The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  But the kiss was so sweetly, so quickly, given. It would have been rude to refuse. Put it away, save it for Easter, tally up your virtue, I thought. I glanced toward our square yellow-brick school, toward the rectory, the convent. Not a witness in sight. Inside, at Mass, they were reciting the Creed by now. We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen. I peeled back the foil. I took a bite. There was a loud bang. I popped to my feet and shoved what was left of Paula’s gift into my pocket. I turned to see it was the screen door. The slamming of the convent door, and there was Sister Christine, hiking up her habit, dancing down the steps.

  Sister Christine was our sixth-grade teacher. I loved her. You know how there always seems to be one nun in the bunch who’s different, cool. That was her, Sister Christine. She had a twelve-string guitar and a bucktoothed grin that made you want to sing. She was a tall, handsome woman with reddish brows and, I think, red hair—though that was another mystery that remained just beyond the veil. She still wore hers while most of the other nuns had taken them off. I asked her why once and she said, “I wear my veil as a constant statement of a deeper reality.” She was full of sayings. During class she’d often repeat, “Remember, it’s through discipline that the transcendent enters our lives.” She’d grown up on a ranch north of town and you could see it in her mighty stride. She marched straight for church, swinging her guitar case. Her rosary beads clacked against her thigh. I chewed fast and held still on the steps. She came to a halt and turned her head.

  “Marty,” she called out. “You’re late.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  She took a quick glance toward church, then walked over to the top of the steps.

  “Lord, it’s so clear today.” She caught my eye. She was one of those adults who, when they looked at you, really looked. I ran my tongue around my teeth and swallowed, hoping to erase any trace of my transgression. “Marty? Are you sick again?”

  “I’m OK. How are you?”

  “Fine. Just . . . not sleeping well.” She moved down a couple steps toward me and propped her guitar case up, held the neck of it. “Have you been practicing your tunes?”

  “Yep.”

  Sister was the first person in the world who ever said she thought I might be musical. That’s how it started. Now I was studying with her twice a week, during recess, just the two of us chatting on a pair of stools, me learning chords on my cruddy little guitar. Tie me kangaroo down sport, tie me kangaroo down. I was always glad to be with her and not out on the playground, worrying about which sort of ball might hit me in the head.

  “Marty, you need to get a better instrument. A real guitar. They’re not that expensive. Why don’t you find a way to earn a little extra money?”

  “A job?”

  “You’re at the age where that might be really good for you.” She gazed again toward the mountains. “Hard to believe Lent’s already here. Everything’s going to bloom soon. What did you give up, Marty?”

  “Chocolate.” I looked down at my loafers.

  “That’s a tough one.”

  I nodded.

  “Our Lord spent forty days and forty nights in the desert with no food or drink. And all for us.”

  “Why us?”

  “We’re blessed.”

  “He must’ve nibbled something.”

  “Nope.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s written.”

  “Forty days. Why so long?”

  “Lent is good practice for when you grow up and have even greater appetites to curb.” She looked right into my dark, chocolate-stained soul. “These actions,” she said, “are part of our redemption.”

  “I know.”

  “A way of buying back what was lost.”

  “Sister . . . what did we lose?”

  “Oh . . .” She stared far away over the treetops. “Our true place of rest. Our home with God.” She picked up her guitar. “We just have to keep winning our grace.”

  My stomach growled: grace drowning in Hershey’s.

  “Come on. Hurry up, or we lose.” She started toward Mass, then stopped suddenly and turned back to look at me.

  “One day your soul shall be released, Marty.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, faith. You’re a good boy. You’ll be released.”

  “From what?”

  She glanced down at her sensible shoes. Her eyes had the most sorrowful look. A look that made me want to squeeze her hand or give her a kiss.

  “From loneliness,” she said. “From being alone.”

  We both stared toward Mount Evans. One stately cloud, all marbled and bright, slid slowly north. She nudged me in the arm with her big elbow.

  “Look at those hills!” she cried. “Nil Sine Numine.”

  “What prayer is that?”

