Kilburg lay curled on the concrete as the three boys, whooping and high-fiving, made off with his textbooks. I watched him struggle to sit up, then drag himself over to the leg. As though he had sensed my presence, he looked up the avenue a few times, directly at the Impala, or so it seemed, squinting as he held his groin. Every part of me wanted to help him as I should have sooner, but if I revealed myself now he would know I had been watching all along. And so I remained behind the Impala, hidden and ashamed, as Kilburg wiped the sleeve clean with the palm of his hand, reattached the leg, and limped off toward home.
He never did show up at school, and when I called his house in the afternoon there was no answer. That night I found him at the fort. He was sitting outside, rubbing his stump in his usual way, the prosthetic leg resting beside him in the dirt. Inside, the flashlights were on, a bright glow spreading from the door frame. The air smelled strongly of marijuana.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
Dime-sized welts rose from his neck and arms, as though he had been pelted with stones. He had a black eye, and the side of his face, badly bruised, looked like the palm of a catcher’s mitt.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
I sat down next to him. It seemed that not all of his injuries could have resulted from what had happened that morning, that some of them must have been his father’s doing. I didn’t know how to ask him if it was true that the man beat him.
“What happened to you?” I said.
He relit a joint, shaking his head as he looked down at the leg. The laces had come untied, he claimed, and he had tumbled down a flight of stairs at the school library. He had gone there, he told me, to check out a few books on gardening, since all of the saplings we had planted appeared to have died. There were fifteen in all. Many had begun to sprout leaves, but now the leaves hung from their branches like rolled parchment. There had been no end to the drought, and the water we had brought to the fort hadn’t been enough to keep the maples alive.
“Jeez,” I said. I felt a revulsion for myself, regret that churned in my gut. “You look pretty bad.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll heal.”
“Did it hurt? The fall, I mean. You in any pain?”
“You’re such a wuss,” he said, and raised an eyebrow. He took a hit off the joint. “I bet you never even jerk off.”
I wasn’t sure what being a wuss had to do with masturbating, but I answered, “Sure I do. Who doesn’t?”
“Girls don’t.” He handed me the joint, burned down to nothing. “Girls don’t have peckers, stupid.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “OK.”
I had smoked marijuana only once before, with a cousin at a family reunion in Illinois. I inhaled, pinching the joint between my thumb and index finger, the way I had been shown.
“Good stuff,” I ventured, managing not to cough.
Kilburg strummed an air guitar. In a rock ’n’ roll falsetto, he began to sing: “What I want, you’ve got, and it might be hard to handle. But like the flame that burns the candle, the candle feeds the flame.” It was a song we both liked—“You Make My Dreams,” by Hall and Oates. In a short while, my eyelids grew heavy and a dense heat surrounded me. I had a sense of time passing slowly. I was suddenly very hungry.
“You make my dreams come true,” he sang.
“Awesome,” I said, and laughed.
He lowered his arms and took a breath. “Holy shit,” he said. “I’m so goddamn stoned.”
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. The sun had set hours ago, but it had to be close to ninety degrees outside. I could feel warmth rising through the desert floor. A cloud of smoke hovered above the fort, drifting into the night as I extinguished the joint against the side of a rock. Kilburg started mumbling to himself, gesturing with his hands. I couldn’t make out the words. Already my forehead was throbbing, and I was glad I hadn’t taken a second hit. After a time, I heard him say, “I’m gonna fuck you.”
Just like that, my high was gone, or I thought it was. “Yeah,” he said, as though he had reflected on it and made up his mind. He spoke slowly, leaning back on his elbows, his voice soft but emphatic: “I’m going to fuck you.”
A coyote wailed in the distance, the desert aglow in the milky light of a full moon. I had understood him well enough, and for a few weeks now I had been disturbingly curious about intercourse between men. Still, I wasn’t entirely sure what he had in mind. I should have voiced my unease, but I wanted to follow his orders, whatever they might be.
“Stand up,” he said, louder now. “Pull down your shorts.”
I did as I was told, standing in front of him with my shorts and underwear bunched at my ankles. I felt the twinges of an erection, and soon it was bobbing beneath the hem of my T-shirt. In a corner of my mind I could see into the future, into tomorrow or next week, when I would look back and yearn for this moment. I knew that it would seem distant, fictional. I guess I was scared, but I wanted to savor it.
“Kneel down,” Kilburg told me, and I knelt before him. He sat up straight, his real leg outstretched in the dirt. He took my hands in his, and his thumbs trembled in my palms. He was just as scared as I was. The muscles flexed in his arms, while a purple vein bulged from the side of his neck. He tightened his grip, squeezing until it hurt. Then he grabbed hold of my head and pushed it into his crotch. He leaned over and put his lips to my ear. “First you’re gonna blow me,” he whispered.
I unzipped his cutoffs, resting my cheek against his knee, where I could smell the sharp scent of his groin. I heard him take a deep, eager breath, but when I kissed the inside of his stump, tasting the salt of his skin, he flinched, pushing hard at my shoulder. I looked up at him. In the light from the door frame, he was working his jaw like an animal. It seemed as if he might vomit.
“Get away from me,” he said, his face twisted in anger.
“What is it?” I said. Still kneeling, I smiled in a way that I thought might comfort him, but I only got him angrier.
“I’m not like you!” he yelled. “You make me want to throw up. You make me hate myself.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Just shut up,” he said, pressing his fingers into his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
I pulled up my underwear and my shorts and sat back down in the dirt. I looked through the darkness, and it struck me that all across Las Vegas, at that very moment, there were people having sex. When I had turned twelve, my father had tried to broach the subject of intercourse, uncomfortably explaining that, beyond the fulfillment of desire, it was an act of love. But right now people were doing it in motel rooms and bathrooms and parked cars and storage closets, and they either loved each other or they didn’t. I wasn’t sure if it made any difference. It was possible that simply being with someone—anyone—was enough, and I had the idea that desire was nothing more than a form of desperation.
“I promise not to tell anyone,” I said, sounding helpless. “I wouldn’t ever do that.” I considered taking off my shirt. To make my chest look more feminine, I had plucked what few hairs I’d had from around my nipples, and I wanted to show him. I wanted Kilburg to see what I had done. “Trav,” I pleaded.
“I told you to shut up,” he said, zipping his cutoffs. He pinched the knotted center of his stump, the way I had seen my father pinch the bridge of his nose when, late at night in his study, he thumbed through blueprints in preparation for the next day’s work. I’m not