The Kingdom of Childhood

He rested back against the sofa with a tired half smile. “I think he should have turned down the BJ,” he replied. “Just say no to head.”

“They’re not impeaching him for the impropriety,” I explained. “They’re impeaching him for lying about it under oath.”

Zach shrugged. “He wouldn’t have had to lie about it under oath if he hadn’t gotten blown.”

“True. He knew they would hang him for it. This wouldn’t have happened in Europe. I think they’re slinging mud at him just for the sake of it.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I think it serves him right. He ought to have had the self-discipline not to take it when it was offered, even if he is a politician. ‘Without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty.’”

I stared at him in dismay. “Where did that come from?”

“The Bhagavad Gita,” he mumbled. He chewed the side of his thumbnail. “It’s a yoga thing.”

“So you think it’s karma.”

“That’s exactly what I think it is.”

“That’s not what you used to think about this situation,” I reminded him. “Back in the fall you thought he was getting a crappy deal.”

“Yeah, I changed my mind. I think he’s getting what he deserves for lying to everybody. Cheats and liars need to be brought down.”

“You think so.” I took a few steps forward so he could see me more clearly. “And where does that leave us?”

He removed his thumbnail from his mouth just long enough to answer. “Fucked.”

Back at the school, Zach lingered in the parking lot for a few extra minutes as Judy carried the cookies inside, in a sort of halfhearted nod to her paranoia. Russ was over in a sandy section of the play area, stationed at the ring toss, shouting in a friendly way to the little kids as they set their tongues between their teeth and gave the game their best shot. Whether they did well or poorly, he congratulated each with a high-five. Zach stood at the edge of the lot with his thumbs in his pockets, watching him plainly, making no effort to be covert. He was taller than Zach by several inches, lean for a guy of his age; his face, fair-skinned and spectacled, carried a kind of arrogance that evoked in Zach feelings of both respect and scorn. Regardless of the present state of his marriage, he was Judy’s real lover—the one who found it no trouble to handle her, who was even bored of going to bed with her, who would no doubt laugh if he knew the boy watching him at the edge of the grass was also the object of her attentions, because was that the best she could do?

He ground a patch of gravel beneath his shoe and considered that he ought to admit defeat—to go to Judy and say, I’d like to be excused now, then return to his day job of currying the favor of a girl his own age. In the months since Ohio, Fairen had gradually warmed to him again. When they met with Temple to discuss their history project, she often sat beside him at the table now, rather than across. At Madrigals practice the week before, after the third run-through of a song none of them particularly liked, she had dropped her head back—he was standing just behind her, on the risers—and rested the crown of it against his chest, sighing and meeting his eye to express her aggravation. For a long time after Ohio, resentment still shadowed every interaction he had with her, and his enthusiasm for Judy left him unmotivated to set aside his anger. But now, not much older but a whole lot wiser, he felt ready to lay down his sword where Fairen was concerned. If she wasn’t holding a grudge, then neither would he, for he hated the sense of waste that welled up in him when he mused that in his greed to have her he had lost her entirely.

He wandered back into the gymnasium and caught up with his friends. The whole group of them, Scott included, was now gathered at the bake-sale booth, but Judy was absent, and so Zach happily joined them. By the time the bazaar began to wind down, he was in high spirits; Fairen had flirted with him, Russ stayed out of sight, and for a precious couple of hours life felt entirely normal.

Temple offered him and Fairen a ride home, and Zach was glad to accept. He sat in the back with her until Temple pulled up in front of her house—an odd route for him to take, given that hers was midway between his and Zach’s—then climbed into the front passenger seat for the ride back toward Sylvania. “You forget where I live?” Zach asked him as he pulled on his seat belt.

“Nope. Just wanted to talk without Fairen here.”

“What about?”

“Tacitus.”

Zach laughed and set his foot against the dash. “You picked the wrong person to talk to about that. Fairen’s the one who’s doing all the reading.”

“This is all stuff we went over in class,” Temple said. “Remember the part about how they used to hang traitors from trees, and stake down the prostitutes in the swamps, and drag women—”

“Through the streets naked. Yeah, I was listening for that part. What about it?”

“She talked about how certain crimes were punished out in the open, so they could make an example of the people, and for the ones where they considered the people polluted, they had to, like, destroy them and all the evidence. I was thinking about that—”

Zach squinted at him. “Man, that’s got nothing to do with our report. Does it? It’s supposed to be about Maryland, right? I think we can sneak in the Bunny Man thing, but not anything about them staking down hookers in Hauschen Lake.”

“Stop interrupting me for a minute and just listen. I’ve got a point to make.” His voice had grown tighter; Zach glanced at him. “I was thinking about how what it gets at is that, anywhere you go, the tribe doesn’t want people breaking with the code. The individual threatens the group, so the group threatens the individual. You know what I’m saying? In a small, tight society, they had to be real brutal with the violators to make sure the code gets followed. People still broke it some times, even though they knew what was coming. Maybe they thought they could get away with it, who knows. Maybe they just got sidetracked by whatever they were after and it made them stupid.”

Zach nodded absently and turned the hot-air vent to blow toward him.