Читать книгу Greetings from Below - David Philip Mullins - Страница 8

Arboretum

THE SAPLINGS STOOD IN NEAT ROWS ALONG EASTERN AVENUE, each leafless maple growing from a dark hump of soil that resembled a pitcher’s mound, or a small grave. They rose six, seven feet above the sidewalk. With flashlights and a trowel, we uprooted the shortest one we could find and carried it off to our plywood fort in the desert. I was in my early teens. It was late on a Sunday, and I had left my house in the middle of the night without permission. Surrounded by catclaws and schist rocks, the fort was a rickety structure that sat stark and uninviting in the middle of a dried-up arroyo. Kilburg had said that all the outside needed was a little greenery, a few trees.

Earlier that evening, I had learned that my father was going to die, and I was glad to be out in the open, away from home. Kilburg had convinced me to sneak out my bedroom window, to meet him at the end of our block at a quarter past eleven. Now he had me on my hands and knees, scooping rocks and hard-packed dirt baked solid after a rainless winter. The drought that had begun in December had yet to subside. This was more than twenty-five years ago, before interstate water banking, and people joked that their faucets might soon run dry. Summer was two months away, but even out at the fort—a twenty-minute walk into the Mojave wilderness that bordered our neighborhood to the south—the warm air had begun to smell of the chlorinated swimming pools and freshly mowed lawns that were partially at fault for the city’s water shortage. Beside me Kilburg massaged his aching stump. He could only stand for so long before he had to remove his prosthetic leg, a hollow, plastic thing, a mannequin’s appendage, from which he sometimes drank the Bushmills whiskey I borrowed from my father’s liquor cabinet.

“I don’t know about you, but I sure could use some action,” said Kilburg. The leg lay beneath him in the dirt; he sat crouched on it as though it were a log at a campfire. It had once matched the color of his skin but had faded to an unnatural ivory. In one hand he held a flashlight, and with the other he kneaded his stump in a slow figure eight, avoiding the spot in the center where the skin had been knotted together like the end of a hot dog.

“Action?” I asked. I scooped a clump of dirt over my shoulder and it hit the ground like a stale dinner roll. “What kind of action?”

The sapling was propped against the overturned paint bucket we used as a bongo drum. Behind us the fort stood at an angle, leaning westward, undeserving of its name: it wasn’t fortified in any way and appeared on the verge of collapse. Deep in what seemed an uncharted region of the Mojave—there were no trails, no cigarette butts or empty beer bottles left behind by the local high-school kids who partied in the desert—and concealed by the arroyo’s high, crumbling banks, it was at least unknown to the rest of the world. Building the fort had been Kilburg’s idea. We had spent an entire Saturday wrestling with the sheets of plywood we had found in his father’s tool shed, shaping a door frame with his ancient jigsaw and dragging the sheets one by one through the desert to hammer them together, and in the end our construction was nothing more than four unpainted walls and a low, flat roof, less complex than your average doghouse.

Kilburg shook his head at the ground, the way he did whenever I asked him a question.

“Action,” he said. “Chicks. Jesus, do I have to explain everything?”

“Oh,” I said, and felt like an idiot.

Travis Kilburg was tall and muscular, with long earlobes and a wide, open face. He wore a military buzz cut, and it seems to me now that his complexion always had a greenish tint to it—like the patina of an old bronze statue—his eyes dark and serious. Kilburg had diabetes and had lost his leg at the age of six due to a blocked artery. He liked to talk about sex, about the many girls whose virginity he had taken, though I knew that he himself was a virgin. We both were. We were fourteen years old. Neither of us had ever even kissed anyone. Kilburg was perhaps incapable of honesty, no matter what the topic, and I played along when he fabricated his exploits, nodding as he spun tales of seduction and conquest.

