The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  “I’m sorry, Margie,” I said. “That’s about the worst thing I ever heard.”

  “The first times we did it I felt like a saint, or a monster or something,” she said. “I felt smarter than everybody else, and sort of dangerous. Then it started making me sick and I couldn’t sleep and I felt like maybe I was possessed or something. I almost asked my mom to get a priest. Like in The Exorcist.” She made a hissing noise. “But I knew it was me. My fault. But I can’t ever erase it. You probably hate me now, right? And I guess I’ll go to Hell about twice over.”

  “I don’t believe there is a Hell,” I said. “And if there is, I’ll be there too, and so will all my friends. Who cares?”

  She exhaled. “You’re nice, but I bet you already want to get away from me. I know what people must think, boys. Anyway, I deserve it.”

  Actually, she was partly right. I wanted to be away from her where I could think about this and decide how I felt and maybe get used to it. I strained towards logic. She’d been very brave to tell me, and I thought she must be feeling relieved, if not actually better. She needed me, then. Amazing. And it occurred to me, goose bumps making my scabbed legs hurt, that Margie was the only person who had touched me, for years, without using a belt or extension cord or fist. Feeling sorry for myself mixed in with feeling sorry for her, and something hooked in my chest.

  “I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself,” I said. “And I’m glad you’re not ordinary. I don’t care about the other thing.” That wasn’t true, yet. But I hoped it would be.

  “I was going crazy from keeping it secret. I had to tell you. I’ve been practicing what to say ever since that day in church when you smiled at me and I knew I still wanted to be alive.”

  She hung onto me and pressed against my shoulder, blinking back the tears. The ache in my throat spread into my face. Everything seemed so important. I pressed my lips to the damp hair over her ear and whispered that I loved her, and she clung to me harder, and then lights were shivering in my eyes.

  I barely even sniffled, but Margie knew. She began to brush the hair back from my forehead and to kiss my cheeks. She stopped crying, whispered, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.”

  After a few seconds, of course, I realized how I must sound. I cut a sob in half, stopped. I sat back exhausted. “Damn it,” I said. “Man, am I embarrassed. What’s wrong with me?” I was off guard and a reflex sniffle came out like a hog-noise. “Excuse me,” I mumbled. “Don’t ever hurt yourself again, okay, Margie? You’re the only person I’m comfortable being humiliated in front of.”

  She giggled through a sniffle. “I started it. I’m more humiliated than you.” She kissed my cheek. “Listen, I was too dumb even to kill myself right. I got the razor out of Mama’s Gillette. The cuts on my wrists weren’t much worse than the ones on my fingers from holding the razor. I fainted and hit my head on the toilet.”

  The idea of Margie’s blood made me weak. We were wrapped around each other, sniffling in turn. It got abruptly dark. I assumed the streetlight had burned out. Dogs began to bark all over outside.

  We talked about her parents’ divorce. Also, she had an older brother in prison. I whined about my hernia and my parents beating me. We talked for I don’t know how long. Finally she said, “Walk me home?”

  We went out into the drizzle, every light in the neighborhood off. “It’s mighty dark,” I said. A flashlight beam floated over someone’s backyard, shimmering with needles of rain. “The power must’ve gone out.”

  “Francis,” Margie said, “what are you doing next weekend?”

  “Well, I’m supposed to do something with the gang …”

  “Oh. Because Mama’s going out of town.” Margie folded herself around me from behind, arms across my chest, chin on my shoulder, one thigh slid between mine. She spent a final sniffle. “I wish you’d find a way to come over and watch for the ghost with me. See if she’s real or if I’m just crazy. Maybe it would make her go away. You could sleep in my room. I mean, if you want.”

  She held me in the dark. My face was cool from the rain. A few blocks away a siren bansheed and a whirling red light swept the treetops like fire. I raised my jar and sucked down the last burning trickle of liquor, and then I hurled the jar as hard as I could towards the street. After the burst there was a long tinkling sound as the jar disintegrated, the lid stammering across asphalt, and a long beam of light swung from a backyard towards the sound and made the pieces of glass glitter.

