Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 06:45:54 +0000
From: hobby391@att.net
Subject: Boy From The High Country Chapter 8

BOY FROM THE HIGH COUNTRY Chapter 8

by Hobbyboy

hobby391@att.net

DISCLAIMER: See the warning before Chapter 1.

A NOTE ON PSYCHOLOGY: As a college psychology minor, I know
just enough psychology to be dangerous. Like a scientist writing science
fiction, in this chapter I am venturing into what we might call psych-fi.
Art's theory about Kelly and his foster brothers will not be found in the
textbooks. However, it is plausible enough to operate in a fictional
world, and not so far from generally accepted theories as to be totally
impossible.

CHAPTER 8: STORM CLOUDS

We breezed through the Yellowstone entrance with my national parks
annual pass. The first priority was finding a camping spot for the night.
Since I was traveling without an set schedule I did not have a
reservation, but sites were still available on a first-come-first-served
basis., Just inside the entrance, we stopped to check the board showing
the status of each campground. Sites were going fast, and at the east
portal we were still nearly fifty miles from the prime viewing areas of the
park. I had previously decided to see Yellowstone in two days, one day
for each loop of the figure-eight highway that runs through the park, so
the campground at Canyon Village seemed to be the best choice. It was
nearly an hour away.

As we drove over Sylvan Pass it was difficult to visualize this as part of
the rim of an ancient caldera, the sunken center of a great volcano and
the site of one of the greatest volcanic eruptions in the history of the
earth. The scenery became more interesting as we approached
Yellowstone Lake. Kelly squirmed in his seat and swiveled his head like
an owl, trying to take in every spectacular view as we drove past the
typical tourist attractions on our way to nailing down a camping site.
There was nothing like this in Casper. It appeared that Kelly had never
left the city, had never been hunting or fishing or hiking. It was a shame
that a boy could have grown up surrounded by scenic grandeur, without
ever getting a chance to see it close up.

By the time we arrived at Canyon Village, only a dozen sites were left of
the nearly three hundred in the area. It was not an attractive
campground, there being no trees or landscaping in the sites, but we
were there to enjoy the park, not the campground. We drove into the
site long enough to mark it as occupied, and were on our way to take the
southern loop. We decided to save the attractions closest to the
campground until our return, which I soon realized was a mistake. We
were on the east side of the park, and the morning sun would give us a
much better view of Yellowstone Falls than the afternoon light, which I
feared might leave the falls in shadow. Our first stop would be the Norris
geyser basin, located just twenty minutes west.

Our first twenty-four hours together had been full of anxiety and stress.
The remainder of this day was strictly for fun, and Kelly proved to be a
handful. He was a bundle of energy, and I did not move nearly fast
enough for him. As I review my mental home movies of that day -- I still
regret that I had not brought a video recorder -- one recurring image is
of Kelly dashing far ahead on a wooden walkway toward one of the
geysers, then turning around, calling for me to hurry up, dancing back
and forth, sometimes jumping up and down on one foot, then when I
finally caught up, taking my hand and pulling me onward. He couldn't
wait to see the next geyser, round the next bend in the road, or paw over
the cheap trinkets at the next souvenir shop.

At the Fountain Paint Pot, Kelly took one look at the brown, burbling
mud and said it reminded him of his step mother's attempt at making
soup. In my  mind's eye I suddenly saw Kelly as a character out of
Dickens, his bony hands holding out a bowl and plaintively saying,
"Please, sir, I want some... more?" But I was sure that in the movie,
Oliver Twist was not naked.

He never asked me to buy him anything. Perhaps he had been denied
everything for so long that he had come to believe there was no point in
wanting anything. But if he could not have things, he could still at least
admire them. There was only one item that really caught his eye, and it
had nothing in particular to do with Yellowstone. It was the kind of
silver-and-jade necklace that seems to be for sale in every flea market
and souvenir shop in the country. It was always advertised as an
example of "American Indian craftsmanship," with no indication of where
these mysterious Native American jewelers actually lived. When I urged
him to try it on, I saw that the silver chain looked stunning against his
olive skin. The blue-green stone, hanging  just below the cleft between
his collar bones, made the color of his eyes even more intense. Kelly's
beauty made this piece of junk jewelry look, well, not like a million
dollars, but certainly like more than I had to pay for it.

