The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. I can’t explain. I remember this: first, sitting on the bench during my Little League team’s 7 P.M. game, and second, waking in the crawl space of my house near midnight. Whatever happened during that empty expanse of time remains a blur.
When I came to, I opened my eyes to darkness. I sat with my legs pushed to my chest, my arms wrapped around them, my head sandwiched between my knees. My hands were clasped so tightly they hurt. I unfolded slowly, like a butterfly from its cocoon.
I brushed a sleeve over my glasses, and my eyes adjusted. To my right, I saw diagonal slits of light from a small door. Zillions of dust motes fluttered through the rays. The light stretched ribbons across a cement floor to illuminate my sneaker’s rubber toe. The room around me seemed to shrink, cramped with shadows, its ceiling less than three feet tall. A network of rusty pipes lined a paint-spattered wall. Cobwebs clogged their upper corners.
My thoughts clarified. I was sitting in the crawl space of our house, that murky crevice beneath the porch. I wore my Little League uniform and cap, my Rawlings glove on my left hand. My stomach ached. The skin on both wrists was rubbed raw. When I breathed, I felt flakes of dried blood inside my nose.
Noises drifted through the house above me. I recognized the lull of my sister’s voice as she sang along to the radio. “Deborah,” I yelled. The music’s volume lowered. I heard a doorknob twisting; feet clomping down stairs. The crawl space door slid open.
I squinted at the sudden light that spilled from the adjoining basement. Warm air blew against my skin; with it, the familiar, sobering smell of home. Deborah leaned her head into the square, her hair haloed and silvery. “Nice place to hide, Brian,” she joked. Then she grimaced and cupped her hand over her nose. “You’re bleeding.”
I told her to get our mother. She was still at work, Deborah said. Our father, however, lay sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. “I don’t want him,” I said. My throat throbbed when I spoke, as if I’d been screaming instead of breathing. Deborah reached farther into the crawl space and gripped my shoulders, shimmying me through the door, pulling me back into the world.
Upstairs, I walked from room to room, switching on lights with my baseball glove’s damp leather thumb. The storm outside hammered against the house. I sat on the living room floor with Deborah and watched her lose at solitaire again and again. After she had finished close to twenty games, I heard our mother’s car in the driveway as she arrived home from her graveyard shift. Deborah swept the cards under the sofa. She held the door open. A blast of rain rushed in, and my mother followed.
The badges on my mother’s uniform glittered under the lights. Her hair dripped rain onto the carpet. I could smell her combination of leather and sweat and smoke, the smell of the prison in Hutchinson where she worked. “Why are you two still awake?” she asked. Her mouth’s oval widened. She stared at me as if I wasn’t her child, as if some boy with vaguely aberrant features had been deposited on her living room floor. “Brian?”
My mother took great care to clean me. She sprinkled expensive, jasmine-scented bath oil into a tub of hot water and directed my feet and legs into it. She scrubbed a soapy sponge over my face, delicately fingering the dried blood from each nostril. At eight, I normally would never have allowed my mother to bathe me, but that night I didn’t say no. I didn’t say much at all, only giving feeble answers to her questions. Did I get hurt on the baseball field? Maybe, I said. Did one of the other moms whose sons played Little League in Hutchinson drive me home? I think so, I answered.
“I told your father baseball was a stupid idea,” she said. She kissed my eyelids shut. I pinched my nose; took a deep breath. She guided my head under the level of sudsy water.
The following evening I told my parents I wanted to quit Little League. My mother directed a told-you-so smile at my father. “It’s for the better,” she said. “It’s obvious he got hit in the head with a baseball or something. Those coaches in Hutchinson don’t care if the kids on their teams get hurt. They just need to cash their weekly checks.”
But my father marshaled the conversation, demanding a reason. In addition to his accounting job, he volunteered as part-time assistant coach for Little River’s high school football and basketball teams. I knew he wanted me to star on the sports fields, but I couldn’t fulfill his wish. “I’m the youngest kid on the team,” I said, “and I’m the worst. And no one likes me.” I expected him to yell, but instead he stared into my eyes until I looked away.
My father strode from the room. He returned dressed in one of his favorite outfits: black coaching shorts and a LITTLE RIVER REDSKINS T-shirt, the mascot Indian preparing to toss a bloodstained tomahawk at a victim. “I’m leaving,” he said. Hutchinson had recently constructed a new softball complex on the city’s west end, and my father planned to drive there alone, “Since no one else in this family seems to care about the ball games anymore.”
After he left, my mother stood at the window until his pickup became a black speck. She turned to Deborah and me. “Well, good for him. Now we can make potato soup for dinner.” My father hated potato soup. “Why don’t you two head up to the roof,” my mother said, “and let me get started.”
Our house sat on a small hill, designating our roof as the highest vantage point in town. It offered a view of Little River and its surrounding fields, cemetery, and ponds. The roof served as my father’s sanctuary. He would escape there after fights with my mother, leaning a ladder against the house and lazing in a chair he had nailed to the space beside the chimney where the roof leveled off. The chair’s pink cushions leaked fleecy stuffing, and decorative gold tacks trailed up its wooden arms. The chair was scarred with what appeared to be a century’s worth of cat scratches, water stains, and scorched cavities from cigarette burns. I would hear my father above me during his countless insomniac nights, his shoe soles scraping against the shingles. My father’s presence on the roof should have been a comfort, a balm against my fear of the dark. But it wasn’t. When his rage became too much to handle, my father would swear and stomp his boot, the booming filling my room and paralyzing me. I felt as though he were watching me through wood and nails and plaster, an obstinate god cataloging my every move.
Deborah and I frequented the roof for other reasons. On that night, like most nights that summer, we carried two things there: a pair of binoculars and a board game. Our favorite was Clue. We unfolded it on the chair seat and sat cross-legged on the shingles. On the box cover, the six “suspects” relaxed before a ritzy fireplace. Deborah always picked the elegant Miss Scarlet. I alternated between Professor Plum and crotchety Miss Peacock. The candlestick was absent from the group of weapons, so I’d replaced it with a toothpick I’d plucked from the garbage, its surface pocked with my father’s teeth marks.
As usual, Deborah clobbered me. She announced her verdict in a voice that echoed over Little River’s homes: “Colonel Mustard, in the study, with the wrench.”
On the other side of town, the lofty spotlights that circled the ball park flickered on. Little River’s adult softball teams-“rinky-dinks” my father called them, and he refused to watch such amateurs-competed there three nights a week. It seemed as though half the population of Kansas belonged to some sort of ball team that summer. Between our turns at Clue, Deborah and I grabbed the binoculars and focused on the field. We watched the players’ bodies as they jogged through the green quarter-circle of the outfield. We kept track of the score by zooming in on the electronic scoreboard at the left-field fence.
A cottonwood tree towered beside our house. The wind blew seeds loose from its inferno of branches as we solved our murders. By summer’s core, the green pods were splitting, and white cotton tufts butterflied through the air to fall on the roof, the game board, our heads. We knelt beside the chair and waited for our mother to call us to dinner. Dusk swept its inks across the sky, and she finally stuck her head from the kitchen window and hollered, “Potatoes!”
“We get to eat without him,” Deborah said. We left the roof, ran into the kitchen, and began to eat, the potato soup our conspiracy. My mother had thickened the soup with crumbled chunks of homemade zwieback, and as I spooned them into my mouth I stared at my father’s empty chair. It loomed larger than the other three. I imagined he had swallowed an invisibility pill; we couldn’t see him, but we could feel his presence.
That night, I did something I’d never done before: I wet the bed. The next morning, I rose with my skin drenched, partly in sweat from the summer heat, and partly from the urine that soaked the sheet. My father stepped into the room, spiced from his morning cologne, decked out in the corduroy suit he wore to the office. I felt the muscles cramping in my chest. “You’re nearly nine goddamn years old,” he yelled. “And Pampers doesn’t make diapers in your size.” My mother blamed it on confused hormones, allergies from a new detergent, even something as simple as downing too much potato soup or too many glasses of water.
Not long after that, I began fainting without warning. “The blackouts,” Deborah and I called them. They would come unpredictably, at erratic intervals, over the rest of my childhood and adolescence-as often as once a week, as few as once a year. My eyes would roll into my head, and I would drop like a shot deer. I felt emptied, as though my stomach and lungs and heart had been sucked from my body’s midsection. When the school year arrived again, my classmates believed I faked the blackouts. They invented nicknames to refer to those times my senses clicked off and I fell to the classroom floor. Nutcase, they called me. Fake-fuck. Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.
That summer, the summer of ’81, the blackouts were both frequent and severe. My mother took me to Dr. Kaufman, the most expensive and revered of Little River’s trio of doctors. His office sat on the top floor of an historic hotel, our town’s most famous building and, at five stories, its tallest. His waiting room smelled like disinfectant and bandages; the smell made me woozy. “The doctor will be ready shortly,” the receptionist told my mother. I lounged beside a potted fern, skimmed through women’s magazines, and silently prayed I didn’t have a disease.
Dr. Kaufman wore a bow tie, a tweed cap, and a white robe. He ushered me into his office and propped me on his table. I held my breath when the stethoscope’s tip grazed my chest. “Like an ice cube, isn’t it?” he said.
Dr. Kaufman questioned me about the fainting spells, and he furnished my mother with a checklist of possible food allergies. “Do you honestly think his problems stem from food?” my mother asked. She guessed that my first “spell” must have happened during that final Little League game. “Someone could have knocked Brian with a bat,” she told the doctor. “A mild concussion, maybe?”
The doctor nodded. Perhaps that explained why I didn’t remember who had driven me home or what had happened during that five-hour void. “Call me if something like this happens again,” he said. When he touched the back of my neck, his fingers felt chillier than the stethoscope.
Two things defined my father’s life: food and sports. Since I had disappointed him by quitting baseball, I decided to share in his passion for eating. I fixed hot dogs, bowls of popcorn, and lemon-lime gelatin, grapes buoyed beneath the molded surface like infant jellyfish. I climbed the ladder to the roof and served him. We ate together in silence.
One afternoon, as usual, the paperboy dropped the Hutchinson News on our doorstep. My father stopped my mother from slicing potatoes. “We’ll eat out tonight,” he said. He pointed to a quarter-page feature in the paper where an eaterie called McGillicuddy’s advertised four hamburgers for a dollar. My father made enough money to treat us to dinner at Hutchinson ’s priciest restaurant, but he never did.
McGillicuddy’s walls displayed photographs of fifties movie stars. The salad bar was built into the interior of a genuine fifties convertible, its dark purplish red the identical color of the sliced beets that filled one of the salad bowls. We ordered our burgers and stuffed ourselves. When my father looked at me, I pretended to be enjoying the most sumptuous feast ever prepared. He smiled as he chewed, nearly intoxicated by good food at an inexpensive price. Our waitress sported penciled-on eyebrows, drawn into her forehead’s center. Her name tag said MARJEAN and I’M HERE TO MAKE YOUR MEAL AN EXPERIENCE.
Deborah couldn’t finish her burger, so my father wolfed it down. Outside the restaurant, a fire from Hutchinson ’s dump lazily corkscrewed its smoke in the distance. In the parking lot, a young couple danced the two-step. The woman’s dress sashayed around their ankles. My mother watched them, the edge of her water glass poised against her bottom lip.
On the drive home, my father hummed along to AM radio. We passed immense stretches of milo and corn, meadows overgrown with sunflowers, and wheat fields where combines rested like sentries waiting for the upcoming harvest. We passed bankrupt gas stations and fruit stands selling tomatoes, cucumbers, and rhubarb stalks. Deborah and I stared through our respective windows, barriered from their world by the dark vinyl seats.
Midway between Hutchinson and Little River, my father braked and muttered, “Shit almighty.” A huge turtle lumbered along the stretch of asphalt ahead of us, painstakingly making its way toward a pond at the edge of a field where alfalfa plants stretched their purple blooms. The turtle was a snapper, its legs as thick as sausages. My father bounded from the car. He opened the trunk and pulled out a gunnysack filled with tools. From the backseat, Deborah and I heard the clang as he dumped hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches into the trunk.
My mother got out to help. The angle of her body displayed her discontent as she walked toward him, hands on her hips. She bent down. The turtle hissed at them, its ancient jaws clapping shut. My father stepped on its marbled back, slid the gunnysack’s mouth beneath its body, and booted it in. “Meat,” he said. He carried the sack to the trunk, arms held stiff in front of him.
Deborah nudged me and rolled her eyes. She started to say something, but my father poked his head into our backseat window. “Tomorrow night, your mother will make turtle steaks.”
I skipped upstairs early that night, because I feared what might happen. I busied myself by scrubbing an old toothbrush over a lemon-colored urine stain on last night’s bedsheet. As I was pulling pajamas from my dresser, my father tapped his usual one-two-three on my bedroom door, just as I’d expected. “Brian,” he said, “I need help in the backyard.”
I rewadded the pj’s into the drawer and followed my father. He was dressed in jeans and tennis shoes. He clutched a knife, which glinted under the back porch light. He walked to the car, lifted the trunk, and hoisted the gunnysack into the air, the shape inside writhing and quivering against the burlap.
Earlier that spring, my father had demonstrated the proper way to gut catfish and bass. Now I would learn more. He dumped the hissing turtle onto the grass. “Step on its back,” he said. I obeyed. I lifted my head and stared at my room’s windows. Up there, I could see the blemished pattern of my ceiling’s tiles, part of the wallpaper, and a frantic moth, its powdery wings beating against the globe of my bedroom light.
“Hold it down,” my father said. “Put more pressure on it.” I looked to the grass. The turtle’s head stretched forward. My foot’s weight forced it from its shell. My father gripped the knife in his fist, its blade inching toward the neck’s craggy skin. The turtle couldn’t move. For some reason, I hadn’t minded when he’d filleted the fish, but now my strength fizzled. “Step down harder, Brian.” The knife slid across the neck, and I saw a sliver of my face reflected in the blade. A gush of blood washed over it. “Dammit, stomp harder.” The turtle was still snapping, its head nearly severed. My father sawed farther into its flesh. I couldn’t stand. My body weakened, and my foot lifted from the shell.
With the sudden release of pressure, the turtle’s blood splashed the toe of my sneaker and my father’s jeans. Its jaw closed over the meat of my father’s hand, its sharp edge razoring his skin. He yelled. He made one last cut, collected the head in his wounded hand, and stared at me. At that moment, the face wasn’t precisely his. It resembled colorless taffy someone had stretched, then bunched back together. He dropped the turtle’s head, and it bounced twice on the grass.
My father lifted his arm. I knew he was going to hit me. Before I felt his hand, I passed out, crumpling like a dropped puppet.
I awoke minutes later, sprawled in a living room chair. My father stood over me, smiling, offering me chocolate milk in my favorite cup, the one with a map of Niagara Falls that my parents had saved from their honeymoon. When I finished, my father took the cup from me. “You’re better now,” he said. “Nothing’s the matter with my boy.” He thumbed a brown trickle of milk from my chin.
The following day my mother cooked turtle steaks. On my plate, the cut of meat resembled a gray island, floating in its river of gravy. “Mmmm,” my father said, savoring his first bite. “Brian helped carve these babies,” he announced to my mother and Deborah.
The softball complex in Hutchinson sponsored a world-class men’s slow-pitch tournament that summer, and my father didn’t miss a moment. On Saturday, he finished the remainder of the leftover turtle in the form of a gristly stew my mother had filled with pearl onions and baby carrots. “Sunday school tomorrow morning,” he told Deborah and me. He chugged away in his pickup.
My mother sprayed air freshener to immolate the kitchen’s meaty smell. “There now, he’s all gone.” While she sliced potatoes, Deborah and I changed into our pajamas. I turned on the TV.
By the time we finished dinner, that night’s comedies and news had ended. A late movie began on channel ten. The plot involved a teenage boy who hid behind a house’s walls to spy on the typical American family who lived there. I kept dozing off, secure within the huge fur throw pillow, waking to catch fragments of the movie.
I opened my eyes. Deborah was smacking the side of the TV with her fist. “Haven’t even had the thing a year,” my mother said, “and it already needs repair.” Staticky fuzz displayed itself across the screen, leaking blue beams through the room. The sound was fine-“Let’s get out of here,” a character screamed-but the picture was faulty.
A car honked from outside. “Someone’s pulling in the driveway,” my mother said. “His ball games must have ended early.”
She opened the door, and a man stepped into the house. He looked about twenty-five. He wore cowboy boots and a threadbare, sleeveless gray sweatshirt. A pinch of snuff bulged behind his bottom lip, and he periodically spit into a plastic cup. “Christ, Margaret,” he said to my mother. “You’ve got to see this thing I’ve been following, all the way from the outskirts of Hutchinson.”
