They go to hockey games with their Cub Scout pack, eight-year-olds junked up on soda filling tiny bladders, with dads who just wanna watch the game can you sit still we’ll go to the bathroom when the period’s over so they sit unable to enjoy the game because they want to burst and they’re not sure what they’re watching in any case because this is the first time they’ve seen hockey since dad’s usually not around to lace up and play or sit down and watch TV so when the period ends dad looks down and then they’re both looking down and, as if for the first time, they see it’s too late, it’s always too late

 

They hammer nails into their fingers tear themselves with saws and do everything left-handed which is why their father calls them maudit gaucher but when was being left-handed a bad thing and their mom and aunt say they were smacked by the nuns to learn to write with the right hand and they should count themselves lucky nuns don’t do that now

 

They shit themselves on the walk to kindergarten and turn back home where their sister is playing with their mother or they shit themselves in their seat in kindergarten and the nun sends them home where their sister is playing with their mother because she doesn’t go to school yet and she can shit her pants whenever

 

They get sent down to the principal for acting up in class and they get their hair pulled by teachers who force them against the blackboard with fingers pushed into the sternum and for what exactly, they’re just horsing around, or sometimes they’re made to stand in the hall between classrooms and the principal walks by and says you there follow me I’ve got an errand for you and they do it as the obedient kids they are but the teacher pokes her head out the classroom door and finds they’re not there anymore and gives them hell for leaving the hallway and for having the temerity to lie they’d gone on an errand for the principal and they don’t dare say call her and ask her because that’s just mouthing off just asking for it and these are the same nuns and the same teachers who give them As on their report cards and say they’re gonna go far

 

They receive communion they go to confession they say I don’t know it in Latin they’re only in second grade and wonder if they’re bound for hell now they’re in the confessional with the old priest who insists on Latin

 

They take piano lessons and listen to the radio and sing Elvis and Englebert and “Hi Lili Hi Lo” and Perry Como and Tony Bennett and the Beatles and they hum “Paper Roses” while washing dishes in the back of the winter cabin while on the Boy Scout winter survival camping trip and they chant “na na na na hey hey hey goodbye” while crammed into the front seat of the car of their friend’s father who says that ain’t music

 

They race each other down the kangaroo trail behind the cemetery and they hurtle down the four-story-high conveyer belt at the quarry, hurdling foot-high steel hoops on the way down and they bike no-handed on ten-speeds up the middle of Grattan Street at midnight singing “Pinball Wizard” at the top of their lungs

 

They shoot pellet guns in the woods behind the houses along Rolf Street where they kill squirrels mostly, though they’re not sure why because no one at home would cook with the meat, and then there’s that once, that last time they target a living creature, when, even though they’re such lousy shots, they drop a chickadee

 

They play football in the firehouse yard, counting Mississippis to ten which is an awful long play-is-completed time, they play hockey on rough surfaced backyard rinks, they play baseball and Don pretends to be Joe Morgan with that twitchy elbow thing he does in the batter’s box before sending tennis balls atop the flat-roofed school and they’re always picked last it doesn’t matter which sport always last they’re always

 

At the suggestion of their assistant scoutmaster, they put on girl’s clothes

 

They serve the new priest at the altar, where he mangles the French prayers even though he is a local boy and his parents speak French he’s twenty-six and fresh out of the seminary and he is put in charge of the altar boys and comes around the grammar school where the nuns love him where he recruits boys and soon there’s forty of them fourth grade and up and all the altar boys compete to be one of the chosen ten, a position symbolized by an envied gold cross, better mass times, plus weddings and funerals where the servers get tips five bucks ten bucks, serving the six-thirty a.m. convent mass for the nuns and gifts back and forth at birthdays and feast days particularly the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption because the priest loves Mary and he loves boys he loves holding their hands on outings to Mountain Park where the boys sing “Never Ending Song of Love” because they love to sing boys love to sing

 

They play strip poker with their fellow Scouts, eight to a tent made for four, then send the loser out to streak around the tent

 

They roam in gangs

 

They walk alone

 

They smoke pot in the woods behind the mall where they place a make-believe fishbowl over Denis’s head and pretend to talk just mouthing words and Denis freaks out because he can’t hear anything and he can’t yank off the fishbowl it’s stuck even though it’s fake and then they’re singing “Mandy” and some of them are in the trees, sloths draped around branches

 

They pile into Danny’s car, which he’s been working on for months before getting his license, and pop in a cassette of Stevie Wonder’s Greatest Hits and shout out “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”

 

They strike their fathers in the head while spreading loam from a giant pile in the back yard even though they’d been warned about shoveling left-handed just don’t hit me in the head maudit gaucher

 

They push each other when they’re standing at the urinal

 

They fight bare-fisted in the schoolyard as girls cheer them on and before the nuns pull them apart

 

They eat donuts for lunch in the park across from school or smother hotdogs and hamburgers and fries with ketchup in the diner down the street

 

They play marbles

 

They write, they dream

 

They lie

 

They swear they’re telling the truth

 

They swear they’re telling the truth and yet they have to pull down their pants and bend over the footboard and grip the bedposts while their fathers remove their belts and strike them over and over until they apologize en français calisse

 

They spend time in corners of rooms on their knees in punishment praying “Notre Père”

 

They hike the Appalachian Trail

 

They have paper routes and save money and buy albums and T-shirts and concert tickets and gifts for girls and they return the gifts to the store when the girls say they don’t wanna go out anymore

 

They join the Boy Scouts at age ten with their friends and everyone wants to go camping with Doug

 

They rent a cabin at the Moses scout reservation in Russell and they joke around, call each other “mo bait” and other joshing words and have not a clue what it all means and when Doug asks if they want to know of course they say yes they don’t want to be embarrassed not knowing things

 

They are so young when Doug reaches into their sleeping bag to touch them, they’d never had an erection

 

They lie on their back on their sleeping bags because Doug says do you want to know how boys do it with boys or how boys do it with girls and they say girls and he says then lie on your back

 

They say no they don’t think they want Doug to put his mouth on their penis

 

They think they said no

 

They can’t remember

 

They wonder if it’s a thing boys do