The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Fuhrman

  Her arms, legs, and middle were very bare, and she radiated gusts of perfume that smelled moist, like a misted flower garden. I didn’t feel worthy of all this.

  Margie’s room had been built into the attic, and one wall was really the roof slanting down over the bed, the paneling brightened with posters. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and some black-light psychedelics. A plastic rainbow curved above the headboard and a silk daisy hung its head from an elongated 7UP bottle on the night table.

  Downstairs, the TV announced the defeat of our local baseball team, and one of the brothers swore.

  Margie stood up, tugged the miniskirt smooth, and clicked on her stereo, a more elaborate machine than my parents could afford. A bleak piano began to plink, and Harry Nilsson sang that he couldn’t live, if livin was without you, then howled it in harmony with his own multiplied voice.

  I said, “That’s one of my favorite songs.”

  She said, “Mine too.”

  I glanced at the photographs tucked into the frame of the mirror on a white wicker vanity, mostly shots of Margie and horses. An old group photo of a Brownie troop. One teenage male pop singer, barechested. Margie saw me looking and snatched the heartthrob from the glass and wadded him into a wicker basket. “My mom gave me that,” she explained, true pink blooming around her rouge. “I had to keep it a while.”

  I still had the Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine in my hand. “Want to drink some of this?” I said. “It’s pretty good.”

  “Okay. Or we could try some champagne first.” Her eyes scanned the room. “If you want.”

  I guessed it was part of the plan. “Sure, whatever you want.”

  “Don’t go anywhere.” She laid her hand on my shoulder, kissed my bruised eye, then rather awkwardly yanked off her heels and exchanged them in the closet for a pair of flat red shoes, smiled like she was embarrassed again, and left. I thought this must be how it felt to be married.

  In a minute she was back with a bottle of Andre and a Siamese cat winding between her feet.

  “Let me open it,” I said, taking the bottle. “I’m good at this.” I popped the stopper out the way Daddy had shown me and pressed my palm to the bottle’s mouth until the bubbles relaxed, then raised my hand and a pale tongue of carbonation darted out. Margie lifted champagne glasses out of a dresser drawer. I was flattered by all this contrivance, but my anxiety increased, like an understudy who hears that the leading man’s had an accident, and that now everything’s up to him.

  “You’re positive your mother’s not coming home?” I asked. The bottle kept ringing against the glasses as I poured.

  “Uh huh. But it wouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t come up here.” Margie handed me my glass, sat beside me. The Siamese hopped onto the bed and mewed loudly, frequently. Her body was cream colored and she had a chocolate-dipped face, tail, and legs, and an idiot’s blue eyes.

  We each sipped a glassful of champagne, then agreed to move on to the wine, which looked to be sweeter. The label said, “Serve Very Cold,” but it was lukewarm. I cracked the screw top, it fizzled, a glitter of bubbles rising, and then I took a long instinctive pull before I remembered I was supposed to be sharing it with a girl prior to romance, not bolstering myself against an ordeal.

  Margie and I drank in the traditional Boone’s Farm way, passing the bottle between us. She smiled and said, “MMm,” and treated me to the green of her eyes. Our fingers touched on purpose, driving my blood faster.

  The dog attack and the drinking had cleared some of my worry so that lust could sneak back in. Margie’s bare midriff tempted me. I inhaled her perfume aura. “You sure smell good,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She crooked her wrist under her nose, sniffed. “I think I might’ve put on too much perfume.” She offered me the wrist.

  I took her hand, inhaled more of the drizzly fragrance, and kissed the whitish scar across the cords of her wrist. She didn’t pull her arm back. I kissed again.

  From downstairs Donny yelled, “Margie!” She slumped and rolled her eyes, then recovered, but for that moment she looked extremely young.

  At other times I had noted, and dismissed, the slight crookedness of Margie’s nose, the vaccination dimple at her shoulder, a pink mole on her throat. I saw them now, again, and regretted that she wasn’t perfect, although she was so nearly perfect that it frightened me. Then I was able to ignore them again, aided by the alcohol.

