Fr. Scarcross never woke—at least not while I was there. A nurse padded in and gave him an injection, changed his I.V., and said I had to go. I’d been sleeping for hours, through the rain and clumsy thunder, in the chair beside Eli, clutching his list. I’d awakened from a dream to see a doctor staring at me with curious amusement as he checked Elijah’s pulse. He said, “You’re the other one,” and made a wry face. I’m the other one? I wondered. I’m the other what? I drifted off again until a second nurse came in and shook me by the shoulders and said, “Up and Adam.” I shuffled off my sleep and unpocketed the money Ian had given me to catch a cab home. I was glad that he had. Outside, it was a deluge. And the room was strung with lightning as I passed by Peter’s bed.
“Moby! Psst!” a voice whispered to me.
The nurse was in with Scarcross, so I headed for the voice. “How’s it hangin’, Moby?”
“It’s Toby,” I yawned.
“You yawned in my face!” Peter shouted, scandalized.
“Now listen,” he continued, talking like a junkie. His face was streaked with lightning and his eyes were quick and red. “I have something for you.” He produced an envelope.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You can open it downstairs… . You’d better go, girlfriend.”
I took the envelope and left.
Peaches pulled around so I wouldn’t get soaked and seemed more than pleased when I slipped her Ian’s fifty. “That boy be livin’ large,” she declared and lit a joint. I was sitting by a pretty little three-year-old kid.
“That’s Donna,” Peaches said. “My dead sister’s baby. This be mobile day care.”
“Hullo, Donna,” I said.
“Say hello, girl!” Peaches ordered.
Donna coughed.
“It’s the smoke,” Peaches told me. “Little Donna, she doan mind.”
Donna smiled shyly and, noticing the envelope, tried to snatch it from me with her quicksilver hands.
“Donna, stop dippin’!” the lady cabbie scolded. “She always got her little hands in everybody’s business!”
Lightning struck a tree and Donna shouted, “Jacaranda!”
“She get some Hershey Kisses if she say that,” Peaches said.
When the cab pulled away from St. Osyth’s in the downpour, I sneezed and felt my forehead and found out that I was hot. In the mirror I discovered that my tongue was white and coated— like André’s, the patient I had seen, who had AIDS.
“You sick?” Peaches asked.
“I might be,” I told her.
I fingered my throat: my glands were taut and swollen. I looked down at Donna—she was fingering her throat.
“Monkey see, monkey do,” Peaches commented.
I made a face at Donna; she laughed and grabbed for me.
“Doan you let Donna crawl over you, honey! She jess like her mama—she all over white boys!”
Having overcome any preliminary shyness, Donna settled like an oversized doll in my lap. Her small head was cushioned in the pit of my arm as I opened Peter’s envelope and Peaches prated on.
“Sho’ you ain’t sick?”
“I’m not sure at all.”
“Got AIDS in that place.”
“Uh-huh, yeah, I know.”
“Want a condom?”
“A what?”
“You never know, baby.”
“You never know what?”
“When you got to scratch the itch. You got AIDS?”
I looked at her. “Excuse me?”
Peaches coughed. “I said, You got aches?”
“I thought you said—”
“Donna!”
Donna, who thought I was a playground contraption, had scaled my upper body and was hanging round my neck. Peaches was staring in the rearview skeptically. She gave a little grunt and pitched her dead blunt out the window.
“Mama say, ‘Girl, you feel under the weather, you take a little child and you hold it to your chess. You feel better no time.’ Donna-honey he’p you out.”
It was true: there is something restorative in children. Holding Donna, I felt like I was holding my own heart.
“Of course, then ag’in, you might give her what choo got,” Peaches concluded, cranking up Bob Marley. I looked once at Donna. She was looking at me. Her eyes had that bottomless look of acceptance only little children know, and only children outgrow.
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look?
Some say it’s just a part of it —
We ve got to fulfill the book… .
