Originally published in Open Wide Magazine.

“Sing somethin’ beautiful,” said Bents. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted up. His throat kept moving in waves, as though he were drinking something straight from the ceiling. He looked a bit like a hamster at its drink bottle. 

He buzzed a chord on his acoustic and we all jumped in with him on the chorus for Awesome God, except we kept our eyes open. 

Youth group on summer Sunday nights was a tradition in my family. All five of us good little boys — I was smack dab in the middle — looked forward to that day we could stride in the double glass doors with the rest of the high schoolers. High schoolers sometimes went to Dairy Queen; high schoolers sometimes talked about sex. It was a rite of passage for my brothers and me, akin to getting our first pocketknife at age seven, or helping dad in the garden at age ten.
So far, I wasn’t too impressed. It was fun and all, and I had the answers to all the hard questions, having grown up in a church in which the answers never change. 

We guys in the group were all at that certain age and the oscillating pitches of our voices soon tired Bents of the singing; the girls just couldn’t hold a tune if their salvation depended on it. Putting down his guitar, Bents had us count off into groups of three. I was the kid who, when it came to his turn to sound off, held up the correct number of fingers and said, Two million, at which nobody laughed. Gravol and Carne were the other Two Millioners. Gravol had just started coming a couple weeks before. He was boisterous and he had big ears. The girls all loved him. 

I had known Carne since the tragedy of arson at our pre-school brought us together in the east side park; our parents muttered and turned up their noses at the sight of the school’s sharp ribs while we mixed ash and dirt and water and smeared it on our faces. I may have eaten some. 

I had always had a crush on Carne, but never acted on it. I used to get in these epic debates with myself, rationalizing my affection for this girl with whom I sang in the children’s choir, played in the Little League, and represented Grand Fenwick in the seventh grade Nation Fair. The debates would go like this: 

“Carne sure is cute.” 

“I’ll give you that one. She is cute. But is she beautiful?” 

“Define beauty.” 

“Beauty is that which endures.” 

“She’s awfully cute.” 

“Yes, but does she have the staying power of, say, Pamela Anderson?” 

I often lost against myself. I don’t think Carne knew I was so fixated on her. She never let on, anyway; not even when she started leaving youth group in the company of Jenkins, the Dude With No First Name. He may not have had a first name, but he sure had first bragging rights for just about anything that mattered. He was the first in his grade to get his license, the first to go all the way with a girl, the first to ace the final in auto, and the first to run down the suicide hill.

The suicide hill was not a clever name given to a bit of local geography, as make out point or lover’s leap were; it was a clever name given to an historic bit of natural landscaping that was stained with cultural significance, the blood of the ancients, and the sweat of rodeo promoters. It was a near vertical drop that went from some patient lady’s back yard to the shallow river two hundred feet below. The natives used to send their young men down it, mounted on sure-footed horses, as a rite of manhood; at least, that’s what they told us in third grade, and fourth, and at a big assembly in seventh. Now the natives had to fight against PETA for the right to run their burliest men down it, mounted on sure-footed steeds, as a rite of closure for the yearly stampede. It wasn’t that big a deal, Jenkins bragged after he had run it on his own two legs. You just pick your feet up, and when you set them down, you’re almost done.

“What are we playing?” I asked Bents.

He came around to each group with a faint grin and a bag of water balloons. Carne whined, and said she didn’t want to get wet. Bents put into her hand a single deflated pink balloon and then moved on to the next group.

“Extra long Bible study tonight, Bents?” I asked. 

When every group had a balloon, Bents cleared his throat.

“So, we’ve got the Creation festival coming up in a few weeks. Those of you who came to church this morning heard pastor Lyle mention that we’ve already gone into the red on our budget this year. So we’re going to have an auction.”

“Five bucks for the blue one,” Gravol said, pointing at another group’s balloon.

“Please be quiet, Gravol. The church is receiving donations from a number of places, but I thought it would be good if we could help out, you know, since we’ll be benefiting from the proceeds. So we’re going to play a game called Trade It Up. You’ll each go out into the town with your single water balloon and the way it works is this: you stop at a house.” He pantomimed. “You knock. You ask the nice lady or man if they have something just a tiny bit more valuable that they would be willing to trade you for your water balloon. If they don’t, then be polite and move on. But if they do give you something — like, say, a nice pen, for instance — then you take that and move on to another house and do it again. The goal is to get what you think is the most valuable thing.”