I stabbed the trowel into the dirt, leaning to grab a few pebbles from the hole. I didn’t mind doing all the work. It took my thoughts off the news my parents had delivered over dinner. According to my father’s doctor, a rare lung condition—a fibrosis—was responsible for his chronic cough, for his labored breathing, which in the last couple of months had grown louder and raspier. “Talk to him, Jack,” my mother said. “He has a right to know.” My father explained that his lungs were in bad shape, their tissue inflamed. Without at least one transplant, he told me, swallowing the words as he chewed, the fibrosis could prove fatal. “Will,” my mother corrected him, “will prove fatal. We just want you to understand what’s going on, Nick.” The only person I had ever known to die had been my grandfather on my mother’s side, who’d had a heart attack two summers earlier. After a long silence my mother suggested we move to California, near the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. My father’s doctor, a general practitioner, had told them that the respiratory specialists there were among the foremost in the world. Tearfully, my mother reminded my father that because of his age—forty-three—his name would be placed near the bottom of a long waiting list for a new lung. He needed a specific kind of treatment. A move to the coast, she said, might prolong his life, might save it. My father lowered his eyes toward his plate. He reminded my mother that Las Vegas was our home.

“You bring the booze?” Kilburg said now. He put a licked finger to the air. “It ’s about that time.”

“Just some schnapps.”

The liter of Bushmills I had borrowed in the past had been half-empty, and tonight I had chosen a bottle of DeKuyper Peachtree instead, paranoid that my father might have secretly taken to watching the volume of his whiskey. I had a hunch that Kilburg might declare the schnapps an unacceptable offering, but he only shrugged and said, “Whatever, man. Booze is booze.”

I held the sapling up to the light. Dark soil clung to a knot of roots. A shiny worm writhed from the soil, twisting around like a periscope. I positioned the roots in the hole and scooped the dirt back in, patting it flat around the trunk.

“There,” I said. “What do you think?”

Like the fort, the sapling leaned heavily to one side, in a way that made it look pathetic.

“Just as I pictured it,” he said. “This place looks better already. When that thing grows leaves, we’ll have ourselves a little color out here.” He kneaded his stump harder now, as though working a knotted muscle. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s celebrate.”

I reached into my back pocket and brought around the bottle of schnapps, a pint. I handed it to Kilburg, and he uncapped it and sniffed the contents. He made a face, crinkling his nose, then caught himself and smiled. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. “All we need are some chicks and we’d have a party on our hands.”

“Tell me about it.”

He took a long pull, wincing as he lowered the bottle. Kilburg rarely discussed his health, and at the time I wasn’t sure if having diabetes meant that he shouldn’t be drinking. I had never seen him test his blood sugar or inject insulin, nor had I ever thought of his illness as life-threatening. He seemed, at any rate, to have a high tolerance for alcohol, or pretended to. Kilburg would do almost anything for attention. Just above the knee joint, his prosthetic leg opened into a kind of cup, and it was from here that he would drink my father’s whiskey. Into the cup fit a concave socket, attached to which was a leather sleeve that laced up like a shoe. The sleeve slid snugly over his stump—the stump resting inside the padded socket—and when the laces were tied the leg was supposed to remain attached. But if Kilburg took a clumsy step as we crossed the uneven terrain of the desert, the socket would come out, popping like a cork, and he would pitch forward into the dirt. What’s more, the knee and ankle joints—crude-looking mechanisms that bent in accordance with a complicated arrangement of pins and bearings—creaked when he walked, and his stump itched and perspired and developed weekly blisters, causing him to grimace and complain. He moved with the lopsided gait of an arthritic old man. At school, kids tormented him, particularly Todd Sheehan and Chad Klein, two boys in our class who wore baseball caps and chewed tobacco. They were thuggish and athletic-looking—as big as Kilburg—and they called him Peg Leg and Gimp, tripping him whenever they had the chance. Even so, I thought, back then, that there were other, smaller kids on whom Kilburg took out his frustration.

“College chicks,” he said, taking another pull. “That’s what we really need.”

We were still in junior high school, and I wondered if Kilburg had ever even met a college-aged woman.

“I’d go to UNLV for the chicks alone,” he offered, “but my dad says college is for people who think they’re too good to work.”

Kilburg was the son of a chemical-plant operator, and he often found a way to incorporate his father’s opinions into a conversation. He was determined to follow in the man’s footsteps, to land himself a job someday at Kerr-McGee, where his father had worked for the past twenty years. Perhaps because my own father was an engineer, Kilburg needled me about being what he called a “richie,” even though we lived in a small single-story house just up the block. Both our fathers worked in the desert, but the Kerr-McGee plant was only twenty minutes outside the city. The nuclear test site where my father worked was over an hour away.

