The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (24 page)

Tim handed his flashlight to Wade and crept towards the hollow stump. He squatted in front of it, and for a moment the night was so quiet I heard his knees click. Wade stood alongside, shining the light for him, machete raised.

A growl upset the silence, and I said, “Watch it!” and Tim fell back, looking everywhere, and Wade raised the machete higher.

“It was only my stomach!” Joey said defensively. “It was my stomach growling.”

“Sorry,” I said, and giggled nervously.

Tim stood before the stump again and said over his shoulder, “Rusty, that five bucks you owe me. If I get killed, give it to Francis so he can take Margie to the movies.”

“If the cat kills you,” Rusty said, “I’ll use that five bucks to get him stuffed and put in the trophy case at school.”

Tim chuckled, then lifted his foot and eased the toe into the hole of the stump. He nudged. Then he squatted again and put both hands inside. I was wincing, teeth gritted with anxiety. Then Tim stood and turned, a sagging bobcat in his arms, its tongue out.

We said, “All right!” and “Son of a bitch!” and laughed, finally surprised that the Wildcat Caper had succeeded. I believed then that we were capable of anything.

Tim plucked the dart from the cat’s hide and its tongue slid up into the mouth and it swallowed.

Rusty said, “He’s alive all right.”

“Wade,” Tim said, “take this dart and wipe the prints off of it, then lay it down where they’ll be sure to find it. Also, see if you can locate some bobcat droppings and stick them in the baggie.”

Wade stuck the machete in the ground and wiped the dart on his shirt.

Tim looked at the cat in his arms and held it up at me. “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” He grinned.

“William Blake,” I said.

Tim looked at the cat’s underside. “Hey, this is a female.”

I glanced up at the oak limb where I’d been holding the light, but the bobcat had disappeared. I lit the other limbs, suspicious bulges, clusters of leaves. I heard an exhalation below.

Tim’s painted face was turned up at me, mouth stretched, forehead squeezed, and his hands were up behind his neck. The limp bobcat lay in the grass. Tim’s knee buckled and he half turned. The other bobcat was on his shoulders, jaw clamped at
the base of his skull. I threw light on him. Wade looked over from the far side of the pen. I shouted as loud as I could and felt my hernia tearing open, and from the top of the oak tree a huge white heron rose and flapped slowly into the darkness.

Rusty leapt into the pen, hitting the ground hard. I threw myself onto the rope and slid down it, my insides tearing more with the effort and bulging into my pants, and I fell to the ground and kneeled up and screamed at the cat as it jerked Tim’s neck and Rusty and Wade kicked at it.

The cat pounced away. Wade pulled the machete out of the ground. We watched, in the trembling pool of Joey’s flashlight, as Tim’s eyes shifted panicky from Rusty to Wade to me, then lost focus and drifted. I found I was holding my hand against the pain in my groin and praying for Tim not to die. We stayed there confused.

“Bring him up!” Joey shouted. “Get out of there!”

We looked around for the cats. There was electricity around my heart, but I was hurt too bad to escape quickly.

Rusty said, “Wade! Get up there and I’ll hand him up to you. Joey, shit, I guess you better go get that guy and tell him what happened.” He spun his light around the enclosure.

“What if they’re still screwing?” Joey said, and turned and ran into the woods where the trail was.

“We’re in big trouble,” Rusty said. “Help me get him up.”

“I can’t,” I gasped, and even the effort of speaking stabbed at my groin. “My hernia’s busted wide open.”

Rusty slung Tim over his shoulder and passed him up to Wade. Then they did the same to me. I felt terribly weak and was glad to surrender myself to stronger people.

I sat on the deck with my knees pulled up tight against me, beside Tim. I prayed helplessly. I counted six little punctures on the back of his neck. There was some blood, but I’d seen him lose much more than that in fights and still be able to laugh at it. I stared down at the planking between my shoes. I didn’t look at
Tim after that. Rusty tore the note off of the railing and stuffed it in his pocket.

I heard an eerie voice in my head, like the voice of my adult self in years to come, scolding me: Now you’ve done it, boy. Now you’ve really done it.

Paul Steatham crashed out of the woods with a lantern flashlight and thundered up onto the platform, squeezed Tim’s throat, and said, “The ambulance is coming.” Then Joey appeared with the girl. She said she’d opened the gate. She stood behind Paul, wearing a tie-dyed shirt now, hugging herself as if it was cold. Every few seconds someone coughed or sighed or called on God.

Paul said, “Let’s carry him to the building to save time.” He took Tim under the arms and lifted, and Rusty took his legs, and Wade supported him in the middle, and they carried him down the trail. I hobbled and gasped behind them.

“Are you hurt too?” the girl asked.

I said I was, a little. She held onto me, trying to help. It made it more awkward, but I was glad to have a woman’s arms around me. We heard the siren of an ambulance wailing onto the island like a banshee in the dark.

