The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  “Would it be okay if I met you at the park tonight?” I didn’t feel right saying this, and I was relieved when she said no.

  “If you want to make it up to me, you can stay over Friday night and keep watch for the ghost.”

  “Then you’ll have to say you forgive me now. That way I can forgive Tim, and then I can tell my parents I’m spending the night with him. Okay, please?”

  “I might think about it.”

  “You know, if you really hated me, I’d die. You’re the only thing in the world.”

  “Don’t try to make me cry.”

  Because she was angry and pouty and my attachment to her was in jeopardy, I wanted her badly, physically, and my pants grew snugger, warmer. I stared at my poster of Neil Armstrong planting a flag on the moon. We wrangled about who had to hang up first. I submitted.

  I ate the entire bag of chocolate chip cookies. At dinnertime I pretended to be sick. Mama came up and took my temperature and gave me aspirin for my eye and knuckles. Her concern seemed larger than my condition. I lay in bed and finished the Tarzan book.

  After the birds started, I got up and opened the packet of Sea Monkey eggs, little aqua-tinted crystals which had probably sat in some warehouse for years. The water hadn’t cured for twentyfour hours, but I decided to risk it.

  Still in my underwear, I flipped my curtain back so a beam of sunlight sliced through the jar of water. I poured in the crystals, tapping the packet to get them all out safely. For one minute, as instructed, I stirred the water with a pencil. My brothers slept. The dog whined in a dream.

  Downstairs, in the coffee-smell, the television murmured the early news update. Tomorrow’s black protest march. Watergate. Skylab. A Mexican scientist claimed a cure for cancer. Partly cloudy. Daddy coughed.

  I stopped stirring, put my face close to the jar. Dozens of tiny whitish dots were flicking around in the water. Live creatures, hatched on my dresser, that minute. You can be amazed by nothing more than brine shrimp. I felt suddenly like that first sailor who stepped off a ship’s ramp onto the dried lava of the Galapagos, awed by the acres of tortoises and iguanas. I peeled the corner off the third packet and tapped out a few grains of food. They would eat. They would grow. They’d require care and responsibility. Someday I’d have to take them to the ocean, set them loose. In the jar the tiny shrimps clustered towards the spike of sunlight.

  The next few days were what we called Machine Gun Days. Those are days when you wish you could take a machine gun and wipe out everybody you see. Tim and the gang left me alone. Thursday night Margie called me, and while my little brothers listened on the kitchen extension, she blessed me with her official forgiveness, and I forgave the rest of the world and surrendered my machine gun attitude.

  Food Chain

  Friday morning, as planned with the gang, I skipped school. I shrugged my uniform on, swallowed milk, walked Peter schoolward, and then navigated the lanes back into our house. The dog was the only witness to my return. I cocooned myself in bed and went back to sleep. A racket at the window scared me awake, and I rolled over and shoved my face through the curtain.

  Gravel spattered the metal screen. I jerked back. Tim was standing in the lane, hooking his arm for me to come down.

  I stumbled below to the kitchen and opened the back door. Tim stepped in, then backed out, and held a one-second finger up. He hawked and spit, followed me upstairs.

  My mouth tasted garlicky, and I felt empty and irritable.

  “We’re the only ones skipping,” Tim said. “Rusty has to serve the school Mass this afternoon. Get dressed for adventure.” Tim’s hair was shagged out over his ears, and he wore cuffed jeans and a sweat shirt he’d silk-screened with a Picasso bull. He tapped my jar of Sea Monkeys. “These are just brine shrimp, you know.”

  “What makes you think I want to speak to you?”

  “You came downstairs in your underwear and let me in. Besides, you’re not capable of staying mad more than a couple days. By the way, I saw Kavanagh walking into the principal’s office with the dread manila envelope yesterday. I hope we haven’t waited too long.” He opened my closet and rummaged. “Where’s your whiskey jar?”

  “Margie and I drained it.” I dragged yesterday’s corduroys off the dresser and yanked them on. “You’re not drinking this early?”

  “If I give myself a liquid lobotomy by 10 A.M. I might Have A Nice Day like all the other idiots. It keeps me from throwing firebombs.”

  I pulled a T-shirt on, mumbling through fabric, “You won’t live long.”