Three years earlier, Kilburg’s mother had run off with a gambler from Arizona, a man she had met at a poker table. As a consequence, it occurs to me now, Kilburg liked to brag that he had the coolest father in the neighborhood—the smartest and the toughest. His father was tall and potbellied, and he glared at you with stony eyes, and when he spoke his black beard parted to reveal a mouth full of crooked teeth, many of which overlapped or were angled to such a degree that you could see their rotting undersides. Evenings, he nursed a Heineken in his Barcalounger until he fell asleep. Kilburg worshipped him, but on more than one occasion he had shown up for school with a fat lip, or a bruised cheekbone, or a cut above his eye. When I had asked Kilburg, the Monday after we had built the fort, why his wrist was black-and-blue, he told me that a stereo speaker had fallen on him—knocked over by Tarkanian, his German shepherd—but I suspected the injury had been punishment for the wood that had gone missing from his father’s shed.

Presently, Kilburg switched off the flashlight, slipping it into a pocket of his shorts. “C’mon,” he said. He handed me the bottle, scooting himself off the prosthetic leg and onto the ground, his real leg stretched out in front of him. Pushing with his hands, the same way we eased ourselves down the sloping banks of the arroyo, he inched across the dirt and into the fort.

I crawled behind him through the low door frame. A green shag rug, taken from a supermarket Dumpster, covered the hard dirt floor. Flashlights hung like inverted torches in each of the four corners, dangling upside down from shoestrings nailed to the plywood, one of the bulbs always faintly flickering. Brushing against a wall of the fort caused the flashlights to sway in their corners, yellow beams crisscrossing the rug as if it were a dance floor. Each month Kilburg stole the latest issue of Playboy from the 7-Eleven near our school, and our only adornment was a glossy centerfold of Bernadette Peters, thumbtacked to the wall opposite the door frame.

I took a sip of the schnapps, coughing as it burned down my throat.

“There you go,” he laughed. He took off his shoe, a white sneaker whose mate was outside, on the foot of the prosthetic leg. “We’ll make a man outta you yet.”

Before long I had a terrific buzz going. My head had grown numb, and I was loose-jointed, slurring my speech. The two of us lay flat on the rug. In the still air I could smell sagebrush and Kilburg’s cheap drugstore cologne. He kept saying, “You drunk yet? You feeling anything?” I pinched my eyes closed and a kaleidoscope of color spun behind the lids. When I opened them, Kilburg was leaning over me, his breath warm on my face.

“Get off,” I said, squirming, but he held my arms. I couldn’t get free, pinned by the stiff weight of his torso. I looked away. Through the door frame I could see the moon, white light in a black sky. When he put his lips to mine, I let out a grumble, doubtful of my sudden arousal, a tingling sensation that rained from the crown of my head to the tips of my fingers. I was confused, unsure of how to process what was happening, but he slipped his tongue into my mouth, and I found myself giving in to the kiss. He eased off me, touching my ears, my cheeks, the side of my neck. Then he forced his stump into my hip, and gave a shudder when my erection brushed against his own. What we were doing seemed wrong—criminal, maybe—but I started to feel energized, bold, the way I had felt when we had stolen the sapling from Eastern Avenue, the way I imagined Kilburg felt when he shoplifted Playboys from 7-Eleven. I brought my arm up around his neck, but he batted it away.

“Easy, lover boy,” he said. He rolled off me, laughing.

“I thought—”

“I thought, I thought,” he mocked. “Relax. We’re not fags, dude. It’s only practice for the real thing, for when we both get girlfriends.” Kilburg narrowed his eyes as if the answer to a troublesome question had finally dawned on him. “We’re drunk, Nick. We’re not thinking right. Don’t ever tell anybody about this.” He pulled his shoe back on, looking panicky. “You do and you’re a dead man.”

