The Cranberry Hush: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  Patti’s specialty in the real estate world was fixer-uppers. I imagined her walking through a rundown house, hands clasped together in practiced delight. “A fresh coat of paint and this place will be darling,” she would say. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d seen the same qualities in Simon that she might praise about a house with an outdated kitchen or a leaky roof.

  When Simon was dressed and tucked, Patti tugged at his sides to straighten him and gave him a once-over. She nodded in approval.

  “That’ll do. Now grab your jacket and I’ll bring the car around. Nice seeing you, Vince!”

  When she’d left Simon pulled the shirt out of his pants a little—just a little—to give it some slack and took a last swig of Sprite. He tossed the empty can over the counter and landed it squarely in the trash.

  “I love that woman, but this house better be amazing,” he said. “Now, don’t forget to bring the empty boxes out back and finish the pulls. Big-Ears McKenzie will probably be in on his lunch hour, so have his ready first. And check to make sure we have enough blank subscriber forms. And the new Comic Shop News—make sure those are out.”

  “I know, I’ve got it, Simon, don’t worry. Did you want the rest of your sandwich?”

  “Nah.” He stepped away and then turned back and grabbed it off the wrapper.

  “Don’t spill on your shirt.”

  “Famous last words,” he said. He raised his hand in a wave without turning around, and then he was gone.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon setting aside comics in white paper bags for the regular customers who only wanted to pop into the store to pick them up. On each bag I wrote a customer’s name.

  It was funny to look through the comics on the shelves—they seemed frozen in time. Most of the issues at the top of each stack were ones I’d put there myself a week ago, two weeks ago, before Griff came, before any of this. That was how it was—there were some weeks, even months, where nothing happened, where I was the same person doing the same ordinary things. And then there were weeks that changed everything.

  At around three I helped a kid who’d obviously come down from upstairs pick out some comics to kill a post-Novocain afternoon with. His mouth was stuffed with gauze with red tendrils of blood creeping to the edges.

  “I know how you feel,” I told him, pointing to the scrape on my chin. It made me think of Zane dabbling aloe into it. Apparently even Simon had noticed the weirdness between Zane and me, and he almost never worked with us together. Had it been that obvious? That strained? I decided to call Zane when I got home. To apologize for last night. To ask him to go out for pizza, as friends, as whatever. I would call him, I promised myself.

  I promised myself a lot of things.

  I closed the store and stuffed the keys in my pocket. My stomach was rumbling—I hoped Griff was at home making something for supper. But he wasn’t. He was in the Golden Age lot, leaning against the side of his Jetta with his arms folded. Beneath his vest and hooded sweatshirt he wore a gray t-shirt that said Elsewhen in blue letters. I remembered the night he got that shirt. It was the only one he had that actually fit.

  “Well hello,” I said.

  He stood up straight and put his hands in his pockets. “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “You should’ve come in.”

  “It’s OK, I haven’t been here long. Hey, I need you to follow me in your car somewhere.”

  “Why? Where to?”

  He grinned and opened his door. “Just follow me?”

  I did, and it didn’t take me long to figure out where we were headed, given the general direction and Griff’s limited knowledge of town. I thought of losing him down a side street or banging a U-turn after he’d gone around a bend, but I couldn’t do that to him. Whatever was going to happen at his not-so-secret destination, he was excited about it. I would have to suffer through my own surprise party. I would have to trust him.

  He pulled up in front of Zane’s house near where we went through the hedge and I parked behind him, my heart racing. Just leave, leave, I told myself with even more urgency now that we were here. Just step on the gas and lay down a mile of rubber behind you and leave. I put my hand on the stick to knock it back into drive, but just then he got out of his car. He opened the back door and brought out a black plastic bag, a second bag, and—my god—a big bundle of green rock-climbing rope.

  “What is that for?” I said before I’d even rolled down my window enough for him to hear.