  “Adulthood doesn’t interest me. My only worry is drinking’ll stunt my growth.”

  I went into the bathroom, flipped the light on, and a transistor radio hummed awake on the back of the toilet. This entertained my mother during the hours she spent concocting her face and hair. The music, all strings and choruses, tried eerily to be soothing.

  The mirror reminded me that my blackened eye had faded into bluish yellow. My hair stood up like a flame because I’d used my pillow that morning as a substitute for nighttime. I stroked it down with a brush, but it rose halfway again. I doused it with water.

  Tim peeked in. “When you finish fagging-off with your hair, we’re thumbing out to Ferguson House to buy the angel dust.”

  Ferguson House was the boys’ home out in the country. Tim said we were going to meet with the orphan kid who stayed with Rusty’s family one weekend a month. The boy would sell us PCP, an animal tranquilizer.

  “They use it in Jellystone—I mean Yellowstone,” Tim said, “to knock out grizzlies.”

  “Why are we thumbing all that way? Let’s ride bikes.”

  “It’s easier to avoid the cops on foot. You can’t hop fences with thirty pounds of bicycle.”

  In the lane we picked wild blackberries, tiny thorns dragging at our fingers like kittens’ claws. We ate them, and the seeds revenged themselves between our teeth. Tim spat purple. We crossed the street to Riner’s store. I stepped on the exact spot where my brother John had bled onto the sidewalk after the car hit him. For weeks afterward, kids had made pilgrimages to see the stain. Now it was just indifferent concrete.

  Tim said, “Let’s rev up our nervous systems with a Coke. My treat.”

  I waited outside so Mr. Riner wouldn’t mention truancy next time Daddy was in for a six-pack. On the door was a handlettered sign Riner had posted when blacks moved into the neighborhood: ONLY 2 STUDENTS ALLOWED IN STORE AT I TIME. Riner trusted our whole gang, however, and we stole from him with friendly regularity.

  Tim stepped out, shoving the door open with his foot. He handed me a sweaty, uncapped bottle. I turned it up, swallowed many times, and belched vigorously.

  “If only we could harness that as a source of energy,” Tim said. He took small sips because he didn’t know how to burp.

  We walked along Waters Avenue, wary of police cars. We finished our Cokes, leaving a finger of backwash, and hid the thick emerald bottles in a bed of ivy, for when we needed change.

  We talked movies, books, school. I stuck on the topic of Margie Flynn so long that Tim asked me to shut up. The day was warm and green, with birds singing at the edges. Each time a car approached, Tim aimed his thumb down the road.

  A Lincoln Continental, going the opposite way, slowed past us. It U-turned and overtook us, slid up on the shoulder and tooted. The car had vents on each side like the gills on a shark.

  “Oh hell,” Tim groaned. “Is that somebody’s dad?”

  We jogged over, and the passenger door swung out, and a man ducked towards us. “Can I give you men a lift?” He was almost my dad’s age, but had a mustache and short hair crowned with a medallion of naked skin. He wore an alligator shirt. Tim and I glanced at each other. Cool air poured out at us.

  “Thanks,” Tim said as he opened the back door and slid in, obliging me to sit up front. The man wiped a stack of mail from the passenger seat as I got in, then checked the rearview and spun out onto the road. He smelled clean, alcohol-sweet, in the ma
nner of wealthy men. “Where headed?” he asked.

  “Ferguson House” I said.

  “Really?” His gaze swung to me, then matched itself politely to his profile again. He named two of the boys at Ferguson House, asked if we knew them.

  “We’ve never been there before,” Tim said. “We’re visiting a friend of a friend.”

  “I see. Is it summer vacation already?” He said this archly, showed teeth under the mustache.

  “We got suspended for fighting,” Tim said.

  “I noticed your buddy’s shiner,” said the man. “Which school?” He pressed the cigarette lighter in.

  “Bible Baptist,” I lied. I unpinned an envelope that was working itself under me.

  “I knew it,” he said. “I went there when I was y’all’s age. You wear the wrong necktie and those people think you’re possessed by the devil.” He took a pack of thin cigars from the dashboard, shook a filtertip out, and extracted it with his teeth. “Anybody care for a smoke?” The lighter sprang up and he touched it to the little cigar.