My father began taking a daily dose of prednisone, a steroid meant to decrease the inflammation in his lungs. Local specialists struggled to slow the fibrosis they said would take his life, guessing that overexposure to unsafe chemicals at the test site had been its cause. I didn’t know why it was that Kilburg’s father, who worked at a chemical plant, didn’t suffer from a fibrosis of his own. My mother kept me updated on the specifics of my father’s condition. Over the past several weeks he had undergone a CAT scan and a bronchoscopy—procedures I had never heard of—and already there seemed to be a lack of hope in his eyes, as if he had predicted the ultimate uselessness of his treatment. How long did he have to live? And what exactly was a fibrosis, anyway? The word itself was a mystery. What would be my father’s last requests, and what would life be like without him? Such questions troubled me but were often replaced by daydreams of being at the fort with Kilburg.

We continued to sneak out after dark, the course of each night the same. We hid behind the corner of an office building, or in the shadows of an empty strip mall, peering from the darkness until the coast was clear, waiting as motorists made their way up and down the avenue. To the trill of katydids—everywhere that spring—we dug a twiglike sapling from the earth, wrapped its roots in a plastic produce bag, and made our way by flashlight into the desert. After planting a sapling, we saturated the ground with water we brought in plastic thermoses, and in a chrome flask my father kept in his liquor cabinet. Later, we drank ourselves to recklessness, finding new ways of expressing our attraction: petting, unzipping, fondling, going farther every time, Kilburg always in control. I concocted elaborate fantasies during which we spent entire weekends together, waking on the shag rug, unclothed in each other’s arms. Prior to our first kiss, I had never thought of him or any other male in such a manner. But my desire for Kilburg quickly grew as strong as any I’d had for a girl, and all the more surprising, I suppose, for the fact that he had only one leg.

To girls I was invisible, a brainy kid with chronic acne, buck-toothed and exceedingly thin. To Kilburg I was worth something. Not a day went by when I didn’t think about him. I felt lucky to be more than just his friend, though I was convinced I wasn’t gay, deciding on a precise distinction between bona fide homosexuality and my curious interest in Travis Kilburg. Surely a person could be drawn, temporarily at least, to a member of the same sex without being a homosexual—surely there were explanations for such a phenomenon. Like Kilburg, I didn’t want anyone to know about what we did at the fort.

By the end of May—as the days grew longer and the air dryer, the sun scorching the valley with what people now joked could only be malice—the saplings numbered twelve around the fort. After dinner my father read from newspaper articles about the drought, the longest in the city’s history, his voice thin and scratchy as he shook his head in disbelief. His hands had fattened from the prednisone and had taken on a yellowish color, as though he soaked them in formaldehyde. One evening he ran across an article that made mention of the missing maples. “Whoever’s taking those trees should be rewarded,” he said, calling our crime retribution for the city’s mistake of planting them in the first place, in the middle of a drought. He was right. It had been a surprising decision, and you got the feeling that, drought or no drought, the city was trying to change the landscape of Las Vegas, trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. The saplings were well-hidden at the fort, but I worried that the avenue might now be under some kind of twenty-four-hour surveillance. When I mentioned this to Kilburg, it seemed only to excite him. “Screw ’em,” he said. “Bring ’em on.”

Mornings, we walked together to school—through our neighborhood and up Eastern Avenue, past each of the humps of soil we had emptied, caved-in like little volcanoes—but when I ran into Kilburg between classes, he usually ignored me. Todd Sheehan and Chad Klein teased him as he hobbled through the hallways, and time after time I had the urge to stand up for him. I never did, afraid they might unleash their viciousness on me.

My mother, who worked days as a receptionist but played the violin in her spare time, started speaking of my father as though he were already dead, her words bearing a gravity that seemed childish and contrived. “Before long, it’ll just be the two of us,” she would say with tear-filled eyes, playing something morose by Brahms or Tchaikovsky—composers she spoke of as if they were friends—lowering her head and sawing away at the strings, her hand moving wildly up and down the fingerboard. She had always thought of herself as an artist whose potential had never fully developed. Resting the bow on her shoulder, she would tell me to get used to being the man of the house, and hand me a tissue. When I failed to cry, she would insist that I was in a state of denial. But if my father was around, my mother was all smiles, preparing his favorite meals, surprising him with tickets to a movie or a new set of golf clubs. She bought him watches, ties, books by his favorite authors, and in June, for his forty-fourth birthday, she gave him a new Buick LeSabre—an expense, I know now, my parents couldn’t afford.

