The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

1

I WAS GOING NOWHERE alone up the wet Medford street through slashes of drizzle pretending my footsteps in puddles proved I was braving a storm. The rain was personal, falling especially on my head, testing my willpower. Then I saw the girl hurrying ahead of me. Her jacket was drenched in patches, her soaked skirt flapping against her legs, and a swag of slip, satiny, pink-edged, with a ribbon of lace drooping beneath the hem. She was there for a reason, I felt: because I was there, braving the rain. She turned at the sound of my puddle-slapping steps, her face pale and small. She seemed to study me with her narrowing lips. So I dogged her in the rain, following that hanging scrap of slip.

She went into St. Ray’s, I entered just after her, and the heavy iron-studded church door banged shut behind us. We were both in a shadow that smelled of hot wax and candle smoke and damp wool and a residue of incense, all the stinks of veneration. But there was candle shine on the girl’s pretty face.

The holy water was tepid from all the dipped fingers, and dripping from my fingertips to my palm I smelled its stagnation as I crossed myself. The church was clammier and cooler than outside, dank with sweaty varnish and dying flowers. Though the church was large, entering it on this dark day was like going downstairs into a damp cellar.

When I had turned to dip my fingers into the holy water font I lost the girl. I took a seat at the far end of a rear pew, under a stained-glass window — Satan in a lower panel, his green face and veined crushed batwings and snakelike tail, his body twisted on the downward-thrusting spear blade of a glowing Saint Michael. The Last Supper, in an upper panel, showed thirteen Apostles at the long table, one with rusty hair and no halo — Judas looking guilty.

The colored windowpanes trapped the light and prevented it from entering the church. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I saw that the girl in the wet jacket was in the pew in front of me, kneeling, her head bowed, and as she prayed and relaxed she lowered her small shapeless bottom onto her heels. I sat behind her and looked at her narrow shoulders, her skinny neck, her wet shoes — pigeon-toed behind the kneeler, and the scrap of satin, her smooth lace-trimmed slip, the more alluring for being mud-spattered.

Above the altar the candle flickered in the red chimney of the lamp on the long black chain: the red light meant that Christ was present as a consecrated host in the tabernacle, the gilded cupboard-shaped box in the center of the altar. A statue of Christ stood at the side of the altar, his robe parted, his right hand indicating his torn-open gown and his blood-drenched heart in flames.

The candles on the altar, the paschal candle, and the red-tinted sanctuary light were nothing compared to the heat from the sloping rack of vigil lights that blazed in front of the small side altar near me, the wicks standing in pools of liquefied wax, a bank of fluttering flames. A woman in a black coat lit a fresh one with a taper, then inserted a coin with a clink into the coin box, and she knelt and prayed.

As I knelt to get a better look at the girl, she sat back in her pew, her hair near my nose. She slipped her wet jacket off and a warm sweet soap smell crept over my face. I remained a moment, sniffing, and then sat and looked at the tiny buttons down the back of her blouse, one of them undone, showing in the parentheses of her parted blouse the fastening of the back strap of her bra. That she wore a bra at all seemed to me a miracle.

Feeling hot-faced at the sight of her bra strap in the church, I turned away and saw that I was sitting under the Eleventh Station, Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross, the soldiers banging the nails through Jesus' hands and feet with mallets while Jesus lay on the wooden cross, glaring at his persecutors.

“This is the ninth day of the Novena and the beginning of Holy Week,” the priest said. It was Father Staley. “Scaly” Staley, we called him, because of his hands. “Those of you who have completed the Novena will be rewarded with sanctifying grace. Please follow the service on the pamphlet provided in the pew. Let us pray.”

While he prayed aloud I looked at the Novena booklet, flipping through it until I came to the section of testimonials.

I was operating a machine at my place of work, watching the belts and wheels. Without any warning a wheel worked loose, the machine broke apart and scattered chunks of metal in every direction. Although I was not quick enough to get myself out of the way, I was completely unharmed. None of the pieces hit me and just one of them could have seriously harmed me or even killed me. I believe I was spared due to the divine intercession of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whom I had prayed to in the course of a recent Novena.

Father Staley was clearing his throat in the pulpit. He gargled and said, “This is a special week in the church calendar. We know it is a special week when we look at the Gospel of John and read the words of Christ. 'Did I not choose you, the Twelve, and one of you is a devil.'”

The big sleeve of his vestments crackled against the microphone as he paused to let this sink in.

“One of you is a devil,” he said again. He nodded at us and dabbed at his mouth with his floppy sleeve.

Satan was grinning in the stained-glass window, his green face, his broken wings, his shiny thrashing tail.

“Who is that devil?” the priest asked. “The devil is you, if you betray Christ by committing sin.”

Satan was grinning in the window because he was being speared, because he was in pain, because in stained-glass windows only the devils grinned. Grinning was a sign of wickedness.

“Later, John says, ‘And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him.’”

I could tell from the way his lips smacked that Father Staley wanted us to remember the word “sop.”

“What is a sop?” he asked, and nodded and paused. I looked at The Last Supper for a clue. “It is something you eat. They were at the Last Supper, eating. Judas was eating with the Apostles. But Satan entered into him.” The priest lifted the Bible and the lacy cuff of his big sleeve swung as he said, “'Then Jesus unto Mm said, “That thou doest, do quickly.”’”

In the long silence that followed, Satan hovered over me and tried to enter me and make me look at the girl’s gray bra strap.

Father Staley shouted from the pulpit, “‘That thou doest, do quickly!’ Betray me, but make it quick!”

This sharp cry of condemnation made the girl in front of me jerk her head back, and after that a shiver passed through her body. I became conscious that I was watching her and I shut my eyes.

Father Staley said, “Unless you are in a state of grace the devil is inside you, blackening your soul. You are Judas, betraying Jesus. You are a Roman soldier hammering a nail into our Lord’s hands!”

And yet even then I did not believe the devil was inside me; I believed that if I struggled and prayed there, and let the girl leave the church alone, I could enter a state of grace.

2

I went to sleep that night, and woke the next day, with the same thought, not any words but a clear picture of the pretty girl with the wet jacket and the drooping slip. I remembered that grayish lacy slip swinging below the hem of her dress before I remembered her face, her green eyes, her nervous lips and skinny fingers. I wanted to see her again.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked as I headed outside.

“The Stations.”

She was pleased and surprised, she looked at me in a kindly way, she said, “Don’t forget to bring something for the collection.

I found some change on a saucer in my room that I had been saving to buy some ammo for my air rifle. I took a nickel, but hesitated. When I saw my face in my mirror I felt ashamed and pocketed the quarter.

The afternoon was bright and cool because of yesterday’s rain; the sky was clear, the clouds bulky and white and tumbling overhead; the streets were dry but the gutters were still moist and muddy. At the corner of Webster and Fulton I saw John Burkell coming toward me, biting his necktie. He seemed glad to see me. He took his tie out of his mouth and jingled some coins in his pocket.

“Want to go to a show?”

“I’m going to church.”

“You don’t have to.”

He meant it wasn’t a sin not to go today.

“My mother’s making me. The Stations.”

“There’s a pisser Abbott and Costello movie at the Square Theater.”

“I’m going to be late.”

Burkell didn't say anything. He just put the end of his tie back into his mouth and walked toward Medford Square.

The Stations of the Cross service was at four, and it was ten to four by the time I got to the Fellsway, where black cars were speeding past. I ran across one lane and onto the center of the island toward the trolley tracks. A sudden clanging of the bell of an approaching trolley made me jump, and the thing screeched past me on the metal rails as I imagined myself run down and smashed under the iron wheels.

That thought of dying was worse because I had not seen the pretty girl, and somehow I expected to, as I had the day before, at the Novena. On the area of the sidewalk where I had followed her in the rain I saw four big boys and a small one sauntering along in my direction.

Strange boys approaching on the sidewalk in a certain careless way always made me nervous, because they were bolder in a group. For a moment I wished I had gone with Burkell, but then it was too late to think anything at all because the boys were blocking the sidewalk and wouldn’t let me pass.

I stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and hurried onward with my head down.

“Want a fight?”

I said nothing.

“Get him, Angie.”

One of them tried to snatch my arm.

“He’s smaller than you and you’re scared.”

“Let go,” I said, and hated the tremor of fear in my voice.

“Chickenshit. Hit him, Angie.”

I winced and kept walking. I knew nothing crueler or more vicious and unforgiving than ugly hard-faced boys like these daring me to fight. One put his leg in front of me while another pushed me. I tripped and fell flat but scrambled to my feet and tried to get away.

“Fairy!”

Before I could move on, a boy I couldn't see punched my upper arm, then knocked me on the head. I was breathless and terrified.

“Asshole!”

I staggered along the gutter, splashing into a puddle left over from yesterday, and soaked my shoes, the water chilling my socks and feet. The boys laughed, and one of them threw a muddy stick at my arm.

My feet squelched, and what was worse was that one foot was wetter than the other and made a noise as I ran. I knew I was late for church, but at least I had a place to run to. I saw St. Ray's ahead as a refuge and was glad for my decision to go.

Easing the big door open, holding it ajar and hoping no one would see me, I slid through the narrow crack into the darkness of the church.

“Shame on you!”

With this hiss, which startled me, a hand snatched my ear and I saw the angry face of a nun — pale skin and a half-plucked mustache and a black hood like a villain, no lips and crooked teeth and a bristly chin. She twisted my ear and then punched my arm, harder than the attacking boy had done.

“It’s a sin to be late,” she said in a harsh sour breath. “It’s an insult to Jesus.”

I was startled and felt helpless again. Nuns were hardly human, bearded women, like demons, somehow incomplete, hidden beneath black gowns and starched collars. I could not imagine what their bodies might look like when I considered their scary faces and claw-shaped hands.

She had punched my coat where the boy's muddy stick had whacked me.

“You're filthy. Your shoes are soaked.” She held on to my arm. “This is the house of our Lord and Savior!”

She twisted my arm and pushed me so hard I scuffed my feet for balance, and some people in the last pew turned to see what the fuss was about. I ducked down the side aisle and into the nearest pew to get away from the nun, and as I knelt I heard the chanting of the congregation and the loud “Amen!”

“Sixth Station,” Father Staley said aloud, and raised his eyes to the image on a pillar. He stood there, an altar boy on either side of him, each one carrying a lighted candle. The priest went on announcing: “Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus.”

Palm fronds were folded behind the carved wood image that showed Veronica's cloth imprinted with the face of Jesus, the hanging cloth like a mirror, another miracle.

“Veronica in her mercy was guided by the angels,” the priest said, “although there were devils all around.”

Knowing human cruelty — boys who looked for fights, nuns who pinched me and tried to frighten me with threats, and other human scares — made it hard for me to believe in the devil. Human wickedness worried me and made me want to be alone, or else to find a friend.

She was not in church. I squinted into the dim light that was dulled by the soupy color of the stained-glass windows. I thought I saw her at the Tenth Station, Jesus Is Stripped of His Garments, but it was someone else, a bigger neater girl and not as pretty. I knew that in looking for the skinny girl I appeared attentive and pious, my face forward. I watched for her and heard Father Staley's shoe leather squeak. I watched for her and heard the chinking of coins in the collection basket. I dropped the nickel in and kept my quarter.

Father Staley had left the last Station, fourteen, Jesus Is Placed in the Sepulchre. He turned to face the people in the pews and said, “Confession will be heard tomorrow. You must be in a state of grace or else you can’t perform your Easter duty.”

As he spoke I saw the girl on the far side of the church — her lovely face — under the Eighth Station, The Women of Jerusalem Weep Over Jesus. I turned to get a better look and my arm went numb as though I had been bitten — it was the nun, bugeyed in fury, pinching me.

“Kneel down!”

“I want ejaculations from you,” she said in my ear. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, forgive me!”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, forgive me.”

“Five hundred times.”

I knelt with my head down reciting them, and when I was done the church was empty, the girl gone. But it wasn't only punishment; we were promised that each ejaculation knocked one day off the time we would spend in Purgatory.

3

I still had no idea who she was, but after two days I had a better notion of what she looked like, her thin face and green eyes, the way her clothes hung straight down on her, her thin neck and narrow shoulders and bony legs, her limp skirt and the way her slip drooped beneath it, different clothes on different days but the same torn slip. She was like a certain kind of skinny doll.

I did not want to talk to her — didn’t have the courage, had nothing to say. I just wanted a chance to stare at her. So outside the church on Wednesday afternoon I waited by the grotto, a statue of the Virgin Mary balanced on a ball, and standing there I realized for the first time that the ball was the earth and her bare feet were crushing a snake.

Earlier in the year we had had a special ceremony and a sermon on this spot, consecrating the statue, the pastor explaining the Assumption, that when the Virgin Mary died she rose to Heaven.

“The Blessed Virgin was not buried, her body did not decay, she was assumed into Heaven, body and soul, because she was the mother of God, the second Eve. This is Our Lady’s year, the Marian Year.”

I kept hearing the expression “Marian Year” and I knew it had something to do with Mary, but what was I supposed to do? It did not seem so odd to me that she had uprisen, flown to Heaven on rooster tails of flame: it was shown in all the pictures, even the oldest ones.

But now that the pastor kept insisting that Mary was assumed into Heaven, that this was official doctrine, saying “It’s true,” I started to think that it might not be true. Looking at the stone statue, the big hard folds of the Virgin’s blue cloak and her heavy body, I tried to imagine her rising from the ground, over the tops of the telephone poles and past the trees in Hickey Park, into the glowing clouds, the whole grotto, scallop shell and planet earth and all, shooting like a rocket ship upward on a plume of smoke.

Then, staring past the Virgin, I saw the skinny girl hurrying along the sidewalk alone, wearing the jacket she had worn to the Novena — it had dried out — but a blue skirt, the same shoes, falling-down socks, and the scrap of drooping slip. Her tangled hair made her seem nervous and unhappy, as though someone was chasing her.

The devil was always after us, the priests said. Maybe she was being dogged by the devil, walking lopsided, one shoulder higher than the other.

She turned to climb the church stairs, and I followed her, keeping my distance, waiting a few seconds after the big door closed on her before opening it again. The bad light blinded me as I entered, I stumbled in the shadows, and I paused behind a pillar until I could see clearly.

Two confessionals were in use. In the pews near them people were waiting, some of them kneeling, some sitting, waiting their turn to tell their sins.

The skinny girl was walking slowly up the center aisle trying to decide where to go. We knew that in confession some priests were stern and some friendly. I had no idea which priests were in the confessionals, but I knew where to go when the girl chose. I wanted to be near her but not next to her. Her confessional had two compartments for people to confess. The girl was in the line that fed into the right-hand side, and so I sat two pews behind her, in the line for the left-hand compartment, five people ahead of me, five ahead of her. She knelt and prayed.

Above her was a stained-glass window — Saint Rose of Lima, first saint in the Americas, from a rich family; but, the nuns told us, she decided to serve God. The next window showed Saint Theresa of Avila. She was famous for having a vision of Hell, another nun’s story: a tiny room made of white-hot metal in which she could neither stand nor sit, flames on the walls, where you burned for eternity.

Every time I saw Saint Theresa’s odd comical headpiece and pleated cloak I was reminded of this hot room in Hell.

That was why we were going to confession. If you were not in a state of grace, with a stainless soul, you went to Hell when you died and you stayed in the flames forever.

Saint Francis, in another window, was a relief to me, the way the birds fluttered around his head — he spoke to birds, they talked back to him. On his hands were wounds, the stigmata. The cuts did not surprise me. If you were very holy, God made your hands and feet bleed, the way Jesus had bled during the crucifixion. I saw the wounds as a Jesus-like achievement, not something that was painful but a sort of reward, a bloody badge, and the proof of holiness.

