Mother, seeing my latest tangled mess from her kitchen window, will soon come running. As ever, perfectly supplied, she’ll hold a silver tray supporting Merthiolate, pedicure scissors, cotton balls plumped fast and hostessy into a silver salt-dish (Grandmother Halsey’s, 1870 or so). Plus Dan’s favorite drink—a light Cutty and water. (I heard “Cutty Shark,” I liked knowing that its label showed The Fellow Ship.)

Dreading others’ seeing us, hating how pain alone permits our union, I cry “Really sorry” into splayed legs. They remain wide open. I’ve run right into their V-shaped shelter. I wedge now farther between.

I am sobbing, he holds me fast. I am getting to touch good fur on the one arm I failed to hook. I find that, in his suffering, Dan doesn’t much notice how I hold him. And so, sick with boldness, I tip against the inner fabric of his much-washed pants.

Mid-thigh, I read the Braille outline of sexual parts, his. They’re presented plain, canine in guilelessness, grapelike in gentle plentiful cascade. The very symbol of abundance, Mr. Dan’s portables nearby.

Birds, disturbed by his wounded cry, go again all song. I hear Mother clanking in the kitchen, assembling emergency gear. And me? I’m just crazed enough by guilt and proximity. Using bloodshed as my excuse, I find nerve enough to cup my open right hand lightly—light as light itself—against them, against all his. Just overtop, no pressure. I simply do it, crying as distraction.

First Dan only holds my shoulders, staring at my freckles. Then my pleasure—stirred, overambitious—leads me to tighten my clamp on him, his. My reach exceeds my grasp. I see his face change, slow.

(Meanwhile, back at the crotch, my subtle squirrelish fingers register: my Dan today wears no underdrawers, unusual in Falls in ’57. My palm can tell: unlike Dad and me, my Dan here is not circumcised [born poor].)

I see concern fold the brow of a squatting man who clutches a child, holding, unexpectedly, that dude’s own central credentials. No “Ooops.” No, “Errr, would ya please let ’em aloose now, son?”

Instead: Dan himself glances down between Dan’s own mighty legs. Definitely checking on a little scoop-shaped paw now curved against his right-dressed member. Beneath my grasp, it feels as spongy as a round loaf of sandwich-sized Wonder.

He still half-pretends not to notice. No one near the house can see what’s going on. Dan, metal-blue jaw, gives me one sleepy, dubious half-smile. In it, amused recognition, some pity maybe, much fellow-feeling, sadness, a father’s patience for one kid’s guileless curiosity. Oh, The Fellow Ship.

He makes no move at all to close his legs or shift my hand. But—being Protestant—I know to remove my hand, for him. Enough. For now.