“That baby girl, shit, she as strong as two fellas. I be there when they had her,” Peaches said. “Kid come out swangin’—”
Suddenly, Donna grabbed the envelope from me and tore it in pieces as I scanned Peter’s note. She’d also found the twenty-dollar bill he had inserted and examined it with interest, then stuffed it in an ashtray. Donna settled back into the cushion of my lap and tried to pick my nose as I read Peter’s letter:
Moby,
My brother says he will pay you
more money if you can find me the
drugs we read about in journals.
Can you get them for me? if not I
understand. I think you are very
sweet like my brother. Kenny’s gay
too are you? I thought so! I am
sorry Moby if I embarass you by
asking you are awfully sweet.
Destroy this letter because of
course St. Ozs will be SO PLEASED
to here that I am looking for other
treatment! It is all too slow and
then we will be dead. Can I call
you Moby girlfriend don’t take
offence its only a joke!
—Love & Tongue Kisses, Peter
“Lemme ask you something,” Peaches was saying. “Ian, he tell me your name is Tobias, my name be Peaches to my family an’ friends—”
Behind us, a patrol car cruised around a corner, then another one like it started cruising at its side. I gave Donna Peter’s letter and she put it through the “shredder,” then she stuffed it in the ashtray with the twenty-dollar bill.
“Toby, you in any kinda trouble with the law?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
Peaches grimaced at the squad cars.
“ ’Cause every time I getchoo the man be on my tail! I ain’t never seen someone like you for fetching cops!”
“Jacaranda!” Donna squealed.
“There she go,” Peaches muttered.
The police pulled away, and behind them, in the storm, a gorgeous tree exploded with color in the wind, its long arms heaving with violet flowers, the wet ground around it spilling purple in the rain.
“Jacaranda!” Peaches sang, and Donna shrieked sweetly. “Every time she see one, she say it, Lord have mercy! Her auntie give her Kisses when she do that, so she do it. She think it make her smart, but she ax juss like a ho’.”
Donna curled up in a ball against my chest.
“She like you,” Peaches said.
I stroked her hair.
“I like her too.”
“She strong as two men,” Peaches said. “Ain’tchoo, honey?” Donna was sleeping.
“Rain’ll do that,” Peaches said.
Peaches dropped me off at the end of our block so my father wouldn’t see that I’d been brought home by a cab. I sprinted through the squall and almost tripped across two cats who were hunchbacked and howling, hypnotized by coming violence. They looked like they’d been delivered by or from a hurricane, and I would’ve separated the two with my shoe if I hadn’t been vaguely aware of a rebellion in the pit of my bowels as I hurried up the drive. Dad’s car was missing, in itself an odd thing: he never went out weeknights; the TV tethered him. “Ahoy there, Pops!” My shout echoed down the hallway as I burst into the house: it ricocheted in emptiness. On the counter in the kitchen lay a photograph of Mom looking forlorn and forgotten. It
was pasted on pink paper. Above Mom’s photo Dad had written in Crayola “Have you seen me lately?” several times, and crossed it out. At the bottom of the paper, under pencil erasures, was a word Dad had scribbled and obliterated: “Tom’s.” I didn’t know a Tom and neither did Dad, and neither did Mom, as far as I knew. And the windows and curtains in the house were open wide and little pools of rainwater had stained the windowsills. I called out for Dad, but he wasn’t anywhere as I ran about the open house battening down the hatches; and outside my parents’ window I could see the same cats turning threatening circles and shrieking at each other. They weren’t any neighborhood toms I’d ever seen. They looked like they’d been born to light and frighten each other. I slammed the window shut on their god-awful music and, impelled by a matter just a little bit more pressing, rushed into the bathroom and let my trousers drop. A great spray of diarrhea flooded the toilet and a wave of itchy sweat unfurled across my chest. I sat there, reeling, and hoisted up a paper basket. I dry-heaved a little, then when my bowels regained control, I wiped my throbbing asshole and hobbled off to bed. I was sick. The house was empty. I had a whopping fever—103°, Mom’s thermometer