The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  Again, a frond jerked, and I heard a tap. I stared until I saw a green lizard on the green palmetto, chewing.

  Chameleons appeared in the landscape, some standing on their hindlegs. They sprang from perch to perch, catching the insects in their almond mouths. They chewed, stalked the next bug. I watched a green lizard turn brown.

  A redbird hopped along the fencetop, pecking insects out of the air, feasting. From the house, the cat slunk over and crouched by a tree, and a lizard streaked up the trunk. The cat flattened into the grass, ears back, flying ants collecting on its fur.

  “This is like one of those food-chain diagrams we studied,” I said. “And I’m kind of hungry too.”

  “I can’t bear to watch that cat kill anything,” Tim said. “Let’s book before that hoodlum gets back.”

  We stood up. The boy’s cigarette butt had scorched a sort of totem-face into the grass, and it grinned at me with glowing teeth. I ground the sparks out with my sneaker, imagining myself an initiate in some primitive, magical tribe.

  A Test of the Emergency Broadcast System

  The afternoon was slow and mysterious. My consciousness, due to the pot, was a bundle of telescopes: I’d start seeing through one of them and forget the others, then I’d recall them and my mind would shift, slide down another tube, and get trapped there a while, enlarging the details at the end. Sometimes I felt normal, then immediately I’d feel warped.

  We dozed on a bus most of the way back to town. I said goodbye to Tim outside of Blessed Heart, four hundred inside voices murmuring “Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ,” as the school suffered our weekly Mass. Tim crept into the vestibule to consult the list of forbidden movies, condemned by the U.S. Catholic Conference. He convinced his parents to take him to those.

  Safely home, I ate snacks and leftovers in a sequence that made me nauseated, then took a nap. It seemed I never fell asleep, but I remembered odd dreams. I went and collected Peter from school and deposited him in front of the TV with John. When Mama got home, I asked if I could spend the weekend at Tim’s.

  “Your daddy and I are going to a party there tonight. Why do you need to sleep over two nights?” She moved into the kitchen, lifted the phone receiver.

  “Tonight’s for drawing, tomorrow’s for camping out,” I said.

  “Francis, I won’t inflict you on the Sullivans two nights in a row.” Her hands, phone included, went to her hips.

  “They invited me.”

  In the living room the television was blank and whining, a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. My true purpose— staying the night with Margie—made me so desperate that real anguish tore my voice. I suggested that my artistic and outdoors pursuits were healthy, whereas beating your children bloody was something you didn’t want the neighbors to hear about.

  I was ashamed of myself for this, of course, but I saw it working on her. She patted the receiver on her thigh. I stared forlornly at the kitchen tiles their obsolete space-age pattern. Mama countered with her drunken-stepfather-and-his-razorstrop anecdote, then set the price: “Clean your room, wash the dog, do the dishes.”

  She began an hour on the phone. The Emergency Broadcast System test was followed by a cartoon cat chasing a cartoon mouse with an axe.

  I glossed my room by shaking the wrinkles out of the bedspreads on each bunk, then organizing all the knickknacks (shark’s teeth, arrowheads) into symmetrical patterns wherever they lay. I crammed games and sports equipment and toys into the closet and under the beds.

  Bathing Gretchen, the dachshund, was quick, though I had to hoist her, squirming, back into the tub four times, then swab the floor with towels.

  Because my mother was only a dilettante at housework, washing the dishes was a monumental chore. I tied an apron on.

  The automatic dishwasher promises ease, but it lies. It was half full from its previous use. I unloaded it into cabinets and drawers, heedless of grease spots or dried-on food. Then I began to dismantle the teetering dish-pyramids in the sink, reliving various meals as I ran each item through a scalding cylinder of water. I scraped petrified spaghetti from five plates and a pot, while the neighborhood kids laughed and shrieked at their outside games. The sun sagged into the top of the window over the sink. I shaved coagulated lard from a frying pan. The sink filled with a reddish soup, and a mummified fly rose and floated.

  The sun centered itself in the window, branding circles into my eyes. I fetched my mirror sunglasses, put them on. I stuffed the dishwasher beyond its abilities, knowing the plastic items would flip and fill with greasy water, or fly loose and melt.

  The dishwasher wouldn’t close until I pried a pitcher out, washed it by hand.