  Precipitation and Anchovies

  When I got to my yard I saw Tim hunched on the stone bench like a gnome, feet scissoring above the grass. I told him I had to go inside and get bitched out for being late. The streetlights had returned the familiar landscape, brought to mind the regular rules and punishments. My mouth was horribly dry, my clothes wet.

  “I wouldn’t grovel to my parents for a while,” Tim said. “I smell booze on your breath from here.” His hair strung over his eyes and ears, dripping water onto his Bogart-style trench coat.

  I sat down beside him, further soaking my corduroys.

  “You look ghastly, Francis. You didn’t weep in front of that girl, did you?”

  “Not so loud,” I whispered. “My folks will hear us.”

  He hopped down and stood, trench-coated, and looked at the top of my head. He stretched himself, vertebrae spreading, neck thinning, until with the extra inch he was as tall standing as I was sitting. “Come on, then,” he said. “We’ll get something for your breath and hide out in my old clubhouse. You ever had anchovies?”

  We shattered puddles on the way to Riner’s store. Inside, some old men were drinking beer and shooting pool. A boy with bad acne bowed over the pinball machine in back, bumping it with his hip, slapping the flipper buttons, making bell-and-buzzer music. I slid the cooler open and pulled up a Coke while Tim ducked and shimmed a tin of anchovies into his sock. Mr. Riner, pistol holstered at his side, squinted at the fuzzy black-andwhite TV at the end of the counter. He rang open the register, took my dollar. He was bald and had fingernails thick as nickels.

  Tim always said that when you stole something, you actually paid for it with fear and worry, the currency of the outlaw.

  Riner chuckled at something on Hee Haw and trickled coins into my upward palm.

  We mushed through the lane into Tim’s backyard. It was dense as a jungle. Tim’s dad called it the only natural ecosystem in the neighborhood, but he kept the front lawn trimmed for his wife and for the neighbors. Frogs were singing.

  The clubhouse, behind the garage, was five squares of plywood we’d dragged from the lumberyard one Sunday and hammered together. We opened the door panel, crouched inside. We sat on warped tea crates and Tim crackled the wrapper off the anchovy tin and started rolling it open with the key. The only light sprayed through a small galaxy of holes on one wall where Tim had tested his dad’s shotgun. “So give me the filthy details,” he said.

  “There are none.” My imagination was torturing me with a scene of Donny and Margie in bed, and when it got the most hideous (both of them naked and bucking, licking each other’s mouths, sweaty, groaning), that little section stuck in an instant replay mode.

  “Confess, man. I set you up in that cozy Maxfield Parrish scene. Share it for godsakes. I’ll probably be a virgin until the day I shoot myself.” Hints of fish came from Tim’s corner. The buckshot holes speckled his face with light. He finished coiling the lid off the can. I recalled kissing Margie and my stomach ached.

  “It’s sort of private,” I said, thinking even the good parts would spoil if exposed to another boy. “Who’s Maxfield Parrish again?”

  “Private? Shit, two days with a girl and friendship goes down the toilet. Fine. Then you’ll never know why the electricity went out tonight.”

  “You didn’t do that.”

  Tim smacked his lips. “Goddamn, these are tasty. Here, have an anchovy, get rid of that booze breath.” He passed me the tin.

  “What did you do to the lights?” I
peeled a greasy strip out of the can and laid it in my mouth. I crunched prickly little bones. It tasted like a minnow half-dissolved in salt and oil. I gave them back to Tim and dug out my housekey and pried the cap off my Coke. I guzzled some, burped. “Those fish are corroded,” I said. “Okay, I kissed her under the big magnolia tree again. We made out a little.”

  “And you started crying?”

  “I didn’t say that.” I gulped more Coke, wiped greasy fingers on my knees. “It was part great, part awful. I can’t say any more.”

  “Aw,” he said. “My heart bleeds like a pig for you.” He wadded a tiny fish into his mouth, snorted at me. “ ‘Can’t say any more.’”

  Rain drummed onto the flat wooden roof and dribbled down the inside walls, reviving the mildew smell. The frogs got louder.

