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 sure what made me do it, but when Kilburg closed his eyes, as if he were trying to recall some vital piece of information, I told him my father was sick. “He’s going to die,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
I was crying again, the second time in two days. I remembered what Kilburg’s father had told him about shedding tears, and I felt silly and weak. Kilburg stared at his hands, his arms loose across his lap. His mother had left him without notice, and I wondered if he cried over her when no one was around.
“I already heard,” he said, his voice trailing off. “My dad told me.”
Between low clouds I could see the stars. They seemed to float through the sky like distant aircrafts, flashing in and out of sight, faint in the light of the moon. I thought of them falling in slow motion, all at once—a blizzard of stars—down through the universe and into the valley, filling it up before melting into the dry landscape. I assumed my mother had gone around telling everyone in the neighborhood about my father’s condition, looking for pity, or who knows what. For a couple of minutes, there was only the noise of katydids, a steady chirr that filled the air. As I watched what I thought might be cumulonimbus clouds—a term I had heard my father use when he read aloud from articles about the drought—a breeze picked up, stirring dirt around the fort. The clouds came swiftly together, dark and swollen, padding the sky. I thought of the smell of sagebrush when it rained—it was hard to forget, at once fragrant and repellent, something like the smell of your hand after you licked it. Kilburg nodded his head. He seemed to have calmed down. He bent forward and picked up a rock, chucking it into the night.
“Why didn’t you help me this morning?” he said.
I wiped tears from my face, looking him up and down.
“I know you were there. I saw you.” He lifted his chin. “I saw you behind that car.”
I tried to think of a lie—an excuse for why I hadn’t defended him, to make up for the ugly truth of my cowardice—but I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, switching it on and shining it at a yucca, a Joshua tree. Heads of sagebrush rose up among the catclaws and schist rocks. He pointed the flashlight at a small cluster of jimsonweed, swathed by little white flowers shaped like trumpets. He circled the weed with the beam, clicking his tongue.
“If you wanted to hallucinate,” he said, “you could eat those flowers. Problem is, they might kill you.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
And I was. I owed him an explanation. But I was still thinking about my father. It would turn out that my father would suffer for seven more years, never undergoing a transplant yet slipping in and out of long, miraculous periods of remission, his lungs dissipating intermittently. He would die, with little warning, in a hospital room on a cold Las Vegas evening in November, a week before Thanksgiving—two years before my mother’s emotional constitution would begin to unravel in earnest. At that moment, however, sitting there with Kilburg, I had a sense of imminent tragedy. In my mind, as in my mother’s, my father was already dead. I pictured his last, gasping moments, then his wake: he lay in an open casket, done up with cosmetics to resemble the living, the way my grandfather had lain at his own wake two summers earlier. I saw Kilburg beside me at the burial, and afterward—days later, perhaps—I saw the two of us sneaking into the cemetery at night and, in my father’s memory, planting a sapling behind his headstone. I saw Travis Kilburg as an important part of my life, even though I felt that this would be our last time together at the fort—that we would never steal another sapling, that our relationship was more or less over. Indeed, we would never go back to the fort again. Kilburg would eventually move across town, and the last time I would run into him would be at a party the week before I would leave home for college, where he would tell me he dropped out of school and took an entry-level job his father got him at the Kerr-McGee plant. It would be an awkward conversation, but I would have no feelings for him—none at all.
Now Kilburg was looking directly at me. The breeze that had picked up grew stronger, sending a tumbleweed bounding past the fort, lifting a plastic produce bag we had left in the dirt. A dust devil spun elegantly and died. I hadn’t stopped crying, but I tried not to show it, blinking away the tears. I told him again that I was sorry. One of the tears landed on my forearm, and even though I had felt it fall from my chin, I thought for an instant that after five long months it had begun to rain. But the clouds had already started to separate, exposing the moon and the stars, floating east toward Sunrise Mountain.
Kilburg knuckled his shoulder. He set the flashlight in the dirt and reached for the prosthetic leg, scowling as he pulled the sleeve over his stump and tightened the laces. I’m not sure why, but it occurred to me, for the first time, that he had a potentially critical illness: if it had cost him his leg, I reasoned, it could just as easily cost him his life. I was suddenly convinced that, like my father, Kilburg wouldn’t live long.
“I guess I thought we were friends,” he said, a note of fear in his voice.
It was late, and I could feel that I was still pretty high. I didn’t know what to tell him. I was tired and I wanted to go home. Finally I stood, brushing dirt from my shorts, and offered Kilburg my hand.
“We are,” I said, because a lie seemed less hurtful than the truth.