“That’s lame,” said some guy from the blue balloon group. “Who would trade anything for a water balloon in the first place?”

“You might be surprised what people are willing to get rid of,” said Bents. He sat down on the floor, wrapping his arm around the neck of his guitar as though it were his wife. He stroked its strings. “Now I’ll stay here and keep the doors unlocked. Maybe I’ll go get some donuts or something. Does every team have a watch? We meet back here at nine-thirty. Shoo.”

Some groups had cars, and enthusiasm, and piled in with whoops and hollers. Gravol, Carne, and I slid our easy hands into our pockets and strolled down the street. It was a warm evening. I thought about Bents strumming lightly on his guitar and it seemed like the perfect soundtrack. 

“Where should we go first?” asked Carne. Gravol shrugged and I copied him.

“The Hilarys live three blocks down or so,” I said. “They gave me a hundred bucks for graduating the eighth grade.”

“Worth a shot,” said Carne. We ambled along in our flip-flops, catching bits of gravel on our toes and launching them ahead like bullets.

“You guys doing anything for the fourth this year?” I asked as we segued onto the sidewalk.

“There’s a party at the lake,” said Carne. “Jenkins asked me to go with him.”

“You going?”

“Probably.”

“What about you, Gravol?”

He acted as though he were about to sneeze, but caught it right before he did. “I haven’t decided yet. My family usually does something.”

“Quiet evening at home?” I asked.

“I have a big family.”

Carne and Gravol were on either side of me. I tried to slow down my pace, to fall in behind them — I always feel more comfortable in the back — but they slowed down with me. We still had a couple of blocks to go.

“Last year,” I said. “I went to some guy’s party.”

“You?” said Carne with a giggle.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That was when I was hanging out with Rusty.” Rusty’s name had faded out of use, recently. He had been caught smoking pot before school. He dropped out of the group and, eventually, wasted away to a sliver and blew away to Los Angeles with his mom. He and I had hung out for a year, throwing bags of sugar off of our town’s only overpass and rolling tires down cliffs into the lake, which didn’t seem too much of a sin to me, since I was one of the honor students who had been volunteered to keep the shore clean.

The three of us were walking lockstep. The padding of our feet on the oiled pavement sounded to me like the rhythm of a drum circle. I always fancied myself a storyteller, or a poet. I timed my first words so that the troches took their beat from us, but after that Carne fell out of sync and I got lost and plowed on.

“Rusty brought along a bottle full of gasoline, and another full of black powder. We waited until dark and then snuck into the alfalfa field of the guy’s neighbor. Ripped up a bunch of the junk. Then Rusty dug a little hole to put the bomb in. Wanted a bigger blast radius, or something. Like when you cup your fist around a firecracker instead of leaving your palm open.”

“I’ve never done that,” said Gravol.

“Well it hurts less if you leave it open. Then he ran a couple leads back across the field and plugged them into the car battery. Most of the other guys were drunk and weren’t expecting it. The thing was dim; I barely saw the explosion, but man, I felt it. Like an artificial chest compression. That was something else. I turned and ran as soon as it happened, because I was scared the farmer was going to come find us. Halfway to the car, I turned, and saw Rusty staring at me like I let him down. I was probably wearing some dumb outfit or something. He liked to tell me to be mature, to grow up. I think that’s why he hung out with me. He walked to the car in the time it took between the farmer’s lights coming on and his door opening. Then we drove off and read about it in the paper on Wednesday.”

“Grow up, Bird,” Gravol said. I laughed with him.

“I felt like praying for those poor drunk people. Couldn’t go to sleep that night until I did, actually.”

“I never heard about it,” said Carne, folding her arms across her breast as though cold. I was hot from my words, about ready to take my shirt off when a cool breeze tickled the hair on my arms.

“I would have told you,” I said, bumping into her shoulder with mine. “But you lost my phone number.”

The Hilarys had a stone footpath that wound across their lot-size lawn. We tramped straight for the door, our rhythm going all to pot. At the porch, I reached for the bell, but Gravol got there first. 

Mister Hilary answered, doubled over and panting. 

“Uh. You okay, mister Hilary?” asked Carne. He looked up and grinned. He smelled like sweat in an airtight room. 

“Just fine. What can I do for you kids?”

“Bents has got us on this game,” I said. “We’re trying to upset the balance of the economy. We want to trade you this for something a bit more valuable.”

Gravol held up the balloon. He had rolled most of the rubber around its small opening. It looked like a miniature condom.

