Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  My heart is trampolining out of my mouth. There is no way out of this house, and I’m too paralyzed to rally enough to take flight in one of the other, undiscovered rooms. I could just present myself, I think wildly. After all, he is my friend. But something about the presence of this unknown lanky white boy completely disconcerts me. Of course, I do exactly what they’d do in a Restoration comedy or an episode of Three’s Company: I dive underneath the bed, dragging my body over a litter of socks and magazines. I’m not in there a moment, their twin footfalls growing closer, when I realize I’ve left my duffel out, within view. Frantically, I reach out for it and drag it into the dark with me.

  I can hear them now at the top of the landing, first a boy’s thick-as-molasses southern drawl (so much for Charlotte’s claim that this isn’t the Deep South), treble and gravelly: “Francie, didja really come all the way back here just to make me into a big ole faggot?”

  First a razor-sharp laugh, then his voice—his voice—and when I hear it, my insides go sick, it’s been so long: “Oh, please, don’t let’s start on that again, Brickhouse. You know this is a story that began many, many years ago. In the flush of youth.”

  They’re in the room now, their voices so near I’m tempted to call out just to break this tension; as it is, I’m trying so hard not to so much as rustle that my whole body is shaking. I can see their feet now: Brooks sockless in his old loafers, which haven’t been polished in some time, and this Brickhouse, whoever he is, doughy in his sandals, white-blond hairs sprouting from the bridges of his feet and his alien, slender toes.

  A soft, guilty fraction of a laugh from Brickhouse, then: “Mr. Jefferson Tremont, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” Then the sound of someone wetly smacking someone else’s lips. My whole body goes rigid with horror, revulsion, and rage: is that what we sounded like? I can’t believe he’s subjecting me to this. Shouldn’t he, with his keen intuitive powers, know that I have arrived?

  The sound of a zipper unzipping, then Brooks again, gurgling with laughter (and it occurs to me he’s probably drunk), “No, Mr. Brickhouse, I rather think you do. A certain boy, say, thirteen years old, whose poor honky mama came up here to clean windows for a certain poor little rich nigger boy’s maiden aunt—”

  “Mmm, God rest her soul.… I loved your auntie,” this Brickhouse says, all grave now.

  “Yes, I loved her, too.” Then more smacking. “Anyway. A certain boy who came up here every Wednesday in the summer to cut hedges and knew that when he was done a certain poor little rich nigger boy would be waiting for him in the garage with his allowance and a bottle of Wesson oil?” His voice seems to be getting more drawlish as he goes along, and I don’t know if it’s a put-on or not. “And then a very, very sad following summer when a certain nigger boy was sent away to camp, but a certain fourteen-year-old piece of poor white trash still had to keep trucking up to Calvary Hill every Wednesday because his poor mama needed the extra eight dollars a week?”

  There’s a long pause, before this Brickhouse says, with fake giggly thoughtfulness: “Hmmmm, I don’t seem to be recallin’ no such thing.”

  “Like hell you don’t!” Brooks lets out heartily, and then they’re both laughing and they’re at it all over again. A pair of filthy cutoffs falls down around the doughy sandal feet and is hastily kicked away, followed by khaki camp shorts landing in a clump on top of scuffed loafers. There’s more smack-smack-smacking, before Brickhouse sighs.

  “I sure miss your Auntie Fleurie, though. That was a sweet kick-ass lady with more class than any white girl I ever knew.”

  “She’s flattered in heaven right now, I’m sure.”

  “Every Wednesday when I was through, she’d give me my eight dollars, then you know what she’d do? Every Wednesday?”

  “Pray tell.”

  “She’d give me some old book! She’d have it set aside for me. Then the next week, she’d ask me if I’d finished it—and I’d always lie and say, ‘Yes, ma’am, I sure have and it’s mighty good!’—and she’d give me a big old smile, and give me another, hand-picked. Always boys’ stuff. Probably your old stuff. Like Hardy Boys and shit. I wonder if she ever caught on to your game, Francie.”

  “Hm” is all he says, ruefully, then, “Yes, giving away books seems to be just one of the damnable traits I inherited from Fleurie.”

  “You talking about that little pussy Catholic boy up North again?” Brickhouse says, infinitely bored, and I want to come bounding out with an Apache scream.