  Four messy plates remained in the sink. I cleaned one, squirting soap onto it, scraping off the food-rocks with my softening fingernails, then rinsed it, dried it, and stacked it away. This consumed the span of an entire “Looney Tune,” which I heard my brothers howling at.

  With pale, wrinkled hands, I attached the dishwasher to the faucet, clicked the dial to Heavy Load, and the machine hissed and strained and thumped. I gathered the last dirty plates, stepped out into the lane, and sailed them like Frisbees, ceramic exploding on gravel. The past two weeks had worked me into an end-of-the-world point of view where nothing would be left after Sunday, and I wasn’t going to waste another moment.

  I stepped back inside as Daddy, trailing the odor of dead chickens from work, lifted a beer from the refrigerator. I stood before him in my apron and sunglasses.

  “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “Blinded in the line of duty,” I said and groped past him towards the doorway, eyes closed behind the dark lenses.

  “Just wait till The Service gets ahold of you, son.”

  I showered, washing all of it twice.

  I entered the wilderness of Tim’s backyard and heard a ticking through the curtains of greenery near the clubhouse. I waded the waist-high grass, carrying my duffel bag overhead.

  “One more step, Francis, and you’ll have an unusual experience.” Tim had a blowgun at his lips, a long camouflaged tube with a mouthpiece. He’d bought it last year from a comicbook ad.

  Beside me, propped against the clubhouse, was a painted plywood cutout of President Nixon, his chest bristling with darts. I stepped back. Tim’s cheeks bulbed, he huffed, and a dart flicked shivering into Nixon’s heart.

  “I’ve been practicing,” Tim said as I walked to him. “The marijuana actually seemed to help. You have to perceive yourself, the blowgun, the dart, and the target as all parts of the same thing.” He drew a dart from the quiver, a swatch of foam rubber around the blowgun’s shaft. The dart was six inches of pointed wire joined to a plastic yellow cone for propulsion. This dart was odd, its stem fattened with a brown crust.

  “This is one of our wildcat tranquilizers,” Tim explained. “I cooked up a paste of the angel dust and dabbed it onto the wire, then blow-dried it.” He had left the tip bare so we wouldn’t get drugged if it pricked us by accident. He grinned.

  In a TV character voice I said, “Thank heavens you’re using your powers for the forces of Good.”

  Tim was able to laugh and spit cleanly at the same time.

  “That black eye makes you look sort of’two-fisted, Francis,” said Mrs. Sullivan, Tim’s mother. “Your parents are coming tonight, I hope?”

  Mrs. Sullivan’s dress was low-cut and blooming with candycolored flowers, her hair in honey-butter curls. She had skewered her earlobes with golden hoops. She wore lipstick, mascara, Indian beads. My mental scrapbook showed Mrs. Sullivan in glasses, cutoffs, and a sweat shirt, hair French-braided. Even smart women will turn themselves into a confection for their guests.

  “I’m not batting my lashes at you,” she said and patted my chest. “It’s these damn contact lenses.”

  I said the things you say to nice mothers, affected a boyish politeness which was close to real, and carried my duffel bag into Tim’s room.

  Tim bolted us in, slapped
a finger across his cassette player, and Alice Cooper began sneering “School’s Out” from several small, naked speakers wired throughout the room. One wall was all bookshelves, and books were stacked everywhere else too. Another wall featured surrealist, impressionist, and comic-book art posters.

  Tim raked some fanzines and comics out of the way so we could sit on the bed. His drawing table offered the only bare space in the room. The rest was a metropolis of monster models, chemistry sets, Tim’s paintings and constructions, weaponry, magic kits.

  Tim said, “You’d better hang around until your parents see that you’re actually here.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out for myself.”

  “Fine. We’ll get juiced meantime. Or I will. They say firewater interferes with the act of love. I have no way of knowing, of course.”

  “It doesn’t seem to affect me much,” I said. “I have to keep my hands in my pockets, to cover, even when I just talk to her. I’m afraid not to drink.”

  “I’m almost tempted to stay sober for this party. Watching these professors and rich people is like going to the zoo. I told you I walked in on a couple screwing in my bed one night. They messed up half a dozen magazines.”

