by Vivien Dean
“But…you were tutoring.”
As long as he was shattering illusions, he might as well get rid of all of them. “No, Howard was my tutor. I lied to you about that because I didn’t want you to find out the truth. I lied to you about a lot of stuff that Christmas.” He closed his eyes. The stars weren’t out yet, but he couldn’t bear to look up, knowing they were out there judging him. “I’m so sorry.”
The apology was long overdue, but it didn’t provide the catharsis Jim hoped for. It couldn’t change the fact that his behavior had driven Ronnie to enlist. It had cheated them out of years of their friendship. Worst of all, no matter what Ronnie claimed otherwise, it was the reason Ronnie had to live in so much pain now.
Guilt didn’t even begin to cover the depths of Jim’s anguish.
Then he felt it. A tickle along the side of his hand.
A moment later, Ronnie’s fingers curled gently around his.
“For being the smartest guy I’ve ever known, sometimes you’re pretty dumb,” Ronnie said softly.
In spite of his sorrowful regret, Jim snorted. “Yeah, I can’t argue with you there.” Carefully, he tightened his grip, wary of any change in Ronnie’s in case he pressed too hard and lost this valuable connection. “You don’t hate me?”
“I could never hate you.”
“You said you were angry.”
“Last I heard, that wasn’t the same thing.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Is that why you’re bummed out? Because you lost your shot at NASA?”
“Nobody expected me to come back. After I graduated, I told my dad my plan to help Grandpa, and he went through the roof.”
“Because he knows you’re better than that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with farming.”
“Except you don’t love it. You’re just doing it because you don’t know what else to do.”
That was it. Exactly. Without his grand plan as a goal, Jim floundered to find another one. He wasn’t shocked Ronnie had put his finger on it after only a few minutes of confession, but it didn’t lessen the sting of his father’s less than insightful reaction. “Dad asked me what was the point of a fancy college degree if I wasn’t going to use it.”
“What’d you say?”
“I didn’t. I walked out of his office and I haven’t talked to him since.” Not that he’d talked to his father much while he was in Omaha anyway, but he missed the approval he’d always got while he was growing up. Ernie McCutcheon might’ve had high expectations of his son, but he’d never laid a finger on Jim or belittled him like Mr. Mayer did to Ronnie. “That probably sounds selfish.”
“Nah. If we didn’t have problems with our fathers every once in a while, what kind of men would we be?”
It wasn’t funny considering the circumstances, but it eased the mood. Jim opened his eyes and saw the moon hanging on the horizon. He still felt like crap. He still didn’t want Ronnie to leave.
But lying there, with their hands locked, he believed for the first time in years that he could bear it.
Chapter 4
Muffled shouting woke Ronnie up.
His dreams had been restless, a maelstrom of images dark and bloody that left his throat burning and his back a snarl of knots. In them, he was trapped beneath the truck instead of getting thrown, screaming until he was hoarse as he tried to yank his legs free. Kenny, the kid from West Virginia who got transferred into his unit the week before, knelt at his side, trying to talk him into chewing his way free.
“Like the wild animals do,” he kept saying, echoing the stories about hunting he’d wasted hours regaling.
In the dream, Ronnie was almost convinced to do it, anything to stop the crushing weight, but then another bomb had gone off and Kenny disappeared, leaving him alone again.
For a split second after waking, he wasn’t so sure the shouting hadn’t come from him.
He laid on the cot, staring up into blackness, his heartbeat creeping its way down from the gallop it’d been at. His ears roared. Over the past year, he’d got used to the constant ringing, but some days were worse than others. Turning his good ear toward whoever was speaking was usually enough to compensate—just like turning away was enough to block them out if he didn’t want to hear what they were saying—but there were times when getting past the noise left him with headaches.
That was the biggest reason he preferred the quiet. He didn’t have to fight so much for something he’d taken for granted before.