When he realized that the necklace was his, I thought Kelly was going to
cry. Instead, he kissed me. He just leaned forward and kissed me, right
on the lips, right there in front of God and everybody, there in the Old
Faithful souvenir shop. A severe-looking woman with tight curls, looking
as if she had stepped out of a Toni Home Permanent magazine ad from
the 1950s, was just about to cover the eyes of her two pudgy,
sunburned children when Kelly pulled back and in a loud voice said,
"Thanks, Dad!" The lady with the out-of-fashion pin curls dropped her
hands and actually smiled, in a grim sort of way. "Some children still
appreciate their parents," she pointedly said to her own two. Her son
rolled his eyes up into his head and murmured, "Spare me!"

Kelly hooked his arm into mine and we marched out of the store, both of
us grinning insanely, and joined the crowd gathering to watch the no-
longer-so-faithful geyser. The eruption began with a series or spurts,
each a little higher than the one before, followed by a very satisfying main
event. The crowd applauded. Kelly leaned close to my ear and asked,
"Is that me?" I looked at him blankly. "When I squirt, is that me?" I'm
sure my mouth dropped open in shock. His audacity astonished me. He
gave me a wicked grin, then turned back to watch the remainder of the
eruption. I tried not to contemplate the image Kelly had suggested. I
really did not want to have to make any adjustments to my pants. It was
a losing battle.

At Grant Village, I blew up the two-man raft I kept stuffed between the
wall of the camper and the truck bed, and we paddled around
Yellowstone Lake for an hour. We stayed close to shore, because we
did not have life vests. Kelly especially enjoyed splashing me, protesting
that he was just learning how to use the little blue plastic oars. He
squealed with delight when I returned the favor, and soon we were both
drenched.

My skin will burn under a strong reading lamp, so I used plenty of SPF
45 sunscreen. I made Kelly use it too, ignoring his claim that his skin was
brown enough that he never burned. Besides, I had too much fun
stroking the lotion onto his shirtless torso. In this middle of my
ministrations, Kelly suddenly announced, "That's making me horny. Do
me again." His shorts were down and off before I could protest, and he
lay down in the bottom of the raft, ignoring the water that had collected
there. I looked around in a sudden panic, but there was no one in sight
on shore. As an old friend of mine used to say, as well be hanged for a
sheep as for a lamb. The creamy sunscreen lotion made for  a
wonderfully slippery situation, and in the end he was a bit like Old
Faithful after all.

Once again I politely refused his offer of an exchange of gifts. I clung to
my illusion of not really being sexually involved. However, the expression
"blue balls" did come to mind.

At Bridge Bay we rented bicycles and rode the nearly three kilometers
out to the natural bridge. If the trail had been wide enough, Kelly would
have ridden circles around me. Instead he resumed his earlier game of
forging on ahead, then waiting impatiently for me to catch up, but this
time instead of dancing from foot to foot he bounced up and down,
popping wheelies and generally violating most of the rules of the trail. The
ride was hard work for an old man, but even Kelly was beginning to huff
and puff. I had to explain to him that since we were at nearly eight
thousand feet of elevation, he had to breathe a lot more to take in the
same amount of oxygen.

At the bridge we continued to try to wear out the delayed shutter on my
little quick-load camera. I treasure the album of photos we took in those
few days: Kelly and me at a dozen nameless geysers, Kelly and me and
two bicycles at the natural bridge, Kelly and me at... well, you get the
idea. There are none of Kelly and me in the raft, so the album is G-rated
and I can show it to friends. He and I took turns shooting each other,
and the overall impression from the whole album is one of immense
happiness. My favorite picture of all was taken at Artist Point, this one
snapped by a friendly Japanese tourist whose camera we used to return
the favor. Kelly and I are standing with our arms around each other's
shoulders, and behind us is the grandeur of Yellowstone Falls. The falls
were not in shadow after all, though we decided to take another look the
next morning. In the picture we look like a happy father and son, and I
could pass for his father because despite my grey hair and beard, the
years have been kind to me and I look closer to fifty than to sixty.

We were, in the very best sense of the word, happy campers when we
pulled the pickup into the campground in the lengthening shadows of late
afternoon. I grilled the hamburgers we had bought at the surprisingly
well-stocked grocery at Old Faithful. I had a beer, Kelly a Coke, and he
won the burping contest. It had been one of the happiest days of my life,
and it was not over yet.