“You’re tanked,” my mother said. She spun to face Deborah and me. The TV began whispering and buzzing, and the screen cast shadows over our four faces. Its blue reflected in the man’s eyes, something familiar in its color. “Kids,” my mother said, “this is Philip Hayes. He works with me at the prison.”
“Brian,” he said. “Deborah.” He knew our names, which surprised me. His hands shook, and the booze on his breath saturated the air of the room. “Come outside.” He was speaking to all of us now.
I put my glasses back on, then grabbed my sneakers by the laces and stepped into them. Philip Hayes hustled outside, and we followed him out. The night grew curiously quiet, lacking the regular sonata of crickets and cicadas. The silence made me edgy. Deborah and I passed Philip’s Ford pickup, which sat like a dinosaur in our driveway, its humongous wheels jacked up. He had left its door open. “This way,” he said. “Around to the north of the house.”
He led us to the hillside, the side that faced away from Little River toward the field where my father raised watermelons. “Look there.” He pointed to the sky, but the three of us had already seen it: hovering in the night air above our field, a group of soft blue lights.
I stepped forward. My mother gripped my shoulder. “What is it?” she asked. Philip shook his head.
I made out the form of a plane or spaceship. It issued a low hum, like the barely audible drone of machines. It looked like two shallow silver bowls, welded mouth-to-mouth into an oval shape. Lights circled the ship’s middle, and they radiated cones of blue. A small rectangular hatchway protruded from the oval’s bottom. It shot forth a brighter, almost white spotlight that meandered across the field below and illuminated rows of plants. The spotlight lingered, then retraced its paths, as if searching for some sign of life among the melons. The ship moved through the sky as leisurely as a cloud in a breeze. We stood at the north face of the house, not speaking. When I looked at Deborah, the silvery blue glowed against her face. It gave my own skin a bluish tone that sparkled on the toes of my sneakers, where a crust of turtle blood remained.
“While I was driving out of Hutchinson I saw it flying around,” Philip said. He wiped his palm on his sweatshirt and spit snuff onto the grass. “It was going faster then. That white beam kept searching over a field of cattle. I followed it and followed it, and it went right over the sign that says LITTLE RIVER: FIVE MILES. I thought I’d better show this to someone so they won’t think I’m nuts.”
“It’s one of those UFOs,” my mother said. The blue lights seemed to intensify, and the humming got louder. My mother lifted her hand from my shoulder and shaded her eyes.
The spaceship began to move farther away, beyond our field, past the town’s edge. Its spotlight crowned the tops of trees, giving a white corona to the oak and cottonwood leaves. We craned our necks toward the heavens as we stood on the hill, the two-story house behind us like a portrait’s massive frame. I wondered how we looked to whoever or whatever manned the ship. Maybe the ship’s inhabitants thought we were a family: Deborah and I were the kids who shared our mother’s blond hair; this tall, dark-haired Philip Hayes was our father.
Soon the line of trees blocked the UFO. Its glare remained briefly, then disappeared. “Christ,” Philip said. Spit. “I almost thought I was crazy.”
“I wonder if anyone else saw it,” Deborah said. She still watched the treetops, as if the ship would suddenly come zooming back.
We trudged toward the house, Philip following. As we entered the living room, the television gradually sizzled to life, its picture becoming clear again. In the movie, a policeman drew his gun and blasted the criminal teenager in the chest. An ambulance’s wail blended into tinkling, plaintive piano music. “I’ll make coffee,” my mother told Philip. “He should be back soon.” At first I wasn’t certain who she meant. I fell onto the fur pillow, and Deborah sat on the floor.
Philip Hayes joined my mother in the kitchen. I heard her open the cabinet, the silverware drawer, the refrigerator. “What do you think-” I started.
“Shhh,” Deborah said. In the television’s glow, her eyes resembled the jewels of blue lights that orbited the spaceship. Blue, I thought.
The screen displayed the movie’s closing credits. I lazed back into the softness of the pillow and closed my eyes. As I drifted toward sleep my mind focused on two things, a pair of the summer’s images I’d never forget. I saw the cramped room of the crawl space, directly below where Deborah and I were sitting. And then, equal in power and mystery, I saw the UFO, still out there somewhere, levitating the earth.
Our new neighbors were losers. They loved spying on us. After sunset, a woman loitered in the street with binoculars. Two men sometimes idled their car along the curb or in the driveway, shining headlights into our living room. Mom and I tolerated it at first. We had just moved across Hutchinson, the fourth time in as many years, to a house on Monroe Street.
One night, less than a week after we’d settled, we heard a honk from outside. Mom upped the TV’s volume and drew the blind on the bay window. High beams illuminated her from head to belly like spotlights on a go-go dancer.
“It’s that El Camino again,” she said. “Only assholes drive those. Well, I’ll give them what they want.” She began stripping. Her clothes piled on the floor like a miniature tepee. Shorts, blouse, pink underwear. When she finished, she pranced and discoed through the rooms, a dance I’d grown accustomed to. Her skin shone, as white and solid as frozen milk. She resembled a living version of the Venus statue I’d seen in Hutchinson ’s Carey Park, minus the scratches and misspelled graffiti.
She blew the spies a kiss, then shook her fist. “Screw you.” We both giggled. The car sped away, and she dressed.
Later, I curled beside her on the makeshift couch we’d constructed with red throw pillows. She ran her hand through my hair like a warm brush. We switched channels until we found a horror film. Mom finished her bottle and turned the volume down; we listened to the thunder in the distance. The portable fan blew a few hairs loose from her scarf, and they tumbled across her shoulders. She fell asleep first.
I was almost nine years old, and the new house was half-mine, half-hers. The summer of ’81 was just beginning. She snored, her breath heavy and velour against my ear. The movie ended, and a picture flashed on the television: a test-pattern drawing of an angry Cherokee in headdress, numbers and symbols floating above him. Mom stirred in her half-sleep. Her bottom lip grazed my eye. “I’m dreaming about my Neil,” she whispered.
During that first week in June, thunderstorms ripped through central Kansas. Podunk towns flooded, dried up, reflooded. One evening, the father-son weatherman team on channel twelve interrupted Mom’s favorite sitcom to identify where tornadoes had been spotted. Hutchinson ’s warning sirens started screaming, and Mom and I rushed next door to take shelter in our new neighbor lady’s fruit cellar. A single light bulb dangled on a cord from the ceiling. Peaches and tomatoes floated in Mason jars like the unborn puppies I’d seen in the science lab at school. “This place smells like a fucking sewer,” I said. Mom nodded, but Mrs. Something-or-Other appeared as if she’d swallowed chili peppers.
The storm passed. We puddle jumped home. Mom telephoned her current boyfriend, Alfred. He chugged over to pick her up, and they left me in front of the TV. “No work tomorrow, so we’re going barhopping,” she said. She jabbed my ribs. “Be back in half past a monkey’s ass.”
An hour later, another branch of the same storm revisited Hutchinson. The sirens echoed through the street. The top corner of the TV screen displayed a sketchy funnel and the word WARNING. “Three’s Company”’s innuendoed dialogue was replaced by a newsman’s monotone. “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Reno County. Take shelter immediately. Keep clear of windows. If you are in a vehicle, pull to the side of the road, get out, and lie facedown in the ditch…” I’d heard it all before, but for the first time I didn’t have Mom to guide me.
I considered running next door again, then decided on Mom’s room. Through the window’s glass, nuggets of hail mixed with the spattering rain. Car headlights blurred into narrow white trails. The wind almost drowned the siren’s noise. I crawled beneath Mom’s bed and cupped my palms over my ears. It was dark under there, but I found a lacy negligee and a stack of magazines I hadn’t previously seen. Sandwiched between the House and Gardens and Cosmos was a ragged copy of Playgirl.
I’d riffled through porno magazines at school-a kid used to sneak them from his dad’s closet and dole them out at recess. We would draw beards and eye patches on the naked women, then fold them into paper submarines and 747s. But the Playgirl was different; I didn’t want to deface these models. All of them were males. I slid myself from under the bed, pulled the chain on the lamp, and returned to my hiding place. I skimmed the pages. Sullen-looking men lounged on plush sofas, beside swimming pools, amid a barn’s scattered hay.
I focused on “Edward Cunningham”’s series of pictures: he nibbled a strawberry, poured champagne, relaxed in a Jacuzzi, toweled off. He had tanned skin, feathered hair, and, like almost all the other men, a mustache. Edward’s was the shade of my “goldenrod” crayon in the Crayola box. The camera had caught the gleamy water beads on his shoulder and the trail of hair below his belly button. I slipped a hand into my Fruit-of-the-Looms.
“Edward” made me forget the storm. When I finished, I realized the sirens had ended. I carefully replaced the magazine exactly as I’d found it. Had the lower corner been dog-eared five minutes earlier? I tiptoed back to bed. Mom and Alfred returned at 3 A.M., and I held my breath, waiting, until certain they’d fallen asleep.
Alfred announced over a plate of sunny-side-ups that a cyclone had touched down three miles from Monroe Street. He drove Mom and me to view the minor damage. The storm had hit hardest in Yoder, a tiny Amish community we sometimes visited to buy sourdough bread or cinnamon rolls. Bearded farmers drove their horse-and-buggies on roads strewn with litter. Mom pointed first to a dead collie sprawled in a ditch, then to a shingle that had speared through a telephone pole. Tree limbs had avalanched onto a block’s worth of roofs. “Boring,” I said.
We headed back into Hutchinson. “Last night an A-bomb could have hit and I wouldn’t have known it,” Mom said. She swigged her can of Olympia and pressed it against my forearm.
Alfred stopped at Quik-Trip for another six-pack, then beelined across town to the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce. He had told Mom how Little League might help keep me out of her hair for the summer months. They escorted me inside. A circle of rowdy kids lingered under a giant American flag, waiting to scribble their names on lists for the summer’s baseball teams.
I leaned across a table lined with clipboards. On each page, two columns were labeled NAME and AGE. I had to choose from the Junior Division’s twenty-two different teams. “Pick the one that’ll win you the trophy,” Mom told me. She was shitfaced drunk. A puny kid, his ear sprouting the wire from a hearing aid, pointed at her short pink skirt. If I’d been alone with him, I would have crushed the hearing device in my fist.
I chose the Hutchinson Pizza Palace Panthers. One, because their uniforms were snazzy-a crudely drawn cat leaping from a blue and white pepperoni pie. Two, because I thought the sponsors might treat the team to free pizzas after games. “Your coach’s name is Mr. Heider,” the balding man behind the sign-up booth said. “He’s only been coaching a year, but he’s got an enviable record already.”
The man handed me a folded baseball jersey and matching pants. The number ninety-nine was emblazoned on the jersey’s back. “I have to drag that old Polaroid from the closet,” Mom said. She knelt, nearly falling at the feet of the circle of kids, and focused a make-believe camera. “Smile, baby.”
Practice started one week later at a teeny baseball diamond even dwarves would feel stifled on. The fence behind home plate displayed tatters and gouges. The infield’s mud hadn’t yet dried, and a musky odor of rain choked the air. Horseflies buzzed around my head.
Coach Heider lined us up. He wore a white T-shirt, blue sweatpants, an A’s cap. I noticed the bushy sand-colored mustache that curled at his lips’ corners. I’d been thumbing through Mom’s Playgirl almost daily, and I’d started to daydream those mustached and bearded cowboys, lifeguards, and construction workers clutching me, their whiskers scratching my face.
I had told Mom I wanted to look tough, so she had darted to the local Salvation Army store and United Methodist Thrift for wristbands and a used pair of rubber cleats. She also bought the black sunblock most major leaguers smeared below their eyes. I wore the bands, the cleats, and the sunblock to that first practice. My teammates watched me as if I might unsheathe a knife.
Coach squinted at the new troupe of Panthers, searching for defects. His gaze paused on me. Desire sledgehammered my body, a sensation I still wasn’t sure I had a name for. If I saw Coach now, say across a crowded bar, that feeling would translate to something like “I want to fuck him.” Back then, I wasn’t sure what to do with my emotion. It felt like a gift I had to open in front of a crowd.
He told us to announce our names. We obeyed, and he repeated them, scribbling in a score book. “Bailey, Thieszen, McCormick, Varney…” He spoke with a German accent. “Lackey, Ensminger…” When he rolled his r’s on “Porter,” my teammates silently mouthed the same name. I was younger than most of them, which made me want to try harder. I wanted to impress Coach Heider.
The players hit ten baseballs each. Coach stood at the pitcher’s mound, poised like one of the gilded figures I’d noticed on trophies in the Chamber of Commerce hall. He cocked back his arm and pitched. Most kids hit ground balls that barely left the infield or, worse yet, struck out. I’d never seen many of them before, but I could tell they were poor excuses for players. Coach must have mirrored my feelings. “Come on.” Disgust cracked his voice. “Concentrate, watch the ball, swing like you mean it.”
My turn. I gritted my teeth and tried to form a synthesis of a few major league idols. I.e., I’d seen the Reds’ Joe Morgan twitching his right arm before taking a swing, pistoning his elbow as if pumping blood into his biceps. I mimicked the gesture. Coach Heider grinned. His first pitch lobbed toward me, and I smacked a line drive to left field.
After practice, Coach shepherded us into the dugout and began a pep talk from the center of our huddle. He summarized his initial reactions. I might as well brag. It appeared I’d be the team’s star player. My fielding was as topnotch as my hitting, so Coach positioned me shortstop. “And McCormick, I think we’ll bat you cleanup. We need the home runs.” He said the word as if it had three syllables. When he leaned over to pat my shoulder, I noticed a cluster of moles like spatters of chocolate on his neck.
A man walked toward the team carrying an expensive-looking camera. Coach lined us in two rows beside the dugout, and I got the privilege of standing in back, next to him. “This is for our records,” the photographer said. “Say cheese. No, say yogurt.” The numbskulls on the team laughed, and he snapped the picture.
“Refreshments served,” Coach said. The fifteen Panthers fractured the posed configuration and rushed toward his station wagon, most running faster than they had all day. Coach opened the back door to a cooler filled with cans of flavored sodas. I fished around its icy pond and came up with a peach Nehi.
The parents began arriving after the two hours had finished. Mom drove Alfred’s pickup to the ball diamond. She had started a job at an IGA grocery store on Thirtieth Street, and she’d bought an extra house key for me. She strung it onto a thin silver chain and slipped it over my neck. “Now, let me meet that coach of yours.”
Coach jogged toward us. He held a baseball in one palm. He took off his cap and brushed it over the sweat on his forehead. His hair was blond and thinning.
“Mr. Heider, I’m Neil’s mother.” They shook hands. “I have a full-time job and don’t know that many other moms. I was wondering if there might be a system where another Little League mom could drive my son home after games. We live on Monroe Street.”
“No problem,” Coach said. He looked down at me, then scrutinized Mom, as if decoding her eyes’ primal secrets. “I do this sort of thing all the time.” He pointed toward his car. “That’s what station wagons are for. Any time Neil needs a ride, he’s got it.”
I imagined sitting in the front seat, his leg brushing mine as his foot touched the accelerator. “That’s some ballplayer you’ve got,” Coach Heider told Mom.
“He’s mine, and I love him.” She held my hand as if it were money.
Coach lobbed me the baseball. “Here’s the one you nearly whacked over the fence.” A grass stain on its leather resembled a screaming face. “It’s yours to keep, your trophy.” He touched his thumb to the black line of sunblock on my cheek. He glanced at his thumb, winked at me, then looked back to Mom.
The arms of our backyard’s apricot tree drooped with wormy fruit. Three swings and a slippery slide stood under the tree. I never used them. The poles were striped pink and grayish white like candy canes, and 6411 North Monroe ’s previous tenants had painted clown faces on the plastic swing seats. Sparrow shit peppered the slide. Years later, Mom would ask a neighbor to tear the whole set down, and I’d realize I never did slide or swing on the thing.
As it turned out, Mom got more use from the set than me. The night of that first practice, I heard her and Alfred. His voice kept slurring things like “Jesus Priest” and “Christ above.” After a while, I figured out his words weren’t coming from Mom’s bedroom but were creeping into my open window from the backyard.
I knuckled the crust from my eyes, crawled from bed, and peered out. The violet bug light crystallized everything in its somber, rheumy glow. Something that looked like a bat whirled figure eights above the tree. An empty bottle of Beefeater gin sat beside Mom’s portable eight-track tape player in the grass beside the porch. I could hear Freddy Fender’s voice crooning the melody of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”
Alfred slumped in the center swing’s seat. Mom hovered over him. His shirt was pulled to his neck; his pants, to his ankles. Her hands bustled in his lap. Alfred’s cowboy hat had fallen off, and hair curled from his head in wisps, as lacy as the silk that covers an ear of corn. His body swayed back and forth, lazy and gin-seduced. His bare feet smashed apricots into the lawn. “Christ,” he said again, drawing out the vowel in unison with the eight-track tune’s schmaltzy crescendo.