  “Not a prayer, exactly. It’s our Colorado state motto: ‘Nothing without Providence.’ ” She snatched up her guitar and stepped swiftly. “Come along . . . can’t keep still. Time to move.”

  5

  SISTER’S SUGGESTION THAT I find a way to earn money gave particular motion to the motion of things.

  I got a job. And the most astonishing thing about becoming a Denver Post paperboy, besides ringing people’s doorbells and taking their cash, was that suddenly I was friends with George Doyle. Chubby, mean, paperboy. The neighborhood menace. Though he was Catholic and lived just around the corner, chances of us ever being chums were slim. He was public (McMean) and two years and most of puberty ahead of me. His idea of fun was dropping a lit M-80 firecracker into the corner mailbox. Bang! So I was astonished when, at our paperboy marketing powwows, he seemed to take a shine to me. He gave me advice and I gave him extra rubber bands. It was the bond of capitalism.

  He used to call me Marsh, short for Martian.

  “Marsh,” he bellowed one day, “that’s your mistake. Don’t ever collect from the Weinstocks on Friday night. Jewish people won’t touch money after sundown. It’s a Sabbath thing. Tip death. As for the Catholics, shoot for cocktail hour. Any day.”

  It was the Monday after Easter. A sunny day, the paper, slim. I flung the headlines onto the lawns of my patrons, happy to think how I’d become the final link between world events and the residents of Kearny Street. When I finished I zoomed over to George’s place, dropped my bike on their dried-up grass, ducked under their sickly weeping willow, and walked up to the porch. I felt queasy every time I came to fetch George but these nerves, I figured, were a small price to pay for the cachet of hanging out with a bona fide bully.

  I knocked on the screen door and immediately there were heavy steps. I prayed it wasn’t his dad. Tall and terrifying, he was chairman of the local NRA; had guns hanging all over the house like precious paintings. I’d gone hunting with him and George one Sunday in March. With Mr. Doyle’s coaching and a telescoped gun, I shot a gray jackrabbit right in the neck. Mr. Doyle congratulated me, one of the few times I’d heard him talk and the only time I’d seen his tight, crooked smile. He grinned as we walked through the tumbleweeds to examine the splattered body of the bunny. The rabbit’s eyes were open, frozen in a terrible question aimed at me. “Well done,” Mr. Doyle had said, nudging the belly of the rabbit with his boot. I felt sick. Worst of all, we just turned and walked away. Left it lying there, flies dancing around its bloody head. An act against all hunting rules. Now, whenever Mr. Doyle saw me he’d ask: “Wanna go hunting?”

  “Who’s there?” came a high-pitched voice.

  I was relieved it was Minnie, the live-in housekeeper.

  “It’s me, Marty.”

  “Oh. Oh . . . come in, hon.”

  She swung the door open, big smile on her face because, well, because it was me: the boy from Christ the King. She had a rag in one hand and a spray bottle of Parsons ammonia in the other. Minnie loved Parsons. Said it was the one true cleanser, like Catholic was the one true church.

  “George ain’t home yet,”
she said. “He’s running late on his route . . . trouble at school. Again.” Tough as a tank, dressed like a Howard Johnson’s hostess; Minnie scooted to the fridge and took out a quart of milk. “That boy’ll be the death of me.” She slapped down a glass, then leaned against the turquoise-colored oven and clipped the Parsons to her belt, where it hung like a gun.

  “Did you have a good Easter?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’s school?”

  “OK.”

  “Who said Mass this morning?”

  “Father Elser.”

  “Oh, now . . . he’s a saint.”

  I nodded, thinking, God, if she only knew what a surly saint.

  Father Elser, our priest, was German by way of Ireland and all shriveled from years as some kind of prisoner of some kind of war somewhere. It was all sad and vague but one thing was clear: whatever happened to him, it was our fault. He was always angry about something.

  On Holy Thursday the week before, he’d stormed into our sixth-grade class in the middle of reading lab and sent Sister Christine and all the girls to the multipurpose room. His face was red, the veins in his neck sticking out.

  “Vich one of you boys stole wine from the sacristy?”

