Atlantis: Three Tales (23 page)

“They made me take it off,” I said, wondering now if it wasn't really me who'd made the suggestion. What was it they'd said about the glare from my shirt? Maybe I'd just looked silly in a suit and an open collar . . . But Mom seemed to think it was more funny than not. And when Dad came upstairs from the ground-floor funeral parlor,
he
didn't say anything—maybe he hadn't actually gone over to the Hunts' and seen me . . . ?

A year or so later Robert provided me with the most sexually exciting few hours of my childhood.

I had met Robert's father a few times. A physically vast, gray-haired man, the elderly and successful Scotsman was notably senior to his German-American wife. Then, one year, just before school started, my mother put down the phone to tell me: “Aunt Kay just told me that Robert's father died this summer! That's so sad for his mother. And the
boy, too. He's had such a rough time.” She meant Robert's motor problems that had, by now, all but vanished and whose faintest lingerings I never noticed anymore.

When I saw Robert again in school, I was a little scared for the first minutes, wondering if his having a dead father would make him any different. But he looked just the same as before. And soon—almost—I'd forgotten it.

That spring vacation, for the first time, Robert invited me to come up to
his
summer house. (April's cruelties, as Chaucer knew, have a certain thread of generosity woven through them.) His family had a farm outside New Paltz, and his mother—who'd gone back to work as a nurse in a hospital—would drive us up there.

Our own family's summer place in Hopewell Junction was a small affair. But it was
sort
of a farm—at least for several years my father had grown a field of corn behind it. We had a dozen acres of woods. And one summer Dad had raised a matte-black coop of chickens and, another, stilted up five feet from the guano-splatted ground and walled with octagonal wire, a house full of turkeys.

But what Robert's mother (us in the back seat of the station wagon) finally pulled up to was, after our two-hour drive, a sprawling three-story farmhouse, with an even more sizable barn set off from it. There were several fields, a forest, a sloping lawn, and even a pond on the property. There were a number of cows, some ducks, and a rambunctious dog, who lolloped out of the barn to leap on and lick all over us as we got out of the car. His name was King, after the dog on the
Sargeant Preston of the Yukon
radio show, Robert explained. Robert and I both listened to it each week at home (a booming, slightly anglicized baritone, which meant Canada in the 1950s: “On, King!
On
, you huskies . . . !”), along with
Superman, The Green Hornet
, and
The Lone Ranger
—television was still, at that time, an expensive novelty more than anything else.

How the farm was managed when Robert and his mother weren't there, I don't recall. But the system of live-in hands and visiting caretakers was explained to me satisfactorily enough at the time.

That first afternoon, Robert's mother had to drive into town. A little later, the hand who was about had to go off in his own car. Being left alone fit in perfectly with a plan I'd had in mind for some time now.

Though Robert was my friend, he was not a part of the pre-adolescent afternoon sexual carryings-on I engaged in in the showers of our school basement after swimming. That circle of initiates included Raymond, Wally, Vladdy, and—sometimes—Jonathan. There was another tall boy in our class, Arthur, another bully, who knew
something
was happening and, when Jonathan wasn't there to tell him to get lost, would occasionally barge naked into our gray marble changing booth and threaten to tell: the menace from Arthur far outweighed any threat from the Phys. Ed. teacher or his assistant—who simply wanted to stay as far as possible from the wet, naked, screaming, towel-snapping Sixth and Seventh Graders.

But I couldn't see why Robert wouldn't like it as much as the rest of us. Awkward as he was, though, I decided it would probably be better if I broke him in myself
before
I brought him to the others. These sexual explorations were carried on almost wholly without words—only partially because of Arthur. So you had to know what to do, or at least be able to figure it out without making noise.

When, once, Arthur finally did confront our regular Phys. Ed. teacher with an accusation, the t-shirted man put his hands on his hips, looked at the tall, belligerent boy, and, with a contemptuous jerk of his head, asked, “How come
you're
so interested in stuff like that? Nobody likes squealers—about anything. But
you
keep on talking about
this
kind of stuff, somebody's going to start wondering why
you're
so curious and concerned about it all . . .” which left the boy surprised, silent, and probably confused.

