Amazing things were happening. Summer fizzled, depositing its remains in swirling piles of leaves, sap that trickled from trees, and skeletal tumbleweeds that bounced through our town’s streets. The air smelled of ripening squash and melon. The nights became longer and cooler. I spent them lazing on my bed, my gaze directed out the window, watching migrating birds that scattered the sky. A family of possums took up residence in the trees beside our house. The cicadas buzzed their autumn lullabies; in the mornings, as I mowed my designated lawns for the final times that year, I’d find their crispy yellow shells fastened to trees, signposts, the frames of Little River’s decks and porches.
Gradually, my alien dreams ceased. Other dreams replaced them, these more brief and unsophisticated, new crystal-clear scenarios into which the eight-year-old Neil McCormick sometimes figured. I abandoned my dream log beneath my bed.
A certain sentence rang through my sleep, one spoken by Neil McCormick, seven words that I first remembered on the night Avalyn had been inside my room. Open your eyes, it will feel good.
College began in September. I enrolled, bought books, and studied. My mother surprised me by pulling into the driveway in a used Mustang she’d bargained from a lot in Hutchinson. The Toyota became my hand-me-down. I drove to school in the mornings and returned in the evenings, the routine falling into place.
Things went as expected; my courses, however, were easier than I’d predicted. And my psychology, calculus, meteorology, and English classes interested me less than did my growing friendship with Eric Preston. Since I’d met him, we’d been spending the steamy afternoons by frequenting the dollar-fifty matinees at the Flag Theater or listening to tapes in his room. I fibbed to my mother and claimed he was a friend from school I studied with. Initially I’d thought him strange, insisting we had nothing in common. But I realized that was wrong-I was no doubt just as strange. Besides, had I ever had a real friend before? Avalyn, perhaps, but she was thirteen years my senior. And as the days pitched forward, as my uncertainty about the UFOs and aliens grew, I wanted to divorce myself from my obsession with Avalyn. Although still preoccupied with the need to discover the solution to my missing time, I was no longer so certain the answer emanated from the spaceship I’d seen hovering over my house. The only thing I now knew was that somehow, Neil McCormick had my answer. And Eric Preston would lead me to him.
One night, not long after we’d met, Eric and I sat in his room and told each other about our lives. He outlined his childhood in Modesto, California, describing what he called “a completely normal life” until he started high school-when, he said, he “hung out with a wild crowd,” began “committing little crimes and taking cheap drugs,” and “came to the conclusion” he was gay. “A queer. A full-fledged fag.” He watched me when he said that, waiting for my reaction.
“Doesn’t bother me,” I said.
Eric continued. “Ultimately, I was knocked senseless by my parents’ car accident.” At that point, his face thawed slightly. “So here I am, in Kansas, with my dead dad’s parents.” His eyes closed and opened in slow motion. “Reborn.”
My turn. My childhood seemed tame when compared to his. I hadn’t taken drugs, hadn’t committed crimes, and was about as versed in sex as I was in sign language or acupuncture. So I made things brief, supplying little details: as a kid, I loved to capture grasshoppers and dragonflies in mayonnaise jars. Once my sister, Deborah, her friend Breeze, and I had tromped through an overgrown field to search for sandhill plums, only to be plagued with poison ivy the following day. My father never really liked me. In high school, I’d snagged second prize in a state-wide math contest…
Ultimately I cast anchor on what I knew Eric wanted to hear: why I’d chosen to seek out Neil McCormick. I chronicled the central mystery of my life, my obsession. I explained why I thought something important, even profound, remained hidden in the empty cracks from my eight-year-old summer; that Halloween two years later. And I ended by telling him about my interest in Avalyn. I hesitated; although no longer certain the UFO belief was truth, at least I considered that story intriguing or out of the ordinary. So I told Eric about the slight possibility that Neil and I were the victims of an abduction.
Eric appeared amazed, but I felt relieved when he didn’t laugh. He professed to be interested in unexplained phenomena as well, especially parapsychology. “I’m telepathic,” he told me. “Well, slightly.” He could prove it by a test: I would concentrate and close my eyes; he would transmit a message, just by staring at my head. I did as he instructed, but didn’t hear any inner voice. “What message did you receive?” Eric asked.
I ventured a guess. “Urn, the weather sure is nice today?”
He winced. “Oh, forget it.”
Outside, cars drag raced through the trailer court’s cul-de-sac. When the noise quieted, Eric asked further questions about the aliens. I mentioned the dreams I’d had; my recent inklings that something more lurked beneath them. When I finished, Eric promised to prepare Neil for our upcoming meeting by informing him about my UFO suspicions. “No, you don’t have to do that,” I said.
“Yes I do. I’ll send him a letter.”
“Hmm.” I imagined Neil McCormick’s fingers tearing at Eric’s envelope, the same fingers I’d dreamed gripping mine. I saw him reading, pausing over the words about me, and then, as he gradually remembered, closing his eyes and smiling.
One morning, the telephone woke me, and minutes later my mother appeared in my bedroom doorway. “It’s Avalyn,” she said. I hadn’t seen Avalyn since that night on my bed, the night of her failed attempt at whatever she was attempting. I’d only spoken to her twice that month. In many ways, I missed her. But an inner voice held me back, instructing to put my Avalyn visits on hiatus until I discovered more about Neil and our past together. “Tell her I’m asleep,” I said.
My mother grabbed the upstairs extension. “I’m afraid he’s still in bed. All that studying makes him sleepy.” Something-possibly triumph-soured her voice. “Bye-bye.”
Just as I began dozing off, the phone rang again. I knew it wouldn’t be Avalyn, so I answered. It was Eric, asking if I wanted to “go hunt watermelons.” That sounded odd. I hadn’t eaten watermelon in years, due to the simple fact that they had overpopulated my childhood. After my father had left, the field beside our house had become just that: a field. It was no longer a venerated patch of land for growing that sticky-sweet fruit; no longer a place where my father spent summer and autumn hours planting, cultivating, and ultimately picking.
Still, when Eric asked, it piqued my interest. I brushed aside papers scribbled with notes for my upcoming psychology exam. “They won’t be ripe anymore,” I guaranteed. “It’s nearly November.” Then he told me we would go along as guests of Ellen McCormick. Neil’s mother. The person closest to him, the woman I still hadn’t met. “What time should I be there?” I asked.
Now that I had unlimited use of the Toyota, I could come and go as I pleased. I hedged telling my mother the truth, tapping a knuckle on my psychology book to indicate I planned to study at the library. My mother seemed to like Eric slightly more than she had Avalyn; nevertheless, the day after she met him, she’d referred to him as “weird” and “morose,” claiming she believed he “carried some secret in all that depression.” I didn’t care what she thought; he was my friend. I stepped out the door, waving good-bye.
It was jacket-wearing weather, and the road from Little River to Hutchinson had changed color, everything now a dull, deerskin brown. When I pulled into the trailer court and knocked on the door, Eric’s grandma answered. She and her husband gave me the same polite “hello” and “how are you” I’d grown accustomed to. Eric emerged from the hallway, dressed in black, fiddling with a limp, spotted banana peel. “Hey, man,” he said. I followed him to his cramped bedroom, selected a tape by a band I’d never heard, and popped it into the stereo.
“We’re meeting Neil’s mom in an hour,” Eric told me. “Don’t be shocked, but I think we’ll be trespassing through someone’s pasture. Neil’s mom found some field on the west side of town, and it’s full of melons and pumpkins. She wants to make watermelon-rind pickles. She hopes the owners don’t mind if she borrows some melons.”
Eric’s grandpa knocked and entered with a plate of brownies. I sat on the opposite end of Eric’s futon, positioned the brownies between us, then asked, “Why’d she invite me? She doesn’t even know me.”
“Actually, it was my idea to invite you. When she called, I suggested it. She and I became friends, sort of, when Neil was still around. Strange, I guess.” Eric licked the corner of a brownie, testing it, then took a bite. Clumps of hair poked in awkward, three-quarter-inch angles from his head, uncombed from last night’s sleep, his haircut identical to a band member’s on the poster behind him. “Honesty time. I sort of fell in love with Neil. Wasn’t reciprocated, though. Hope that doesn’t freak you out. Anyway, I think Neil’s mom knows that. Could be she feels sorry for me. Could be she’s like us, she doesn’t really have anyone to hang out with. Especially now, with Neil in New York.”
So that was it, I thought. Eric had fallen in love with Neil. “Is Neil-” I couldn’t think of how to finish.
“Yes, he’s a queer,” Eric said. That sounded too harsh, a word I remembered hearing my father say, a scowl engraved into his face, whenever he described the women players on certain softball teams he drove into Hutchinson to watch. It dawned on me that my father, back when he lived with us, had always frequented tournaments at Sun Center, the same softball complex where, according to Eric, Neil had been employed as a scorekeeper.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Before we meet Mrs. McCormick, I’d love it if you could take me to Sun Center. To see where Neil worked.”
Eric grinned, revealing something almost mean in the angle of his mouth. “Gotcha. I’ll show you Sun Center. And then I’ll show you where he really worked.”
We left the bedroom. Eric handed the plate back to his grandpa. “These were scrumptious.” He didn’t bother informing his grandparents where we were going.
Sun Center had closed, the summer’s tournaments finished. Eric stopped the car at the padlocked gate. Ahead of us, a sign read KANSAS’S LARGEST HAVEN FOR SOFTBALL FUN. He clucked his tongue at it. “Sorry. Looks like we can’t get in.” I surveyed the place. The only signs of life were some sparrows, a hunchbacked groundskeeper sprinklering brown plants, and two children who’d somehow managed to climb the fence and now seesawed in the complex’s playground.
“See those press boxes above the bleachers?” I looked to where his finger pointed. “That’s where Neil sat, hour after hour, blabbing on and on about this and that nonsense. You know, ‘Preston the batter, Lackey on deck.’ That sort of stuff.” I tried to imagine Neil sitting there, his face behind the glass, watching every move the players made. All I could envision was the boy’s face in the Little League photo. I saw Avalyn smashing that picture against her knee; next, the prepubescent Avalyn from “World of Mystery,’ her pigtails shooting behind her.
“We had sex up there once,” Eric said. He paused and looked at me, the expression on his face now flushed and dithery, his eyes gone glassy. “Oh, sorry. I’m not trying to shock you. That stuff’s over with anyway.” He backed away from the gate and stomped the accelerator. Dust and dead leaves spun behind the car in a brown cyclone. The kids on the seesaw watched us leave, shaking their middle fingers.
Eric checked the dashboard clock. “This thing’s fifteen minutes slow,” he said, “so we should be meeting Neil’s mom in about ten minutes. Enough time to show you Carey Park.”
We drove east, then south. My parents had taken me to Carey Park once or twice, years back. I remembered playgrounds, softball diamonds, a golf course, a fishing pond, and a minizoo where ostriches, gazelles, and a dusty-bearded buffalo lazed under cottonwood trees. “The animals aren’t there anymore,” Eric said. “Losers from high school were poisoning them, so the city called it quits on the zoo.”
The road twirled through the park. A ubiquitous, decaying odor pervaded the air, a smell like sun-poached fish on a riverbank. Leaves fell on the windshield, and the sky smeared with barn swallows and sparrows. On the right, more kids were swinging and seesawing. On the left, two men in white pants carried their clubs toward a dirt mound. This golf course needs mowing, I thought.
“Time for some information on Neil,” Eric said. “He used to come here and get picked up by old men. Do you know what I’m talking about?” I shook my head. “Prostitution. Neil was a little whore; had been for quite a few years. He’d come out here whenever he needed money. The oldsters would get their rocks off and hand him a couple of twenties, boosting his ego somewhere into the stratosphere range.”
The park sped past. “Wow,” I said. I’d thought only women could work as prostitutes; thought it only happened in the largest cities. The idea of Neil-as-prostitute seemed like a feature from the sensational TV programs my mother adored. I imagined a newscaster’s voice-over: “This teenage boy generates an ample amount of money for sex, and it all happens right here in the sleepy midwestern city of Hutchinson, Kansas.” Eric was watching me; I wondered what reaction he expected. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Did you send him that letter?” I finally asked.
“Oh, the one about you?” He looked at the dashboard clock again and steered toward Carey Park’s exit. “Indeed I did. Took me a week to finish. I doubt Neil will write back. But he knows who you are, knows you’re going to meet him when he comes home.”
The park’s road intersected Reformatory Drive, and as we passed I could see KSIR and its four turrets. I noticed a shadow in the southwesternmost tower. The figure might have been my mother, standing guard over the grounds; although I couldn’t be certain, I reached over and honked Eric’s horn, then leaned out the window and waved my arms. It was something I did sometimes.
When we got to North Monroe, Mrs. McCormick was sitting on her front steps. “There she is,” Eric said. Her hair fell across her face, the same color as Neil’s in the photograph. She looked a little wild, dark, very pretty. I instantly liked her.
She trotted over to the car and squeezed into the backseat. Her hand reached forward, its fingernails painted pink, and I shook it. “Eric’s told me about you,” she said. “You’re an old acquaintance of my Neil?”
“Sure am.” Then: “Little League.” Whatever Eric had said, I hoped he’d chosen to disregard the UFO story. Since she didn’t look at me as if I were crazy, I assumed she didn’t know about it.
As for what I knew about her, Eric had sketchily detailed her job at a grocery store, her sense of humor, the fact that she drank. Like my mother, she was a single woman with a teenaged son, but Mrs. McCormick seemed unrestrained, more independent and feisty than my austere, workaholic mother. The two of them wouldn’t get along.
Ellen McCormick seemed especially friendly with Eric, almost acting as if they shared critical secrets, or as if he were her son instead of her son’s friend. What did she know about him and Neil? And what about Neil’s doings in Carey Park? Perhaps it didn’t matter now. She leaned forward, her perfume oozing its nectar, her eyes scanning the ditches for identifying road markers. “Up here by this red barn, make a left,” she directed. “Go a couple of miles. You’ll pass some haystacks and a felled tree in the ditch.” She offered us black licorice whips, pushing them into the front seat as if she’d magically retrieved them from the air. “From the same batch as the ones we ate at Cheyenne Bottoms,” she told Eric. “I can’t get rid of this candy now that Neil’s gone.” I took one, and it slid snakelike from her fingers.
Eric honked as he passed a hilly cemetery, its stone crosses and mausoleums outlined against the horizon. He drove farther into the boondocks. Hutchinson’s city limits disappeared behind us. “Here it is,” Mrs. McCormick said from the backseat; Eric steered into the ditch and stopped.
The watermelon field-a flat, sandy plot lacking trees-was separated from the road by a damaged barbed wire fence. A sign, wired to a fence post, spelled out TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. We began trespassing regardless. I could tell the melons had seen better days: their leaves and vines had yellowed, with carcasses of fruit scattered here and there, exhibiting crimson wounds, ravaged to smithereens by raccoons.
We crawled over the fence. “My father taught me-” I said, then stopped myself. No, that was not what I wanted to say. “Um, I know how to tell if a melon’s ripe. There’s a little coil where the fruit meets the vine. It turns brown, and the melon’s ready. I hate to say it, but these are rotten.” I sounded like my professors at the college, and I suddenly wished I’d shut up.
Mrs. McCormick was unfazed. “I don’t need the meat,” she said. “Just the rinds. My neighbor lady taught me to make watermelon rind pickles. Ooh, they’re good. I could get drunk on them. Now, let’s get to picking.”
I searched awhile. A scattering of pumpkins freckled the field’s far end; since Halloween was approaching, I robbed the three with the most intriguing shapes and carried them back to the fence. Good melons were harder to find. Still, I discovered some whose curlicues were brown instead of black; these I ripped from the vines and placed beside the pumpkin trio.
Mrs. McCormick began whooping, her voice lilting in the air like a yodeler’s. She had spied a raccoon. I glanced up and saw her hightailing through the watermelon patch. She chased the coon, gaining on it, her speed almost superhuman. The stripes on the animal’s tail bobbed through the dying vines, and twice she leaned to try and snatch the tail, her feet sliding in the loose sand. Eric laughed, one hand clasped over his mouth, his eyes darting from Mrs. McCormick to me to watch my reaction. Just before she could snag it, the raccoon reached the pasture’s end and scurried under the barbed wire, secure at last. Mrs. McCormick raised her head, gave a final whoop, then turned back to us, exasperated.
