The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

sprouting and body spurts described in the back of my Scout book (page 273). I was awaiting the big dream, the trigger, wondering if maybe then I’d get big. And strong. And sure.
    George grabbed a fistful of dirt, hurled it into the creek, and right out of the blue asked: “Hey, Marsh, was that counselor, Bob, at St. Malo the summer you were there?”
    St. Malo was the boys’ camp up in the Rockies run by the Archdiocese of Denver. Most of the counselors there were, or were thinking about becoming, seminarians—men training for the priesthood. It was a gorgeous place. My dad had gone there, my cousins.
    “Who?” I asked.
    “Remember that guy, Father Mac’s assistant. Bob? He was always taking pictures of us, yelling about the right way to do pushups?”
    I did remember. An image popped into my head of him standing with Father Mac at Chapel. Tall guy with dark-framed glasses. He had combat boots but always wore penny loafers with dimes in them to dinner. But I remembered him especially because he told the most amazing campfire stories about jungle ghosts and war in Vietnam. He’d been a soldier there and brought back weird gongs and drums, which he used, at just the right moment, in his stories
(Bang!)
to scare the shit out of us. Even the older campers would scream. After lights-out he’d come around the bunks to make sure we weren’t too frightened to sleep. “Are you OK?” he’d whisper, pressing a piece of butterscotch into your hand or leaving a Jolly Rancher perched on your tummy.
    “You mean the guy with the ghost stories, right? Who slept in the dorm?” I asked George.
    “Yeah.”
    “He was cool.”
    “Well, he knows my dad from down the Veterans’ Club.” George dug a rock from the sand. “He’s starting a boys’ camp of his own up on a mountain ranch. He’s fixing it up, wants help this weekend. He’s paying ten bucks. Want to go?”
    “A ranch. Wow. But, I’d have to find someone to cover my route. And 8:30 Mass on Sunday—it’s my turn to serve.”
    “Well, try.”
    I told George I would, I’d try. The picture in my head of me on a ranch in the Rockies had already set my heart racing.

6
    T HE FOLLOWING F RIDAY , right after school, I sat in our kitchen. Waiting.
    The earth trembled. I ran to the window to see what had happened. A huge truck had come to a halt in our driveway. I noticed the fat tires, the way the tread spilled off the concrete and onto dad’s lawn. God, there’ll be ruts of ruined grass, I thought. Dad’ll be furious.
    A man, taller than I remembered him at Malo, hopped out of the cab and marched toward the house. He had on the penny loafers.
    “Mom! He’s here.” I grabbed my pack off the hall bench, set it near the door.
    My home has never known such weight, I think. Mom must feel it, too; she sits so still at the end of the kitchen table. It’s like there’s a moose standing there, leaning against our stove. His genial smile, his green eyes are trained on Mom. One of his legs is crossed over the other, easy like. Both big hands are propped up beside him near the front burners, his thumb covering the
W
of Westinghouse. His red flannel is unbuttoned enough to reveal the clean, white T-shirt that covers his chest and the little hairs that creep over the collar like an advancing army of daddy longlegs. He has a brown belt, faded Levis. Stuck in the loafers are the shiny dimes. His heft is leaving prints in the linoleum, I think, tracks through the kitchen like the ruts his truck is leaving on the lawn.
    He’s larger than the images I have stored in my head from camp two summers before. I can’t believe he’s in my kitchen. Except for when he whispered
goodnight
and left candy, he spoke to me only once that summer after fourth grade when I spent two weeks at Malo. It was when I walked by his room and he invited me in to see the photos tacked to the wall over his tiny bed and dresser. Black-and-white pictures of mountain ponds and aspen trees. And smiling