As the sun sank lower and bright daylight turned to mellow evening, our
mood became more somber. The conversation petered out, and we sat
in the comfortable folding nylon camp chairs and just looked at each
other, paying no attention to arriving vehicles or to the families all around
us still in various stages of preparing and eating their dinners. Their voices
seemed to simply fade away. His face was open and untroubled, and he
regarded me with a look I could only interpret as hero-worship. Who
was I to this boy? Too old to be a buddy, too intimately involved to be a
father, I seemed to have entered into a relationship that had no definition.
I knew only that I loved him, and that I would give him as much love and
attention as I could in whatever time we had together, and that I would
give according to his need.

But to find out what he needed, I had to know what he had been
through. I started our conversation again, remarking about the clouds
that were gathering in the north. Soon I steered our conversation back to
the events of Kelly's past, and at length I was able to ask, "Did those
truckers do anything else to you, Kelly?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, a bit petulantly I thought

"Last night in the shower, I couldn't help but notice something. Your
behind is bruised, I mean, um, there's bruising around your anus. It's
pretty obvious that someone has, well..."

"Fucked me?"

"Yes, Kel, if that's what it was."

"What do you mean, if that's what it was?"

"Well, Kelly, there's playing around, like boys experimenting and
exploring each other's bodies. And there's making love, where two
people have sex because they want to be as close to each other as two
people can get. And there's fucking, which is usually one person just
going for the physical pleasure and not caring much about the other
person."

"Yeah, I've been fucked all right." He said it tonelessly, as if it made no
difference.

"Was it one of the truckers, because--"

"No, I already told you about them."

"Your step father, then?"

Kelly snorted, and nearly choked on his Coke. "You mean Reverend
Satan-gets-in-your-crotch Foster? Shit! He thinks sex is evil. I wonder
how he ever had a kid. He caught me playing with my dick once and he
told me I was going to hell and he was going to drive the devil out of me,
and I thought he was going to kill me."

"What did he do to you, Kelly? How did he hurt you?"

"I remember once he said to me, 'I'm never going to spank you. I don't
have to.' And he didn't. He could do a lot worse than that."

"What did he do?"

"He was some kind of commando or ranger or some fucking thing in the
Army and he learned about these things, these pressure points."

"You mean, like you use to stop someone from bleeding?"

":No, this is different. There are places on your body where he could
press with his thumbs or his fingers and it would hurt like hell. The longer
and harder he pressed, the more it hurt."

"Did that happen a lot, Kel?"

"A lot. If I was late getting home from school, or if he saw me talking to
a boy who wasn't from our church, or if I forgot to mow the lawn, or if
he was just pissed off, he'd take all my clothes off and stand me up
against the wall, and he'd press right here," and he pointed to a spot just
below his rib cage, "or on my back, and he'd just keep pushing, and the
longer he kept his thumbs there the more it would hurt. But the worst
place was right behind my balls. He would push his thumb up there hard
and at first it would feel almost good, and once I started to get a woody
and he sad, 'You are evil!' real loud and jabbed me so hard that I
doubled over and fell down.

"He had this room that had an exercise bicycle and some bar bells and
these wooden rods on the wall he would hang onto and do leg lifts. He
got some towels from the kitchen and he tied my arms and legs to those
bars. He stretched me so far I thought I was going to come apart and he
pushed and pushed there behind my balls and it hurt like a motherfucker.
And if I cried, he'd say, 'Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry
about.' and then he'd push even harder. God, it hurt so bad. And I
couldn't tell anybody he was doing it because I couldn't prove anything. I
mean, I'd read stories about boys who had these welts and scars all over
because of their fathers beating them with belts or something. Sometimes
I wished he would just beat me so I could show somebody what he was
doing, but I never had a mark on me. Freddie's parents were the only
ones who believed me."

"So is that how they got him to let you stay at their house?"

"Yeah, Mr. Watson found this guy on the Internet that teaches this shit
and they bought one of his books and a videotape so they could see
what he was doing. Then they told my step dad that if he didn't listen to
them they would show the child services people how he was hurting me
without bruising me."

"Why didn't they just call child services right away?"