One night when I returned home from the fort, a light was on in the family room. It was late, one o’clock. I had never been caught sneaking out, and I feared that my parents had finally discovered my absence. I worried the police had been called, but when I crept to the window, squinting into a space of light where the curtains didn’t quite meet, I saw only my mother, her knees drawn to her chest in my father’s leather armchair. She paged through a stack of sheet music, a pencil behind her ear, eyes half-closed.

I knelt down between some shrubs. My mother rested the stack of sheet music in her lap, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles. A tear streamed past the corner of her mouth as she scribbled something into a margin. When she glanced up, I ducked below the edge of the window, holding my breath. But as I looked back in—cautiously, my heart hammering in my chest—I saw her paging through the stack again. For some reason, I kept holding my breath, thinking of my father, of what it would be like to struggle for air. I thought about what the specialists had told him, that soon he would need an oxygen tank to breathe, one he would wear all the time, as you might eyeglasses or a hearing aid. I imagined tending to him, what my mother would have to go through, fretting at the bedside of a dying spouse. I, too, began to cry, ashamed of the tears, as if my father himself were my witness. Kilburg had once told me that crying was a sign of weakness, that, according to his father, shedding tears meant you were no stronger than a little girl. I had never seen my own father cry, not even when he talked about his health—which he did only when motivated by my mother—or when he wheezed around the house, huffing his words when he spoke. My chest heaved, and I let go my breath. We had parted only minutes ago, but I suddenly missed Kilburg. I didn’t know if he could understand what I was feeling, but I missed him anyway, as though I might never see him again.

Placing the stack of sheet music on the floor, my mother got up from the chair, stretched her arms, and switched off the light. I walked down the block, but Kilburg’s bedroom window was dark. He lived in a big split-level with wood trim and aluminum siding, out of place in our neighborhood of low stuccoed houses. As always, a trailered boat took up the driveway, and an orange ’67 Mustang was parked against two bricks in the middle of the yard. A single agave grew beside the rusted automobile, the dead grass a sunburned brown. The development dipped along a hillside, and the distant valley was a bowl of glimmering light, the Strip a reddish flare that blazed across the land.

I walked around the side of the house, through the open wrought-iron gate. The backyard had never been landscaped, and patches of creosote grew from the wind-blown dirt. Along the edge of the cinderblock wall stood an abandoned lawn mower, two of its wheels missing. I sat down in an old blue wheelbarrow that was overgrown with dandelions and quack grass, as if, like the lawn mower, it hadn’t moved in a hundred years. It was a school night, but I remained in the wheelbarrow for a long while, deciphering constellations that glared in the night sky, a skill my father had taught me. Kilburg was asleep in his bedroom, and I wondered if he even liked me, or anyone else, for that matter. He was a bully, and bullies weren’t known to enjoy the company of others. I had never seen him completely naked, but I pictured what he might look like—a solid torso, two arms and a leg—and I unzipped my shorts and began to masturbate.

The following morning I was running late for school. When Kilburg knocked on the front door, my mother told him to go ahead without me. Fifteen minutes later, I was making my way up Eastern Avenue when I spotted him at the corner. He should have been in class by now, but there he was, twenty yards away, surrounded by Sheehan and Klein and a third boy named Billy Walsh, who had been in my gym class the previous semester. Suddenly Sheehan swung at Kilburg, clipping him on the cheek. When Kilburg raised an elbow to shield himself, Klein took a step forward and kneed him in the groin. Walsh stood in the background, howling and stomping his heel on the concrete. Doubled over, Kilburg stumbled to the left, then to the right. I waited for his leg to come off. Like a felled tree, he tipped slowly to one side, his textbooks spilling from his arms as he hit the sidewalk.

I was half a mile from school, and I considered running for help, cutting unseen through the desert and summoning the principal, Mr. Gerhard. I wondered what, if anything, Kilburg had done to provoke the boys. Walsh was short and skinny, a loudmouth and a tagalong. Paralyzed with fear, I knelt behind a beat-up Impala, figuring that, if I had to, I could take him in a fistfight. But I had recently chipped both my front teeth during a game of touch football, and I imagined Sheehan and Klein kicking them in entirely while Walsh held me from behind.