  “Hm?” he asks again, distracted, then, in that old weary drawl, “Yeah. I suppose I am. Now I’m sorry I ever told you about that if you’re going to rub salt in my wounds every fifteen minutes by bringing it up.” I hear the crack of a match, then inhale the familiar smell of his cigarettes.

  “All the books in the world wasn’t enough to get him to save your ass when he coulda,” Brickhouse says, like an old sage, then, so tenderly I want to puke, “Lemme see that head scar again, sugar?”

  “You’ve gotten awfully affectionate in your old age, Brickhouse. What happened to the little no-necked monster who used to let me suck him off, then call me Fudgie Fudgepacker before he took my money and headed off to shoot dogs with his BB gun?”

  “Well,” Brickhouse says philosophically, dragging from the cigarette, “the little monster grew up. Lost his mama, like you.”

  “Fleurie wasn’t my mama,” he says sternly. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, but she raised you, so she may as well a been your mama. And you know that.”

  “I suppose,” he says indifferently. “Proceed.”

  “Like I said.” Brickhouse drags again. “Grew up. Lost his mama.”

  “Never left town,” Brooks says—a little meanly, I think.

  “Couldn’t leave town,” Brickhouse says, unperturbed. “Had two baby sisters and a baby brother.” Then, as though he’s having a delayed response to Brooks’s slur, “At least I finished high school, you snotty-ass little cocksucker.”

  “I know,” he says. “Cum laude in woodworking.”

  “Go fuck yourself!” Brickhouse virtually shrieks, and I hear the sound of a slap. Good for Brickhouse, I laugh to myself; even though the sight of him (or the sound of him, and the sight of his pasty feet) repulses me, I feel a peculiar laborer’s allegiance with him—right here, from underneath the bed.

  “Good Lord!” from Brooks. “I’m just kidding, for God’s sake. Come here”—and as he crashes down on the bed, the mattress drops so perilously low that I’m sure it will completely smother me, forcing me to cry out, announcing myself, as soon as Brickhouse joins him on the bed.

  But Brickhouse doesn’t. “I want some more of that gin,” he sulks.

  “It’s right here.”

  “Well.” Brickhouse pauses. “I want more tonic to go with it. I’m goin’ downstairs.”

  “There’s no more tonic. The house is empty.”

  “I saw one lyin’ in the wet bar when we were packing up earlier today. And I left it there.”

  “How sly for you. Well, hurry back.”

  I watch Brickhouse’s sandals scuff out of the room, until there’s silence. It’s just the two of us in here now. His loafered left foot, dangling off the bed, is so close to me it’s virtually in my face. Infinitesimally, I creep my right hand along my side and reach out until I’m an inch away from plucking one of the hairs out of the knob that is his anklebone. I want to scare the living hell out of him. But then he sighs dramatically and pulls his leg up onto the bed. Then, aloud, in a private voice that’s either the saddest or maddest I’ve ever heard him, he says into thin air: “Oh, fuck fuck fuck. Fuck!” and he pounds his fist four times on the mattress. Then he makes an odd little whimper—it vaguely recalls the horrible sounds he was making that night on the common—and then he’s silent. And all of a sudden, I want to call out his name—I want so badly to let him know I’m here, I want to crawl out from under him, tell him not to make a sound, say a word, and just curl up with him
on his own bed, Brickhouse be damned. And I swear I’m so close to saying it—“Brooks”—that my heart is throbbing in my trachea; I’ve got my hands on the underside of the mattress, separated from him only by a matter of layers, when he leaps off the bed, crosses the room, and picks up the phone. I hear him dialing—four digits, a pause, then another seven—and I see his feet shuffling in place as he waits. Then I hear him slam it down and say it one more time—“Fuck!”—before he throws himself back down on the bed, and the mattress closes in on me again. Now I’ve lost my nerve.

  Brickhouse comes back. “See, I told you so,” he says coyly, and I hear the hiss of an uncapped bottle.

  “Would you put that down and come here?”

  “Oh, all right. Lord, you’re horny!”

  Brickhouse gets on the bed, and the mattress drops to within three inches of my upturned face. They’re at it all over again now, the bulge in the mattress shifting from side to side.

