The Infinite Onion

by Alice Archer

  “All Kai does is check out library books and abuse coloring books,” Mitch had said.

  I’d gently pulled the coloring book out from under Kai’s marker and flipped through it, charmed by his experimentation with color and the boundaries of how things “should” be. At Kai’s questioning look, I’d shaken my head, patted his back, and slid the coloring book back into place. Kai refocused his attention on filling in a mermaid’s hair with blue and green, adding curlicues past the black lines printed on the page.

  I returned from my memory when Kai said, “Art camp wasn’t Mom and Dad’s first choice. I told Mom how much I liked Mr. Oliver’s house. I said I’d only go to camp if it was art camp.” Kai forked up another small bite of stew. “Joel’s going to hockey camp and football camp.”

  “Well, good for you.” I washed the spoon with a dribble from my water bottle and said to Penelope, “Does Oliver teach at the art camp?”

  “No. I wish he did. They ask him every year. He always says no.”

  “Hmm.” Something niggled at the back of my brain, like an almost invisible dot on a distant horizon.

  “Oliver says it’s because he doesn’t need the money.” Penelope’s expression seemed to say, If he doesn’t need money, he could teach us for free.

  “Hmm,” I said again.

  Penelope tipped her cup to drink the broth. “Thanks. That was delicious.”

  “I agree.” A final scrape of the pot and I’d finished my stew too.

  “You look skinny.” Kai’s gaze dropped from my face to my chest. He handed me his half-full cup. “I can’t finish. Do you want the rest?”

  God, what a sweet boy.

  I took Kai’s cup and finished the stew quickly, before I got weepy. The dishes received a rinse into the pot. I’d toss the rinse water out in the woods to keep food scraps away from the campsite.

  “Okay, troops,” I said. “What do you two have planned for the day?”

  “What are your plans?” Kai asked.

  “I’m going to Oliver’s to give an unruly hedge a haircut.”

  Kai’s eyes lit up. “Can we go with you?”

  “Do you think Oliver would mind?” I asked Penelope. “I mean, I’m not asking you to do any work, or to take responsibility for whether—”

  Penelope interrupted me. “He won’t mind, not if the green flag is up.”

  “Right. Then we’ll take the driveway route, like proper visitors.”

  Penelope led the way along the narrow paths. When we reached Violetta Road, Kai took my hand.

  “Doing okay there, buddy?” I gave his hand a squeeze.

  Kai looked up at me and nodded.

  The green flag was up, so we forged ahead down the driveway. I left the kids in the front yard to play on an ugly metal sculpture I decided to call Where the Dump Truck from the Steel Plant Puked on the Lawn, and went up the porch steps to ask Oliver where I could find hedge clippers.

  Through the open front door, I heard Oliver’s laughter. I couldn’t help but move toward it. I poked my head inside, nudged the door open farther, followed the sound. He was in the bedroom, which I’d never seen. A white tarp covered part of the floor, like maybe he was getting ready to repaint the walls.

  I approached with stealth, tried to stay hidden, to watch Oliver before he saw me.

  He lay on the bed. If he didn’t turn his head and I didn’t make a sudden movement, he probably wouldn’t notice me. It felt wrong to watch him as he lay there and talked on the phone, but I did it anyway. There was too much of him I needed to take in. I considered snapping a photo, but my internal Creep Monitor vetoed it.

  Oliver’s voice took on a more serious tone. “When will you be back? There’s something I want to talk with you about.” After a short pause, he said, “Yeah? Really? That would be great.” After another pause, he said, “I wasn’t ignoring you. I was in Tacoma that day and forgot my phone.”

  As Oliver talked, he played with a hair band. The blue of the tarp on the bed made Oliver’s skin and the spread of his golden red hair pop.

  I took a slow step backward, then another, and left the house.

  About an hour later, after I’d found hedge clippers in the outbuilding, which turned out to be a workshop, Oliver shouted a greeting from the porch, his hair back up in a topknot.

  I called out a hello, then turned my back on him to study the next section of hedge.

