clipping him on the cheek. When Kilburg raised an elbow to shield himself, Klein took a step forward and kneed him in the groin. Walsh stood in the background, howling and stomping his heel on the concrete. Doubled over, Kilburg stumbled to the left, then to the right. I waited for his leg to come off. Like a felled tree, he tipped slowly to one side, his textbooks spilling from his arms as he hit the sidewalk.
I was half a mile from school, and I considered running for help, cutting unseen through the desert and summoning the principal, Mr. Gerhard. I wondered what, if anything, Kilburg had done to provoke the boys. Walsh was short and skinny, a loudmouth and a tagalong. Paralyzed with fear, I knelt behind a beat-up Impala, figuring that, if I had to, I could take him in a fistfight. But I had recently chipped both my front teeth during a game of touch football, and I imagined Sheehan and Klein kicking them in entirely while Walsh held me from behind.
It was a hot, clear morning, and sunlight glinted off the Impala’s chrome bumper. As I leaned against it, I understood that Kilburg was really no bully at all. He was just a kid with a difficult homelife and an unfair disadvantage, someone to feel sorry for. Perhaps this, beyond his physical appeal, was what I liked most about him. I suppose I loved him, or thought I did—I had never known such love, or anything like it—and I waited to feel compelled to rush to his defense, to act as any good friend would. But the feeling never came. I had once seen my father break up a quarrel between two rowdy fans at a UNLV basketball game, and I contemplated why it was that I hadn’t inherited his bravery. I was glad I hadn’t walked to school with Kilburg. I had nothing but a desire to escape, a spineless longing to be somewhere else: back home, or safe at the fort.
I peeked around the bumper of the Impala, holding my breath the way I had in front of my house the night before. Traffic whooshed by on the avenue. Some cars had slowed during the commotion, but none of the drivers had got out to help. Kilburg groped around on the sidewalk, trying to stand, but before he could get to his feet, Walsh did something I’ll never forget. He bent down and pulled off Kilburg’s leg, spitting into the leather sleeve and then tossing the leg as far down the sidewalk as he could, far enough that Kilburg would have to crawl to retrieve it.
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