  “We’re scared of cancer,” Tim said.

  The man said, “It’s important to be naughty once in a while.” His gaze drifted to me again, and I grew uncomfortably aware of my own body. I studied the mail between us. The top envelope was from a sweepstakes. Another came from a hunting lodge in North Carolina. Both were addressed to Richard Poythress.

  The man punched a button and the radio thumped on, and some quiet classical music blended pleasantly with the air conditioning. “I’m Ted,” he said. He smiled. “You boys have names?”

  “Eric,” said Tim.

  “Shawn,” I said. I started memorizing the name and address on the envelopes.

  “I’ll bet you boys like to drink, don’t you?”

  Tim said he liked Cokes a lot. The man said he meant real drinks. We were quiet. The man smoked. The car paused at a four-way stop, the turnoff to the boys’ home. Ted-Richard said, “That’s a Picasso on your shirt, right?”

  Tim said, “Yes, sir.”

  Ted-Richard drove on without turning. “I drew just like that when I was three years old.” He chuckled. I glanced back nervously. Tim was looking at me, forehead grooved.

  Tim said, “We missed the turnoff, Ted.”

  “I decided to invite y’all over for a drink. I’ve got a swimming pool.”

  Tim said, “We don’t have our bathing suits.”

  “What the hell,” the man said.

  I tried to keep breathing evenly. The man said maybe he could loan us swimsuits. Tim and I traded looks again and a sort of telepathic plan to jump out at the next stop.

  Ted-Richard said, “Have ya’ll ever seen a real polar bear? I’ve got one mounted in my den. I’ve also got some Super-8 movies that are hard to get ahold of. They’ll make your eyes pop out.”

  I said, “My dad’ll be looking for us at Ferguson House soon.”

  “Uh-hunh. Now how come he didn’t drive you out there, then?”

  “He’s at work. He’ll pick us up on his lunch hour. He’s a state patrol officer.”

  “Does he know you hitchhike?” Ted-Richard’s smile sharpened beneath the whiskers. “Come on, you boys are pulling my leg, aren’t you? If you don’t want to go for a swim, maybe we should swing by your school and see if we can straighten things out?”

  Tim was looking from me to the man to the shoulder of the road passing beside us at fifty miles an hour, then back again, and I was afraid he might try to leap out.

  “I guess you can let us out right here, Mr. Poythress,” I said. “I know where your house is, if we feel like stopping by on the way back.”

  Hearing his name, the man loosened his hold on the steering wheel and smiled with his mouth shut, then dragged on the little cigar. His movements became relaxed, like someone amused and ironical in defeat. The big Lincoln drifted over to the shoulder. We got out into the steamy heat and the car glided away.

  “Good move, man,” Tim said. “I thought I was going to have to pull my knife on him.”

  We hiked to a clearing on private land near the orphanage. We squatted against a split-rail fence around a pigsty and waited for the orphan drug dealer, while smallish pigs snuffled in the pen or shaded themselves under the shell of an old truck. In the shack beside it, a TV blared out lunchtime romance. A cat coiled itself tighter on the porch.

  A big kid stomped out of the woods and flipped a cigarette butt into a patch of dry grass. I disliked him on sight. He had a training mustache and a hickey the size of a crabapple on his throat.

  “Y’all got the money?” He addressed me because I was taller, and I felt embarrassed for Tim. He opened his mouth and stroked the little hairs alongside it.

  “Yeah,” said Tim, rising into his Picasso-at-the-beach stance, chest bullfrogged, arms wide. “You got the illegal substance?”

  The boy squinted as if Tim had spoken French. Tim flashed me the face that meant everybody in the world except us was a moron. Tim pulled out five dollars.

  The boy took the bills and folded each one separately. He tugged a chain on his belt and a leather wallet hopped out of his seat pocket and swung. He made a ritual of snapping the wallet open, nestling the money inside, and removing a tiny, heat-sealed corner of a plastic bag filled with something like sand. He gave it to Tim.

  Tim said, “Rusty says ‘Hey.’ “

  The boy looked over our heads toward the shack, then checked the watch on his leather wristband. “Y’all want to smoke a roach?”