Nobody knew about his hearing problems except the doctors. He’d specifically asked them not to tell his mother, though none of them liked it. But he could function—mostly—which made a hearing aid a waste of money, so they went along with it. Now that Jim was back in his life, Ronnie debated on a daily basis telling him how bad it could get, especially since Jim had started confiding in him over the past couple weeks. He always decided against it, though. Jim was still a caretaker at heart. Ronnie wouldn’t lay bare yet another weakness and fuel behavior he was sick and tired of. He was a grown man, damn it, and he definitely didn’t need two mothers.
The floorboards above his head creaked as someone stomped across to get from the kitchen to the living room. His father. Had to be. Mom couldn’t make that much noise with a bulldozer. And if his father was making that much noise, something had to be seriously wrong.
More of the shouts that woke him echoed through the basement. Without thinking, Ronnie pushed back the sleeping bag and stood, ignoring the twinges in his leg as he headed for the stairs. The shroud of his dreams fell away. His single-minded focus now was on finding out what was going on.
He opened the door to a storm of another making. Mom stood with her back to the sink, her knuckles bone-white where she gripped the edge of the counter. Her skin was pale, except for the red splotch mottling the left side of her trembling jaw. Scattered on the floor next to her were glass shards, the curve of a handle telling him it had once been a coffee cup. The splatters on her skirt were still wet.
“What’s going on?” Ronnie asked.
“Oh, sure, now you decide to come out of your hole.” At the sound of his father’s voice, Ronnie whipped around to see him standing in the archway separating the kitchen from the dining room. He had on his workpants, but instead of the long-sleeved shirt he was forced to wear even in summer, he was stripped down to his white undershirt. He was taller than Ronnie by an inch, but the lean muscles that had terrified Ronnie as a child had softened with age, a slight paunch forming above his waistband, the arms less defined. “Get back down there. This is between your ma and me.”
His first instinct was to do as he was told. But as his body tensed to back off, he caught another glimpse of Mom out of the corner of his eye. She cowered against the counter, pinched and petrified.
He surprised himself by pulling up straighter to glare at his father. “You’re scaring Mom.”
Father jabbed a finger at him. “Shut your mouth. This is none of your business.”
Ronnie ignored the warning in his tone and edged closer until he was firmly between his parents. “I’m a part of this family, too.”
“When you pull your weight around here, then you can have a say in the matter. Until then—”
“What?” His ire was festering, seething beneath his skin. “What’re you going to do to me that’s any worse than what happened over there?”
Father’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t push me.”
“But you can push us around, is that it?”
Never in his life had he spoken to his father like this. Bert Mayer ruled his home with an iron fist, one that occasionally made contact with someone’s flesh. Even Jim was scared of him, and Jim wasn’t afraid of anybody. But seeing his mother so small and so vulnerable broke the leash that had been holding Ronnie back. He forgot about his aching leg and nightmares. All he felt was the white-hot rage at a man who should’ve been grateful for the family he had when so many others were torn into pieces.
“Y
ou’re not too big to put over my knee,” Father said.
Folding his arms over his chest, he stood as squarely as he could. “I’d like to see you try.”
“Ronnie—”
“Shut up, Evelyn.”
Ronnie didn’t want her getting in the middle of this either, but the way Father said it stoked his fury higher. “Don’t you have to go to work?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Father sneered. “You seem to be getting around just fine when it suits you, meeting up with that McCutcheon kid or going to the movies, but as soon as you don’t want to do something, you go sniveling to your mother when she’s got better things to be doing with her time than waiting on your skinny, lazy ass.”
“Stop it, Bert! You know what the doctors said.”
“Oh, I know what they said. And I can see with my own two eyes that it’s a load of horseshit. He’s using this leg thing to milk you for sympathy when he should be out there, looking for a job and chipping into this household the way a real man should.”
