The Book of Skulls

He went out.

Yes. Tomorrow it’s my turn.

chapter thirty-seven Eli

Oliver said, “There was this day in early September when my friend Karl and I went hunting, just the two of us, chasing doves or partridges all morning through the scrubby woods north of town, catching nothing but dust. Then we came out of the trees and saw a lake before us, a pond, really, and we were hot and sweaty, for summer wasn’t entirely over yet. So we put down our guns and got out of our clothes and took a swim, and afterward we sat naked on a big flat rock, drying ourselves and hoping some birds would fly by, so we could pot them — pow — without even getting up. Karl was fifteen then and I was fourteen, and I was finally bigger than he was, because I had reached my full growth and passed him in the spring. Karl had seemed so mature and big a few years before, but now he looked thin and flimsy next to me. We didn’t speak for a long time, and then, just as I was thinking of suggesting that we get dressed and move along, Karl turned toward me with a peculiar look in his eyes, and I saw he was studying my body, my groin. And he said something about girls, how stupid girls are, what stupid noises they make while you’re “laying them, how tired he ,was of having to make love talk with them before they’d let him get into them, how bored he was with their dumb floppy tits, their makeup, their giggling, how much he hated buying them sodas and listening to their chatter, and so on. He said a lot of stuff along those lines. I laughed and said, Well, girls may have their flaws, but it’s the only game in town, isn’t it? And Karl said, No it isn’t.

“Now I was sure he was putting me on, and I told him, I never went much for fucking cows or sheep, Karl. Or maybe it’s ducks you’ve been going with lately. He shook his head. He looked annoyed. I’m not talking about fucking animals, he said, in the sort of tone you’d use in speaking to a small child. That kind of shit is for morons, Oliver. I’m just trying to tell you, he said, that there’s a way you can get yourself off, a good way, a clean way, it doesn’t involve girls, you don’t have to sell yourself out to girls and do all the shit they want you to do for them, you know what I mean? It’s simple and it’s honest and it’s clear-cut, all the cards on the table, and I want to tell you something, he said, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. I still wasn’t sure what he meant, partly because I was naive and partly because I didn’t want to believe that he meant what I thought he might mean, and I made a noncommittal grunt which Karl must have mistaken for a go-ahead, because he reached over and put his hand on me, high up on my thigh. Hey, wait, I said, and he said, Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, Oliver. He went on talking in a low intense voice, words tumbling out of him, explaining to me that women were nothing but animals and he was going to keep clear of them for life, that even if he got married he wasn’t going to touch his wife except to make kids, but otherwise, so far as his pleasures went, he hoped to keep them on a strictly man-to-man basis because that was the only decent and honest way. You hunt with other men, you play cards with other men, you get drunk with other men, you talk with men the way you’d never talk with women, really opening yourself up, and so why not go the whole route, why not get your sex kicks from men, too?

“And as he was explaining this to me, speaking very fast, never once letting me get a word in edgewise, making everything sound almost rational and logical, he had his hand on me, putting it there in a very casual way, on my thigh, the way you might put your hand on somebody’s shoulder while you’re saying something to him, meaning nothing particular by it, and Karl was rubbing this hand up and down, up and down, still talking a streak, moving the hand closer and closer to my crotch all the time. And he was getting hard, Eli, and so was I, that’s what amazed me so much, so was I. I was getting hard. With an empty blue sky above us and not another human being within five miles. I was afraid to look down at myself, ashamed of what I knew was happening to me. That was a revelation to me, that another fellow could arouse me like that. Just this once, he said, just once, Oliver, and if you don’t like it I’ll never mention the subject to you again, but you mustn’t knock it till you’ve tried it, you hear? I didn’t know how to answer him and I didn’t know how to get his hand off me. And then the hand moved farther up, up to here, and even higher, and — look, Eli, I mean, I don’t want to get too graphic. If this is embarrassing you, just tell me and I’ll try to describe it in general terms — ”

“Say it however you need to say it, Oliver.”