Mom’s head lowered to Alfred’s crotch. When it lifted again, I could see his dick. It looked huge. I only remembered two, maybe three, of the guys from Mom’s magazine having dicks that big. Alfred reached down, circled two fingers around its base, pushed her head back toward it. The bug light zapped, its purple flash ending the life of a mosquito, a grasshopper, something.
Mom blew Alfred. Someone among our cast of neighbors was no doubt spying on them, too. I watched it all and wondered the things I’ve come to realize, if those personal experience stories in all the porno magazines I read are true, are common things for a kid to wonder in this situation. How would it feel to have my dick in someone’s mouth? To have someone’s in mine?
I focused on Alfred’s features. His jaw clenched. His eyes opened and closed. He talked ceaselessly during their sex-“Yes, Ellen,” “Oh God that feels good…” Looking back, it paralyzed me to hear him, but it wasn’t long after that I became a sucker for blabbermouths in bed. I would learn to relish an older guy telling me exactly how I made him feel, precisely what he wanted to do to me.
After five minutes, Alfred hoisted Mom up, pulled off her blouse. Her nipples purpled under the bug light’s blaze. She stumbled as he led her toward the slippery slide. He positioned her with a leg on each side, then pushed her onto it. I thought of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster on the slanted doctor’s table, jagged bolts of electricity jetting above his head.
Alfred fucked Mom on the slide. I imagined myself in Mom’s position, my favorite “Edward Cunningham” straddling me. I unzipped. “That feels amazing,” Alfred murmured.
Alfred pushed himself into her. Faster, harder, the usual. The slide buckled under Mom’s ass on an especially deep thrust. She gasped. Double pause. They both laughed, and Mom touched a finger to her lips. The zapper jolted another bug.
The season’s first game pitted the Panthers against a group of kids from Pretty Prairie. They had won the league championship the previous year. Still, we stomped them, 13 to 5. My first time at bat, I didn’t concentrate. I looped a pop fly to the third baseman. But later I smacked a double and a triple, the latter with bases loaded. I slid into third base just for the thrill of staining the pants’ knees with mud. From the bleachers, the row of moms and dads erupted into applause. None of them knew me. I fantasized them wishing I was their son instead of one of the talentless fuckups they were raising.
The game ended on a double play. A Pretty Prairie kid slid into second base, where a Panther crouched with ball in glove. An umpire barked, “Yer outta there.” The crowd went wild. From the dugout, Coach Heider paraded his score book in the air and grinned.
After the win, the losers jogged toward the pitcher’s mound, then lined up to shake hands. This was a ritual after every Little League game: to display sportsmanship, each team congratulated the other. The Pretty Prairiers looked on the verge of tears. “Good game,” each kid chanted as he touched a stranger’s palm. We were supposed to repeat the same two words, but I stayed silent. This pissed off my opponents more than if I’d shrieked “Fuck you.” I glared into their faces; squeezed their hands as if they were sponges.
Coach Heider watched me, still smiling.
Coach telephoned the Saturday after game number one. He told Mom the team would celebrate the victory by meeting at the Flag Theater on Main Street for Sunday matinee. If she would consent, he would pick me up in the station wagon tomorrow at noon. “Certainly,” Mom slurred. She buttoned her IGA apron for the late shift.
He arrived at our house wearing his usual T-shirt, but jeans in place of sweatpants. His station wagon smelled mossy and artificial, a scent that pulsed from a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from his rearview. On the drive across town, he asked what theater candy I liked best. I listed Hot Tamales, black licorice, those pastel-coated almonds that looked like the eggs of some curious bird. Mom always griped that the almonds were beyond her price range. Not Coach. “Yes,” he said, his voice flustered and boyish. “I could eat ten boxes of those.”
When we reached the Flag, none of my teammates was waiting. The lobby was empty, save for twin girls who held hands with a furious-looking granny. Coach didn’t say anything about the rest of the team, and I didn’t ask. It surprised me that he would lie to Mom, but more than that, it excited me.
Coach stepped to the ticket booth. The scheduled movie, some imitation Disney clunker, didn’t interest me. I only liked the more violent sort of animation. I took a chance and asked if he wanted to drive over to the Fox. I knew they were showing the R-rated Terror Train. Even then, I was a sucker for horror flicks. Coach looked uncertain, but I shrugged. “Mom doesn’t care.”
Off we went. Terror Train featured a killer who struck during a masquerade party. I relished his skill in twisting the mask off each new victim’s head and slipping it over his own to fool the next victim. Coach watched me during the entire movie, but I pretended not to notice. I munched two boxfuls of pastel almonds. I clapped when the murderer beheaded one partygoer, and Coach smiled. He seemed to be giving close examination to my every reaction, short-handing mental notes.
The Fox Theater’s painted walls showed señoritas dancing the salsa and fringed matadors flapping scarlet sheets at bulls. Chandeliers hung from a three-stories-high ceiling. Burgundy curtains shrouded the screen, slowly brushing back as the film started. During the action, Coach tilted his head, as if spirits were flouncing among the chandeliers, but when I looked over, his gaze remained fixed on me. By the movie’s finale, his head rested against the back of his seat. “You missed the last part,” I said. The heroine on screen sobbed pathetically. “The killer finally bit the dust.”
His hand cupped my shoulder. “Let’s head home. I’d bet money you’re hungry.”
“Sort of.” I walked up the aisle and kicked a bucket, scattering popcorn kernels across the carpet. “Pizza, maybe.”
“There’s a take-out place called Rocco’s just down the street from my house,” Coach said. “They use fresh mushrooms instead of canned. They make zucchini pizza, which I’ve yet to try. Plus, their slices of pepperoni are bigger than this belt buckle.” He pointed to a brass horse-head-inside-of-circle between his stomach and crotch. “So, if your mom didn’t set a curfew, maybe we can watch cartoons and pig out and set up some strategies for next week’s game.” I nodded, curious about Coach’s house.
We stepped toward the station wagon. The afternoon sky had darkened, the air thickening as another storm swirled into Hutchinson. The clouds looked like marshmallows dunked in grape juice. Heat lightning flashed in the distance.
Coach lived alone in a small house off Main Street, near the Kansas State Fairgrounds. Once a year, Hutchinson hosted the State Fair, our city’s major tourist attraction. Catty-corner from Coach’s porch, a billboard displayed the forthcoming September’s entertainers. The names on the sign proved typical for the fair: The Statler Brothers, Eddie Rabbitt, magician Doug Henning. “‘September twenty-sixth, Tanya Tucker,’” I read. “That’s my ninth birthday.”
Coach unlocked his front door and swung it open. I noticed two baseball bats in the umbrella stand. Directly in front of me, in his living room, were a giant-screen TV, a VCR, an Atari with game cartridges strewn around it. Some of my favorite games dotted the floor: Phoenix, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Joust.
“I’ll order the pizza,” Coach said. “Do whatever you want. Turn that thing on if you feel like it. Frogger’s my favorite. How does pepperoni and mushroom sound?”
I nodded. He disappeared into the kitchen, the slatted half-doors swinging behind him like the doors in movie saloons. I heard him lift the telephone from its receiver. I glanced around the room. Three blue beanbag chairs lined one wall. Coach had thumbtacked an Aquaman poster above a leopard print couch. The end table was scattered with Disneyland brochures and a hardback called Coaching Young Children. Other books, albums, and videotapes lined the bookshelf. I flicked the switches to the TV and Atari. Bleep, said the screen.
Coach returned and set the game panel for two-player mode. “Positive your mom won’t be expecting you?”
“She’ll stay pretty late at the store,” I said, “and then probably go out with Alfred.”
He raised one eyebrow and began pressing the joystick’s button. “My guess is you spend a lot of time by yourself.” On screen, his frog vaulted a ravenous electronic alligator.
“It’s no big deal. I kind of like it. School’s out for the summer. I watch TV or ride my bike. We have some weird neighbors, so I pedal around and spy on them.”
“I’m alone a lot too. When I’m not coaching, I stay here. I mostly just like some good friends to be with now and then. Good friends like you.” The screen’s colors strobed against his blue eyes. He didn’t blink. His frog drowned, and he handed me the joystick. “So, where did you learn to play baseball like that?”
“I taught myself.” I could guess the next question, so I continued. “He’s dead. I never knew him.” I turned my head from his face to the television.
Coach won both games. In the middle of the third, the pizza arrived; he shut off the Atari and spread the open Rocco’s box before us like a treasure map. “Wait here.”
He jogged to the kitchen and returned carrying a Nikon camera in one hand, two cans of peach Nehi in the other. He gave me the pop. “I remembered you like this stuff.” He watched each bite I took, each mouthful I chewed. After I’d finished my second piece, Coach opened a door to his stereo cabinet. He fetched a small microphone and plugged it into his receiver.
“This might seem weird at first,” Coach said. “I want to do a little experiment with you.” He handed me the microphone. “Just start talking as you normally would. I need to record my team’s voices, especially my good players. And something else, too. Take a couple of big slugs of that pop. Don’t rush it, there’s no hurry. When you think you’re about to burp, tell me and I’ll record it.” He fingernailed a switch on the camera flash, and a high-pitched squeal filled the room.
I swallowed a breath, uncertain what Coach was doing but having fun nonetheless. I had snagged his attention. “I’m ready,” I said. I belched three times over the next five minutes, and he taped them all.
I spilled some peach Nehi on the carpet. Its fizzy puddle looked like battery acid, and I tried in vain to wipe it up. “Shit.” When Coach heard me say that, he grinned. “Good,” he said. “Keep that up. Say ‘shit’ again. Say ‘goddamn.’ And burp a few more times.” I obeyed. I even said “fuck” once. That seemed to impress him. He knelt down and hugged me, my face even with his stomach. I could feel curly hairs through his shirt, the miraculous breath swelling inside him. He brushed his chin against the top of my head.
“I like you,” he said.
Coach stood again. The tape continued recording. In between my giggles and cuss words and burps, he snapped photographs. For most of them, he instructed me to look up at him and smile. I stuck out my tongue in one picture. He fingered its pink tip-I tasted the salt of his skin-and clicked the shutter. For another photo, he made me push the microphone between my lips and close my eyes. “Oh, Neil, that’s perfect.” Click.
I couldn’t sleep. Alfred and Mom were fucking in the next room. I tiptoed to the bathroom, locked the door, stretched out in the tub. The porcelain stung, as frosty as a glacier. I slipped my underwear to my ankles, grabbed my dick, and lifted my forearm to my lips, feverishly kissing my skin as if it were someone else’s mouth. Thunder rumbled from outside, and Mom’s bedsprings squeaked. The sink’s faucet dripped every fifth second. I squeezed my eyes shut, but this time I didn’t picture the men from Mom’s magazine. Someone else stood over me. He dropped his camera and bent down, unbuttoning and unzipping, his face moving toward mine. I heard Alfred mumble an incomprehensible sentence. I mouthed the word “Coach,” tonguing furiously at my arm, grating my front teeth against the skin.
When I woke, my mother’s knuckles were drumming the bathroom door. “Are you alive in there or what?” I pulled my underwear up, covered the purplish mark on my arm, and stumbled out.
The second of July, 1981. Mom had been appointed to work a double shift at the IGA. “I feel like a slave, there’s got to be something better,” she said. She hugged me, her arms wrapping around my body, her fingers aligning with my ribs. I thought of the way Coach had hugged me and wished Mom were him. “I know you’re going to beat their asses tonight. I predict four home runs.” Mom kissed me between the “four” and the “home runs.”
I thanked her. At 7 P.M, the baseball diamond would feature the Panthers versus Hutchinson Taco Hut, who’d lost every game for the past two years.
“Coach will drive you home, I guess.” Mom hand-fanned her face and skipped toward the door. “I love you, love you, love you, and don’t you forget it.” The screen crashed behind her. I waved with my baseball glove as she started the engine.
Mom hadn’t been gone ten minutes when Coach’s car idled in our driveway. The game wasn’t scheduled for another three hours. When I slid into the station wagon, I planted my glove on the seat between us. “I’m glad you’re early,” I said. “It’d be great if I could try those other game cartridges.”
Coach parked the wagon in his garage. I followed him toward the house. “Home is where the heart is,” he said. He reached toward a shelf piled with five or six photo albums. He pulled one down, handed it to me. “I got the pictures developed.”
I fell into a beanbag. The first twenty or so pages showed other boys I didn’t know. Some wore baseball uniforms. One series displayed a shirtless red-headed kid, pizza sauce smudged across his chin, playing the game Battleship. I couldn’t help staring at one blurry print, shot in extreme close-up, where the boy seemed to be nibbling the big toe of someone’s-probably Coach’s-bare foot. The kid’s freckled face looked confused, as if he’d just been bludgeoned.
On the following page I saw myself, holding the microphone. I bent closer to examine. My hair needed combing. My skin was pale, and my pupils gleamed red. I looked haunted. I’d appeared this way to Coach as he’d stared down at me. I flipped through the next few pages, discovering more photos of me in the album than all the photos taken during my entire life. In one shot, my eyes had closed. “I look pretty stupid here.”
“No, you’re perfect,” Coach said. “Your expression-like you’re having a really great dream.” He sat in the beanbag beside me and fit his palm over my knee. He had bitten his nails, and one finger’s cuticle grinned a dried crescent of blood. “I think I like you better than those others in that book. You’re definitely a better ballplayer.” The hand on my knee tightened. It seemed faultless, the hand of someone amazing, superior, invincible. “Neil, I’ve been thinking about you a lot this week.”
My face heated up. I squirmed from the beanbag, not wanting him to see it. “I’m hungry.”
Coach stood and moved toward the kitchen. I followed. “Another pizza?” he asked. He opened a cupboard. “Or maybe you see something you like in here?”
He’d stocked his kitchen with bags of candy, fudge cookies, Jiffy Pop popcorn, Tang, boxes of pudding. I spied a Breakfast Sampler Pack, miniature boxes of ten different cereal brands packaged together. “Mom never buys those things,” I said, pointing. “She says they’re a big waste of money.”
“Let’s eat, then,” he said.
I chose sugar Corn Pops. Coach, Cocoa Krispies. He pulled milk from his refrigerator and two spoons from another drawer. He positioned his fingers at each end of his box and faultlessly ripped it open. I tried to emulate, but when I tore, the box exploded. The cereal spilled across the checkerboard tiles. “Shit,” I said. Gold nuggets lay at our feet, their sugar coatings gleaming in the kitchen light. I started to apologize, but Coach shushed me. He held his box over his head. He tipped it. Cocoa Krispies rained down. I watched as he opened the Froot Loops, the Alpha-Bits, the horrible-tasting Special K we wouldn’t have eaten anyway. He spilled them all.
The cereal scattered the floor. In the moment that followed, everything around me clarified. I stared at Coach, every detail of him, this grown man’s body standing before me. The kitchen’s light sharpened the thin blond hairs that curled from his shirt collar. The darker shade of his mustache. His sideburns, clipped level with his earlobes. The small copper-colored sunbursts that ringed each black pupil. And, inside that black, a reflection of my face.
Coach’s hand reached for me. It clamped the back of my neck. I closed my eyes and felt him guiding me, regulating my actions, pushing me toward the floor. I fell to my knees, and he fell with me. “Here we go,” he said. I opened my eyes, and he was leaning over my body. Hundreds of cereal bits were strewn around us like debris from a catastrophe. My nostrils bristled with a perfume of sugar. He moved closer, and I smelled his breath, the clean scent of his Panthers T-shirt, the coconutty residue of his shampoo.
He massaged my neck. “When I really, really like someone, there’s a way I show them how I feel.” He gently pushed my shoulders until I lay flat on the floor. He rested his head against my heart. I shifted under him, and pieces of cereal crunched beneath my ass. Snap, crackle, pop.
I knew what was happening. Half of me realized it wasn’t right. The other half wanted it to happen. Coach hugged me, his fingers soothing and caressing, tracing and retracing the paths and angles of my shoulders, my back, my ass. “Shhh,” he said. “Angel.” His nose touched mine, and his breaths moved into my mouth. “There’s nothing wrong with kissing someone like this. Nothing. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything wrong with it.”
He shut his mouth over mine, pushing his tongue between my lips, trailing the line of my front teeth, moving back to circle my own, smaller tongue. It felt as though his tongue were gorging my entire head, tasting and licking behind my eyes, tracing the blue lobes of my brain. Our teeth clicked together. His bottom lip curled over my jawline. My head was disappearing, he was swallowing me. I moaned and understood it was the right noise. Alfred and Mom made that sound at night.
Occasionally I’d open my eyes, catch a random image, then snap them back shut. The images shuffled in my head: his fingers, loosening his circle-and-horse-head belt buckle; teardrops of green glass on the chandelier; his shirt’s pouncing, drooling panther; silver fillings in the recess of his mouth.