  Tim handed me William Blake’s Songs of Experience, told me to read “The Tiger,” and left to get us drinks. The doorbell rang. Rang again. The poem was simple and strange and made my arm-hair rise.

  Tim returned with two Cokes, gave me one. The doorbell continued.

  “Easy, man,” Tim said. “That’s about 40 percent rum.”

  When the Alice Cooper tape clicked off, jazz breezed in from the living room, along with the rolling laughter of conversations and the chiming of ice in glass. Tim fed an Elton John tape into his multiphonic player. We read and drank for about an hour. We tried to make a threatening phone call to Richard Poythress, friend of young boys, but his number was unlisted and the operator proved untrickable. The doorbell ringings grew infrequent. Tim asked if I thought my parents were here by now. I said probably.

  “Let’s stiffen these Cokes and go catch the antics in the other rooms,” he said. “Then you can rendezvous with the dream girl.”

  The living room smelled like a volcano, made my eyes sting. Ashtrays and lost drinks gathered in the low places. A woman I knew looked at me and said, “What’s a nice boy like you …?” and laughed hoarsely, heaving her bust up into the scoop of her sweater. I glimpsed rosy flesh near the tip of a breast, my stomach tightening. She went to school with my mom. Rode a motorcycle.

  My parents stood in the territory between living room and dining room. Mama’s gown displayed most of her back, which embarrassed me, and Daddy wore Sansabelt slacks, a checkered shirt, and a wide tie, also embarrassing. A sweaty man gestured comically in front of them, only occasionally bothering to glance at my dad, then went limp and guffawed, potbelly heaving, and they laughed too. Dad slurped beer right from the can.

  “Don’t act so ashamed,” Tim said. “They’re the least bullshitty couple here.”

  Mama saw me, and her hand went up like a butterfly. Daddy smiled. The man gaped at me.

  Tim’s father was sitting in his leather recliner, sipping from a shot glass. He had a beard and pink indentations on each side of his nose bridge. He wore a dashiki. A man yammered to him about the Gods From Outer Space theory. Mr. Sullivan saw us, winked hello, and killed us with his gun finger. “Did you hellions get to see the flying ant invasion?”

  “During recess,” Tim said. “Cute shirt, Dad.” Frowning, he guided me into the kitchen. “Time for more medication.” He topped off our bottles with rum, in plain sight of the sweaty man who’d been laughing with my folks.

  “Shit, Timmy,” the man said, “at least pretend like you think I’m an adult.” The man’s shirt was damp at the throat, the breastbone, beneath the armpits and pectorals, and in a stripe down his belly that flared out at his navel. He breathed loudly. He clawed ice cubes from a silver bucket, dropped them into his glass, added vodka. He was leering into the living room. “Will you look at the lungs on that chick?”

  The motorcycle woman had wiggled into my dad’s lap when he sat on the couch. She was bent over so that her breasts hung down against the sweater and created a thick slice of cleavage. Daddy, smirking, sipped beer as if this was everyday. His hair was fluffed on one side, his nose lit up.

  “I’ve got your husband, Jackie!” the woman roared at my mom.

  “That’s your problem!” shouted Mama, and people laughed.

  The sweaty man tipped vodka into his mouth, then spat ice back into the glass. He wiped his lip and grinned. “Shit, I figure she’ll stumble into my lap next, only I ain’t letting her get away. She’s just what this fat drunk boy ordered. Is that your mama standing over there, son?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sir.”

  “She’s pretty. Are you adopted? Just kidding. Hey, I’m overdue for a piss.” He plodded through the rooms, turned his glass up over his mouth, throat pumping, and smacked his shoulder on the door jamb going into the hallway.

  “Attorney,” Tim said. “People pay that jack-off thousands of dollars to escape punishment for their crimes.”

  Mrs. Sullivan glided around the furniture, sliding coasters under drinks, pushing trays of miniature food at people. My own mother’s laugh, high and syrupy, cut through the others. She was smiling as if the entire planet was delightful, eyes gone Oriental, touching everyone near her. I was glad I wouldn’t be home tomorrow when she and Daddy suffered “sinus headaches” and stationed a bucket beside the bed.

  “I’m ready to be away from here,” I said.

  We lowered ourselves out of the window in Tim’s room. Tim accomplished this with a Coke bottle clamped in his teeth.

