20

APRIL 4, 2002. We have just stepped outside the Veterans Hospital. I’ve finally clicked on the tape recorder; I feel it buzzing, proof in my pocket that this whole thing is happening. There’s not a cloud in the sky and we move to the shade of a palm tree—me on a bench, Bob in his wheelchair. I am so aware of the face-off, of all my grown-up effort, my thousands in therapy, for this: to be frank. As I am about to speak, a little brown sparrow arrives, flutters close to Bob’s head, and disappears. Then he says,

“I must have read your letter a dozen times to try and see . . .”

“What I wanted?”

He nods, then looks down at his hands clasped tightly in his lap. “To try and see your state of mind, I guess. I fix up old cars for a living. Can’t work much anymore.” He gestures toward the bandage on his partly amputated foot. “Lost my lease.” His right hand becomes a fist now, which he’s squeezing around his left index finger. It makes me think of a little boy who’s got to pee bad. He looks up and says, “I mean, if you’re thinking of suing me, I don’t have anything.”

His lips lift with a hint of a grin, his eyes saying: your move, and I wonder if he’s joking. But then I think, no, he’s worried. It’s all over the papers, isn’t it? Younger men like me, nailing older ones like him, seeking answers, damages.

“Look, I’m not here for that,” I tell him.

He unclasps his hands. “It was my fault,” he says, grabbing the arms of his wheelchair. “When you called me all those years ago, I didn’t have words. Mentally . . . I still don’t have the words . . . mentally it’s like I was the same age as you. But, I have to take it on my shoulders.”

This strikes me as a sentence from his psychiatrist.

“It was your fault. You were the adult and I was a child and I did not have consent to give.” I feel a sudden heat beneath my sternum, like the breath of the twelve-year-old I’m here to represent, as if he’s in there saying: Yeah, that’s good. Say that, get me off the hook, please. “I . . . I wanted to help you. You were such a gentle soul,” Bob says.

“Soul?” I say. “My soul? You went for me the very first chance you had. Didn’t even wait for a second date.” He seems (chooses?) not to hear this remark.

“Mentally you were way ahead of the other boys. You were special.”

“Now that I hate. What does that mean, special? How many specials can you have, Bob?”

He holds up a hand and says, “There were others, I admit. But not like you. You were so curious about things but you were afraid and . . .”

“Afraid? What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, “you were kind of wimpy.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t say that to me!”

“No, I mean you were shy and I wanted to teach you about the land and animals and help you gain confidence. And you did.”

I want to disown it but it flashes through me that with this guy: I rafted a river, I watched a calf being born, cleared a field, conquered a glacier, learned a Hereford from a Holstein, a spruce from a cedar.

“I watched you grow to be a young man.”

“Yeah, you did, didn’t you.”

“There were lots of levels to what we shared,” he says, dropping his head again.

The brown sparrow is back, circling the crown of Bob’s head as if tracing a halo. As if it might land. Bob is slumping there, his silver head shimmering in the California sun, completely unaware, it seems, of the bird, and I wonder, in some Catholic way, if the creature bears a message from On High. Be gentle, the fluttering spirit seems to say, I’ve come to bless him to whom you speak. Then I tell myself: Marty, stop it. The bird’s scoping for food, or nesting material.

“Who was it that sent you to prison? A camper?”

He nods. “Yeah, the boy’s family . . . and the archdiocese. They hounded me. It got the attention off the priests who’d been fooling around at St. Malo. I was a scapegoat.”

I have the sense that he’s lying or exaggerating and I ask, “I heard you got ten years, Canyon City? Is that true?”

He shrugs and gives a little nod.

“Must have been awful.”

“You can’t imagine. It made my eighteen months in Nam look like a walk in the park.”

Just then, a black guy sits down on the bench next to me, same hospital uniform as Bob, smoking a cigarette. Bob lets out a rude growl, says, “Let’s go,” and wheels himself down to the shade at the next bench, where he launches into a monologue about the good parent he’s tried to be to his daughter who’s all grown up and doing great. He speaks then of Karen, their breakup and troubles. After a time I try to interrupt, to get back to the “us” of this but, “Just let me finish,” he says, raising his hand sharply and somehow this, more than anything else, lets me know I really don’t like the guy. My candy-striper quotient evaporates and I say,

“Hey, I had sex with both of you . . . several times. Remember? You, me, and Karen. One morning there was blood in the bed. I thought something terrible had happened until you explained it was her period.”

This shuts him up.

Then he says, “It was an awkward attempt, I guess, at helping you be more, you know . . . a man. I knew you were worried about . . .”

“Being gay?”

He nods.

“You know, Bob, you used to tell me that homosexuals were people without love. Interesting thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“Have you ever figured you might be gay?”

He brings his hands to his face and says, “I’ve had to climb so many walls in this life, I suppose there are some things I never could really look at.”

“Imagine, Bob, what our friendship might have been if . . .”

“If what?”

