Page 76 - Some Dance to Remember

46 Jack Fritscher

happens to you, I want you to know it’s nothing to worry about.”
Ryan felt a first peculiar turn of real sexual panic in his stomach. This
was worse than all the spiritual fear Madonna had caused. Why was his
father, this man whom he loved so much, talking dirty to him? He wanted
to escape from the car, but in the stifling heat he could not lift his hand
to the door handle. Besides, where would he run? They were miles from
home. His father would think he was crazy.
Ryan had to stop him. He had to stop the feeling in his stomach. He
had to stop the stirring he felt swelling in his loose Bermuda shorts. His
cock was uncoiling and it hurt. He did not want the vague pleasure he
knew must be the sin of impurity they all feared so much. “I know all
about it,” he lied. “You don’t have to tell me.”
Charley-Pop, relieved, put his hand on Ryan’s bare knee. Ryan wanted
to pull away, but he did not. His young balls ached. Something in him was
betraying the long schooling of his purity. The nameless thing he feared
late nights in his bed and in the dark of the confessional was here. It filled
him with want. It was scary, this thing. It smelled of hell and felt sweet
between his thighs. He wanted his father to hold him, tenderly hold him,
closer than he ever had before.
Ryan sat stock still. The shadowy thing he wanted with this man, who
had been a three-sports star in high school, was not in his father, but was
in him only. Whatever it was, Ryan was smart enough to know that. This
one-sided ache was more than wanting to be like-his-father when he grew
up. This was the first time in his life that Ryan consciously experienced
one thing meaning two things. His father’s hand on his knee was his
father’s hand, but it was something else, something Ryan felt in the pit of
his stomach, something vague he had no name for, something he did not
know even existed, something he would later call passion.
“You don’t have to tell me.” He lied to his father for the first and last
time in his life. “Sister Mary Agnes instructed us boys about what we
need to know.”
Later that afternoon, Ryan rode out to the Bar-H Stables with Kenny
Baker. They squandered four dollars for two hours on two horses to cel-
ebrate Ryan’s last weekend before leaving for Misericordia.
That final Sunday afternoon, in the early evening, Ryan’s rental horse,
at the last bend of the return trail, sensing the comfort of the stables,
broke into a startling gallop. Ryan was terrified. The horse’s pace was too
fast for him. He dropped the tied reins to the horse’s neck and hung onto
the saddle horn with both hands. The horse, taking its head, rounded
the curves of the trails, cutting tight under the sticker branches of the

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