He stretched on top of me. More snaps and crackles. My hand made a fist against the linoleum, and my palm burst pebbles of cereal. The tongue kept darting inside my head. Trails of his spit dripped down my throat. I swallowed.
His head lifted. “Shhh.” He unzipped, and somehow managed to wriggle his jeans to his knees. His dick stiffened against my thigh. “Open your eyes and look at it,” Coach said. I did. At that second I would have obeyed anything. His dick curved slightly upward, a milky drop leaking from its tip.
“Neil, I like you so much.” His eyes resembled chunks of stained glass. He kissed me again, and one hand wandered up my leg, rubbing my crotch through my baseball pants. “That feels nice, right?” He squeezed, ironed, massaged. “Right?” Yes, it felt nice. I heard something that sounded like fabric ripping. He reached inside my baseball pants. He grabbed my dick, the sweat of his palm almost stinging me. I focused on a vein in his bicep. The vein twitched like a puppet’s vulnerable string. My body tensed, canting against the support of his other arm, nearly nine years of anticipation clamping in each tendon and muscle. I couldn’t hold it. I moaned again to let him know, and then he shuddered. His entire body shook. He quickly pushed himself up to kneel over me, and in that second I saw the full size of his dick, candy pink and unreal, as it arched over my chest. His sperm shot from the head and pooled its white dribbles across the ninety-nine on my jersey front. It shocked me a little, but I kept quiet. After a while, I put my palm over the puddle. The come felt warmer and stickier than I’d expected. Beneath it, my heartbeat steadied.
He lay back down. He wore an awkward, pained expression, and when he sighed into my face, I could almost taste the heat in the rushing air.
“You liked it,” Coach said. He wasn’t looking at me. “It’s okay that you liked it, it will all be okay.”
Minutes passed. I counted the number of my breaths before either of us spoke. I was on sixty-five before Coach said anything. What he said was, “Shhh,” again, although I hadn’t said a word. I started shivering, and Coach hugged me, covering as much of me as he could, as if my skin had burst into flame and his body were a blanket to snuff it. Only my mother had held me like that.
“That’s how I feel about you,” Coach said. “There’s nothing wrong with showing it. People are afraid to show it, but you should know there’s nothing wrong with expressing to someone how much you really like them, how much you’re proud of them.”
I looked at the floor’s mess: two spoons, a pearly bead of his come, and cereal nuggets in all colors, as if a kaleidoscope had shattered. I swallowed. The taste of his tongue seared my mouth.
He zipped up. It happened, I told myself; it happened. And I had liked it. I heard dogs barking outside, a group of kids fighting in clipped sentences. “I’m telling,” one bawled. Coach dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor beside me, then stepped over my body, a black smudge from my sunblock on his shirt front. He hunched over the sink and twisted the H knob. The water splashed his hands. “I’ll clean the floor later.” He smiled at me. “My number ninety-nine. Guess we should think about heading over to smear that Taco Hut team.”
We demolished Taco Hut. Somewhere within those seven innings I smacked three RBIs, but I don’t remember a moment. I saw his hands giving signals from the coach’s box on the third base line, and I thought about our sex. Although it was difficult to understand it then, what I wanted was more. For the rest of my days I would want it. I would see sex everywhere, splinters shoved into each molecule of each space, saturating everything I saw and smelled and tasted and touched.
I could leap ahead and detail the afternoons I spent with Coach, the money he gave me, everything I learned from him. I could mention the summer’s end, the beginning of third grade, the following June when the Chamber of Commerce assigned Coach another, older group of boys. Without a guide, I would quit baseball. Our paths would trail further and further away, and our relationship would end.
But he’s still here, in a way I can’t explain. Oftentimes I wonder where Coach lives, what he’s doing, whether something like prison or lynch mobs or disease hasn’t killed him. But looking back it doesn’t matter. What matters is how, for the first time in my life, I felt as if I existed for something. When I think back, and I do that a lot, the majority of that summer fades. I barely remember the vacation Mom and I took to Abilene, or her breakup with Alfred. I almost forget the other boys on the team, even the others Coach lured to that house across from the fairgrounds marquee.
Sometimes it’s all I think about: the times I spent with him. It’s as if he and I were all that mattered. My best dreams feature him, no one else, the two of us suspended in his sugary-smelling rooms, alone, as if God had positioned a beam on central Kansas, and Coach and I had stepped haphazardly into its light.
Summers, my father raised watermelons. By September, they matured into ripeness, the salmon pink of their flesh deepening to vermilion. Before the morning’s temperature moved above eighty, my father tramped between the vines, knife in hand, and carried watermelons to the house. Our family ate so much of the fruit, our veins might have contained a concoction of blood and melon juice.
Little River lies nestled one mile off Highway 56, and every autumn my father set up a fruit stand to attract the profusion of cars that drove to and from the yearly Kansas State Fair, held twenty miles away in Hutchinson. He appointed Deborah and me to oversee the truckload of melons. “You sell the goods, you make the money,” he’d say.
One summer-two years after the summer of our UFO-my father decided we could sell unchaperoned. On the fair’s opening morning, he parked the pickup in the gravel shoulder where the Little River road met the highway. He lifted himself into the cab and repositioned the melons, scattering the common, striped kind among the black diamond and pint-sized sugar baby varieties. He handed us an old Roi-Tan cigar box in which one-and five-dollar bills were peppered with handfuls of change. He gave us the thumbs-up and turned to walk home.
Deborah and I perched at the end of the truck bed, watermelons bubbling around us in a pell-mell sea. I felt important, like a merchant opening shop. While she weighed each fruit on a rusty scale, I multiplied the number of pounds by six cents and Magic Markered the price on each rind.
Our first customers coasted toward us: an elderly couple and their three grandchildren. The red frames on the woman’s sunglasses matched the color of her smudged lipstick. She seemed frazzled and desperate. “We’re spending loads of money on all those silly games and rides at the fair,” she explained, “so we might as well spend even more on your melons. Better for the little ones than cotton candy or funnel cake.” She tested a fat one’s ripeness by thumping her fingernail against it. Then she scratched its rind and checked the color. Deborah rolled her eyes. Our father had shown us the secret of telling if a melon was ready: a thin, curly filament wormed where the melon met the vine; when that turned brown, the fruit was ripe. We didn’t relay our secret to the woman. We let her thump until she made her choice. Deborah weighed it. “Harold, give them two smackers,” the woman said, and her husband paid us.
All summer, the sun had lightened my hair, and Deborah’s had bleached to the color of chaff. By noon that day, my hair had dried out, and my skin was tingling. I knew I’d be sunburned by evening. “We forgot suntan lotion,” I told Deborah.
She pressed her thumb against my shoulder. It left a white impression for half a second before the pink returned. “You’ll look like a lobster,” she said. I remembered the previous summer, when we had taken a trip to Kanopolis Reservoir and I had fallen asleep on the beach. Sunburns made me nauseated. If I got sick, my father wouldn’t let me sell the next day.
Deborah’s best friend, Breeze Campbell, bicycled to the highway and joined us. She hadn’t brought suntan lotion, either. She suggested we eat. I found a knife behind the seat in my father’s cobwebby pickup, the same knife he’d used to sever the turtle’s head, two years before. I chose a watermelon, strummed the gauze of sand from its surface, and aimed for its “ 1.25” price. Stab. The melon split in jagged halves, and we dug our fingers into the meat to gobble it up.
I was always shy around Deborah’s friends, but as we ate I grew bolder. I stood beside the pickup, stuffing fistfuls into my mouth, making certain they were watching me. I didn’t swallow. Instead, I punched both my swollen cheeks simultaneously, juice and seeds exploding from my mouth across the pavement. Breeze laughed. She hopped from her seat on the scale and joined me, repeating my actions.
The three of us waited for cars to speed by, then “vomited” watermelons across the highway. After a while I got carried away. I selected melons from the pickup bed, lifting them above my head and dropping them. They burst on the asphalt, echoing identical splotch sounds across the fields. In minutes chunks of pink meat, scraps of rind, and slimy seeds littered a stretch of Highway 56. Flies hovered around the mess as if it were an animal’s carcass.
Deborah stopped laughing. I turned and saw my father. He had showered, dressed, and slicked back his hair, undoubtedly planning to drive into Hutchinson for softball games. The sun shone off the oil in his hair. He pressed both palms against the sides of his shorts, the fingers splayed out stiff and trembling. Breeze cleared her throat and began walking her bicycle up the road.
I could never predict my father’s reactions. He would comfort my mother one minute; slam the door in her face the next. On that day, my father didn’t hit me. He looked toward the east, then the west, for cars. The horizons were clear. He stepped toward the debris and began tossing pink clots of melon into the ditch. When he came to a piece of rind, he held it up and examined the price Deborah had written. “Dollar eighty-five,” he said. He pitched another mess of pink. He found another rind: “Two fifty. A big one, Brian.”
When my father had finished, only a stain remained on the highway asphalt, a burst of juice shaped like a star with countless points. He shuffled to the pickup and leaned against its side. I watched his hands. A fly landed on the left one, wriggling its spindly legs. He shooed it away and knocked a knuckle on the Roi-Tan box. “I’ll be back around seven tonight.” He smiled at Deborah, his eyes blinking mechanically. “Your brother owes me twelve dollars and forty cents.”
In the two years following the night my mother, Deborah, and I saw the UFO, I became obsessed with watching the skies. I began stretching on the roof on summer nights. I went there alone; Deborah had grown exhausted with playing board games, but I didn’t mind. I memorized the moon’s phases and various constellations, and searched through binoculars for any hint of abnormal light.
I scanned newspapers for flying saucer stories, and on occasion I’d discover some brief bit about eerie lights over a city or a curiously shaped craft pursuing an airplane. I fantasized myself as the world’s first adolescent UFO researcher, clandestinely funded by the U.S. government to jet between countries, gleaning information. I borrowed books from the library; examined their sketches and rare spacecraft photographs.
Halloween approached. I’d wanted to dress as a spaceman, but my father balked at the costume’s expense. “My paycheck will not be spent on this foolish holiday.” I had to settle for the cheaper Satan. At October’s close, I dressed in cranberry-red sweatpants, suspenders, and rubber galoshes. “I feel dumb,” I told my mother.
Back then, Deborah and I attended church weekly. For Halloween, we had helped decorate an abandoned house three miles from town. Our Youth Ministry was sponsoring a Haunted Mansion to amuse kids after they’d finished that night’s candy grabbing. My Satan getup made me feel gutsy for once-the kids that picked on me at school wouldn’t recognize me, I thought-and I anticipated lurching from a dark corner to scare them.
I remember beginning the night in Little River Lutheran Church. Deborah and I searched for candles, and as I tiptoed past the pews, my tail bobbed behind me. I lumbered forward as devillike as possible, rehearsing for the night ahead. The stained-glass windows shimmered their faint blues and golds, and I kept imagining the hand of God would slide aside the steepled roof to pluck away my mask.
Deborah stood beneath the crucified Christ. Moonlight angled through the stained glass to illuminate the green warts she’d rubber-cemented to her face. She was dressed as a witch and had dyed her hair red for the evening. Its shade matched the painted blood that dripped from the Savior’s wounds. “Your mask’s almost sacrilegious,” she said as I emerged from behind the altar with the candles. “How perfect.” She’d stopped believing in God months ago. She claimed she only continued with church because it gave her a chance to stare at Lucas Black, the pastor’s eighteen-year-old son.
My father honked from outside, where he and my mother waited in the pickup. When the four of us squeezed together in the seat, my parents looked uncomfortable beside each other. Deborah and I should be between them, I thought.
“I’ve got to be on the job in twenty-five minutes,” my mother said. Her uniform was the color of rye bread. Her gold badge spelled out M. LACKEY. KANSAS STATE INDUSTRIAL REFORMATORY patches covered each shoulder.
“Got to drop these two off first,” my father said. Our truck passed the YOU ARE LEAVING LITTLE RIVER, KANSAS! COME BACK AGAIN! sign. He turned onto the abandoned road that led to the Haunted Mansion.
I checked my mask in the side rearview and adjusted one crooked horn. My breath slivered from the slit in my fleshy maroon lips. I wore new wire-rim glasses beneath the mask, the ones Deborah swore made me look like an owl, the ones kids at school had already teased me about. To get a better look in the mirror, I cracked a window, and Deborah’s hat fell off, her red hair flying back. “Close it,” she said. Her mouth displayed a blackened front tooth.
The world sped past. Out there, the moon hovered above the flat horizon like a jewel surfacing in a black lake. Below it, shadowy farmhouses, silos, and haystacks scattered the fields. A German shepherd chased a rabbit through weeds. Fog began its nightly slide over Kansas, as thick as peaks of meringue.
My father coasted the truck toward the Haunted Mansion. The headlights shone off the house’s murky windows. “I won’t be home until four in the morning,” my mother said. “They make me spend the entire night in that lookout tower as if I’m Rapunzel or something. Thank God I’ve got only one more month of this shift.” She looked at her watch. “Your father has accounts to balance tomorrow. He’ll be falling asleep early, so you need to ask someone’s mom or dad or, better yet, Pastor Black to drive you home.”
My mother kissed two fingers. She touched Deborah’s forehead, then mine. “Don’t be too loud when you come home,” my father said. I hopped from the truck and walked toward the house, Deborah following.
The Haunted Mansion stood in a collar of trees. Rumors claimed a man had slaughtered his family there, years earlier. Little River high schoolers tried to prove bravery by parking in its driveway, most zooming away when no indoor light switched on or no forlorn ghost stared from a window. The house, two stories of gray wood, displayed a surface of loose boards and nails, a roof with shingles bleached to a light tan. Its windows had been cracked or shattered by falling limbs or vandals’ rocks. It looked as flimsy as a matchstick cabin.
A sign on the porch read ARE YOU BRAVE ENOUGH? ADMISSION: $1.00. The letters were written in a “blood” our group had concocted with Karo syrup and food coloring. I sidestepped a welcome mat stained with a splash of the fake blood.
The front room had once been a kitchen. Two jack-o’-lanterns sat in the sink, faces grimacing as if they’d felt every jab and slice of the knives that had carved them. Rubber bats and tarantulas bounced from strings Deborah had tied to ceiling hooks. She hadn’t bothered to sweep away the spider webs in the ceiling’s corners. “Leave them. They add atmosphere,” she had said, even though Breeze Campbell had stepped face first into one.
Leaf, Breeze’s older brother, lurched through the rooms, spilling the counterfeit blood from a plastic milk jug on the floors and walls. He was fat and always wore a black stocking cap. His costume consisted of a bloodstained sheet, the stocking cap, and a knife unconvincingly wedged in his armpit. “All the adults took off,” Leaf told Deborah, “except for my dad, and he’s out back drinking.” Mansion tours were scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes.
Pastor Black had advised us to keep the scares to a minimum. We hadn’t obeyed his rule. Upstairs, in one bedroom, Leaf and his friends had decorated the floor with knives, saws, drills, and hammers. They’d cut a hole into a rectangular table, draped it with a sheet, and lined it with candles. One of them planned to sit beneath the table and poke his head through the hole. A saw’s blade would rest against the neck he’d stained with syrup and food coloring. When the tours began, the boy’s “dead” eyes would open, and his mouth would spew blood.
Deborah pulled a compact from her purse. She touched her earrings, gigantic lightning bolts she’d cut from foiled cardboard. She checked her warts and teeth in the mirror. Her face looked sculptured from pea soup. “The man who lived in this house got up from dinner one evening and went to the toolshed.” She was practicing for her job as tour guide. “When he came back, he led his wife and each of his eight children one by one to the nine rooms of this house, and then…”
She looked through the door of the next room, where Lucas Black was rearranging weapons. Lucas was acting the role of the father-murderer. The Campbells and the other older kids got the jobs of the slaughtered family. I was the youngest in the group. “You can wander from room to room,” Lucas told me, pointing a screwdriver. “Try to scare any kids who think they’re brave.”
That night, my shyness had smothered, and I was eager to do the scaring. Two Halloweens ago, my father and I had driven to Topeka; we had passed a roadside Haunted House similar to our Youth Ministry’s. My father stopped the truck. “Let’s try it.” A bloody-mouthed polar bear and a mummy had stood at the front door, beckoning people in. But I chickened at the last minute, crying when the mummy’s clammy finger slimed across my face. “You’ll never go anywhere with guts like that,” my father had said. “This world’s not all peaches and cream, son.”
Deborah and I stomped upstairs. The red syrup lent the whole house a breakfasty smell. Someone had tied a plastic doll to the banister, her eyes driven through with the spears of scissors. Her dress was lifted to reveal her naked, dimpled butt. I covered it as I passed.
Light striped the master bedroom wall. Breeze’s face lit up, her mascara and lipstick suddenly as obvious and as crude as smears of jam on a pancake. “A car’s pulling in the driveway,” she yelled. She ran to her hiding place.