“If you hadn’t crossed the line. Do you know what it does? Did? The utter chaos when you walk back into Mass, or your sixth-grade classroom, and you’re standing there in your muddy boots, listening to your teacher, thinking, Wow, this thing’s happened. I’m gonna be a man. But it’s happened all wrong, I’m broken, broke the rules, I can’t belong here. And God only knows where you turn because even the mountains and the statues look at you differently and because no one speaks of such things in our Catholic world with all our secrets and our terror of the body. And crazily enough, Bob, then the only place to find five minutes of relief, five seconds of what felt like forgiveness, was back in your arms, again and again.” He looks away and I tell him, “You know, I grew up to be insanely sexually compulsive. I mean, back alleys, bathhouses, hurtful, crazy secrets from my family, my lover, you name it. And it has a lot to do, I think, with all that happened between us. I mean, Bob, I was twelve.”

He shakes his head and looks down at his tangled fingers, and I wonder if I could ever convey to him how that was too young to get shot up with desire. And suddenly I’m thinking of the picture of the boy I saw on page twenty-eight of Time magazine, when I was standing with my dad in the checkout line a few days earlier in Vegas. The photo of the boy who didn’t make it. And I want to ask Bob what he thinks of that. And I’m wondering if he remembers the photograph he took of a fine-boned boy standing in a kayak near the edge of a pond, where we went, just the two of us, three weekends after it first happened. I wonder if he remembers how small I was, holding up an oar, wearing the life jacket he gave me lest I drown.

And all at once, I just want to make clear to this man in the wheelchair how much he’s haunted me, of the terror that lives in me still of repeating, in some way, his trespass. I wonder if I could describe for him how there isn’t a time I don’t squeeze with crazy joy and affection my gorgeous eleven-year-old nephew and think to myself: Oh, God, careful, careful now. I want him to know how I know this child is sacred, and to respect this child, a moral imperative. A certainty. This I know in my body, in this world, now: That here is the Face of God. But I don’t have the words or the will to say any of this to the wounded vet sitting at my side, and all that finally comes out is,

“You know, Bob, I almost didn’t make it.”

He glances at me, then off to the hospital roofs. “I guess,” he says, “on the one hand I wanted to build you up, but on the other, I was tearing you down.”

“OK,” I say. It’s funny but I’m hearing Sister Agatha’s words from way back when. About the angel and the devil, about the tangle inside. And I am looking at this man, this wreck of a man, I’m looking at his face and I can see it. I can see that some part of him means, meant, to be good. And at a time I was lost—my father drinking, my mom gearing for divorce—in he clomped and, in some way his love, and my love for him, helped me. Stranger things have happened in these Disturbed Regions.

“I’m sorry you went through all of this,” he says. And I don’t know if sorry was the sound I was after, but suddenly it’s all enough and I stand to go.

“Will you be here in the hospital long?” I ask.

“Another month, at least. I’d sure like to hear from you.”

“Oh, well, you’ve got my info, right?” It comes out really cold like a: “We’ll do lunch,” because underneath my thought is, You’ve had enough of me for this lifetime.

He backs up his wheelchair a foot or two. “I hope,” he says, looking down at the grass, “I hope you don’t hate me.”

“Bob,” I say, and my words just spill, “whatever else there might have been, there was kindness too. You were kind and I don’t hate you.”

He hunches forward as if hit in the gut and takes the wheels of his chair. “Once,” he says, “we were shopping, you were riding in the cart and you grabbed a box of cereal off the shelf and said: ‘Let’s get this, Dad.’ ” He looks up at me. “Do you remember that?” I say nothing, thinking, God, that cannot be true, even as an image floats through my mind—a Friday night, a fluorescent aisle. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“No.”

“Maybe it was just a slip that you said Dad, but I nearly fell through the floor. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.”

And my hand moves to his shoulder—whoosh—just like that. And I squeeze the loose flesh. God, there it is, I think, touch. Anybody watching from the windows of the hospital might think the two of us a sweet sight.

He extends his hand to shake and we do, like two gentlemen.

“Sometimes I wonder who I might be if I’d never met you.”

“I can understand that,” he says, his face going hard.

I pull away and move down the sunny sidewalk toward the stairs that lead to the parking lot. I can feel his eyes on me. I think he’s waiting for me to turn, to give some kind of sign. When I reach the door of my rent-a-car I spin around and, sure enough, he’s positioning his wheelchair right at the edge of the steps where he can watch me go. He’s silhouetted against the white brick and I am just amazed that he’s there. That he gave me this stab at the past. And, without permission, my hand flies into the air and waves, jauntily. Ever the boy from Christ the King. And when Bob raises his arm to wave back I’m filled with the strangest, strongest feeling that this very goodbye was contained in the first moment I ever laid eyes on him.

I turn away and I get into the car thinking, That’s it. I came, I met him, I did it. I was frank. This will put an end to all of it. Right? That’s why I’ve come. But the grip of it, of him, it’s still there. I start the car and I back away wondering what in the world you have to do to get free of it. In another thirty years, I’ll be seventy, he’ll be dead. Enough.

And a thought came to me. Something Sister Christine said all those years ago. That with the really rough things it would always come down to grace. A gift from the beyond that moves us toward our own salvation. And as I crawled out into the thick Los Angeles traffic, what I kept hearing in my head was this prayer, a plea repeating: OK, grace, please, to let it go, let him be, for heaven’s sakes. Let him rest. I mean Bob, of course. But then, I realize I’m really talking about someone else. The twelve-year-old. The sweet kid caught in a photo, still talking his way out. And I’m not sure how in the world to let him rest. Not yet, anyway.