"They didn't really think child services would believe them. They were
just bluffing. But I guess they scared my step dad, because he let me stay
there. Sometimes I just wanted to kill that motherfucker."

Kelly's vocabulary still went into the gutter every time he talked about his
step father. The rest of the time, his language was cleaner than what I
heard every day in the halls of my school. By this time, I was not setting
a very good example myself. "That bastard! Why would he hurt a
lovable kid like you?"

"I told you. He wasn't my father, he just got stuck with me when he
married my step mother. He let his own kids get away with murder, but I
think he just liked to have somebody to hurt."

"But what about the other foster kids who lived with you. Did he hurt
them, too?"

"Yeah, all the time."

"But foster kids usually aren't there permanently. Couldn't they report
him after they left."

Kelly seemed troubled, almost as if he'd been caught at something, but I
couldn't imagine what it might be. "I guess they were just too scared," he
said.

I didn't want to push Kelly too hard at this point, so I hefted myself out
of my chair and stretched out the stiffness in my knees and back. It was
time to take a break. I walked to him and held out my hands. He took
them in his own, and I helped pull him to his feet. I put my arms around
him and held him in a tight hug. "Remember what I said, Kel. I'll never
turn away from you, no matter what has happened to you." Then I broke
the hug and said, "Showers." I started toward the camper. Then I
stopped and turned back to him."Separate showers." He stuck his
tongue out at me.

With our teeth brushed and the dust of the road washed away, we
wandered back toward our site, walking hand in hand. A fresh breeze
had sprung up, and we could hear a distant roll of thunder. Looking up,
we could see that storm clouds were now darkening the sky above us.
We were only half way to the camper when the first raindrops fell, and
we had barely shut the door behind us when a steady rain began. We
were tired but not yet sleepy, and we still had work to do. I opened a
caffeine-free Coke for each of us and got down to business. "Kelly, who
was it that caused all that bruising in your butt?"

He hesitated and bit his lip, a now-familiar sign of nervousness. I smiled
at him, took his hands in mine, and waited silently for him to reply. Finally
he decided to risk the truth. "It was Jason. My step brother. I still
remember the first time. I was about nine, and he was thirteen, and he
was just starting to get big down there. One day my step dad had just
given me one of his special treatments and he pushed me down into the
basement. I was still naked. Then Jason came down right after that and I
was still lying on the floor, crying. He stood over me he said, "You are a
pussy, and I'm going to give you what a pussy deserves," and he started
taking off his pants. I thought he was going to hit me with his belt and I
ran into my bedroom, but it didn't have a lock and he came in after me.
He was naked and he had this big hard on and he had hair on it and
everything and he grabbed my arm and he twisted it behind my back and
he pushed me down on my bed so my knees were still on the floor, and
he stuffed his grungy underwear into my mouth so I couldn't scream. And
he said, 'You're a pussy, and pussies get fucked,' and then he just
pushed his thing into my butt. He didn't even spit  on it or anything and it
hurt worse than anything my step dad ever did. And it just kept on
hurting and his body was banging against me and knocking me against
the bed, and he was grunting, and then he just stiffened up and he said,
'Oh, fuck, yes!' and he sort of fell on top of me. I didn't really understand
what was happening. I just knew his dick was in my butt and it felt like
he'd pushed a burning torch up there. And then he pulled out  and it
didn't hurt quite so much any more and he said, 'If you tell my dad about
this I'll tell him that you are demon possessed and you made me do it,'
and I believed him. And the he put on this accent and he said, 'I'll be
back,' like that guy in the movie."

He fell silent, and I decided to give him a prompt. "And then it didn't
stop."

"No. After that it was practically every day. Every night after dinner I
had to stay in my bedroom naked, because if Jason came down and
found me with my clothes on he said he would tell his dad I had said a
dirty word and I would be punished.."

"Did he carry through on his threat?"

"Only once. After that I stayed naked."

"And what about the other foster boys? What happened to them?"

I could not account for the anxiety that now showed in Kelly's eyes.
Obviously there was still something he did not want to tell me.  He began
to sputter. "They... I... and then one day...."

There was silence, and Kelly looked at me as if I were supposed to
understand something now. Then the penny dropped. I sat up with a
sharp intake of breath. "Your step father caught him."