Downstairs, a tape player clicked on. Horror movie soundtrack music lifted through the air, a droning bass punctuated by a high, screechy violin’s staccato. I took my place in the smallest bedroom, grabbed a broom, and crouched in a musty corner. On the room’s opposite side, in front of the window, Breeze hung from a noose. She looked dead, in spite of the hidden sling around her shoulders and the foot she propped against the window. I waved the broom at her, and she winked back. She adjusted the rope. The candlelight glowed a pair of pink Vs against her face.
Lucas Black whistled from downstairs. Three seconds of silence. Outside, car doors slammed.
I listened as Deborah assembled some kids. “We’ll have tours every ten minutes,” she said in her regular voice. Pause. Then, gravelly, “Greetings to all. I hope you’re feeling brave. This house is haunted. The man who lived here was a cold-blooded murderer. One night he left the dinner table…” I closed my eyes and imagined a bundled-up, chickenhearted row of kids, their gazes fixed on the witch tour guide.
The rubber mask made my ears feel as if tiny hands were squeezing them. Slowly, the assembly began climbing the stairs. “The youngest daughter was the first to go,” Deborah hissed at the kids. “He brought her into this room, where he told her to open her mouth and close her eyes. She thought she was getting a nice mouthful of candy corn or cinnamon bears for dessert, but boy, was she wrong.”
Downstairs, the horror film music crescendoed. Upstairs, a series of wails. The kids had stepped into the room where Marcy Hathaway lay sprawled across the floor, her face drenched with a caul of blood, a raw veal cutlet poised on her chest to simulate a sliced-off tongue.
The tour group returned to the hallway. As I squatted there, my heart drummed in my chest. My throat trapped each thin breath. At any second, tonight’s kids would burst into the bedroom.
The door creaked open. Breeze rolled her eyes into her head and lolled her tongue. “Go on inside,” Deborah told the kids, and they filed in. “He hung this daughter. Open your mouth and close your eyes. That’s what he said to all of them. He listened to the snap of this girl’s fifteen-year-old neck.” The kids surrounded the body, fascinated. A little boy with plastic fangs began to cry.
I waited. They spun around, ready to explore the next roomful of carnage. Then I sprang from the corner. They screamed as I swung the broom at them, careful not to touch their heads. They sprinted through the door. I laughed, and Deborah gave me the thumbs-up.
The tours sped by, one every fifteen minutes. After a while, Deborah lost her interest. I selected one member from each group to pick on, usually a girl or boy in a topnotch costume. It disappointed me that none were Martians or robotic aliens, so I wound up picking a favorite in the kid dressed as the Shroud of Turin. He or she wore a black body suit and headpiece, gilded head to toe to resemble the pre-Resurrection Jesus. I gave the “Shroud” a jab of my broom and soft pinches from my glued-on devil’s claws.
With the final tours, the crowd began to change. I had recognized most kids from Sundays at Little River Lutheran, but now more unfamiliar faces drifted through the rooms. Most unrecognizables seemed older. “I think they’re from Hutchinson,” Breeze whispered. The door reopened, and her irises rolled back into her head.
A group of boys looked familiar to me. Six of them filed into the syrupy-smelling bedroom. They had ditched their tour guide. I watched them through the slits in my mask. One belched, his breath visible in the chilly air. He had a blond crew cut and a choker necklace made of minuscule white shells. Another wore overalls and a Reds baseball cap, his teeth gleaming with a row of braces. None of the boys had dressed in a costume.
I emerged from the shadow. Metal-mouth spun and started laughing. “Hey, it’s Lucifer.” The others turned and stared.
The boys surrounded me. I opened my mouth and choked out the word “boo.” All six laughed. Even Breeze Campbell laughed. Her body shook from its noose.
Then the crew cut boy with the shell necklace leaned forward. His green eyes stared into mine.
In that moment, I remembered. I’d known these boys a couple of years previous, during the summer of the missing time and the UFO, the summer I’d started Little League in Hutchinson. I had practiced with them; had listened to them yelling things like “four eyes” and “pansy” and “the only place for you is the bench.” Now, years later, this boy reached toward me, and the memories flooded back-how I hated baseball, how I never returned, even though my father had urged me on, had bragged of the game’s benefits.
Crew cut pushed me against the wall. “Really, unbelievably, incredibly frightening,” he said. His hand shot toward my Satan mask. He tore it from my head, tossing it to the floor.
I felt hairs rip from my scalp. I opened my eyes, and the world had slipped out of focus. My glasses had come off with my mask.
They were laughing, all of them. Breeze’s giggle blistered the air, shrill and pestering, like a blue jay’s screech above their tenors. She was showing off for them. I stepped toward their circle.
My right boot landed on the glasses. I heard the crack, felt them snap like potato chips. I bent to pick them up. Nothing but shards, as thin and sharp as the teeth in a monster’s mouth. I swept the pieces aside and grabbed my mask.
The boys watched me run from the room. I had made a fool of myself, just as I’d done again and again, summers ago. I remembered standing in right field, dropping a pop fly, the older boys taunting me. I staggered downstairs, and my foot slipped on a bloody stair, my arm knocking over the doll and her scissor-gouged face. I passed the hallway, where Deborah and the others stood talking. Without glasses, I could hardly see them. Deborah’s warty face was pressed against Lucas Black’s chest, smudging it with green makeup. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I still heard them upstairs, my old teammates. Their voices echoed bits of sentences: “the decapitated guy in the next room,” “one lousy dollar,” “waiting for us outside in the station wagon.”
Deborah held out her hand. “What’s the matter?”
I sped through the kitchen. It seemed as though the entire town were laughing now, and the noise echoed through the house. I slammed the screen door and ran across the porch, past the row of cars, into the trees.
Thirty minutes later, I sat with Deborah and Breeze in the Campbells ’ car, riding back into Little River. I stared out the window, the black night rushing past, my eyes glazing over. Something had happened to me when I left the Mansion, something I couldn’t quite remember.
I recall bits and pieces. When I sprinted from the house, I saw the moon, orange, almost electric, stalled between feathery clouds like a helium balloon, ready to burst into a million splinters. Without glasses, the world melted from focus. The house and trees seemed under water. I leaned against a tree and felt its knobby trunk pressing into my skin like a column of bones.
I put the mask back on. Behind me, the pipe organ music swelled, softened, swelled again. Most of the kids had gone home. “Let’s call it a night,” an adult said. I kept walking, trying not to cry. My scalp tingled from where the hair had ripped out, and my face pounded from the kid’s hand.
I remember passing the parked cars. Ahead, nothing but air so cold it snapped, and an arena of trees, the bordering saplings leading into towering, ancient cottonwoods and oaks. I wandered through them, their arms whispering and creaking in the wind. I looked up to their blurry branches, as lacy and fragile as spiderwebs.
Back at the house, Leaf roared, no doubt grabbing some kid’s shoulder. A chorus of wails. “Hey, Brian,” Deborah yelled. I was no longer part of that scene. I didn’t stop walking. The Little League boys are in the past, I told myself. Forget them.
In the distance I heard a creek’s murmur. I moved toward the sound, deeper into the trees. Thorns from bushes snagged my cape, oak leaves fell around me, and my galoshes oozed through mud puddles.
A stick cracked behind me. I remember it making that exact sound-crack.
Then I noticed how everything had altered to an unbelievable silence. The crickets, the creek, even the wind had ceased. The quiet made me think of that night on the side of our hill; how I had stood staring up at the sky, a little scared but curiously peaceful, even happy, as the spacecraft hovered its carousel of blue lights above us.
The final thing I remember: In the center of the quiet, another branch snapped. And I turned.
Blur.
Neil McCormick was a scruffy, moody stick of a boy. I developed a crush the same day I set eyes on him. It didn’t take long to discover my crush was doomed: he was one of those queers.
The kids at Sherman Middle School realized this fact during an afternoon recess séance. It was September 1983; at twelve, I’d begun to slip into the antisocial skin I’ve never slipped out of. The trends my Hutchinson classmates followed seemed foolish: neon rubber bracelets, nicknames in iron-on lettering on T-shirt backs, or illegal lollipops made with tequila and an authentic, crystallized dead worm. But when some other sixth graders became interested in the occult, I joined them. “Finally,” I told Mom, “they’re into something cool.” Groups of us traipsed through graveyards on dares. We bought Tarot decks; magazines devoted to telekinesis or out-of-body experiences. We gathered at recess, waiting for some small miracle to happen.
My mom claimed she was observing a change in me. For my upcoming birthday, I’d requested albums by bands whose names sounded especially disturbing or violent: The Dead Boys, Suicide, Throbbing Gristle. I longed for the world that existed beyond Hutchinson, Kansas. “You, Wendy Peterson, are looking for trouble with a capital T,” Mom had started to warn.
In my eyes, that trouble equalled Neil. I’d noticed him, but I doubted anyone else had. He always seemed to be alone. He was in fifth grade, not sixth, and he didn’t participate in the daily half-hour soccer games-two disqualifications from what most everyone considered cool.
That afternoon, though, he fearlessly broke the séance circle. Two popular girls, Vicky and Rochelle, were attempting to summon a blond TV star from the dead. Sebastian So-and-so’s BMW had recently crashed into a Hollywood brick wall, and my classmates were determined to disclose whatever heaven he now hovered through. “Aaahhhmmm,” the girls moaned. Hands levitated in midair, attempting to catch this or that spiritual vibration.
When Neil interrupted, his sneakered foot stomped squarely on a Ouija board someone had brought. “Watch it, fucker,” a séance attendee said.
“You shitheads know nothing about contacting ghosts,” Neil said. “What you need is a professional.” His voice sounded vaguely grandfatherlike, as if his brain were crowded with knowledge. Eyes opened, concentrations broke. Someone gasped.
A few tall boys’ heads blocked my view. I tried to peek above their shoulders; saw a mop of thick black hair. A breeze blew it. To touch it would be like touching corduroy.
Neil picked up the valentine-shaped beige plastic disk from the Ouija board. It looked like a tiny, three-legged table, a gold pin poking through its center. Sun glinted off the pinpoint. Only moments before, Vicky and Rochelle had placed their polished fingernails on the disk to ask about the coming apocalypse.
“My father’s a hypnotist,” Neil said. He waved the disk in front of his face like a Smith & Wesson. “He’s taught me all the tricks. I could show you shitheads a fucking thing or two.” From Neil, all those fucks and shits were more than just throwaway cuss words. They adopted some special meaning.
Neil slipped off his shoes, sat on them, and pretzeled his legs into a configuration only someone that skinny could have managed. The crowd blocked the sun and shadowed Neil. The air felt chilly, and I wished I’d worn a jacket. From somewhere behind us, a teacher’s whistle shrieked. Some classmates chanted a brainless song, its words confused by the wind.
“Who wants to be first?” Neil asked. He excited me to no end. Maybe he’d expose their infinite foolishness.
Vicky volunteered. “No way,” Neil said. “Only a boy will work for the kind of hypnotizing I’m going to do.” Vicky pouted, planted her tequila pop back on her tongue, and stood aside.
Neil pointed toward Robert P., a kid whose last initial stuck because two other sixth graders shared the same first name. Robert P. could speak Spanish and sometimes wore an eye patch. I’d heard him bragging about his first wet dream. Some girls thought him “debonair.” Like most everyone else in school, he seemed stupid to me.
People made room, and my view improved. Under Neil’s direction, Robert lay on his back. Random hands smoothed the grass, sweeping aside pebbles and sandburs, and someone’s wadded-up windbreaker served as a pillow. Roly-poly bugs coiled into themselves. The more nervous kids stayed on the circle’s outer edge, watching for teachers, unsure of what would happen.
Neil sat beside his volunteer. He said, “Everyone, to their knees.” We obeyed. From where I knelt, I could see into Robert P.’s nostrils. His eyes were shut. His mouth had opened slightly, flaunting teeth that needed braces. I wished for a spot at the opposite side of the circle. Being near Neil McCormick would have satisfied me.
Neil touched his middle and index fingers to Robert P.’s temples. “Breathe deeply.” The fingers rubbed and massaged. I would die, I thought, to be that volunteer. Neil’s voice lowered: “In your mind, begin counting backward. Start at one hundred. One hundred, ninety-nine. Keep going, counting backward, slowly.” Everyone else’s mouths moved in synch. Could he hypnotize an entire crowd?
“Eighty, seventy-nine, seventy-eight…” His voice softened, nearly a whisper. My eyes darted from Robert P.’s face to the back of Neil’s head. I was so close to him. “Sixty,” pause, “nine…”
By the time Neil reached sixty-two, Robert P. looked zombieish. His chest moved with each breath, but all else remained motionless. I figured he was faking it, but wondered what Neil would make him do or say. I hoped for something humiliating, like a piss on Miss Timmons’s shoes or a brick demolishing a school window.
A girl said “Wow,” which Neil seemed to take as a signal. He crawled atop Robert P., straddling his stomach. Belt buckles clicked together. “Fifty,” Neil said. Robert didn’t move. Neil gripped his wrists; pinned his hands above his head. The circle of kids tightened. I could feel fingers against my skin, shoulders brushing mine. I didn’t look at any of them. My gaze fixed on Robert and Neil, locked there as if I were stuck in a theater’s front row, its screen sparkling with some beautiful film.
Neil’s body flattened. He stretched out on Robert. The buckles clicked again.
Clouds crawled across the sun. For a few seconds, everything went dark. Another whistle blared. “Recess over,” Miss Timmons screamed, but no one budged. We couldn’t care less about the whistle. The silence grew, blooming like a fleecy gray flower. A little voice inside me kept counting: thirty-three, thirty-two.
Then it happened. The lower half of Neil’s body began grinding into Robert’s. I watched Neil’s ass move against him. By that time in my life, I’d seen some R-rated movies, so I knew what fucking looked like. Only these were boys, and their clothes were on.
Neil positioned his face directly over his subject’s. Robert’s eyes opened. They blinked twice, as beady and inquisitive as a hen’s. A thick line of drool spilled from Neil’s mouth. It lingered there, glittered, then trailed between Robert’s lips. Robert coughed, swallowed, coughed again. Neil continued drooling, and as he did, he moved his face closer to Robert’s. At last their mouths touched.
Vicky screamed, and everyone jumped back. Kids shouted things like “gross” and “sick.” They sprinted for Miss Timmons and the classroom, their sneaker colors blurring together. I stood and stared at the separated pair of boys. Robert P. wriggled on the grass like a rattlesnake smashed by a semi. A chocolatey blob stuck to his chin: dirt, suffused with Neil’s spit.
One of Robert’s buddies kicked Neil’s ribs, then hustled away with the others. Neil didn’t wince, accepting the kick as he might accept a handshake.
“Queer,” Robert P. said, plus something in Spanish. He was crying. He kicked Neil, too, his foot connecting with the identical spot his friend had chosen. Then he ran for the school’s glass doors.
Neil sprawled there a while, smiling, his arms spread as if he’d been crucified to the earth. He struggled to get up. He and I were alone on the playground. I wanted to touch his arm, his shoulder, his face. I offered my hand, and he took it.
“That was great,” Neil said. He squeezed my fingers and shuffled toward the school.
Something important had happened, and I had witnessed it. And I had touched Neil McCormick. I waited until he departed earshot. Then I pretended I was a character in a movie. I said, “There’s no turning back now.” A small spit bubble lay on the dirt at my feet like a toad’s gleaming eye. I bent down and popped it. If I could make Neil my friend, I figured I wouldn’t need anyone else.
The séances vanished. By the end of that week, the kids who’d brought their Ouija boards and magic eight balls had jumped back to four-square and soccer. I watched them and wanted to scream. I longed to approach Neil again, this boy I saw as my doorway from the boredom I wanted to escape.
That Friday, a team of bullies gathered on the soccer field. They found Neil standing by a tree and cornered him. “You’re one of those queers,” a kid named Alastair yelled. Neil flew at him. A crowd formed, and I joined it. Arms and legs darted and windmilled, and the ivory crescent of Neil’s fingernail sliced Alastair’s chin. There were tears and a few drops of blood, all of which turned out to be Alastair’s. At twelve, I’d seen more tornadoes than blood. Its red looked magnificent and sacred, as if rubies had been shattered.
When the fight was history, Neil stood beside the same oak. He wore a hot rod T-shirt, a real leather coat with zippers like rows of teeth, and matching boots. Animals had died for those clothes, I thought. He would be perfect holding a switchblade in one hand, and me in the other.
I took a deep breath, collected the gumption, and tiptoed over. I tilted my head heavenward to look cool. The sun rebounded off the steel plates of Sherman Middle School to reveal the roof’s slant. It had been littered with toilet paper, a yellow ball some vandal had sliced from its tether, and random graffiti. GO STRAIGHT TO HELL was all someone could think to spray paint. I stared at the jagged red letters and kept walking. Around me, brown five-pointed leaves fell like the severed hands of babies. I moved through them. Neil heard the crunch, crunch and glanced up.