Eric calmed down and began wandering around lazily, stirring up clouds of dust. Neil’s mother returned to her previous spot and continued foraging for healthy melons. After a while, she looked up from the space where she was crouching and mock-frowned. She pointed to Eric and aimed her voice at the sky. “What to do with this one? He doesn’t want to work.” Then her finger pointed at me. “But this one,” she said, “is a keeper. This is the one my Neil will have to meet.” I wasn’t certain what she meant by that, but I liked the sound of it. She pushed a sugar baby melon with the flat of her hand, and it slowly rolled toward the fence, leaving a trail in the sand.
After the watermelon afternoon, the weather became explicitly autumn. Eric began wearing a series of bulky black sweaters, his pale skin turning paler. I told him the sweaters looked comfortable. The following evening, when I stopped by the mobile home after class, he presented me with a blue one. “No need to think I’m in love with you,” he said. “I just wanted you to have this. A gift from a friend.”
My mother was working overtime, so I invited Eric back to Little River. He fetched his tapes and a bottle of whiskey. I started to say, Don’t let my mother see that, but that sounded inane. I started to say, I’ve never been drunk before, and that sounded even more inane. I finally said, “Let’s go.”
At home, my room was chilly, so I slipped the blue sweater over my head. “That’s better.” I chose a tape by a band called Breathless and blasted the volume. Eric uncapped the whiskey, took a drink, and delivered it to me. He began to search my closet, finding sheets of paper and a cigar box full of magic markers. Scribbled on the box, in my father’s handwriting, was 6¢ PER POUND. He had written that years ago, when Deborah and I had sold watermelons during the Kansas State Fair.
We sat on the floor. I drank, trying not to wince. Eric took a large piece of paper and folded it into three sections. He explained a game he’d learned in art class: one person would draw a figure’s head on the first third of paper, then make guidelines for the body into the top edge of the middle section and pass it to the next person. Artist number two would draw the body, leaving guidelines for legs and feet. A third artist finished the figure.
Eric handed me the folded paper. The head would be my assignment. “I know,” he said. “Draw an alien.”
I frowned. “Is it in the rules that you have to tell me what to draw?” I began sketching a lightbulb-shaped noggin to appease him. The alien’s nostrils seemed bigger than the ones I remembered from my dreams. After I finished the enormous eyes and the mouth’s miniature slit, I took two more swigs of booze. It felt hot going down, a giddy fusion of fire and water.
“Neil’s lips have touched that exact bottle,” Eric said.
His turn. “I’m not going to tell you what to draw,” I said. I left him the pair of required lines so he could begin his body. He started in, taking twice as long as I had, nibbling his bottom lip in concentration. On the stereo, the band sounded especially melancholy. “There you are with your idiot ideas,” the singer sang. “More or less as far-fetched as mine.”
When Eric had finished, he turned up the final third of paper. “Stupid me. I guess there’s only two of us.”
I thought for a second. “Let’s pretend Neil’s here,” I said. “Do the feet the way you think he’d do them.”
Eric drank. I drank. He chose a different magic marker, started to touch it to the paper, and stopped. “No,” he said. He slid the paper across the floor to me. “You do it. Based on what you know about Neil, based on what you remember, start drawing.”
Neil’s appearance from the Chamber of Commerce photograph formed in my head, and I began from the lines Eric had traced on the paper’s last third. I concentrated on any scrap of evidence I’d discovered about Neil until the drawing was finished. My head felt disordered, and I knew I was getting drunk. I centered the paper between Eric and me, and we unfolded it together.
First came my alien’s head, a picture nearly identical to the one Avalyn had drawn for the Wichita newspaper, its eyes slightly lopsided and overwhelming its face. “That’s good,” Eric said. His torso, a detailed representation of a skeleton, held a blood-dripping scythe in hand, its finger bones splayed at angles, its hipbone shaped like a fat heart. And the skeleton’s legs led into “Neil”’s-my-drawing of feet. Eric regarded it; said “and this is good, too.” I’d sketched a bowlegged form with knobby knees. The legs wore clodhopper, cleated tennis shoes, the laces untied. Next to the left foot were a baseball bat and a glove, the number ninety-nine written on its thumb. And next to the right foot, an oversized baseball. Across its surface, I’d written one word: COACH.
Eric tapped a finger against the baseball I’d drawn. “Coach,” he read. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I downed the remainder of the whiskey as if it were water. “I really don’t know.”
I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke to the telephone ringing. I sat up from the floor, suddenly dizzy, my head pounding. I nudged Eric’s knee. “I think I’m drunk,” I said.
“I think you are too,” he said. He staggered over to answer the phone.
“Wait. It could be Avalyn. I still don’t know what to say. Just tell her I’m asleep or something. Tell her I’m not here.”
Eric stepped into the hallway and positioned the telephone on my room’s floor. He wrapped his hand around the receiver and paused, thinking. Then he picked it up. “Hello.” I waited to hear what he said next. “Well, yes.” He was stammering. “Just a second. I’ll get him.”
I mouthed, “Who is it?,” slightly panicking, since the clock beside me said 11:45. Shouldn’t my mother be home by now? I imagined her car in a crushed heap at the side of the road, her body lacerated by flying glass. I imagined a bullet from an inmate’s gun hammering into her skull.
“It’s some guy,” Eric mouthed back. He kicked off his shoes, fluffed a pillow on my bed, and eased his head onto it.
I crawled across the room and grabbed the phone. “Hello.”
Silence. The person on the other end swallowed, took a deep breath. “Brian,” a voice said. “It’s me.” At first I didn’t recognize the voice, and I stared at Eric as he began to drift into dreamland.
The voice repeated my name. This time, I couldn’t mistake the caller. It was my father.
I hadn’t seen my father in three years, since the Christmas of 1988 when he’d visited Deborah and me, when he’d tucked a twenty-dollar bill into each of our fists and perched in a corner to watch us open gifts. And he hadn’t telephoned since last year’s Christmas. He’d forgotten both my graduation and my recent nineteenth birthday. For some curious reason-the fact I was drunk, maybe, or Eric’s companionship in the room-I felt uncommonly brave. I also felt angry. I wanted to scream at my father. I wanted to dig deep into the place where I kept all my feelings for him, all the pieces of dissatisfaction or rage or hatred, then stir them around, retrieve a fiery amalgamation, and throw them into his face. “What the fuck do you want?” I asked. That sentence almost hurt my mouth, as though it had been jimmied from my lips with an invisible blade, and when I said it Eric shot up from bed, his eyes widened toward me.
“Brian,” my father said, almost scolding. My question had shocked him, too. Then his voice calmed and stationed itself. “I missed your birthday. You should get some-you know, some form of apology.”
“I don’t need anything from you,” I said. I’d never spoken to my father like this. If I had mouthed off to him when I was little, he would have backhanded me. But now, woozy within this drunken fog, I had to do it. So much had happened since he’d last called, so many people and places and memories. My father had no connection with any of them. He knew nothing about me. I was no more his son than the boy that probably delivered his morning paper or the kid from the house next door in whatever city he now lived in.
“That’s not true, son,” my father said. “You know, I’ve been meaning to visit you again, because we have so much catching up-”
“Like hell we do,” I interrupted. Eric was standing now, head cocked in curiosity.
“Don’t be angry with me. Please.” My father had said please to me, and it made me sick. “Just talk to me, son. I want to know how you’ve been, what you’ve been up to.”
I felt on the threshold of something. For years I had wanted to ask my father what he knew about my missing time, and now, our telephones connected, I wondered how I could gather together the words for the question. “You do, do you? Well, here’s what I want to know.” I could hear his breathing, lucid and steady, and for a moment I saw my father’s chest rising and falling with each breath, his image absolutely clear, as if I’d only seen him yesterday.
“Something happened to me when I was little,” I said. “Maybe you can tell me about it.”
“What’s going on?” he said. “What has your mother-”
“My mother isn’t here. She has no part of this. Right now I just want to hear from you. I’ve been fucked-up inside my head for so long, dear father”-on that word, Eric put his fingers to his mouth-“and since the last time you called I’ve been trying hard to figure out why. Maybe you can help. Maybe you remember that night years ago, when I woke in the crawl space. I was bleeding, and I was dirty, and I smelled horrible, half-dead. Do you remember that? Or were you upstairs, too busy sleeping, not caring a fuck about me? Do you remember how she took me to the doctor, and all you cared about was the fact that I wanted to quit baseball? And do you remember all the times I passed out after that, all the times I pissed the bed, with you never questioning why, only screaming at me for it? Do you remember that Halloween night a few years later, when I passed out again, and I knew something else had happened, and all you did was shrug it off? Do you?” I stopped to take a breath. My voice had elevated, becoming something I no longer possessed. And the words kept coming: “Could be that someone did something to me, on both those nights. Could be that someone tried to kill me even, or did even worse than that.” My sentences blurred together, and I wondered what he could understand of my ranting. “So what do you know, dear father? What do you have to tell me?”
There was another pause, this one lasting entirely too long. My chest hurt-no, not my chest, my heart-and as I waited I realized the preposterous idea of this conversation, and I knew he couldn’t answer me.
“I don’t know,” my father said at last. He sounded exhausted. “There’s nothing to say here. I can’t help you, Brian.”
I started to slam the phone down, but that seemed one step too far. I figured I at least needed to tell him good-bye. “Good-bye.” I hung up before he could speak again.
My hand throbbed. I looked down at it. Somehow I had grabbed the drawing Eric and I had made; had crumpled it in my fist. I let go, and the paper swelled a little, its wrinkles loosening. I could see Eric’s skeleton wrist. I could see a single, staring eye of my alien. I could see the C and the O from the word I’d written on Neil’s baseball.
Eric lay back on the bed. He didn’t ask questions. A brilliant blue light shone in the window behind his head, but without investigating I knew it was merely the porch light from one of Little River’s homes. Only that, nothing more.
“It’s just as I thought,” I said. “He didn’t do anything to me. It wasn’t him. He had nothing to do with it.” I stared at the telephone for what could have been hours. After a while, it seemed to crawl across the floor. I knew the hallucination was due to the darkness, to the bittersweet spell of the whiskey. I stretched my leg, rared back, and kicked the phone as hard as I could. It sailed through the hallway. A pure, almost miraculous second of silence passed before the telephone smashed against a door, the closed door to the room where my father had once slept.
Life in New York didn’t begin as planned: I suffered through a record-breaking four weeks-twenty-nine days, to be exact-without sex. “I always knew you had willpower,” Wendy said. I didn’t tell her that my abstinence wasn’t due to willpower, but to the crabs, which kept returning. I’d already administered doses three and four of Eric’s medicine from that day in Great Bend, a day that now seemed part of some other eon. Finally, with dose number five in mid-September, I’d decimated the crabs forever, free to do as I pleased.
I’d heard from various people how I could find sex anywhere in New York. Great, I thought, but I also remembered something Christopher Ortega had said months earlier, when I’d detailed my plans to relocate. “Don’t have sex up there,” he’d told me, as if I were spaceshipping to some distant and ominous planet. “Dangerous.”
I figured sex couldn’t be as dangerous as the street where Wendy-and now, where I, too-lived. The apartment sat on the fifth floor of a grungy building on Avenue B. As soon as the sun rose, unemployed women and men perched on the sidewalk and sipped from beer cans in brown paper sacks. Kids chased one another, dodging traffic, screaming sentences in Spanish. The neighborhood drug dealer prowled around, chanting his code words “bodybag, bodybag” to anyone who approached. Try as I might to sleep late, I couldn’t, tossing and turning in the makeshift bed Wendy had set up in one of the three rooms, the street’s seismic chatter squeezing into my ears until I woke.
On the evening after I knew the crabs had gone, I wandered through the West Village. New York’s streets made it seem I’d been dropped into some tricky labyrinth. Corner groceries sold autumn flowers in bundles, a concept completely unfathomable in Kansas. Men traipsed outside clothing stores and drugstores, thrusting flyers into the faces of passersby: “Big sale tonight,” “Ten percent off everything.” I felt the hollow throb of hunger in my stomach, so I stopped at a streetside fruit stand and plunked down three quarters for a carton of shriveled, overripe strawberries.
On West Tenth, I saw the sign for an obviously gay bar called Ninth Circle. Three rough-looking boys gathered in front, lingering under a streetlight as if it were warming them, and they glanced up when I passed. I downed more strawberries and pretended not to notice. Their crotch-forward stances and their sneers made me think, Hustlers, no doubt. They were dressed alike-simple white T-shirts, jeans-and I was dressed like them.
A homeless man, one eye as inert as a dead flounder’s, stopped me and asked if he could “have one or two cherries.” I felt the group of boys staring. I handed the berries to the homeless man, which gave me a strange sort of martyrdom high.
Then I discovered I was being watched by someone else. A fortyish guy approached, the kind with a three-piece suit and briefcase, the kind that blends into whatever crowd he happens to be hurrying through. “Hi,” he said when our eyes met. I said “Hi” back. Three minutes later, I was following him home, eager to smash the glass window of my recent celibacy.
The guy was a lawyer, and he’d piled his apartment’s bookshelves with dictionary-size books on law. An American flag covered an entire bedroom wall. I saluted it. He took my hand away from my forehead and pulled me toward him. His eyes flashed in the darkness. I tossed my clothes into a corner; he folded and stacked his. His dopey basset hound padded in to sit beside the bed, attempting to lick my toes whenever my foot dangled over the edge.
The lawyer talked a lot during sex-standard, impersonal porno chatter I still loved. He unrolled a condom onto my dick, then maneuvered his body into a hands-and-knees position. He looked over his shoulder, and I slipped myself into him. For fun, I imagined what he might be thinking: It’s sheer ecstasy having a teenager inside me; If only I were twenty years younger, I could be this boy’s lover and not some freak fuck.
He came, I came, the regular shtick. His face got frantic. “You will stay, won’t you?” He pushed himself from the bed, calmed his fanatical dog, started searching his pants pockets. I began to explain how I couldn’t stay unless I called my roommate first. Then I stopped. The guy had turned around, was holding out a few bills.
Those had been hustlers on West Tenth. And the lawyer assumed me one of them. I took his money. “Sure, I’ll stay,” I said.
I thought: If this isn’t fate, what is?
After the autumn equinox, New York grew dark faster. Around eight o’clock, the streets would curd with a cool and smoky air. The city smelled like fire, like an odor from some voodoo ritual. Machinelike people scurried here and there, no one looking at anyone else.
If my first New York sexual encounter had earned me fifty dollars, then perhaps the job search I’d been dreading could temporarily wait. Besides, I told myself, I’ve got to know this place first. I continued walking the streets. I sometimes returned to West Tenth, where the same cluster of boys stared without speaking. But no more men picked me up. Evenings, I’d arrive home before Wendy, usually with a moronic gift (old “Witching Hour” comic books; more earrings for her collection; roasted cashews from a street vendor) to tranquilize the guilt I felt for shacking up without paying. “I’m becoming a true New Yorker,” I told her. “I don’t miss Kansas one teeny weeny bit.”
But I did miss it; no denying that. After my trick with the lawyer, I’d stretched back on his bed’s doughy pillow as he curled his arm around me, my mind drifting. Before I fell asleep I remembered how Kansas had appeared from the airplane. As the 747 lifted from the Wichita Airport’s runway, I’d leaned back in seat 17A, a slumbering woman and her young daughter beside me, and peeked out the window. Thousands of feet below, the earth became a patchwork of greens and yellows and browns, marked here and there with shiny barn roofs and silos, rivers that twisted like sapphire arteries, and yes, an uncountable number of baseball diamonds. On one kelly-colored outfield, antlike players jogged toward their dugout as the inning ended. An urge crept up on me, and I softly announced, “End of inning. Coming to bat in the top of the fifth…” I imagined how Sun Center would look from the sky. That made me remember Eric, and I visualized my friend and my mom as I’d last seen them, standing at the boarding gate, hands waving in synch. The airplane entered a fluffy cumulus, and Kansas disappeared.
One day, after my legs grew weary, I walked back to Avenue B. Two queens bickered outside the corner deli. “I want names,” one hissed at the other, and I swallowed away a laugh. Beside them, pumpkins were stacked into a pyramid, anticipating Halloween. They looked foolish in the middle of the city: pathetic, nothing like midwestern pumpkins, each no bigger than a dimwit’s brain. They wouldn’t do justice to the upcoming holiday. I scrutinized them, tried to decide which would look best in our apartment window, bought the fattest.
“Jackpot,” I said to the mailbox: a letter from Eric and a postcard from Mom. The latter showed a cyclone demolishing a town. KANSAS TORNADO, the caption said. I read the opposite side as I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Mom had scribbled some quick lines about the freezers conking out at the grocery, the weather turning cooler, the house not being the same without me. “I miss you. Hourly.”