read—and though I’d always been inclined to mild hypochondria, even I knew that a flu was just a flu, that you had to ride it out, that you had to get rest. The fact that I’d been sleeping with a guy I’d only known for five, six months, a guy from somewhere else, a guy who seemed less experienced than I was—except at matters like, um, head and French kissing—had not permitted darker thoughts to steal inside my mind. I hadn’t been eating. I hadn’t been sleeping. I was under stress. I had sprinted through a storm. My aches, my diarrhea, the glands expanding in my throat had nothing to do with the boy I had kissed, the lips I had tasted, the body I had shared. And I was sufficiently enlightened to know that the hands I had held that day at St. Osyth’s were far more likely to feel the effects of any virus I might carry than any they might transmit, than any they could transmit, ravaged as they were. I had seen enough pandering public service announcements to know that you couldn’t get AIDS just through touching, that only blood and semen were the bearers of bad tidings, messengers whom—in this case—you couldn’t kill, but messengers who, in any case, could kill you. I’d never let Ian Lamb come inside my mouth. And we’d never had each other up the butt, or anything. Except for the occasional backseat blow job, our activities had been confined to deep kissing and rubbing. But how deep did we kiss? And how hard did we rub? Once, after serious foreplay with Ian, I’d noticed an abrasion on the shaft of my dick. I dabbed it with alcohol, lightly; it stung. That stinging told me it had opened on the bloodstream; and I thought about Ian, and a past I didn’t share. Just because Ian seemed more innocent than I was didn’t mean he was. So he said he was a virgin … I loved him so much I couldn’t think about his past. The present is future enough for anybody. I knew I was clean; I’d had a couple quick encounters that were more guilt-inflicting than anything else. Then I’d met Ian and we’d fallen in love. We were young and attractive and healthy and safe. We wouldn’t hurt each other. We couldn’t hurt each other. AIDS was something other, older, gayer people got. But that night, in bed, quilts and blankets wrapped around me as another arctic cold front descended on my room, I thought about Ian, and the things we had done, and I sweated so much that I left a silhouette of my body on the bedsheet that lay suffering beneath me. We’d kissed in the library, that week, and I’d bled. I’d cut my lip open, Ian’s spittle had entered, and if for any reason … I couldn’t think about it. Ian loved me. I loved Ian. We were smart. We were careful. We didn’t use condoms. We didn’t need condoms. We didn’t share needles; we shared, instead, ourselves. My temperature was 103° from the flu, my body was sweaty and aching from the flu, my mind was worried and reeling from the flu, people got the flu and it was really just the flu. Still, the empty house was as jolly as a morgue. No father, no mother, no Ian, nobody. Just me. In the storm, in the cat-howling storm, in the nobody storm, in the nobody darkness …
And two days later, after lots of crap TV, convinced that I was better—though I hadn’t seen a doctor, and no one except McDuffy’s receptionist had called, and the people from St. Osyth’s, to say Scarcross was dying—I got dressed Friday morning, determined to be better, and stood beside the porchswing staring at a purple sky. As the sun rose before me like the Champion of Darkness, I was even more frightened, because everything had changed—the sunlight I had loved, the sky I had prized, everything now held a promise of disaster. And still I had a fever; I could feel it, very slightly. It was burning in my head like a thought I couldn’t shake. I was really all alone. And my mother was alone. And my father was alone. And my Ian was alone. Nobody had phoned me; and I had phoned no one. I had ridden out a tempest and no one had seen me do it. So I got dressed and prayed to a new sort of God—a God not of love, but of fear, delivery—and as I stood on the frontporch waiting for Juice beside several tidy piles of immaculate laundry someone had delivered to our porchswing in the night, I thought, Take a breath. Take a deep breath, Toby. This is just the beginning, and you’re in it to the end.