"Yes. He came home early on Monday and walked in and Jason was
fucking me in the ass. And Jason started to cry and told him he couldn't
help himself because I was possessed by a demon. My step dad started
screaming at me to get my pants on because my step sisters were up
stairs and he wasn't going to expose their innocent eyes to my
nakedness. He was calling me a faggot and a pervert and a son of the
devil. As soon as my pants were up he picked me up by the belt and
threw me out the door. I already told you the rest."

There it was. The whole story at last, or so it seemed. However, I was
suspicious of the eerie, icy calm with which he told his harrowing story.
Recounting these events should have been emotionally wrenching. He
was still holding something back, and I decided that it was taking all his
energy to keep everything under control. The wind was beginning to
howl around the camper, mirroring the emotional storm going on inside
Kelly. I decided to take the risk and push him still farther. "What about
the other foster boys, Kel?"

His composure broke then, and he began to cry, Quickly I motioned him
to come to me, and he climbed up on my lap like a little boy. But he was
no longer so little. Another three or four months and I would no longer
be able to hold him like this. As Kelly's tears began, there was a bright
flash outside and about ten seconds the sound of thunder. The heavens
really opened up and the rain began to hammer against the roof of the
camper. Kelly began to whimper. "I hate storms," he said.

"Don't change the subject. It's just a thunderstorm; they happen all the
time here. It'll be over soon. What about the other foster boys?"

"It's just that I forget sometimes. They seem so... but they don't... they
aren't real, I made them up."

"Why? What are you talking about?"

"When my step dad was punishing me sometimes the pain would get so
bad that the only way I could get away from it was to just let my mind
sort of drift away, and I would imagine that there was another boy
named Mark who was feeling all the pain. I was someplace else, and
there was a beautiful woman who leaned down and kissed me and held
me in her arms. It seemed so real. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to lie."

For the first time I began to feel real fear for Kelly. I thought I was
beginning to understand, but I had to be sure. There was another bolt of
lightning, closer this time, and Kelly seemed to want to burrow into me to
hide from it. We were too close to the center of his misery, though, and I
could not stop now. "Kelly, listen to me. Was Mark the only one?"

"No." It was as if the thunder was Reverend Foster, pushing hard against
Kelly's most vulnerable spots. He was whimpering in fear even as he
talked, but I could not tell whether it was fear of the storm or fear of his
memories. "My step mom used to just scream at me over every job I
did. No matter how hard I tried she would always find something wrong,
and sometimes when she was yelling at me I would just tune her out like
a radio, and I'd leave Joel there to listen to the shouting and the bad
names."

Another brilliant flash and an almost immediate crash of thunder. The
storm was directly overhead now. I was almost shouting over the roar of
the thunder. "What about the rape, Kelly? What about the fact that Jason
was raping you almost every day? Who took that, Kelly? Who?"

He cried out in terror as thunder cracked like a gunshot above our
heads. "That was Christopher. He would kneel down and take it in the
butt and I would just go a way and be with my dad. I was in heaven with
my dad, and Christopher was getting fucked instead of me." The storm
was almost physically buffeting Kelly now, and he recoiled from every
flash of lightning, from every roll of thunder. I held Kelly more tightly and
tried to protect his ears from the thunder while I made a frantic attempt
to piece this all together.

An awful possibility suddenly opened before me like a yawning chasm,
and I then I was sure, without quite knowing how, that I was looking into
the dark truth of Kelly's torment. He was skating perilously close to
developing a multiple personality disorder. How he had avoided it I
could not imagine. He had invented foster brothers to take the pain for
him so he could escape into his fantasies. Mark, Joel, Christopher, had
taken the pain, taken the abuse, taken the force of Jason's unbridled lust,
while Kelly disappeared into some secret place far within himself. Yet
somehow he managed always to come out again, to hold on to that thin
line between fantasy and reality.Unlike a true multiple, he had moved into
these alternate identities only under the pressure of extreme pain or
humiliation, and even then that movement, that hiding, was still in part a
conscious process. He did not suddenly become first one personality,
then another. He was aware of the existence of these substitute boys,
and knew them for what they were: phantoms.Away from his abusive
home, I was sure he would recover quickly, though he should still spend
time with a skilled therapist.

