The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (19 page)

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 turned 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.

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.

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.