“It’s a balloon,” said Gravol. Mister Hilary laughed, or he might have just been breathing heavily. He invited us in and offered us something to drink. Carne and I declined, but Gravol took a proffered soda. Something more valuable, mister Hilary muttered, digging through a hall closet.

He raised his voice. “Sorry things are kind of a mess. Hillary is away for a bit, which means I get to be lazy with the house work.”

“I thought she sounded real nice this morning,” said Carne. Missus Hilary was the choir’s leading soloist and, going by weight, three-quarters of the soprano section.

“Yeah, thanks,” said mister Hilary. “Ah. Here we go.” He gave us a tennis ball, took the balloon, shook his head, and grinned us right out the door.

We went to the next couple of houses on the block. Gravol kept smiling and laughing to himself as though remembering a joke only he had thought was funny. We traded the tennis ball for a pound bag of candy, and the candy for an old copy of Stratego. It was missing a couple of the red pieces.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” said Carne. “Let’s go to doctor Bar’s.”

I shrugged into a nod and turned down a block toward the comparatively rich side of town. 

“Bargain hunting?” said Gravol, now a few steps behind me. Carne was at my left, her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.

“Shut up,” she said. Then, to me, “You weren’t in church this morning.”

“I slept in,” I said. I had stayed up way too late the night before. I’d already outed my sin of incendiaries, though, so I decided she didn’t need to hear about how I’d discovered a message board on the net that was full of stolen passwords to members-only porn sites. It makes it hard to sleep, the thought of getting so much for free. And I wasn’t about to mention it to Gravol. For all I knew, the guy would cop the best ones right out from under me.

Carne pulled in the first half of a sigh.

“What is it?” I said.

“Can I tell you something, if you promise to keep it private?”

At the end, she would probably hug me. “Sure. It’s story time. Why not.”

“I can’t tell Bents or Clara. Last week, I—” She kept the sound of the letter coming, a single long note, while behind it her mind worked to produce an entire melody. “I was taking a shower after practice,” she went on. “Mom and dad weren’t home, yet, and I was just going to watch TV until I fell asleep. I didn’t lock the door when I got home. And when I got out of the shower— my— my boyfriend was there.”

“Jenkins?” I asked.

“God, no. I broke up with him a month ago. But he, my boyfriend, you wouldn’t know him, he brought me some flowers.”

“That was nice of him.”

“Well, parts of flowers at least. It was sweet, yeah. Yeah, it was.” I glanced sideways. She was opening and closing her mouth. I thought she might be fumbling for a metaphor. She finally settled on:

“It was like getting struck by lightning. You know what I mean?”

“An explosion.”

“Yeah, yeah that’s kind of how it was. So I turned on the TV, kinda low. He gave me the flowers. And there were soap operas on. I left it on. And he tried— well, he tried hard. And it’s summer, you know. You know how it gets hot in your house with the windows open all day and the sweat is practically telling you it wants to evaporate. Even after the shower, it was just all— I don’t know. Urgent, I guess. And when you’re naked— don’t look at me like that. I know you like getting naked. You and the guys went skinny dipping on the hike last year.”

“That wasn’t me,” I said. “I was the one that screamed and ran, remember? Anyways. Go on.”

“I’ve heard this one before,” said Gravol. Carne shot him an evil look over her shoulder.

“It was nice, being open in the air. It was warm enough to be a layer of clothes; it wasn’t bad at all. To move and not feel your clothes pulling against you.” She trailed off, then, and pulled her hands out of her pockets. She crossed them over her chest, gripping each shoulder with its opposite fist. 

“Keep going,” I stammered. Her mouth fell open and wide at the corners; it took a few seconds for the laugh to come.

“You little sicko,” she said, and punched me in the kidney. Then she tilted her head as if listening to a particularly good poem, or the school fight song. “It was nice. It’s summer, you know.”

“Yeah. Um. Are you going to get pregnant?”

Gravol snorted. “No,” he said.

“Shut up,” said Carne. “I’m not scared,” she told me, which is funny, because she ended up a bug hunter. I’ll get to that later. “But I broke up with him,” she went on. “He didn’t call.”

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” said Gravol, equidistant from Carne and me, now. We were a triangle crossing the quiet street. Doctor Bar had a house built like a geodesic dome, assembled from larger triangles, the skeleton on the outside. We stopped at the end of his driveway.

“Is that the door?”

“No. I think that is.”