People left the confessional with their heads down, and other people entered, looking anxious. We slid along the pews, awaiting our turn. Each time the priest began to hear someone's confession a window inside was jiggled open, like a kitchen cabinet. Then the priest pronounced a blessing, and when the confession was done he shut the slider with a smack and opened the one on the other side.

The girl was kneeling, praying. I tried to pray, but above my head the stained-glass window showed Saint Michael spearing the devil, his snaky tail whipped to one side. The windows were full of snakes. Saint Patrick holding a staff was casting wiggly snakes out of Ireland, and the Virgin in her window was squashing a squirming snake with her bare feet.

I looked from one snake to another, marveling at how fat and healthy they seemed. These evil things were the only images in the windows that were full of life, even struggling to survive as they were, and the saints were overcolored, with big sleeves and fat faces and dead eyes, and halos like gold donuts.

Thup-thrip, the jiggling slider closed on one side of the confession box, and thrip-thup, opened on the other. The girl was gone from the pew in front, so I assumed she was inside the confessional and perhaps the mumble I heard was hers. Since I knew the confession formula, I could follow the high points of what she was saying. Beneath the loose curtain I could see her scuffed shoes and falling-down socks.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” After a pause, a breath, she continued. “It has been blee weeks since my last confession. Blee blee fault blee times. Blee my mother blee.”

Hearing her say the word “sinned” made me eager and hot, and there was more.

“Blee blee blee impure thoughts blee times.”

Lifting my hands to my face and blinding myself I saw in my dark damp palms someone new, not a pale skinny girl but someone friskier and fleshier, who committed sins and suffered guilt; someone like me.

“Blaw blew blee occasion of sin?” the priest asked.

“Yes, Father.”

“Blah blay else?”

“No, Father.”

“Blay blee Hail Marys and blaw Our Fathers and a good Act of Contrition.”

“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee,” she replied. “I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell.”

As she gulped and recited in a quavering voice I realized that I was in love with her — hearing her confession, her uncertain and guilty voice, her pathetic expressions of sorrow, a tone that said: I am sorry but I know I will sin more and I will have to come back here and confess my sins all over again.

Thup-thrip. Then she was pushing the limp brown confessional curtain aside and ducking out, and as she did, heading for the altar, her hands clasped, her head lowered, her eyes were on me, and she looked happy.

Instead of going into the confessional I slid out of the pew and followed her to the altar rail. I knelt beside her. The heat of the vigil lights, the flickering bank of candle flames, the smell of scorched wax, the warmth of the altar, and the sooty lingering whiff of incense. She was mumbling prayers, her forehead resting on the altar rail. I watched her out of one eye, but when I turned away and pretended to pray she got up and left the church.

So only then did I go to confession, and now I had a descriptive phrase for my sins: impure thoughts.

4

“What happened yesterday?” Father Staley asked from the pulpit on Holy Thursday, and he waited a while, too long, and I was worried, because I was thinking about yesterday. Finally he said, “Judas was plotting to betray Jesus yesterday. What happens today?” The priest leaned forward and spoke angrily. “Today, Judas betrays Our Lord.”

Father Staley was speaking directly to me. I could not look at him.

“And so Christ’s message on Holy Thursday,” he said, and he raised a flopping sleeve and shook his white finger at me, “Christ’s message on Holy Thursday is, prepare to suffer.”

She was sitting in front of me. I thought she had seen me on the way in. She had seemed to hurry ahead. How I loved her. Who was she?

“Tomorrow is Good Friday. Christ knew that he was going to be crucified. He knew that nails would be driven into his hands — big spikes, like the ones carpenters use. Driven into his feet. And a crown of thorns. Not the sort of thorns you see on rose bushes. These are big thorns — inch or so — you find them in the Holy Land. They didn’t set the crown of thorns on his head like a hat — they jammed it down so the thorns pierced his flesh. Drove the thorns into the bone of his skull!”

Father Staley waited a little, picking at the dead skin on his fingers.

“He knew this was going to happen. He had been told. It was written in the Scriptures. Holy Thursday, when Christ was betrayed by Judas, he knew he was going to suffer and die. ‘That thou doest, do quickly!’”

She was listening with her head and shoulders, a stiff attentive posture, her hair out of place. I loved her loose hair, her untidy clothes, her twisted collar — one side up, the other down, the smudge on her upper arm where she had brushed the church door perhaps.

Something also told me — the way she sat at a slight angle — that she was aware that I was behind her. If she had turned just a fraction more she could have seen me. Though I was listening to the priest, I was watching her the whole time.

“The example of Christ’s suffering has inspired many people to suffer themselves — to become better Christians. Maria Goretti was just a poor pious girl in a small Italian village. She was twelve years old. She did not know that Christ had chosen her. What was the choice he offered? It was to give way to the devil or to die. The devil lived in the village. His name was Alessandro Serenelli.”

I almost laughed out loud when I heard this funny name, especially the “nelly.” I looked down smiling at the floor of the church and did not look up again until I had swallowed the smile.

“Serenelli watched Maria Goretti. He followed her. Wherever Maria Goretti went, Serenelli also went. But his heart was filled with impure thoughts. Serenelli stared at Maria Goretti’s innocent body. He stared at her modest clothes. Maria was never alone — Serenelli was always behind her, watching her with his lustful eyes. Waiting for his chance.”

I picked up a hymnbook and leafed through it to take my eyes off the skinny girl in front of me. I felt the priest was warning her about me — she was Maria, I was Serenelli. I wanted it to be a love story, with a happy ending, but I was nervous: in church I never heard love stories, and there were no happy endings.

“Serenelli followed Maria even into the church. He watched her praying. But instead of admiring Maria for her faith, Serenelli harbored impure thoughts. Imagine! In church, this devil was sinning in his heart!”

I tried to read a hymn, I put my fingers on it.

“Serenelli sat in the church and watched the poor girl praying. Wicked thoughts kept him watching. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her.”

My eyes were so dazzled with fear for Maria and swallowed laughter I could not make out the words of the hymn.

“The devil was inside Serenelli.”

The name Serenelli made me think of a small fat man with a big nose and black mustache and flat feet, a clown in a brown suit with spaghetti stains on his necktie and a smelly cigar in one hand.

“He followed Maria to her home. She took a shortcut through some woods. The pure innocent soul did not know that this demon was watching her. And when he got a chance he grabbed her and demanded that she commit a sin of impurity.”

Until that point the whole story made sense to me — I could see each separate word as a vivid detail. But “sin of impurity” baffled me. I saw Maria, I saw Serenelli — Serenelli was me. But what did he want? Whatever it was, the sin was so enormous that she would be damned if she did what Serenelli wanted her to do — which was what?

“Maria said that she would never give in to him. She would not commit a sin.”

But in this description — Maria in the woods, talking back to Serenelli — I began to suspect that she was tempted. That the sin attracted her. That she needed to pray, because part of her wanted to give in to Serenelli. In my mind the sin was something to do with kissing her, hugging her, touching her — Serenelli slobbering over her, still holding his smelly stogie in one hand and squeezing Maria Goretti’s cheek with the other. I smiled because I saw this clearly — the fat hairy man, the brown suit, the skinny little girl in her ragged skirt and muddy shoes; the woods; the shadows, the puddles, the lighted windows in the girl’s distant house.

“When she refused, he stabbed her. Still she prayed to God for strength. Serenelli stabbed her again and again. Even after she fell to the ground this devil stabbed her.”

I was so horrified I let the hymnbook slip to the floor. I saw the knife plunging into Maria Goretti’s body. I saw Serenelli transformed from a guinea wop like Chicky DePalma’s father, with a mustache and cigar, into a devil with crazy eyes and a bloody dagger. Maria was like the girl sitting hunched and attentive in front of me, so small in my imagining that it seemed especially cruel to stab her more than once. And so thin that I imagined the knife going in one side and the blade point sticking out the other, each thrust of the knife making two wounds, blood spurting out.

“All told, Serenelli stabbed Maria Goretti fourteen times.”

I wanted Father Staley to stop using the name Serenelli, because it was still hard for me to picture a devil named Serenelli.

“As she was dying, her last words were merciful — forgiving her killer. ‘I want him to be with me in Paradise!’ Christ on the cross turned aside and said the same thing to the good thief. That is why she is going to be canonized in a few months. She will be a saint! Christ provided the example for Maria Goretti. But who provided the example for Serenelli? It was Judas, the sinner, who betrayed Our Lord and Savior. Let us pray.”

I knelt and prayed but all I saw was the skinny girl in front of me, and wherever I saw bare skin I saw bleeding stab wounds.

More priests appeared in purple albs and frilly smocks at the altar, and the service continued with chanting and incense and foot-washing and the raising of a monstrance, a big spangled trophy with the host inside a round glass door, and the whole gold thing shaped like a blazing sun.

But I sat and stared at the girl’s shoulders and head, and I tried to sniff at her hair when she sat back in the pew. When the service ended I watched her leave. She did so in a hurry, not looking at me, which I felt was her way of noticing me.

5

Good Friday was a holy day of obligation: it was a sin not to attend church. I knew I would run into my friends. The week had developed slowly for me, the progress at church had allowed me to be near the pretty girl I devoured with my eyes from behind, the girl who, to my confusion, to my guilty flustered pleasure, had confessed to “impure thoughts.”

John Burkell was sitting on the church steps chewing his tie. When he saw me he started complaining about the length of the service.

“This thing is going to last a year.”

He was snapping a stiff card the size of a playing card.

“What’s that?”

He handed it over. One side showed Jesus rising to a multicolored Heaven, and under a prayer was a small cellophane window with a cloth dot, the size of a dot that a paper punch made.

“Part of the Holy Shroud,” Burkell said.

But I read, Fragment of a piece of linen that has touched the Holy Shroud, and pointed this out to Burkell.

“Same thing,” he said.

As we were talking, Chicky DePalma walked over, his footsteps making clicking sounds from the metal taps on his heels, clickety-click, like a tap dancer.

“That’s gatz,” Chicky said. “Look at this.”

He took out a small card with a similar cellophane window, but this one showed a dark chip of wood.

“Piece of the True Cross.”

It looked like the sort of splinter that you tweezed out of your finger after you'd been fooling in woodworking class.

Burkell said, “My old man says they've found enough pieces of the True Cross to rebuild the Italian navy.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Chicky asked.

But I was laughing, imagining a whole harbor of bobbing ships, all of them made of tiny dark splinters.

“Your old man's a Protestant,” Chicky said. “What does he know?”

Burkell went silent and chewed his necktie.

“They got a mixed marriage,” Chicky said to me, and made an Italian gesture of emphasis, flipping the fingers of one hand.

“My folks aren't the only ones,” Burkell said in a small beaten voice — he was embarrassed at having to admit that one of his parents was a Protestant — that is, damned to Hell for all eternity. He was watching the steps, his face tight with shame, looking at the people going in to the Good Friday service. “Her parents got one, too.”

The pale skinny girl had just walked by.

“Her father's a Jew. Her mother’s Catholic. That's worse. Jews are Christ killers.”

I controlled myself and said, “What’s her name?”

“Evelyn Frisch. She goes to the Swan School. Her sister’s a tramp. She lives down near you, off Hickey Park.”

I had never seen her. I said so.

Burkell said, “Because of her folks, the mixed marriage. She only started to come here a few months ago.”

The fact that she had chosen to come to church alone, to attend Holy Week services, made her seem virtuous. She was always on her own. She got down on her bony knees and prayed. But I hoped that she was also showing up partly to be near me, to let me see her, as part of a flirtation.

In church we could be near, we could stare at each other, examine each other's clothes, study each other’s face and body. At school this was impossible — someone would notice us and start teasing. And anyway, Evelyn Frisch did not go to my school. But in church, in the candlelight, in the mottled shadows of the stained-glass windows, it was possible for me to gaze at her for a long time and satisfy myself — and today, Good Friday, more than ever, for the slip that had been just peeping out last Monday at the Novena was now sagging lower, giving me a glimpse of satin and lace flopping against her leg as she mounted the stairs to St. Ray’s.

“How did you know her sister’s a tramp?” Chicky said.

Burkell said, “She’s a pig. Vinny Grasso saw her making out with a tenth-grader at the drive-in.”

A sharp voice startled us: “Why are you hanging around here? Get inside.”

With a frown on her bristly face, a nun loomed over us like a bat in her black cloak.

“It’s disrespectful to loiter here. This is the house of our Lord and Savior. Get a move on!”

As we started to go in, slightly hunched for fear she might hit us, she snatched at me, got a grip on my arm, and pulled me aside. Chicky and Burkell hurried ahead.

“I saw you yesterday,” the nun said. “You were smiling.”

That was true — I was sitting in the pew, smiling at the sound of the name Serenelli. But how had she seen me?

She pinched my chin and said, “Do you think there’s something humorous about immorality?”

“No, Sister.”

“Do you think that mortal sin is something to smile about?”

“No, Sister.”

“Are you going into church to mock Jesus today?”

“No, Sister.”

“And betray our Lord, like Judas?”

“No, Sister.”

“Do you know what happened to Judas?”

“He went to Hell, Sister.”

“He took a halter and hanged himself by the neck,” the nun said. ‘And then he went to Hell, because he was a sinner. Do you know what Hell is?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Hell means you never see the face of Christ.”

That did not seem so bad to me — in fact, I was relieved when she said it. She still had a grip on my chin. “I’m going to be watching you. I know your parents. If I see any mockery I’m going to tell them.”

She pinched my chin one last time and pushed me so hard I stumbled on the granite step and almost fell. As I got my balance and looked back I saw her crooked lips and bristly cheeks.

Chicky and Burkell were waiting for me inside the door by the holy water font. We dunked our fingers and blessed ourselves and went up the aisle, sitting together, far behind Evelyn Frisch. When the praying Father Staley said the word “chrism” Burkell muttered it and had a laughing fit, covering his mouth.

Saint Theresa, Saint Patrick, Saint Michael, and Saint Rose of Lima looked down on us, and so did the nun. Chicky picked his nose and flicked a piece of snot into the aisle, and the nun hauled him out of the pew, gripping his head. A little later, Burkell folded the Easter Message into a paper plane and kept it on his lap, and he was next to go. Then I was alone, hungry from having fasted, no breakfast, no lunch, and straining to see Evelyn Frisch.

Good Friday was a terrible holy day. The service lasted three hours — each time I thought it was over there was a new prayer, more kneeling, another procession, an upraised ciborium, and a louder chant. The day commemorated the arrest of Jesus, his denunciation by Pilate, his robe stripped from him, the whipping, the jamming onto his head of the crown of thorns. He was given a heavy wooden cross to carry. He was spat upon by the same people who had welcomed him on Palm Sunday.

“And he was brought to Golgotha, which means the Place of the Skull,” Father Staley was reading. And he described the rusty nails, the hammering, the bleeding, the cross raised up with Christ slumping upon it.

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani—Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”—Father Staley was still reading.

Christ asked for a drink of water. A Roman soldier dipped some bread in vinegar and hoisted it on his spear to torment him. Another soldier stabbed Christ in the side to make sure he was dead, and later Christ was taken down from the cross by Mary and some others, and he lay dead and bleeding on their laps.

The service continued, recalling blood and pain, death and darkness, “Free Barabbas,” the Jews saying “Crucify him! He is not our king. Our king is Caesar!” the rusty nails, the suffering of Jesus, “the passion and death,” the Good Thief, the Bad Thief, the storm, the earthquake, the suicide of Judas. Much worse for me was that I was sitting at the back of the church, too far from Evelyn Frisch for me to see her. But at least I knew her name.

