what had become the psychotic haunted house of Corky’s mind, oh no, this one was for real. A door that would end one nightmare and start another…

  The door opened.

  And everything stopped.

  Three people, two of them men and one a young boy, held frozen. All caught in the act. All three taking in the image from their own perspective and (for once daddy was not alone) speechless in voice and thought.

  The trio could not have been more statuesque than if having been instructed to pose for a photograph at the Sears portrait studio: Daddy in the doorway, shovel in one hand, doorknob in the other. Gus bent at the hips yet fully erect down below. Corky limp and utterly lost, lost in a catatonic blackness between the cyclonic storm in his mind and the blessed rescue/cataclysmic admonishment (he could not have told you which one) he was about to receive.

  How long they held that pose is unknown. It could have been an instant, a few moments, even untold eons in duration. But one of them had to move and it was Gus. Gus moved first and he moved fast. He released the boy, almost tipping him off the stool in the process, and withdrew his erection while frantically hoisting his pants.

  Corky was next. His hands left the scope while his body wilted back and slithered to the floor in one elongated movement. The pain inside him released, but his anal rim throbbed like fire. His naked torso puddled on the linoleum and he wailed out long and hard.

  And while Daddy didn’t move, what he did do was an absolute milestone. He spoke. He spoke first and unprompted. Fighting through the waves of confusion and anger he engaged his voice like never before: “WHAT?!” The word roared out of him. “WHAT’S – GOING ON – IN ---HERE!”

  The words drove into the priest like crucifixion nails. And while they may have been intended solely for the priest oh, ohhh how those words also drove into Corky. Corky’s wailing became a crescendo. He wailed in fear and shame of daddy’s presence. He wailed for God and Jesus and the angels that he had somehow displeased. He wailed in fear of the kindly priest who had turned savage. He even wailed in relief of the end of the torture. He wailed and wailed but had nothing left within him to wail for the most important part of all; his damaged mind.

  The priest, now hastily clothed, moved right into damage control.

  This scene was not what he expected, but that’s not to say that he was unprepared. Many nights he had lain awake pondering how best to respond should he be faced with an accusation. No, he never expected to get caught in the act, but he still had the same fundamental response in mind.

  He had always imagined it to be pre-planned meeting. First would come a phone call from an alarmed parent, followed by a face-to-face meeting (at the church of course!) where he could will himself (with the help of every holy emblem at his disposal) upon the accusatory parishioner. His stock responses to any accusations had always been planned to deflect attention or minimize the impact of his accuser. “Oh yes, we spent time in my room. Of course I comforted the boy with fatherly hugs. But what you’re suggesting, oh my, oh no, I am a priest who is committed to sacred vows. Besides, you know how boys like to tell stories. To bear false witness against your neighbor, against your priest, against your church, is to bear false witness against God himself! I am a loving and forgiving man, but to have such stories repeated would be an act of opposition to the holy institution of the faith. I pray that you talk to your boy, remand him as you see fit. Do that, and then you may let him know that I have already absolved him, saving him from any embarrassment of the confessional.”

  He had rehearsed the scene countless times but like many an aspiring understudy had never needed to enact the performance.

  This was different.

  There could be no deflection, no minimizing, no hiding. He was busted. Flat out fucking busted. Oddly, his now hastily hid erection was still at full throttle. The shoe string and the cock ring were still doing their job; maintaining the phallus status, despite the fact that at this moment he wanted to be a million miles removed from anything sexually based. The padre’s pants tented accusingly and made his words unconvincing.

  “This. It’s not what you think.” It was the best he could do.

  13

  Aft
er daddy had finished the church steps, stamped his feet and headed toward the rectory he did so with trepidation. He needed words. Or maybe just one word: ‘Done.’ If the priest felt the need to engage in further conversation then daddy would become absorbed with putting the coat on the boy and leading him out to the car. Maybe the priest had become tired of watching the boy and would be happy to see them go. One could only hope.

