Rats Saw God (21 page)

I slipped my hand underneath the sheets and ran it down the warm cotton T-shirt that ended where her panties began. I rode my hand over her butt and down along her thigh. She murmured. I brought my ear closer to her, so I could hear. This time it was clear.

“Sergio,” she cooed.

Then she grabbed me and bit my ear.

“That's what you get for being a perv.”

•   •   •

Later that day, I played my first game of football since I was eight and first grasped the import of the activity to the astronaut. He had told me to pull my head out after I dropped a pass in some meaningless two-on-two matchup with neighborhood kids. I didn't catch a pass the rest of the day, but I'll say this for the man, he kept throwing them.

Here, on vacation with friends, things would be different. The Whiteside brothers and I matched up against Doug, Veg, and Missy for a game of beach two below. I wasn't sure
whether Doug took Missy as a concession for our team having me or Ivy, but I resolved not to take it personally. Our foes jumped out to a quick touchdown lead. On the opening kickoff Missy ran in—and I'll use this term literally—
unmolested
for the score. I had her dead to rights, but I couldn't figure out where to touch her.

“On her ass, you wuss,” Dub shouted from the sidelines.

We got killed due largely to the fact that Doug took the game eighteen times more seriously than the rest of us, at one point stiff-arming Ivy into a sand dune and then Electric-Sliding across the back of the end zone. I caught a few more passes that bounced off my chest, so I was happy. When Bill decided he wanted to run some routes, I discovered I had a congenital talent for throwing a tight spiral. I hit Bill on a couple of sideline streaks that dropped in over his outside shoulder just beyond Doug's flailing arms. The late TDs made the score a bit more respectable.

For one glorious day I answered to the nickname “Moon,” who I was told quarterbacked for the Oilers.

“He's just the only one out here not hungover,” Doug said.

“Okay, when you're feeling better, you can show us your arm,” Bill said sarcastically.

That night we built a huge bonfire on the beach. We sang “Kum Ba Yah” just to be smartasses. Hundreds of high school and college students along the beach joined us in our rendition. By the time we got to “Someone's shouting, Lord,” we could have been led on a crusade. Samantha, sitting directly across the fire from me, had put on a sweatshirt when the night turned chilly, but she was still in her bikini bottom. The more
I drank the less capable of averting my gaze I became. I don't think anyone noticed, but it got me thinking about those medieval monks who would whip themselves for impure thoughts about stable boys and the round earth theory. If I had a cat-o'-nine-tails, I would have had at me right then. I was in love with the girl under the blanket with me.

I don't know how many backroom deals Dub had to make with Missy and Rhonda to convince them to sleep on the floor somewhere else in the house that night, but we ended up getting the extra bedroom to ourselves.

“Have you thought at all about birth control?” Dub asked when we were down to our underwear. We hadn't progressed beyond this point, and the truth was no, I hadn't. Dub asked the question so frankly, though, I felt stupid for not having considered it.

“A bit,” I lied.

“Think about it some more.”

That night we wrapped ourselves together, safe in our underwear, a little drunk, and I forgot all about the astronaut… Doug… Samantha… condoms and spermicides… French words for common American expressions… the numerical value of pi.

More than any holiday, the last day of school usually served to bump up my enthusiasm thermostat from detachment to a point just shy of zeal. The last day of my sophomore year, however, failed to measure up to its predecessors. Three months in San Diego without Dub? Get real. I was, by nature, mopey.
Forlorn and mopey was going to be an ugly combination.

As soon as my Friday night shift ended at the 'Plex, I headed to Doug's. Graduation was the next evening, but I would be on a plane for the West Coast by then. That night I said my final good-byes to Trey, Bill, Holly, and Samantha. When I arrived, The Grippe was rehearsing and was well into a raucous rendition of Alice Cooper's “School's Out.” Veg's vocals somehow managed to incorporate both the nasal, emotionally desolated yowl of Bob Mould and the requisite “we mean it, maaaaan!” snarl of late seventies punk. I noticed that, though the band still unleashed vision-blurring torrents of sound, they were no longer merely loud. They stomped through the song with none of the volume-over-ability bluster that was their early tendency. They had gigs booked at Zelda's and the Vatican that I would miss. Even this made me sad despite my worsening relationship with Doug. It's like he took it as a blow to his ego that I wanted to spend as much time as possible with Dub. After I said I didn't want to be in the band, he quit asking me if I wanted to do anything. He even referred to Dub as “your wife.” The more shit he dished out, the less I saw of him.

Later I sat next to Bill and Holly, dangling my pallid legs in the pool. Holly was heading for Northwestern in a matter of days; she had enrolled in the first summer session. Bill had been accepted by MIT. The two had been a couple since their sophomore year.

“I know it's none of my business,” I said when Dub went into the house to use the bathroom, “but how are you going to do it, stay together, when you're so far apart?”