6

Kneeling alone in church on Holy Saturday in a thinner crowd than yesterday — today was not a holy day of obligation — I was not watching the altar. My gaze was fixed on Evelyn Frisch, now in the pew just in front of me. She had entered the church after me, she had chosen to sit where I could see her. She knew what was in my head: that I had come there to worship her.

I stared at her neck, her tangled hair, her limp jacket, her droopy slip. She was kneeling, and so I knelt. I was praying to her; I hoped she was praying to me.

The priest appeared with two altar boys hurrying beside him. He busied himself at the altar, muttering in Latin, the boys replying. He opened and closed the tabernacle, he fussed with the chalice, he smoothed the linen napkins. At the consecration one boy shook the hand bells and Father Staley shuffled the host and snapped it apart with his scaly fingers and said, “Hoc est enim corpus meum, ” and I thought, This is my body, Evelyn.

The host was not bread anymore; it had been transformed into the body of Christ, as the wine sloshing in the chalice had been made into blood. Father Staley was leaning on the altar, his elbows on the marble, eating and drinking, chewing body, swallowing blood. I knew what was happening, I had half believed it because there was nothing else to believe. But now I believed in Evelyn Frisch, body and soul.

The way she knelt and prayed in a posture of struggle seemed to show that she was trying to believe, praying for strength. I was also kneeling, but I was not praying anymore, I was thinking: It is so hard to believe in God, and harder still to love him, or Christ the criticizer. It was so easy to love this skinny girl, who was full of life and yet frail, dressed poorly, probably in hand-me-downs, and yet her clothes attracted me. And half Jewish was alluring too; she was odd, exotic, didn't really belong here, and although she had never looked directly at me, she knew exactly where I was. We were together in church, worshiping together, worshiping each other, amid the watery flicker of lighted candles.

“On this Easter vigil, the burial of Jesus, we light a candle to signify Christ's passing from death to life,” Father Staley was saying in his sermon. “God is love, and if your soul is pure, you too can have eternal life.”

The candle flames were a nice part of the ritual that day, the warmth, the fire, the light, the dripping wax on the knob of the candle stump. And as I knelt she sat back in the pew and her head was against my face, her sweet soapy hair-smell in my nose and mouth.

I did not want eternal life. I had no idea what the words meant. What I wanted most of all was this, an hour in church with Evelyn Frisch, even if it meant I had to betray Jesus and be a sinner. She was love.

7

On Easter Sunday at eight o’clock Mass she glowed in a pink and white dress, wearing cream-colored gloves and a white hat with a gauzy veil over her face and the same scuffed shoes and falling-down socks. We were in the same pew, about ten feet apart — three people between us — but still I could see just beneath the hem of her Easter dress the same scrap of lace-trimmed slip like a lovely sin.

The day was warm and the sun so bright even the stained-glass windows poured bars of reddish light into the church.

People sang, their voices raised, their prayers flying up to Heaven.

I murmured earnestly but I knew that my prayers were not rising. I was glancing at Evelyn Frisch and not at the altar, imploring her, so that she would be kind to me, so that she would want me. I venerated her, I prayed to her, and all that I wanted from life was that she, or someone just like her, would want me.

I was frightened at the thought of seeing her outside, and perhaps having to speak to her, in the larger harsher world of light and air. I understood Judas — why he was tempted, why he gave in, why he was lost long before he betrayed Christ.

After the service, people left quickly, noticing each other’s new clothes. I waited, I looked around, and seeing that the church was empty except for us, I slid a few feet toward Evelyn Frisch. She slid toward me until we were close enough to touch — her thigh against mine. I let my hand stray until I could take hold of hers. I asked a question with my shy fingers, and she answered with her hot damp fingers, and we sat there a long time, holding hands and not looking up.

1

THREE FIGURES came single file over a wooded hill of the Fells carrying their rifles one-handed and keeping their heads low. They were duck-walking, hunched like Indian trackers, with the same stealth in their footfalls, toeing the mushy earth of early spring. I was one of them, the last, being careful, watching for the stranger, his black hat, his blue Studebaker. Walter Herkis and Chicky DePalma were the others. When we got to the clearing where the light slanted through the bare trees and into our squinting faces, you could see we were twelve years old.

“Where?” Chicky asked in a harsh disbelieving tone, keeping an irritated grin on his face. He had a brown birthmark like a raisin on his cheek. His hair, greasy from too much Wildroot, and his big nose and his yellowish Sicilian face made him look even more like an Indian brave.

“Wicked far,” Walter said. Worry settled on his scrubbed features whenever he was asked anything about the incident. He motioned with the muzzle of his gun. “Up by the pond.”

Walter's saying it was far made us slow our pace, though we still kept off the path. When one of us stepped on a dry twig and snapped it, someone else said, “Watch it,” because in the movies the snapping of a twig always betrayed a person's position to strangers. We wanted to be silent and invisible. We were not three boys, we were trackers, we were Indians. Certain words, such as “sure-footed” and “hawk-eyed,” made us self-conscious.

“Skunk cabbage,” I said.

Dark red and black claw-shaped bunches of the glossy plant grew in the muddy patch near a mass of rotten wood and dead grass that was pressed down and combed-looking from the weight of the snow.

“Them others are fiddleheads,” Walter said, stopping farther on, where the mud was thicker and wetter. Ragged veils of gnats whirred over its small bubble holes. From the evaporated puddle, a slab of mud as smooth as chocolate, rose a clump of packed-together ferns, in sprays like bouquets, their coiled tops beginning to unroll and spring open. Fiddlehead was the perfect name for them.

“Vinny eats them,” Walter said. He lifted his rifle and poked the ferns and gently parted the stalks with the muzzle.

Chicky said, “He’d get sick. Vinny Grasso is a lying guinea wop.”

“And you’re a pissah.”

“Eat me, I’m a jellybean,” Chicky said.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “Someone will hear.”

“Fuckum,” Chicky said.

For emphasis, he stepped over to the tight green bouquets of new ferns and scattered some in one kick, then broke the ones that remained and trampled them flat, his boots squelching the mud and burying them.

Looking at the damage, he said, “But my nonna eats dandelions.”

Chicky's outbursts alarmed me, because they made him sound crazy, and his threats were sudden and scary, especially when he was trying to be funny. To act tough, he sometimes punted schoolbooks and kicked them along the sidewalk. I had never before seen anyone kick a book. He’d say, “Who cares? I can hardly read anyway,” which was true, and as shocking to me as wrecking the books.

“Give me a freakin’ weed, Andy.”

“Coffin nails,” Walter said.

“Who asked you?”

“They’re wicked bad for you,” Walter said, straightening himself with confidence.

“You’re just saying that because they’re against your religion,” Chicky said.

Walter Herkis was a Seventh-day Adventist. He couldn’t be in our Scout troop, because Protestants weren’t allowed to be Scouts at St. Ray’s. He wanted to join our Beaver Patrol, but he would have been shocked by our Scout meetings in the church hall, the prayers especially, Father Staley—“Scaly” Staley — telling us to kneel on the varnished wood floor of the basketball court, and raising his scaly hands, and folding them, and giving a sermon, or else saying, “Let us pray.” Walter went by bus to a special school in Boston, with other Adventists. Walter could not smoke or eat meat, not even hot dogs, or tuna fish, and he was supposed to go to church on Saturday. He was playing hooky from church today, as he often did, though today was special: we were hunting the stranger.

“They stunt your growth,” Walter said.

“You eat it raw.” Chicky snapped his fingers. “Come on, Andy.”

I unbuckled my knapsack and found, among the canvas pouches of bullets and the marshmallows and tonic, the crushed pack of Lucky Strikes Chicky had stolen from his brother. I shook out a cigarette for him and put the rest away.

“Luckies,” Chicky said. He tapped the cigarette on his knuckle like an old smoker, and said, “Got a match?”

“Your face and my ass,” Walter said.

“Your face and the back of a bus.” I handed him a book of matches. “You want a kick in the chest to get it started?”

Chicky lit up and puffed and wagged the match to put it out. He inhaled, sucking air with his teeth clamped shut, making slurping sounds in his cheeks. Then he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and admired it as he blew out a spray of blue smoke.

“You're giving it a wicked lipper,” Walter said.

“Stick it, goombah. You don't even smoke.” Chicky handed the butt to me.

I puffed without inhaling, snuffled a little from the smoke leaking up my nose, and covered my gagging by saying, “Where was he?”

“Not here,” Walter said, and walked ahead. Pale and freckled, taller than either Chicky or me, Walter was skinny and had long legs, his bony knees showing in his dungarees. He was such a fast runner we could not understand how the man had caught him — if he had caught him. Walter had not told us much of the story, only that we had to track the man down and find his blue Studebaker. He was round-shouldered hurrying ahead of us, and his twisted hair, his slender neck, made him look lonely.

“I don't even freakin' believe him,” Chicky said.

“Quit it,” I said. “Walter doesn't lie.”

“He's a Protestant.”

“So what?”

“It's not a sin for them to lie,” Chicky said.

We followed Walter up the hill, away from the path. We passed Wright's Tower at the top of the hill and climbed the urine-stinky stairs to the lookout: Boston — the Customs House — in one direction; the dark trees in the other. We descended and went deeper into the woods.

Even on this early-spring day, there were mud-spattered crusts of mostly melted snow, skeletal and icy from softening to slush and refreezing. The woods looked littered and untidy with the snow scraps, with driblets of ice from the recent rain in the grooved bark and boles of trees, ice enameling the sides of rocks, the old poisoned-looking leaves, curled and dead, brittle, black, thicknesses of them like soggy trash, the earth still slowly thawing, with winter lingering on top. Even so, spring was swelling, pushing from beneath, like the claws of skunk cabbage rising from the mud, and small dark buds on bush twigs, the knobs of bulbs and plants like fists thrusting up through softened soil, and the first shoots, white as noodles. The first were the hardiest, the most resistant to frost, not even green, nor tender at all, but dark and fierce, small, tight, just starting to take hold. Between the frozen silence of winter and the green of spring were these clammy weeks of mud and stink and the rags of old snow.

Walter was waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, at a cliffside and a boulder pile we called Panther’s Cave.

“Was he here?” Chicky said, glancing at the cave entrance, a damp shadow falling across it, for it was already five and would be dark soon. The portals of the cave were two upright boulders, bigger than we were, scorched and smelling of woodsmoke.

“I already told you, no.”

“Tell us the story,” Chicky said.

“Shove it up your bucket,” Walter said, and peeled the cellophane from a package of Devil Dogs.

“Fungoo,” Chicky said. “Hey, Herkis, I had dibs on them.”

“I’m hungry,” Walter said, poking a Devil Dog into his mouth, chewing hard, his voice sounding dry and cakey when he said, with his mouth full, “Anyway, you got cigarettes.”

“Give me one or I'll whack your ass.” Chicky swung his rifle by its barrel, like a bat, at Walter.

“Let’s go,” I said, because Chicky's quarreling made me uneasy and this was all a delay in the darkening woods.

“He’s a Jew,” Chicky said. “Okay, if he's scoffing the Devil Dogs, I hosey the Twinkies.” He looked hard at Walter. “Jelly belly.”

“Rotate,” Walter said, and raised his middle finger.

With his tongue against his teeth, Chicky chanted, “My friend Walter had a pimple on his belly. His mother cut it off and made it into jelly.”

Walter, still chewing, staring at the ground, looked hurt, not for anything that Chicky had said but as though he was thinking about something worse.

“Come on,” I said. I had meant “Let’s go,” but Walter took it to mean the story.

“It wasn't here,” he said.

“Where then?”

“I told you, wicked far.”

“Near the road?”

“No, past the Sheepfold.’'

“Spot Pond? The rezza?”

“The other one,” Walter said. He was licking fudgy flakes and frosting from his dirty knuckles. “Where you see cars sometimes.”

“Where we shot holes in that No Parking sign?” Chicky said. Then shouted, “You had to eat all the Devil Dogs yourself, you fucking Jew bastard.”

“Doleful Pond,” I said. My father sometimes took me fishing there with my brother Louie. We caught small slimy fish, pickerel, hornpout, and kibbies, and removing the hook we sometimes slashed our fingers on the sharp fins.

Doleful Pond was so far, we did not bother tracking or whispering, but started off again, walking together on the bridle path, our rifles slung by their straps on our shoulders.

Chicky said, “Walter’s got a new girlfriend.”

“Quit it,” Walter said.

“Her name’s Mary Palm.”

“At least I don’t eat fur burgers like some people I know.”

“You gobble the hairy clam,” Chicky said. “Andy plays pocket pool.”

Chicky let the cigarette die. He lit it again and finished it, puffing it to a small butt, less than an inch, tweezing it between his fingertips. “Look,” he said, and pinched the ashy tip off and began tearing at the paper and loose tobacco. He peeled the paper and flaked the tobacco and scattered it.

“That’s called fieldstripping. My cousin showed me how. He was in the navy in Japan. He brought back this wicked nice jacket with a dragon on the back. I’m going in the navy.”

“The navy gets the gravy, but the army gets the beans,” Walter said. “That’s true, you know. The food in the navy is really good.”

“I bet you’ve never seen one, Andy.”

“One what?”

“Twot.”

It was true, but I shrugged in a worldly way, as though the question was irrelevant.

“I’ve seen billions of them,” Walter said. “My mother’s always charging around the house bollocky.”

“That doesn’t count,” Chicky said. “She’s too old.”

“I saw my cousin’s,” Walter said. Though he sounded as if he was breathless from the memory, it was really from climbing the path, beating the twiggy bushes aside, kicking the snow crusts with his wet shoes. “She was bollocky. She didn’t even know I was looking at her.” He measured with his cold reddened hands. “It was yay big. It even had some hair on it.”

“Like you’d know what to do with it.”

“I didn’t have any Trojans,” Walter said.

“As if they make them that small.”

“Anyway, I wouldn’t bang my cousin without a rubber.”

“She must be a nympho.”

“She’s a virgin.”

“So are you,” Chicky said.

A silence entrapped us with the truth: we were each of us virgins. We knew nothing except the wild talk.

“You Jew bastard, why did you eat all the Devil Dogs?”

“Hungry,” Walter said. “This kid I know at school says to me, A girl doesn’t have to get pregnant. After she gets banged she can just piss it out — piss out all the sperm.’”

Another silence and the crunching of dead leaves as we walked, each of us considering this, trying to imagine the process.

“What a shit-for-brains,” Chicky said. “It’s impossible.”

Though none of us knew why. In fact, it seemed logical.

“I would have known what to do with your cousin,” Chicky said.

“Sure. Every day and twice on Sunday.”

“Anyway, what’s her name?”

“Cheryl.”

“Headlights?”

Walter nodded and said, “She even wears a boulder holder.”

Chicky said, “I’d say, ‘Hey, Cheryl,’ and then do like the four Roman emperors. Seize ’er. Squeeze ’er. Pump ’er. Dump ’er.”

“Did you really see her knobs?” I asked, and thought what heaven it would be to behold such a miracle.

“Yeah,” Walter said. “We was sitting on the glider, on her piazza. I was going to feel her up.”

“I would have,” Chicky said, “'cause I’m in the Four-F Club. Find 'em, feel 'em, fuck 'em, and forget 'em.”

Now the woods ahead were indistinct, though there was still light in the sky. The great thing about being in the woods at this hour was that there was rarely anyone else around: the woods were ours, and we were free in them. We walked on, into the thickening shadows.

Walter said, “Look, a toad.”

