The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace by Martin Moran Page A

with any of the other boys. It seemed not. It seemed to me that I was the only one. Most of the kids appeared to be troubled cases. The depressed and the delinquent. Kids he’d rounded up, kids he meant to help—a boy from Michigan whose dad hated him, two brothers from Nebraska whose parents were splitting. A loner from Longmont.
    When summer was over and winter came, it wasn’t just off to the ranch that we sneaked. There was an apartment in Boulder belonging to someone I never saw; there was a garage in Arvada, a little log cabin in the woods outside Nederland. An old lady owned it, he told me. Someone among the many Bob had charmed, someone I’d never meet.
    I remember waking there once in a big feather bed, a huge comforter covering us, the cabin surrounded by blinding sunlight reflected off two feet of fresh snow. I had braces on my teeth by then, and little patches of hair on my body. Bob was still asleep. I slipped off my headgear and set it on the nightstand. (The orthodontist and my mother had told me I must wear it religiously or I’d always be bucktoothed and no one would take me seriously when I grew up. So at night, after our sex, I’d slide it into my mouth and strap it around my head before going to sleep.)
    I hopped naked out of the warm bed to build a fire in the wood-stove. It was freezing. Bob woke and threw on a pair of sweatpants. We began arguing about how best to place the kindling and the newspaper. “I learned this in Scouts,” I told him. “Wrap the paper tight, stack the kindling loosely.” He disagreed—paper loose, he said, kindling packed tight. Suddenly our hands were tangled inside the soot-covered stove, each of us struggling to get his way. I remember how ridiculous it seemed, how odd it felt, to be bickering, first thing in the morning. Like an old married couple. Or like two little kids. And Bob stood there, three feet taller, twenty years older, pouting like a child because I told him he was stupid and angry because I got my way. In the quiet tension of that morning, as the fire warmed the cabin and he cooked our breakfast, I remember him asking me, “Why do you always just lay there, like a fish?”
    “What do you mean?” (I knew and didn’t know what he was referring to and instantly felt embarrassed.)
    “Most of the time you just lay there, like you’re not interested. Except that I know you are.”
    I just shrugged my shoulders and ate the rest of my oatmeal. He let it drop. I thought of it often, slowly figuring out that what he was telling me was that he was frustrated with our sex, that I wasn’t a good lover.
    In fact, I did lie there like a fish. I needed to feel that what was going on, no matter how much pleasure I found in it, was being done
to
me. I meant to hide, hold back, the want. I didn’t want to let him, or myself, know that I owned any part, any desire, when it came to sex. He—it—was all happening
to me
. I had to hang on to that thought. For survival.

    Sometimes, many weeks, even a couple of months, went by without hearing from him, and I’d think,
Good
. Good, he’s forgotten, and so have I, and it won’t happen again. I won’t let it. But a letter would arrive or, more often, a phone call announcing a project, offering an invitation, and I’d be ready and wanting. “I’ve bought some land of my own in Sunshine Canyon,” he said one day on the phone. “I’m going to build a house on it. Why don’t you come this weekend and help me get started.”
    “All right.”
    His whiskers were thick, almost a beard. It had been long since I’d seen him, two months, maybe. I remember the ache that night, sitting next to him in the truck. The pure want, the physical feeling of missing him. Of missing the pleasure of touch. Of having been shot up with him and now, most definitely, hooked.
    We stopped at the garage in Arvada on the way to Boulder. It was an auto-repair shop of some sort. It was after hours and no one was there. Bob had a key, said