I expected to spy a for sale sign sprouting up like a realtor’s weed from our yard as I waited for Juice’s dilatory Porsche to show. I had called Juice at dawn and had spoken to his mom, who had said, “Leonard’s outside trying to start the Buick.” The only time Juice ever made it late to school was when the shit-car he drove to his Porsche wouldn’t start. Mrs. Compton said, “Who is this?’’ “Toby Sligh,” I told her. “I go to Sacred Heart, and I need a ride to school.’’ It was the first time I’d ever heard Mrs. Compton’s voice, and it was a lot less black than her son’s, I noticed. Juice was like Ian: protective of his parents, though his protectiveness was born more of love than of dread. Juice tried to keep the world at arm’s length from his mother; his father was a world he kept an arm’s length from himself. “You’ll have to wait a minute,” Mrs. Compton announced, and set the receiver on the counter with a clang as she hollered through the kitchen window: “Leonard! Telephone!” I heard an engine hacking like a lion with a hairball, and a distant voice shouting, and a train rattling by. When Juice got on the telephone he seemed surprised to hear me.
“Where you been, boyee?”
“Sick,” I said to him. “Can you take me to school?”
Juice said he could, but he’d be a little late; he had to fetch his cousin.
“And Anquanna’s on the rag,” Juice added, sotto voce, as if his mother didn’t know what periods were.
“You remember where I live?”
“I remember, G-money! Don’t play me like d’at! I ain’t some fuckin’ Alzheimer’s!”
Juice knew where I lived. He’d been there lots of times. He used to play Scrabble with me and my folks before Ian came. He was a super player. Juice had a gift for forming seven-letter words, and he and my mother would team up together against my dad and me and kick our asses off the board. Once my mother laid down the word “galatea,” and I reached for the Webster’s and Juice snatched my wrist. “You doubtin’ your moms?” Juice asked me, aghast. I looked at him and smiled. “It’s a word ?” I said to him. “Of course it’s a word! So is ‘mom’!” Juice shouted. I looked it up later. It was a word, too.
“Is Leonard in trouble?” Mrs. Compton asked me, when Juice ducked off the telephone to go and take a leak.
“Not that I know of.”
“If he were, would you tell me?”
I can’t remember what I said.
“If you were his mom, you would.”
Juice stopped coming to our house to play Scrabble because he tried to sell my folks a bag of pot. I’d found an old bong on a shelf in the garage where the four of us used to hold our epic Scrabble tourneys, and not knowing what it was, had asked if I could use it for a hydraulics project overdue in Physics class. Mom and Dad and Juice had all pissed themselves laughing. “Haven’t you thrown that thing away, Timothy?” “No, Bea,” my father said, opting out on “Beatrice.” My paren
ts only used their first names for company; otherwise, it was endearments: Snuggle Pie and Cuddle Buns. Beatrice and Timothy were someone else’s parents—people you played Scrabble with on Sunday afternoons. “Well, put it in the trash, Toby Sligh,” my mother ordered. “We should’ve thrown it out with those old Procol Harum records.” But when I came back, the garage was deserted and Mom was in the kitchen brewing up a pot of coffee. Dad was on the frontporch yelling at Juice, and Juice looked embarrassed; then he slunked away. When Dad came inside he wouldn’t say what had happened; Mom was playing dumb, but was upset that Juice had left. “Would’ve sold it to ’em wholesale,” Juice explained to me later, “in exchange for the Scrabble and Doritos, don’tcha know.” Till Juice filled me in on exactly what had happened I thought Dad had run him off because Juice had kicked his butt in Scrabble. And ever after that, Juice never came around—even though there was a picture of the four of us together we had taken with an old-fashioned automatic camera and tacked to the door of our Sears refrigerator underneath a silly frame of smiling pomegranate magnets; even though my mom often asked about Juice and longed for the marathon sessions of Scrabble; even though my father had confessed one afternoon after losing to my mother in a blitzkrieg round of Risk: “Except for certain hobbies, that Compton kid’s all right.”
“Your folks ain’t around?” Juice asked, lying low. He was hunched down in the frontseat, hands across his eyeballs. “That thing is Anquanna,” Juice said. “This is Toby.”
I nodded at the girl who was crashed out in the back.
“Hey, Tubby,” she mumbled. “You homies with Leon?”
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