But the rest of us were miraculously off the hook.

Today I suspect this was just our gym teacher's (wholly homophobic) way of dealing with a situation he'd probably encountered many times in ten or fifteen years of teaching athletics.

But more recently, a male history teacher had been temporarily assigned to supervise the afternoon swim activities, and, wandering
through the labyrinth of marble-walled shower and changing stalls, he must have overheard something, so waited outside ours for a good five or ten minutes, listening. Finally, still in his bathing suit, he stepped around, where three of the five of us had completely abandoned ours, and announced nervously: “What you're doing is sick!” He was a tall, sunken-chested man, who never looked very happy. “You know, that's very sick, now. I should report this. You just don't understand how dangerous what you're doing is. This is much more serious than you think—you don't understand it. What you're doing is
very
sick . . . !”

We froze in naked guilt. Then Wally, the most aggressive of us, suddenly declared, mockingly: “Well, I think
you're
sick!” Then he let an ululating hoot, that ended in a kind of grunting, idiot laugh. Was he returning the intimidation to the teacher the way our gym coach had done with Arthur? Wally was the class clown anyway and, probably from nervousness, had simply blurted the most outrageous thing he could think of. Still, maybe he had
some
notion that moving our actions from the simply sinful into the truly insane—certainly the effect his words, wail and cackle had on me—might, somehow, save us. The history teacher blinked, said nothing, then—suddenly—walked away. And for the next anxious week, I wondered if we were to be punished. But in the end there was no more fall-out from his discovery than from Arthur's. And so, after a hiatus of three or four days, we resumed.

But this was why you had to be on your toes to join in. And had to be quiet. On your toes was
not
the place Robert ordinarily stood—unless he had some coaching. But he was a smart kid and learned quickly. This country visit, now we were alone on the farm, seemed as good a time as any for me to start him out.

Our shoes and socks off, we were wandering around the grass. We'd been told we weren't supposed to go into the livestock part of the barn barefoot. So we didn't. But I started horsing around with Robert. Wrestling together on the hem of a haystack, I made a couple of grabs for his crotch. Once I got my hand down his baggy corduroys and made tickling motions between his legs.

“Don't
do
that!” Robert protested.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” I said. “That doesn't feel good?” I grinned.

He frowned. “It doesn't feel anything,” he said. “It's just
silly
.”

So much for my attempt, positioned (as are pretty much all early acts of desire, however clumsy) so ambiguously between the selfish and the compassionate, to introduce Robert to our puerile pleasures. But he was not very physically developed anyway. That seemed to be the end of it. So I didn't try again.

Now we threw sticks for lolloping, golden King. And got tired of it.

Then Robert brought me over to show me his ducks. With King nosing up at his elbow, Robert leaned over the half door in the barn's side, pointing around in the indoor duck pen. He told me that the fat, white, waddling birds had been given him that summer. During their stays on the farm, they were his responsibility. When they were sold, in a few months, Robert was going to get a third of the money. They had to be kept very calm and quiet, he explained, or they'd get all tough, and you wouldn't be able to eat them.

At some point, we decided to let the ducks go for a (calm and quiet) swim in the pond down the slope. But to do it, we'd have to tie up inquisitive King—otherwise, Robert explained, he'd kill them.

Between us, we decided to hold the dog, let out the ducks, then put King in the duck pen and leave him there while the ducks enjoyed the water. I held onto King's collar, while Robert opened the lower half of the door—King nearly yanked me over.

Ducks flapped, fled, and quacked.

“They're not supposed to
do
that!” Robert cried. But once they'd scurried off a few feet, the birds turned placidly toward the pond and started over the grass, while Robert and I got King into the pen and closed the bottom half of the door.