“Reaching his hand up and up, until his hand was clasped tight around my — around my cock, Eli, he was holding my penis, holding me there just like a girl might, the two of us naked by that little lake where we’d just been swimming, at the edge of the woods, and his words pouring through my head, telling me how we could do it with each other, how men managed it. I know all about it, he said, I learned it from my brother-in-law. You know, he hates my sister, they’ve been married only three years and he can’t stand her, the way she smells, the way she files her nails all the time, everything about her, and one night he said, Let me show you some fun, Karl, and he was right, it was fun. So let me show you some fun, Oliver. And afterward you tell me who gave you a better time, me or Christa Henrichs, me or Judy Beecher.”

The bitter odor of sweat was strong in the room. Oliver’s voice was hard-edged and sharp; every syllable came forth with the force of a dart. His eyes were glazed and his face was flushed. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. If it hadn’t been Oliver, I would have thought he was stoned. This confession was costing him some tremendous inner price; that had been plain from the moment he walked in, jaws rigid, lips clamped, looking weirdly uptight as I had seen him only a few times previously, and began his rambling, hesitant tale of a late-summer day in the Kansas woods when he was a boy. As the story unwound I had been trying to anticipate its route and guess its payoff. Obviously he had betrayed Karl in some way, I supposed. Had he cheated Karl in the division of the day’s catch? Had he stolen ammunition from Karl when his friend’s back was turned? Had he shot Karl dead in some sudden quarrel and told the sheriff it was an accident? None of those possibilities persuaded me; but I was unprepared for the actual turn in the narrative, the wandering hand, the skillful seduction. The rural background — guns and wild game and woods — had misled me; my simpleminded image of Growing Up In Kansas left no room for homosexual adventures and other manifestations of what to me was a purely urban species of decadence. Yet here was Karl, the virile huntsman, groping innocent young Oliver, and here was an older Oliver crouching before me pulling the reluctant words from his bowels. The words became less reluctant; Oliver was caught up in the rhythms of his tale, now, and, though his anguish seemed no less, his flow of description became more copious, as if he took some masochistic pride in baring this episode to me: it was not so much a confession as an act of abasement. The story rolled inexorably on, liberally embellished with telling detail. Oliver portraying his maidenly shyness and uneasiness, his gradual succumbing to Karl’s earnest sophistries, the critical moment when his uncertain hand at last sought Karl’s body. Oliver spared me nothing. Karl had not been circumcised, I learned, and in case I might not be familiar with the anatomical implications of that fact Oliver carefully explained to me the appearance of an uncircumcised member, both flaccid and erect. He told me also of the manual caresses and of his indoctrination into the oral joys, and finally he painted the picture of the two sinewy young male bodies writhing in elaborate copulation beside the pond. There was Bible Belt fervor in his words: he had committed an abomination, he had dabbled in the sins of Sodom, he had fouled himself unto the seventh generation, all in that one afternoon of boyish fun. “All right,” I wanted to say, “all right, Oliver, so you made out with your pal, why stretch it into such a big megillah? You’re still basically hetero, aren’t you? Everyone fools around with other boys when he’s a kid, and Kinsey told us a long time ago that at least one male adolescent out of three goes to the point of climax with—” But I said not a word. This was Oliver’s big moment and I didn’t want to put him down. This was his shaping trauma, this was the fiery-eyed demon that rode him, and he was letting it all hang out for my inspection. He had awesome momentum now. He swept me grandly along to the final orgasmic spurt, and then sat back, spent, dazed, face going slack, eyes going dull. Waiting for my verdict, I guess. What could I say? How could I pass judgment on him? I said nothing.

“What happened afterward?” I asked at last.

“We took a swim and cleaned ourselves up and got dressed and went and shot some wild ducks.”

“No, I mean afterward. Between Karl and you. The effect on your friendship.”

“On our way back to town,” Oliver said, “I told Karl that if he ever went near me again I’d blow his fucking head off.”

“And?”

“He never went near me again. A year later he lied about his age and joined the marines and got killed in