I sat on the apartment floor and tore open Eric’s letter. It was dated three weeks back; he’d only recently sent it. The letter consisted of eight handwritten notebook pages, which I recognized as torn from the half-poetry journal, half-secret diary I’d sometimes spied him carrying. Pages one and two rattled on about his grandparents and echoed Mom’s Kansas weather report. Then, somewhere around page three, things got interesting:
Here’s the main reason for this letter. Four days ago I met this guy. It’s weird but I’ve spent tons of time with him ever since, all four days as a matter of fact. No, it’s not what you think, we’re not fucking. I don’t even think he’s queer. I can’t see him ever having sex with anyone, actually. Anyway, he’s just started school at the stupid college. He’s from this totally tiny nearby town called Little River, and I went there yesterday and it looks artificial, like it’s only a dream of a town, its buildings and churches and trees like a movie set’s cardboard cutouts, ready to topple at the slightest kick. That sounds stupid but it’s true. His name’s Brian. He’s blond, awkward-looking, glasses, zits, etc. So here’s the story: he’s obsessed with you. No, I’m not kidding. I caught him hanging out in front of your house, a while after you’d left. When I spied him, he asked, “Are you N. McCormick?” I freaked. I told him no. Turns out he used to play on your Little League team-well, he only played for a couple of games or whatever. He was squad’s worst player, etc. Now take a deep breath, make sure you’re sitting down for this, all that. Yesterday, after hem-hawing and beating around the bush, he basically told me that although he’s not exactly sure, he thinks that when you and he were kids, you were abducted by a UFO and examined by space aliens. He was completely serious, and believe me I could tell from the look in his eyes. He blabbed on and on, sort of baring his soul about this woman friend of his who’s been abducted, been on nationwide TV, etc., and telling me about these dreams he’s had where you and he are inside a blue room and these extraterrestrials are reaching out to you, touching you all over, communicating with you in this weird sort of ESP way (and of course that last little detail really drew me in, considering my interest in ESP stuff). Anyway when he’d finished telling me all this he just looked me straight in the eye and said, “But actually I’m beginning to realize something else really happened, and all this is crap.” (When he said “something else,” it was as if the words were italicized, and when he said “crap” it was like he’d never sworn before.) So what’s the story on this? Do you remember Brian or what? And WERE YOU ABDUCTED BY A UFO? If so, why haven’t you told me about it etc? Weird.
Eric’s letter continued, but at that point I stopped reading. At first I answered no, I couldn’t remember anyone named Brian from my past; I couldn’t even recall a Brian from my Hutchinson junior high days. The part about the UFOs twisted my face into a foolish smile, the kind that forms whenever I hear something astounding and irresistible. I felt as though someone had whispered the world’s juiciest gossip, tickling me all the while.
Then I stopped smiling and really considered Eric’s words. The kid named Brian, my Little League team, the part about “something else” actually happening-it seemed both familiar and unpleasantly intimate, so much so I felt embarrassed. Brian? I shut my eyes, thinking. Brian.
Instead of the boy, my closed eyes and concentration gave me a substitute image. Coach. The glitter in his eyes, the rough sand-colored mustache, his muscles’ ripples and curves-all there, crystallized within a precious cranny of my brain. He was still part of me.
It was love, I told myself. Coach had loved me. But there had been others, boys whose faces I’d seen smiling from his photo albums. And I could remember three separate times when he’d brought other boys home to join in, to add fuel to the forbidden. Had one of the three been Brian? These boys’ faces stayed vague, beyond surfacing. Perhaps Coach’s emotions for them had caused me to feel jealous, inadequate, or damaged; whatever the reason, I had dislocated my memories of them. And their names were as incapable of being conjured as the names of men I’d tricked with from Carey Park, from Rudy’s, from anywhere. When it came to names, I remembered Coach and nothing more.
“I’m beginning to realize something else really happened.” I could hear Brian, whoever he was, saying that to Eric. Perhaps the UFO story amounted to nothing but bullshit. Perhaps he’d already told Eric about Coach, and they’d agreed to pull my leg all the way from Kansas, to see what I’d say. Perhaps, and perhaps not. I didn’t want to think about it.
I considered telephoning Eric, but I couldn’t. Only one other person knew about Coach-Wendy-and even she didn’t fully understand the story. She couldn’t know the privacy and the bliss I felt when he held me, and yes, the love. Coach existed in my past, my most special and unblemished memory. Eric could never know about him; Mom could never know. Whatever recollections Eric’s new friend held, I couldn’t allow them to interfere with mine.
But even as I thought this-as I fell back on the floor and tossed aside Eric’s letter-I had the weird idea that I knew Brian, or at least understood him, as if I’d been burdened with the sort of ESP that Eric could only fantasize having. It was a confident knowledge, and it scared me.
Money dwindled fast. There one day, gone the next. Evenings, I wasted time with Wendy and her friends, drinking in smoky East Village bars. We alternated between straight and queer hangouts. I slept around; sex was nothing spectacular, nothing too different from what I’d had in Kansas. I wanted something more.
One night, in a place with the ingenious name of The Bar, a bartender asked where I hailed from. I told him; he smiled, thought a minute, and said, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” He hadn’t been the first to say that. Everyone thought the Oz references hilarious-bartenders, Wendy’s pals, and an old dude whose eyes flashed with the leery optimism that yes, I was his for the night.
After the bartender said the line, I turned to Wendy, my face blazing with drunkenness and anger. “I hate Dorothy and Toto,” I said. We ferreted our way around the place and sat on a bench beside the pool table. White ball collided with blue, knocking it into a corner pocket.
Wendy removed the rubber band from the ponytail that trailed in a long strip down her head’s median. Her dyed-scarlet hair tumbled everywhere, so gorgeous I had to plunge my face and hands into it. It smelled like flowers-honeysuckle, I guessed. “Braid it,” Wendy said.
I didn’t know how. She shrugged and combed her hand through her hair. “It’s like tying knots in rope, only with three ropes instead of two.” I started tying, making a mess of it, until finished.
When Wendy got up to check her hair in the bathroom mirror, I headed over for another beer. The bartender was engaged in a hushed conversation with a friend, and he wiggled one finger to signal he’d be right with me. I heard the words “hustler bar.” What? I leaned forward, inconspicuously trying to catch as much as possible about Ninth Circle. But the bartender and his friend weren’t discussing the West Village. They whispered about a place on the Upper East Side, a bar called Rounds (What a stupid fucking name, I remember thinking). I couldn’t hear everything-something about how the bartender and another friend had gone “as a joke” to Rounds, how the friend had caught a recent ex hustling there.
I couldn’t have cared less about this melodrama; I just wanted to know where, when, and how. I shuffled over and ordered a beer, giving the bartender my best crooked smile. “Oh yeah, I’ve been to that place,” I said. He appeared miffed that I’d heard his supposed secret, but I continued. “What street is that again?”
Before Wendy returned, the bartender had told me all I needed to know, vindicating himself of his earlier Oz remark. I learned that Rounds was located on East Fifty-third off Second Avenue, stayed open seven nights a week, sometimes enforced a vague dress code-no hats or tennis shoes, the bartender explained.
Wendy and I returned to our bench. She had brushed a wet hand over her knotted strip of hair, and water beads gleamed red on the closely cropped bristles at the sides of her head. She jerked her thumb to the right to indicate the bar. “More Kansas jokes?”
“No,” I said. “He was just getting friendly.” I handed her the beer. She tipped it, swallowing in heavy gulps until it was gone.
That following Friday, 8 P.M., Wendy hurried out to meet her friends for a speed-metal concert. I parted my hair on the side, combed back my bangs, replaced my shirt with a white button-down, and slipped on the ten-dollar pair of wing tips I’d bargained from a First Avenue thrift store. I snuffed the candle from the hollowed carcass of Wendy’s jack-o’-lantern. “Here I go,” I said, and stuck my tongue into its toothless grin. On the way to the subway, I checked my reflection in nearly every window I passed.
As I strode the avenues toward Rounds, I contemplated Eric’s letter. The UFO bunk still confused me, but by now I’d cemented my certainty that this “Brian” was another kid from Coach’s history, a boy he’d selected from the Little League lineup. If that were indeed true, then I’d had some form of prepubescent sex with him-a tidbit he’d either (a) disremembered, or (b) hadn’t chosen to tell Eric. The three separate occasions when Coach suckered another kid into our afternoons still floated around in my head somewhere. I could remember Coach’s voice, hissing instructions. “Suck his dick, Neil.” “Put your hand farther inside me.” I tried to imagine Coach saying something to the effect of “Let him fuck you, Brian.” His voice remained, as lucid as crystal, as crisp as the five-dollar bills he’d hand to me and anyone else after we’d satiated him. In my head I envisioned a Forty-second Street marquee, strobes pulsing with NEIL AND BRIAN MEET THE LITTLE LEAGUE COACH. Yes, it was entirely possible.
I reached the doorway to Rounds, and I tucked these thoughts away. After all, how could I successfully hustle wearing a face distorted with complicated memory? “I’ll think about it later.”
Chilly, carpeted, low-lit: the place’s appearance seemed as far from the East Village bars as, say, a funeral parlor from an amusement park. Piano music tinkled through the air; an octogenarian blond woman sat before the keys, crooning a song called “Love for Sale.” Fat queens huddled beside her, some mouthing the lyrics, periodically dropping bills into a glass vase on the piano. I stared at the singer, then looked around me. The distinctions between hustlers and johns were embarrassingly obvious. Everyone stood around, watching one another. The hustlers sipped at mugs of beer; the johns, fruity drinks with floating wedges of lime, lemon, or toothpick-speared olives. I took my place against the wall, one in a line of other teenaged or early-twentyish guys, most of whom didn’t seem all that attractive. I stuffed thumbs in pockets and tried to force my features into whatever innocent expression it kept among its ranks.
The johns stared, stared, stared. Their eyes were the beady, slothful eyes of anteaters or vultures. Neil McCormick, the new commodity. I thought: I have them all in my grubby little hands, and I’m going to pierce them with pins, like butterflies.
After a five-dollar beer and some horrendous, nonprofit small talk with two johns, a guy approached who didn’t look half-bad. “What’s your name?” he asked, his tongue pink in the gap between his teeth. I told him, and he repeated it. “You’re kidding, because my name’s Neil, too.” I mocked astonishment. The singer broke into “Just a Gigolo,” her head bobbing, her eye winking lewdly at the surrounding johns.
The following minutes filled with standard john/hustler dialogue. “Can I buy you a drink?” “Sure.” “What do you like to do?” “Just about anything, as long as it’s safe.” “I usually pay a hundred and twenty.” (I tried to suppress a gasp; still, as I’d soon discover, he’d quoted an average price.) “That sounds good.” “Whenever you’re ready to go, just say the word.” “How about now?”
Neil-the-john lived in Texas and visited the city on business. His hotel smelled poisonous, hospitallike. I might have sneezed if not straining to appear as healthy and attractive as possible. When the door shut behind us, he took hold of my belt buckle and tugged me forward. “Happy Halloween, my little boy.” I’d forgotten the date. I closed my eyes, conjured up a mental picture of a witch steering her broomstick across a bloated orange moon, and waited for the hour to end.
For the umpteenth time, I skimmed Eric’s letter for specific sentences and words: extraterrestrials…abducted and examined…Little League…totally tiny nearby town. I stared at one word in particular, the name of the place where Brian lived. Yes, I remembered. I had been to Little River. Once, long ago. That summer.
The Panthers’ game had been called due to a sudden rainstorm. One player remained standing in the dugout. His parents hadn’t arrived to retrieve him. Brian. Coach had comforted him. “I’ll drive you,” he said. He opened the station wagon’s backseat door, and Brian crawled in. But Coach hadn’t taken him straight home. He had detoured to his own house; had invited us inside. The usual stuff followed.
Afterward, Coach had driven the station wagon to a munchkin town north of Hutchinson. Little River. I could remember the storm, the thunder, the windshield lined with tendrils of rain. I could remember the sweaty exhilaration that had always fizzed in my body after Coach had loved me. I could remember Coach beside me, one hand on the wheel, one hand on my knee. And I could remember Brian-yes, at last I thought I understood his piece in my past-as he’d sat in the station wagon’s backseat, arms held stiff at his sides, his baseball glove still on. The car sped toward Little River, and as the town approached I kept turning to look at Brian, the black pinpricks of his eyes all blurry and blazing, as if trying to focus on something special that once was there, but was there no longer.
Zeke came from L.A., part of the “just in town on business” contingent of Rounds johns. He wore the expression of a female sword swallower I’d seen years ago at the Kansas State Fair-the face she’d made after the sword had slid in to the hilt. That wasn’t the least bit attractive; still, Zeke approached me before anyone else did, and I wanted to finish for the night, needed the six twenties in my back pocket. He stood beside me, habitually touching himself here and there-for example, brushing his fingers against a shoulder, reaching down to scratch an ankle. It reminded me of baseball; the signals coaches give from the third base line as their players step to the plate. With Coach, knee touched to elbow had meant “don’t hit the first pitch”; a rubbed nose, “bunt.”
“Let’s go,” Zeke said. I followed him out, grabbing my jacket from the coat check booth. Rounds’s doorman, chummy with me by then, glanced at Zeke’s unsightly appearance. He raised an eyebrow, perhaps flabbergasted I’d chosen someone so ugly. I didn’t care. The money was more important. Besides, I liked his name.
Our taxi took us to a midtown hotel. Lights from the street’s various theater marquees made everything pulsate. Doormen, desk staff, and room service were decked out in two-piece black suits. They looked like snooty penguins, their eyes on Zeke and me as we stepped into the lobby. I put my nose in the air and boarded the elevator.
The hotel’s rooms were small, warm, meticulously designed. An oversize reproduction hung from the wall above the bed, a detail from a Flemish painting I recalled studying during a high school art class. In it, a blurry milkmaid hovered over her pitcher. A window’s ghostly sunbeam caught the glint of her jewels, the white of the milk. The picture made me want to cry or, better yet, leave.
Zeke saw me staring. “Vermeer,” he said. “Well, sort of.” He reached out, unbuttoned my shirt’s top button.
In seconds I was naked, more myself than I’d been when dolled up in the silly dress clothes. But Zeke hadn’t removed a stitch. He fell on the bed, rested his head on the pillow, and sighed. “I suppose it’s my turn.”
I watched as he undressed. His clothes were a few sizes too big; their bulk on the floor made me want to giggle. But there was nothing funny about Zeke’s body. I searched for a description. “Skinny” and “slim” missed the mark. “Emaciated” was better. His knees were square bulbs, floating in his legs. His ribs made me recollect a section of abandoned railroad I’d once seen pushing from the cracked earth after the Cottonwood River’s flood waters had receded.
But worse than the knees and the ribs was Zeke’s skin. It seemed as white as the milk in the Vermeer pitcher. Purplish brown lesions scattered across his stomach and chest, angry blemishes that looked ready to burst. More marks disfigured his shoulder, an ankle, his knee’s knobby vicinity. He was a compressed landscape, a relief map.
“I hope these don’t disturb you,” Zeke said. “They keep popping up in the most unexpected places. Don’t worry, this is the safest encounter you’ll ever have, I assure you that.” He turned over, presenting me with his boxy ass, more outlines of ribs, his hard backbone. He spoke into the pillow. “Just rub my back for a while. I need”-I thought he would say “you,” which would have horrified me-“this.” I couldn’t see his face, but he seemed on the verge of tears. If he cries, I thought, I will sprint home. He patted the bed. “Make me happy, if only for a while. You’ll get your cash.”
I sat on his ass and placed my palms on his back. I wasn’t hard, and my dick drooped against his ass crack. My thumb touched another lesion, this one just a small purple blotch. It appeared as harmless as a mole. I have to make him happy, I thought. It was my duty. I was locked here, in this new place where KS no longer meant the abbreviation for Kansas, but something altogether different. I pressed my thumb into the lesion, wondering if it hurt. I began to massage his back, and as I did, his head relaxed into the pillow. It appeared artificial, something I could untwist and remove and hurl across the room like a basketball. Above me, the milkmaid continued in her frozen moment of pouring the milk for someone she loved. It was a beautiful day. Her cheeks were flushed, her mouth curved into a smile that displayed her joy in performing such a pure task. I watched her face and pushed harder, kneading the flesh beneath my hands.
Zeke grunted softly. On a simple black table beside us, his wallet was stuffed full with credit cards and cash, the edges of bills clearly visible in the lamplight.