The ambulance left as the girl and I came out of the woods and the police cars were pulling in. The gang was sitting on the porch of the building, between the giant white columns. Mr. Doolan, the policeman from our neighborhood, got out of one of the cars. Two other cops headed down the trail with Paul, carrying long flashlights. I watched all this from inside a thick, quiet
bubble. I was calm and shaking. Mr. Doolan came over, but he didn’t recognize us with our faces painted. Rusty identified us.

Paul took us into the building to call our parents. I was hunched over and every step felt like a kick in the groin. Mr. Doolan saw and then helped me out to his patrol car and got in. He held the microphone to his mouth and told the dispatcher he was taking me to the emergency room. Suddenly I was afraid that this was the car I’d tossed the douche into a few days ago, and I regretted every wrong thing I’d ever done.

“Everything’s gonna be okay, Francis,” said Mr. Doolan. He shoved the car in gear and we heard popping noises from the woods, and my soul sank deeper into its terrible self. He turned on the siren and screamed towards the hospital at such speed that I was able to get scared again.

The hospital was near our neighborhood. Attendants were waiting at the curb with a wheeled stretcher, and my parents materialized as I was lying down. “We’re here,” Mama said, and followed beside us as I was rolled through the sliding glass doors. They behaved as if they’d done something wrong and needed me to forgive them.

In a curtained-off area in a white room, a black man wearing glasses helped me strip and wriggle into a gown. He tried to converse with me about baseball while he soaped me and shaved off my pubic hair. I looked down once and saw a bulge on the right side of my groin the size of an egg. Then the man put a tube inside me and filled me with liquid and slid a bedpan under me to take it back. A nurse entered and gave me a shot in the thigh that hurt beyond what I thought I could stand. She told me not to tense the muscle, to relax.

Men pushed me into a room lit brightly in the center, and placed me under the light, shining with steel, surrounded by darkness. I was cold. I kept my eyes closed. A nurse brought hot towels and spread them over me, and when they cooled she brought more. People gathered around me, and a man all in cloth except for eyeglasses and rubber gloves slipped a mask
over my nose and mouth and I breathed a sweet, heavy gas. He told me to count backwards from ten, and I began to say the muffled numbers. Someone worked a needle with plastic wings into a vein on the back of my hand, taped it there, connected to a tube running up into a bag of clear liquid, hung from a metal gallows. I couldn’t breathe. I felt sick, and I was going to tell them to take the mask away, and then everything grew numb and quiet except for a thudding inside my head.

Someone far away and invisible said, “It’s all over, Francis. You’re fixed and sewn up and ready to heal.”

Later I heard women talking. I felt injured and nauseated and was moaning softly every few seconds. Someone laid a damp, cool cloth on my forehead. I was too sick to open my eyes and afraid to throw up because even the tiniest movement was like a knife plunging into me. I understood that the women talking, more quietly now, were nurses.

“D.O.A.?”

“Mm hmm. Had been, a while.”

“It’s awful to say,” one whispered, “but it’s probably for the best, with his spinal cord the way it was.”

One walked over and pressed my wrist for several seconds. Something plastic was around my wrist, loose. She said, “You want some chipped ice to chew on, honey? It’ll make you feel better. We can’t give you anything else for pain yet.”

All I could manage was a moan.

She placed something beside my head. “I’ll leave this basin here in case you want to get sick.” She walked away and sat down on a creaky metallic chair.

For a long while I stayed helpless in a delirium of nausea and pain, but I heard everything they said.

“You should’ve seen the flirt-face she gave Billy when he picked me up after the eleven-to-seven.”

“She is a pure b-i-t-c-h.”

My stomach pushed up into my throat and I grabbed for the basin and retched into it, turning painfully, the tube pulling at my hand. I gagged more, then swallowed a vile sourness. The nurse emptied the basin and gave me chipped ice in a washcloth. I sucked at it feebly, like an animal.

For days after the accident I felt sleepy and stupid and like I was wrapped all over in warm blankets. I hardly remember anything about the funeral. I had to wear my school uniform because I didn’t have a suit, and I walked bent over where my flesh was tightened with prickly thread and stiff, iodine-stained bandages. The chapel was almost full with people I knew, and I tried to cry but I couldn’t. I accidentally caught a glimpse of Tim’s profile in the coffin, which was somehow confusing, because I had this notion that he was in the back somewhere, slouched against a wall and rolling his eyes like the patron saint of boredom. I’m sorry I saw him that last time, because I carried it with me for years—hair trimmed, not pale enough—like a touched-up souvenir photo.

On the way to the cemetery our Volkswagen stalled at a stoplight and Charles Sapp’s daddy had to push us with his Impala.

We stood under a canopy held up with poles and when I sat down in the metal chair one leg sank into the ground so that I was tilted. The casket was lowered into the dirt on nylon straps between brass poles. I remembered that Tim had said if everybody that ever lived was buried, there wouldn’t be room left on the earth for the living. When they began to shovel the mound onto him, I started to panic. What if he was in a coma and wasn’t really dead, what if he woke up and found himself packed into solid darkness with only a few horrible hours of air left? I had
to tell someone! They had to pull him back up and check, wait a few days. And then I remembered about embalming. That’s when Tim really died for me.