The ducks seemed to know exactly where the pond was, and went ambling, amiably and loudly, toward it.

Robert had locked the bottom half of the Dutch door; but he'd only pulled the top half closed. It must have swung in a crack. King nosed it open—at a bark I turned to see brown and gold rise up, arch over, and
out! With another bark, there were dog and ducks all over the grass.

Robert cried, “Oh, Jesus
Christ
—
!”

We ran after them. I wasn't too sure how you were supposed to pick up a terrified duck, and didn't want to learn by trial and error. I hadn't had much experience with barefoot running, and did it gingerly in the cool grass. Friendly enough before, King was practically as big as we were and didn't
want
to be stopped!

Nearly in hysterics, skidding after one of his frightened charges, Robert slipped in the grass, then clambered to his feet, yelling, “No . . . ! No . . . !” He tried to chase the dog away from the honking ducks, grabbing one of the earthbound birds. “No . . . ! They're not
supposed
to run . . . ! They'll be all ruined . . . !
No . . . !”

I ran around as much as I could, wishing that Robert wasn't so upset and that we could treat it more like a game. Once, when he finally got hold of one, I ran over to see. The yellow web raked repeatedly at Robert's belly (duck's feet have claws, too), where his blue t-shirt had ridden up from his pants. Once, behind its beak, a dark red eye turned to sweep mine, not seeing me or Robert (my sudden panic insight) as any less menacing than King—who leapt and leapt, trying to bite the bird, while Robert turned away to protect it with his body from King's eager jaws. Near them, for one moment I saw, among the snowy feathers, cushioned around Robert's scratched-up hands, a single and, in the midst of the hysteria, scary smear of duck blood.

“Get him away . . . ! Get him
away!
Bad King!
Bad
dog! Get him away . . . !”

So I chased King back—

—who careered off, down to the pond, where two ducks had already reached the water. King went splashing right in, throwing up a steel-bright sheet that angled above the grass and fell as spray.

Running down, I stopped at the lake's edge. Robert went splatting in, fell, coughing and crying, got to his feet, and leapt on King, while pushing a flapping white bird away over the water.

Once I saw it wasn't deep, I waded in after them and helped Robert haul King back to the grass.

The ducks clustered, honking, at the pond's far side.

Holding onto the wet dog collar with Robert, while sopping King pulled against us, I realized—as I tugged, shoulder to shoulder with him—how upset Robert was. “
Bad
King . . . !” He hiccuped and cried, even as we got the dog up on the bank. We had to haul King back to the barn. “You
damned
dog—!” Once Robert kicked at the beast with his naked foot. King tried to dash away again.

“Come
on
, Robert—”

Then King decided to shake himself.

Robert let go and started crying again.

Under the splatter I pursed my lips, turned away my face, tightened my hold and, knuckles deep in wet fur, with the smell of dripping dog all around me, pulled King forward.

As he clipped the dog onto the leash that he'd tied to one of the barn posts, Robert started crying once more. (We were still barefoot and were in the barn against orders, but there hadn't been anything else to do.) “They're all ruined and tough, now! Nobody'll eat them . . . !”

“I think we better get them back into the pen anyway, huh?”

King barked a few times as we walked away. We stepped off the straw- and pebble-strewn planks and onto soil, patterned with tire tracks and packed down, now, with our footprints, then onto the grass.

With King out of the way, we herded the ducks out of the pond, up the slope, and back to their pen. The duck that had been bleeding seemed to have gotten washed off by her swim and was okay now. None of them looked too much the worse. I thought that would be the end of it.

But Robert was desolate.

“Look—” I tried to be practical—“nobody was around and saw us. You don't have to tell anybody it happened, do you?” We were standing under a tree. The sky was overcast, and I thought we should go inside. “You could always pretend that it didn't—”

“That isn't the
point!
” Robert's face was dirty. His hair was wet. Tears still streaked his cheeks. “They were my responsibility! And now nobody'll be able to
eat
them!”