  “Why do you hafta leave so soon?” Brickhouse whines out of nowhere. “Couldn’t you just keep this house and live here for a little while? You ain’t got nothin’ else to do with your life now.”

  “Impossible.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Impossible, you idiot,” I want to say, but Brooks says it for me. “What am I supposed to do all alone in this big house on Calvary Hill? Start a Fleurie Jefferson Memorial Museum? Anyway, Godfrey’s already put it on the market.”

  “I hate that old bastard,” Brickhouse says. “He never tipped me more than a dollar.”

  “He’s tight,” Brooks says. “But he’s giving me my freedom two years short of twenty-one, so I’m not cussing him.”

  “Where you gonna go anyway?” This seems to be the eternal question with him, I’m thinking. “You sure ain’t goin’ back to that school. They won’t have you no more!”

  “No, mercifully,” he says. “I think I’ll go to New York for a little while. Then—well, the world is my home.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Brickhouse groans. “Well. Just don’t forget where you came from.”

  “How could I? I’m in bed with it right now.”

  Brickhouse laughs triumphantly. Then they’re really at it, and I’m convinced that any minute I’m going to bolt from this bed, terrifying the shit out of both of them, and run right out of this house, down Calvary Hill, and all the way back to Washington. But of course I don’t. I just lie here, rigid, my face screwed up, listening to them: Brickhouse’s little moaning declarations—“Oh, sugar,” and “Oh, yeah, like that”—and Brooks’s deeper sounds of mild discovery and surprise, as if he’s on a particularly fruitful archaeological dig. I have to lie here and listen to the whole thing as it builds and builds, shifting around uncomfortably to avoid the moving mattress, and the worst thing is that even in the middle of my distaste and acute, acute jealousy, I’m getting unbearably stiff, like I’m the invisible third party in a very odd little ménage à trois.

  Then, finally, they’re done. Brooks reaches his hand down and pats around on the floor—I cringe away in fright—until he locates a dirty shirt.

  “You’re really leavin’ tomorrow, baby?” Brickhouse says, still whiny but sounding half asleep now.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Brooks says, as unsentimental as ever. “Everything’s packed, and you’ll be here when they come to put everything in storage. Wouldn’t I just be prolonging the inevitable if I stayed?”

  “You could stay on my account,” Brickhouse persists.

  He laughs. “Don’t you think we’re a little mismatched?”

  “We don’t sound any more mismatched than you and your little buddy in Connecticut.”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “Whatever. Wasn’t I better than him just now? I bet I was.”

  Another laugh. “Not necessarily. When you scratched the surface of his Catholic guilt, he had a certain frisky quality. It was endearing.” I feel myself blush furiously in the dark.

  “I’ll bet,” Brickhouse drawls skeptically. There’s a pause, then, “You know, I think you’re a bit of a freak, Francie Tremont. A mean, lonely, out-of-place little freak. You got too much money and too little love.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he says, unfazed. “The fairheaded concubine-for-hire of Calvary Hill.” He explodes laughing, and Brickhouse joins in, sounding oddly melancholy. “You’re an asshole, sugar,” Brickhouse says.

  “Oh, be easy on me, darling.”

  His last words linger in the air, because they’re silent now, and I guess they’re falling asleep. (By the glow of my watch in the dark, it’s now after midnight.) At least, Brickhouse is falling asleep, because in a matter of minutes, I hear ungainly, ragged snores, and I know they’re not Brooks’s. I want to make a getaway now, but I can’t—he could still be awake, and even if he is asleep, I don’t know how I’d slip out through this mess, duffel bag intact, without rousing them. So for what seems like an eternity, I just lie there, trapped, every muscle in my body cramped, including my stomach, which is screaming for food, and I’m afraid it’s going to start protesting aloud pretty soon. I’m starting to get the paranoid feeling that he knows I’m down here after all and he’s doing this just to spite me, to see how long I can last.

  But I guess it’s just paranoia, because, thankfully, after about half an hour, I hear a rustling, then his voice: “Brickhouse. Are you asleep?”

  From Brickhouse, groggily, “Hmph?”

  “Wake up. Let’s go spend the night at your house.”

  “What the fuck’re you talkin’ about, Francie?” He sounds functionally awake now.

  “You heard me. I can’t spend my last night in this house. It’s giving me the creeps. I feel like Fleurie’s creaking around downstairs.”