  Tough to do with my eyes closed, but I gave it a shot.

  Chapter 33

  Oliver

  After my call with Freddie, during which he’d told me he’d wrap things up early on Whidbey, I felt lighter. My smile stayed put as I copied the drawing from the butcher paper to the panels using quick strokes.

  I moved the pencil over the man’s elbow, crooked to hold the boy close, and thought I heard a child’s laugh. I stopped my hand and held my breath to listen. The laughter seemed to come from the front yard. I closed the bedroom door behind me and went out to investigate.

  “Hi, guys.” I raised my voice to be heard from the porch, not sure I wanted to do more than say hi before I returned to the mural.

  “Hey,” Grant said. “Hope we’re not bothering you.”

  Oh. Grant wielded my heaviest trimmer, the one that hung on the far wall of the toolshed, which meant he’d gone in without my permission. I didn’t want to jump on his case in front of Penelope and Kai, so I only said, “Carry on.”

  “Yes, bwana.” Grant lifted a hand above his head in a mock salute.

  “What’s a bwana?” Penelope asked Grant.

  Grant stopped clipping to look at her. “Guess.”

  “Boss man.” Kai’s soft voice carried just far enough for me to hear.

  Grant’s delighted chuckle was affirmation enough for the kids. They all turned to grin at me, and I felt uncomfortable in my elevated position on the porch. Grant said something to Kai I couldn’t hear then shifted a couple of steps down the hedge. The three of them moved as a cohesive unit. Neat and tidy with their jokes and smiles.

  I went back inside and closed the door.

  At the kitchen sink, I washed a pear and wandered to the front of the house to eat it as I peered out the open window.

  Penelope circled Grant like an eager puppy, chattered in her bright voice about art camp. Kai kept in touch with Grant at all times. He put a finger through Grant’s back belt loop, or leaned on Grant’s hip, or sat on the grass with his back against Grant’s legs. Grant didn’t seem to mind any of it. Before he moved along to trim another section of the hedge, he’d swipe clippings off Kai’s shoulders and set his gloved hand on Kai’s head, or squat to talk with him for a minute. Kai would answer, nod, offer a fleeting smile.

  I couldn’t quite understand Grant’s words, because his voice was so deep. He must have asked the kids excellent questions to prompt Penelope’s long, engaged answers. Kai’s answers ran to short paragraphs rather than only a few words.

  My hands itched to pick up a pencil and sketch an idea for a garden sculpture. Happy Kids Orbit the Gardener.

  No. I already had enough to do. The pear core hit the bottom of the compost bucket with a thunk. I fled the chatter in the front yard, fled the house, in favor of a long carving session at the throne.

  Les Charbonniers pissed me off sooner than usual.

  I kept going. The chisel rubbed a hot spot on my palm through the gloves, but I kept at it until I could barely lift my arms and the early twilight meant Grant and the kids would be gone.

  When I dropped my tools onto the floor of the shed, I squinted at the back wall, but I couldn’t see far enough in the gloom to make sure Grant had returned the hedge clipper, and I didn’t want to turn on the light.

  Silence from the front yard.

  I walked around the house to the driveway roundabout.

  The hedge looked like it had been trimmed b
y a precision instrument. Maybe it had been.

  I couldn’t stop thinking the phrase trim my hedge.

  The summer after our senior year of high school, Freddie and I landed part-time jobs with a landscape company in Tacoma. Freddie would pick me up in his old Crown Victoria and drive us to the south dock for the 7 a.m. ferry. We’d lay the car seats back and nap while the coffee we’d brought from home grew cold. In Tacoma, we met the crew at the job site and spent the morning doing the menial tasks, to free the full-timers for the more professional work.

  We’d trimmed a lot of hedges that summer. On the job and off.

  Something about the stink of our sweat made our mid-day ferry rides back to Vashon torture. Maybe the physical exertion mimicked the exertion of sex to our teen psyches, because we inevitably shot off the ferry on the Vashon side lusty and primed. Freddie would floor the Crown Vic down a narrow road, onto a gravel track, and park at a dead end where we knew we wouldn’t be found.