We took a gamble and knocked. Maxine, the doctor’s wife, answered.

“Hi there, kids. What’s up?” We explained the game to her. “Wait here,” she said, and closed the door behind her. Gravol leaned against the wall and rolled his shoulders.

“She’s kinda hot,” he said.

I laughed. “That cinches it. We’re all going to hell.” We had only painted pictures of some lake of fire to imagine. And I’m sure we all saw ourselves dancing on the beach, listening to something stupid and infectious on the radio, telling ghost stories and roasting wieners over the liquid heat. Hell was no threat; hell was nothing more than pigment on canvas, and not even that in the brain. Even we were more.

“Here you go,” said Maxine. “We’ve had this thing around for years.” She was struggling not to bend over with the weight of a dinosaur computer. I jumped forward to take it from her.

“Have any games on it?” asked Gravol. Maxine laughed and dusted her hands against each other. 

“I’m not sure. It was my husband’s, but I haven’t seen him use it for years.”

“It’s just a word processor,” I said, trying to fit its bulk under my arm and nearly dropping it. 

“Here,” said Carne, offering Maxine the battered copy of Stratego.

“Oh, no thanks, honey. I think we’ve already got that one in one of the kids’ rooms.”

We thanked her and left.

“Need any help?” Gravol asked me at the end of the driveway. 

“Sure.” We adjusted the machine between us, each grabbing a couple corners. My hands were starting to sweat. 

“This has got to be worth a couple hundred dollars, right?” said Carne. “We ought to go back.”

“I sure as hell don’t want to lug this thing around longer than I have to,” I said. “But it’s only worth about fifteen, my friend.”

“We could get my car,” offered Gravol. “I only live a couple blocks from the church.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “What’s a couple blocks, anyway. Besides, we haven’t heard your story yet, Grav.” My theory is that summer pollen lames me up a bit more than normal. I’ve got bags of evidence. Think back on what you have heard; I guarantee you that the bits that drip with gum-thick fondness and idealism were written at evening, with the window open and the smell of cut grass in my hair.

“Don’t call me that,” said Gravol. “That’s what my mom used to call me.”

“She’s dead?” Tact decreases as lameness increases.

“No, asshole. She’s in Seattle.”

I felt a sick thrill at the forbidden insult rush my ribcage. I grinned.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, loosening his grip on the word processor and sticking me with the extra weight. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t see much of her, anyway. An arm here, a leg there.”

“You close to your dad?” I asked.

“Now, that’s the interesting answer.” We turned a corner. Carne was in the lead, hands in her back pockets again. I watched her legs move, more than a little mesmerized. “Not really close to him. But he taught me a lot of stuff.”

“What does he do?”

“Drink beer. Oh, and he’s a mechanic.”

“How do you, how you say, drink beer?” It was a strain and Gravol’s smile looked about as tired as my sense of humor felt.

“I do a lot of stuff to get happy. It’s called hedonism,” he said.

“Learn something new every day,” I said.

“I haven’t really tried drugs, because they’re so damn expensive, but I’ll go for pretty much everything else. Food, girls, being on stage— it all works the first time, and then a little less the second, and even less the third time, but by that time it’s a habit and it keeps going on, even though I stopped being happy a long time ago. But there is one thing that works.”

“Lift up a bit on your end,” I said. “What’s that?” I added.

“When I was twelve,” he said, “my dad taught me how to change the oil in his car. An old Honda. I’ve always loved how he taught me. He slid me under the car on a scrap of cardboard. I was skinny enough to fit clear under without putting the thing up on ramps. Then he told me to look for a bolt. I found quite a few, so I asked him which one I was supposed to twist, and which way I was supposed to twist it. He told me to look for the only one that could hold oil in. Use my freaking head. So I spotted the one at the base of the oil tank, like it would have been any of the other ones. I was a pretty stupid kid,” he confided.

“Glad to see you’ve grown out of it,” Carne tossed over her shoulder.

Gravol went on. “It was great. Dad had just run the car around the block, testing the lug nuts or something. He gave me the ratchet wrench and I went to town. Felt like fifteen minutes unscrewing that thing. Dad kept grumbling at me to go faster. The bolt started turning loosely in its well, but it wouldn’t come out. I told dad; he said the threads were probably stripped. A tiny trickle of oil was licking around the body of the bolt; most of it was dripping onto my wrist, and from there into the pan. It smelled kinda good. Solid and real and heavy, like dirt. Dad told me to get rid of the wrench. Just grab the bolt in both hands and pull on it while twisting, try and get the threads seated again. My fingers were slippery. My finger nails were too long; when I pulled, they hurt.