Holly looked at Bill and something passed between them
I couldn't interpret. Holly answered. “We're going to see other people in college. We're breaking up without the big fight, or the prefight, or the thirty-day make-each-other-miserable period. I'm not saying I won't want to call him every day, and he'll probably die without me, but why ruin something so perfect by trying to stay together?”

It was logic I simply didn't understand, but I kept my mouth shut.

I carried the stack of letters waiting for me on the kitchen bar up to my room. Since my fight with Sarah, I had been ducking the rest of my family. What she said, it just couldn't be true. Still, I didn't look my mom in the eye and I had to fight the urge to take one of Chuck's dumbbells to the side of his head. Sarah, she would want to talk about it, or worse, apologize. Give me some time. I'll deal.

My mail came exclusively from colleges: Pepperdine, accepted; Loyola Marymount, accepted; UCLA, accepted. The fourth letter bore the embossed crimson insignia of Harvard. Why did the verdict contained in this envelope loom so large? Because the astronaut never did this. He never got accepted to an Ivy League school, to conceivably the preeminent school in the country. Remembering Sarah's derisive comments about my letter-opening mastery, I examined the envelopes I had already opened. All of them survived undamaged. I could send them back to the schools for a deposit. I held the Harvard envelope up to the light. No help. I ripped it open. The envelope tore surgically down the bottom crease. Sighing, I reduced it to
confetti. Then I unfolded the letter: Harvard, accepted.

Spreading my arms and extending my fingers, I nodded my head and used my hands to settle the thundering audience. I mouthed thank yous into an invisible microphone.

I
didn't even have to pull a drowning woman out of a river.

If this was good news for me, it was better for Allison. She scored twenty points higher on her SAT; she participated in more activities; she made significantly better grades. She was a shoo-in. It didn't matter in any real sense. She needed to go somewhere on a full ride, but she had cared enough about the results to spend fifty dollars on the application fee. She probably got her acceptance today, too. I called her at home.

“Kimble residence,” she said. What a square.

“It's me. Heard from Harvard yet?”

“Last week,” she said.

“And?”

“‘We sincerely regret to inform you, yadda, yadda, yadda.'” She paused. “Why? Did you get your letter yet?”

“Yeah. My letter just had two words on it—Charlie Vato.”

“Yeah, well, Harvard sucks,” she said.

“Harvard
does
suck,” I agreed.

We talked for a few more minutes before hanging up. I considered Harvard and why they had green-lighted me. I had been wrong about the astronaut never getting accepted there. He just was.

I flew back to Texas once that summer. It was during this visit that Dub and I lost our virginity. After the mental anguish I
suffered buying condoms, I would have felt pretty stupid had we not done the deed. Sex, in the clinical rather than the rhapsodic sense, had been the prime topic of most of our daily phone calls. Would we? Should we? Dub was a regular medical expert by the time all was said and done. I had to change my flight arrangements once, because I would have arrived at her most fertile time of the month. We briefly discussed the pill.

“Let's see,” she said. “I'll experience radical mood swings. I'll get nauseous—probably gain weight.” There was a pause on the phone. “It'll make my boobs bigger.”

“I say go for it.”

But she hadn't. She offered to purchase the condoms herself, but that made no sense. People knew her in Clear Lake. I was satisfactorily unheard-of in San Diego. Besides, this was a man's job. The deal went down at a Piggly Wiggly on my fifty-minute lunch hour. Dub made me promise not to buy them from a gas station bathroom vending machine.

“No fancy colors, no feathers, no glow-in-the-dark feature, nothing that says, ‘for her pleasure.'” Dub instructed. “Something with a spermicide… and Sylvia says the lubricated kind are better.”

“You asked your sister what kind of rubber we should use?”

“Big sisters have to tell you these things; it's in their contract.”

I made up my mind that I would make this purchase without any of the stock comic antics of others in my position. I wouldn't pay for the condoms along with a plethora of nonessential, unsexy food—frozen Tater Tots, nondairy creamer, allspice—as if the variety would prevent a checker from noticing the virginal boy at the counter aiming to have
sex. Nope. I planned on swaggering up to the express line, standing feet shoulder-width, gripping my fist with the opposite hand behind my back, daring the checker to notice my crotch.

Initially thrown by the selection offered by the contraceptive industry, I became conscious of the eternity I'd been gazing at the condom rack. I wondered briefly if I would eventually develop some form of brand loyalty. I finally selected a box of twelve—any less would have seemed superficial and cheap; any more would have come off narcissistic. There was no line at the express counter. The cashier was roughly my mom's age. She scanned the box, demanded the money, gave me change—all without so much as reviewing the instructions for use or questioning my moral rectitude.

I flew back to Texas on my seventeenth birthday. The midsummer trip was requiring a significant chunk out of my savings, but I didn't care. As I hustled off the plane and up the tunnel, I was blindsided by my eager girlfriend who bear-hugged me, knocked me into the tunnel wall, and effectively halted the deplaning process. The money was already worth it.