  Snickering, aware of our comical desperation, we’d meet in the back seat. The Crown Vic saw a lot of action that summer.

  Years later, on my knees in my bedroom in front of the white panels of my mural, I bowed my head. The buzz of summer filled my ears. I smelled cut grass and Freddie’s skin on the sun-heated vinyl car seat and gave myself over to the memory.

  I lean against the door in the back seat, laugh as I untangle my arms from my T-shirt.

  Freddie wraps a hot hand around the back of my neck. His lips land beside my nose and rest there, on the tender skin beneath my eye. I burrow into the sun-dirt-sweat smell of his neck. We’re close enough to the dock to hear the clatter as vehicles load for the next sailing. Freddie keeps his lips on my cheek, stills me until I’ve stopped laughing and the sound of the ferry engine has faded away, until the whoosh of the sea against the shore slows and the subtle sounds of high summer under the trees reign again.

  When the moment begins to feel too still, I open my eyes, lashes brushing the stubble on Freddie’s upper lip. He lifts his head to look down at me. I know he’s thinking of the end of summer and our routine drawing to a close when he flies off to college on the East Coast.

  Not yet. I close my eyes again and wait to find out what Freddie will do.

  Strong hands yank my legs to lay me flat.

  I moaned on my bedroom floor, not because the memory turned me on. It did turn me on, but in the fantasy, the yank on my legs shifted me into a different car.

  The worn vinyl of the Crown Vic gives way to smooth leather.

  Not Freddie’s hands. These hands are bigger, like Grant’s hands. The body above me is bigger. I don’t want his fierce movements, so unlike Freddie’s gentle care. I don’t want the rougher stubble or the knit cap that covers his head.

  I push off the cap to feel his hair, coarser than Freddie’s, rub my hands over him.

  I do want him.

  He folds my legs into my chest, noses into the hair around the base of my cock, licks and bites me there, pulls my ass up into his face. Hungry for me.

  I’ll give him whatever he wants.

  Wherever we’re going, it’s nowhere I’ve been before. No one does me like this, with rising urgency, like my skin, my scent, my hair, my cock are the antidote to his pain. With a press of my feet, I lift into him. He seems to want to be smothered by me, and the thought that I could be someone’s air brings a whine up through my parted lips.

  He uses his thumbs to separate my cheeks and slobbers over my hole until I cry out and reach for my dick. He beats me to it, lunges up to cover my cock with his mouth. I want it. I want him, more, all of it. I show him by pushing down on the back of his head.

  Here, take more of me.

  We find each other in the rhythm and whine. In the press and fall and thrill of being in sync. When I feel the jerk of his orgasm in the stutter of his mouth around my cock, I grip his hair—hair I know without opening my eyes is black, not Freddie’s brown.

  I lift into his wet mouth, giving up, giving it all up for him.

  Some time later, I returned to my bedroom floor.

  It took a while.

  I stood carefully from where I’d knelt in front of the mural, disturbed by the feeling that I’d been paying homage to it, and set the pencil on the dresser. In the bathroom, I left the light off while I wiped myself down and changed into clean underwear and shorts.

  Before I left the house, I closed the bedroom curtains and locked the bedroom door.

  Outside in the almost darkness, I unhitched the bike trailer then pedaled out across the lawn, pedaled harder, flew into the woods, driven and reckless.

  I had a fantasy to outrun.

  And it was gaining on me.

  Chapter 34

  Grant

  The Fourth of July Saturday passed without fanfare. I was asleep in my tent before dark.

  The next day, I took a hike to celebrate the final day of the week and to distract myself from my irritated skin. I wished I’d asked Oliver for early collection of shower privileges if I finished all my assignments early. I didn’t want to show up at Oliver’s to collect early and be turned away, so I walked and waited out the week.

  On Monday morning, I trekked to Oliver’s on an alternate path Penelope had recommended. It wound uphill to a view through a gap in the forest where a giant tree had fallen. I dropped the empty water buckets and sat on a moss-covered log to check out snow-capped Mount Rainer in the distance to the southeast.