“Took another five minutes of me pulling until I felt resistance and then twisting. Then, suddenly, the thing popped out like a bottle rocket and there was oil gushing everywhere. Stupid kid me had both his hands right under the stream— but I didn’t move them. I didn’t even say, I got it, for a few seconds. The oil was warm and thick; it felt like blood pumping over my hands. I flexed my fingers in it and played with the splash patterns in the steaming pan.

“That’s the car I got when I turned sixteen. Probably should get that bolt replaced, but I kept pulling it out the same way, and pounding it in with a rubber mallet when I was done.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Carne. We were at the church’s front doors. None of the other groups had come back, yet. We trooped inside and plopped the word processor down on the foyer floor. Gravol went to the bathroom to wash his hands; I poked through the kitchen for anything other than water to drink. Found a two liter of 7-up. I brought it and three glasses out. 

Bents was sitting on the floor next to Carne.

“How’d you guys do?” he asked.

“All right,” I said. Then, holding up the bottle, “Can we drink this?”

“Yup.”

I poured three glasses. Gravol came over, drying his hands on his pants. He sat down as far away from Carne as he could and still be one corner of a recognizable shape and took a glass from me. Carne sipped hers, staring out the glass doors at the sky brushing down from light blue to dark.

One by one, the other groups barged in, singing and holding their prizes aloft. When the pile of booty was finished, we had the word processor, a mountain bike, a box of cigars, our old copy of Stratego, and a giant inflatable stegosaurus. 

“All right,” said Bents, swigging the last of the soda straight from the bottle. “Let’s total up the values. I’ll take the winning team out for ice cream.”

“Hang on a sec,” said Gravol. He bounded up and out the door. We argued about whether smoking was a sin until he pulled up in front of the doors in an old gray Honda. It sputtered when he turned it off.

“One last trade, Bents,” he said, yanking open both of the double doors as though he were a movie star arriving on the scene at the crescendo in the sound track. “I’ll take that computer; you can sell off my car.”

“Are you sure, Gravol?”

“Come on. It’s only worth a couple hundred dollars, now. I’m happy to. I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at writing,” he said. “I’ll need some help carrying that beast home, though.” I volunteered.

After ice cream that night, I never really spoke to Gravol again. He was in a class with me, sophomore year, and we had to do a presentation together, but he acted as though he didn’t remember ever stringing two original words together with me, much less having told me his story.

I never got together with Carne, though I did kiss her once. We were both drunk at a post-Prom party, and she even let me cop a feel. Her breasts were saggy; that was a couple years after she had the baby. She had gotten pregnant after all, and I never knew who the father was, but I’ve never been a smart kid.

After graduation, I didn’t hear a thing about her, until I got a twice-forwarded message from my mom. It was originally from Carne’s mom, a plea for prayers for her daughter’s peace as she was on her last few days of fighting against AIDS. One night, soon after I read that, I walked home smelling like whiskey and thought I would call her up. I got her number from my mother, whose hobby it is to keep in touch with people.

Carne sounded as weak as I expected.

“Hey, Bird,” she said. “It’s been a while.” And we chatted. My focus was nowhere, and she sounded medicated, so I doubt the conversation would have made much sense to anyone listening in. She told me about how she started hunting bugs in college, and now I can’t get the image out of my head of her running across a meadow with a butterfly net held like a club in both fists. She explained that she had learned from her gay friends that there was a whole subculture devoted to sleeping with people who were infected with STDs. She paid good money to fuck three men who were HIV positive. The first two left her with nothing more than sore legs in the morning. The third one had gotten her infected.

“Why in God’s lengthy name would you do that?” I think I screamed it at her, but she was already giving me the answer, so she probably didn’t notice.

“I’m not scared. I wasn’t scared anymore. I could do anything I wanted, and I’d never have to worry that I’d get more than I was ready for.”

“Aren’t you scared of dying?”

“Not while my redeemer liveth,” she said, and hummed. “I’d fuck you so hard if you were here right now.” I hung up on her. She died a week later.

Gravol didn’t even make it that long. He committed suicide at the end of senior year. The memorial service was held at the church. We raised money for his dad by raffling off tickets to swing a sledgehammer at the old Honda, which had served the youth group well for a couple of years, though we always got headaches when we rode in it.