Afterward, I needed to be with Wendy; it was time to come clean about hustling. The cab driver passed a corner grocery. “Stop here,” I yelled. I bought Wendy a bundle of flowers: roses, carnations, and other varieties I’d only glimpsed in encyclopedias or a foreign film I watched once during a particularly spectacular acid trip. I walked the remainder of the way to the small coffee shop and café where she worked.
South American Blend sat two avenues and five streets from our apartment. With the sudden cold weather onslaught, the store’s business had begun picking up, and Wendy had volunteered to work overtime. She had been staying past midnight, serving desserts, cappuccinos, and hot chocolates to pretentious people who occupied entire tables to “read” French literature or books about philosophical bullshit. When I stepped inside, I smelled the swirl of French roast, Irish mocha, hazelnut cream. The smell, infinitely more exotic than Mom’s instant Maxwell House, still reminded me of her somehow.
Wendy greeted me at the counter, stirring a tea strainer through a teapot’s steaming water. I held out the flowers, and she put her hand to her mouth. “For me? You shouldn’t have.”
After she’d placed them in a bowl, I leaned over the counter, my mouth to her ear. “Please say you’ve got a minute,” I whispered. “We have to talk.”
Wendy’s boss had left for the night, and the customers looked sated for the time being. She followed me to the table nearest the counter and pushed me into a chair. “What did you do now?” Her tone of voice hadn’t changed since she’d lectured me years ago, when I’d first started hustling in Carey Park.
My mouth opened twice, but nothing came out. On the third try, I said, “I’ve been at Rounds. It’s a hustler bar on the Upper East. I’ve been hustling.”
Wendy’s expression looked like a special effect. Anger registered somewhere within it. She checked the counter, saw no customers, turned back to me. “Do you think I haven’t figured out what you’ve been doing? Where you’ve been at night, dressed like a goddamn teenage executive, or where you’ve been getting money for beer? It’s been part of you for years, did you think I’d believe you’d stop now? Especially now, in a city where you can make thousands doing it? No, I’m not that stupid, whether you think so or not.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to think you are.” She paused, took a breath, looked me in the eye. “Do I want to hear this? Okay, fire away.”
I started to pretend I’d been hurt by her comment; decided it was no use. “I’ve been making money,” I said, “and things have been cool, actually. Nothing unsafe at all, nothing that could bother me. You always said during the Carey Park stuff that whenever something bothered me, I should stop.”
Wendy swabbed her thumb over the table’s semicircular coffee stain. “And tonight something’s bothered you.”
I told her the whole story. I described the cab ride, the hotel, the room, his body, his skin. “After the massage, all I did was stand at the side of the room, jerking off. That’s what he wanted. There it was, this surreal mixture of the hotel’s decor and this guy’s obvious disease. He just sprawled out on the bed, watching me, jerking off until he came.” I refrained from detailing the dainty pattern of white come/purple blotches on Zeke’s chest.
Wendy’s foot touched mine. “You just jerked off. That’s all?”
“That’s all.” Her foot moved away, then came back and stayed. I could tell she wanted to touch and soothe me with her hand-a typical sympathetic Wendy Peterson gesture in this situation-but her overriding anger only allowed me the comfort of her foot. “You’re mad at me,” I said.
“Maybe. You just have to be so, so careful,” Wendy said. “You have to know that things are different for you now. This isn’t Kansas.” I’d heard that line so many times, but never from her.
The blue trapezoid shapes on the table’s Formica surface resembled ugly, swollen purplish brown blotches. I wanted to say something more. I could tell Wendy about Brian, but that seemed too complicated, beyond any explanation my confused state could offer. “For the first time in my life,” I told her, “I’m bothered by it. Sex. After tonight, everything just feels fucked up.”
A postcard from Eric arrived the first week of December. Not a postcard, exactly, but an old paperback book’s ripped cover-a romance titled Gay Deceiver, which I knew he’d stolen from United Methodist Thrift. On the other side was his trademark scrawl.
Neil:
Hope all is swell in New York. Hope you’re making enough money, having a good time, etc. Life here is the same as always. Brian and I are trying to kill the boredom. Your mom took us watermelon hunting. She actually chased a raccoon. She claims she’s got pickles ready for me. She’s so cool. She says she’s sending your plane ticket. Can’t wait to see you over Christmas, birth date of baby Jesus ha ha ha. And Brian’s dying to meet you. He says you have a lot to talk about. That’s an understatement from what I can guess. If you wrote back sometime it would be earth-shattering. Anyway I’ll see you at the end of the month-
Eric
“Brian,” I said aloud. “Damn.” The idea of him meeting my mom seemed appalling. I wondered again what he truly knew about me, about Coach. Whatever he’d remembered, I hoped he hadn’t blabbed to Eric, or, god forbid, Mom. Why was this happening now?
Wendy had taped a calendar to the refrigerator. I stared at it, counting the days until my flight, until Kansas, until Brian. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.”
After Zeke, I avoided East Fifty-third. I sat in the apartment, watching TV, numbed by boredom. But that couldn’t continue. Two days before Christmas, I contemplated the return trip to Kansas, my flight the following morning. I hadn’t the foggiest what to buy for Christmas gifts; besides, I didn’t have the dough. One hundred and twenty dollars can be yours tonight, I announced in a game show host’s bray. Wendy was at work, oblivious to my combed and slicked hair, my ironed shirt, my shoes that shone under the bathroom light. “This just isn’t me,” I said. Oh well. I had to go back.
The piano chanteuse remained as bawdy as ever, substituting nasty lyrics into Christmas standbys. “Jingle Bells” became “Jingle Balls.” “Chet’s nuts,” not “chestnuts,” were roasting on her open fire. I shouldered my way through the crowd, which consisted of three times as many hustlers as johns. The hustlers avoided one another: we were all competition.
“Merry Christmas.” I turned to see a kid named Stan, one of the few hustlers I’d chosen to befriend. His sense of humor made him my favorite, and I’d often chatted with him before getting down to business. He reminded me of Eric, thanks to his skinniness and dyed hair. When he spoke, he sounded truly prissy, enunciating vowels for utmost effect. He’d fabricated nicknames for some of the regular johns. My favorites: Special Friend (who got his name due to a line he apparently always used), Snooty Tooty (a man who wore headbands, brooches, and garish, flouncy clothes), and Funnel of Love (a troll notorious for lying on the floor, popping a funnel between his lips, and asking tricks to piss into it).
I listened to Stan until he strolled toward a john who’d been ogling him. Minutes passed. I downed a beer, then another. No one seemed interested. As I finished a third, Stan stepped back to my corner and pulled me aside.
“No luck?” I asked. The singer wailed away, abandoning her sleazy carols for a tune from Gyp?? y or Guys and Dolls or some other musical. When I moved my head to hear Stan better, the dizzy feeling proved I was swimming toward drunkenness.
“This guy wants a three-way,” Stan said. “He’s been watching you. He thinks you’re ideal for fucking him while he sucks me off, all that. He’s willing to give us seventy-five each.”
“No way,” I said. I didn’t even think about it. My answer just popped out. And the reason I’d said no wasn’t because the seventy-five bucks was less than my usual hundred twenty. I said no because the three-way possibility reminded me of Brian. This person I didn’t know, this boy I’d shared with Coach, had managed to infect me somehow, to ruin my once-beautiful memories. I realized this now, as I stood in my hustler’s stance in Rounds, both drunk and unwanted. I turned away, swallowed the last of the beer, headed for the door.
The walk from Second Avenue to Third felt more like a run. After a while I noticed a red car behind me, slowly following. Before I reached the subway stop, the car inched forward to idle at curbside. The passenger window slid down. A Kewpie doll face hovered inside the shadows. The face leaned forward into the light; I saw the driver wasn’t a doll at all, but a man sporting a buzz haircut and a pink polo shirt. “Hop in,” he said.
I half-remembered Stan lecturing me about trolls who preyed outside Rounds, men waiting for hustlers who hadn’t snagged a trick for the night, attempting to get reduced rates. Stan had explained how a typical cheapskate john would drive toward the river, park in this or that discreet shadow, unzip, push the hustler’s head toward a stubby dick, and hand over two or three twenties. Stan apparently had done this once and regretted it. “It’s not worth it.” I hadn’t asked why. But now, I didn’t care. I didn’t bother setting terms or getting acquainted first. I opened the door and crawled in.
“Mind going home with me?” the man asked. “No names. No bullshit. I’ll pay.” His baritone came in brief, hiccuped sentences, as if someone were regulating his speech through a control panel, one overzealous thumb pushing a button. I nodded, and his car tore downtown.
He looked fortyish, straight, slightly criminal. At that point it didn’t matter. We didn’t speak; I put my ear against the cold window. The sounds around us seemed slowed down, far away. Rev, zoom, honk-honk. The radio’s song droned on, a sugary voice repeating, “I guess I’ll have to love you in my favorite dream.” For some reason that sounded pretty. I dozed off at one point, due to the narcotic effects of the car heater and the beer.
I opened my eyes. The car was nearing my neighborhood, and I thought of Wendy. Sweet dreams, I almost said. We zoomed onto Delancey Street, then crossed the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Things got incredibly quiet. Lights, brownstones, and storefronts blurred past. “Where are you taking me?”
“Brighton Beach,” he said. I’d seen those words on subway maps, and I knew Brighton Beach was miles from Manhattan. I opened my mouth to protest. “No more questions,” he spat. Surprise must have registered on my face, because he smirked and added a much calmer “I hope you’re horny.”
“Yeah, whatever.” I wanted to blurt, One hundred and twenty dollars horny, but it didn’t seem the time or place. My eyes closed again, and Zzzz.
When I woke, he was shutting off the ignition. He had parked beside an apartment complex. The world had hushed. I looked around, saw trees, residential houses, even a picket fence across the street. Only the orangy light from the nearby subway station remotely resembled New York. I wanted to be on that now, riding home. But I had work to do. He led the way into a claustrophobic elevator. His calloused finger touched the seven button. I noticed a black crescent on his thumbnail, a dark scar like a half-lidded eye. “Accident with a hammer?” I asked, my words slurring together. He didn’t answer.
We entered his apartment, number 703. He shuffled around, turning on lights, then dimming them. I fell into a couch as if it were a pool of warm water. Somewhere, romantic music was playing. Minutes passed. I fought the urge to close my eyes. When he entered the room, I sat up and took a good look at his face. He seemed emotionless, regular, the sort of average joe that crafty policemen might stick into a criminal line-up to help a victim identify a guilty felon. “The bedroom’s this way,” he said.
More dimmed lights. I saw a bed, a bookshelf without books, and a single poster on the wall advertising a jazz festival, its J shaped like a saxophone. The guy opened a drawer. His hands moved toward my face. One held a miniature plastic spoon, its yellow and red handle molded into the shape of Ronald McDonald’s grinning head. The other cupped a hill of white powder. “Snort this.” I didn’t want to, but I was already fucked up, and the coke looked cute, like glistening grains of sugar. I brought some to a nostril and breathed in. “Again,” he said. Again.
He snorted the rest. Then he began tearing off his clothes and throwing them, arms flailing. Buttons popped; fabric stretched and ripped. He was evidently emulating scenes from various butch pornos. The polo shirt sailed past my head like a pastel pterodactyl. “Strip,” he commanded. His dick had already hardened. It looked massive, an image from a joke’s unfunny punchline, and it curved upward like a giant accusing finger. “Go down there, boy.”
I figured I’d been lucky, considering most of the johns I’d tricked with had been older milquetoast types who hadn’t forced me to suck or get fucked. A few had simply held me in wrinkly arms, whispering crap like “You’re daddy’s little boy” or something equally embarrassing. Now, with me drunk and god-only-knew-how-many subway stops from home, those elementary acts had slipped away. I fell to my knees and took his dick in my mouth.
“You like that, don’t you?” he said. He fucked my face. “Swallow it deep. Moan for me, let me know how good it is.” That seemed sickening for some reason. He thrust it farther, its head tearing at the back of my throat. It choked me, and I winced. I let up a little, pulling my head back, and as his dick slid out I felt him spit on me. I heard the distinct pull of the phlegm from deep in his throat, the pause, and finally the cartoony “phew” as the spit hailed from his mouth. A thumb-sized blob hit my cheek.
I stood. For the first time, I was scared. For the first time, I was fathoms away from my usual helm of control.
He shoved me onto his waterbed, the sloshing as sudden and loud as if I’d been tossed into an ocean. He placed a knee on the bed, grabbed his dick, and slapped my face with it. It hit the blob of spit, and a tiny puddle splashed into my eye. “You’re not finished, slut,” he said, then slammed back into my mouth. I was drunk; this wasn’t supposed to be happening. I imagined corkscrewing his dick from his body and tossing it through the window, into his Brighton Beach garden, seven floors below. That image should have been funny, but it wasn’t.
His arm wrapped around my chest. He flipped me over in one motion, as if my body had been hollowed out. Slosh, slosh. “I’m going to give the slut what he needs.” His thumb wriggled around in my ass crack, then punctured the hole.
I pictured the black scar on his thumbnail, now fishing around in the place where only one other person had been, so many years before. I briefly drifted back there. “Tell me you like it, Neil, tell Coach how much you like it.” I’d told him so. Had that been truth, or just a stream of gibberish? “Tell me.”
“No,” I said. “It’s going too far.” My head reeled, and I hoped he could understand the garble. “This is what I don’t do.” I managed to squirm off the bed, my arm held out to keep him away. He lifted his knee and stood before me, eyes flashing.
The room grew quiet. In the outside hallway, I could hear footsteps, a walk breaking into a run. “You were at that place,” he said. “I know what you were there for. You’ll do what I tell you. That’s what a slut does.”
“I don’t know why I was there,” I said. “I really don’t.” The door to the adjoining room was cracked slightly, and when I peeked around his shoulder I could see a bathtub’s porcelain edge. “Just wait a minute,” I told him. “Let me piss. Then…I’ll be back in a second.”
I expected his meaty arm to shoot out and grab me, but it didn’t. I brushed past him, made it to the bathroom, slammed the door. It had one of those old-fashioned locks, a little hook-shaped latch that fit into a silver eyehole. I fastened it and sat on the tub’s edge, breathing. The drug’s grains exploded through my brain. In a matter of hours, I would land in Kansas again. Calm down, I told myself. Calm him down. Be careful, finish, get the money.
Then I heard him, trying to get in. I looked at the door. The john had wedged the end of a butter knife into the crack, and he wiggled it higher, toward the space where the latch connected door with frame. I actually felt my body tremble. The knife pushed higher, meddling closer to the latch until their silvers struck. The latch came loose, clicking back against the door. A second of silence passed. Then the door flew open, and the john came thundering in.
He’s going to kill me, I thought. I imagined the thin, pliable shape of the butter knife thudding against my skin over and over, at last breaking through to razor my heart. I held up one hand to stop him. But he wasn’t going to stab. Instead, he tossed the knife into the air. It made a half-revolution, and he caught it again, stepped toward me, and raised the thick handle. It smacked against my forehead. Snap.
I fell backward. The room spun in a blurry maelstrom, the naked john its center. I landed in the bathtub. My face was turned away from him, toward the gold circle of the drain. I saw stray beads of water, a soap bubble, a black pubic hair. “You’re getting fucked whether you want it or not,” his voice said, and in the cold space of the bathroom it echoed like a barbarous god’s. “And I know you want it.”
For a second I thought of Zeke, sprawled on his hotel bed, disease dotting his skin. This trick was much worse. I felt my legs being pulled up, slabs of meat a butcher hoists toward the gleaming hook. He maneuvered me into a failed headstand, and the side of my face slammed against the tub’s bottom. Something made the sound of a walnut cracking.
The thumb pushed back into my ass. Another. Then, unmistakably, I felt him twiddling his thumbs inside me, that classic bored gesture I suddenly knew I’d never make again. The twiddling sent a warm throb deep into my stomach, and I groaned. He took that as his cue to pull my body toward his. My ass became his bull’s-eye. His dick slammed against the hole, holding there, teasing it, and then my tight bud of skin gave way to it. He was inside me. “Gonna show you what that hole was made for.” I tried to move my head, tried to focus on him, only saw the horrible bright white of porcelain and his head’s shadow. The bathroom light crowned him with an enormous halo.
I felt skewered. His body pistoned back and forth as it had when he’d fucked my face. I moved my arm, attempting to stop even some fraction of his motion. In my position, I couldn’t reach back to touch him. My hand smacked a faucet, and cold water began dribbling from the shower head, seasoning our bodies. My eyes closed. When I reopened them, I saw blood swirling toward the drain.