The thing had been startled from the path and hopped next to a crumbling log. Chicky kicked it, saying, “Bastards give you warts.”

The stunned toad looked bug-eyed and feeble as it made a low heavy hop.

“Stand back,” Chicky said. He worked the pump on his Winchester and shot it, the first rifle shot of the day, a startling sound, so loud it was unfamiliar, echoing as though there was a wall at the far end of the woods. “Shoot him between the eyes.”

Walter and I started firing, Walter with his single-shot Remington, me with my Mossberg, tearing its body open, its belly ripping like the thin rubber on a small squeeze toy. As it flopped forward, Walter shot its blunt head, and burst it, then Chicky booted the ragged corpse into the leaves.

“Beaver Patrol to the rescue,” Chicky said in a singsong voice, making a monkey face.

Farther on, Walter said, “Cheezit.”

Two riders on horses trotted down the bridle path toward us as we scampered behind some rocks and flattened ourselves on the ground. They were women, in round riding caps and tweed jackets and tight pants and black boots. Unseen by the mounted women, we watched them go by, moving off in the last light of day.

“Think they heard the guns?” I said. We were nagged by the fear of our guns being taken away.

No one replied. Walter said, “They must be rich.”

We watched them rocking and swaying back and forth in their saddles, chucking their boot heels against the horses’ bellies.

“Women get horny riding horses,” Chicky said.

“That’s bull.”

“They get hot,” Chicky said. “Them two broads are so freakin’ horny.”

We were still lying on the ground, watching the long swaying tails, the twitching flesh of the horses’ high hindquarters, the women’s packed buttocks and wide-apart legs.

“I’ve got a bonah,” Walter said.

The women rode off, unaware that three armed boys lay hidden, watching them from the margin of the bridle path, excited by the snorting horses, the stamping of hooves in the cinders.

“Tell us the story again,” I said.

2

Walter clawed his damp spiky hair and sighed, having to repeat himself. He said in a mumbling way, “I’m walking along the path near where we found the ripped-up magazines that day.”

“Doleful Pond,” I said.

“Yeah,” Walter said. “Where you see cars sometimes and you wonder how did they get there?”

“They’re watching the submarine races,” Chicky said. He began to snap a narrow comb through his greasy hair.

But I was thinking about the magazines, how they had been torn to pieces, but even so, they were easy to put together. Each fragment was a part of a naked woman, and some pieces were so big there was a whole naked woman, the white of a smooth body so clear, almost luminous, or pale as sausage casing, breasts like balloons. They had seemed like witches to me, powerful and pretty, smiling sinners, representing all that was forbidden.

As Walter talked I saw everything in black and white, because the past was always black and white, as the television was in black and white; because of right and wrong, no in-between. Also black and white because of the weather, for in early spring the green was blackish, the trees were dark, the stones and big boulders were white, the ground bare except for the patches of snow that lay like torn scraps and muddied sheets, black and white rags all over the woods.

“I’m walking past this blue Studebaker and I didn’t know this old guy was in it until he says, 'Hey, kid,' and reaches out the window. I looks over — he's smiling with these yellow teeth, and as I walks away I hear the door open.”

“Why didn't you take off?”

Walter could run faster than either Chicky or me, but he was slower-witted, so he did not always know when to run.

“I almost shit a brick because he scared me. I didn't know what to do. I just kept walking, to show I didn’t really care.”

I knew the pond and the road there, so I could easily see Walter marching stiffly away from the blue Studebaker, his little head, his skinny neck, his spiky uncombed hair, his baggy pants and scuffed shoes; trying so hard not to look scared, he moved like a puppet.

“I thought he was supposed to have a bonah,” Chicky said.

“That was later,” Walter said.

“When he chased you?” I asked.

“No. I looks back and he's in the car, so I kept going. I knew he wouldn’t drive on the path. There’s a sign, the one we blasted with our guns. There’s a gate. He couldn’t get through.”

“Which path?”

“To the Sheepfold, like I said. I was going up there to build a fire and get warm.”

“What about your gun?”

“I didn’t bring it.”

“You said you did.”

“No sah.”

“Yes sah.”

“My sister hid it, to be a pain.”

Chicky said, “You said you aimed your gun at him and he freaked.”

“Knife. I had my hunting knife, so that I could make wood shavings to start the fire. I had it in my belt, in the sheath. I pulled it out as I was walking up the path, in case he chased me.”

“You said ‘gun’ before. Didn’t he, Andy?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. Truly, I didn’t. All I could recall was the blue car, the old man, his black golf cap, Walter being pestered.

“You told the story different before,” Chicky said. “You said you saw him in the woods.”

“You didn’t let me get to that part,” Walter said in a wronged, pleading voice, his eyes glistening so much I felt sorry for him. More softly he said, “So I’m at the Sheepfold. There’s nobody around. I whittle a stick and get some shavings. I try to start a fire, and I’m kneeling down and blowing on the sparks and I hear something.”

“What?”

“How do I know? Twigs. But I look around and the old guy is standing right behind me. He followed me somehow. He’s saying, ‘Hey, kid.’ His fly is open. That’s when he had the bonah.”

“What did it look like?” Chicky said.

“He tries to grab me,” Walter said, hurrying his story. “I screams at him but there’s no one around, right? So then I starts running.”

“What about all your stuff, and the fire?”

“I just left it.”

“Anyway, you escaped,” I said.

Walter didn't say no. He frowned again and clawed his spiky hair. He said, “Then, when I was out to the road and thought it was all over, this blue Studebaker conies screeching up beside me, and it's the guy again, and he’s after me.”

When he said that, I got a chill. I could imagine it clearly, for sometimes in my worst dreams people kept showing up, I never knew how, to scare me or accuse me.

“Everywhere I go I sees the stupid guy.”

Chicky said, “He’s definitely a homo.”

Walter was silent, paler than when he had started the story, biting his lips.

“But you told it different the first time,” Chicky said.

“You think I’m bullshitting?”

“Sounds like bird turd to me,” Chicky said.

“You believe me, Andy,” Walter said in a beseeching voice.

“Sure.” But he had told the story differently the first time. He had a gun. He had turned and threatened the man, who had fallen back and returned to his car. He had not said anything about the Sheepfold and the fire. Seeing the man again on the road, the car stopping — that was new. He was chased more the second time; he was more scared. The whole story sounded worse, which was why Chicky didn’t believe him.

“Wait till you see his car,” Walter said. “Then you’ll believe me.”

“Anyway, what did he want?” Chicky asked.

“He was a homo. You know what those guys want.”

But we had absolutely no idea, except that it was wicked and dangerous and we were unwilling. In my imagination, such a man would hold me captive in his car, all the windows rolled up, trapping me and threatening me. What he did was not anything I thought of as sex. These men were friendly at first, so that they could grab me and tie me up. In my imagining, I was gagged and blindfolded. Then he would take some of my clothes off, and something happened, something that hurt. In the end, when I was naked, he would kill me, probably stab me.

“I don’t get it,” Chicky said. He was still impatient and overstimulated, flecks of spit in the corners of his mouth, blinking hard, his yellowish Italian face looking damp with confusion. “He was bigger than you, right? So why didn’t he just grab you?”

“He did grab me,” Walter said. “I was fighting with him.”

“You didn’t say that before.”

“You didn’t give me enough time.”

Walter was looking breathless and wretched, yanking his hair.

“Did he touch you?” I asked.

“I didn’t want him to,” Walter said, protesting.

“Where did he touch you?”

“I told you, the Sheepfold.”

That was new. I had not seen Walter struggling at the Sheepfold, only fleeing. Now I put him back at the Sheepfold, on the ground, the man grabbing at him.

“I mean, did he touch your nuts?”

Walter said, “I was pushing him as hard as I could,” and as he spoke he was fighting tears.

“I thought you ran away.”

“I did run away. After.”

“What else did he do?”

“I don’t know. He was feeling my pants. He was really strong and he had this mustache and was chewing something like a cough drop. He even tried to kiss me. He was snatching my hands.”

“Was he saying anything?”

“Yeah. ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.’”

“I would have shit a brick.”

“I was wicked scared,” Walter said.

He was quiet for a moment. His face was blotchy with red patches, he was remembering, his mouth quivering, trying to start a word.

“How did you get away?”

“Ran. Like I told you.”

“You never said he touched you.”

“I forgot that part.”

“How could you forget that, you freakin’ banana man?”

Walter lowered his head and said, “When I screamed out loud he got wicked worried. He tried to put his hand over my mouth. His hand was really smelly. That’s when I tried to stab him in the leg with my fork.”

“Your fork?”

“I was going to heat up some beans. The fork was lying there.”

“That’s great,” Chicky said.

I said, “I don’t get why he showed up later.”

Walter kicked at the snow crust. This was painful, an awful story, much worse than the first time. I suspected it was true because it was messier, there was more of it, and the new parts were unpleasant.

“He was trying to tell me he was sorry.”

“Pretending to,” I said. “He was just trying to trick you. If he had caught you, he would have killed you.”

“He said he wanted to give me some money. Ten bucks.”

“That’s bull for one thing,” Chicky said. “Ten bucks!”

Walter reached in his pocket and pulled out a little ball of paper and flattened it and smoothed it: a five-dollar bill.

“Jeez,” Chicky said.

Five dollars was more money than we ever saw, and it could only mean that Walter, who never had money, might be telling the truth. But it was five, not ten.

“Where’s the rest?” Chicky said.

Walter opened a flap of his knapsack and took out a box of bullets and slid the paper drawer open, showing us the fifty tightly packed bullets. I had a little envelope of bullets for my rifle, Chicky had the same. But this was ammo.

“Vinny sold them to me for a fin,” Walter said. “I want to find this guy and sneak up on him. And scare him like he scared me.”

“Like how?”

“I don't know.”

“Kill the bastard, maybe,” Chicky said.

“Maybe we should tell the cops,” I said, because whenever Chicky talked about killing someone it made me nervous. He had never done anything so violent, but it seemed that he was always trying to nerve himself for something that bad, and that one day he would succeed.

“Don't be such an asshole,” Chicky said.

His saying that worried me too, because not telling the police meant that you took illegal risks, and were somehow always on the other side, never trusting. Only suckers trusted the police.

“And they'd take our guns away,” Chicky said.

“The cops wouldn't even believe me.”

What kept us from asking any more questions was that we both knew that Walter was going to cry.

“I would have blubbered,” I said, because I could see his tears and embarrassment.

Hearing that must have made Walter feel better, because he sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket and didn't look so tearful.

“I mean, especially if some old guy put his hands on me,” I said.

I thought it would help some more, but it made it worse, because when I mentioned the hands Walter got tearful again.

“I'd like to kill him,” he said in a fearful, helpless voice.

“Let's all kill him,” Chicky said, smiling wildly.

“I don't even care,” Walter said. “If he was standing right here I’d shoot him in the nuts.”

Chicky loved that and started to laugh, his face growing yellower at the thought of it. When Walter saw Chicky laugh, his anger left him, and he laughed too, but harder, angrier, his whole face brightening. But there were tears in his eyes and stains of tears on his cheeks — smears of wetness and dust. He wiped his face with his arm, smearing it more, looking miserable.

“I will,” he said. “In the nuts!”

But the day had gone cold, and dark had come down on us without our realizing it, a dampness rising with it from the dead leaves and rotten earth, and so we headed home with night pressing on our heads.

3

“There were three boys,” Father Staley was saying at the Scout meeting in the overbright church hall of St. Ray’s the following Wednesday. He was giving a sermon, one of his stories from the navy, about a captain who was trying to find the smartest boy to do a job. “Three boys” made me think of Walter, Chicky, and me, and as Father Staley spoke I saw each of us in the story.

“The captain gave each boy a keg of nails. ‘There are five thousand nails in each keg,’ the captain said. ‘There is also a gold nail in each keg. The first one to find the gold nail will get the job.’”

Father Staley paused and let us picture this, but the pause was too long, and when we began fidgeting after a little while Arthur Mutch, the scoutmaster, said, “I’m going to be handing out demerits!”

“What would you do if you were in those boys’ shoes?” Father Staley said.

“Find the freakin’ gold nail,” Chicky said, much too loud.

“DePalma — one demerit!”

Father Staley then explained that the first boy picked through the nails in his keg, pushing them aside, looking for the gold nail. While he was doing this, the second boy began removing one nail after another from his keg, trying to see which one was gold.

“The third boy asked the captain for a newspaper,” Father Staley said, and paused again to enjoy our puzzlement.

Chicky covered his mouth and muttered, ‘And he read the freakin’ newspaper while the other dinks found the gold nail.” When he looked up Arthur Mutch was staring at him.

“The boy spread the newspaper on the floor and dumped the whole keg of nails onto it, all five thousand of them,” Father Staley said. “He saw the gold nail at once. He picked it up and then funneled the nails back into the keg. And he got the job. What lesson does that teach us?”

We said nothing. We had no idea, though I saw the story clearly: the wooden kegs, the boys, the glittering gold nail in the pile of iron ones.

“Sometimes you have to take drastic action,” Father Staley said. “And sometimes, to save your soul…”

As soon as he uttered those words, save your soul, I stopped listening, and so did Chicky, because afterward, when we were in our circle of folding chairs, the patrol meeting, Chicky said, “What was the point of that freakin’ story?”

Arthur Mutch approached us and glared at Chicky and said, “Beaver Patrol, at ease.” Then, to me, “What merit badge are you going up for, Andy?”

“Camping,” I said.

“What have you done about it?”

“Took a hike last Saturday.”

“Name some of the essentials you had in your pack?”

Mossberg.22, twelve bullets, Hostess cream-filled cupcakes, bottle of tonic, stolen pack of Lucky Strikes, book of matches. But I said, “First aid kit. Flashlight. Canvas tarp. Some rope. Canteen. Pencil and paper. And some apples.”

“I think you forgot something.”

Since none of what I had told him was true, it was easy to remember the missing item required by the badge for a hike. “Um, compass.”

“Good,” Mr. Mutch said. “Engage in any activities?”

Killed a toad, chased a squirrel, spied on some women getting horny on horseback, listened to Walter Herkis's story of being molested by a man in a blue Studebaker. But I said, “Knot-tying. Cooking. Tracking.”

Tracking was not a lie: we had headed toward Doleful Pond with Walter before it got too dark to go farther.

“What did you cook?”

“Beans and franks. And afterward we doused the fire and made sure the coals were out.”

More lies, but once — months before — I had done just that, and I considered that it counted.

“What knots and what did you use them for?”

“Sheepshank for shortening the rope. Half hitch. Square knot. Propped up the tarp with them to make a shelter.”

“Know the bowline yet?” Mr. Mutch asked.

“I’m trying.”

Behind me, a voice — Father Staley’s — said, “I think I can help you with that, Andy.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Mr. Mutch, satisfied with me, turning to Chicky, said, “DePalma, what badge are you going out for?”

“Civics.” Chicky blinked, and as his yellow face grew pale his brown birthmark got darker.

“Civics? DePalma, tell me, what is a bicameral legislature?”

Chicky twisted his face, to show he was thinking hard, and said nothing. His fists were pressed in panic against his legs.

“You don’t know, do you?”

Chicky shook his head, his springy curls glistening with Wild-root. No, he didn’t know. Chicky could barely read.

“How many merit badges have you earned, DePalma?”

Chicky muttered something inaudible.

“Louder, please.”

“None,” Chicky said in a hoarse humiliated voice.

“You’re still a Tenderfoot after a year and a half in the Scouts,” Arthur Mutch said.

Father Staley said, “Try a little harder, son. Do some homework.”

“I could go out for car maintenance, Father, but do they have a badge for it? No.”