  My denim-covered thigh touched her bare one, magnetized towards the heat, and our little fingers found each other and tangled like mating snakes. She turned her mouth up to me, and I kissed her without pressure, drank some wine, kissed her deeply, and then instead of passing her the bottle I poured my mouth full with the magic soda and shared it as we kissed, her mouth grinding eagerly against mine, clicking my teeth, and her delirious breathing made a tight, satisfying pressure in my lap. The cat butted purring against my hip. I touched the bare stripe of Margie’s waist, explored around the soft curve, incapable of believing any of this. Perfume, incense, and cheap strawberry flavoring sweetened everything.

  I slid my hand inside the back of her shirt and stroked girlskin, which even on a thin girl is softer than your own. My hand smoothed circles up her back then stalled on the stitched cloth of a bra clasp, and I got timid again because she arched and pressed against me to make it easier for me to unsnap it. The music finished. The stereo ticked, tapped, shut off, and her brothers’ voices returned.

  The condom packet in my pocket felt like a murder weapon. I pictured myself undressed in front of Margie, ugly as a conch peeled from its shell. I wondered if she and Donny had committed incest right here on this bed, and I wilted and began to ache. Margie pulled back, asked what she’d done wrong.

  Donny yelled up, “Margie! Where’s the can of spaghetti?”

  She turned angrily to the door and yelled, “I cooked it! Make something else!”

  “Maybe Doyle’s hungry too!”

  Donny’s knowing that I was there caused me to feel guilty and criminal. I checked for an alternate escape route, but there was only the wisteria-veined window, stopped up with an air conditioner. Margie jumped up and slammed the door, turned to me with a smile, and asked if maybe I was hungry.

  “Just thirsty,” I said.

  “Well, let’s talk then, and drink.”

  I assumed she was being patient with my bashfulness, and I was grateful, but I also felt like she was in control. She lifted the cat and sat in the chair across from me, our knees a knife blade’s width apart, and the cat narrowed its crossed eyes in delight at each stroke she gave it.

  “So,” she drawled, “what’re you doing tomorrow that’s so topsecret?”

  I told her how the bobcat was supposed to free us all from Blessed Heart, distract Father Kavanagh from our filthy comic book, and provide the gang with its final adventure.

  “That’s pretty neat,” she said. “But you better not get hurt. Did your friend Tim come up with this plan?”

  I admitted he had.

  “Well you just better be careful. He’s crazy. I can recognize crazy people, you know.” She had affected a pout, very cute and persuasive. It made me want to put my hands on her.

  “You remind me of Tim in certain ways,” I said. “I bet you two would get along real well.” I wished I hadn’t said that, because Tim seemed much more attractive than me, and was approximately Margie’s height.

  “No,” she said, the pout reversing into a smile, teasing. “He’s a maniac. I only get along with you.”

  Through the door we heard Donny yell, “Margie! Where the fuck is the motherfucking can opener?”

  “Ignore him,” Margie said. “He’s the biggest baby.” She plucked the wine bottle from my lap and drank some, then asked if I wanted to watch “Horrible Movies,” the local Friday night monster film. I’d always considered that show my particular property. Sharing it seemed safely intimate, so I said fine. She turned off the lights and turned on the small color set atop her chest of drawers. I could
tell by the way her steps thumped the floor that she was not used to drinking this much.

  “Horrible Movies” was the reward I looked forward to each week of my childhood. It appeared in the mysterious hours beyond my parents’ bedtime, in the democratic black-and-white which was just as good on our old set as any new one. I loved being entertained by the dead, Karloff or Lugosi, or the unknowns who seemed like real people. These movies renewed the world with strangeness, in the way the denatured magic of religion failed to do, werewolves and living dead testifying to other realities, the importance of the invisible. They made you suffer pursuit, dungeons, tombs, and afterwards you surrendered consciousness, received nightmares, and Sunday morning you rose, still alive, stronger by one more horror.