  I had that reflexive moment where I felt sure I’d done it, started to raise my hand, but we all knew it was Ricky Flynn. He’d tried every trespass on the list. Ricky didn’t fess up so we all got the usual twenty Hail Marys. Then, instead of storming out, Father walked slowly to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk. We watched as he scribbled:

  The Sacred Seed of God.

  Through his thick tongue, he spoke.

  “Ven you grow from a boy to a man, Got gives you the seed of life. In each drop there are a thousand hopeful Catholics. After the sacrament of marriage in the sacred act of intercourse they will race to find the egg inside a woman. The fastest one will penetrate the egg, be born and baptized into the one true church. This will happen in Got’s own time.”

  It was stunning to hear him speak of this. To hear that human beings are inside of seeds inside of us. His good gray eye (the other was glass) wandered across our frozen faces.

  “Your genitalia are for procreation. Do not abuse. If you do, you abuse Got. A mortal sin.” With that he dropped his chalk and marched out the door.

  “You want some more milk, hon?”

  “No thanks, Minnie.”

  There was the sound of a key in the front door. Minnie stiffened. George dropped his coat on the hall floor and headed for the fridge.

  “School called. They said you ditched third period.”

  George glanced around and gave Minnie a filthy look. She fondled her trigger.

  “Wait until your father comes home.”

  “He doesn’t give a shit.”

  “George!” she cried, moving toward the basement door. “Dinner’s at six,” she said as she disappeared down the steps.

  “Come on, Marsh!”

  We jumped on our bikes and flew past the shoebox-shaped houses and out onto the dirt trails that twisted their way along Cherry Creek. Plump as he was, George was poetry on a bike, leaping off jumps and zooming down the paths like a jackrabbit. I nearly killed myself trying to keep up. I’d cracked my head open twice already, gotten stitches and scars. I wore them like merit badges, proof of being a boy. We zigzagged through the elms and aspens, their branches scribbled against the sky. Buds were everywhere but the leaves hadn’t burst yet. We’d just turned the clocks forward and you could feel, folded in that extra hour of light, the promise of summer. Of schools closing and pools opening. The late afternoon sun was strong, poised high above the Rockies, like a blazing whole note.

  Finally, worn out, we dropped our bikes and slid down the steep path right to the creek’s edge.

  “You got to lean into it,” George said, all out of breath. “You’re afraid of everything.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  He threw a punch toward my stomach. I flinched.

  “See,” he said. “See how you are?”

  “What?”

  “Nervous.”

  I leaned back and watched the muddy creek, picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could. It smacked into a tree on the other bank.

  “Hey, George? Where’s all this water go?”

  “Joins the Platte, the Missouri, the Mississippi . . . dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, I think.”

  “Wow, all that way?” I stared at the current. “It’s like Virginia Vale is connected to the whole planet by Cherry Creek.”

  “Don’t get weird,” he said.

  I turned and watched the rise and fall of the purple lettering—Led Zeppelin—written across George’s big chest. His black T-shirt was too small, Zeppelin stretched to the limit. His blond hair was damp, curled at the ends with trickles of sweat. He had brown fuzz on his lip; it had gotten thick lately. He told me how he was planning to use his new razor soon. I was waiting for all of that. The hair sprouting and body spurts described in the back of my Scout book (page 273). I was awaiting the big dream, the trigger, wondering if maybe then I’d get big. And strong. And sure.

  George grabbed a fistful of dirt, hurled it into the creek, and right out of the blue asked: “Hey, Marsh, was that counselor, Bob, at St. Malo the summer you were there?”

  St. Malo was the boys’ camp up in the Rockies run by the Archdiocese of Denver. Most of the counselors there were, or were thinking about becoming, seminarians—men training for the priesthood. It was a gorgeous place. My dad had gone there, my cousins.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Remember that guy, Father Mac’s assistant. Bob? He was always taking pictures of us, yelling about the right way to do pushups?”