I leaned against another tree, feigning nonchalance. “You are a queer, aren’t you?” I said the Q-word as if it were synonymous with movie star or deity. There was something wonderful about the word, something that set him apart from everyone else, something I wanted to identify with.
“Yeah,” said Neil.
I felt as if I were falling in love. Not so much with him, though, as with the aura of him. It didn’t matter that he was a year younger than me. It didn’t matter, all the distaste I detected in teachers’ voices when they called his name during recess. Neil McCormick, they barked, the fence is there for a reason, don’t cross it. Neil McCormick, put down that stick. I had eavesdropped on Miss Timmons in her office, as she whispered to the school nurse how she dreaded getting the McCormick boy in her class next year. “He’s simply evil,” etcetera.
To me, “evil” didn’t seem all that bad.
Neil’s long hair frayed in the breeze, as shiny black as the lenses in the spectacles of the creepy blind girl who sat behind me on the morning bus. His eyebrows met ominously in his forehead’s middle. Up close, I could smell him. The odor swelled, like something hot. If I weren’t so eager to touch him again, I would have shrunk from it.
I breathed again, as if it were something I did once a day. “But you’re a tough queer, right?”
“Yeah.” He examined the blood smear on the back of his hand. He made certain I was watching, then licked it off.
In my room, I fantasized miniature movies starring Neil and me. My parents had okayed my staying up to watch Bonnie and Clyde on the late-late, and in my Neil hallucinations I assumed bloodred lipstick and a platinum bob that swirled in the wind, à la Faye Dunaway. I clung to his side. We wielded guns the size of our arms. We blew away bank tellers and other boring innocents, their blood spattering the air in slow-mo. Newspapers tumbleweeded through deserted streets. MCCORMICK AND PETERSON STRIKE AGAIN, their headlines read.
In these dreams, we never kissed. I was content to stand beside him. Nights, I fell asleep with clenched fists.
Weeks passed. Neil spent most recesses just standing there, feeling everyone else’s fear. I wasn’t afraid, but I couldn’t approach him again. He was like the electric wire that separated my uncle’s farm from the neighbors’. Touch it, Wendy, my little brother Kurt would say. It won’t hurt. But I couldn’t move toward it. Surely a sliver of blue electricity would jet from the wire and strike me dead. I felt the same way about Neil: I didn’t dare go near him. Not yet.
Zelda Beringer, a girl who wore a headpiece attached to her braces and who wouldn’t remain my friend much longer, teased me about Neil. “How in the world can you think a queer is cute? I mean, you can tell he’s a freak. You can just tell.” I advised Zelda that if she didn’t shut up, I’d gouge out her eyes and force her to swallow them. The resulting look on her face wouldn’t leave my mind for days.
For Columbus Day the cafeteria cooks served the school’s favorite lunch. They fixed potato boats: a bologna slice fried until its edges curled, a scoop of mashed potatoes stuck in its center, watery cheese melted on top. They made home fries, and provided three squirt bottles of ketchup per table. For dessert, banana halves, rolled in a mucousy marriage of powdered gelatin and water.
Fifth graders sat on the cafeteria’s opposite end, but that day I was blessed with a great view of Neil. He scooped the boat into one hand and devoured it in a single bite. If I’d had binoculars, I could have watched his puffy lips in close-up.
I remember that day as near perfect, and not just because of potato boats. The yearly sex-ed filmstrips arrived. All afternoon, teachers glanced at clocks and avoided our gazes. We knew what was happening. We’d been through it before. Now we could view those films again, together in the room with the virgin fifth graders. “We’re going to see cartoon tits and ass,” Alastair said, the slightest hint of a scratch still on his chin.
Grade five lumbered in. Neil stood at the back of the line. For the first half of the process, the principal, Mr. Fili, separated boys from girls. The boys left, and Miss Timmons dimmed the lights. The room felt stifling, as if some killer had snuck in to poison our air with a noxious nerve gas. I rested my elbows on my desk; planted my chin on my fists.
Miss Timmons hesitated before reading the film’s captions. “Sometimes, at this age, young men will want to touch certain places on a young lady’s body.” She bit her lip like the section of an orange.
When the filmstrip was over, Miss Timmons handed out free Kotex pads. Most girls popped theirs into purses or the back shadows of desk drawers. I examined mine. It resembled something I would hold over a campfire or take a chomp from.
After ten minutes, the boys returned. “Find a seat, men, somewhere on the floor,” Mr. Fili told them. “This time, try to keep quiet. If you feel the urge to make some capricious outburst, please hold your breath. And no commentaries. This is serious stuff.” When he said that, he scowled at Neil.
Neil moved toward me, as if following a dotted line to my desk. I swallowed hard. He sat, his knee touching my calf.
Part two of the birds-and-bees rigamarole was special: a film instead of filmstrip. Kids oohed and aahed when they heard the projector’s buzzes and clicks. Perhaps this meant we would see real, live sex action.
Some fool of a filmmaker had dreamed up the idea that humor was the best way to teach sex. Tiny cartoon sperm wriggled and roller coastered toward a bulging, rouged egg. The egg licked its lips, as eager and lewd as an old whore. The music-The 1812 Overture-swelled, and the quickest and most virile sperm punctured the egg. “Bull’s-eye!” the voice-over cackled.
Some kids clapped and cheered. “Shhh,” said Miss Timmons.
Neil looked up at me. I swore I could smell bologna on him. A smear of ketchup had dried on his shirt front. He smiled, and I smiled back. He mouthed the words, “This is total bullshit,” moving to lean against my legs. When he shifted, I felt his backbone move. No one was watching us.
On screen, drawings of a penis and the inside of a vagina flashed on and off. A couple of fifth graders giggled. Penis entered vagina, and white junk gushed forth like mist from a geyser. More giggles. Miss Timmons shhed again.
“Ridiculous,” Neil whispered. “Not everyone fucks like that.” Some kids heard him, glared and sneered. “Some people take it up the ass.” One girl’s face reddened, as if scratched.
As the credits rolled, Neil’s hand rested on my sneaker, resulting in a goose bumpy feeling that lasted three tiny seconds. I wiggled my toes. Lights clicked on, and his hand moved away. “Let’s go, fifth grade,” Mr. Fili said.
“How fucked up,” Neil said to me. He was speaking to no one else now. “Why don’t they teach us something we don’t already know?” Disappointment amended his face.
Neil waved as they filed out. Kids’ heads turned to stare at me, and I felt as though it were Neil and me versus everyone else. It was a good feeling. I let my classmates gawk awhile, then shook my middle finger at them.
That evening, I upped the volume on the stereo to drown out the TV my parents and brother were fixed in front of. Even with the bedroom door closed, I could hear televised trumpets blaring “ America the Beautiful.” A newscaster said, “Happy Columbus Day.” I lifted the needle from my Blondie album and started side one over again: “Dreaming,” my favorite song.
My geography book toppled off my bed. I was just beginning to effectively imagine myself as a singer onstage, a cluster of punks bouncing below me, when Mom rapped at the door. “Can you hear in there?” she asked. “You’ll shake the house off its foundation. Anyway, you’ve got a phone call. It’s some boy.”
I ran to the kitchen’s extension. Mom had just finished drying dishes, and her set of knives lined a black towel on the table. By that time in the fall, it was starting to grow dark by six o’clock, so the room looked like some kind of torture dungeon. I left the light off.
The music on the phone’s other end sounded cool. I listened for three, four, five seconds. “This is Wendy.”
Someone stuttered a hello. Then, “You might not know me. My name’s Stephen Zepherelli.”
My eyes widened. Everyone knew the notorious Stephen Zepherelli. He attended class in the adjoining building at school, one of the Learning Disabilities trio we occasionally saw delivering messages to Mr. Fili or bending over water faucets in the hall. The LDs, we called them. Stephen Zepherelli was the most severe of the three LDs. He wasn’t retarded, but he was close. He drooled, and he smelled like an old pond.
Then I realized the absurdity of him calling me. I’d heard Zepherelli’s voice before, and this wasn’t it. “Okay,” I said. “Not funny. Someone’s got to have at least half a brain to know how to dial a telephone. Who is this really?”
A laugh. The new-wave song paused, then began blasting a guitar solo. “Hey Wendy, this is Neil McCormick.” I couldn’t believe it. “I’ve called three Petersons in the phone book already, and I finally found the right one. What are you doing?”
I forgave Neil for the Zepherelli joke. “Nothing,” I said. “As usual. How about that film today?”
We chatted for ten minutes about people we despised most at school. While Neil spoke, I handled the knives, arranging them on the table from longest to shortest. “I’d like to stab all those fools,” I said, my back turned from the direction of the den and my parents. “Make it hurt. Stab them in the gut, then twist the knife real slow. I’ve read it really hurts that way. Or I’d cut their heads right off.”
When I said that, Neil laughed. I pictured him throwing his head back, his mouth open, his teeth gleaming like an animal’s.
By Halloween I stopped riding the bus home and began walking with Neil. His house was only four blocks from mine. Sometimes we carried each other’s books. We tried alternate ways home. Once we even went the opposite direction, heading toward the prison on Hutchinson ’s east side. Neil stood at its gate, his shoelaces clotted with sandburs, breathing in the wistful smells of the rain-soaked hay and mud, the raked piles of leaves. “Kansas State Industrial Reformatory,” he read. “Maybe I’ll end up here someday.” A guard watched us from the stone tower. We waved, but he didn’t wave back.
Neil lived with his mother, and had no bratty brothers or sisters to deal with. And his father wasn’t a hypnotist at all. He was dead. “Killed in a war,” Neil said. “He’s nothing but a corpse now. I know him from one picture, and one picture only. He looks nothing like me, either. What should I care about the guy?”
Mrs. McCormick drank gin straight from the bottle. On the label, a bearded man was dressed in a plaid skirt. The first time I visited Neil’s, his mom slid the bottle aside and took my hand in hers. “Hello, Wendy,” she said. “It’s not often I see a friend of Neil’s. And such vibrant blond hair.” Her own hair was as black as her son’s. She had pinned it back with green pickle-shaped barrettes.
A bookshelf in Neil’s house was piled with paperbacks with damaged or missing covers. Neil explained that his mother had a job at a grocery store, and her boss allowed her to keep whatever books the customers vandalized. Many concerned true kidnappings and murders. Mrs. McCormick saw me eyeing them. “You can borrow whatever you like,” she told me. Soon I stopped reading about the tedious exploits of that ignoramus Nancy Drew. Within days I knew all there was to know about Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, two teenage fugitives who blazed a trail of murder and mayhem across the Midwest a few decades ago. They weren’t that much older than Neil and me. They even hailed from Nebraska, our border state. In two grainy mug shots, their grimaces couldn’t have been more severe if their mouths had been clogged with thumbtacks. If I thought hard enough, Neil and I almost resembled them.
I had decided that ’83 would be my last year as a trick-or-treater, and I wanted to dress as something special. I considered a gypsy, a freshly murdered corpse, an evil nun with a knife beneath her habit. Then I decided Neil and I should go as Charles and Caril. On Halloween night, I stared at the criminals’ pictures and tried to change my looks.
Neil stretched out on his bed. “It’s not working,” he said. He tossed a baseball into the air, caught it. “No one will get it, so why bother?”
I wiped the lipstick on a Kleenex and watched him watching me in his bedroom mirror. When I peeled off the fake eyelash, my lid made a popping noise.
Mrs. McCormick dragged two spider costumes from her closet. She and a date, Neil claimed, had gone as “Daddy and Mommy Longlegs” to a party last year. “She lost that boyfriend around the same time,” he said. “Sometimes she can’t handle anything. But she’s my mom.”
We mascaraed circles around our eyes and thumbed black blobs across our mouths. Before we left the house, Neil gave me three yellow pills. “Swallow these.” The box in his hand read DOZ-AWAY. I wasn’t sure if that meant we’d grow sleepy or stay perky, but the box’s cover pictured a pair of wide-awake eyes.
By that point I would have done anything Neil told me. I popped the pills in my mouth, swallowing without water.
Neil handed me the telephone beside his bed. He told me to call my parents and claim his mom would be escorting us. When I lied to Mom, it didn’t feel so scandalous. “I’ll take Kurt around the neighborhood without you, then,” she said. “Call back when you want me to drive over and get you. Don’t stay out too late, and remember what I told you about those perverts who prey on kids on Halloween.” She laughed nervously. I thought of her stories of razor blades wedged into apples, stories that never ceased to thrill me.
Two hours came and went. We wandered around Hutchinson as spiders, our extra four legs bobbing at our sides. The rows of our eyes gleamed from our headpieces. The shadows we cast gave me the creeps, so we shied away from streetlights. Neil hissed when doors opened. One wrinkly lady touched my nose with a counterfeit black fingernail. She asked, “Aren’t you two a little old for this?” Still, our shopping bags filled to the top. I stomped a Granny Smith into mush on the sidewalk. No hidden razor.
Neil traded his Bit-O-Honeys for anything I had with peanuts. “I’m allergic to nuts,” I said. That was a lie, but I wanted to make him happy.
At Twenty-third and Adams, a group of seven kids walked toward us. I recognized the younger ones from school under their guises of pirate, fat lady, and something that resembled a beaver. “Hey, it’s you-know-who from school,” Neil said, and pointed to a green dragon in the crowd’s center.
I couldn’t tell who it was. “It’s that retardo,” Neil told me. He was right. Even under the tied-on snout and green pointy ears, I could make out Stephen Zepherelli.
“Hey,” Neil said. Their heads turned. “Hey, snotnoses, where’re your parents?”
The beaver-thing pointed west. “Back there,” it said. The words garbled behind its fake buck teeth.
Zepherelli smiled. The dragon snout shifted on his face. He carried a plastic pumpkin, chock-full with candy. “Let’s kidnap him,” Neil said to me.
I’d witnessed Neil’s damage to Robert P. and Alastair. Now, some dire section of my brain longed to find out what twisted things Neil could do to this nimrod, this Stephen Zepherelli. Neil checked the sidewalk for adults. When none materialized, he grabbed the kid’s left hand. “He’s supposed to come with us,” Neil said to the rest of the trick-or-treaters. “His mom said so. She doesn’t want him out too late.”
Zepherelli whined at first, but Neil said we were leading him to a house that was giving away “enough candy for three thousand starving kids.” Zepherelli didn’t seem to mind the kidnapping after that. We stood on each side of him, gripped his scrawny wrists, and pulled him along. Mahogany-colored leaves spun around our rushing feet. “Slow down,” he said at one point. We just moved faster. He stopped once to retrieve a handful of candy corn from his plastic pumpkin, and once to find a Zero candy bar. His painted-on dragon’s teeth shone under street lamps, as white as piano keys.
We arrived at Neil’s. “Is this the house with the candy?” Zepherelli asked. He rummaged through his pumpkin, making room.
“Good guess.”
Neil’s mom snoozed on the living room couch. Nearly every light in the house had been left on. Neil pushed Zepherelli toward me. “Hold this little bastard while I’m gone.” He trotted from room to room, flicking switches. In seconds, darkness had lowered around us. Neil slid aside a record by a band called Bow Wow Wow and slipped another LP on the turntable. Scary sound effects drifted through the house at a volume soft enough to keep his mom sleeping. On the record, a cat hissed, chains rattled, crazed banshees wailed.
“Neat,” Zepherelli said. His snout showed a smudge of white chocolate from the Zero. He nibbled the tip from a piece of candy corn.
I heard Neil pissing. I suddenly felt embarrassed, standing there with our victim. Neil returned, carrying a flashlight and a paper sack. He opened the latter. Inside were firecrackers and bottle rockets. “Left over from Fourth of July,” Neil said. He winked. “Let’s take him out behind the house.”
The McCormick backyard consisted of overgrown weeds, an apricot tree, and a dilapidated slippery slide-swing set. Behind the swings was a cement-filled hole someone had once meant for a cellar. We walked toward it. The rotten apricot odor permeated the autumn air. Stars glittered in the sky. Down the block, kids yelled “trick or treat” from a doorstep.
Neil pushed Zepherelli toward the stretch of cement. “Lie on your back,” he said.
The yellow pills had done something to me. My skin tingled like I’d taken a bath in ice. I was a hundred percent awake, and prepared for anything. I adjusted a loose arm and stood above the victim; Neil spilled the bag’s contents onto the cement. “Bottle rockets,” the dragon said, as if they were hundred-dollar bills. I could smell Zepherelli’s breath, even over all those apricots.
Neil told him to shut up. He pulled off the dragon’s snout. The string snapped against Zepherelli’s face. “Ouch.”