  Familiar creepers of social anxiety threaded through his chest as he entered the ante chamber of the rectory. Reflecting on his password, ‘done,’ made him oblivious to the fact that he was still holding onto the shovel as he headed up the hallway.

  The hallway doors were all shut now but daddy possessed perfect recall of doors and the meters that lay behind them. Besides, he could hear the boy and the priest engaged in some kind of game of celestial tug-of-war. “See the hea-heavens. Look for the l-light!” And the squealing of his son? Growing up with 10 younger siblings who could ever distinguish between the nonstop squeals of pain and delight. Besides, nobody ever paid any attention to it, nobody cared. At least the boy and the priest were talking so that meant he might be excused from participating. He tried the word one more time on his lips ‘done’ and then had opened the door.

  The scene before him did not unveil. There was no horizontal image that unrolled from right to left as the door swung inward. It was more of a mental blackboard with the word ‘done’ that melted into an image of… The priest was completely bare assed.

  It was obvious what had happened. The priest had been helping the boy look through the telescope and his pants had fallen off.

  But then the image changed. The priest was thrusting into the boy in a manner that every farm kid has witnessed with the livestock each spring. But, that can’t be right. It’s not done that way. Male? Female? Man? Child? Front? Back? Enter confusion – prepare for obscenity. If there were any doubt, it vanished as daddy caught an eyeful of the priest’s erection being frantically withdrawn from the boys behind.

  Daddy’s mind did not go through nearly as many gymnastic maneuvers as Corky had already experienced, but he did go through his share. The word ‘done’ now fully erased from the blackboard, he called upon one of his best stock words when he need to buy time. And fueled by some guttural force that he had been holding in reserve during a lifetime of constraint he had roared: “WHAT!?” “WHAT’S – GOING ON – IN ---HERE!”

  They were the last words he would ever utter to the priest.

  That’s not to say that Father Milliken didn’t have a few words of his own to offer. After his first fumbling ‘it’s not what you think.’ He floundered badly through his pre-planned repertoire. ‘I was giving a hug to the—‘ No, that wouldn’t do. ‘He was sliding off the stool and I tried to catch—‘ Strike two. ‘You know how boys like to tell stories—‘ Bad move, there was no story. He had been caught in the act. He had been caught and now all he wanted was to get this screaming kid and gawking sasquatch out of his room so he could begin to restore his dignity…and maybe, just maybe find a way to salvage his career.

  Daddy had not moved. He neither went toward the priest in anger nor in compassion toward his son. His hands remained gripped - left on the shovel, right on the doorknob. After his initial outburst of speech he had visibly recoiled, alarmed by the alacrity of his voice. And he had frightened himself. He had shouted. Shouted at a priest! In a rectory! It may not quite be a church but it was close. He swam with guilt for what he had said and what he was seeing. A word tried to form its way from his lips. ‘sorry.’ But what words there were had already been spoken. And so he stood; oblivious to the needs of his son, blind to any action to inflict upon the priest. He was a man who needed direction; who responded to orders. Fortunately Father Milliken gave both.

  “Take your boy and go.” The words came out as half command – half plea. “Just go.” He added for emphasis.

  Only now, having been instructed, did daddy go to his boy. He had released the doorknob willingly enough but the shovel had trailed along as he crossed the room. Squatting to the boy below him, and with a two handed operation to perform, only then did he notice the shovel. He rose again and turned back to the hallway, intending to return the shovel to the large supply closet near the front of the building. He had neglected to return it when he re-entered the building (subconsciously perhaps) as it symbolized the work he had done and possibly the work the priest would still like him to perform.

  “Leave it! Just go!” Gus flamed. Daddy leaned the neck of the shovel against the bed and turned back to the boy.

  14

  Tears were unaccustomed to Corky. His sedate life of TV, sleep and more TV left little opportunity for tears of any form or fashion. He very well could have been just another piece of furniture or spool of thread among his family’s possessions. He held a place of importance that was below that of lunch buckets and coffee pots. He was a thing, an object, a tolerance at best. That which is benign is not entitled to experiencing human emotion. And any practice with tears cried in the past had gone unresolved. No soothing, no cuddling. When he was done crying (for whatever the reason) he was just plain done.