He didn’t mean to lunge. Well, maybe he did. There had been plenty of times in the past fifteen years when he’d thought about standing up to his father, once and for all. Show him what it felt like to feel helpless. Mete out just a little bit of the same suffering that Bert Mayer had lorded over his family.
So maybe it wasn’t such a surprise after all.
His shoulder crashed into his father’s midsection, propelling him into the dining room chairs. As they went down, he caught his cheekbone on the wooden rail on the back of a chair, while Father’s head connected with the padded seat. In the background, he heard his mother’s shriek, but all he cared about was pummeling the man tangled beneath him.
A blow landed over his injured ear, hard enough to make his entire head explode in lights. Ronnie cried out, and hands clawed at his arms, trying to separate him from the object of his fury.
“Stop it! Both of you!”
Mom’s cries pierced his fog, but not before Father hit him again. Ronnie rolled away, trying to escape both of them, his breath coming short and fast.
Adrenaline still pumped through his veins, goading him into going after Father again, but when he lifted his head, Mom was in the way, bent over the man who’d only minutes ago lashed out at her, running soothing hands over his bowed back.
He would never understand. All his life, Mom had excused Father’s behavior, protecting Ronnie when the need arose but ultimately always defending him. Just like now, helping Father get to his feet, offering a steadying arm when her face was still mottled from where he’d probably slapped her. It didn’t make sense for her to react with kindness to a man who treated her like she was less than a real person with real feelings.
Ronnie scuttled backward, out of the way, until enough distance was between them for him to stand and make a beeline for the basement door. The other part he didn’t understand was the fury that had engulfed him. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt it. The sudden mood swings had been around ever since he got shipped back, though this was the first time he’d got so physical as a response. Once, he’d yelled at a nurse who had accidentally dropped his leg a few inches when she was redoing a bandage. Another time, an orderly had to drag him back to his bed when he made the mistake of watching the nightly news.
He didn’t recognize that part of himself at all. To say it scared him was an understatement, but he didn’t know how to control it when he was in the moment.
In the dank murk of the basement, he hobbled over to the mirror that hung on the wall and stared at his reflection. Blood beaded in the graze where Father hit him over his ear, and deep shadows beneath his eyes made his face look like a skull. His head pounded. The pain would be rough today.
At least he could feel it now. At the height of his anger, he hadn’t been able to feel anything but rage.
* * * *
“Jimmy!”
Grandpa’s voice echoed up the stairs, reaching him all the way in the shower. Poking his head out from behind the curtain, he hollered back, “What?”
“Telephone!”
“Who is it?” He didn’t want to abandon the scalding water if the call was from his dad or someone else he didn’t want to talk to. He’d been up since four, working in the barn where one of the more ambitious piglets had managed to root his way out of the bedding pen to allow an escape route for all his brothers and sisters. It wasn’t even eight o’clock and he already felt like he put in a full day’s work. The only good thing to come out of the entire experience was that at least now he’d have a good argument on why Grandpa needed to finally put down a concrete floor in the barn.
“Mrs. Mayer! Get down here!”
Grandpa wouldn’t sound so urgent if it wasn’t important. His mind raced with possibilities as he hopped out and quickly dried off. Was Ronnie sick? Did he fall? He’d seemed fine a couple days ago when they’d gone to the pictures again. He’d even let Jim hold his hand during the movie. It’d been the closest to the old days they’d had yet, though Jim still lacked the courage to encourage more physical contact. They hadn’t really talked about it—they didn’t talk about anything of substance, really, outside of Jim telling him more about how hard college had been—so Jim wasn’t sure if Ronnie’s feelings had changed on the matter. Boys weren’t supposed to be with boys. Hadn’t they been told that their whole lives? But neither one of them had cared when they realized how right it felt to touch each other, to kiss wherever they could risk not being seen, to fall asleep sharing each other’s breath.