  He walked up to the Jeep and pushed one of the bags through the window. “Put this on.”

  I opened the bag and saw blue and red spandex and the top left corner of what I knew to be a very familiar S.

  “Griff, what are you doing to me?”

  “You were an ass to him last night.” From the other bag he pulled a waist harness typically used for scaling mountains and repelling into icy crevasses. He held it up, buckles clinking and glinting in the streetlight. “It’ll take a superhero to get him back.”

  It was ridiculous, what he was going to have me do, if at that point I had any real idea—and yet, looking at him, I did trust him. I did trust that everything would be OK if I did what he told me.

  After struggling for a few minutes in a space even smaller than a phone booth, I emerged from the Jeep in full regalia: tights, cape, red underwear on the outside. I didn’t feel ridiculous at all. Actually, I felt strong. I felt fucking great.

  Griff had ducked through the bushes and while I was changing he managed to get one end of the green rope to go over the big oak branch above Zane’s second-story window. It took tying his shoe to the end of the rope and flinging it up like a grappling hook, but he’d succeeded. I crept through the bushes, careful not to snag my cape on any branches.

  “Well holy shit, it actually fits,” he said with genuine gladness. He was holding the other end of the rope that snaked down from the tree and twitched in the breeze. His vest was on the ground and the sleeves of his hooded sweatshirt were pushed up to his elbows. He reached out and pinched my cape.

  “It’s a little tight on my balls,” I said, plucking at the red underpants.

  “Little tight on the nipples, too, looks like.”

  “Shut up, it’s cold out.”

  “I’d give anything for a camera right now.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t bring one.”

  “The one thing I didn’t think of.”

  There were no outside lights on to illuminate our exploits, but Zane’s bedroom window was glowing. So were other windows. People were definitely home. Awake. Ready to catch us. I remembered the night in the swimming pool, when my mother was suddenly there in the backyard, her hands clenching the pool fence. Zane’s mother could come through the door at any moment. At least this time I was obviously wearing underwear.

  “Earth to Vince,” Griff said, snapping his fingers up at me. He was kneeling and jiggled the waist harness impatiently at my feet. “Come on, step into this.” I stepped through the loops and pulled the harness up around my red trunks.

  “You should’ve gotten a red one so it would blend in,” I said.

  “Haha! Blend in! You’re singing a different tune now that you’ve got the suit on, aren’t you?” Touching the cape again, he said, “Well it is pretty cool.” He hooked a beener onto the loop at the end of the rope. “The guy at the sporting goods store tied the knots, and he seemed to know what he was doing, so they should hold. He showed me how to do this. I hope I remember.”

  “Yeah, I hope you remember too, dude.” In the snow lay a second harness. “What’s that one for?”

  “Duh. So you can rescue him.” He picked it up and clipped it to mine. Carabiners swung from it, jingling. “That’ll be fun getting into. The rest is up to you.”

  “If he gets in at all.”

  “Good point. But don’t worry about that just yet—you’ll figure out something to say. Just tell him what you told me last night.”

  He picked up the other end of the
green rope and pulled it with him across the yard, tossed it over the hedge and left for a second a Griff-shaped hole in the hedge. Through a first-floor window I could see a low-lit dining room table and chairs, and a doorway beyond them. A shadow moved past.

  “OK,” Griff called after a minute. He must’ve been standing on my bumper or something because I could just see his head over the top of the hedge. “You’re all connected and I’m going to start backing up to hoist you up. Ready?”

  I gave him a thumbs-up. I could hear the Jeep’s motor rev and then loops in the rope began to straighten out across the snow. I reached up and gave the rope a tug to check this bit of engineering when suddenly my red underwear squeezed my hips even tighter and my sneakers, draped with red flaps to represent boots, lifted out of the snow. I rose inch by inch, very slowly, until my feet were ten or twelve feet off the ground, and then my progress slowed and stopped. Standing on the bumper again, Griff peered over the top of the hedge to check my progress. When I gave him another thumbs-up he started laughing, just a smirk at first, then louder, then practically hysterical. His head disappeared; he was probably doubling over. I knew he didn’t think this was ridiculous, but rather that it was awesome. Beyond awesome. When he got himself under control his face appeared again; he was wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

  “Yuck it up,” I told him.

