Different Seasons(162)
“Gimme some skin, man,” he said, sounding tired.
“Chris—”
“Skin.”
I gave him some skin. “I’ll see you.”
He grinned—that same sweet, sunny. grin. “Not if I see you first, f**kface.”
He walked off, still laughing, moving easily and gracefully, as though he didn’t hurt like me and have blisters like me and like he wasn’t lumped and bumped with mosquito and chigger and blackfly bites like me. As if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he was going to some real boss place instead of just home to a three-room house (shack would have been closer to the truth) with no indoor plumbing and broken windows covered with plastic and a brother who was probably laying for him in the front yard. Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these ass**le poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.
30
The back door was locked so I fished the spare key out from under the mat and let myself in. The kitchen was empty, silent, suicidally clean. I could hear the hum the fluorescent bars over the sink made when I turned on the switch. It had been literally years since I had been up before my mother; I couldn’t even remember the last time such a thing had happened.
I took off my shirt and put it in the plastic clothesbasket behind the washing machine. I got a clean rag from under the sink and sponged off with it—face, neck, pits, belly. Then I unzipped my pants and scrubbed my crotch—my testicles in particular—until my skin began to hurt. It seemed I couldn’t get clean enough down there, although the red weal left by the bloodsucker was rapidly fading. I still have a tiny crescent-shaped scar there. My wife once asked about it and I told her a lie before I was even aware I meant to do so. When I was done with the rag, I threw it away. It was filthy.
I got out a dozen eggs and scrambled six of them together. When they were semi-solid in the pan, I added a side dish of crushed pineapple and half a quart of milk. I was just sitting down to eat when my mother came in, her gray hair tied in a knot behind her head. She was wearing a faded pink bathrobe and smoking a Camel.
“Gordon, where have you been?”
“Camping,” I said, and began to eat. “We started off in Vern’s field and then went up the Brickyard Hill. Vern’s mom said she would call you. Didn’t she?”
“She probably talked to your father,” she said, and glided past me to the sink. She looked like a pink ghost. The fluorescent bars were less than kind to her face; they made her complexion look almost yellow. She sighed... almost sobbed. “I miss Dennis most in the mornings,” she said. “I always look in his room and it’s always empty, Gordon. Always.”
“Yeah, that’s a bitch,” I said.
“He always slept with his window open and the blankets... Gordon? Did you say something?”
“Nothing important, Mom.” ... and the blankets pulled up to his chin,” she finished. Then she just stared out the window, her back to me. I went on eating. I was trembling all over.
31
The story never did get out.
Oh, I don’t mean that Ray Brower’s body was never found; it was. But neither our gang nor their gang got the credit. In the end, Ace must have decided that an anonymous phone call was the safest course, because that’s how the location of the corpse was reported. What I meant was that none of our parents ever found out what we’d been up to that Labor Day weekend.
Chris’s dad was still drinking, just as Chris had said he would be. His mom had gone off to Lewiston to stay with her sister, the way she almost always did when Mr. Chambers was on a bender. She went and left Eyeball in charge of the younger kids. Eyeball had fulfilled his responsibility by going off with Ace and his j.d. buddies, leaving nine-year-old Sheldon, five-year-old Emery, and two-year-old Deborah to sink or swim on their own.
Teddy’s mom got worried the second night and called Vern’s mom. Vern’s mom, who was also never going to do the game-show circuit, said we were still out in Vern’s tent. She knew because she had seen a light on in there the night before. Teddy’s mom said she sure hoped no one was smoking cigarettes in there and Vern’s mom said it looked like a flashlight to her, and besides, she was sure that none of Vern’s or Billy’s friends smoked.
My dad asked me some vague questions, looking mildly troubled at my evasive answers, said we’d go fishing together sometime, and that was the end of it. If the parents had gotten together in the week or two afterward, everything would have fallen down... but they never did.
Milo Pressman never spoke up, either. My guess is that he thought twice about it being our word against his, and how we would all swear that he sicced Chopper on me.
So the story never came out—but that wasn’t the end of it.
32
One day near the end of the month, while I was walking home from school, a black 1952 Ford cut into the curb in front of me. There was no mistaking that car. Gangster white-walls and spinner hubcaps, highrise chrome bumpers and Lucite death-knob with a rose embedded in it clamped to the steering wheel. Painted on the back deck was a deuce and a one-eyed jack. Beneath them, in Roman Gothic script, were the words WILD CARD.