Sure, they’d tried it with girls, but it was never the same. Not for Jim, anyway. Girls didn’t excite him the way Ronnie did. When he’d been in Omaha, after Ronnie had enlisted, Jim discovered a few other guys who got him hard, but he never acted on the desire. It felt wrong, like he was cheating on Ronnie, and with the possible stigma attached to being a fairy if he was found out, it was easier not to do anything at all.
He knew who he was. What he wanted. The question was whether or not Ronnie still felt the same.
Water dripped into his eyes as he bounded down the stairs dressed only in his shorts. The phone receiver rested on the table, and he had to fight to uncurl the cord enough to get it to his ear.
“Mrs. Mayer?”
“Oh, thank goodness.” She sounded breathless. His gut clenched. “I didn’t know who else to call. I can’t even think straight after this morning.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you have time to come around the house today? This morning, actually. As soon as possible.”
Her escalating time scale was as worrisome as her request. “Why?”
“It’s Ronnie. I’d look after him myself, but Bert needs stitches, and I don’t know, I don’t know what happened to him this morning, he’s never done anything like this before—”
“Slow down, Mrs. Mayer.” The more she said, the less she made sense. “Tell me what happened.”
He heard her take a deep breath. “Ronnie attacked his father.”
A young boy, deep inside him, cheered. The adult cringed at the implications of what she claimed. “I’ll be right there.”
Though he could’ve stayed on the line to get more answers, he didn’t need them before getting to the Mayer house. He dressed in record time, but as he was hunting around for his keys, Grandpa appeared in the doorway.
“He okay?” Grandpa asked.
“I don’t know. He got in a fight with his father.”
“He’s not in the hospital, is he?”
“No, but I think Mrs. Mayer is taking Mr. Mayer there.”
He found the keys under the cap he’d worn into town the other day. Scooping them up, he straightened to head out the front door when Grandpa caught his arm.
“It’s not easy coming back.” Grandpa’s eyes were solemn, locked on Jim as tight as his grip was. “You don’t know because you were lucky enough not to have to fight, but it changes you.”
He didn’t need a lecture right now. The sooner he got t
o Ronnie, the better everything would be. “I know, Grandpa. War’s hell.”
Grandpa huffed in frustration. “You don’t know. You think you do, with all your book learning, but until it’s you pulling that trigger and doing things no civilized man should ever have to do, you can’t. Ronnie’s a good boy, but you gotta remember what he’s gone through.”
If he tugged, he could break free and get out of there. Every second mattered. But Grandpa looked so serious, he couldn’t walk away yet.
“I see it every time he lets me,” Jim replied.
“You’ve gotta see it when he doesn’t, too.”
“I’m trying.” Every second of every day.
“I know. You boys always were good for each other. What I’m saying is, don’t lose that. Use it.”
In that moment, he had the sudden suspicion that Grandpa knew the whole truth about his relationship with Ronnie, but the thing of it was, there was no admonition in his gaze, no disappointment in the way he talked about them. Jim wished he had the nerve to ask. He’d sleep better knowing they had at least one ally in this world. But even if he somehow found the courage, he never would. Grandpa wouldn’t answer. It wasn’t his way.
This, this quiet resolution without judgment, this was his way.
Perhaps they had an ally after all.
“I’m going to bring him back here,” Jim said. “Whatever happened, he needs to get out of that house.”
Grandpa nodded and let him go. “That seems best. For everybody.”
As the screen door slammed shut behind him, Jim focused on the practical rather than his fears. It was better than imagining a broken Ronnie lost in the bowels of the Mayer home, or worse, an infuriated Ronnie refusing to leave. Concentrating on controlling his speed worked, too. His heart beat at its usual slow tempo when he finally reached Ronnie’s street.
Nobody answered when he knocked on the front door. Frowning, he stepped to the side to peer through the window, but the house looked deserted. Mr. Mayer’s car still sat in the driveway, but hers was nowhere to be seen.
On a whim, he tested the inside door. It turned. Mrs. Mayer had left it unlocked for him.
