This passed for clarification. I simply nodded, swallowing it whole. I would need to bike to the library. I understood I was not meant to know … how bad, it was, whatever Dan had chanced…. Did Everyone’s Great Shame come from his having attempted it, or his longing for something Dan really truly wanted but never even nailed?

He ceased being. He stopped being, as Mom put it (her joke, not mine) “The Heartthrob of our Community Chest.”

Monopoly had one card we most dreaded: GO TO JAIL. The worst part, you could only sit, could just admire the others’ hopping happily forward, snatching up your better hotels. Eventually, your fellow players quit even addressing you; you could watch them from up close forever, but could not get OUT.

IV. Book Me Passage on The Fellow Ship

When Mom complained about the hours Dad squandered getting even worse at golf, he reminded her: the happiest times of his whole life had been spent at war, with other loud good boys in mobs and squadrons. “Helen, I need my weekly fellow ship time.” The Fellow Ship. Guys spoke of it often, as being golden. As something craved nearly as much as women were, by all real men. Me too. I heard about a local high-school athlete winning “a full Fellow Ship to Duke” and envied him his crowd on board, the jolly boyish upriver voyage clear to that steepled campus.

At age six, I made The Fellow Ship a pirate craft, longer than wide, a carved dragon’s head snarling at its rapier tip, a barge almost too pointedly male ever to float on nebulous female water.

At nine, I pictured a torch-bearing Viking boat, its rowers shirtless doctors and lawyers, its cargo monogrammed leather golf bags, its destination the Links of America, but its true goal: grab-assing, the dirty guesses about who that slutty little Donna wouldn’t “do” dry. At the prow, hands on hips, lit unevenly by violent orange torchlight, shirtless yet bandoliered with those leather thongs Kirk Douglas wore in The Vikings—Dan, Captain of The Fellow Ship of choice. His deep voice called, “Stroke, fellows. Stroke it good, pals o’ mine. Pull hard, because The Fellow Ship is for us baad boys only. Pull hard, good men, because you can.”

I imagined my tree-house closet was a Fellow Ship franchise. Or at least its outrigger offspring, The Boy Raft. Sometimes, among maple leaves, I took off my seersucker shorts. Because I could. Who’d know (robins excepted)? I let the breeze be my buddy, my coxswain.

There was a new verb, used mainly in churches then. Mother found it vulgar. “To fellowship.” For me, that latent active verb sounded like a pillage itinerary, some oarlock means of transport, and my own future port in Paradise.

PROMINENT EXEC ARRESTED
FOR APPROACHING YOUTH, 15
(AT PENNEY’S TOILET)

Dateline: Raleigh—A 33-year-old Falls resident, recent chair of our town’s most successful Community Chest drive and a four-time winner of the Broken Arrow Country Club’s Amateur Golf Tourney, was apprehended on morals charges Saturday while in Raleigh doing family business.