  “Sorry. If you could just see yourself.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “So another ten feet or so?”

  “OK.”

  The Jeep revved and I began to rise again.

  I clutched the rope in front of me to keep from tipping backward. For a moment I could see into Zane’s bedroom—it was cluttered with posters and towers of white comics boxes like a scaled-down version of Golden Age—and then it was lost again to blue siding as the rope slipped along the branch. I reached out and touched the side of the house. Then once again I soared skyward. The window sill, encrusted in ice, passed my eye-line again and I could see into the room. It was dim, lit with moving blue pictures of the television. I couldn’t see Zane.

  I tapped on the glass with my finger. The harness was crushing my balls and I was sure I was wearing it wrong, that it was inside-out or upside-down or something. Griff lifted me up a few more feet so that I was directly in front of the window. I was almost looking down into the room—there was a pair of jeans lying on the brown carpet—when Zane came into the room. He had on flannel pajama pants and a red t-shirt that said Everybody loves an Asian boy. He saw me and dropped his Doritos. My heart started pounding.

  The rope was turning me gently and I rotated away from him so that I was now facing the front yard and the neighbors’ houses across the street. I looked down at Griff, who no longer had to stand on the bumper to see me, at the small cars in the driveway, at the flat expanse of snow below. Suddenly a foot or two of slack appeared in the rope as it slipped farther along the branch and I fell that distance with a nut-crushing jerk. The branch spronged like a diving board and dumped down snow and stripped bark. Snow dropped down the back of my neck into my suit. I went rigid and clenched my teeth.

  Behind me the window opened, crunching ice on the sill. It sprinkled to the ground. I kicked my legs, trying to turn myself around, my cape swooshing back and forth with the effort. There was a tug on the back of my neck, pulling open wide the collar of my suit, and even more snow went down my back. I gasped. The collar was let go with a cold snap.

  Then a hand on my harness as Zane gave me a twirl, and I faced him.

  “OK,” I said, “I deserve that.” A clump of snow shifted between my shoulder blades and made an icy trail along the small of my back. “Ah.—Oh my god.”

  “What are you doing, Vince?” There was a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth, but a severity in his eyes made me feel like this was all for nothing.

  “Can I come in?”

  “I really don’t know if I want you to.”

  “Please? This thing really hurts.”

  He looked down at the ground, then at me. “All right.”

  I tried lifting my feet up onto the sill. He grabbed my ankles and pulled my red-booted legs up into the room. When I was sitting, half inside, half out, Griff called up to hold on so he could give me some slack. The Jeep drove forward a few feet and the rope behind me got loose. I ducked under the top of the double-hung window and slipped inside. It was easier than I feared but clumsier than I hoped.

  I pushed the window closed on the rope and unclipped myself; the knot fell to the carpet. The bedroom was lit only by the television and a flickering red candle on the bureau. The aloe plant was sitting beside it, as if keeping warm.

  “This is amazing,” Zane said, but it sounded like a concession. He idly poked the knob on his dresser drawer. “I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” I sat down on the foot of his bed and my cape pulled tight under me, choking me. I tugged it away.

  “You hurt me, Vince,” he said. “You can’t pull some trick with ropes and expect me to be your friend again, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Then what are you doing?” He looked sad. I felt like something to be pitied. “What’s this all for?”

  “I guess to apologize.”

  He nodded, pursed his lips. He tugged out the drawer a couple inches then pushed it back in. “Did Griff put you up to this?”

  “He puts me up to everything.”

  “I was right, huh? You really are in love with him.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. He’s straight.”

  “I don’t know if he is.”

