The Republic of Boys

Jake Bienvenue

It was not a good bar. It was the kind of place that seized on the trends of 10 years ago—hoppy beers, cornhole, sweet potato fries—and executed them poorly but consistently. The Iron Griz. It sat at the edge of a golf course. It was run by college students, some university program, I think. I was embarrassed to be there at all.

Mitch sat at a high-top on the patio. He was on his phone. It was a pleasant September evening. Mount Sentinel was bright in the sunset, its grasses soft and orange. He saw me arrive and stood and we shook hands. It had been years. Just as we sat down, a kid-server brought him a beer, and after asking what I’d have, the two started in about fishing. “We had a lot of luck down there at x,” and so on. It was clear Mitch belonged to the vagrant young who live on Montana tourism. He was a fishing guide for a luxury ranch. For no reason, I ordered fried okra. Mitch ordered sweet potato fries. I saw a mouse scurry under a table, heading towards the kitchen. We had two Coors Lights each. We left by 8:30, one hour after we arrived. Vague promises to link up again.

I felt odd driving home. Something unresolved from our brief but thorough friendship as boys. Mitch lived two doors down. His father, I recall, often boasted that he was in the MTV video for “The Safety Dance.” At parties, he would put it on the TV, pausing when he appeared, pointing, laughing. Like a Faulkner character, he could not scale the walls of that moment, dancing with the extras. Mitch and I spent long afternoons together, the kind that childhood seems to be made of: aimless, endless, easier if shared. We tread water in the pool. We sat by the creek. We begged pocket change, then walked to the gas station for candy. One unbroken chain of afternoons, that was our friendship. When school started, we had different friends, but in the summer, on those days when the world is a shallow bowl of light, we shared lonely hours, lonelier, in some ways, because shared. Gradually, these afternoons became the more populated days of high school, and we drifted apart as casually as we’d come together.

One fall evening during my sophomore year of high school, I asked Mitch to meet me at the creek, at the scene of our childhood friendship. I had become a Christian. I wanted to test the vigor of Christianity against the vacancy of the life he represented to me. It is boredom as much as grief that drives people to Christ. And Mitch, however unfairly, signified the life from which church had rescued me. On a rickety bridge at dusk, I presented the gospel. He was reticent; I was firm. He gave in, the same way he had when we were boys. We linked arms and spoke a few words over the noise of the creek.

Such a conversion was as empty as any afternoon we’d spent together. More so: those days by comparison seemed quite pleasant. I had felt guilty for years. Guilty and embarrassed—he must think of that moment as a betrayal, an intrusion, a manipulation. Or even just strange. Why had I done that? Just to say I had? To save is the most sacred of powers. Maybe there was some altruism in it, I no longer remember.

Halfway through our second beer, Mitch told me that, years later, he’d been my parents’ pool guy. He was working for some outfit in town, and wasn’t sure whether my parents knew who he was anymore. He pulled his white cap low over his eyes, he told me. What was it like to be in that backyard on a vacant summer day so alike to those we’d spent as boys? The pool sparkling, rippling as the net sailed through, the house of childhood empty, the suburbs hazy in the heat. A vacancy from which there is no salvation.

That we’d reunited after so many years was by accident. I saw online that he’d moved to Missoula, and reached out. What had I expected? Something other than the quiet, eager boy I had known? We did not discuss our friendship. I asked about his family. He said they were fine. His parents had split. His father had moved to Spokane. His mother remained in Folsom with his younger brother, who was attending community college, not seriously. I could see in his eyes that old capitulation, but it was veiled behind some hardness, something borrowed from the company of men who do not want any meddling in their lives: the men, or boys, rather, who run that lonely grill on the golf course and probably the whole town.

I thought of his father. Late hours of a barbecue, frozen before the same suburban dads, Coors Lite in hand, watching that video. “It was here,” he’d insist, pointing. “Right here.”

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