The shower of water enraged him, a rage I could feel shooting into my own body. “Slut,” he screamed. From the corner of my eye I saw him reach toward the tub’s edge; close his hand around a shampoo bottle. His arm raised, briefly obliterating the bathroom light. Then his arm came down, curving at full speed and force through the air. The bottle bashed against my head. The arm rose again. The bottle struck again. Blood squirted a red poppy onto the porcelain. Another swing. I thought, It isn’t breaking. It’s shatterproof. His dick stayed massive inside me. The bottle pummeled my head a fourth and fifth time. The noise it made-and I could hear it so clearly, a perfect sound rebounding through my head-was a hollow, almost soft bup.
The words please stop took form inside my mouth, but I couldn’t say them. The shampoo bottle battered my cheekbone, my chin, my eye. More water needled down. He drilled farther through me, dismantling my guts, his dick seeming to lacerate whatever internal walls my body still supported. Bup. Pause. Bup bup bup. He beat me, matching his arm with the rhythm of his fucking. The bottle dropped, still not shattering, and landed next to my head. I read its label: BABY SHAMPOO. Below that, written inside a pink teardrop, NO MORE TEARS.
“God, you want it. Take that cock all the way inside there.” His words blended into a moan, a yell, a kind of cough. I felt hot and gluey spurts bulleting deep inside me, bursts of wet heat, arrows aimed for the pit of my stomach. The spurts ricocheted off my body’s ruined walls, staining me everywhere with their deadly graffiti, and if I opened my mouth I knew they would spew out. But my mouth was open. I was trying to scream.
I still strained to bat him away. It was too late; he had finished. He pulled his dick out and dropped my legs back into the tub.
Water streamed beside my face. My blood, a granular swirl of soap, and a stray bullet of his sperm blended into it and zoomed toward the drain. I found I could move at last, and I looked up at him. He walked out, swatting the light switch. The darkness wasn’t what I needed, but it was close.
When I woke, the darkness remained. “I’m sober,” I said, and my voice cracked on both words. I lay on the front lawn of the john’s apartment complex. I couldn’t remember dressing or leaving. Beneath me, blades of grass felt like ice picks. In the mulch beneath a dying bush, I saw a close-up view of pebbles, a screw, coils of tangerine peel, tangled ribbon from a gutted cassette tape, a torn section from a Times obituary…darkness ruffled everything beyond that.
I sat up and raised my head, counting the apartment’s ascending windows toward the seventh floor. He lived beyond one of those windows. He remained there, perhaps cleaning my blood from his porcelain tub, perhaps washing come from his pubic hair with a handful of baby shampoo.
Blocks away, the lights from the subway station gleamed their sickly orange. I was an hour’s trip from home, but at least I knew how to get back. What would I tell Wendy? I pushed myself from the ground, and my head throbbed. Pain shot through my stomach, into my chest. My tongue snagged on the razorlike edge from a chipped front tooth.
To forget the pain, I thought about what the night had done. Everything had been hurled out of balance, a sudden and sickening displacement I could feel even as I walked toward the subway, as I lumbered and tripped like a hopeless drunk, like the person my mom had been when she’d barely survived her worst drinking days. “Mom,” I said aloud. I almost put “I want my” in front of it.
This is what has happened, I thought.
The empty subway car shed light on my abraded knuckles, the dribbles of blood on my shirt. I started to count the stops on the way back, but I lost count after fifteen.
I remembered a detail from the days I’d first had sex for money. Then, when I arrived home from my Carey Park tricks, I’d scarf down whatever food I could find to rid my mouth of their anonymous tongues’ residues. My duty done, I’d ease back into my little life. Those days were a fairy tale now. I spat on the subway car’s floor to hopefully obliterate any smidgeon of virus he might have deposited there. If only I could use some similar gesture for my ass. I was filled with the queasy urge to shit, but I fought it back. I never wanted to touch my ass again. It felt as though something were jammed inside it still, something small yet full of hazard and horror, like TNT or a scorpion.
When I arrived home, the kitchen clock read 4:45. My plane would leave La Guardia Airport in five hours. Wendy’s bedroom door was closed. I peeked inside, saw her hair jutting from the blanket like a rooster’s crest. This time I deserved the lecture she’d give. I stepped into the bathroom, leaving the light off, taking care to avoid the mirror. As I stripped, each movement made me wince.
I pulled down the lip of my boxers and stared at my dick. It was repulsive. I hated it. The boxers dropped to the floor, landing beside a green-and-yellow striped shirt I’d worn that afternoon. I sat, picked it up, held it to my face. I breathed the scent of how I was before. Outside, in the street, a woman screamed so loudly it might have been a machine. The screaming continued for two minutes, three, then stopped. In the seconds that followed, the entire world grew incredibly quiet, and I cried.
When I arrived home, the only face that greeted me was the one on the television screen. There, the slobbering teenage girl from The Exorcist experienced the height of demonic possession. Brian lazed on the floor watching her, barefoot, his back to me. Another kid sat next to him, hair spiking in precarious angles from his head. A silver necklace, thick as a bicycle chain, sparkled under the stranger’s haircut.
“You’re sitting too close,” I told them. “You’ll go blind.”
Brian rushed to the doorway to take my bags. “We didn’t expect you this early,” he said. I explained how Breeze, my ride from the airport, had risked my life by speeding the entire route to Little River. When I glanced at the sofa where our mother usually sat, Brian said, “She’s still at work.”
Brian’s friend introduced himself. “Eric.” His eyes, smeared with makeup, stared at my skirt’s tie-dyed pattern. He offered his hand, its middle finger bisected by a ring that showed a grinning skull, silver crossbones, and the letters R.I.P. “Happy holidays,” Eric said. “I feel I know you already.”
I’d heard about him too, via different telephone descriptions. From Brian, Eric was “a friend of someone I’m trying to get in contact with”; from my mother, he was both “Brian’s diversion from studying” and “a tad bit messed up, but well meaning.” I shook his clammy hand and sat beside him; on TV, the green demon snarled at the priest. “If I remember right, this is just starting to get good,” I said. “Worry about my bags later.”
We watched the movie’s remainder. There was something deranged and distinctly midwestern about a station that programmed The Exorcist three days prior to Christmas. I’d viewed the original at a horror movie festival in San Francisco, but this was the edited-for-television version. Scenes of violence and sex had been scissored into tameness. One line I distinctly recalled wincing at-the demon’s guttural “Your mother sucks cocks in hell”-had altered, and the replacement voice-over growled “Your mother wears socks that smell.” Maybe this change was for the better, considering what Brian had told me about Eric’s parents.
The demon’s face filled the screen, her cankered skin glowing. Brian grinned at me. “She looks like you did, that Halloween,” he said. “Remember? The year you were the witch.” Yes, I remembered.
Then Brian turned to Eric. “You know what I mean. That night. In the woods. The second time it happened.” Eric nodded, and their eyes revisited the TV.
At one point I moved to see my brother better. During the scene where the priest and a friend sneak into the possessed kid’s freezing bedroom, Brian upped the volume. The characters lifted the sleeping girl’s dress to shine a flashlight on her skin, which by now had bleached to an otherworldly bluish hue. Brian’s eyes stayed glued to this scene, entranced, as if they recognized something. The flashlight lingered as a pair of words blossomed on the blue flesh. HELP ME.
After the credits had rolled and the eerie tinkling piano soundtrack had faded, I climbed the stairs to my room. I began unpacking, layering clothes into my dresser drawers, mixing the smells of my California apartment with the indelible, almost spicy smell of home. A door slammed outside. Through the window’s glass I saw my mother, decked out in her officer’s uniform, rushing from her new Mustang into the house. Seconds later she stood in my room’s doorway.
“I’ve missed you,” I said. I hugged her, and we sat on the bed.
As usual when I returned home, my mother and I chatted about the same humdrum things. I answered her questions about the flight, the ride from the airport with Breeze. I assured her everything was fine with my apartment, my retail job, my night class on weaving and looming. She told me she was overdue for another raise at work; she had briefly worried about money when my father’s child support checks stopped coming and Brian had entered college, but all was still manageable. “And I see you’ve met Eric,” she said. “He’s like the new son around here these days.” I guessed by her tone she didn’t mind.
“Things got a little strange during the summer,” my mother continued. “But Brian’s calmed down now. Maybe that’s due to Eric, preposterous as that sounds.” My mother’s letters and phone conversations had enigmatically referred to these summer “problems,” but I’d never received a direct answer about what any of it meant. I remembered half-jokingly asking things like “Has Brian joined a religious cult?” and “Is he having a nervous breakdown?” only to receive the standard “No, honey, it’s nothing to worry over.” Even now, I could tell, she would promptly change the subject before I inquired. “As we speak,” she said, “Brian and Eric are downstairs, heating up dinner for us.”
They’d not only cooked dinner, but had draped the table with a checkerboard cloth and lit clove-scented candles. The setup overlooked the window’s wintery view of our empty field, the neighbor family’s barren peach orchard, and, beyond that, the stark grays and blacks of the Little River cemetery. I took my place at the table; Brian sat at my left elbow, and Eric, my right. The last time I could recall all four sides being occupied, my father had been here.
Brian ladled potato soup from a tin pot. Since I’d last seen him one Christmas previous, he’d cut his hair shorter, lost about ten pounds, and begun wearing things I attributed to Eric’s influence-a dark, bulky sweater, ripped denims, black Converse high-tops. These clothes didn’t make my brother “tough” or “punk” or whatever else he might have been striving for. They just lent Brian an even goofier look. And he’d developed an odd habit-he occasionally blinked forcefully, a random nervous tic, as if attempting to dislodge dust from his eyes.
The meal shifted from soup to main course. I’d swallowed five or six mouthfuls before I noticed my mother’s guns on the kitchen counter: three of them, as well as a leather holster and belt, a scattering of bullets, and handcuffs that shone in the kitchen light. One month earlier, my mother had called San Francisco to describe a disastrous escape attempt from KSIR. Although she hadn’t been there for the mayhem, she was nevertheless disturbed by what had transpired. The inmates had held two co-workers hostage; prior to capture, their kingpin had buried a hammer’s claw end into one hostage’s skull. My mother had told me how she planned to buy extra weapons. I remembered trying to explain how bizarre that sounded-guns in Little River, a town of less than a thousand people, a town where the most criminal act to occur in the last two decades had been the theft of ten gallons of gas at the local Texaco, “That’s just all your San Francisco peace and love speaking,” she’d said. “If you could see what I’ve seen…”
My mother saw me staring at the guns. “Do those have to be out in the open?” I asked.
To appease me, she stashed the weapons in a cupboard and returned to the table. Her voice took on a mock seriousness. “The way I see it is this. Now, if anyone tries to hurt you or Brian, they’ll have to deal with me.”
When she said that, Brian whispered a question to Eric. “Then where was she ten years ago?” My mother didn’t hear, and I assumed I wasn’t supposed to either. His words elicited a discomfited shrug from Eric. I didn’t ask what he meant.
I woke during the night and thought of how, as a little girl, I would sometimes sneak across the hall to Brian’s room. I’d kneel beside his bed, still woozy within my own somnolence, and imagine myself a world-renowned sleep researcher or a girl with superhuman powers who could enter the mind of anyone she wanted. I’d whisper words into the shell of his ear, words I honestly believed would reshape Brian’s dream scenarios to make him happy.
Three-thirty, according to the bedside clock. Pinkish white clouds bloomed in the night sky outside my window, the kind that glow through the darkness. I hoped they signaled snow. Lines from “White Christmas” lilted through my head as I stood from bed. I tiptoed. Now, as an adult, spying on Brian felt criminal, but I opened his door anyway.
Brian had left his blankets strewn this way and that, one’s fleecy corner spilling over the mattress to touch the floor. He wasn’t there, and I prepared to trudge back to my own warm bed. Then I noticed how Brian’s room had changed. His books were missing, as well as the posters he’d tacked up long ago, the advertisements for sci-fi films, the colorful monsters and aliens and astronauts that had held reign over his room for so many years. Gone, too, were the mobiles he’d hung in the corners, those ships and planes I remembered twirling from his ceiling on even the previous Christmas, the last time I’d come home.
Now, only one thing remained on Brian’s wall, a small memento he’d taped to the space next to his bed. I stepped closer. It looked like a photograph. I could see a group of petite boys, standing and kneeling in two rows, staring out from the picture. They wore uniforms; some held baseballs and bats. I scanned their faces, their eerie smiles and eyes, before recognizing one of the boys as Brian. That had been so long ago.
I looked around me, at Brian’s barren, strangely meticulous room. It had never been so clean, and something about it made me feel lonesome. I began to shiver, so I tiptoed back to my own room.
My friend Breeze telephoned the next morning. She and her husband planned to spend December twenty-third visiting friends in Garden City, and she needed a baby-sitter to watch her two children. I had nothing better to do. “Wonderful,” I said. Then, as I hung up: “How typical.”
The living room television was playing, sound off. A cartoon cast its vibrant greens and oranges over Brian’s and Eric’s faces. They lay sleeping on the floor, arms and legs splayed, as if frozen in a complicated dance. A pair of pillows from my mother’s bed sat next to their heads, and Eric cuddled one against his ear. I assumed she had placed them there before she’d departed for work. She could keep three, four, even a thousand guns in the house, and it still wouldn’t fool me: she’d always be her same worried, tame, overprotective self.
When I’d met Eric, his exaggerated seriousness and shadowy, downcast eyes terrified me. It would have been easy to imagine him sprawled on the floor in some icy bathroom, his slit wrists gushing blood across the tiles. But now, there on the floor with Brian, he looked harmless, even angelic. He smiled in his sleep. I didn’t want to wake him, but Breeze would be arriving soon with the kids, so I had to.
“Ahem.” No response. I opened a window, letting the frigid air curl into the room, and slammed it shut. At the sound, Eric’s eyes fluttered open. “Shit” was his first word. His hair looked like overgrown thistledown, garlanded with a ball of carpet fuzz. He looked toward the television, where a cartoon cat’s eyes crossed as a mouse bashed its head with a sledgehammer. The cartoon blended into a commercial; Eric turned, seeing me. “Oh, hi.”
“Good morning,” I said. “Hate to wake you two, but an old friend’s coming over to drop off her kids. How does helping me baby-sit sound?”
Eric yawned and placed a hand on Brian’s shoulder: it was a motherly gesture, strange and feminine. He nudged Brian, rousing him. “Kids,” Eric said. “How old are they?”
“Michael is about four, I guess. The little one’s still in diapers.” He gave me a horrified look. Brian, on the other hand, seemed confused, glancing from Eric to the television to me. “Breeze is on her way over,” I told him. “We get to baby-sit the kids for the day.”
While Brian dawdled in the shower, Eric assisted me in picking up around the house. He seemed to know better than I where things were located; he returned from the kitchen holding a can of furniture polish and a rag I recognized as torn from one of my father’s old shirts. A lemony spray sizzled forth; Eric glossed the rag over the coffee table, the TV, the rocking chair’s knucklebones. We didn’t speak, but kept catching each other’s eye: I watched him, he watched me.
Breeze arrived, clutching the baby in one arm, a wrapped package in the other. A suitcase sat at her feet. When I met her at the front door, I noticed her husband waving to me from their car. “We’d stay a bit, but we’re in a hurry,” Breeze said. Her breath clouded the air. The older boy, Michael, whirlwinded past me to perch beside the television. Breeze stared at him. “TV should keep him occupied.” I took the baby from her arms, and she positioned the suitcase and package inside the door. “Diapers, food, all the necessities. The gift is just some fruit,” she, said. “Better eat it quick or it will spoil.” She dug into her pocket and handed me a matchbook with a telephone number written on it. “We’ll be at this number. We’ll return before dark. I hope everything goes okay. Good-bye, Michael.” She kissed the baby’s head. “Good-bye, David.”
Brian walked in, scrubbing a towel across wet hair. Eric pointed across the room toward Michael, who hadn’t taken his eyes from the cartoon. The cat gulped a birthday cake which, unbeknownst to the animal, was crammed with dynamite; its stomach exploded, and the cat became a blackened shadow with shocked white eyes. Michael rocked to and fro, still wearing his coat, giggling along with the cartoon mouse.
Brian saw my armful of David, and he placed his fingers against the baby’s face. “Wow.” I pushed David forward a little, and one tiny hand reached out, as if beckoning Brian to hold him. “He won’t cry, will he?” I shrugged and delivered him into Brian’s arms.