“Any other ideas?” Father Staley said.

“Maybe Indian Lore.” Chicky’s eyes were shining with shame and anger. “Maybe Camping.”

“What makes you think you can earn them?”

“I went on a hike with Andy.”

“And did you cook franks and beans, too?”

“Yes, Father. And capacol’. Guinea sausages.”

“Well, that’s a start.”

Father Staley stepped over to me and smiled and lifted my chin with his hand, saying, “You pick up the lame and the halt, don’t you?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

He looked pleased, having asked me a question I could not answer; and he followed Mr. Mutch to the next patrol group.

Under his breath, Chicky said, ‘“How many merit badges have you earned?’ Mutch is an asshole.”

“You’ll get millions.”

“I’d get one if they had car maintenance, engine repair, some shit like that,” Chicky said. He stood, hunched over and discouraged. “I got gatz.”

As Chicky said gatz, Father Staley, at the front of the hall, said, “Let us pray,” and blessed himself slowly, using the tips of his scaly fingers, “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost…”

Another Saturday, Walter Herkis walking ahead through the woods, his Remington under his arm. He had told his mother that he was going to church but instead sneaked off and met us on South Border Road, and we had entered the woods obliquely, skirting the small reservoir and dashing through the trees. Walter did not want us to see his face, because he felt he had not been brave. But he was brave. Whatever the man had done, Walter had at least fought him. He had lost, but he was stronger and faster than me, which worried me. In the same position, I would have been in deeper trouble.

But Chicky said, “Maybe he’s shitting us.”

I wanted to say, If that was so, why was Walter looking so sad and angry — why so silent, why was he walking that way, why had he cried at the end of his story?

I said, “I don’t know. We’ll track the guy down and see.”

“It’s stupid that there isn’t a car maintenance merit badge.”

“Boy Scouts don’t have cars, Chicky.”

“I can start my brother’s Ford. He lets me rev it. I know how to change the plugs.” He was kicking through the leaves, glancing around. “Look, a chipmunk. Let’s kill it.”

He chased it, and shot, and missed, and then complained that it was too small to hit.

The woods were full of wonders, full of occurrences that only happened in the woods. Some people parked at the edges, but they didn’t walk far from their cars; others used the bridle paths; no one but us wandered the woods — or if they did, we never saw them. We hiked beyond the roar of traffic on the Fellsway. Past Panther’s Cave, all we heard were birds chirping, the rustle of squirrels, and the wind in the boughs up top.

There were still snow scraps this second week, but wetter ones; more fiddleheads, redder skunk cabbage, bigger buds. We looked closely at them, as self-conscious Scouts and woodsmen, and we took pains to hide ourselves from anyone on the path. That was why, near Doleful Pond on this next hike, we avoided a fisherman who was fussing with his rod and line on the shore, slashing it like a whip.

“Is that the homo?” Chicky asked.

“No,” Walter said.

Nor was there a blue Studebaker parked behind him, but rather an old black Pontiac; still, because we had rifles, we kept to the bushes by the side of the pond.

“Hey, you kids, is there a fire station around here?” As he spoke he was holding his fishing rod.

Somehow the man had seen us. He had asked a pervert’s question: perverts often pretended to be in trouble. Once a pervert had said to Chicky, “There’s a rock under my car. Help me get it out.”

A rock under my car was just a lie to get his hands on Chicky, but Chicky had run away. This question about a fire station made us speed up and shoulder our rifles so that he could see we were armed and dangerous.

“He’s waving something at us,” Chicky said under his breath.

The fisherman had put his rod down and was waving his spread-apart hand. He said, “Hooked my thumb!”

He showed us his thumb, and it was true — a dark wire stuck out of the meaty part of his thumb muscle, like the loop on a Christmas ornament. I was thinking: Maybe a man would deliberately stick a hook into his thumb in order to look helpless, so that he could trap a boy.

“What do you kids think you’re doing with those guns?” he said. He just glanced at our guns but he went on frowning at the embedded hook.

“Boy Scouts,” I said. “We’re allowed.”

“I was a Boy Scout. I never learned how to use a gun.”

“Hey, did you learn how to use a fishing rod?” Chicky said.

“What are you, a wise guy?”

“Because, hey, you hooked your thumb — don’t look at me,” Chicky said.

“It’s not funny, I need to get this fucking thing out.” He wiggled the hook and winced and swore again.

I said, “You can’t pull it out, because of the barb. You’re supposed to push the hook in deeper, and twist it to get the barb through the skin, so it sticks out. Then you snip off the barb and you can just slip the smooth part out. Got any pliers?”

“So you’re a wise guy, too. I’m going to tell the cops about your guns. Them are illegal, you know.”

What I had told him was in the First Aid merit badge handbook, three stages in removing a hook: push, snip, pull. Snip it with pliers, the handbook said, but he did not want to hear it. The hook in his thumb looked just like the one in the picture illustrating the hook-removal technique.

“Where’s the emergency people?” he said angrily. “Where’s the fire station?”

“And you need a tetanus shot for tetanus toxoid,” I said, to irritate him, because he refused to do what the book told him to do.

“You could get lockjaw.”

“Another wise guy,” the man said, and stooped and groaned and gathered up his fishing tackle with his left hand — I could see a pair of the right kind of needle-nose pliers in the tackle box. He held up his right hand like a policeman signaling to stop traffic, his fingers spread out, his thumb hooked.

“This hurts like hell — it’s throbbing,” he said. ‘As if you give a shit!”

And he threw his tackle box and rod into the back seat and reversed down the narrow road, the car bouncing.

“Getting POed makes your heart beat faster,” I said. “The poison spreads.”

“He’s not even supposed to drive here, the stupid bastard,” Chicky said. He mocked the man, saying, “It’s thrawbing!”

“This is where the other guy was,” Walter said.

“The homo?” Chicky said.

Walter sucked on his lips, probably so they would not quiver and show how upset he was, and we looked at him, feeling sorry for him, standing on the spot where the strange man in the blue Studebaker had — what? — fooled around with him. No one said anything for a while.

“Other people come parking here,” Chicky said at last. “Submarine races.”

About twenty feet from where the fisherman had parked his car there was a barrier gate, just a horizontal steel pipe, hinged to a post on one side and padlocked to one on the other. Above it, the sign with our bullet holes in it, No Parking — Police Take Notice. Chicky unsheathed his hunting knife and shinned up the pole and scraped away at the t, so that it said, Police Take No ice.

“Bastards,” he said.

Farther along the shore of the pond, in the water, beyond a scooped-out embankment, there were scraps of paper curling and bobbing beneath the surface. Making sure the fisherman was gone, we put our guns down and broke off branches from the low bushes. We stood at the edge and used these, dragging the branches, to fish up the fragments of paper. The women in the torn pages were alone, some sitting or lying down, some in bathtubs, half hidden in a froth of bubbles, heavy breasts and dark nipples. We knew these dripping pages were from girlie magazines, ripped squarely in large pieces. On one was a large breast, on another a bare leg, a shoulder, the woman’s head: bouffant hair, big lips, black-and-white photographs of naked women. They seemed much wickeder soaking wet.

“I like this one,” I said.

“She’s wearing socks,” Chicky said.

“She looks more naked that way.”

“You’re nuts.”

Chicky found the cover, all in color, Naturist Monthly, two women playing tennis, seen from the rear, a nudist magazine. We pieced some pages back together and saw naked people putting golf balls on a miniature-golf course, others playing Ping-Pong, some swimming, and oddest of all, a family eating dinner at an outdoor picnic table, Dad, Mom, and two little flat-chested girls. Mom was smiling: droopy tits and holding a forkful of droopy spaghetti.

“You can’t see the guy’s wang,” Chicky said, “but lookit.”

Naked children frolicking in shallow water with naked parents, a whole bare-assed family. And even though one of the teenage girls was being splashed I could see her breasts and a tuft of hair between her legs.

“I bet she’s not a virgin,” Walter said. And then, grunting, “I’ve got a raging bonah.”

“Give him some saltpeter,” I said.

That was the remedy we had heard about, to prevent you from getting a hard-on. People said that in some schools the teachers mixed it with the food, to keep the kids out of trouble.

We trawled with the branches, hoping for more thrown-away pages. There were certain secluded places at the edge of the woods or near the ponds, where cars could park, where we found these torn-up or discarded magazines. They were always damaged; we had no idea where anyone could buy them. Without being able to explain it, we knew that men took them here, as part of a ritual, a private vice, to look at the forbidden pictures and then destroy the evidence.

And we did the same, piecing the wet pages together, and gloating over them, and then, feeling self-conscious, we scattered them and kicked them aside and walked on.

At the far margin of the pond, there was another parking place, another barrier, more litter, broken beer bottles and paper.

“It wasn't here,” Walter said.

We knew what he meant. We were more relaxed, kicking the trash, for sometimes there were coins in the cinders.

“Lookit. A Trojan,” Chicky said.

A rubber ring, partly unrolled, thin balloon skin protruding, lay lighdy on the ground.

“Never been used,” Chicky said. He poked it with his gun barrel. “No jism in it. All dry.”

“What do you figure he did with it?” Walter said. “Huh, Andy? Tell us the story.”

“He goes, ‘Open your legs.’ She goes, ‘Use a rubber.’ He takes it out but she’s so hot and bothered he doesn’t have time to put it on his dong. Her legs are open so wide he can see up her hole and into her tonsils. He throws the rubber out the window and bangs her.”

Chicky was giggling as he said, “What else?”

“She’s saying, ‘Farther in, farther in!’ He goes, ‘I’m not Father In, I’m Father O’Brien and I’m doing the best I can.’ Now she’s knocked up.”

“I like the way you tell stories,” Chicky said, as Walter, holding up his Remington, showed us a rubber dangling, suspended from the nipple on the front sight. “It’s used,” he said.

The slimy smooth gray-white rubber reminded me of naked bodies, hairless women's skin, and penises.

“Prophylactic,” I said, trying out the word that was on the Trojan wrapper.

“You can get a wicked disease from that.”

Walter flopped it onto the ground and fired his gun into it, and at the same time the three of us looked around, hearing the gunshot echo, blunted by the pond.

“Let’s go,” I said, fearing that someone might have heard.

As we walked quickly away, Chicky said, “I know this guy who got a pack of his brother’s Trojans and stuck a pin through each one. So that when his brother banged his girlfriend a little bit of sperm leaked through.”

We tried to picture it. A little bit of sperm leaked through did not seem very risky, not enough to make a baby. You needed a lot of sperm for that, and in my mind some sperm represented arms, and some legs, and more would make the baby’s body and head.

We left the bridle path and crouched, ducking through the budded bushes, traversing the hill. No one could see us, and as always when we were sneaking through the woods like this we were careful not to step on any twigs. We trod on the balls of our feet, “sure-footed,” as though in moccasins, like the Indians we saw in movies who were indistinguishable from the bushes and the mottled light of the forest.

“Heads up,” I said, hearing muffled hoofbeats, a lovely sound, because it was not a gallop but a slow tramping gait, the hooves crushing and grinding the cinders on the bridle path. The sound made us feel more than ever like Indians. “It’s a mounted cop.”

He rode upright in the saddle like a sheriff in a cowboy movie, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and shiny black boots, a big black holster at his waist on a wide belt. We pressed ourselves against the ground, like Indians in the same movie, watching him, feeling anxious pleasure that he did not see us as he passed, and when he was gone, just the distant sound of hooves, intense excitement.

“We could have told him about the homo.”

“He wouldn't have believed us.”

“He'd take our guns away,” Chicky said. “He’d tell our parents.”

Another mile onward, walking along the margin of the bridle path, we came to a clearing, the meadow of the Sheepfold, some scorched stone fireplaces and picnic tables and stumps to sit on. The place was empty this cold afternoon: all ours. We gathered wood and started a fire, warmed our hands, piled on more wood, and I whittled a stick to roast the hot dogs.

Walter said, “Those things have shit in them, real pieces of shit.”

“You’re just saying that because you don’t eat meat,” Chicky said. “Because of your religion.”

He unpacked some Italian sausages, bright red meat and pepper, speckled white with fat, and held tight with filmy sausage casing that looked like a Trojan. These he penetrated lengthwise with a sharp narrow stick, and held them over the fire, letting them sputter and burst.

“I’m going up for a Cooking merit badge,” Chicky said.

Walter ate a chocolate bar while I burned my hot dog and, trying to toast it, burned the roll I had brought. Chicky nibbled the burned end of one of his sausages, and roasted it some more over the fire.

“It looks like a bonah,” Walter said.

“Hoss cock,” Chicky said.

While we were sitting there, the fire crackling, the smoke blowing around us, three people approached through the meadow, two men and a woman. They were much older than we were, and had the look of being strangers, not just to these woods but maybe to the state.

“What’s the name of this place?” one of the men asked — the taller one, in the sort of thick warm sweater I associated with college students.

“Sheepfold,” I said. “Where are you from?”

“Tufts,” the man said.

Chicky said, “Hey, can I see that pocket book?”

The smaller of the two men, young but balding, wearing a blue windbreaker, was holding a paperback book. On the cover was a crouching woman clutching her head. You couldn’t see much of her, but you knew she was naked. The title was Escape from Fear.

“It’s a psychology book,” the man said.

Chicky snatched at it and almost got a grip, but before he could try again the taller man batted Chicky’s arm, hitting him hard and knocking him off balance. Chicky, too startled to get to his feet, held his elbow where he had banged it on the ground and began to wail — not cry, but howl.

“Hey, you hurt my friend,” Walter said, and I admired him for stepping up to the man who was flanked by two other people.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, looking suddenly worried and regretful. He pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and gave it to Chicky, who had stopped wailing but was still holding tightly to his elbow.

“I’m telling the cops,” Chicky said.

The man said to me, perhaps because I had said nothing at all, “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

The woman, who was pretty, a college girl — wearing a skirt, thick white socks, a tweed jacket — said to the man, “Let’s go. These kids could get us into trouble,” and before she finished speaking she screamed.

Walter was pushing the bolt action into his gun, which he had picked up from where he had hidden it, behind the stone fireplace.

“What are you doing with that thing?” the taller man said, trying to be calm.

The woman looked too terrified to speak. The smaller man in the windbreaker said, “You're not supposed to play with guns.”

“I'm not playing,” Walter said.

Without their having noticed him, Chicky had crept to his feet and found his rifle behind the fireplace. When the three people turned he put a handful of bullets into his mouth and began spitting them into the tube under the muzzle, loading it.

“You crazy? What do you want?” the taller man said, looking panicky and taking the woman’s arm, shoving her behind him.

“What do I want? I want you to pound sand up your ass and give your crabs a beach,” Chicky said. “Say you’re sorry.”

“I already said it.” The man was angry but he was also afraid. In an abject voice he said, “Okay, kid, I'm sorry. Put that gun down.”

“Fungoo to you,” Chicky said in defiance. He slid the handle on the pump action of his Winchester, putting a bullet into the chamber.

The three people, perhaps without realizing it, had begun to raise their hands, and held them chest high, as though being robbed. They backed away, the taller man saying, “Look, we're going — we don’t want any trouble.” And then they were running across the meadow and toward an opening in the trees, where the road led to the parking lot.

“You hear what I said? Pound sand!” Chicky said. He was excited, jabbering crazily. “He hurt my friggin’ arm!”

Walter said, “Why didn’t you get your gun, Andy?”

“Didn’t have time,” I said, but the fact was that I was afraid — fearful of being caught with it, fearful that it might go off, fearful of something awful happening, hating the recklessness of Chicky and Walter, wishing that we had not brought the guns.