  A floodlight ignited the backyard into a surreal jungle, DayGlo leaves splashed on rippling black velvet. Tim swayed, guzzled from the bottle.

  “Watch,” he said. “I’m the famous painter Jackson Pollock.” He took a mouthful of rum Coke and spewed it on the whitewashed side of his house, tossing his head and bobbing. A caramelcolored mess spread and dripped. “Still Life with Drool.”

  He finished laughing at himself, turned to me sloppily, and asked if I’d bathed and brushed my teeth.

  “Are you supposed to be my trainer?”

  “Sorry. I guess I’m excited for you. Here’s a gift.” He turned his pocket inside out, getting a small, square packet, and tossed it to me. “Prophylactic. That’s a rubber to you. Lubricated and tropical green. I’ve had it a while, but I know I’ll never get a chance to use it.”

  I’d been so tense about sleeping over at Margie’s that I’d convinced myself nothing dramatic was going to happen. I respected her too much. She was still upset because I’d told her secret. She wouldn’t want to get involved in sex for a long time, after what had happened. But Tim made it seem like I was expected to go all the way with her, and I got scared all over again.

  “Look,” Tim said, “I’m sorry about letting the cat out of the bag about you-know-what. Tell her I’m sorry, I’m just a frustrated dwarf. I hope your hernia doesn’t cause any problems.”

  My stomach was full of wasps now. “Wait a minute, maybe I need to plan this out more,” I said.

  “Don’t turn chicken. You’ve got to live dangerously. You have nothing to fear but fear itself—of impotence and VD and premature—”

  I entered the leaves.

  “Electric light’s a miracle,” Tim slurred.

  I stopped, turned. “Hunh?”

  He snickered. “Well, I just mean it’s wonderful, if you look at it with Martian eyes. If you pretend you’re seeing it for the first time. See? Never mind.”

  I heard him gulping, then his bottle thwacked off the clubhouse. He belched three times, each burp more ragged than the one before. “I’ve learned how to burp!” he said. “I’ve discovered the secret of burping.”

  The light through the leaves was like hundreds of new quarters being flung into the blackness. It blinked on my eyelashes as I turn
ed to go.

  I bought gum and stole a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine. I combed my hair on the way to Margie’s, unable to generate entire thoughts. I began to talk to myself like an air-traffic controller comforting the pilot of a crippled plane. Be calm. You can make it, buddy. We’re standing by.

  I halted on the sidewalk outside of the Flynns’ enormous house. I hung my head, found I was standing in a hopscotch rectangle chalked onto the pavement. I felt dreadfully ill and ashamed of my fear and would’ve rather taken a whipping than go into that house. I looked up for the stars, in order to see all of this in its true insignificance. Above me, a rat ran along a trembling telephone wire. I broke a sweat.

  Margie’s silhouette appeared in an upstairs window, waved and vanished, and then the front door opened, sent light across the porch. I staggered towards it.

  Margie shouted, “Peaches! No!”

  I didn’t see the dog until it had my shin in its jaws, snarling like a chain saw, jerking me across the lawn.

  Welcome to Horrible Movies

  I sat on the bed beside a stuffed bear while Margie, kneeling in a miniskirt, daubed rubbing alcohol onto the teeth holes in my ankle. It felt similar to a jellyfish stinging. In sympathy, Margie supplied the noises I was stifling, little backward hisses at each touch of the Kleenex. I distracted myself by studying the stripe of pale bare skin where her short, sleeveless top ended and the skirt began. She had on high heels.

  “She’s a strong dog,” I said, “for her size.”

  “Patrick’s supposed to lock her in the yard at night, but Mama wasn’t here to make him. I should’ve thought of it.” She tipped some alcohol onto the tissue. “This’ll hurt.”

  She pressed the Kleenex to the deepest bite. We both flinched and my knee flew up beside her face. The dog howled in the backyard. As Margie patched my leg with Band-Aids, it occurred to me how deliberate things were. We hadn’t seen any of her brothers on the way up, though now I heard the murmurings of boys and television. Smoke was drifting up from a stick of incense in a nearby potted fern. Margie’s eyes, cheeks, and lips were made up, and her hair had been tamed out of her eyes by a turquoise barrette.