  “It’s weird,” Tim said quietly, chewing. “I’m not afraid of jackshit. I’ll take any dare, fight guys twice as big as me, I don’t care. But the few times I’ve talked to a girl I liked—” He sucked a piece of fish from between his teeth. “—it’s like my mind turned into a Hallmark card. And I get clumsy.”

  “Whatever’s the most important is the most scary, I guess.”

  “Yeah, so,” Tim said. “Are we going to trade secrets?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please. It might be helpful to me.”

  “It’s not. It’s not a regular secret. Not normal.”

  “Oh, Jesus, now you really have to tell me. Come on.”

  “It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Fuck! We’ve been best friends for three years. I taught you every interesting thing you know. I’m going to tell your mom you showed us her copy of The Sensuous Woman if you don’t tell me.”

  “You would not, you bastard, you’d be ashamed.”

  “Please, I swear I won’t tell.”

  “Not even Rusty?”

  “Nobody. I swear. On William Blake’s grave.”

  Telling it, I grew exhausted again and ashamed and then relieved, like going to confession myself. I meant to hold back the worst part, knew Margie didn’t want it told, but it heaved itself up and then it was out in the clubhouse and sitting on Tim’s back too. We were quiet. Tim took a deep breath and let it out whistling like a falling missile.

  “You’re right. You shouldn’t have told me that,” he said. “Are you bullshitting?”

  “I wish.”

  The rain crashed for a while. Then Tim asked questions, shaking his head, studying me. He said, “It’s one of those goddamn sick Southern things. You know, Edgar Allan Poe did it with his own teenage cousin. I forgive him, of course, he was a genius. Donny’s just a putrid slug. Shit, you people.” Tim crunched the final anchovy, swallowed, spit, held his hand out for the soda. I told him to finish it.

  He turned it up and gurgled, passed the bottle back. “You can have the backwash.”

  I turned the bottle over and foam spattered into the dirt. I let the bottle thump to the ground. “What a world.”

  “Hell, you can comprehend it, though. Listen to those frogs. They’re going to mate. You think they agonize about who’s related to whom?” Tim creaked forward on the tea crate. “Let’s say you’re her brother—you’ve got this beautiful sister, you’re comfortable around her, sleep in the same house—”

  “Hush, man. Come on.”

  “Sorry. I’m willing to avenge this thing, just say the word.”

  “She avenged it on herself. Let’s bury it, okay?”

  “I envy you anyhow, you lucky bastard. Very romantic. Dark secrets, kissing under the lotus blossoms, ghosts … and what about this private pajama party you’ve got scheduled?”

  “Tell me about the electricity now,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Oh. Nothing. I was bored. I took my axe and chopped down a utility pole. It didn’t take two minutes.”

  “Jesus! Aren’t we in enough trouble? Are you taking pills again?”

  “Fuck!” Tim shot up and his head banged the ceiling and the clubhouse hopped and particles of something rained down my neck into my shirt. He swatted his leg, stomped, cradled his head, cursed.

  “What?” I said, crouching up. “What!”

  “A fucking big roach ran up inside my pants!” He peeled his jeans up over one knee, battered the door flat onto the grass, and tumbled out into the rain. I got out too. The clubhouse had shifted slightly, showing some bare earth and a stream of glistening cockroaches panicking into the grass towards the garage. “Gag a maggot,” Tim said, standing, shaking out his trench coat. “You could rope and ride those sons of bitches.” He unrolled his pantsleg. “Let’s book on out of here and go see the wreckage.”

  We hauled Tim’s bike out of the infested garage, and I pedaled with him sitting on the handlebars. On the black, shiny street the tires sprayed fans of water, flung grime up the back of my denim jacket.

  Tim craned his head around so I could hear. “That power line snapped loud as a gunshot. Then total darkness, except for blue fire. The lemming types came out of their houses with flashlights. Going to light up the world with those flashlights, I guess.” He laughed. “I stopped them all from watching Happy Days. Forced their IQs up a couple notches.”

