Free The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace by Martin Moran

birds. As they glided over, I reached out to grasp them. They scattered.
    “Dad?”
    “Yeah?”
    He coughed horribly then and Mom yelled that it was Pop-Tarts, and car pool any minute. I ran to get dressed.

11
    I NTO MY SIXTH-GRADE classroom I took: Mud from the ranch. Brown leather boots clomping across the linoleum. Shit-kicking weights on the end of my legs, making me master of myself. I’m two inches bigger in these things. Even without them, I’m taller now. Superior. In the space of one weekend at the foot of a mountain, I’ve been thrust up, eyeing things now from a new height. Adult territory.
    I bend to fix the thick, red shoelace, straighten the blue cuff of my polyester pants. No one else in my class wears footgear like this. That’s just fine. No one else knows of these things. They weren’t chosen to walk in the muck of a real barn. They didn’t have the luck, the fate, the sweet devil-joy come their way. I’m different, always have been, knew it all along.
    Just fine. Fine with me.
    What happened, what I did, what I am, stands between me and everybody else in the whole fucking world. Every body. Except one.
    And the boots are my own keepsake. They’re like the pledge—
just between us
—tied around my feet. And a ring of mud around each sole to recall the trail I’ve gone down. Down to the pleasure, to the wet earth smell, to the hidden world of skin on skin. The muck sticks. It’s our glue.
    But, strangely, when I think of
it
, it’s not exactly him I’m thinking of. It’s more the
force
, the thing that’s been revealed. That’s most of what I’m feeling, thinking of. The orange ball of fire at the center of it all. I’ve seen it, this grown-up truth. Contacted it. And none of you sorry sixth graders can imagine where I’ve been. How big and real it was, is. The flesh of it. None of you teachers or parents or priests with all your rules and books can possibly imagine what’s humming right now in my chest, heating up my thighs. The power of it. The hum of a holy spirit, the holy hum of sex, come to enter my life, fill the void. At long last the burning question has a solid answer.
Touch
.
    Our sixth-grade class is the last room at the north end of the hall on the second floor. Windows run along the west wall, opposite the clock and the crucifix. I look outside. The mountains are there, distant and clear. They are out there calling and calling and I want to go, up into the wild. I want to live as an animal. A savage. How can anything in these books be real? Anything from these churchified, city mouths? I’ve stumbled upon the one, the only thing that is
real
. Everything up till now has been a lie, hasn’t it? My body is all on fire with the truth.
    I turn away from the windows and up to the cross. The crucified, nearly naked corpus. He looks at me differently now and I want to tell him—
How dare You
, and I want to pull off his little loincloth, Mr. Son of Man, and ask him a thing or two about gods on earth. The kind with dicks.
    Sister Christine asks us to rise. She gives directions about the reading lab, about concentration, but her voice is garbled by the hum of molecules dancing between bodies, bouncing around the fluorescent lights. The gigantic chords ringing in my head muffle her words. I’ve tried twice and our eyes have met and she doesn’t seem to see someone other, someone different. It’s all easier than I thought; to make what happened seem like it didn’t. To hold it down in a corner inside and act just the same. It’s someone else’s story, all
that
, someone else’s body. Or, if it really is my story, well then I can hold it quietly within while I tell the stupid world another tale. The tale of the golden one. The altar boy. The tale they want to hear, the one that will protect me.

    At fleeting moments I want to scream, to burst forth with the news of what I discovered. Or what discovered me. I don’t want to confess, but to boast.
You see, the thing I’d