  “You’re just sad to be goin’. Can’t you go to sleep an’ forget about it? It’ll be morning soon.”

  “I can’t make it until morning! Did you fucking hear me? Now, are you going with me or not? Because if you’re not, I’m taking your junkheap of a car and checking into a hotel downtown and I’ll come fetch you in the morning.”

  “Jesus, Francie, you’re a crazy man,” Brickhouse says, as awake as Brooks now. “All right, all right. You can spend the night at my house. But you’re spooked, sugar. Fleurie’s a peaceful soul. She’s fast asleep in heaven. She’s not walkin’ around haunting the earth.”

  “It’s not just Fleurie,” Brooks says. “It’s this whole damned house. It’s ma vie incompréhensible.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just skip it and get dressed.”

  “All right already. But I’m gonna have to kick you outta my bed before morning and put you on the floor. There’s little kids in the house.”

  “Fine,” Brooks grumbles, rolling off the bed, Brickhouse following. “Far be it for me to bring the stench of Sodom into La Casa Brickhouse.” Now I can see his slender hand rummaging around on the floor for his doffed clothes; for a moment I’m terrified he’s going to conduct a full-scale search for something clean and get down on the floor, eye to eye with me. As soundlessly as I can, I slide my fetal body toward the far, linty depths of the underneath. Then, from him, “Oh, je m’en fiche. I’m fine like this. So are you.” I watch his feet, reloafered now, proceed out the door. Then Brickhouse’s sandals advance on them, stopping him in his tracks.

  “Why you scarin’ me, boy?” he asks, low, not coyly at all. I can see their four feet shuffling around in an uneasy little dance, then Brickhouse’s sandal crawling up the length of Brooks’s leg. “What’s wrong with right here, huh?”

  A pause, then, sternly: “Brickhouse. For all the allowance money I forked over to you, would you please just humor me my last night in Virginia? This fucking house is haunted.”

  “Ain’t!” Brickhouse laughs.

  “Is!” Brooks yells, so harshly he gives me a start under the bed. Then, his voice breaking that same terrible way it did the night up in the loft when I found him with his shoebox of pictures, “Please, Brickho
use. Just please let’s get out of here.”

  “All right, sugar, all right,” Brickhouse says, softly, and I’m ripped that it’s him giving the comfort here, while I cower under the bed. “Don’t go cryin’ on me. You go cryin’ and I’ll start cryin’ with you.”

  There’s a dignified little sniffle from Brooks, then, in a small voice, “We certainly couldn’t have that.”

  “Let’s go,” Brickhouse says, flipping off the light, and I hear them rustling out the door. Fuck! inside my head, and I pound my fist on the floor under the bed.

  “What the fuck was that?” from Brooks, farther away, in the hall now.

  “What?”

  “That bang?”

  “I didn’t hear no bang. Guess that’s your Fleurie sayin’, ‘Clean that room!’ Guess you’re right after all about the haunted.”

  His final words float back to me: “You’re droll, Brickhouse.” Two sets of footfalls recede down the staircase. In a moment, I hear the great boom of the front door again; then the house is silent. I wait five seconds, then scramble out from under the bed, my whole body aching, and over to the window. They approach the car—I can faintly make out a second of flame as one of them lights another cigarette—then they’re in the thing, there’s an explosion of engine in the still night, and they’re off. I’m alone in this house again, as though they’d never come.

  I don’t turn the light back on. I stand in the middle of the dark room, in the middle of his debris, and I stretch in every possible direction to take the cramps out of my arms, neck, and legs. I feel my way down the dark hallway until I find a bathroom—a gleaming porcelain chamber, stripped bare like the rest of the house—and the sound of myself hitting the bowl, the subsequent flush of the toilet, seems to fill up the entire house, rattling its way down to the lowest depths. Then I go back to the room, get my hands on the last, congealed slice of pizza in the box, sink down on the floor, and devour it in the dark even though it tastes like a triangle of plywood. Brickhouse never touched the tonic, but he did uncap it; I pick it up, pour half a dirty glass of it, fill it up with the gin, stir it with my index finger (a habit of my father’s), pop my finger in my mouth, gag, recover, and sit there, cross-legged, drinking the rest in tiny, mincing sips.