“We better get out of here,” I said. “They might see that cop and tell him.”

That was a danger. We put out the fire by dumping dirt on it, and flung away the burned sausages and hot dogs.

“Let’s make sure they didn’t tell the cop,” I said, because I was still concerned.

We went through the woods to the parking lot, just in time to see the car — three people in it — speeding down the road. We looked at the lot, the space where they had parked, and saw a dollar bill and some change.

“He must have been pulling the keys out of his pocket,” I said, “and this fell out.”

“So it’s mine, because I scared him,” Chicky said, and picked it up. ‘A buck thirty.”

Back in the woods, heading home the long way, over the hill, off the path, we saw a squirrel, and chased it, throwing stones at it because a gunshot would be heard clearly so close to the road. And chasing it, the squirrel leaping from bough to bough, pushing the branches down each time he jumped, we came again to the margin of Doleful Pond, without realizing how we had got there, and losing the squirrel in the darkness.

That was when we saw the headlights, so bright the glare of them obscured the shape and color of the car.

“That’s him,” Walter said.

“Bull,” Chicky said, because it was just a pair of yellow lights.

We crouched down and watched the car reverse, moving slowly, and where the road was wider, the car stopped and made a three-point turn, lighting the bushes, illuminating itself, a small blue car sitting high on its wheels, a Studebaker.

4

So Walter Herkis, who sometimes fibbed, was telling the truth after all. He did not gloat about being right — he didn’t even seem glad that now he had us as witnesses to the blue Studebaker, the man inside. He even seemed a bit sorry and looked as though he had eaten something bad and wanted to throw up. He looked more worried than ever, even sick, which seemed like more proof that he had not been lying. And maybe the truth was even worse than he had admitted. Certainly he had been very upset and we were not quite sure what had really happened, what the man in the blue Studebaker had done to him at Doleful Pond. We asked again but this time Walter did not want to talk about it, only made the swollen pukey face again. That meant that something serious had happened.

The man had driven past us. He was not a blurry villain anymore, but a real man in a shiny car and looked strong. We had not seen his face — we were on the wrong side of the car, hiding against the pond embankment. He had driven fast, in the decisive way of a person who had finished something and wanted to get away; not on the lookout for anyone, not noticing anything, like a man in a hurry to go home, someone late.

The way the man was leaving fast seemed to make Walter angry, and he watched, growing helpless, like the man was escaping from him. Walter’s eyes were glistening. He held his gun in his arms tightly as though he was cold. But he was clutching his stomach and retched, started to spew, a moment later bent over and puked into the bushes, and paused, labored a little, and splashed some more, coating the leaves with yellow slime and mucus and chewed puke.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I’d like to kill the bastard.”

“Yeah,” Chicky said. “Let’s kill him.”

I did not say anything. I was retching myself, my mouth full of saliva from having watched Walter. I was also afraid of the word; and they knew it, they noticed my silence.

“Andy’s chickenshit.”

“Yah. Let’s get him,” I said. I could not say the word “kill” without feeling unsafe. “You all right, Herkis?”

Walter nodded. He was not all right. He was pale and pukey-looking. But he was angrier than ever, and his anger excited Chicky and touched me too. The anger gave us a purpose that was better than going out for merit badges but involved the same concentration. We had found the car, we had glimpsed the man, we had to find him again and do something. We were not Scouts, we were soldiers, we were Indians, we were men, defending ourselves.

“Kill him” was just an expression, but one that frightened me. Walter and Chicky were not so frightened of it — Walter was angry, Chicky was excited. We did not explain what killing meant, but I wanted to think it was stalking him, trapping him, not firing bullets into him.

“We’ll put him out of commission,” I said, so that they would see I was on their side, because they thought of me as the sensible one, the cautious one, the chicken.

“Even if we really do kill him, no one will know,” Chicky said.

That was the way we reasoned in the woods — getting away with something made it all right. If we killed a squirrel, or started a fire, or shot bullets into a sign and no one caught us, we felt we had done nothing wrong: nothing to explain. If we found money, we kept it. “What if we discovered a dead body in the woods?” Walter had asked once, and Chicky had said, “What if it was a woman and she was bollocky!” In the woods we were conscienceless creatures, like the other live things that lurked among the trees. Even so, Chicky’s excitement disturbed me — he was jabbering to Walter now — because talk of killing, even in a reckless jokey way, made me uneasy. My hesitation was not guilt, not even conscience — I was afraid of getting caught and having to face my parents' fury and shame.

“They'll never catch us. They'll think it's some big murderer. They'll never think it was kids.”

“Let's shadow him first, and then see,” I said, dreading their conviction.

Walter said, “Chicky's right. Kill him.”

“We can track him. We’re good at that,” I said.

Lurking, hiding, hunting; scouring the earth for footprints, tire tracks, clues; the lore of Scouting was real and useful.

The sky had gone gray, some of the clouds as dense as iron, as black, with streaks of red and pink between them, like hot iron that had begun to cool. And not only that, but more because the evening sky was always a mass of unrelated marvels — above the iron were vast decaying faces, tufts of pink fluff in a soup of yellow. The light in the sky was all the light there was; the woods were dark, and so was the surface of the pond at this low angle, and not even the path was clear.

“We should head back,” I said, and started walking.

“I don't even freakin' care,” Walter said, but from the way he said it I knew he was glad to go, a bit wobbly and gagged from puking.

Chicky said, “We could wait till he parks his car, then cut a tree down. It falls across the road, he can't drive away, we nail him.”

“Or dig one of those big holes and put sticks across it, and leaves and stuff, so that it looks like the ground,” I said. “He walks right in. We could say it was an accident.”

“Or just shoot him in the nuts,” Walter said.

Talking this way in the darkness of the woods seemed unlucky and made me nervous about bumping into a stranger, maybe that very homo. The others might have felt that way too, for although they were talking big, they held tightly to their rifles, bumping shoulders and sometimes stumbling. When we heard some cars and saw the lights of South Border Road, we walked faster and were relieved to be out of the woods.

Chicky started across the Fellsway alone, walking stiffly to conceal his gun. He turned around and took out his comb. “Anyway, don't do anything I wouldn't do,” he said, tilting his head, raking his hair with his comb. “Or if you do, name him Chicky.”

Walter and I turned toward Foss Street. He was silent, except for his puffing — winded and sick from the experience of having seen the man — a big boy out of breath, his whole body straining as he plodded up the hill.

“We'll get the guy,” I said, to reassure him.

“Who cares?” His voice stayed in his mouth and sounded awful, as though he couldn't swallow. When we got to the Fulton Street fire station at the top of the hill he said, “My mother thinks I went to church.”

The special Saturday church of a Seventh-day Adventist made it sounded pagan and purposeless, just an empty ritual on the wrong day.

Looking miserable, saying nothing except “See ya,” he turned and headed down Ames Street toward his house. I walked off wondering and anxious, for so much had occurred during the day and I was still not sure what it meant; sometimes such events just happened and were never repeated, but other times there were consequences, and those I feared.

Entering my house, leaving my rifle behind the sofa on the piazza to hide later, I went into the kitchen, which was filled with light and warmth and the steamy odor of sweated meat.

“Where have you been?” my mother said. She was standing at the stove, poking at a pot roast in a kettle.

“Nowhere.”

“You smell of smoke.”

“I went for a hike. For a merit badge.”

“Have you been playing with fire?”

“There was a forest fire. I helped put it out.”

“Take your shoes off — you're tracking in mud. Wash your hands and face. You're filthy. And set the table.”

I did as I was told, but it was hard to do the right thing here at home, hard to know what to say. I felt uncomfortable and out of place in the house, in this world that was parallel to my outdoor life, as though I did not belong indoors, could not reveal anything of my real life. Only in the woods, with my gun, my wool hat pulled over my ears, did I feel free, “sure-footed,” “hawkeyed.”

The next Scout meeting was on the following Wednesday. We gathered at St. Ray's hall and were talking and fooling until Arthur Mutch yelled at us to pipe down and to line up in patrols.

“Close interval, dress right — dress!”

Each boy stuck his left elbow out, making a space, and because Chicky was on my right he jabbed me hard and laughed.

“Ten-shun!”

Mr. Mutch led us in the Scout oath while Father Staley stood at the side. After the oath, Scaly led us in a prayer, the same prayer as always: “Let us pray. Dear Lord, help us to be worthy of your love…”

“At ease,” Mr. Mutch said afterward. He lectured us a little on obedience and how we had a duty to behave with respect. Then he nodded to Father Staley, who held up one finger to get our attention and said, “This, too, is a house of God.” Then Mr. Mutch told us to meet in patrols and that he would be coming around to check on us.

The leader of the Beaver Patrol was an Eagle Scout named Corny Kelliher, a redheaded thirteen-year-old with freckles and spaces between his teeth. He hated camping but was good at arithmetic and hobbies: he had a ham radio and knew Morse code and raised tropical fish. He wore a sash stitched with merit badges, twenty or more. He had gone out west to the Jamboree by train and had showed us snapshots he had taken of Pikes Peak and Grand Coulee Dam.

Corny said, “So let’s talk about what Scouting activities we’ve been doing. How about you, Andy?”

“Learning about tracking,” I said.

“Can you identify any animal prints?”

“Yup. Bear. Deer. Muskrat.”

“How can you tell a muskrat track?”

“Drags its tail between its footprints and leaves a line.”

“How do you know if the prints are fresh?”

I didn’t know, so I said, “If they’re kind of wet?”

Corny said, “No. But if they have snow inside them, then you know that they’re not fresh, because it snowed after the animal left them.”

“What about in the summer when there’s no snow?”

I liked asking him outdoor questions because he was always indoors.

“The prints are soft,” he said. “What else did you do?”

Chased a squirrel. Saw a man with a fishhook in his thumb. Got yelled at by him. Found some dirty pictures and rubbers. Quarreled with some people. Found a buck and change. Tracked down a homo’s car.

But I said, “Hiked. Identified some plants. Skunk cabbage and stuff.”

Saturdays were for tracking. We went back again, we could only go that day, but we went with the same dedication. We were small, we were not strong, so we valued cunning and skill and made being small our asset. If we could not come face to face with the enemy, we would find him, shadow him, then make a move on him. We whispered, we tiptoed, we wore dark clothes, we avoided stepping on things that made noise, stayed off the path, moved from big tree to big tree keeping our rifles pointed down, used hand signals. We were trackers, we were stalkers, we were scarcely visible.

Our stakeout spot was a grassy overlook near the big smooth boulder above Doleful Pond, in a natural trench like a foxhole, sluiced by a gully wash. There we lay in the speckled leaf shadow and watched the bridle path where cars — lovers, fishermen, crazies with girlie magazines — sometimes parked. We got to know them, the ones who cuddled in the back seat and tossed rubbers out the window, the fishermen who stayed until dark, the loners who tore up the magazines.

“I’m cold. Let’s start a fire,” Chicky said one Saturday.

“No. They’ll see the smoke.”

“Who made you the chief?” Chicky said, and lit a cigarette, and warmed his hands with it. He was becoming an expert smoker and boasted of the nicotine stains on his fingers.

Walter said, “Cigarettes are stupid. You’re going to be a shrimp.”

Chicky blew smoke into Walter’s face and said, “Know what? Dwyer got bare tit off a seventh-grader at Helen Slupski’s birthday party.”

Walter was listening closely, a Seventh-day Adventist envying us our wild life and our parties. He said, “Is she pretty?”

“She’s a dog, but she’s a tramp,” Chicky said. “Probably a nympho.”

We watched the road, the parking space, side by side, prostrate, like braves. A car pulled in: lovers, the green Chevy.

While we watched them, I said in a low voice, “This guy was banging his girlfriend up the Mystic Lakes and she clamped his dong so hard in her twot he couldn’t pull it out. It was stuck wicked shut, like in a vise. The cops found them. ‘Let’s see your license and registration.’ Then they saw what happened and took them to the hospital. My brother told me.”

“That’s a pissah,” Chicky said. “So they’re in the ambulance together and his dong is stuck inside her.”

“Sometimes your finger gets stuck in a Coke bottle,” Walter said, thinking of how it might have happened.

After a while the Chevy backed out, and with its lights on we realized that the day had gone dark, time to go home. We descended the hill, rounded the pond, and lingered where the car had been, in the tracks of all the other cars, the fishermen, the crazies, the lovers, about fifty feet from the post where the sign we had vandalized said, No Parking — Police Take No ice.

I said, “They all see that sign and stop.”

“Let’s lose it,” Chicky said. “Then they might park over there.”

“So what?”

“Easier to kill the homo,” Chicky said, and a moment later was climbing the pole and hanging on the sign, tearing it from its rusted fastenings.

“Your fingerprints are on it now,” I said.

“As if I give a shit.” Chicky walked to the edge of the pond and winged it into the water, where it skipped twice and then sank. He went back and kicked the iron pipe from its supports, shouting crazy, “I’m leaving my footprints!” He was strong and he had gotten bolder, and even his reckless talk was a worry.

The next time we went was milder, mid-April now, some lilacs and forsythia in blossom at the edge of the reservoir, and purple azaleas already starting to show. I knew their names from the flower book that Mr. Mutch had loaned me. We waited for Walter, who was later than usual. His mother had found out that he was skipping church, and forced him to go. But he was loping along with his gun when he caught up with us at the stone pillars at the entrance to the Fells.

“I took it to church,” he said. “No one even saw me.”

“That’s wicked great,” Chicky said. “I’m going to do that.”

I tried to picture it, sitting in a pew at St. Ray’s with my rifle lying under the kneeler.

“I still don’t get why you have to go to church on Saturday,” Chicky said as we walked into the woods, making our usual detour through the trees.

“Because it’s the Sabbath.”

“Bullshit,” Chicky said. “Sunday is.”

“Saturday,” Walter said. “Jews go then, too.”

“That’s why they’re Jews. You’re not a Jew, except when you’re hogging the Devil Dogs.”

“Cut it out,” I said, seeing that under Chicky’s scolding Walter was getting pink-faced and a little breathless, as he did when he was upset.

But Chicky was annoyed because we had waited most of the day for Walter, and he was so late there were only a few more hours of sunlight. Chicky had said, “Let’s go without him,” but I argued that we needed Walter — to be a team, to act together, and so that Walter would see the man’s face.

“Yeah, we don’t want to kill the wrong guy,” Chicky said.

Walter trudged ahead of us, as though compensating for being late. From the way he was silent and thoughtful, his shoes flapping, I knew that he envied us being Boy Scouts. But Scouts were forbidden by his church, like coffee and tuna fish.

“We’re supposed to be tracking,” Chicky said. “Get down low.”

“I’m a tracker,” Walter said. “No one can see me.”

We glided through the woods like wisps, like shadows, alert to all the sounds. Blue jays were chasing a squirrel, harrying the creature from tree to tree the way we might have done ourselves if we had not been so determined to conceal ourselves. We were off the path, and the dead leaves were flatter and wetter these days, not like the brittle crackling leaves of winter. We moved hunched over in silence.

More buds made the trees look denser, and the tiny bright leaves on some bushes gave the woods a newer, greener feel, hid us better and helped us feel freer. The sky was not so explicit, the boughs had begun to fill out with leaves as delicate as feathers. And a different smell, too, the crumbly brown decaying smell of warmer earth and tufts of low tiny wildflowers.

Once again, Walter pointed out some fiddleheads, the only wild plant he knew, though most of them had fanned out into ferns. The skunk cabbage was fuller and redder. Nor were the woods so silent. There were insects and some far-off frogs. We wanted to be like these dull-colored creatures and wet plants, camouflaged like the wildest things in the woods.