It was a hot, clear morning, and sunlight glinted off the Impala’s chrome bumper. As I leaned against it, I understood that Kilburg was really no bully at all. He was just a kid with a difficult homelife and an unfair disadvantage, someone to feel sorry for. Perhaps this, beyond his physical appeal, was what I liked most about him. I suppose I loved him, or thought I did—I had never known such love, or anything like it—and I waited to feel compelled to rush to his defense, to act as any good friend would. But the feeling never came. I had once seen my father break up a quarrel between two rowdy fans at a UNLV basketball game, and I contemplated why it was that I hadn’t inherited his bravery. I was glad I hadn’t walked to school with Kilburg. I had nothing but a desire to escape, a spineless longing to be somewhere else: back home, or safe at the fort.

I peeked around the bumper of the Impala, holding my breath the way I had in front of my house the night before. Traffic whooshed by on the avenue. Some cars had slowed during the commotion, but none of the drivers had got out to help. Kilburg groped around on the sidewalk, trying to stand, but before he could get to his feet, Walsh did something I’ll never forget. He bent down and pulled off Kilburg’s leg, spitting into the leather sleeve and then tossing the leg as far down the sidewalk as he could, far enough that Kilburg would have to crawl to retrieve it.

Kilburg lay curled on the concrete as the three boys, whooping and high-fiving, made off with his textbooks. I watched him struggle to sit up, then drag himself over to the leg. As though he had sensed my presence, he looked up the avenue a few times, directly at the Impala, or so it seemed, squinting as he held his groin. Every part of me wanted to help him as I should have sooner, but if I revealed myself now he would know I had been watching all along. And so I remained behind the Impala, hidden and ashamed, as Kilburg wiped the sleeve clean with the palm of his hand, reattached the leg, and limped off toward home.

He never did show up at school, and when I called his house in the afternoon there was no answer. That night I found him at the fort. He was sitting outside, rubbing his stump in his usual way, the prosthetic leg resting beside him in the dirt. Inside, the flashlights were on, a bright glow spreading from the door frame. The air smelled strongly of marijuana.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

Dime-sized welts rose from his neck and arms, as though he had been pelted with stones. He had a black eye, and the side of his face, badly bruised, looked like the palm of a catcher’s mitt.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

I sat down next to him. It seemed that not all of his injuries could have resulted from what had happened that morning, that some of them must have been his father’s doing. I didn’t know how to ask him if it was true that the man beat him.

“What happened to you?” I said.

He relit a joint, shaking his head as he looked down at the leg. The laces had come untied, he claimed, and he had tumbled down a flight of stairs at the school library. He had gone there, he told me, to check out a few books on gardening, since all of the saplings we had planted appeared to have died. There were fifteen in all. Many had begun to sprout leaves, but now the leaves hung from their branches like rolled parchment. There had been no end to the drought, and the water we had brought to the fort hadn’t been enough to keep the maples alive.

“Jeez,” I said. I felt a revulsion for myself, regret that churned in my gut. “You look pretty bad.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll heal.”

“Did it hurt? The fall, I mean. You in any pain?”

“You’re such a wuss,” he said, and raised an eyebrow. He took a hit off the joint. “I bet you never even jerk off.”

I wasn’t sure what being a wuss had to do with masturbating, but I answered, “Sure I do. Who doesn’t?”

“Girls don’t.” He handed me the joint, burned down to nothing. “Girls don’t have peckers, stupid.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “OK.”

I had smoked marijuana only once before, with a cousin at a family reunion in Illinois. I inhaled, pinching the joint between my thumb and index finger, the way I had been shown.

“Good stuff,” I ventured, managing not to cough.

Kilburg strummed an air guitar. In a rock ’n’ roll falsetto, he began to sing: “What I want, you’ve got, and it might be hard to handle. But like the flame that burns the candle, the candle feeds the flame.” It was a song we both liked—“You Make My Dreams,” by Hall and Oates. In a short while, my eyelids grew heavy and a dense heat surrounded me. I had a sense of time passing slowly. I was suddenly very hungry.