“He feels like a gigantic sponge,” Brian said into David’s face. His voice altered, becoming thinner, inching up half an octave. “And somebody’s squeezed the water from the sponge, but there’s still a little bit left in there, just enough to keep the sponge damp.” He thumbed David’s nose. Eric looked at me, one eyebrow raised.
In the following hour, Brian and Eric helped me feed the baby, took turns trying to burp him, and clumsily assisted when I changed his diaper. They waited for him to fall asleep, gently smoothing creases on his shirt. David nodded off at last, and while he snoozed on the living room floor, Brian and Eric headed for the kitchen. They made lunch: peanut butter sandwiches, formed into shapes from Christmas cookie cutters. Mine was a star; Brian and Eric got bells; and Michael, a fat Santa Claus, toy-filled sack slung on his back. Michael licked a dot of peanut butter from his upper lip. “Mommy always lets me have dessert,” he said.
Eric remembered the fruit and fetched Breeze’s gift from its spot at the doorway. I let Michael rip through the paper. Inside a basket, behind see-through green cellophane, were pears, oranges, apples, bananas. “Some Xmas present,” Eric said.
Michael stared awhile, deciding. He was a ferocious-looking child, with a pug nose and hair the color of copper. His forehead sprouted a cowlick, the skin beneath it revealing a vein’s blue squiggle. He selected a pear and put it to his lips. His mouth punched a miniature hole into its yellow skin. “Yuck.” He handed the pear to Eric, who stood and began juggling the pear, an orange, and an apple. He tossed them into various configurations, hands snagging them from the air like a magician’s. Michael watched, fascinated.
Brian selected three paring knives from the kitchen. He lined a red Delicious, a yellow, and a green Granny Smith side by side, forming a stoplight pattern on the floor. He told Eric and me to take our pick. “We’ll show you how to make apple-head dolls,” he said to Michael. Brian and I had done this once when we were little. We’d skinned apples and carved faces, then arranged them in a window to harden and degenerate. Over a period of weeks, the apples took shape, wrinkling into amber-colored “heads” that looked like shrewd, prehistoric people. We’d jammed pencils into the heads and dressed them in doll clothes.
Michael gawked as we began peeling and carving. I whittled slits for eyes, nostrils, a frown; my apple took on the countenance of an evil crone. Eric changed the round shape of his face completely, giving it sunken cheeks, a square jawline, even meticulously shaping rows of square teeth.
Brian couldn’t decide what to carve. Eric and I displayed our dolls as we completed each feature, but after Brian finished peeling, he passed his smooth apple from palm to palm, indecisive. “Mine’s a skull,” Eric told him, “so how about your trademark alien?”
Brian looked disgusted for a second. “I knew you’d say that.” He adjusted his glasses, thumbprinting one lens with apple juice. “I told you to shut up about it. It’s history.” Eric fidgeted, and I concentrated harder on my knife’s placement in my doll. Brian stabbed the knifepoint into the apple and curved it, hollowing out an almond-shaped eye. Another. The rest of his face was easy: two pinpricks for nostrils, a feeble cut for a mouth. He rubbed his thumbs into the apple-head’s eyes, as if polishing them. “There,” he told Eric. “Satisfied?”
When finished, we displayed the apples for Michael. “Normally,” Brian instructed, “you’d wait for these heads to dry. But we don’t have to do that.” He grinned at Eric, apparently no longer angry. He searched the house for pencils and returned with three, fashioning bodies for the apple dolls.
The telephone rang, and I ran to the kitchen. It was my mother, calling from work to check up. I told her about baby-sitting, how Brian and Eric had helped me through the day. “Is everything okay with Brian?” she asked. When I said I guessed so, she seemed relieved. “He’s been acting funny lately. More and more as Christmas approaches, though I can’t tell why. Maybe I’m imagining things. But he was awake before I left this morning, and that was unnatural. Just staring out the window, all nervous.”
“I don’t know.” I peeked into the front room, where Eric and Brian, now ventriloquists, performed a demented apple puppet show for Michael. Eric gripped the pencil bodies of the skull and alien apples and skipped them toward Michael. The little boy screamed. Brian quickly grabbed the alien doll from Eric’s hand and pushed it aside.
My mother was still talking, and I tried to assimilate her words with those between Eric and Brian. Their conversation, while hushed, seemed more interesting. Eric asked “What’s wrong?” but I didn’t catch my brother’s answer. Eric mentioned something about “one more day, then you’ll calm down.”
I heard an intercom page my mother’s name on the other end. “Sergeant Lackey, line one.” She paused. “You kids know I love you,” she said. Another pause. “You will tell Brian I love him, won’t you?”
“Yes.” In the next room, Michael giggled. “Stop worrying,” I heard Eric say. I looked in; he was speaking to Brian, not Michael. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
I didn’t think about what my mother had said until that evening, when Breeze returned for her children. Michael rushed for the door, and Brian lifted David from the floor as if his skin were glass. He surrendered the baby into Breeze’s arms. It immediately began crying; for an alarming second its cranky and swollen face resembled one of the carved apples. Breeze thanked us, and Brian swallowed a breath and gripped her shoulder. “Please take good care of them,” he told her. “Keep both eyes on them, no matter what.” I wondered what that meant. I looked to see if Eric mirrored my slight embarrassment, but he was watching the floor.
My mother’s words echoed in my head again later, after Eric had driven back to Hutchinson. I stood at the sink finishing dishes. From the window I saw Brian, bundled in his coat, tramping through the blustery wind on the hillside. He crouched down, burrowing in the dirt with his fingers. He placed something in the little grave he’d dug. Then he stood again and began stomping his feet on the mound of dirt, as if throwing a tantrum he’d been waiting to throw for years. I instantly thought of the night our father had left, and the mindless dance Brian had reeled through, there in that very spot.
I wadded the dish towel; retrieved my coat from the living room. That afternoon, Eric had placed the crone, the skull, and the alien on the windowsill to dry; now, however, the alien was missing. I didn’t need to hurry outside. At that moment I knew what Brian had buried in the dirt, knew what he’d stomped into the earth. But I didn’t know why.
In my half-sleep, I heard my bedroom door click open. Brian padded in. Darkness almost camouflaged him, thanks to the black shirt and sweatpants he’d probably mimicked from Eric’s wardrobe. He lurked in the shadows at the threshold of my room, his breathing’s constancy like the steady ticking of a clock. Could he tell my eyes were open? At last he stepped forward, the side of his face and neck exposed by the moonlight’s cold shelf. His skin looked clearer than ever, and I could see one eye, deep blue and dreamy, like a marble held to light.
“Deb,” he whispered. He made the nervous blinking gesture.
I snaked a leg from under the blanket, and he stepped back. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m awake.”
Brian sat on the bed’s creaky edge. Moonlight cast its diagonal across him, striping a banner on his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s late.” I toed his elbow, a gesture to signal it didn’t matter.
He wanted to talk. He needed someone to listen; without speaking, I nodded, urging him on. “Tomorrow”-he looked at the bedside clock-“well, actually today, I’ll meet this guy named Neil. It’s really important. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
I didn’t. “What’s happening? What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know where to start. It’s about all the things that used to happen to me. I used to pee the bed, I was always blacking out. You remember. All of that, everything, was stemming from something else. Whatever it was, it fucked me up. And I think I know what it was. I know, but I don’t know. It’s all fucked up.” Brian’s sentences didn’t quite connect; they were like fragments gouged from various conversations. And I’d rarely heard my brother swear. But rather than making him seem tougher or more seasoned, these words did the opposite. They lent him a curious innocence.
“Go on,” I said. I was whispering; at that second it seemed the only way to speak. “Be more specific.”
“This guy named Neil. Whatever happened to me, happened to him too. But he remembers better than I do. I’m sure he knows what happened the night you found me in the space beneath the house. He might even know what happened that Halloween, in the woods, when I blacked out.” Brian made a hiccuping sound, then quickly spat out the next sentences. “It wasn’t a UFO. It was our coach. And Neil knows. He’s going to be here soon. He’s going to tell me. To confirm things. I’ve been waiting for him for years.”
His words confused me. I opened my mouth to form questions; Brian must have anticipated this because he stopped me. “No,” he said. At that moment he inched forward, leaning his head beside me, brushing closer until his ear touched my left shoulder. I moved my right arm and cradled his face in my hand, gently closing his eyelids with my fingers. His breathing grazed my skin, as delicate and even as a glassblower’s.
The questions remained, but I couldn’t ask them. I couldn’t speak at all. I simply held my little brother as night dammed the room around us, until, at last, we fell asleep.
A merman starred in my afternoon nap’s dream. He lifted himself from the water, twisting his half-human, half-barracuda body onto a sea-splashed rock. His tail’s scales glittered green, then gold, then green again. He brushed away starfish and anemones, sighed, and craned his neck to face the sky. His flawless mouth opened and he sang, mournfully lamenting the ordinary love of a mortal…
…his voice blended into my grandma’s. “Eric, sweetie, you’ve got a guest.” So much for dreaming. I hauled myself back to reality and remembered it was the night of Neil’s scheduled return. But Neil wasn’t the guest Grandma spoke about. “I believe it’s your friend Brian,” she said. Right-Mrs. McCormick had invited us for dessert, a Christmas Eve welcome-home party for Neil.
Brian appeared in the doorway. His looks had altered, his hair now brushed and parted, his skin scrubbed and shining, touches of pink zit cream daubed here and there. He grinned, but the expression seemed false. Was that expression due to Neil?
“Welcome,” I said. “And happy holidays. Xmas Eve greetings, all that.” My two-foot-by-two-foot window verified I’d snoozed too long, because dusk had begun to settle over the neighbors’ mobile home. I could hear a woman’s angry drawl: “Junior, move your ass right on in here for dinner.”
Brian jangled his car keys. “Let’s go for a drive before the McCormicks’. And bundle up. I think it might snow.”
I slipped on an extra pair of socks and beelined to the bathroom. Tonight’s the night, I told myself. Four months had passed since I’d met Brian, four months of listening to his obsessions and preoccupations alter and equivocate. Whether Brian referred to his memories of UFOs or, as he’d recently called it, “something altogether different, more real-life,” one variable didn’t change. And that was Neil. Neil had been the subject of the first sentence Brian spoke to me, and tonight Brian hoped Neil would provide the final piece to whatever puzzle he’d been linking together.
I splashed my face with water, brushed my teeth, and gargled with my grandpa’s denture mouthwash. Grandma had taped a Christmas card to the bathroom mirror, on which a valiant reindeer led Santa through a starless night. I fingernailed the tape and pried open the card. “Dear Harry and Esther, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and a much-belated Sympathy for what happened last year. Sincerely, The Johnsons.” I thought for a minute, couldn’t remember the Johnsons, didn’t care.
I hadn’t seen Neil in months, and I wanted him to notice some smidgeon of change in my appearance. He’d expect my trademark “depressed,” so I opted for “spry” and “carefree.” I stripped off the black and shrugged myself into Grandpa’s white cardigan. Back to the mirror. Did I look good enough to kiss? Brian pounded the door, yelling to hurry up.
We threw ourselves into Brian’s car. Slam, slam. He blasted the heater, then the stereo. The music was from a tape I’d loaned him, a tape I’d originally borrowed from Neil. In the space between our seats, Brian had sandwiched the photograph from his Little League days-to show Neil, I presumed-and, beside it, a spiral notebook that resembled my journal. I didn’t ask. Instead, I questioned him about our agenda prior to dessert at the McCormicks’. Brian answered with a brief “You’ll see.” I fantasized he’d gone off the deep end, stolen one of his mother’s guns, and would force me to sidekick on a Christmas Eve terrorist spree. Well, maybe not.
Nearly every Hutchinson house had been done up for the holidays. Festive lights flashed from rooftops, windows, evergreens. A massive star strobed from the pinnacle of a water tower. An entire boulevard’s elm branches had been tied with thousands of ribbons. Brian seemed entranced by it all, and he paused at the Chamber of Commerce to inspect their lawn’s nativity scene. Electric candles illuminated the faces of Mary, Joseph, wise men, a donkey, a lamb, and a long-lashed heifer. Someone had stolen the baby Jesus. In its place was a red ceramic lobster, its claw hooking over the side of the manger to reach toward the world.
The car yielded at Main. A teenage girl crossed, gripping leashes on which two Chihuahuas trotted. She peered at us through glasses shaped like the infinity symbol. Her mouth formed the word “faggots.” Brian didn’t seem to care. I sent the girl a message: May your dogs get carried off by owls.
Low-hanging clouds had gathered, perching in tree branches and church steeples like chunks of meat on shish kebab skewers. “Not that weathermen are foolproof,” I said, “but the guy on channel ten predicted snow, and it appears he’s right.” Brian nodded and whistled softly to the music: a vain attempt to make me believe he wasn’t nervous. When he stopped whistling, I switched my attention from the clouds to the place he’d parked. The Toyota was idling behind the dugout of a small baseball diamond.
The field looked as though players hadn’t competed on it in years. It was a far cry from Sun Center’s fanciness. The outfield’s brown grass had crept inward, a rash, to surround the spaces where bases should have been. Littering the infield was a flotsam of dead leaves, empty beer cans and tobacco pouches, Styrofoam cups, crumpled pages from the Hutchinson News. The field looked as conspicuous as a shipwreck. “Where are we?” I asked.
“This is the Little League diamond,” Brian said. “It’s where the Panthers, where Neil and I, used to play.” At that, he left the car, stepped toward the dugout, and began climbing the fence. A sign beside him said REPORT ALL ACTS OF VANDALISM; the telephone number it gave was identical to the McCormicks’ except for one digit. As the wind blew, the sign shook, clicking like a Geiger counter.
“I’m staying here,” I yelled. “Too cold.” Brian stood at the plate, staring forward, as if a spectral pitcher were preparing to lob him a home run ball. He began running the base paths; after second base, he seemed to lose himself in the amorphous border of the outfield, and he headed for the fence and its battered scoreboard.
With Brian minutes away from the car, I saw my chance. I wriggled the spiral notebook free from the crevice between the seats. On the cover, in blue ink, were drawings of moons, stars, clouds, and a swarm of orbiting spaceships. Black ink had x-ed everything out. I didn’t want to snoop, really, but I reasoned it necessary. “I’ll feel guilty later.”
At first I touched the notebook’s pages as tenderly as I’d touch a Ouija board after inquiring about my death. Then I plunged in. It didn’t take long to realize it was Brian’s dream log. Yes, I’d heard him mention this once or twice, during up-all-night blabathons when he’d expanded on his UFO stories. But that had been weeks ago. I skimmed through random entries, glancing up every few sentences to make certain Brian still paraded through the outfield. There he was, leaning against the far fence, head tilted upward. So I shuffled to the last pages. Perhaps he’s dreamed about me, I thought.
As I came to the final dreams Brian had logged, I slowed my tempo. His handwriting was atrocious in spots, but I trudged through it. The dreams were dated over a month ago; I didn’t see my name, but I did notice Neil’s. I read.
11/10/91-
Last night, following my father’s disastrous phone call, the dream I suppose I’ve been dreading all these months. This time, I see Neil McCormick incredibly clearly-he’s there in the blue room, his rubber cleated shoes, pizza and panther on his shirt, black line of sunblock under his dark eyes-and then I see the shoes on the floor, the shirt, a white towel smudging away the sunblock. Neil’s lips, warm and fluttery against my ear-saying It’s okay, don’t worry. Then a door creaks open and the figure is there, four wide strides and he’s next to us, one hand on Neil’s shoulder, one hand on mine. “Neil, get his clothes off.” Neil’s pile of clothes thickens, the little hill grows as my Panthers shirt, my socks, my pants are thrown onto it. In the dream I can’t look into the figure’s face, I can only stare into his bare chest-and at first I see the mysterious blue-gray skin again, the same skin from other nightmares, and slowly, slowly, slowly it starts to change-the change takes forever, it goes from blue-gray to just gray, then from gray to grayish white, all the while sprouting little blond hairs. At last its color is white with a hint of pink, proof that it’s alive and blood is jetting beneath it, it’s no longer the skin of an alien, but the skin of a human being. A human arm, wide and hairy and freckled, and it wraps around me-and beside me Neil McCormick says here we go-
11/22/91-
Back among the trees, Halloween, and the figure’s there, his mouth spitting out I sure liked you Brian, I always hoped I would see you again-but this time the mouth isn’t the alien’s skinny slit, it’s a human mouth, full lips, blond mustache-the mouth moves toward me, nibbles at my own lips, just as they’d done two years before in the blue room with Neil-and I know who it is. It’s no alien, I’m thinking-my eyes are open and I’m not eight anymore, I’m not ten anymore, I’m nineteen, and now I know what’s happened to me, and I know they aren’t dreams. They’re memories.