  I did remember. An image popped into my head of him standing with Father Mac at Chapel. Tall guy with dark-framed glasses. He had combat boots but always wore penny loafers with dimes in them to dinner. But I remembered him especially because he told the most amazing campfire stories about jungle ghosts and war in Vietnam. He’d been a soldier there and brought back weird gongs and drums, which he used, at just the right moment, in his stories (Bang!) to scare the shit out of us. Even the older campers would scream. After lights-out he’d come around the bunks to make sure we weren’t too frightened to sleep. “Are you OK?” he’d whisper, pressing a piece of butterscotch into your hand or leaving a Jolly Rancher perched on your tummy.

  “You mean the guy with the ghost stories, right? Who slept in the dorm?” I asked George.

  “Yeah.”

  “He was cool.”

  “Well, he knows my dad from down the Veterans’ Club.” George dug a rock from the sand. “He’s starting a boys’ camp of his own up on a mountain ranch. He’s fixing it up, wants help this weekend. He’s paying ten bucks. Want to go?”

  “A ranch. Wow. But, I’d have to find someone to cover my route. And 8:30 Mass on Sunday—it’s my turn to serve.”

  “Well, try.”

  I told George I would, I’d try. The picture in my head of me on a ranch in the Rockies had already set my heart racing.

  6

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, right after school, I sat in our kitchen. Waiting.

  The earth trembled. I ran to the window to see what had happened. A huge truck had come to a halt in our driveway. I noticed the fat tires, the way the tread spilled off the concrete and onto dad’s lawn. God, there’ll be ruts of ruined grass, I thought. Dad’ll be furious.

  A man, taller than I remembered him at Malo, hopped out of the cab and marched toward the house. He had on the penny loafers.

  “Mom! He’s here.” I grabbed my pack off the hall bench, set it near the door.

  My home has never known such weight, I think. Mom must feel it, too; she sits so still at the end of the kitchen table. It’s like there’s a moose standing there, leaning against our stove. His genial smile, his green eyes are trained on Mom. One of his legs is crossed over the other, easy like. Both big hands are propped up beside
him near the front burners, his thumb covering the W of Westinghouse. His red flannel is unbuttoned enough to reveal the clean, white T-shirt that covers his chest and the little hairs that creep over the collar like an advancing army of daddy longlegs. He has a brown belt, faded Levis. Stuck in the loafers are the shiny dimes. His heft is leaving prints in the linoleum, I think, tracks through the kitchen like the ruts his truck is leaving on the lawn.

  He’s larger than the images I have stored in my head from camp two summers before. I can’t believe he’s in my kitchen. Except for when he whispered goodnight and left candy, he spoke to me only once that summer after fourth grade when I spent two weeks at Malo. It was when I walked by his room and he invited me in to see the photos tacked to the wall over his tiny bed and dresser. Black-and-white pictures of mountain ponds and aspen trees. And smiling campers standing next to mountain ponds and aspen trees. “Are you a photographer?” I asked. “Among other things,” he replied. He was the only counselor who slept in the dorm. Father Mac wanted him to keep a close eye on things, he said.

  Mom’s squinting at him. Her nail file midair, motionless.

  “When do you think your camp will open?”

  “I hope by the third week in June.” His voice is velvety. He shifts, uncrosses and recrosses his long legs. I think the kitchen will shift with him, tilt to the south. “We have a lot of work yet to do on the main dining hall.” He shoots me a look as if, in this instant, I’ve become his recruit, one of the we. “Plastering and painting.” There’s a ring of keys dangling from his belt. I try to count them. He’s got more than the janitor at school has. Fifteen, twenty, maybe. How many doors can there be in one life? How many locks?

  “How many boys do you expect to attend?” Mom looks so small, hunched at the table, asking her questions. I notice (perhaps for the first time ever) how shy she can be. Shy or preoccupied or both.

  “I’m not sure yet. I’m just getting out the fliers. But I don’t want more than fifteen or so a week. This way we can work together, build community. There’ll be the usual—archery and horseback and fishing and so on.” He pushes, with an index finger, his glasses up the bridge of his nose and scoops his bangs to the right. “But, more importantly, I want the boys to experience life on a working ranch. That’s my idea. A real introduction to husbandry.”