T hey were haloed in the light, smoking in the cool outside the rec center. In their angst and their anger, they made a strange trinity on a summer’s night in 1976. The largest boy, Billy, had grasped the secret of blaspheming. He married a series of obscenities to Jesus and God—shouted them in a voice calculated to alert the town to his newfound skill. Robert, the thin one with the beginning of a boy beard, hunched and laughed while beside him, Louis, a precariously tall, ugly boy with a heron’s neck, leaned back against the stiff corrugated aluminum wall of the rec. When he swallowed, which he did unflatteringly often, it was like he was sucking in an apple. He scooped up a rock and tossed it into the darkness.

“Jesus,” said Billy again, and “Fuck.” The rest of his words were sotto voce: unknowable to the small boy on the freezer watching from across the way.

A stranger to that island in north—a mining town separated from the rest of the world by a security post at the end of a narrow bridge that punctuated fifty miles of dirt road—would have rated the boy on the freezer a good two years younger than the other three, but he wasn’t. “Crazy Talk,” a Chilliwack song, drifted out of the open window of a passing Jimmy, but the boy didn’t notice. He was busy with his shoes, lacing them tight, tight, tight. Then he slipped off the freezer and slunk through the trailer door like a secret agent in a war film. Once outside, he paused beside the caramel-colored Gremlin and lowered himself to the gravel, where he couldn’t be seen. He was concealed and moving, crawling out of sight to the back of the trailer where the yellow grasses shushed his flow and the loud boys could not pester. Here, the dark was not strange like it was in the light of the rec. It was absolute. Here he was free to run like a child. The trees muzzled, engulfed the lawn and drew more silence. He felt rather than saw the bike path and he followed its snake towards the beach, stopped, went aside, and nosed for the bog, where the fallen trees waited precisely. He was not fleeing, he was romancing the night, coming towards those boys in a long, determined loop.

For their part, they dug into the stone beneath their feet and pretended to be sixteen. They hacked with their heels as though they might dig their way out. They lit more cigarettes and said extraordinary verbs. They were not like him (they were disconsolate and slow) although they were of his grade. Diane, the thirteen year-old daughter of one of the French crew—one of Gauthier’s diamond drillers—had gotten their sex up earlier talking about weird stuff that couldn’t be replied to with their limited experience: stuff that reduced them to a few loud obscenities, like the way men spoke. Now she was gone and her curiosity with her and they were waiting for something to strike out against, their pockets full of rocks.

All the while he was approaching. One tree led to another. He didn’t see the trees but he knew them, and he made mathematical quicksteps in the dark: a five-step log, leap left, four steps on a roller, leap right. He was finished with the bog—stood at the base of the coulee. From there he counted back. Eight leaps, if he needed them, would find him at the fouled trunk of a deadweight tree. Its gnarled roots clutched stars. The earth beneath stank of putrid mold and moss.

The building he pressed himself to was the longest building on the island because it had to be. It was stocked with necessities, distractions to combat the stultifying boredom of the north: a curling rink, swimming pool, gymnasium, pool hall, library, and bar. Edging forward from the curling rink end, he could see them at the turn where the library stood with its scant holdings of potboilers and “Lucky Luke” comics. He clutched the cold wall, as though it had the power to make him invisible.

He was deliciously scared. He had tried once before, tried to penetrate their circle with no success, and he knew that they threw hard. Once he got beside them, they would accept him, he assumed; instead of stones they’d offer cigarettes, but how to get through without the ignominy of being pelted? And he had to get through: Jesus, they were his best friends!

For five years, they’d played together, joined in purpose, comrades against boredom and futility. They’d fished in the summer, snowmobiled and tobogganed through the winter; they’d skated, footballed, dreamed and sported their way to a point, a chasm that he had not crossed with them. He stood alone on the bank of a river he could make no sense of. And while he could make no sense of it, the boys on the other bank made no sense to him either. But they were him.