I watched as Neil took three bottle rockets and placed their wooden ends in Zepherelli’s mouth. He pinched Zepherelli’s lips shut. He moved briskly, as if he’d done it all a thousand times. Then he straddled the kid. I remembered that seance, Robert P.’s still face. Stephen Zepherelli’s resembled it. It looked drugged, almost as if it really were hypnotized. It didn’t register any emotion. Its cheeks had been smeared with green makeup. Its eyes were cold and blank, not unlike the peeled grapes we had passed around during the inane Haunted Hall setup at school that day. “These are the dead man’s eyes,” Miss Timmons had told us in her best Vincent Price voice.
“Keep these in your mouth,” Neil instructed the LD boy. “Do what we say, or we’ll kill you.” I thought of Charles and Caril Ann. Neil’s extra eyes caught the moonlight and sparkled.
From the effects record inside the house, a girl screamed, a monstrous voice laughed. Neil turned to me, smiling. “Matches are in the bottom of the sack,” he said. “Hand them over.”
I fished out a book of matches. The cover showed a beaming woman’s face over a steamy piece of pie and the words “Eat at McGillicuddy’s.” I tossed the matches to Neil. “Be careful,” I said. I tried not to sound scared. “Someone could see the fireworks.” I still thought this was all a big joke.
“Tonight is just another holiday,” Neil said. “No one’s going to care.” He lit the first match. The flame turned Zepherelli’s face a weird orange. In the glow, the rockets jutted from his lips like sticks of spaghetti. His eyes were huge. He squirmed a little, and I sat on his legs. I felt as though we were offering a sacrifice to some special god.
Zepherelli didn’t spit the rockets out. He made a noise that could have been “Don’t” or “Stop.”
Neil touched the match to the fuses. One, two, three. He shielded me with one of his real arms. We skittered back like crabs. I held my breath as tiny sputters of fire trailed up the fuses and entered the rockets. Zepherelli didn’t budge. He was paralyzed. The bottle rockets zoomed from his head, made perfect arcs over the McCormick home, and exploded in feeble gold bursts.
The following silence seemed to last hours. I expected sirens to wail toward the house, but nothing happened. Finally, Neil and I snuck toward Zepherelli. “Shine the flashlight on him,” Neil said.
The oval of light landed on our victim’s face. For a second, I almost laughed. Zepherelli resembled the villain in a cartoon after the bomb goes off. The explosives’ dust covered his dragon snout, his cheeks, his chin. His eyes had widened farther, and they darted here and there, as if he’d been blinded. We leaned in closer. Zepherelli licked his lips and winced. Then I saw what we’d done. It wasn’t funny at all. His mouth was bleeding. Little red splinters stuck through Zepherelli’s lips, jammed there from the wooden rocket sticks. Bubbles of blood dotted the lips.
The victim’s eyes kept widening. I remembered thinking blood beautiful when Neil had punched Alastair. Now, from Zepherelli, it looked horrible, poisonous. I turned away.
Zepherelli made a mewling noise, softer than a kitten’s. My heart felt like a hand curling into a fist. He whimpered again, and the fist clenched. “Neil,” I said. “He’s going to tattle on us. We’re going to get it.” I wondered if my parents would discover what we’d done. For the first time, I wanted to slap Neil.
A look spread across Neil’s face, one I’d never seen there. He bit his bottom lip, and his eyes glassed over. Then he shook his head. The glassiness left his eyes. “No,” he said. “He won’t tell. There’s things we can do.” He spoke as if Zepherelli weren’t lying beside us. “We’ll get him on our side. Help me.”
I didn’t know what to do. I gripped the flashlight until my palm hurt. Neil wiped dust from Zepherelli’s cheek. When their skins touched, Zepherelli trembled and sighed. Neil said, “Shhh,” like a mother comforting a baby. His left hand remained on the kid’s face. His right moved from Zepherelli’s chest, down his stomach, and started untying the sweatpants dyed green for Halloween. He squirmed a finger inside, then his entire hand.
“When I was little,” Neil said, “a man used to do this to me.” He spoke toward the empty air, as if his words were the lines of a play he’d just memorized. He pulled the front of Zepherelli’s pants down. The kid’s dick stuck straight out. I swung the flashlight beam across it.
“Sometimes I wanted to tell everyone what was going on. Then he’d do this to me again, and I knew how badly he really wanted it. He did it to some other kids, but I knew they didn’t matter as much to him, I was the only one whose photo he kept in his wallet. Every time he’d do it he’d roll up a five-dollar bill, brand-new so I could even hear it snap, and he’d slip it into the back pocket of my jeans or my baseball pants or whatever. It was like getting an allowance. I knew how much it meant to him, in a way, and after a while, it kept going further and further. There was no way I could tattle on him. I looked forward to it, for a while it was every week that summer, before the baseball games. It was great, he was waiting there, for me, like that was all he ever wanted.”
Neil’s voice sounded lower, older. It wasn’t spouting nasty words or giggling between sentences. Then Neil shut up and leaned beside Zepherelli.
Neil buried his head in the kid’s crotch. The dick disappeared in Neil’s mouth. I watched the spider arms bob as Neil hovered over him. I slid back. The flashlight flipped from my hand. Its column of white illuminated the apricot tree’s branches. Up there, a squirrel or something equally small and insignificant was scampering around. Already-dead fruit tumbled to the ground.
Stephen Zepherelli moaned. His breathing deepened. He didn’t sound scared anymore.
The shadow of Neil’s head lifted. “That feels nice, right?” The shadow moved back down, and I heard noises that sounded like a vampire sucking blood from a neck. I wanted to cry. I tried to fold myself into my dream of Charles and Caril Ann, those teenage fugitives. What would the blond murderess do in this situation, I wondered. Neil and I were nothing like them. I heard another chorus of “trick or treat”s, this time closer than before, maybe right there on the McCormicks’ doorstep. I thought of Neil’s mom, sleeping through it all. Where had she been when the man from Neil’s past had put his mouth on her son like this?
I lay on my back until the noises stopped. Neil retied Zepherelli’s sweat bottoms and handed him the dragon snout. “It’s okay.”
When Zepherelli stood, his eyes had resumed their normal luster. He was drooling. A comma-shaped trickle of blood had dried on his mouth. I got up, carefully pulled a splinter from his upper lip, and dabbed the blood with my black sleeve.
Neil patted the kid’s butt like a coach. “I’ll walk him home,” Neil said. He smiled at me, but he was looking over my shoulder, not at my face.
We tiptoed through the McCormick house. In Neil’s bedroom, I could see his tousled sheets, his schoolbooks, his baseball trophies. The scary record had ended, but the needle was stuck on the final groove. “Scratch, scratch, scratch,” Zepherelli said. I faked a laugh.
Neil’s mother was still sleeping. She snored louder than my father. I shone the flashlight on the bookshelves above her, making out titles like Monsters and Madmen, Ghoulish and Ghastly, All the Worst Ways to Die. Only days ago, I’d wanted to read those. Now I didn’t care.
“I know the direction home,” Stephen Zepherelli told Neil. He seemed anxious to lead the way. “I can show you where to go.”
We left the house. The cool air smelled like mosquito repellent, barbecue sauce, harmless little fires. When the air hit my face, I ripped my headpiece off. A single beady spider’s eye fell to the sidewalk. I bent to get it. In the weak street light, that eye stared back at me. I saw my reflection in its black glass. Instead of picking it up, I stood and ground it beneath my shoe.
“See you later, Stephen,” I said. It was the first time I’d said his name, and my voice cracked on the word. “And you too, Neil. Tomorrow.”
And I knew I would see him tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Neil had shown a part of himself I knew he’d shown no one else. I reckoned I had asked for it. Now I was bound to him.
Neil led Zepherelli down the block. I watched them shuffle through the dead leaves, moving farther away, until the shadows swallowed them up…
My brother spent most of his time alone, and sometimes I wondered if my mother and I were his only friends. No one accompanied Brian on his walks home from school. He never went to parties or special school functions like the homecoming dance or Christmas formal. When he did venture from the house, it was to attend the latest program at the Hutchinson Cosmosphere, a conglomerated space museum and planetarium, which I found boring. Still, I often joined him, driving him into Hutchinson to see whatever space film happened to be showing.
Although I never mentioned it, I felt sorry for Brian. One night, I’d picked up the telephone to hear teenagers giggling. “Is The Nightmare home?” one voice mocked. “Zit patrol,” another said. “We make house calls.” Laughter, click, a dial tone.
Brian still performed his nightly practice of trudging to the roof. I’d given that up long ago, and by then my father had stopped as well, preferring instead to drive away in his truck after fights. Even the ragged rooftop chair was gone. But night after night, about an hour after sunset, Brian would climb the ladder, binoculars bouncing from the strap around his neck.
I wouldn’t be around to watch his ritual much longer. I’d graduated, and Christmas 1987 marked my final week in Kansas. The night before the holiday, I sat in front of the antique mirror at my bedroom window and decided to procrastinate packing. I looked outside. The crisp combination of the moon and the back porch’s light allowed the normally obscure surroundings of our house to slide into focus. A group of rabbits, their fur thickened to adapt to winter, scampered around the evergreen trees that flanked our driveway.
For the first time, I wondered if I would miss Kansas. After eighteen years in Little River, I’d grown to despise it. My friend Breeze still lived in town, but she was already preoccupied with her husband and son. My other friends had all left for college, but chances were they’d return. I was certain of one thing: I didn’t want to stay here all my life.
I heard Brian above me, stomping to the roof. I remained at the window. In seconds his shadow cast its freakish proportion across our lawn. I could tell he was wearing his down coat, mittens, a stocking cap peaked with a fluffy ball, even the bulky earphones that pounded out his favorite spacey computerized music. This was Brian’s private time, his brand of monasticism, and watching him filled me with both embarrassment and guilt, as if I were viewing him in the shower: He lay on his back on the pebbled shingles, one leg crossed over the other, lazily twirling a foot in the air.
Then his shadow lifted the binoculars to his face. Instead of spying on Little River, he lifted his head and peered toward the moon and stars. He scanned the night sky for something, some inviting slant to his life, excitement he couldn’t get in the house below.
I missed him already.
Before bedtime, Brian left the roof and reentered the house, where the rest of us were waiting. According to ritual, my family spent Christmas Eve by gathering in the living room to open one gift each. Brian slumped next to me at the base of the tree, his stocking cap still on. My mother sat in one half of the love seat, hunched over, her face close to ours, not wanting to miss a single detail. Across the room, my father leaned back in the rocker, pulling handfuls of popcorn from a silver bowl. The Christmas lights flashed from the window that overlooked Little River. From our hill, we could see the entire town, lit in reds and blues and greens like the cobbled surface of a fruitcake.
As with every year, my father went first. I chose a gift for him, avoiding the package that said TO GEORGE FROM M, trying to decide between gifts from Brian and me: the tackle box, the Old Spice aftershave, or the key chain. I settled on the key chain and handed it over. He ripped the paper in one motion and dropped it to the carpet. “NFL,” he said, thumbing the gold emblem. “That’s neat.” He only used words like that at times like these.
“I’m next,” Brian said. He selected a package. “From your sis,” he read. Smiling penguins ice-skated across the wrapping paper, treble clefs and quarter notes trailing from their beaks. Inside was a hardback book, the type of gift that appeared most on the lists he’d slipped into my mother’s purse and under my bedroom door. He held the book for my parents to see: Loch Ness: New Theories Explained.
“That’s just what he needs,” my father said. He squinted toward the tree, to other obvious book-shaped gifts. “Let me guess. Those are Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, and Bigfoot.” He reached for the Loch Ness book, skimmed to the center’s photo spread, and tossed it back to Brian. “A load of bunk,” he said.
My mother received a bottle of White Shoulders perfume from Brian and me. She tipped the bottle against her thumb and streaked a drop beneath each earlobe.
My gift was last. I tried to conceal a blush as I unwrapped a boxful of bras from my mother. “Whoa-ho-ho,” my father said.
“You can always use new underthings,” my mother said. The lights flickered emerald green against her face. “No matter where you’re living, Little River or San Francisco.” Brian watched my reaction. I smiled at him, and he looked away.
That night I woke to hear my parents screaming downstairs. Whenever this happened, I usually sandwiched my head with pillows. But that night their bickering amplified. When my father yelled “Fuck you” and my mother fired “Fuck you” back, I knew they meant business.
I opened my door and padded into the hallway. There was Brian, listening at the top of the stairs. They had woken him, too. He put a finger to his lips when he saw me.
“Sick of everything in this life…” It was my mother, and it sounded as if she’d been crying. The radio mingled with her voice, a tinny chorus of children singing the first verse to “O Holy Night.”
My father cleared his throat. “Then why don’t you just end it all.”
“Why don’t you just go to hell.”
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere you’re going to end up.”
I held my breath. I knew Brian was doing the same. The electric heater in his room made a hollow click, the sound of a knuckle, cracking.
Stomping feet, a drawer opening, and the clink of kitchen utensils floated toward us from downstairs. I heard the crash of knives and forks and spoons dumped onto linoleum tiles. This was my mother’s method of expressing her rage: the kitchen was her territory, and she could just as soon serve my father meals with the silverware as stab him in the throat. Once, after a fight at dinner, we’d seen her fling a plate at the wall as if it were a Frisbee. The scratch was still there.
They continued shouting. But this time, their words had a finality that made it clear they had wearied of fighting, that twenty years of it was enough. Looking back I think it didn’t matter that the following morning was Christmas. Somehow my parents must have known that Brian and I sat at the top of the stairs, listening. I believe they wanted us to understand that it was over.
“Fuck you,” my father said again, and then he was off. He tore through the house, the door slamming behind him. He revved the pickup’s engine once, twice. He sped from the driveway, tires skidding in icy puddles.
Silence. I imagined my mother standing in the kitchen, silverware strewn around her feet. Amid that quiet, my mother blew her nose. For some reason, I found that hilarious. Brian looked at me, and we both clamped hands across our mouths to keep from snickering.
My mother blew her nose again, and the sound trumpeted toward the second floor. This time, Brian’s laughter burst from his mouth, resonating in the air like a shook tambourine. He sprinted down the stairs, taking them three at a time. I heard him trace our father’s path through the house, out the front door. He’ll freeze out there, I thought. He was still laughing when the door slammed behind him.
I tiptoed down. I didn’t want to see my mother’s tear-streaked face, but I figured I should help her clean the mess. “Are you okay?” I asked. She wasn’t in the kitchen. I stepped into the living room: toppled chair, overturned lamp, cinnamony-smelling potpourri spilling from a chipped bowl. A slice of pumpkin pie lay smashed in the floor’s center, leaking a dollop of whipped cream like a teardrop. The fire in the hearth had fizzled out, but the Christmas tree’s lights still blinked, casting rainbows over the wadded remnants of wrapping paper.
I turned and saw my mother. She shuffled toward the window, unaware of my presence. She bumped her shin on the fallen rocking chair. “Owee-owee,” she said, and I remembered her speaking that way when Brian and I were kids, when we’d come to her with scratches or cuts. She continued to fumble forward, her arms held out as if offering something to the dark. It horrified me to see her like this: she had always held reign over these rooms, and was now suddenly blinded and clumsy within them. When she reached the window, she brushed aside the curtain. “You’ll catch pneumonia,” she yelled to Brian. Her breath misted the glass.
I slid into a pair of boots and walked outside. Snow fell in orderly specks, dusting the evergreens. Somewhere, far away, a sparrow was shrieking. I followed the footprints. Brian, dressed in his pj’s and gym socks, stood on the hillside, facing the field. In the distance, the taillights from my father’s truck became smaller and smaller, two minuscule rubies dissolving into black. I wondered if he had used his new key chain to start his engine on this, the night he had finally left.
When the lights on my father’s truck were completely gone, I waved toward his unknown destination. “That’s that,” I said. The words seemed awkward and inconsiderate, and I immediately wished I could take them back. But Brian hadn’t heard me. He lifted his head and stared at the sky. He had stood just like that years before, on the night we’d seen the blue lights in the air above our field. Now, nothing resided there but the snowfall, a mass of white that blanketed any trace of moon and stars.
Head still raised, my brother began to dance. He swiveled his hips and stomped his stocking feet, arms reaching out, fingers scratching the air. He was smiling, sheer bliss spelled out on his face.
Behind us, my mother opened the window. “Pneumonia,” she repeated. I knew she was leaning her head outside, snow sequining her hair and her face, the face no longer lined with concern about the man who’d left us. She was only thinking of the two people who really mattered, her kids.
I didn’t turn around. Instead, I joined Brian in his dance. I was eighteen, and in three days I would be abandoning Kansas for San Francisco, perhaps leaving forever. I didn’t care how foolish I looked. I lifted my arms and twisted my feet in the snow’s thick carpet. The snow began coming faster, shattered bits of gemstones zigzagging through the air. It was a celebration. Brian and I danced on the side of the hill, almost as if dancing on my father’s grave, as the torn pieces of sky tumbled around us like confetti.