  Two blocks away, people with umbrellas were ungrouping from the entrance to the lane. A long truck occupied the entire curb, a jagged, weathered utility pole strapped inside its bed. We coasted up into a creosote smell.

  A man in a hard hat was leaning out on a belt from the top of a new pole sunk beside the stump of the old one. He snipped and tied something and slid a tool into his pouch. Across the street, a CB radio growled and hissed inside a power company truck. A man with a hard hat and a devil sunburn stepped out and stared at us, began walking over. My mouth was as dry as if I’d sucked a green persimmon. I licked rain from my lips. I pedaled us out of the light and away, turning down a different street in case he was watching.

  For the third or fourth time that week, I crackled with adrenaline. I doubled back, spun into Tim’s front yard. He slid off the handlebars.

  “Trouble is our only defense against boredom, Francis. You know that’s the truth.” He took the bike as I dismounted. “Look, tell your parents you’re spending next weekend at my house. My parents are having that party Friday, so all the adults’ll be occupied. You sneak away to Margie’s, gain your manhood. Saturday, we camp in tents in my backyard and leave when it’s dark to free the wildcat.” He spit noisily. “The more dangerous life is, the better. Scary equals important, right?” He laughed and rustled away in his trench coat, walking the bike into the garage.

  I pounded across the street and walked calmly in the front door, trailing footprints from my squishing sneakers. Daddy was sitting in front of the TV with a beer. A tiny Johnny Carson mimed a miniature golf-swing. I stood dripping, ready. Daddy turned his fist and frowned at his watch, sucked his teeth and ignored me. I slogged upstairs, stripped, and got into dry underwear.

  In the bathroom I cupped my hands under the faucet and slurped water that seemed to have gushed over sugared ice. I couldn’t get enough, my stomach swelled like a water balloon. I brushed anchovy residue from my teeth and tongue. I had a couple of more swallows of water, then went and climbed into my bunk above Peter’s snores. Gretchen’s dog tags plinked.

  The dry sheets felt wonderful and caused me to squirm, stretch. Rain pattered the window, and there was a casual boom of thunder which seemed to gather the whole world together, covering it like a giant blanket.

  It rained most of the weekend, and I didn’t see Margie.

  Shopping on a Budget

  The next night, while I was attempting to go to sleep, my brothers talked to each other from their bunks. They laughed at something, and Daddy came up the stairs with a beer in his hand and turned the light on. He said we were there to sleep, and that if he heard another peep out of us he was coming back with the belt and give it to us all. Then he went back downstairs to the late show and my mother. I didn’t understand how he could’ve heard them
unless he had the TV turned low and was listening out for us.

  Looking back on these sort of incidents, I can only think that because their room adjoined ours it was important to them that we be asleep before they went to bed, if they wanted privacy. But all I knew at the time was that I drifted off to sleep that night with my brothers whispering, and abruptly the light was on and the sheet was stripped off me and my dad was slashing me awake with the belt. I judged him a cruel son of a bitch, Mama was guilty for allowing it, and if I was a juvenile delinquent I might as well blame it on that. The adult world was baffling and mean and I cared nothing for its laws.

  We marched down Waters Avenue towards the shopping center. I had two large Rexall bags under my shirt, tucked into my pants, scratchy against my dampening belly. Rusty carried some old receipts and a ministapler to seal the bags after we’d filled them with supplies. Tim had loaned me sunglasses with tiny rearview mirrors inside each lens so that I could be the lookout. The mirrors were too small for details, but satisfied some James Bond notion we all held.

  Joey, his thighs slushing each other as he tried to keep pace, panted, “Since this is my … first time … why can’t I be lookout?”

  Tim said, “You’ve got to swipe something to be in the gang. It’s Francis’s turn to be lookout. All you have to do is steal five small flashlights, okay? What else do we need?”

  “Something to carry water in,” I said.

  Tim said, “Water’s for sissies. We’ll get some quart Cokes. The caffeine’ll keep us alert.”

  Wade wanted candy bars. Rusty, beef jerky. Tim wanted to have sour pickles in the little bags with their own juice.

  “Pickled pigs’ feet,” Joey added, blinking sweat behind his glasses.