Yes, as boys love boys when boys are eight, ten, twelve, and the world is innocent and boys are evil beyond evil because they know not what they do, but do it anyway. So, on some secret level, I had to be hurt. We dear fine friends needed each other. I to be hit. He to strike. My scars were the emblem and symbol of our love.
What else makes you want to murder Ralph so late in time?
The train whistle shrieked. Night country rolled by.
And I recalled one spring when I came to school in a new tweed knicker suit and Ralph knocking me down, rolling me in snow and fresh brown mud. And Ralph laughing and me going home, shame-faced, covered with slime, afraid of a beating, to put on fresh dry clothes.
Yes! And what else?
Remember those toy clay statues you longed to collect from the Tarzan radio show? Statues of Tarzan and Kala the Ape and Numa the Lion, for just twenty-five cents?! Yes, yes! Beautiful! Even now, in memory, O the sound of the Ape Man swinging through green jungles far away, ululating! But who had twenty-five cents in the middle of the Great Depression? No one.
Except Ralph Underhill.
And one day Ralph asked you if you wanted one of the statues.
Wanted! you cried. Yes! Yes!
That was the same week your brother in a strange seizure of love mixed with contempt gave you his old, but expensive, baseball-catcher’s mitt.
“Well,” said Ralph, “I’ll give you my extra Tarzan statue if you’ll give me that catcher’s mitt.”
Fool! I thought. The statue’s worth twenty-five cents. The glove cost two dollars. No fair! Don’t!
But I raced back to Ralph’s house with the glove and gave it to him and he, smiling a worse contempt than my brother’s, handed me the Tarzan statue and, bursting with joy, I ran home.
My brother didn’t find out about his catcher’s mitt and the statue for two weeks, and when he did he ditched me when we hiked out in farm country and left me lost because I was such a sap. “Tarzan statues! Baseball mitts!” he cried. “That’s the last thing I ever give you!”
And somewhere on a country road I just lay down and wept and wanted to die but didn’t know how to give up the final vomit that was my miserable ghost.
The thunder murmured.
The rain fell on the cold Pullman-car windows.
What else? Is that the list?
No. One final thing, more terrible than all
the rest.
In all the years you went to Ralph’s house to toss up small bits of gravel on his Fourth of July six-in-the-morning fresh dewy window or to call him forth for the arrival of dawn circuses in the cold fresh blue railroad stations in late June or late August, in all those years, never once did Ralph run to your house.
Never once in all the years did he, or anyone else, prove their friendship by coming by. The door never knocked. The window of your bedroom never faintly clattered and belled with a high-tossed confetti of small dusts and rocks.
And you always knew that the day you stopped going to Ralph’s house, calling up in the morn, that would be the day your friendship ended.
You tested it once. You stayed away for a whole week. Ralph never called. It was as if you had died, and no one came to your funeral.
When you saw Ralph at school, there was no surprise, no query, not even the faintest lint of curiosity to be picked off your coat. Where were you, Doug? I need someone to beat. Where you been, Doug, I got no one to pinch!
Add all the sins up. But especially think on the last:
He never came to my house. He never sang up to my early-morning bed or tossed a wedding rice of gravel on the clear panes to call me down to joy and summer days.
And for this last thing, Ralph Underhill, I thought, sitting in the train at four in the morning, as the storm faded, and I found tears in my eyes, for this last and final thing, for that I shall kill you tomorrow night.
Murder, I thought, after thirty-six years. Why, God, you’re madder than Ahab.
The train wailed. We ran cross-country like a mechanical Greek Fate carried by a black metal Roman Fury.