Because it was so late there were no horseback riders on the bridle paths, no other hikers, no dog walkers. They must have all left the woods as we had entered: the wilderness belonged to us now.

We cut around Panther's Cave, climbed the hill behind it, and kept just below the ridgeline, parallel to the trail, listening hard. The light was dimming and the sun was behind us, below the level of the treetops.

“I can’t see squat,” Chicky said. “It’s all Herkis’s fault. Fucking banana man.”

“My mother made me go,” Walter said in an urgent tearful whisper.

“Let’s hurry,” I said, hoping to calm them.

“How can we track anyone in the dark?”

“We’ll learn how,” Walter said. “Indians track people in the dark. Indians stay out all night. No one expects to be followed in the dark. We’ll get good at it. Then we’ll be invisible.”

“I have to be home for supper,” I said.

But we kept on, and the gathering darkness did not deter us, it was a challenge and a kind of cloak, a cover for us in our tracking as we crept unseen below the ridgeline.

And walking this way we made a discovery, for cresting the last hill behind Doleful Pond, in our foxhole, we saw that the water still held some daylight, the smooth surface of the pond reflecting the creamy gray of the sky.

The shore was dark, the woods were black, we saw nothing on the road. Instead of lying there whispering in the shallow trench, we made our way down the hill, as slowly and silently as we could, as though moving downstairs through many large darkened rooms of a strange house. Even so, I could hear Chicky breathing through his fat nose, and Walter’s big feet in the leaves, clumsy human sounds that made me feel friendly toward them.

Before we got to the road, Chicky said, “Look,” and swung his arm to keep us back, liking the drama of it.

At the very end of the road, the place where we had removed the No Parking sign and the iron pipe, there was a car, but so deep in the trees we could not see the color or the make.

I put my finger to my lips — no talking — and took the lead, duck-walking to the edge of the pond, where the little trail encircled it. The others followed, keeping low and still watching the car, trying to make it out. Closer, we could see it was small and compact.

“It’s the Studebaker,” Chicky said, whispering fiercely.

Walter knelt and slid the bolt of his rifle. “Let’s kill him.”

“Yeah,” Chicky said. He too knelt and fumbled with his gun.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I could not think of any way of stopping them, nor could I put my worry into words. We had bullets, we had our guns, only mine was not loaded: the other guns were cocked. In the darkness of Doleful Pond, having achieved our objective, there was nothing to stop us. We had made a trap for the man by removing the sign and the barrier, and our work was even more effective than we had planned, for the car was almost hidden in the narrow gullet of the road.

“We’ll surround him,” Chicky said. “We’ll just gang up and shoot from all sides. He won’t have a chance.”

I felt sickening panic and wanted to vomit. Until that moment it had been unreal, just a game of pursuit, Indian tracking, and I had enjoyed it. But we had succeeded too well and now I dreaded that we would have to go through with it. I saw in this reckless act the end of my useful life.

“Maybe he’s not inside.”

The car was dark. I hoped it was empty.

“My mother’s going to kill me if I’m late,” I said.

“Andy’s chickening out.” Chicky’s vicious gloating made him sound psycho.

I was afraid. I thought: If I do this, my life is over. I also thought: I cannot chicken out, I can’t retreat.

“We should call the cops.”

“They won’t do anything,” Walter said.

“Just take our guns away!” Chicky said.

The car moved, not visibly but we heard it, the distinct sound of a spring, the squeak of metal under the chassis, as though it was settling slightly into the road, for there was another accompanying sound, the crunch of cinders in the wheel track from the tires. A weight had shifted in the car.

That sound stiffened us and made us listen. The next sound was louder, not from the springs but the crank-creak of a door handle, and with it a light came on inside the car, the overhead bulb.

We saw the man’s face briefly as he turned to get out of the car and, as he left the door open, the light stayed on. Another shape barely bulked in the front seat — it could have been a bundle, or a big dog, or a boy’s head. There came a spattering sound, like gravel on glass.

“He’s taking a leak,” Chicky said.

“Shoot him in the nuts,” Walter said in a husky sobbing voice. “Shoot the bastard.”

“Hold it,” Chicky said, and I knew what he was thinking.

The man was not a blurry villain anymore. He was a real person, and that was much worse. He wore a black golf cap and buttoned to his neck a shapeless coat that looked greasy, the way gabardine darkens in winter. Slipping back into the car, he flung out his arm to yank the door and we got another look: big nose, small chin, a pinched mouth, and a face that was so pale his mustache was more visible, a trimmed one. He looked like a salesman in the way he was so neat, like someone who put himself in charge and smiled and tried to sell you something.

When the light went off, Walter raised his rifle, and Chicky pushed it down hard, saying, “Quit it.”

I thought the man might hear, but the door was closed, the engine had started, the gearshift was being jiggled and jammed into reverse. The brake lights reddened our faces.

“We can’t do it now,” I said. I was giggling, but still panicky.

“I’m gonna,” Walter said, and tried to snatch his rifle from Chicky’s grasp.

“Tell him, Chicky.”

“Freakin’ Scaly,” Chicky said.

The relief I felt for our not having shot him was joyous, a kind of hilarity, a light like a candle flame leaping in my body making me feel like a small boy again. In my guts I knew that if you killed someone, you died yourself.

5

In the woods we were free to do anything we liked. We knew from what we saw — the torn-up pictures, the tossed-away magazines, the used Trojans, the bullet-riddled signs, the women on horseback, even the fisherman with the hook in his thumb — that other people felt that way, too. We could make our own rules. We thought of the woods as a wilderness. It was ours, it was anyone’s, it was why we went there, and why Father Staley went there. No one looked for you there, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t find you: you could be invisible in the woods.

But we were Scouts, we were trackers, we could find someone if we wanted. We had found the man who had bothered Walter, maybe molested him, though I did not have any clear idea of what “molested” meant, other than probably touched his pecker. “He tried to kiss me” didn’t mean much. We talked wildly of sex all the time, but none of us had yet kissed a girl.

Walter would not tell us what the man had done. Whenever he tried he shook and stammered and got blotchy, pink-cheeked and flustered, and sometimes so mad he began talking about killing the man.

But the man was Father Staley. We could not explain how important that man was; how we could not even think about harming him. On the way home that night, walking at the edge of the woods among the low bushes, so that none of the passing cars would see our guns, Walter was upset.

“Stop crying, Herkis,” Chicky said.

“I’m not crying.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“What’s wrong is, I saw him. That was the same guy. You thought I was lying. I was telling the truth!”

He was screeching so loud he sounded like his sister Dottie, who was almost his age and had the same pink cheeks and pale skin.

“I don’t get what you’re saying,” Chicky said.

“I saw the freakin’ homo!” Walter said.

What he seemed to be saying was that by seeing the man, he remembered everything that had happened. That had upset him all over again.

“We’ll get him, don’t worry,” I said. But I was glad the moment had passed, that none of us had fired our guns at Father Staley. The woods were free but we would have been arrested for killing a Catholic priest, and would have been disgraced and been sent to jail forever. It could have gone horribly wrong, for at that point our pretending had become real — pretending to be Indian trackers, pretending to be hunters and avengers, following the tracks, carrying guns. We had talked about what we would do when we found the man, but I hoped it was just talk, that We’re Indian trackers was the same as Let’s kill him and Shoot him in the nuts—words we said to ourselves for the thrill of it.

Chicky would have shot if it hadn’t been Scaly; Walter had wanted to fire, and was angry we hadn’t let him.

“You both chickened out,” Walter said. He sang off-key, “Chickenshit — it makes the grass grow green!”

“We’ll do something,” Chicky said. “Something wicked awful.”

“No sah. You’re chicken because he’s supposed to be a priest. You actually know the guy.”

Thinking of a priest as “a guy” was hard for us, because he was a man of God, powerful and holy. Because Chicky and I were Catholics, and Father Staley was a priest, we felt responsible for him. It gave Walter another reason to dislike Catholics. We knew that the Seventh-day Adventists said bad things about Catholics, just as Catholics said, “This is the True Church. Protestants are sinners. They’re not going to Heaven,” and “Jews are Christ killers.”

“He’s a homo,” Walter said.

That hurt, but it was true.

“He’s a Percy, he’s a pervert,” Walter said. “He was trying to make me into a homo.”

“He’s still a priest,” Chicky said. “He’s chaplain to our Boy Scout troop.”

“Big deal.”

“It is a big deal. We can’t shoot him,” Chicky said. It sounded strange to hear Chicky being solemn and responsible, his close-set eyes, his yellow skin, his big nose, his picking at his birthmark as he spoke. “But we can do something. Beaver Patrol to the rescue.”

“Just don’t broadcast it,” I said.

They stopped walking and stared at me. We had come to the Forest Street rotary and were standing under a streetlight. Cars were rounding the rotary, going slowly, so we stood holding our rifles upright against our sides, the butt tucked under one arm like a crutch, while keeping the muzzle off the ground. By being silent, they were querying what I had said.

“Because we could get into trouble,” I said.

They saw that I was right. It was certain that if we had reported Father Staley to the police, he would win and we would have to answer all the hard questions: What were you doing in the woods? Why did you each have a.22 and a lot of live ammo on you? Were you lying when you said you were going on a cookout? Why were you fooling around near Doleful Pond with those dirty pictures? Staying out after dark, we were up to no good. We had no answers.

Father Staley would say Walter was lying: people would believe him, not us. And no matter what happened, we would be known forever as the boys involved in the Father Staley scandal, wicked little fairies and tattletales. We would never get a girlfriend. Other kids would tease us and pick fights. We would lose.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said.

We parted that night in the shadows of the street like conspirators, swearing that we would not say anything to anyone.

When I got home and my mother said “Where have you been?” and I said “Nowhere,” I did feel I had been nowhere. We had come close to almost killing a man. I would not have fired my gun, but Chicky and Walter would have. I would have been arrested with them. People would have pointed their finger at me and said, You’re just as guilty as they are.

I took my gun into the basement and stashed it behind a leaning stack of storm windows.

Upstairs, my mother said, “Is there anything wrong, Andy?”

“No,” I said, and felt sorry for her, because she didn’t know anything of what had happened, and there was so much to know. She did not know me, either. I was just a stranger in the house.

At the next Scout meeting, Chicky and I stuck together, not saying anything, but looking at Father Staley when his back was turned. He wore a black cassock with a hundred black buttons on the front, and the skirtlike lower edge of it touched the toes of his black shoes. Now the thing seemed like a dress to us.

When he looked at me, I felt he knew something — he smiled in a suspicious way, pinching his mustache. Being near him made me quiet and fluttery inside: I couldn’t think of anything to say.

But Chicky was more talkative than ever in a bold, mock-serious voice. Looking straight into Father Staley’s face, he said, “I’m going up for my First Aid merit badge, but I’m having some problems.”

“Maybe I can help,” Father Staley said.

“Father, hey, I’m not sure what you do if a snake bites you.”

“Get straight to the hospital, son. That’s what you should do.”

Chicky said, “Um, some people say you’re, um, supposed to suck out the poison.”

It was the thing we always joked about. What would you do if a snake bit a girl on her tits, or a boy on his pecker or his ass? Suck it out. Even the word “suck” sounded wicked to us.

“You only do that if you’re in the woods,” Father Staley said.

“But, hey, that’s where all the snakes are, Father,” Chicky said.

He was trying to get Father Staley to talk about sucking out the poison. Father Staley put his hand on my leg — his hand had never felt scalier — and said, “You’ve got a First Aid merit badge, Andy. What would you do in a situation like that?”

I hated being asked. “In a situation like that,” I said, and hesitated. Then, “You cut the wound with a sharp knife, making an X. And when it bleeds, you kind of, um, suck the poison out. And I forgot to say, maybe put a tourniquet on the person’s arm between the snakebite and his heart.”

“If he’s bitten on the arm,” Father Staley said, and his eyes glittered at me.

“Yes, Father.”

“Very good. So there’s your answer, DePalma,” he said, walking away.

I said to Chicky, “You’re such a pissah.”

Pleased with himself, Chicky said, “I just wanted to see what he’d say. I know Scaly’s a homo now. He was trying to feel you up.”

“Beaver Patrol,” Corny Kelliher said, calling the group together.

We scraped the wooden folding chairs into a circle and sat there, waiting for Corny to lead the patrol meeting.

“Let’s talk about tracking. Anyone?”

“We done some tracking the other day,” Chicky said. “Me and Andy.”

Father Staley crept over to listen.

“Want to tell us about it?”

“Oh, yeah. We were in the woods,” Chicky said. “We seen some tracks. We kind of followed them.”

Nothing about tracking down the pervert, nothing about our guns, nothing about Walter Herkis, nothing about our spying from the hill, nothing about Father Staley and his blue Studebaker — and who knew he had a Studebaker, since none of the priests even owned a car?

“Do any sketches of the tracks?”

“No. But I could draw a picture.” Chicky took a piece of paper and a pencil and sketched some circles and shaded them, while glancing from time to time at Father Staley. When he had finished, Chicky said, “Maybe a wolf.”

“Must have been a dog,” Corny said. “The prints are similar.”

“It was a wolf,” Chicky said.

“There are no wolves in Medford,” Father Staley said.

“Hey, have a seat,” Chicky said. His yellow Italian face made his friendliness seem sly. “Ever been up the Fells, Father?”

Father Staley just smiled at the direct question and said, “My hiking days are over, I’m afraid,” and joined our group, sitting himself on a folding chair, plucking his cassock at his knees, like a woman in a gown, except his fingers were scaly.

Sort of bowing to Father Staley, who was at the center of the Beaver Patrol — bowing was his way of treating Scaly as though he was holy — Arthur Mutch handed us each a sheet of paper, saying, “I just mimeographed these. I want each one of you to take it home and study it.”

The heading at the top of the smudged sheet was “Elements of Leadership,” with twenty numbered topics. The first was “Inspiring respect by setting an example.”

As he passed by, Mr. Mutch said to me, ‘Andy, you should be asking yourself why you’re not a patrol leader. You’ve got the ability. You just don’t use it.”

Hearing this, Father Staley said, “Mr. Mutch is right. You pick up the lame and the halt.”

I faced him, I couldn’t answer, I knew my face was getting red.

“People like that just drag you down.”

I wanted to say: What did you do to Walter Herkis? But I knew that if I did, I would have to pay a terrible price for talking back to a priest.

“You know what I think?” Father Staley said, because he still wasn’t through, and now he was so close I could smell the SenSen on his breath. I knew that smell: we sucked Sen-Sens to take away the stink of cigarettes when we were smoking. “I think you enjoy hiding your light under a bushel. That’s just plain lazy. It’s also a sin of pride.”

I wanted to shoot him in the face. Shoot him between the eyes, we always said. I located a spot between his eyebrows and stared at it with a wicked look. The other members of the Beaver Patrol were pretending to read “Elements of Leadership” but were really sneaking glances at the way Father Staley was scolding me. Buzzy Dwyer, John Brodie, Vinny Grasso. And Chicky’s yellow face was twisted sideways at me.

“Shall we talk about leadership and taking responsibility?” Father Staley said to the others when he was finished with me.

Homo, I thought.

Corny Kelliher said, “That’s a good idea, Father.”

“Or we could practice some knots,” Chicky said. “I’m trying to learn the bowline. Maybe go out for the Knot Tying merit badge.”

“I might be able to help you with that,” Father Staley said. “You know, I served in the navy?”

“I want to go into the navy, Father.” Chicky was smiling at him, and I knew he was deliberately choosing things to say to Father Staley, even trying to please him in a way, like a small boy dealing with a big dog.

