Free Mercy by Alissa York Page B

The boys elbowed each other to let them pass. Finally, a white cloth sphere surfaced on the far side of the creek, more than a little way down.
    “Hey, boy,” Arabia called out, and it was perfectly clear which boy he meant. “Ain’t you comin’ in?”
    So August did. Took the rock at a run and launched himself flailing into the creek. It took him in whole. With a sucking, silty rush it drew him down until his feet met snaky weeds, then pushed him gently back up to the air. Back on the rock, the others were following Arabia’s two buddies like ducklings, trying their best to stand out from the brood.
    August stayed in, partly because Arabia did too—each of them a little apart, submerging to pull through the water,surfacing to let the water pull at them—but mostly for the feel. Smooth enough on the face of things, the creek was strangely alive below. It touched him all over—his chest and legs, his hands and throat, even the patch of new down at the small of his back. He turned that patch to the mild current, felt the shorts flatten to his behind while they billowed out bag-like in front. The water reached up through the leg holes, stroking him
there
.
    Suddenly Arabia was hauling himself out, the other two shaking water from their hair. August struck for the rock—he wasn’t waiting to find himself unwelcome once they’d gone. Back on dry land, his body lost its fluid grace, returning to the unwieldy collection of bones he’d come to know—with one small but immeasurable difference. The same boy who had pointed before now pointed again, though this time he aimed lower, as though his finger’s trajectory was meant to pierce August through the belly rather than the eye. They stared—the boys, then the men—every one of them bent his gaze to the swelling in August’s shorts. His hands came together to shield it. He looked up to meet grin after wicked grin.
    “What’re you starin’ at?” Arabia reached up to untie the undershirt, uncovering a mass of coal-black, curling hair. The armpit hair that matched it bled out over his chest before narrowing to divide his belly with a line. “Never had a hard-on, I guess.” He wrung out the water. “Must be babies still.”
    August watched the pointing hand fall, then the turned-up corners of all those grinning lips. Arabia pulled the damp undershirt on, drawing it slowly over his shoulders and down his front. “That means you’re a man, is all,” hetold August, and the other two nodded and smiled. Then, like a team of workhorses, they turned as one body and started away up the bank.
    August struggled into his pants. Around him the boys were getting fidgety, the railway men above them now, nearly cresting the bank.
A man
. He knew better than any of them what that meant.
    There were those who preferred the back door. August watched them out his narrow bedroom window, so many shadow puppets against the shed—the postmaster’s jabbing chin, the blacksmith’s nose, a certain town councillor’s jowls. Then there were those he didn’t have to spy on, the ones who came brazenly up the front steps, who knew to wait if Aggie’s tasselled shade was down, and often did so on the porch, helping themselves to beers from the cooler. Sometimes, during the harvest, there’d be two or three of them waiting their turn. Men with no wives, or wives in other provinces, or wives who wouldn’t dare open their mouths to complain.
    August didn’t stay with the boys, and he didn’t follow the railway men either. Instead, he scrambled up the far side of the old willow and started running, following the creek’s cutting shape away from town.
    He kept on long after the stitch took hold in his side. When he finally reached the bluff, he dropped to his knees in the poison ivy patch and, like a dog in any carcass it finds, began to roll. Saint Benedict threw himself into the nettle bed to fend off the demon lust—August knew this for a fact, one of many he’d swallowed whole from