  As they often did, my thoughts returned to Kai. The day he and Penelope showed up at my campsite, Kai hadn’t said much. With Kai latched onto me, the hedge job had taken longer, but I hadn’t minded. Penelope entertained us with stories from art camp in years past. When I asked her about school, she said, “That’s not as fun as art camp.” She’d gone as quiet as Kai for a while.

  After I’d cleaned and replaced the clippers in Oliver’s workshop, the three of us tromped back to my campsite. Penelope motored on through with a wave over her shoulder—her normal farewell. “I’ll wait for you up ahead, Kai,” she said, like they’d prearranged a private moment for Kai and me.

  Kai lifted his worried face to me. “Will you be here a while? You’re not leaving yet, are you?”

  I sat on the kitchen log to look him in the eye. “Yes, I’ll be here a little while longer.”

  “How long?”

  With my palm, I swept Kai’s long bangs up off his face to get a better look at him. “Kai, hey, what’s going on, buddy?”

  “I don’t want you to go yet. Can’t you stay?”

  “I expect I’ll be here a few more weeks.” I didn’t want to get Kai’s hopes up, in case things bombed with Oliver. “At some point, I’ll have go back to Seattle to… um…” Kai had problems of his own. I didn’t want to saddle him with my problems, but I couldn’t lie to him. I sighed and made the decision to expose my ineptitude rather than make excuses.

  “I’m out here to try to get my act together about work so I can get a job. Then I can visit you on Vashon or in Seattle without your parents freaking out.”

  “I don’t care if you have a job,” Kai said.

  “Thank you for that, and I really do want to be in your life more than I have been.”

  I saw more sadness in Kai’s gaze than seemed warranted by the possibility that I’d leave Vashon before he was ready for me to. His expression was so open and vulnerable it was almost painful to witness.

  “I thought about you a lot,” Kai said. “I was worried about you after Aunt Laura divorced you. I wanted to call, but we didn’t have your number, and Dad said it was too soon to ask Aunt Laura for it.”

  “Wow.” Kai kept surprising me. “Okay. Well, I’ll tell you how I was doing: I stuck my head under a rock and I only recently thought about standing up for a change.”

  The tiny upward flick of Kai’s mouth hinted at a smile.

 
; “I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” I said. “Thank you for thinking about me.” My surge of joy at the discovery that someone had thought kindly of me during the past difficult year seemed pitiful and tragic. “I want to give you a bear hug right now, but I still really stink.”

  “I don’t care.” Kai lunged at me and wound his arms tight around my neck.

  “Please talk to me soon,” I whispered in his ear. “I know something’s bothering you. I want to help. Okay?”

  He drew back and nodded, but didn’t look at me again, only slid across the campsite to follow Penelope down the path.

  It had felt awful to impose on Kai the eye-watering funk of my unwashed body that no amount of cold-water bucket-baths seemed capable of fumigating.

  As I sat on the moss-covered log with the view of Mount Rainer, I remembered that feeling. I really needed a shower, but I dreaded the crapshoot of another interaction with Oliver.

  Keep it simple: report in, shower, leave.

  I roused myself, hiked on to Oliver’s house, and knocked on the front door.

  “Come on in,” I heard Oliver call out.

  He wasn’t in the big room, so I took a seat. The overstuffed chair I chose turned out to be so soft I might as well have flopped into a goddamned beanbag chair. I focused on that irritation to scrub my mind of the remembered vision of Oliver on the bed setting off sparks against the blue tarp.

  Oliver emerged from his bedroom and shut the door with a click.

  I focused on my knees, which was easy, since they were at eye level.

  Oliver approached until he stood in front of me in his bare feet. He wore the pants he’d worn the day he found us in the ditch, the ones with drawings on them. The beautiful vines and ferns on his arms had faded, scrubbed away perhaps, but he’d filled in the intricate drawings on his pants with painted color in some places, transforming his pants into camouflage gear for hiding in a masterpiece.