  Tim shrugged. The boy fished a squashed cigarette pack from his boot and shook out a charred, home-rolled stub. He lit it and sucked noisily, then took several sharp breaths as he passed it to Tim. Sternly, Tim imitated the boy’s method.

  I’d had marijuana twice before, inspired by the drug-abuse propaganda films at school, but had never achieved a high from it. I worried it had ruined my chromosomes, though.

  Tim gave me the little cigarette, coughing through his nose. The boy peered over our heads again. I resolved that as long as I was stripping my genes, I might as well try for the full effect. I took a mighty drag, and it flared and crackled. My throat burned, and I coughed, mouth clamped, white puffs bursting from my nostrils. The boy smirked and took the joint, licked it to slow the burning. I decided I’d wipe it off next time.

  Tim inhaled some, coughed, smeared tears from his eyes. “You know this is the same crap they make rope out of?”

  The boy produced an electrical clip and pinched the last of the joint in it, and we sucked at it until it vanished. The final puff left me hacking. The orphan’s eyes were dark and shiny now, cracked with red. He grinned. The purplish blotch on his neck seemed more hideous as I imagined how he’d acquired it.

  “Are you sure that was real pot?” Tim asked. He made a horrendous noise and hawked a comet of phlegm towards the trees.

  “Don’t wrestle with it,” said the boy. “Let it take you off, like falling asleep.”

  I began to notice things differently. After a numb minute Tim said, “Hey, man, does it bother you not to have parents?”

  “Fuck no,” the boy said. Then he was still for a while and his features began to twitch. “Fuck yeah,” he said.

  There was a squeal and a bang, like a pig had been shot, and my heart detonated. I whipped around. It hadn’t been a shot at all, but a screendoor creaking open, slamming shut. An obese woman stood on the porch of the house. All the pigs trotted over, unharmed, and pressed up to the fence on that side. The boy said, “Later,” and went towards her. She hardly bothered to look at us. She wore an inadequate halter-top and too much green eyeshadow, but I felt an intense and troubling desire for her. I guessed the drug had me. The woman slid her hand in the boy’s back pocket, and they went inside.

  The weed’s effect was strong, but not extraordinary if you’d had it before. We had no precedent, though, and so it was a plunge into the rabbit’s hole.

  Everything glowed. My heart kept thundering, and I still seemed to feel there’d been a p
ig-shooting. Invisible claws gripped my shoulders. I was afraid Richard Poythress was after us. Tim looked at me with what seemed horror, and then I saw his face in different ways, as if I were many people seeing him for the first time, noticing one feature then another, instead of the shorthand way I was accustomed to. Beneath this was the recollection that God didn’t exist, nothing could save us.

  “Damn,” Tim said. “Why’d we smoke that stuff? We don’t know what was in it—”

  I advised myself to relax, exhaled hundreds of pounds of anxiety, then heard the hurricane inrush of my breath and felt it swell my belly. Distances lengthened, distances collapsed. Objects acquired a curvy shine like balloon sculpture. I chuckled. Tim winced.

  “Oh, man …” I said or thought.

  “So I’m small,” Tim said. “Stop staring at me.”

  “What?” I said. “Did you …?”

  We giggled. The sky burned neon blue. Tim sniffed his fingers. My neck tickled and I rubbed it, something crumbling moistly.

  “Look at this swarm of bugs,” Tim said in slow motion. He was rolling his face around like an aborigine in Disney World. “Where’d they come from?”

  The air was flickering with tiny white wings. A flying ant floated onto the hair of my arm. They drifted everywhere, lit all over me, and I brushed them off gently or blew on them until they flew away. I itched all over, but it passed.

  Tim fanned the air in front of his face, saying, “Goddamnit, I think I inhaled one.”

  I sat. Soft grass blades slipped between my fingers, and a drowsy wind breathed pine and nectar over me. I thought of Margie, recalled that I was spending the night with her, and had a physical reaction while seeming to believe back-and-forth that she was and wasn’t with us now. Images of Margie and Donny writhing on each other in bed now filled me with a strange lust. Insects snowed around us in crystalline sunlight.

  Tim pointed to a palmetto nearby. “Something jumped.”