  Margie and I snuggled on her bed against pillows and stuffed animals, and I was almost numb enough, at first, to feel comfortable with her head on my chest, her careless blonde curls tickling my chin. I willed my heart to slowness beneath her ear.

  After an eccentric used car commercial and some public service announcements, the TV darkened amid the minor chord spiralings and rumble of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, and host Robin Graves materialized, wearing an executioner’s robe, photographed in negative against a graveyard backdrop. “Welcome to … ‘Horrible … Moo-vies’ …” he said in a deep burbling, electronic voice. He joked morbidly, then announced tonight’s feature, The Cat People. Margie began hiccupping. She held her breath.

  The TV flicked to black-and-white, green at the edges. The movie was about a young woman, an immigrant from the Old Country, who believed she had a curse that changed her into a panther when she was angry or jealous or kissed a man. I had a hard time following it, because I wasn’t used to having a beautiful girl up against me. She stopped hiccupping.

  As it grew later, the commercials dwindled and the story began to seem real, and it got creepy. Margie and I kept exchanging drunken glances in the jumping glow, seeing ourselves in the characters, the same as you sometimes believe a song on the radio is meant especially for you. After a scare that made even me jump, Margie clenched a wad of my shirt in each fist and tugged with every stab of music or ominous close-up, shutting her eyes against the worst moments. Robin Graves returned and made fun of the movie, but Margie was still stiff against me.

  Later the Cat Woman’s rival went swimming in an indoor pool at night, water reflections slicing at the walls and ceiling. The panther crept in and paced the lip of the pool as the woman paddled, panicking, in the deep center of the pool. Margie began crying against me, and the movie shrank into the distant box of the TV.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Can you please turn it off? I can’t stand to watch anything scary right now, because of my nerves.”

  I didn’t want to stop the movie. I wanted the mystery solved, and also the TV was like a third person in the room who lessened my duty towards Margie. But I rolled off the bed and extinguished it, the tiny fading eye of the picture dying in a blink. I flipped on the light.

  Margie was curled on the bed with her eyes squeezed shut and her arms around herself, whispering, “I’m so awful,” with tears tracking unaccustomed mascara down her face.

  I touched her back and said, “Margie, it’s off. What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s horrible.” Her voice was high and tiny like a small child’s, and slurred from the wine. “It feels like the eyes of the posters are watching me, even though I know that’s stupid. I just feel scared.” She swallowed and looked up at me with her eyes filling and lips trembling, and I felt coldhearted for noticing that her earrings and teardrops flashed with the same exact sparkle. She said, “You think I lied about the ghost to get you up here with me, don’t you? But I didn’t. Either she’s real, or I’m crazy.”

  Margie was shivering now, and had the hiccups again. I hadn’t even thought about the ghost once. I said, of course, “You’re not crazy.”

  “Well, I’m so scared of being crazy,” she hiccupped, “that I’m going crazy from worrying.”

  “Well it doesn’t worry me. Be crazy if you want. Just relax.”

  She sank into the corner of the bed against the slanted wall and the headboard and watched herself across in the mirror as if it was someone dangerous. I didn’t entirely understand and wasn’t sure how to involve myself. Maybe I should go home and leave her alone, I thought, since I wasn’t helping. I lifted the wine bottle and drank what was left, then started into the champagne, though I’d begun seeing two of everything and sensed nausea behind the deadened wall of myself. Still afraid to go to bed with her, I figured drunkenness was the least sissy way to avoid it.

  Margie said, “I know you feel weird around me. I’m bad and horrible.” Tears leapt from her lashes. “Everybody hates Donny and thinks he’s the bad one. But I made him do it to me.” She wept at the mirror, hiccupping. “I tricked him one night when he was stoned, and then I blackmailed him into doing it all the time. And I loved it, it’s all I thought about. I’m much, much worse than him, and I don’t see how you can stand me.” She dropped her head, sobbing in a whisper.

  I’d already digested the softer version of this that she’d told me in the park, and like my hernia, my brother’s brain damage, and the knowledge that death is the world’s landlord, I’d begun to live with it. But she refused to forgive herself.

