The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (17 page)

“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 pig-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.”

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.

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.