I looked up from the dream description. Just as they’d done two years before in the blue room with Neil. Inexplicably, the voices from the bizarre tape I’d played in Neil’s room rang inside my head, the burping and swearing tenor of the little boy paired with the instigating bass of the adult. My mind’s warped lens focused back to a glossy spread I’d seen in Neil’s pedophilic porno magazine, but superimposed over the preteen’s head was first Neil’s face, then Brian’s. The effect was more abhorrent than hilarious. “Oh, Jesus,” I said, as if that would remedy something. Then I thought about the picture Brian had drawn from weeks back: the shoes, the number ninety-nine on the glove, the baseball scrawled with the word Coach. “Jesus,” I said again. I pulled out Brian’s Little League photograph and paused first at Brian, then Neil-his jersey, number ninety-nine-and, finally, their baseball coach.
At last I understood. The clues had been here all the time. I should have known months ago.
Brian was coming back, galloping toward the car, and somehow his face looked different. It wasn’t his clothes, not the clean skin and hair, not the makeup that covered each pimple. The change lurked somewhere inside him, simmered through his blood and bone, and only now could I see it.
He scaled the fence and opened the driver’s side door. Wind vacuumed the car’s warm air, making me shiver. For a second Brian appeared happy, eager to meet Neil, no longer nervous. Then he turned his head, his gaze dropping from my face to my hands. I still held the dream journal in my left, the photograph in my right.
I couldn’t fathom what to say first. “It’s not a secret anymore” is what came out. “Now there’s no more being cryptic with me.”
Brian took his things; jammed them back between the seats. “I would have told you eventually,” he blurted. “I really would have.” His glasses gradually fogged, and he rubbed them on the knee of his jeans. I stared there, ashamed, as he continued. “Right now, not all of it’s come back to me. I still need Neil. He has to tell me what he knows.”
We sat, silent. The fence’s sign banged and clattered. In a nearby house, a door slammed, shutting someone out. A gust of wind lifted a newspaper page into the air, and it sailed across the car’s windshield. I tried to read a headline; no luck.
“You’re such a snoop,” Brian said. “I would have told you.” I wanted to apologize, but those words couldn’t blanket all the things I was sorry for. All this time, I’d longed to bring Brian and Neil together; instead, I felt like the subject of a conspiracy. “Sooner or later you would have figured it out anyway,” he said. “I’m surprised you hadn’t. Based on what you know about Neil, plus the clues I’ve probably given you here and there. You’re not stupid.” He started the car. “It’s amazing what people know. They just never say anything, they deny it because they don’t want to believe.” Yes, I thought, that was true. “Maybe Neil’s mother even knew what was going on, maybe she didn’t want to believe that whatever was happening was really happening. Maybe my father, maybe my mother.”
Brian shoved the dream journal back into my lap. “Turn to the last pages.” I returned to the 11/22 entry. “No, snoop, the very end.”
Flip, flip, flip. These pages stuck together, and when I pried them apart I saw reddish brown stains. “Your Rorschach test?”
“No,” he said. “My blood.” Brian glanced at his watch and backed the car from the baseball field. “The past few weeks, ever since I’ve been figuring things out, I’ve been getting nosebleeds. Haven’t had them since I was a kid. Back then, the slightest pressure would burst capillaries.” He touched his nose.
“I kept remembering something Avalyn said,” he continued. “She talked about proof, about leaving remnants of yourself to prove something happened.” At a red traffic light, he looked at me, and I placed my hand on the notebook’s brittle pages. “My nose bled that night, the night of the missing five hours. Now that I know what happened, it’s bleeding again. Strange, hmm? It’s like my body’s remembering, too.” Brian’s hand left the steering wheel. His fingers met mine on the dried smears and dots of blood. “This is my proof,” he said.
I didn’t have to give Brian directions. After he parked in the driveway, he simply sat, letting the car settle, as darkness lowered its canopy over Hutchinson’s west side.
We stepped to the porch. In the McCormicks’ bay window, blue and green lights winked from a tree garlanded with popcorn strings and candy canes. Tinsel speared from its branches like miniature javelins. A tin ornament was shaped like a gingerbread man, its eyes, smile, bow tie, and buttons chiseled into the surface by an amateur’s hand, quite possibly Neil’s as a child. I wondered if he’d made the ornament before or after that summer.
When I’d visited Neil in the past, his mom’s excitement would overflow: the door would swing open, and she’d tug me inside as avidly as Hansel and Gretel’s witch. Tonight her movements had slowed. “Good to see you both again,” she said. “I apologize, though. Something happened. Neil’s not well. Perhaps that’s the best way to put it.” Her voice sounded biblical: tired, wounded, meaningful. “He’s had an accident. He’s asleep now.”
Mrs. McCormick pointed. On the kitchen table, two pies lounged beneath a divinity snowman, its raisin eyes and cinnamon stick arms guarding them. “But you can still stay. I’ve baked a peanut butter-peach, and a good old-fashioned apple.”
Brian seemed lost. He eased into a chair, I took another, and Mrs. McCormick searched a drawer for a knife. Her searching knocked a wine bottle cork to the floor, and it bounced into a corner. I hunted for something to say. My gaze was preoccupied with pie number one’s mosaic of peaches, peanut butter dollops, and crumbled graham crackers, and I didn’t notice when the shadowy figure shuffled into the room.
“You’re awake,” his mom said.
Neil stood in the kitchen’s doorway. His eyes looked drugged, slightly incongruous, and I saw that it wasn’t a shadow beneath his right eye, but the gray crescent of a developing bruise. Another bruise curled across his cheekbone. His mouth wore a raspberryish sore. His earring was missing, the lobe swollen, infected. Below it, a cut had been Mercurochromed so thickly it glowed orange.
“Stop staring, Preston,” Neil said. Then he stepped toward Brian. “So you’re the man.” On “you’re,” his mouth widened to display his newly chipped tooth.
“Little League teammates,” Mrs. McCormick said. She aimed the knife at a pie. “Neil never would have remembered a friend from that long ago. How neat that you managed to. How long since you two last saw each other?”
Neil touched the cut on his neck. “Not as long as it seems, I guess.”
“Ten years,” Brian said. “And five months, seven days.”
I assisted Neil’s mom by ordering the table with a quartet of forks and plates. “I’ll have peanut butter-peach,” she said. “How about you guys?” I chose the same, and Brian picked apple.
“One of both,” Neil said. The bruise made his eye appear locked in a perpetual wink. I still loved him.
We ate, barely speaking beyond the standard “Mmm”s and “this is really great”s. Mrs. McCormick was the first to ease the tension. “This isn’t the way Neil normally looks, Brian. He’s a tough one, all right, but he’s learning the hard way not to assert that toughness in just any old place. Hutchinson is one thing, New York is another.” I saw him roll his eyes, mouth a silent, Oh, Mom. “By chance you ever go there, god forbid, take warning. If toughs on the street want something of yours, by all means give it to them, or else expect a scuffle.” Brian nodded, but I didn’t believe that’s what had happened to Neil. I doubted Mrs. McCormick believed it, either.
After we finished, Neil gathered plates and forks, deposited them in the sink, and rubbed his mom’s shoulders. “We’re going to cruise around for a while,” he told her. “There’s something I need to show Brian.”
“I imagine so,” she said. “I guess you have some catching up to do.” She saw us to the door; as we stepped out she gave us each a pat on the back. Then she stood there, waving.
Brian drove. Neil stammered directions. I sat in the back, but by then I could have sat on another continent and it wouldn’t have mattered. They had crossed to another place. I floated away, inessential.
The Toyota turned onto Main. Ahead, beside the street, were the Kansas State Fairgrounds, the wreckage from the previous autumn’s twelve-day carnival still remaining. Briefly I thought Neil would steer Brian there, but he indicated the opposite way. Brian swerved to a narrow street. “This is it up here,” Neil said. “But you probably know that.” Brian parked alongside the curb, shut the ignition, and folded his arms.
They got out, neither speaking. Brian fished the baseball photograph from between the seats. He stepped around the car and leaned against the passenger side door. Neil took his place beside him, wincing as he pushed himself onto the hood, and both he and Brian stared at the boxy, completely mundane house where we’d parked. When I joined them, the glassiness in their eyes looked foreign to me. I understood this as the place their coach had lived. The house sat back from a row of knee-high shrubs, a gravel path leading toward it. A two-door garage linked to the house’s east side, its doors closed, a green garden hose snaking from its wall to the shrubs. Neighbors’ homes were lit up, flashing their greetings and noels to the night street, but here, in this home from their memories, there was only darkness. No Christmas lights braceleted its exterior, no tree blinked its varicolored eyes from the front window. The only beacons were the illuminated doorbell’s tiny rectangular beam and the porch light, the globe of which shone a curious blue instead of white.
“Blue,” Brian said, seeing it.
Down the block, a group of carolers trudged through the cold, pausing before each house to warble their songs to neighborhood families. I listened awhile, not knowing what to do or say. No matter what the carolers sang about-the infant Jesus, enchanted snowmen, nightfall over an ancient village-their words seemed the same. A security underlied their voices, a knowledge that they’d soon be home in bed, a log snapping sparks in the fireplace, mom and dad snoozing in the next room.
“Merry Christmas,” the carolers yelled at a doorstep.
“Merry Christmas,” I said to Neil and Brian. They still stared at the house, stared beyond its glass and wood and aluminum siding, stared at what had happened inside, years ago. Neil’s face was anxious, heartbreaking in its bruised and swollen state. Brian’s face had leached of color.
I wasn’t part of this. Where else did I have to go but away?
I could have said “I have to leave now,” could have explained “it’s better if you two are alone,” but I didn’t say a word. I raised my hand, fingers scratching the air in good-bye, and spun around. I stood there, my back to them, these two people I’d united at last. Then I began walking. The air made brittle stabs at my face, and I swallowed icy mouthfuls.
I tried telepathy one final time. I didn’t care about its foolishness. I zeroed my mind on theirs, hoping Neil and Brian would hear, just this once. I love you both.
A long-haired boy bent over the sidewalk at a neighboring house, his zebra-striped mittens sprinkling salt pebbles onto the cement in rhythm with the Christmas carol down the block. The boy seemed around my age. Neil’s age. Brian’s age. I wondered if he’d lived on this street ten years ago; if he’d known Coach. And then I wondered how many others there had been-where they lived now, the diversity of ways they’d chosen to remember. The boy stopped shaking the salt and hurried toward his house. I kept my head down, staring at the gravel lane, as if immersed in a book, a series of soothing and beautiful words spelled out across the roadside to lead me home.
The nervousness subsided, and my limbs grew numb. For the first time, Neil and I were alone, and we stood beside the house’s battered garage to watch Eric’s shadow trail farther away, each successive streetlight flashing him in and out of vision until his grandpa’s white sweater was nothing but a speck.
I turned and stared at the house. “Blue,” I said again.
There it was, the precise blue from countless nightmares, flooding the air around us as we moved toward the front door. The color came from the porch light, and it radiated a fuzzy semicircle over the yard. That same blue had shone through the windows on that long-ago evening, the rainy night Neil and I had been together inside this house.
Neil followed the gravel walkway toward the cement porch. He paused under the blue light, poised one knuckle against the door, and rapped gently. He waited, then moved his bruised eye to the door’s rectangular window to peer inside. Breath steamed the glass. “No one’s home.” He rattled the doorknob. Locked. “Let’s try the back,” he said, jumping from the porch.
We skulked around the garage, and Neil lifted the latch on a chain-link fence. The backyard was a jungle of tangled, skeletal weeds; their frozen vines and stems crackled beneath our shoes as we walked. Stabbed into the earth were plastic sunflowers, the kind that pinwheel in the wind. Neil kicked one, splintering three of its petals. A cardinal regarded him from a circle of dirt, a female, her feathers a rustic caramel color. Instead of flying south, she had chosen to remain here, in this overgrown garden where I imagined marigolds and morning glories and bachelor’s buttons would bloom in a warmer season.
Neil tried the back door; it was locked as well. He spied an overturned lawn chair, brushed away its layer of sand, and unfolded it under a window. He stepped onto it carefully, his body clutched by pain; still, there was a certain level of fused skill and grace in the way he moved. “You were a great baseball player, weren’t you,” I said. It was the first reference I’d made to the conversation I knew we’d imminently have. “I used to watch you from the bench.”
“I was the best,” Neil said. “He told me so.”
Neil cupped a hand over his brow and peered into the window. “It’s changed, but it’s the same place.” He stepped down, one foot on the ground, one on the chair. “What do you think? I say we go in.”
Down the block, closer now, the carolers segued from “The First Noel” to another song I didn’t recognize. Their voices wavered, as if each kid were shivering. The cardinal lifted into the air, flitting back and forth between two trees as deftly as a badminton birdie. Neil scanned the ground, and I followed his gaze. Beside a beehive-shaped snarl of weeds were glass shards, broken bricks, a rusting tin top from a cat food can, and children’s toys: rubber pony, plastic shovel, foot-size fire engine. Neil kicked a brick. “Should I do the honors, or should you?”
“You’d better,” I said. I bent to pick up a square brick chunk, then changed my mind. My hand closed around the fire engine. I relayed it to Neil, and he remounted the lawn chair.
He made a curious sound in his throat, a noise like a microphone’s static. “Bottom of the ninth inning, and the score is tied,” he said. “Bases loaded, two outs, the count full. McCormick rares back.” Neil swung the fire engine behind him. “And here’s the pitch.” I held my breath, and he hurled the toy at the window. The glass shattered, the crash surprisingly quiet. “Strike three,” Neil said.
Three more bashes of the fire engine’s front end knocked the rest of the glass away. Neil tossed the toy back to the ground, and it clattered against a brick. He positioned his hands on the window frame and squirmed into the gaping wound. I hurried forward, gripped his shoes, and nudged him farther. The house swallowed him.
My climb was more difficult. I rolled up the Little League photograph, wedged it into my pocket, and stretched myself from the lawn chair. I would have to chance accident by stepping onto the chair’s back and quickly thrusting my head and shoulders through the window. “Three, two, one, BLAST OFF,” Neil said. It worked. I leaned into the house, and Neil’s hands coupled with mine. I stared as our fingers intertwined; saw a triangular scar on Neil’s knuckle. Neil pulled me through, and I tumbled to the floor.
Neil and I scanned our surroundings. My eyes adjusted to the drapery of shadows, and the room asserted itself: lamp carved from driftwood, mirrored dresser scattered with paperback gothic romances and makeup, paintings of a stormy beach scene and a cabin in a forest clearing. It must have been the family’s master bedroom, considering the unmade double bed, the walk-in closet with sliding glass doors. “Not much for interior decoration, are they?” Neil asked.
I turned to him then, and for the first time that night I truly stared. Neil was my approximate height. His hair and eyes were pitch black, his eyebrows so thick they seemed mascaraed across his forehead. He had hardly changed from the boy in my pocket’s photograph, that Little Leaguer’s face a bud that had blossomed into the face before me. He was Neil McCormick, number ninety-nine. Seeing him after all these months, all these years, dried me up. I felt like a shell, with a mouthful of grist and an ice cube heart.
A pair of cats puttered forth from the hallway’s darkness, noses in the air. The first was stocky and gray, white fur like a bib beneath her chin. The second had long, almost silvery hair, which pieced onto the floor as she rubbed against Neil’s foot. “Awww,” Neil said, and the jaw he’d been clenching for the past half hour instantly relaxed. He bent to scratch her head, and the cat’s topaz eyes examined him. She begged for food, making a feeble and wee noise, more a wounded crackle than a meow, the sound of a dollhouse door, creaking open.
“Coach didn’t use this room much,” Neil said. “He kept baseball equipment here, other crap, odds and ends.” He moved into the hall, and the cats and I followed.
We gave ourselves a tour. The house oozed a baby odor, a sugary combination of perfumy talcums and lotions and diapers, a smell surprisingly like roasted sweet potatoes. But something else lurked beneath that, and when I inhaled I got a whiff of the house itself, the smell that had attended its rooms for years, a smell as familiar as the blue light.
“Here’s the hallway, the bathroom, the linen closet. And this”-Neil slapped a half-open door-“was his bedroom.”
