declare the schnapps an unacceptable offering, but he only shrugged and said, “Whatever, man. Booze is booze.”
I held the sapling up to the light. Dark soil clung to a knot of roots. A shiny worm writhed from the soil, twisting around like a periscope. I positioned the roots in the hole and scooped the dirt back in, patting it flat around the trunk.
“There,” I said. “What do you think?”
Like the fort, the sapling leaned heavily to one side, in a way that made it look pathetic.
“Just as I pictured it,” he said. “This place looks better already. When that thing grows leaves, we’ll have ourselves a little color out here.” He kneaded his stump harder now, as though working a knotted muscle. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s celebrate.”
I reached into my back pocket and brought around the bottle of schnapps, a pint. I handed it to Kilburg, and he uncapped it and sniffed the contents. He made a face, crinkling his nose, then caught himself and smiled. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. “All we need are some chicks and we’d have a party on our hands.”
“Tell me about it.”
He took a long pull, wincing as he lowered the bottle. Kilburg rarely discussed his health, and at the time I wasn’t sure if having diabetes meant that he shouldn’t be drinking. I had never seen him test his blood sugar or inject insulin, nor had I ever thought of his illness as life-threatening. He seemed, at any rate, to have a high tolerance for alcohol, or pretended to. Kilburg would do almost anything for attention. Just above the knee joint, his prosthetic leg opened into a kind of cup, and it was from here that he would drink my father’s whiskey. Into the cup fit a concave socket, attached to which was a leather sleeve that laced up like a shoe. The sleeve slid snugly over his stump—the stump resting inside the padded socket—and when the laces were tied the leg was supposed to remain attached. But if Kilburg took a clumsy step as we crossed the uneven terrain of the desert, the socket would come out, popping like a cork, and he would pitch forward into the dirt. What’s more, the knee and ankle joints—crude-looking mechanisms that bent in accordance with a complicated arrangement of pins and bearings—creaked when he walked, and his stump itched and perspired and developed weekly blisters, causing him to grimace and complain. He moved with the lopsided gait of an arthritic old man. At school, kids tormented him, particularly Todd Sheehan and Chad Klein, two boys in our class who wore baseball caps and chewed tobacco. They were thuggish and athletic-looking—as big as Kilburg—and they called him Peg Leg and Gimp, tripping him whenever they had the chance. Even so, I thought, back then, that there were other, smaller kids on whom Kilburg took out his frustration.
“College chicks,” he said, taking another pull. “That’s what we really need.”
We were still in junior high school, and I wondered if Kilburg had ever even met a college-aged woman.
“I’d go to UNLV for the chicks alone,” he offered, “but my dad says college is for people who think they’re too good to work.”
Kilburg was the son of a chemical-plant operator, and he often found a way to incorporate his father’s opinions into a conversation. He was determined to follow in the man’s footsteps, to land himself a job someday at Kerr-McGee, where his father had worked for the past twenty years. Perhaps because my own father was an engineer, Kilburg needled me about being what he called a “richie,” even though we lived in a small single-story house just up the block. Both our fathers worked in the desert, but the Kerr-McGee plant was only twenty minutes outside the city. The nuclear test site where my father worked was over an hour away.
Three years earlier, Kilburg’s mother had run off with a gambler from Arizona, a man she had met at a poker table. As a consequence, it occurs to me now, Kilburg liked to brag that he had the coolest father in the neighborhood—the smartest and the toughest. His father was tall and potbellied, and he glared at you with stony eyes, and when he spoke his black beard parted to reveal a mouth full of crooked teeth, many of which overlapped or were angled to such a degree that you could see their rotting undersides. Evenings, he nursed a Heineken in his Barcalounger until he fell asleep. Kilburg worshipped him, but on more than one occasion he had shown up for school with a fat lip, or a bruised cheekbone, or a cut above his eye. When I had asked Kilburg, the Monday after we had built the fort, why his wrist was black-and-blue, he told me that a stereo speaker had fallen on him—knocked over by Tarkanian, his German shepherd—but I suspected the injury had been punishment for the wood that had gone missing from his father’s shed.
Presently, Kilburg switched off the flashlight, slipping it into a pocket of his shorts. “C’mon,” he said. He handed me the bottle, scooting himself off the prosthetic leg and onto the ground, his real leg stretched out in front of him. Pushing with his hands, the same way we eased ourselves down the sloping banks of the arroyo, he inched across the dirt and into the fort.
I crawled behind him through the low door frame. A green shag rug, taken from a supermarket Dumpster, covered the hard dirt floor. Flashlights hung like inverted torches in each of the four corners, dangling upside down from shoestrings nailed to the plywood, one of the bulbs always faintly flickering. Brushing against a wall of the fort caused the flashlights to sway in their corners, yellow beams crisscrossing the rug as if it were a dance floor. Each month Kilburg stole the latest issue of Playboy from the 7-Eleven near our school, and our only adornment was a glossy centerfold of Bernadette Peters, thumbtacked to the wall opposite the door frame.
I took a sip of the schnapps, coughing as it burned down my throat.
“There you go,” he laughed. He took off his shoe, a white sneaker whose mate was outside, on the foot of the prosthetic leg. “We’ll make a man outta you yet.”
Before long I had a terrific buzz going. My head had grown numb, and I was loose-jointed, slurring my speech. The two of us lay flat on the rug. In the still air I could smell sagebrush and Kilburg’s cheap drugstore cologne. He kept saying, “You drunk yet? You feeling anything?” I pinched my eyes closed and a kaleidoscope of color spun behind the lids. When I opened them, Kilburg was leaning over me, his breath warm on my face.
“Get off,” I said, squirming, but he held my arms. I couldn’t get free, pinned by the stiff weight of his torso. I looked away. Through the door frame I could see the moon, white light in a black sky. When he put his lips to mine, I let out a grumble, doubtful of my sudden arousal, a tingling sensation that rained from the crown of my head to the tips of my fingers. I was confused, unsure of how to process what was happening, but he slipped his tongue into my mouth, and I found myself giving in to the kiss. He eased off me, touching my ears, my cheeks, the side of my neck. Then he forced his stump into my hip, and gave a shudder when my erection brushed against his own. What we were doing seemed wrong—criminal, maybe—but I started to feel energized, bold, the way I had felt when we had stolen the sapling from Eastern Avenue, the way I imagined Kilburg felt when he shoplifted Playboys from 7-Eleven. I brought my arm up around his neck, but he batted it away.
“Easy, lover boy,” he said. He rolled off me, laughing.
“I thought—”
“I thought, I thought,” he mocked. “Relax. We’re not fags, dude. It’s only practice for the real thing, for when we both get girlfriends.” Kilburg narrowed his eyes as if the answer to a troublesome question had finally dawned on him. “We’re drunk, Nick. We’re not thinking right. Don’t ever tell anybody about this.” He pulled his shoe back on, looking panicky. “You do and you’re a dead man.”
My father began taking a daily dose of prednisone, a steroid meant to decrease the inflammation in his lungs. Local specialists struggled to slow the fibrosis they