He was closer now, easing within range. He could hear the softer words beneath the obscenities. Louis wanted to go home. Billy called him a suck. Robert couldn’t believe there was nothing else; Thank God, for high school in the fall and a new town where the mine paid to put them up in boarding houses.

“I’m not going,” said Billy with a flat finality. The future meant nothing to him. He’d seen it already every day of his life. Evidently, the Chilliwack song had gotten stuck in Robert’s head. He mumbled tunelessly: “She talks crazy talk. She can make a man feel good.”

As the boy grew nearer, he could see what the light revealed more clearly. It wasn’t as spectral as it had appeared from the trailer. He saw things in the flesh. He noticed, for instance, that the taut expression on Billy’s face seemed to have curiously relaxed. Billy was talking but he seemed unaware of his own words, which was strange as well. Billy loved nothing better than to listen to himself. He saw Billy lean down and pick up a heavy stone somewhat absently. There was nothing unusual about that, per se. But he knew. He just knew.

As the stone leaped from Billy’s hand the boy jumped to the side and a rush of air grazed his ear. A second later, they were after him. They raged from the light. They raged together. They soaked darkness. His feet were a flurry of fear. They were losing sight of each other in the dark when Robert cried, “If we catch you we’ll kill you,” which he knew was a gift. Robert was telling him where they were. But Billy was big with powerful legs in a sprint. The boy could feel Billy’s closeness.

It was three steps down the gully in a shower of stones. Then one two three four five six seven eight. He pivoted, stabbed his body behind the twisted roots of the deadweight tree.

“You’re fucking finished,” Louis chirped, his voice somewhere to the side, somewhere east. Robert’s and Louis’ death threats washed around him like a surging tide. Their voices carried off into the woods.

The world, the night, had spoken: violence then silence. It was the answer to a question he could not formulate. He stood up gingerly. No sounds. He brushed the sick earth from his pants. A bird, he thought, clattered abruptly in a nearby jack. He drifted back to the bog. He was ten steps in the open when he remembered that Billy had not sworn at him. He paused, a sudden cold spike nailed him, and he listened for the bird. Was it a bird? He replayed the footsteps in his head, the clamor that broke and washed over his sanctuary. How many feet?

Not enough. Not nearly enough.

It was at the exact moment when he glimpsed the peril of his predicament that nature exploded on him—a nearby tree burst into flame. That jack had to be twenty feet high. It split in two and the shock of its snap threw him or something else did. Something electric grabbed him and tossed him into the water forcefully. The shattered tree fell in flames into the bog. The water hissed and steamed. And then the night became incomprehensibly dark. He jumped up, fell over a log, rose, fell, found his feet. He stood gaping with astonishment at the charred tree. A strange mingling of moon and midnight gave it the shape of a boy’s body.

“Lightning,” said a voice in his ear. He heard the scrape of a match, then a flame flashed beside him, and he saw the cold contours of Billy’s face in the glow of a cigarette.

All he could say was “What?”

“Jesus loves you. I would have killed you. Honest to God, I would have. But not after the lightning. God fucking damn!” Billy yelped. Then that leering devil turned on his heel, and walked back to the light.

When they staggered from the woods ten minutes later he was already set up in his perch on the freezer. Robert and Louis both gave his porch the finger before returning to where Billy stood waiting with a strange smile, an expression that defied definition. The boy watched them and he knew it wasn’t over. It couldn’t be. No matter what the night said, no matter the meaning of the language of fear and fire that had shaken him in the dark, made his heart leap in his mouth, this romance could not end so hopelessly. He was cut off and he knew it—a verb without a sentence. Like a maddened lover, he understood that he would have to broach the other’s circle, become part of something larger regardless of the cost, if he was going to give himself meaning. If only he could make them stay, just long enough to get it right.

So while the boys slumped impotently against the rec center and made up manly myths about Diane, he retied his laces and stepped out into the cool embrace of the smooth flowing night.