  “He is.”

  “Well I don’t know if you understand that he is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is gay and straight to someone like you, Vince? Do those words even make any sense to you? You can’t relate to them. You’re always going to be waiting for your chance. For him to fall for you.”

  “...”

  “And in the meantime, all there is is consolation prizes. I don’t want to be a consolation prize, Vince. Not even yours.”

  “Zane, come on, you’re not a—” If I finished the thought would I just be deluding myself and lying to him? “You’re not a consolation prize. I’m just stupid.”

  He didn’t say anything for what must’ve been a full minute; we just stood looking at each other. He let his hand fall away from the drawer. I knew he was at the crossroads of a decision and I wondered what he was thinking. Finally his face softened and he looked up. His eyes were moving over my costume as though he were really noticing it for the first time. He laughed, a quick short burst, and bottled it again. He sat down next to me on the bed.

  “I’m sorry for last night,” I said.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “I know I was an incredible jerk. He’s just really thrown me for a loop.”

  “Quite the loop.”

  “Zane— I wish there was something I could say. Some magic words that in a comic would be big and yellow and would make everything OK between us. But I know there isn’t.”

  He looked at me, almost through me. “No,” he said, “there isn’t. But I can tell you really wish there was. And maybe that buys you a night.”

  “One night?”

  “And we’ll go from there.” He looked at my harness and at the rope coiled on the floor. “So where do we start it?”

  “Through that window.”

  “Then this is mine?” He touched the extra harness hanging from my waist.

  “That was the idea. If you’re interested.”

  I held out my hand; he didn’t take it. Instead he put his on my S. His fingernails were trimmed low, looked like they hurt. He kissed me. I smiled against his lips.

  “What?” he said, pulling back.

  “Nothing... I just wasn’t even expecting to be let in, let alone this.”

  “I couldn’t say no to ‘Superman,’ could I?”

  �
�No, I guess you couldn’t. I guess I couldn’t either.” I thought of Griff shoving the plastic bag through my window. Then I looked at Zane. His long, dark sideburns matched the color of his soft eyes.

  He cleared his throat. “I need some clothes,” he said. “Because unlike Lois Lane, I’m not going flying in my pajamas.” He squeezed my knee and stood up.

  “When did she fly in her pajamas?”

  “In the first movie. When Superman takes her flying in her nightgown.”

  “That wasn’t a nightgown, it was a dress.”

  “No. That was a dress? That sheer blue thing?” He kicked down his pajama pants—his boxers were white with purple stars; I suddenly realized I knew what he looked like underneath them—and he picked up the jeans that lay on the floor.

  “She wore it out afterward with Clark,” I said, “remember?”

  “Yeah, but I thought she was still in a starry-eyed love-daze from flying and forgot to change clothes.”

  “Well she was in a daze, but it was a dress.” He still looked skeptical, so I added, “It was the Seventies.”

  He smiled. “In that case, RetroLand, I’ll take your word for it.”

  He pulled on his jeans, stepped into a pair of Chucks, grabbed his yellow hooded sweatshirt from the back of his desk chair. “Now help me get this harness on,” he said.

  I unclipped the extra harness from mine and held it open for him. He stepped through the loops with one hand on my shoulder for balance and hiked the harness up around his waist. I fed the rope through both of our carabiners.

  “I don’t know if this was made to work this way,” I said, holding his harness with one hand and pulling on the rope as hard as I could with the other. It seemed secure but of course I couldn’t simulate our combined weight with just my hands. We hobbled to the window like contestants in a potato-sack race and opened it. “We may be killed.”

  “The snow’ll cushion our fall,” he said, looking down.

  “It’s pretty packed down.”

  “Then I’ll cushion you.”

  “I don’t know, you’re pretty skinny.”

  “I’m not skinny, I’m small-boned.”

  Griff was leaning against the Jeep, looking off down the street. I waved and caught his eye. “Ready?” he yelled.