“You make my dreams come true,” he sang.

“Awesome,” I said, and laughed.

He lowered his arms and took a breath. “Holy shit,” he said. “I’m so goddamn stoned.”

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. The sun had set hours ago, but it had to be close to ninety degrees outside. I could feel warmth rising through the desert floor. A cloud of smoke hovered above the fort, drifting into the night as I extinguished the joint against the side of a rock. Kilburg started mumbling to himself, gesturing with his hands. I couldn’t make out the words. Already my forehead was throbbing, and I was glad I hadn’t taken a second hit. After a time, I heard him say, “I’m gonna fuck you.”

Just like that, my high was gone, or I thought it was. “Yeah,” he said, as though he had reflected on it and made up his mind. He spoke slowly, leaning back on his elbows, his voice soft but emphatic: “I’m going to fuck you.”

A coyote wailed in the distance, the desert aglow in the milky light of a full moon. I had understood him well enough, and for a few weeks now I had been disturbingly curious about intercourse between men. Still, I wasn’t entirely sure what he had in mind. I should have voiced my unease, but I wanted to follow his orders, whatever they might be.

“Stand up,” he said, louder now. “Pull down your shorts.”

I did as I was told, standing in front of him with my shorts and underwear bunched at my ankles. I felt the twinges of an erection, and soon it was bobbing beneath the hem of my T-shirt. In a corner of my mind I could see into the future, into tomorrow or next week, when I would look back and yearn for this moment. I knew that it would seem distant, fictional. I guess I was scared, but I wanted to savor it.

“Kneel down,” Kilburg told me, and I knelt before him. He sat up straight, his real leg outstretched in the dirt. He took my hands in his, and his thumbs trembled in my palms. He was just as scared as I was. The muscles flexed in his arms, while a purple vein bulged from the side of his neck. He tightened his grip, squeezing until it hurt. Then he grabbed hold of my head and pushed it into his crotch. He leaned over and put his lips to my ear. “First you’re gonna blow me,” he whispered.

I unzipped his cutoffs, resting my cheek against his knee, where I could smell the sharp scent of his groin. I heard him take a deep, eager breath, but when I kissed the inside of his stump, tasting the salt of his skin, he flinched, pushing hard at my shoulder. I looked up at him. In the light from the door frame, he was working his jaw like an animal. It seemed as if he might vomit.

“Get away from me,” he said, his face twisted in anger.

“What is it?” I said. Still kneeling, I smiled in a way that I thought might comfort him, but I only got him angrier.

“I’m not like you!” he yelled. “You make me want to throw up. You make me hate myself.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Just shut up,” he said, pressing his fingers into his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

I pulled up my underwear and my shorts and sat back down in the dirt. I looked through the darkness, and it struck me that all across Las Vegas, at that very moment, there were people having sex. When I had turned twelve, my father had tried to broach the subject of intercourse, uncomfortably explaining that, beyond the fulfillment of desire, it was an act of love. But right now people were doing it in motel rooms and bathrooms and parked cars and storage closets, and they either loved each other or they didn’t. I wasn’t sure if it made any difference. It was possible that simply being with someone—anyone—was enough, and I had the idea that desire was nothing more than a form of desperation.

“I promise not to tell anyone,” I said, sounding helpless. “I wouldn’t ever do that.” I considered taking off my shirt. To make my chest look more feminine, I had plucked what few hairs I’d had from around my nipples, and I wanted to show him. I wanted Kilburg to see what I had done. “Trav,” I pleaded.

“I told you to shut up,” he said, zipping his cutoffs. He pinched the knotted center of his stump, the way I had seen my father pinch the bridge of his nose when, late at night in his study, he thumbed through blueprints in preparation for the next day’s work. I’m not sure what made me do it, but when Kilburg closed his eyes, as if he were trying to recall some vital piece of information, I told him my father was sick. “He’s going to die,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

I was crying again, the second time in two days. I remembered what Kilburg’s father had told him about shedding tears, and I felt silly and weak. Kilburg stared at his hands, his arms loose across his lap. His mother had left him without notice, and I wondered if he cried over her when no one was around.