Picking up a short length of rope and extending his scaly fingers so that we could see his movements, Father Staley slowly tied a bowline knot. With a little flourish, which seemed to me a sin of pride, he presented it, dangling it in our faces. I hated his fingers now.

“Now you do it,” he said. He picked the knot apart with his fingertips, then handed the rope to me.

My hands went numb because as soon as I started to tie the bowline, Father Staley lowered his head to peer at my fingers for the way I was tying the knot. His head was sweet from cologne, and I could still smell the Sen-Sen. I made several false starts, then tied the bowline.

“DePalma?” Father Staley handed the rope to Chicky.

Chicky started the knot slowly, his tongue clamped between his teeth. But then he bobbled the rope and tugged on the ends and the knot became a twisted knob.

“That’s a granny knot,” Father Staley said.

He got up and crouched behind Chicky and put his arms around him, and taking Chicky’s hands, which held each end of the rope, he guided Chicky, pressing on his fingers, tying the knot using Chicky's hands.

“See?” His head was in back of Chicky's head, his breath on Chicky's neck.

Squirming free of the priest and looking rattled, Chicky said, “I think I get it, Father.”

In the navy you learned many different knots, Father Staley said. He had been stationed in Japan. He tied a knot on Vinny Grasso’s wrists and said, “Japanese handcuffs. Go ahead, try taking them off.” When Vinny yanked on them, he grunted and his hands went white. Instead of untying Vinny, Father Staley used more pieces of rope to tie Chicky’s wrists and mine. I left the rope slack, because I thought from Vinny’s reaction that the knot would tighten if I put pressure on it. Instead, I made my right hand small and it was so sweaty I managed to slip it out of one side, and untied the knot.

Father Staley saw I had freed myself, and he smiled and put his scaly fingers out for the rope and said, “Want to try again?”

His friendliness made me so nervous I couldn’t speak. I watched him untying Vinny’s wrists. Afterward, Arthur Mutch told us to line up and stand at attention. Father Staley made the sign of the cross and said, “Let us pray,” and my pressed-together hands got hot, for when he prayed I was more afraid than ever.

“Dear Lord, make us worthy of your love…”

On the way home, I thought Chicky would talk about Father Staley hugging him and holding his hands to tie the bowline, but instead he said in a trembly voice, “Scaly thinks I’m dragging you down.”

“He’s full of shit,” I said.

“We should kill him,” Chicky said.

“What will we tell Walter?”

“That we’ll get the bastard.” Kicking the pavement, scuffing his shoe soles, he was thinking hard. “Know what we should do? Wreck his stupid car.”

“Like how?”

“There’s billions of ways,” Chicky said.

I remembered how he got angry because there was no car maintenance merit badge, and he knew everything about cars.

Before we parted that night, he said, “I think you drag me down, because you’re such a fucking banana man.”

We went to Walter’s house after school the next day and hid behind a tree, waiting for him to come home. After a while, a car stopped in front of his house and Walter got out — a car full of kids, more Seventh-day Adventists, more bean eaters, who never danced, who went to church on Saturday. So many of them made the religion seem stranger.

Seeing us lurking near the tree, Walter looked around and then sidled over and whispered, “What’re we going to do?”

“Kill his car,” Chicky said. He loved the expression. He licked his lips and made his yellow monkey face. “Kill his car.”

Chicky put himself in charge, because cars were the one thing he knew about. He said, ‘Andy's the head tracker. And you’re the head lookout, Herkis. But you’ve got to do what I say.”

“No guns,” I said.

“Why not?” Walter said.

“Because if we get caught they’ll take them away.” But my worst fear was that if they had them they would use them and would kill Father Staley.

“How are we going to kill his car, then? I thought we were going to shoot bullets into it.”

“That'll just make holes and dents. We’re really going to wreck it wicked bad, inside and out.”

The next Saturday we spent in the woods, lying on our stomachs in the foxhole on the wooded bluff above Doleful Pond, watching for Father Staley’s blue Studebaker. He didn’t show up, though others did — fishermen, lovers, dog walkers. We watched them closely but stayed where we were, and we were well hidden by the leafy branches, for spring had advanced. Twice during the week we made a visit: no Scaly. Maybe he had given up?

When we did not see him at Mass, we asked Arthur Mutch, Chicky saying, “Father Staley was supposed to teach us some knots.”

“Father Staley is on a retreat.”

“What’s a retreat?”

“It’s what you should do sometime, DePalma,” Arthur Mutch said sternly, because he didn’t like Chicky. “Go to New Hampshire, to pray. Lenten devotion.”

Whispering to me at the Beaver Patrol, Chicky said, “I bet he’s not praying. Five bucks says he’s whacking off.”

We did not see Father Staley until just before Easter, saying the Mass on Holy Thursday. We reported this to Walter, who sort of blamed us for Father Staley.

“We’ll look for him tomorrow,” I said.

“You going to church again tomorrow?”

“Good Friday. Holy day of obligation.”

“I don’t care what you say — that’s worse than us.”

The Good Friday service lasted almost three hours, and the priests wore elaborate robes and faced the altar, but midway through the incense ceremony, one of the priests turned and swung the thurible at the congregation, waving a cloud of incense at us, and Chicky nudged me, whispering, “Scaly.”

Attendance at church was not required on Holy Saturday. We didn’t expect to see Father Staley by the pond, but we had the whole day for tracking, and it was a cold sunny day, with some flowers in bloom, and so we were glad to head into the woods. Even if Father Staley didn’t show up, we would have more chances, for the following day was Easter, the start of a week’s vacation.

Walter was early. He said, “I was in this Bible class. I put up my hand and said, ‘Excuse me.’ The teacher says, ‘Okay.’ So I just left. He thought I was going to the john.”

Chicky wasn’t listening. He said, “If we kill his car, we’ll put him out of commission.”

We stopped and had a snack at Panther’s Cave, sitting out of the wind, in the warm sunlight.

“What have you got?”

“Bottle of tonic. Some Twinkies. You?”

“Cheese in a bulkie. Bireley’s Orange.”

“I ain’t eating, I’m smoking,” Chicky said, and lit a cigarette, and with smoke trickling out of his nose, he looked more than ever in charge.

The day was lovely, the woods so much greener than on that first day, when Walter had told us his story. We had been cold then, and the goose bumps of fear in our bodies too. Afterward, frightened by the thought of the man chasing Walter, we had stumbled through the woods, not knowing where to go or what to do. Now we knew. The weather was warm, the ground was dry, the woods smelled sweet.

We were not boys anymore but men with a purpose as we made our way by a zigzag route to the crest of the hill above Doleful Pond, approaching from behind, flattening ourselves on the ground, sliding forward in the leaves until we could see the far shore, then dropping into the foxhole.

“What did you bring?”

Walter had taken off his knapsack. “Couple of bricks.”

“I’ve got the rope,” I said. ‘About fifty feet. Chicky?”

Chicky kept his eyes on the pond. He said, ‘A potato. A bag of sugar. A couple of tonic bottles. Pair of pliers. Usual stuff.”

He had always been talkative before, but now that he was in charge he liked to be mysterious. He wasn’t good at schoolwork, but he knew how to fix things, and was even better at breaking them.

“Someone’s coming,” Walter said.

But it was the Chevy, the lovers. We watched closely.

“They’re making out — he’s feeling her up. Hey, this guy I know told me the best way to get laid,” Chicky said. “You get a girl in a car, huh. ‘Cheryl, hey, let’s go for a ride.’ Then you drive into the middle of the boondocks, like where they are now, and when it gets dark you park the car and shut off the engine and you say, ‘Okay, fuck or walk.”’

“What’s supposed to happen?” Walter said.

“Listen, banana man. The guy leans over. 'Fuck or walk.' It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s wicked far. So the girl has to take her clothes off and let him bang her, or else she’ll have to walk home.”

“I’d go with them,” Walter said. “I’d get sloppy seconds.”

“You’d just jerk off. You’d leave pecker tracks.”

I said, “When I was young and in my prime, I used to jerk off all the time. But now that I am old and gray, I only jerk off twice a day.”

“Andy plays with the one-eyed worm.”

“And you get hind tit.”

“You can kiss the snotty end of my fuck stick,” Chicky said.

The next time we looked up, the Chevy was reversing down the road.

“She came across,” Chicky said. “Didn’t have to walk.”

By now the sun was low enough to cast long-legged shadows across the pond and the road. The place where the Chevy had been parked lay in darkness.

None of us saw the blue Studebaker appear. All we saw was its rear lights winking as it braked, sliding into the shadows at the end of the road, where we had removed the No Parking sign and the iron pipe barrier. Its rumplike trunk was blue, though just a few minutes after it parked, even while we were staring at it, we could not make out the color.

Each of us had one job to do. Walter’s was first — to get Father Staley out of the car and up the road, chasing him, long enough for Chicky and me to do our jobs.

“There’s someone with him.”

“Probably some kid.”

“Maybe someone we know.”

“Like they say in Russia, tough shitsky,” Chicky said.

“What are you going to do?” Walter said.

Slow-witted and sly, liking the mystery, Chicky said, “I got my ways. Just make sure that bastard is out of the car and up the road for a few minutes to give me time.”

“If he sees us, we’re screwed,” I said.

“He’s only going to see Herkis,” Chicky said. “Herkis is Protestant!”

“Let’s put on bandannas,” I said. The word was from the cowboy movies. I took out my handkerchief.

“You mean a snot rag,” Chicky said, and shook out his own and tied it around the lower half of his face, as I was doing.

We crouched in the foxhole on the bluff, watching the car. The sun sank some more, the temperature changed, the woods grew cooler, damper, darker, while the pond held the last light of the day.

“What’s the bastard doing?” Chicky said.

The end of the road where the car was parked was so shadowy, a person passing by would not have noticed the car. After it had parked, it had seemed to darken and shrink and disappear.

“I can’t see him,” Walter said.

Chicky said in his conspirator’s whisper, “If we wait any longer, he might take off. So let’s go. You’re dumping the bricks, Herkis. Andy, you’re doing the bumper.”

“What about you?”

“You’ll see. Meet back here, after.” Chicky then put his finger to his lips: no more talking.

Keeping low, we descended through the bushes single file to the edge of the pond. We used the thick brush at the shore to hide ourselves. Approaching the car from the rear, we could not see anything of the people inside. We were sure it was Father Staley’s car, but where was his head? Now we were kneeling.

Chicky turned and poked Walter’s arm, and as he did, Walter snorted air and looked alert. With a brick in each hand, Walter rocked back to a squatting position, sort of sighing as he did so. I could see how angry he was from the way his head was jammed between his shoulders and the sounds of his shoes when he crossed from the dirt path to the cinders.

We heard nothing but his shoes for a moment and then two loud sounds, one of a brick hitting the metal body of the car, the other the crunch of a brick against the windshield. Just after that, a complaining two-part shout that was so long the first part was muffled inside the car, and the second part a very loud protest as it was released by the car door swinging open.

Father Staley stumbled out, pulling at his clothes, and Walter screamed “Homo!” as he ran into the woods, and he was gone, hidden by darkness, before Father Staley had stumbled twenty feet. But Father Staley was still going after him.

My hands trembled as I tied the bowline knot on the front bumper. The other end of the rope, another bowline, I tied to the nearest tree. While I was tying the knots, Chicky rushed from the rear of the car, where he had been doing something, to the side, where he was pulling the flap that covered the gas cap. The last sound I heard was the smash of glass, the tonic bottles under the tires.

Passing the car door, which was still gaping open, I saw someone inside, a boy, huddled in the seat, his head down, his knees up. I was glad I could not see his face. Then I was off.

Chicky kicked the car repeatedly, making it shake, and ran, flinging his feet forward, and crashed into the bushes by the pond. He was right behind me, running hard, feeling the same panic that frightened me, the going-nowhere running of a bad dream, skidding on the soil that was cool and moist from the end of day, like running on fudge. We were racing in darkness, but after all the stakeout time we knew where we were going, and when we got to the lookout boulder on the bluff I knew we were safe, because I saw the car's headlights switch on, blazing against the green leaves.

“He’s taking off.”

Chicky said, “Did you see me kick the freakin’ car? I didn’t even give a shit!”

The blue Studebaker was still stationary, its lights dimming each time the engine turned over.

A noise behind us startled us, but before we could react, Walter flopped down and said, “I wrecked his window!”

“Lookit,” Chicky said.

The car grunted and roared, the gearshift grinding, the engine strained against the rope I had tied — strained hard, making no progress, trying to reverse. When the rope snapped with a loud twang I expected to see the car shoot backward, but it had not gone ten feet before the engine coughed and died. Chicky was laughing. The engine groaned to life again — Chicky said, “Hubba-hubba, ding-ding”—and then gasped and died again. But seconds later it was stammering, the intervals shorter and shorter, the engine noise briefer, until at last there was only silence.

“Car’s freakin’ totaled,” Chicky said.

And gloating, combing his hair, Chicky explained: my rope had made the engine rev, but he had jammed a potato into the tailpipe, to delay Father Staley in case the rope broke. He had put a pound of sugar into the gas tank, and that was now in the fuel line, gumming up the pistons. The engine was destroyed, the car was a wreck. Father Staley was stranded in the woods with whomever he had brought there.

After we left the darkness of the woods, there was one last thing, and it was I who raised it. I said, “What about confession?”

Chicky said, “Was that a sin?”

“We were helping Walter,” I said.

“Maybe it’s a sin if you’re helping a Protestant,” Chicky said.

“Not a mortal sin,” I said.

“What’s the difference?” Walter asked.

“If it’s a mortal sin, you go to Hell.”

We detoured past St. Ray’s to go to confession, Walter watching our guns in the shadows beside the church, near the statue of Saint Raphael with his wings and his halo. I confessed seeing the pictures of the naked women, and fighting, and having impure thoughts: venial sins.

The next day, Easter, we performed our Easter duty, sitting at Mass, Walter the unbeliever between us in the pew, not knowing when to kneel or pray — skinny, blotchy-faced with embarrassment when he stood up, surveying the priests in their starched white lace-trimmed smocks, and whispering, “Where’s Scaly?”

Scaly was not on the altar. The pastor’s sermon that day was about the meaning of Easter, Christ slipping out of his tomb, being reborn, pure souls. That was true for me; the holy day reflected exactly how I felt, and made me happy. The smell of the church was the smell of new clothes. When the singing started I shared the Sing to the Lord hymnbook with Walter, who mumbled while I sang loudly,

Christ is risen from the dead,

Alleluia, alleluia!

Risen as he truly said,

Alleluia, alleluia!

Father Staley had vanished. All the pastor said was “Reverend Staley has been transferred to a new parish.” People said they missed him. At Scouts, Arthur Mutch talked about Father Staley’s contribution to the troop. His hard work. “He was a vet.” But Mutch wasn’t happy. The blue Studebaker we destroyed was his: Scaly had borrowed it. The thing was a writeoff.

“Banana man,” Chicky said. That night he said he was quitting the Scouts.

No one knew what happened to Father Staley, and we never found out who the boy was — maybe a Protestant, like Walter; a secret sin. That was also the mystery of the woods. We had discovered that, going there as Scouts. The woods might be dangerous but the woods were free, the trees had hidden us, and had changed me, turned us into Indians, made us friends, so we couldn’t be Scouts anymore, because of Walter. When I quit the Scouts, my mother said, “You’ll have to get a part-time job, then,” and I thought: Great, now I’ll be able to buy a better gun.

We had made Staley disappear. We had made ourselves disappear. No one knew us, what we had done, what we could do, how close we had come to killing a man. I was glad — it meant I was alone, I was safe, now no one would ever know me.