While I was thinking, the thunderstorm continued to intensify. There
seemed to be a flash of lightning about every five seconds, and the
thunder was almost continuous, and deafeningly loud, as if God himself
were a demented drummer and the dome of the sky were the taut skins
on which he hammered the lightning bolts. It was more than Kelly could
bear. He tore himself violently from my arms and frantically tried to open
the camper door. I grabbed him by the arms, tried to slow him down,
but he began to scream, "God is going to kill me. I'm evil and God is
going to kill me. I've got to get out of here so you don't die too."

I tightened my grip and yelled above the storm, "God is not going to kill
anybody. It's just a storm, Kelly, it's just a storm. God is not out to get
you."

Kelly was too far gone to hear anything I said. He twisted away from me
and fell to his knees, clasping his hands over his head and crying out,
"No! No! Don't kill Art! He hasn't done anything wrong! I'll tell you the
worst thing, I'll never do it again, please don't kill him!"

Kelly's screams were matched by the banshee howl of the storm. I had
to do something to try to bring him down from his wild hysteria. I picked
him up bodily and forced him onto the cushions of the dinette. Before he
could recover I snatched the closest half of the mattress from the bunk
and threw it onto the floor. Then I grabbed Kelly again and held him in a
bear hug while I fell onto the mattress. He was so frantic now that only
the fact that I outweighed him by nearly a hundred pounds allowed me to
prevent him from running out into the storm. With my right hand I
reached out and pulled the comforter and the dinette cushions over our
bodies.

"Kelly, if you're going to die, I'm going to die with you. We'll go to God
together. Hold on to me, Kelly. Hold on!"

Kelly was having none of it. "You don't understand. I still haven't told
you the worst thing." Another crash of thunder, a scream of pain and fear
from Kelly, and then more shouting. "Jason. In the basement. When he
raped me. The worst thing is, I liked it. He hurt me and I hated him but
he kept doing it, day after day, and one day it started to feel good. I tried
not to, but I couldn't help it. It was so terrible and so dirty and I liked it
and I hate myself and I want to die." And then there were no more
words, only an incoherent, keening wail, a sound that frightened me more
than the threat of sudden death from the skies. For the second time that
day Kelly was stripped of all his defenses, of everything that keeps us
sane, even of coherent  thought, and there was nothing left but the white
noise of inconsolable grief and inexpressible pain and self-loathing.

There was one more brilliant flash, one more prolonged roll of thunder,
and then, is if in answer to Kelly's anguished confession, the storm began
to abate. My body was wrapped around Kelly as I tried to warm him
and comfort him.  A minute passed, then two, then three, and the rain still
drummed on the roof but at last Kelly, exhausted from his ordeal, sagged
limply in my arms. Thunder sounded once more from far away, and
Kelly began to tense, then relaxed again. He was still crying, but softly
now. I discovered to my surprise that I was weeping too, tears streaming
down my face as my heart went out to this beautiful boy whose short life
had been so filled with suffering.

Kelly finally found his voice. He reached up and touched my wet cheek
in wonder. "You're crying," he said, as if he could not believe that such a
thing could be.

"Yes, my darling Kelly, I'm crying."

"Why?"

How could he not know? Then I realized that he thought only he could
feel his pain. "I'm crying for you, Kelly. I'm crying because they hurt so
much. I'm crying because I wasn't there to defend you. I'm crying
because I'm so happy to be with you now."

Kelly's eyes, reddened by his weeping, opened a bit wider. He thought
this over for a moment, and finally said simply, "Wow!" He seemed
amazed that I cared, that anyone could care.

"We need to go to bed," I said.

"In a minute." And for just about that long, he held me tight. "Okay, now
we can go," he said at last.

It took only a few minutes to re-make the bed. I shut off the light, and
we stripped down and slipped between the sheets. Kelly held his naked
body  tightly against mine, but neither of us showed any sign of arousal.
Then he leaned down and kissed me. It was a lingering, passionate kiss,
and for the first time I felt his tongue first touch my lips, then try to
separate them. I let him in, and I heard him breathe deeply in, then out in
a protracted sigh. His head dropped against my shoulder. The kiss
seemed to have taken the last of his energy, because within moments his
breathing took on the slow, regular cadence of sleep. I closed my eyes
and listened to the softly falling rain until I followed him into oblivion.

NEXT: Chapter 9, Wyoming Dreaming