“I already heard,” he said, his voice trailing off. “My dad told me.”

Between low clouds I could see the stars. They seemed to float through the sky like distant aircrafts, flashing in and out of sight, faint in the light of the moon. I thought of them falling in slow motion, all at once—a blizzard of stars—down through the universe and into the valley, filling it up before melting into the dry landscape. I assumed my mother had gone around telling everyone in the neighborhood about my father’s condition, looking for pity, or who knows what. For a couple of minutes, there was only the noise of katydids, a steady chirr that filled the air. As I watched what I thought might be cumulonimbus clouds—a term I had heard my father use when he read aloud from articles about the drought—a breeze picked up, stirring dirt around the fort. The clouds came swiftly together, dark and swollen, padding the sky. I thought of the smell of sagebrush when it rained—it was hard to forget, at once fragrant and repellent, something like the smell of your hand after you licked it. Kilburg nodded his head. He seemed to have calmed down. He bent forward and picked up a rock, chucking it into the night.

“Why didn’t you help me this morning?” he said.

I wiped tears from my face, looking him up and down.

“I know you were there. I saw you.” He lifted his chin. “I saw you behind that car.”

I tried to think of a lie—an excuse for why I hadn’t defended him, to make up for the ugly truth of my cowardice—but I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, switching it on and shining it at a yucca, a Joshua tree. Heads of sagebrush rose up among the catclaws and schist rocks. He pointed the flashlight at a small cluster of jimsonweed, swathed by little white flowers shaped like trumpets. He circled the weed with the beam, clicking his tongue.

“If you wanted to hallucinate,” he said, “you could eat those flowers. Problem is, they might kill you.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

And I was. I owed him an explanation. But I was still thinking about my father. It would turn out that my father would suffer for seven more years, never undergoing a transplant yet slipping in and out of long, miraculous periods of remission, his lungs dissipating intermittently. He would die, with little warning, in a hospital room on a cold Las Vegas evening in November, a week before Thanksgiving—two years before my mother’s emotional constitution would begin to unravel in earnest. At that moment, however, sitting there with Kilburg, I had a sense of imminent tragedy. In my mind, as in my mother’s, my father was already dead. I pictured his last, gasping moments, then his wake: he lay in an open casket, done up with cosmetics to resemble the living, the way my grandfather had lain at his own wake two summers earlier. I saw Kilburg beside me at the burial, and afterward—days later, perhaps—I saw the two of us sneaking into the cemetery at night and, in my father’s memory, planting a sapling behind his headstone. I saw Travis Kilburg as an important part of my life, even though I felt that this would be our last time together at the fort—that we would never steal another sapling, that our relationship was more or less over. Indeed, we would never go back to the fort again. Kilburg would eventually move across town, and the last time I would run into him would be at a party the week before I would leave home for college, where he would tell me he dropped out of school and took an entry-level job his father got him at the Kerr-McGee plant. It would be an awkward conversation, but I would have no feelings for him—none at all.

Now Kilburg was looking directly at me. The breeze that had picked up grew stronger, sending a tumbleweed bounding past the fort, lifting a plastic produce bag we had left in the dirt. A dust devil spun elegantly and died. I hadn’t stopped crying, but I tried not to show it, blinking away the tears. I told him again that I was sorry. One of the tears landed on my forearm, and even though I had felt it fall from my chin, I thought for an instant that after five long months it had begun to rain. But the clouds had already started to separate, exposing the moon and the stars, floating east toward Sunrise Mountain.

Kilburg knuckled his shoulder. He set the flashlight in the dirt and reached for the prosthetic leg, scowling as he pulled the sleeve over his stump and tightened the laces. I’m not sure why, but it occurred to me, for the first time, that he had a potentially critical illness: if it had cost him his leg, I reasoned, it could just as easily cost him his life. I was suddenly convinced that, like my father, Kilburg wouldn’t live long.

“I guess I thought we were friends,” he said, a note of fear in his voice.

It was late, and I could feel that I was still pretty high. I didn’t know what to tell him. I was tired and I wanted to go home. Finally I stood, brushing dirt from my shorts, and offered Kilburg my hand.

“We are,” I said, because a lie seemed less hurtful than the truth.