Once I stole a bicycle. It was as simple as swiping a gingerbread man from our kitchen’s beehive-shaped cookie jar. But the thrill I got from the bike was more profound. I searched the evening street for snooping pedestrians, lifted my leg over the seat, and pedaled down the block. The icy breeze stung my face. I ended up on Seventeenth Street, at Wendy’s house. “My new set of wheels,” I told her when she opened her front door. I’d grown too tall for my old bike years ago.
Her mouth formed a precise O. She said, “That’s a White Bicycle,” as if each word took an exclamation point. Then her amazement faded, and she got the same idea as me. “Let’s find the spray paint.”
The bicycle metamorphosed from white to black. I furthered its makeover by covering the handlebars and back wheel guards with stickers that Wendy had taken from her favorite punk bands’ LPs. On one, Charles Manson’s eyes peered out. I stuck it on the seat.
I laughed just considering the scandal. One year before, the Hutchinson community had started a program called the “White Bicycles.” Volunteers had bought ten white Fujis, then placed them at various spots around the city. Residents could ride whenever the need arose-when their legs tired, when they were tipsy, when a knife-wielding attacker chased them, whatever. The rider parked the bike for the next person.
I considered the program a big joke, but it didn’t concern me until the day I committed my crime. That morning’s Hutchinson newspaper headline had announced the one-year anniversary of the White Bicycles. In a gigantic photo, teenagers stood grinning beside the bikes, their hands on the seats. I recognized so-and-so and his girlfriend from school. They were just the sort of people I hated-the kind who regarded life as a hunky-dory trip in a helium balloon.
“Tonight I get the last laugh,” I said. The spray paint sizzled from its can. The balls of my fingers had turned as black as olives, and I jabbed them into Wendy’s ribs.
Wendy borrowed her little brother’s Schwinn. The night was cold, lacerated by wind, so we donned scarves and stocking caps and raced toward Monroe Street. On the way there, we passed a stretch of road construction. A chunky female traffic cop waved an orange, diamond-shaped sign at us. “Slow down, goddammit, slow down!” Wendy hated being lectured as much as I did. She lifted her fist from her handlebars and shook it at the cop.
We parked in my garage. Mom had left the porch light on for me. Tiny icicles hung from our roofs edge, gleaming like fangs. Inside, Mom was sliding a tuna-noodle casserole into the oven. She had crumbled barbecue potato chips across the top layer of noodles. It was her third week off booze, and she’d been concocting new dishes every night. Wendy rubbed Mom’s shoulder. “Smells delicious, Mom,” she lied.
Mom kissed her cheek. “Weatherman says tonight will be the first snowfall,” she said. “It might be a white Christmas. You can stay for casserole, Wendy.” We hadn’t dined with a guest since Mom’s last boyfriend.
I turned on the stereo. The annoying deejay began introducing the next song in his top-forty countdown, so I quickly switched it off. TV was better. On screen, a “Gilligan’s Island ” rerun played in black and white. The girls wanted something from Gilligan. Ginger fluttered her eyelids and massaged his neck while Maryanne displayed a just-baked coconut cream pie. Nonexistent humans giggled and guffawed on the laugh track. Wendy asked me how much I’d take to screw the Skipper. “A hundred,” I said. The Professor? “He’s not bad. Fifty.”
When I said that word, Wendy looked at me and arched an eyebrow. For weeks we’d been discussing the easiest ways to make money, namely prostitution. I’d been reading about the concept for years in my stash of porno magazines. Wendy called me obsessed. I’d even written my freshman term paper on the topic. I’d given it the predictable title “World’s Oldest Profession,” but I was content with my B minus. During my research, I’d found a dusty hardback in Hutchinson ’s library that listed cities where older men pay hustlers top dollar for a fuck, a blow job, whatever.
Recently I’d discovered hustling even went on in Hutchinson. Christopher Ortega, a not-bad-looking kid in Wendys sophomore class, claimed he did it on the side. He lingered around the playgrounds of our city’s Carey Park on weekends, thumbs in pockets, watching as lonely middle-agers circled the roadway. “Fifty bucks is my charge,” Christopher had said, and I believed him for the simple fact that he hadn’t lied to us about these sorts of things before-i.e., he supplied us a bag of pot when I didn’t believe he sold drugs, and once, when I accused him of faking being a queer, he’d rammed his tongue into my mouth on the spot.
“I’ve been thinking about hanging out in the park,” I told Wendy. It was the third time I’d mentioned it that week.
Wendy leaned to peek into the kitchen, then turned back to me. “I’d rather see you make a buck some other way.” A wave of fishy odor floated into the living room. Wendy pinched her nose and continued in an altered voice. “But fucking’s perpetually on your mind anyway, so you might as well get paid for it.”
I watched the woman on the TV commercial choose the less-expensive detergent over the most popular brand. “Old guys will pay anything to get off with someone else. Anything different than their own hands,” I said. “It’s that feeling of a young guy’s skin touching theirs. Think of it as a service. They could get something from me, and I could get something from them.”
“True.” Pause. “But be careful. I know that sounds dumb, but even Hutchinson has its freaks. You’re only fifteen. You could trick with the wrong guy. I’d find pieces of you scattered everywhere.”
“You’ve been reading too many books,” I said. I could sense Wendy’s eyes drilling into my face, so I looked down. Paint smudges blackened my sweater sleeve. “Besides, it’s not that I haven’t done it already. For a little money, I mean.”
She’d known this was coming. “Coach?” she said. She was the only one I’d told about what happened that summer. I’d confessed everything to her, again and again. Wendy could practically hear Coach’s voice herself, could smell his breath, could feel the texture of his skin.
She repeated the word, this time without the question mark. “Coach.”
The stolen bike propelled me from poverty to affluence. The following Saturday afternoon, I slipped on an extra pair of socks, downed a plateful of leftover casserole, yelled good-bye to Mom as she headed to work, and rode toward Carey Park. The idea of money for sex thrilled me like nothing before.
A thin layer of ice sheeted the pair of ponds that flanked the park. The golf course and basketball courts were empty. I lowered the stocking cap around my ears.
The johns didn’t take long to spot. Four or five different men drove back and forth, around and around, circling the park in outdated cars. The guy in the Toyota Corolla and the guy in the Impala-it was almost identical to Mom’s car, its color a shade darker-tapped their brakes when they passed my bicycle. I trudged alongside the park road, pretending not to notice. But I did notice. The idea of their wanting to pay for me rendered me breathless, thrilled, delirious, flustered… I glanced into their windows, searching for any scrap of attractiveness, any absorbing or aberrant facial feature that might lead to me enjoying the actual sex.
I lapped Carey Park for thirty minutes, then stopped the bike at a playground. I tried to remember everything Christopher had told me. “Look innocent, yet old enough to be legal.” “Empty the emotion from your face.” “Smile crooked-mouthed; you look cuter.”
I walked toward the brightly painted circus animals, the ones hooked to concrete blocks by heavy springs. I sat on an elephant, and the cold metal stung my ass. I watched clouds curl through the sky, and in seconds the Corolla parked. I squinted at the driver; saw his dark curly hair and mustache. A finger poked from a crack in the passenger seat window and motioned me over.
Bingo.
Already I’d scored. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I opted for the direct. “You’ve got cash?”
“I’ve paid fifty before, and I’ll go no higher,” he said. I must have looked like a pro. I nodded and opened the car door.
He said his name was Charlie. He’d been married, divorced, and had married again. Three kids-a boy and two girls. “I’m in Hutchinson on business,” he said in a gruff monotone, “and my business is marketing snack foods.” I took a good whiff of his car, and it smelled like those orange cheese crackers with the peanut butter filling. He must have predicted my thoughts, because he offered me a package. I grabbed it and chowed down, then looked Charlie over. He wore a green suit, a name tag, a Santa Claus tie. His hands fidgeted at his face, the fingers returning again and again to touch his chin, as if it might crumble. I slid closer to him, and he patted my knee and massaged it. He shifted into drive and watched the road like the eye of a needle.
“Cops patrol this place,” Charlie said. “Even when it’s freezing outside, they’ve got brains enough to know what’s up.” His hands were shaking. “Let’s get a room somewhere.”
That “somewhere” was the Sunflower Inn. Room 102’s welcome mat spelled hospitality with two ls. The bed was comfortable, but the room was creepy. An orange bedspread showed a fist-sized black stain; the TV hadn’t been dusted in what seemed decades. A draft from the window sucked the corner of an orange curtain in and out of the room like a massive lung.
I unlaced my shoes. “Go slow,” Charlie said, “we’ve got all hour.” I thought, one hour equals sixty minutes. Sixty divided into fifty equals about eighty-five cents per minute. I couldn’t help grinning at that, which Charlie no doubt took to mean sensual pleasure. He started massaging my back.
He set the pace. I hardly touched him until he unzipped my pants and wormed three fingers inside. Then I pinched at his nipples, tickled the hair over his belly, rubbed his crotch through his slacks. I’m good at this, I thought. He pushed me onto the bed. He knelt beside me and shoved his head in my lap, his head bobbing and zigzagging as if filled with fizz. His tongue darted around my balls. It felt as flat and cold as a Popsicle.
I naturally thought of Coach. Charlie paled in comparison. That summer was six years past. I’d fucked around with a few guys since, but they’d been in my age group, hadn’t enraptured me much. I traced the outline of Charlie’s ribs and wondered where Coach was now. I knew he’d moved from Hutchinson. At school, I’d heard a grapevine story about someone’s parents being suspicious, causing Coach to quit Little League. At that precise moment, he might have been lying on a bed in some other state with another kid like me. For all I knew, he could have been dead. That idea seemed incredibly romantic. If I’d been alone and high, my imagination would have roamed-me dressed in black, lumbering toward Coach’s open coffin, a tear on my cheek, to center a single white lily on his motionless and impeccable chest… Charlie’s grunt made my fantasy evaporate.
While Coach’s fingers had “caressed” me, Charlie’s merely “touched.” My mind drifted, and Charlie stopped blowing me. He lifted his head and stared at my dick. “Come on, kid, you’re losing your hard-on.” I apologized. His head plunged back in.
Charlie sucked, and I fidgeted on the bed. My watch’s minute hand moved from nine to ten to eleven. Coach’s mouth had felt so much warmer than this. He had massaged the backs of my legs, his entire hands fitting over the muscles in my thighs. My dick and both balls could disappear into his mouth, and I would feel the clamp of his lips around my entire sex, trails of saliva streaming to the knees I’d scuffed from sliding into home plate.
“I’m ready,” I told Charlie. He didn’t pull away. I said it again. This time, I shuddered. He sucked harder, scraping his teeth over the head of my dick. In those seconds, I couldn’t tell pleasure from pain. I tried to extricate myself, but he cupped his hands over my ass’s curves. I came, and he swallowed.
Charlie stood and cleared his throat. “I know what your expression’s saying,” he said. “That wasn’t safe. But this is Kansas, not some city full of disease. And you’re just a kid.” It was the first time I’d heard a man say that, but it wouldn’t be the last.
I lay back, already wanting to leave.
Charlie tiptoed to the bathroom and fastened the lock. He started whistling “Strangers in the Night.” I felt like slugging him, taping his mouth shut, anything. Water needled from the showerhead, and I leaped from the bed. I dressed, then ransacked his suitcase. His clothes were nicely folded. Every sock was white. I uncovered packages of snack crackers, bubble gum, plastic trash cans full of candy, and chewable wax “lips.” I found Vitamin Cs, magnesium tablets, and aspirin. I grabbed my coat and filled its pockets.
During the drive back to the park, we barely said a word. He stopped beside my bike. “Maybe I’ll see you sometime.” He didn’t look at me. His eyes focused on the kid’s toy that hung by a string from the rearview mirror. It was a stuffed bear, the expression on its face vaguely tragic, an expression I’d seen on kids on milk cartons. Its red shirt read DADDY.
He handed me two twenties and a ten. “Thanks,” I said. “It was nice.”
The temperature was dropping, so I dashed home. Mom had left a note: “Early Shift Tomorrow.” In the living room, she lay napping in a chair, the alarm clock at her elbow. For some reason, I wanted to hear her voice. The house was too quiet. I almost woke her, then decided against it. I shuffled to the bathroom and shelved the vitamins. The dusty mirror showed me as always: same bushy eyebrows, same square jaw, same zit on the same neck I needed to smear with alcohol. I walked out; locked myself in my room. My algebra homework remained on the bed, where I’d tossed it. The candy and the money fit perfectly in the bottom dresser drawer, next to the bag of pot I’d bought from Christopher. I wedged one of the twenties into my wallet, pocketed the weed and the trash can candy, then picked up the phone. Wendy answered. When I opened my mouth to speak, I tasted peanut butter. “You’ll never guess what I finally did.”
I met Wendy on her porch. She had screwed a glowing taillight into the back end of her brother’s bike, and I spotted her from two blocks away. She stood in the light’s flashing red, waiting for me, bundled in her coat and scarf. She looked beautiful. “It’s freezing,” she yelled as I skidded to a halt. “And you’re conning me into following you to your new whorehouse.”
We rode toward Carey. I wanted to write a schedule on the park bathroom walls, to “fill the johns in on their new merchandise,” as I’d told Wendy. I’d already been thinking about what fifty dollars a week could bring-more drugs for Wendy and me, a new pair of high-tops, even a real tree this coming Christmas in place of the artificial one Mom kept in our neighbor’s cellar.
I stuck a pair of Charlie’s wax lips over my own. When we stopped at the tracks for an oncoming train, Wendy leaned toward me and kissed them.
In the pitch black, the park was downright creepy. I propped my bike against a tree, and Wendy let hers fall to the ground. We pussyfooted toward the men’s bathroom. It was unlocked, and she switched on the light.
In magenta crayon, I drew an erupting volcano, then wrote: “Saturday afternoons, from 2 until 3. Ready to please.” That sounded stupid, so I x’ed out the last three words and wrote “Young and willing.” Under it, in green, I scribbled a dollar sign. In less than twenty-four hours, I thought, I’ve become a hustler.
“Let’s head home,” Wendy said, “before frostbite sets in.”
I stopped her. “Wait. I want to show you something.” I unzipped. Wendy looked at me as if I were crazy. I pointed to my dick, to the bruises from that afternoon, already purple from the teeth marks Charlie left on my skin. “Look what the guy did to me,” I said. “No brains whatsoever in the blow job department.”
“Put that back in your pants, exhibitionist.” She stomped out, lecturing. “From now on, don’t let anyone do that to you. Your prick is not a candy cane. Next time somebody might chomp the whole thing off. You should start carrying Mace or a switchblade. At least charge them extra if they do that to you.”
“I didn’t realize it was hurting until it was over.” I bit a chunk from the wax lips and handed the rest to her. “Here. An early Merry Christmas.” The cold knifed my skin. I zipped back up.
We biked another half mile west. Our bodies hurtled through the dark. My eyes teared up, blurring the city lights that zoomed past us in stark, rhinestoney streams. After a while, the wind numbed me completely. I wiggled my fingers, barely feeling the gloves. I thought of the twenty-dollar bill in my wallet.
We sped past the entrance road to the Riviera Drive-In Theater. It had been closed since summer, but a feeble light still illuminated the marquee. Random letters were stuck there, and someone had rearranged them to spell HES COMING SOON. Wendy and I abandoned our bikes. We climbed the fence and walked forward, through the labyrinth of speaker poles. The projection booth’s paint was chipping. Ahead of us, the rectangular drive-in screen resembled a gigantic white envelope. It obliterated part of the sky, the open door to an empty world.
We stopped in the lot’s center. It was nearly midnight. The silence snuck up on us. I listened carefully for a siren, a dog’s bark, or a car horn, but I heard nothing. I remember thinking, It should be snowing now, and then, as if I’d punched a button marked MIRACLES, the sky lit up, speckled with thousands of moving flakes.
I felt I had to speak to prove this was happening. “It’s snowing.”
I took Wendy’s hand. Snowflakes clung to our coats. “I wish they were showing a movie right now,” she whispered. “A film about our lives, everything that’s happened so far. And we would be the only ones standing here, just you and me.”
With her free hand, she unhooked a speaker from its pole. She twiddled the dials and lifted it to her ear. “Listen. I hear something. It’s the voice of God.” She laughed, and I leaned to where she held the speaker, the side of my head brushing against its chilly ridges. The snow began tumbling faster in sharp diagonal darts. I closed my eyes and listened. Wendy gripped my fingers tighter. After a while, I heard a whispering from deep within the speaker. It could have been something as explainable as Wendy playing a joke, or our gloves bristling together, or the wind that gusted the flakes around us. But I wanted the noise to be something else. “Yes,” I told her, “I hear him.” The rest of the world had frozen, and Wendy and I were all that remained. I brushed snow from her face. “I hear him.”