  But this was no ordinary crying, and the time when it would be done would also go unresolved.

  Linoleum in the winter is the last place a half naked boy would want to paste his body. Unless that half-naked boy has just been savagely raped by a priest. The cold hard surface gave Corky a sense of reality when every other part of his mind and body was dealing with trauma. He lay on his side, knees drawn up and elbows together, only the absence of a thumb in his mouth left the classic fetal position incomplete. But there was no opportunity for thumb sucking. Long piercing howls and whoops driven by his diaphragm screamed past his voice box, and barely noticed his mouth. The screams seemed to emanate from his entire head.

  On the floor, three independent pools; tears, snot and drool overcame the laws of cohesion and created a puddled confluence of liquid agony.

  He had heard daddy shout. Had felt the priest release him. Had somehow ended up on the floor where he could hide. Hide from the thing that had happened. The things that were now happening. The things that would happen.

  Daddy was reaching for him. Not in a loving comforting embrace, but in standard parental duty. He was placed on his feet and his pants were pulled up. And then daddy was threading his arms into his coat and turning him in the direction of the door. Certain that he was now being ushered off to another form of punishment for whatever it was that he did, Corky lifted his cries to an even higher crescendo.

  “You’re not going to tell anyone about this! It was part declaration and part desperate plea. “No one will believe you! Make a statement against a pri—the church! Make a statement against the church and you’ll be excommunicated! It didn’t fit but it was all that the grasping father could think of. The Freudian slip would haunt him unnecessarily for weeks. “Mind you, not one person will believe you, not a single parishioner, not the church council, not even the police!” Now that was stupid. The boy’s cretin dad had probably not even thought about going to the police or even the church council for that matter and glib Gus had spoon-fed the concept to him like honey on a dipper.

  The man herding his young boy to the hallway said nothing. For Gus it was pure torment. His silent departure meant that he was saving his story for the authorities, or did it mean that he had indeed heard the warnings not to talk and was being compliant. Or was he just plain stupid, gutless, inept, dumb deaf and blind. God damn it all to hell! Why? Why? Why! It would have been better if they had fought it out, exchanged blows, wrecked the rectory! Ha! Headline: Crazy man attacks priest. But no, nothing! Not one fucking word after being caught in the act.

  Why? Why?! Why the fuck was I so careless! Sure, bang a preschooler while his moron father is right outside. Why didn’t I lock the fucking door? Dumb bastard, doesn’t he know how to knock? He latched onto the notion and in desperation shouted after the man: “You didn’t even knock! That’s trespassing! Y
ou make any trouble and I’ll give you trouble right back!” And with that he heard the front door of the rectory pulled shut. He was again alone.

  Gus slumped. His mind scanned for answers and found none. Likewise his eyes scanned the room, furtively looking for – for what? Distraction? Consolation? Affirmation? Again he found none. The room (unlike Gus) was all in order; save for the footstool and the dripping snow shovel. Rage boiled inside him. He savagely booted the shovel away. It flew across the room and clanged into his mahogany desk leaving an accusatory 4 inch gash along the side. Crystal bottles of ointment and oil chattered nervously while half a dozen figurine saints tumbled face-forward like fallen angels.

  “Shit and Shinola! Fuck me up the ass with a red hot poker!”

  Gus had to get a grip.

  Chapter 3

  1

  Dust, gravel and a scrim of oil layered the passenger side floorboard. That, and a small boy. After being led wordlessly into the car, Corky had instinctively crawled into the lowest, darkest, most confining crevice available. Daddy didn’t correct him, perhaps didn’t even notice. If others had been around they may have mistaken the boy for an amateur participant in a game of hide and seek. Crouched on all fours, hands over his ears, face planted into the crook of his elbows, knees locked against his chest, there was a childish charm to his attempt to be hidden. All you needed was another player counting to ten and the game would be on.