Neil went in, but I stayed in the doorway. He flicked the light switch, and I squinted. “They’ve made it a nursery,” he said. On the wallpaper, elephants and clowns juggled polka-dotted balls. Figureheads decorated the bassinet’s posts. Cornflower blue jumpers, bibs, and socks had been layered across the floor, awaiting use. Neil switched off the light and stretched beside the baby’s clothes, the movement causing him obvious pain. He stared upward. “He’s here no longer, and the bed’s here no longer. But that’s the same ceiling.” I looked. “All the little ridges and whirls and speckly-sparkly things. I used to get lost in its pictures, after we’d finished.” He sat up. “You know what I mean by that, don’t you.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
Back to the hallway. There were two more rooms: a spacious kitchen to our left, the living room to our right. Neil tiptoed into the kitchen; the cats scampered about his ankles, expecting dinner. But I began walking slowly into the main room, my skin gradually translating, deepening to the translucent blue with each step as I moved toward the picture window, into the glow of the outside porch light. The world’s silence swelled until I could hear my heartbeat. I stopped in the room’s center. Here I was, at last, in the room from my dreams.
Behind me, Neil opened and slammed the kitchen’s cupboard doors. “What’s up with these He used to keep these things stocked.” I turned to watch him prop a cookie jar between elbow and ribs like a football. He opened the lid, reached inside, and gobbled something I couldn’t see. “That’s better.”
He noticed me staring. Whatever face I was making, its horror or solemnity stopped Neil in his tracks. He moved toward me and posted his hand on my shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “This was the place, wasn’t it?”
I reached up, grabbed his hand, and led him to a couch. Purple lilacs filigreed its upholstery. I sat on one flower, and he took another. The silvery white cat wandered in, upturned her implacable face, and creaked at us.
“Why now?” Neil asked. “Why do you need this now? Why did you search me out?”
“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I want to dream about something else for a change.”
Neil leaned against the cushions. Blue outlined his cheeks and chin, sapphiring his pupils, lending the medicine stain an eerie fluorescence. I was still holding his hand. The numbness persisted, and I waited for it to melt, waited to feel something new. Neil watched the frozen world outside the room’s window for what seemed hours. Finally he turned his head to look at me.
“It’s time,” I said. “Speak.” The forbidden moment had come; Neil would have to tell his story. Before he even opened his wounded mouth I knew what he would say. I knew it as conclusively as I knew my family, my self, and as he spoke it seemed as though his story had already ended, I was already tucked away in some warm and secure place, I was already remembering his words.
“Look down from the sky…and stay by my cradle ’til morning is nigh.” Or so sang the carolers. By the sound of their voices, they huddled together only a few houses from Coach’s doorstep. I scanned the room, thoughts rocketing through my mind so quickly I couldn’t catalog them: there’s the spot where he kept his stack of video games… Right about there, he first took my picture…The same window where he’d drawn the blinds before he carried me to bed…
I knew I had to talk now. Brian waited, eyes blinking behind his glasses, resembling a kid inside his first chamber of horrors. Holding his hand seemed preposterous, so I let go. If we were stars in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, then I would have embraced him, my hands patting his shoulderblades, violins and cellos billowing on the soundtrack as tears streamed down our faces. But Hollywood would never make a movie about us.
“It took a while to remember you,” I told him. “Eric’s letter mentioned you, and something seemed familiar. But really. I’ve never seen a UFO, let alone stepped inside one. If a little green man had examined me, I doubt I’d forget it.” Brian smiled, his mouth an awkward arc. In the darkness he appeared almost handsome. “So I knew there was something more to your story. And then it hit me, who you were.”
Brian stuffed hands in pockets and unrolled a photograph. “Look at this.” Although the dark loosened its particulars, I could still make out the picture of the Panthers. “That one’s me,” Brian said, circling his face with his finger. His expression in the photo seemed lost, hopeless. “And that’s you.” I almost laughed at my pushed-forth chest, the black sunblock bisecting my face. Brian pointed to the figure next to me, but this time he didn’t say a word. It was Coach. Even in shadow, I could distinguish the baseball cap, the steady and rehearsed grin, the mustache.
“I feel like he’s watching us,” I said. “But as for where he is now, I haven’t the slightest. He coached some summers after the Panthers, but his teams were made up of older kids. I’ve always guessed someone complained, and the Little League people assigned him boys he couldn’t handle in the ways he wanted. So I think he moved after that. I really can’t say. For all I know, he could have suffered a stroke or a brain aneurysm, right here in this room. Maybe his ghost is watching us as we speak.”
Brian seemed to ponder that idea, his eyes examining the room’s china cabinet, its ottoman, stopping at its rocking chair. “He came back for me,” he said. “It was an accident. It was Halloween, and I think some of the older Little League boys were with him. He saw me, he knew it was me. He followed me into some dark trees. It’s the only time I’d seen him, and I haven’t seen him since.” Outside, a car slid past, headlights sneaking into the window to highlight Brian’s face. “Maybe I’ll never, ever remember the rest about that night. The reason is because I was alone with him. But the first time it happened was different. You were there. I’m relying on you now.”
The photograph dropped to the carpet and curled like a scroll. I considered the best way to begin. I felt stranded, as though delivering a speech to a stadium filled with listeners. “This is crazy, but inside here are things I’ve never told.” I traced an X across my heart with my fist. “Eric doesn’t know, Mom doesn’t know. I don’t think anyone can understand, really. And this will sound odd, but when it first started happening, the feeling I felt more than anything else was honored.” Brian looked at the floor, nodding. “He had chosen me, you know? Out of all the boys on the team, he’d picked me. Like I’d been blessed or something. He taught me things no other boy on the team or at school could know. I was his.”
The cats stretched out to lounge at our feet. I resumed my story, gradually leading to the point in the plot where Brian appeared. “I guess he suckered me in. He was there at the right time, Mom was with Alfred, I was learning things early.” Brian nodded still. “Are you following me?”
“Just go on. Don’t stop.”
“Coach took me to movies, told me I was his star player. He stuffed me full of candy and let me win a trillion video games. And then he was there, on top of me on the kitchen floor, rubbing his dick against my bare belly.” I could still feel the scratch of the coarse platinum hairs on Coach’s arms. I glanced to my left; to the kitchen’s features that hadn’t changed: the lemony color of the cabinets, paint spattered at the window’s corners, the chandelier’s green glass teardrops. I had watched those dangling above me, catching the light, on that summer afternoon, the floor beneath me carpeted with cereal. Here we go.
“After that, there was no turning back. From then on, I’d do anything he wanted. It lasted that whole summer. We were…in love.” Those words were no longer accurate. I tried to spit out a laugh when I said them, possibly because I’d never said them aloud, had only kept them silent, for years, inside my head. But my throat had no laughter left in it. “I guess I sound like I’m preaching, like there’s a moral here, that I should start bawling and scream ‘my childhood was taken from me.’ But I don’t believe that.”
There was so much more I could tell him, but everything seemed irrelevant. “We were in love,” I’d said, and I wanted to take that back, wanted Brian to speak. I placed my tongue against the inside of my cheek, tasting the steely bud of my wound, soothing the place where the shampoo bottle had smashed my face. I know you want it, the john had said. Had that only been last night? New York seemed lifetimes away.
“The game had started,” Brian said. “I sat on the bench, as usual. I wasn’t good at baseball like you. And then everyone looked up at the rain, sprinkles at first, then torrents, drenching everything. The umpire called the game.”
“Yes,” I said. “I remember that. But no one was there to pick you up.”
“My mother was working, she had planned to leave early to take me home after the game. But she didn’t plan on a rain-out. My father had better things to do. I just stood there, as everyone drove off with their parents. And then you came over, you were beside me in the dugout. ‘We’ll drive you home,’ you said.”
Another car’s high beams lit up the room, briefly illuminating the trio of people in the wall’s framed portrait: a spectacled, orange-sweatered mom, a dad with an overbite and necktie, a baby in blue frills between them. The light stunned Brian. He must have thought the owners had returned, because he shot from the couch, then sat back down. “Sorry. I’m jumpy.” He proceeded to explain that I had to continue the story from here. He called the rest “a blur,” saying it was all part of five hours he’d forgotten.
“You sat in the back of Coach’s station wagon.” I could see him there. I’ll take you home, Brian, Coach had yelled to the backseat, but first we’ll go to my house. “He drove to his place. I led you around. But he didn’t want you in the bedroom. That was our special place, I guess, reserved for just us two.” I wanted to believe that. “He was in the mood for something different. He wanted both of us right here, in this very room.”
I paused again, but Brian objected. “Keep going. Don’t stop again until you’ve finished.”
“The routine was the same whenever Coach invited someone else over,” I said. “He used me as the prop to pull you in. I stretched out on his couch, which”-I patted the space between our seats-“was a hell of a lot more comfortable than this. And he took off my clothes. I wasn’t even conscious of being naked; it’s like God or whoever had created me to be that way. And I oohed and aahed to give the impression that what he was doing to me was the greatest thing I’d ever known.” In a way, I thought, it was. Or it had been, at one time, now only part of memory. “That way, you’d be there, on the other side of the room, hopefully wanting Coach to do to you what he was doing to me. He had planned it all.
“In the game he played, I had to do things to you first, like a warm-up. I’d kiss you a little, preparing you, slipping my tongue inside to get your mouth all wet and shiny before he shoved his big soft lips and that thick mustache over your face and nearly ate you alive.”
“I think I remember that part,” Brian said. His voice was a spider’s, hidden away in some far corner’s web. “It came to me with Avalyn. I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d been kissed.” I didn’t know what he meant, but when I started to ask he stopped me. “I’ll shut up. Go on.”
“Coach and I got your clothes off, touched and massaged you all over. I guess you whimpered, made sounds a deaf-mute would make. Coach loved that. His favorite thing was laying his tongue inside a kid’s mouth, so I presume he sucked around at your tongue awhile. Then things progressed. There was this little game I loved, where Coach would open his mouth as wide as a fist and circle me with it. I mean my dick, my balls, everything.” I expected Brian to blush here, but if he did I couldn’t tell. I only saw his face, limned by the porch light’s deep blue. “He did that to me, and then I tried to do it to you. To show you everything was A-OK. But my mouth was nothing like his. I was just a boy. So he went down on you, sucked and sucked. I watched, amazed and jealous and ten thousand other emotions. You kept your eyes closed mostly, but when they fluttered open they were glassy, far away.”
Brian moved closer to me. I could see his hands shaking, and he bunched them in his lap. Then he took a deep breath, and as he exhaled he made a soft moaning sound. I realized he was trying not to cry. If I had a spirit, I felt it fly out of me then. And if Brian had a spirit, it flew hand in hand with mine, lifting above the couch, passing through the roof, hovering in the black and measureless air that blanketed the house where Coach once lived.
“Then the other game began. The five-dollar game.” The carolers stood next door now, their voices harmonizing in the December chill. Yet in the dark street shineth, the everlasting light. “Coach would make me do things, crazy sex things, and if I could do them I’d get a five-dollar bill. Usually I’d get it even if I couldn’t do them, just seeing my effort was enough for him. And he must have had an extra five bucks that night, because he wanted you in on things, too.”
I waited. I could almost see Coach, standing over us, one hand on my shoulder, one on Brian’s. Go ahead, Neil.
“We had to fist him. Do you know what that means?” Brian nodded, but by then his face seemed so dazed he would have made the necessary gesture at anyone. “I went first, of course. To show you. He stood over us, we looked up at him. That always got him off, I guess, seeing those surprised kid faces staring up like that. Or so I gathered, considering all the pictures in his photo album. On that night, the five-dollar bill was mine if I could reach inside him, ram my little fist inside his ass, then wring it all the way to the elbow. And goddamn, I did it. The way it felt-like plunging my arm into a tight, tight sleeve, its insides covered with wet sponges, and then the suction of his ass, squeezing my elbow-it was like his body wanted me inside it, it wanted to devour me whole. I can’t forget that.”
“And then it was my turn,” Brian said. He snarled his words, his voice almost angry. “I did it, too. I know, because I felt the inside of the calf.” His hand-no, his entire body-was trembling.
“Yes, you did it. Coach there, his ass jutting out, his face sort of erased and this blissed-out look replacing it. And you kneeling on the floor, your arm disappeared, gone, the fist and wrist and forearm swallowed up by his body.” I could remember Brian perfectly now, that lost look in his eyes, eight years old. And I’d been right beside him.
And I could remember Coach, as well, perhaps better now than ever before. But something had changed. “Love”-that was what I’d always termed the emotion I carried for Coach. Now it was different, an emotion I had no adequate word for.
I couldn’t go on. “And we put our clothes on, we got in the station wagon, drove you back to Little River, and dropped you off in your driveway. The end.”
“And I had a nosebleed. Don’t forget the nosebleed. It wasn’t from aliens and their tracking devices. It was something else. I want to know how it happened.”
I was sinking into the couch, it was suffocating me. I stood and stepped across the room to the window. “You were so dazed you couldn’t stand up straight. It was like he’d ripped something free from you, whatever controlled your balance, and when your arm pulled out of him you fell. Weird. You fell face first into my knee, and when we twisted you up onto the couch your nose was shooting this geyser of blood.”
“Like this?” His voice lifted, excited, almost shrieking. “Like this?”
I turned from the window. The blue still shone off Brian’s face, but he had removed his glasses, and his eyes had altered. They glittered and flashed like a puppy’s. And below them, dribbling from one nostril, a stream of blood. It glistened, almost black. As I stared, its flow grew heavier, trickling down Brian’s upper lip, his lower lip, his chin. “Like this?” he asked a third time, and he knocked his knuckle against his nose. The blood spurted then, a gush of it staining his jacket, his shirt, a lilac on the couch’s cushion.
I bounded back to him. “Stop,” I said. I pulled his hand from his face and propped his head into my lap, his nose in the air. I had to stop the bleeding. I swiped my fingers across his face, and his blood made an inky flourish on my hand.
Brian closed his eyes, blood trailing down his cheek and matting his hair. I felt it, damp and warm, seeping through my pant leg. It was Brian’s blood, and for some reason I knew it was pure. No other man I’d held in my arms-and now, not even I-had blood this pure.
His eyes reopened, and he looked up at me. “Tell me, Neil,” he said. “Tell me more.”
I could hear the carolers’ footsteps, their hushed giggles. They approached Coach’s house. We had to leave soon. “One more thing,” I said. “You were so erased that when Coach gave you the five bucks, you just let the bill drop to the floor. I saw the money lying there, and I picked it up. It was mine.” Brian tried to exhale from his nose, and a bubble of blood widened and popped. “So I owe you, Brian. I’ve owed you that, all these years.” I lifted his head a little, patted my ass for my wallet, found a five-dollar bill.
The carolers clomped toward the porch, arguing over what carols they still hadn’t sung. “No one’s even home,” one said. “Let’s yell Trick or Treat,” said another. If I were in my regular mood, I’d stand at the door, smile through one or two songs, then hurl a fistful of dimes and nickels at them with all the strength I could muster. As I thought this, I heard a loud “Shhh.” Brian and I froze, waiting. “Someone’s home,” a boy insisted, and when I looked to the window I saw a face peering in at us, a head with a red-balled stocking cap, gaping mouth, spying eyes made blue by the never-ending porch light. I tried to picture the scene he saw: two boys in the dark, sprawled together on the couch, holding hands; one battered and bruised, the other bleeding from the nose.
They began singing “Silent Night,” which had always been my favorite as a little boy. They finished the first line, and Brian sat up from the couch. The blood’s flow was subsiding. He pinched the five-dollar bill in both hands, looked at me, and ripped it in half. Again. He began tearing it then, ripping the halves into more halves, until the bill was torn into hundreds of pieces. He cupped the pieces in his palm and threw them, green shreds of money showering across the floor.
Brian leaned his head back into my lap. “It’s over,” he said.
“Silent Night” paused, and a caroler giggled. I stroked Brian’s hair with my stained fingers. I wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything would be fine, but I couldn’t speak. I just kept holding him, touching his hair and his face, letting him know I was sorry.
In the middle of that quiet I heard a soft clicking noise. At first the sound puzzled me; then I recognized it as that of a key in a lock. Brian panicked, standing from the couch, pulling me up with him as we attempted to make our break. But it was too late. The house’s door clattered open, and the room’s light flickered on.
A woman gasped. Through the open door I could see a sliver of carolers, some faces peering inside at the scattered tatters of money, some faces turned to the sky and the snow, now beginning to fall. And there, in front of them, in the room with us, stood the family, their outlines barely visible within the weight of the room’s light. It was a light that shone over our faces, our wounds and scars. It was a light so brilliant and white it could have been beamed from heaven, and Brian and I could have been angels, basking in it. But it wasn’t, and we weren’t.