  She continued to hiccup, and her face was smeared with mascara. “You know, I used to sit alone in my room every day doing nothing, thinking awful things. I felt like I was the only true person in the world, like everybody else was a robot put here to test me.”

  “I’ve felt like that before,” I said. “Have you been to a psychiatrist?”

  “They made me go. All the doctor did was ask me questions about the divorce and all. He kept telling me I was normal, which is bullshit. And he gave me pills that made me feel dumb and sleepy.”

  “Maybe you were just caught up in your own imagination. I got the idea, one time, that I had stomach cancer. And worrying about it made my stomach hurt more. For six months I believed I had cancer, then I got my hernia and worried about that instead.” I felt I was so drunk I wasn’t making sense. She didn’t seem to be listening.

  “When I couldn’t get Donny in here—” She hiccupped again and the crying got worse, “—I’d use my fingers and think about him or some other boy. Or my dad … sometimes worse stuff…” She knocked the back of her skull against the wall. “God! I’m so messed up!”

  She got up and lurched over to the mirror and sat down hard in the chair. She stopped crying, put out her finger, and touched her mirror finger. “I think I look ugly and awful. I don’t know why you came here.”

  “You don’t have to tell me all this stuff,” I said. “If everybody did everything that came into their heads, we’d all be waiting on the electric chair.”

  She stared into the mirror, and seemed to me very selfconsciously dramatic, like she was doing something she’d seen in a movie. I realized that she was so locked up in herself that everything she did seemed important, that her crimes were too big ever to be forgiven. I was a little angry by then, and so drunk I couldn’t sit straight, but I drank the champagne down to the bottom. I thought if I ignored her now she might remember I existed. I braced on the mattress and stared at the rolling carpet. I heard a whack and the cat shot between my feet under the bed.

  Margie was pounding the mirror with open hands. I stumbled over, grabbed her wrists where the razor scars were. She made fists and strained groaning towards the glass and said, “Don’t touch me!” I looked at her face in the mirror and was startled at my own image.

  I’ve always encountered myself as a stranger, an unfamiliar boy in photographs, reflections. It’s not the same me I recognize in dreams. I knew I didn’t like this boy either, I couldn’t even stand the way he looked, drunk and dopey and standing around while this little girl indulged in hysterics. I let go of Margie’s wrists and she smacked the glass hard, and a crack ran from one corner to its diagonal opposite.

>   What I did next began as an accident. I thought it, and then I was doing it before I could stop. I punched my mirror face. Pieces fell on the vanity table, a noise that made me angrier, enraged at my own violent stupidity. Margie gasped. The boy didn’t vanish, he scattered into fragments, and I punched the mirror again and again, the same animal rhythm my father used when he beat me, a sick crashing ecstasy with the glass all falling, Margie tugging back on my waist, until I was thudding wood, leaving dull bloodstains. I swung my elbow and the mirror frame jumped cracking against the wall.

  You can’t kill your reflection. Each shard contained another version.

  I felt that the door had opened behind me. Donny was framed there in an attitude of shock, but still chewing something, his arm in a fresh white cast. Margie was half on the floor, attached to my waist, a seductress clinging to her barbarian on the cover of a pulp novel. Donny swallowed hugely, like a python, and said, “I heard a noise up here. Are y’all okay?” then fastened his eyes on mine as I nodded feebly and the pain came into my hands. Donny turned and closed the door behind him with great politeness.

  My mind still smoking, I slid nicked fingers through Margie’s hair. My knuckles were cut, not badly. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Feel any better now?” Somehow I did.

  She said, “In a way, I guess. I think you stopped my hiccups.”

  I offered to pay for the damage, having only about three dollars in the world. She said not to worry about it, that I should see her brothers’ rooms.

  Several hushed male voices deliberated in the hall below the stairway. It was important to me that no older boys come in, pseudo-parents who might reduce me to a drunken kid helping a disturbed little girl destroy furniture. I didn’t want to hear this was silly, or I’d better go home now, or that I was in more trouble. Margie stepped over to the door and dropped the latch in its eyelet.