“Are you fucking with Moonshot Lewis?”
“I think you’d be able to tell. I can still walk, can’t I?”
“I think you’re fucking him.”
“Pete, you’re acting like we were engaged or something.”
“Well, aren’t we boyfriends?”
“Boyfriends? When did that happen? You told me we’re just friends who fuck each other.”
I remembered the stupid expression I’d coined, back when Chris first came to school. I decided to keep my bright ideas to myself from now on.
“Well, now I want to be boyfriends.”
T.J. stopped and stared at me and smiled. Many hours of thought were in that smile. He was wiping his hands with a towel, and he’d taken off his shirt. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
Keith Hanson and John Shepherd were placed on Final Probation. Final Probation meant they lost all their junior privileges and couldn’t go off campus. Blink wrong and they’d be expelled. Dean Press announced at assembly that they wouldn’t be expelled because they didn’t know about T.J.’s asthma. All that had happened was some overly aggressive roughhousing, lost tempers which didn’t warrant expulsion. No one had mentioned the reason for the fight, not Keith or John and not T.J. I looked over my shoulder after the announcement and saw Keith staring at me. There was an eerie look on his face. I frowned at him and turned away. I thought he blamed me for the whole trouble. I wondered why Keith didn’t mention queerness to defend himself.
After assembly I ran over to T.J.’s room. “What did you think of Press’s announcement?” I asked him.
T.J. was lying on his bed in shorts, reading the paper. He spun around and sat up. “I was in the infirmary. What did he say?”
“They’re both on Final Pro. Hanson didn’t know you have asthma, so he wasn’t expelled.” I sat down at T.J.’s desk. “Hanson is a Nazi,” I said. “He’s always talking about walking in lockstep, the group over the individual.”
“I thought you and Keith were best friends.”
“Not anymore.”
“Because of me?” He looked at me suspiciously. “How could he know I was off my medication?”
“It’s not just because of you.”
“Chris and I were friends, and then he turned on me like a snake. It’s supposed to mean something, you know. You don’t just drop your best friend. You give him a chance.”
“You don’t understand.” I said. “You’re white.”
“Moonshot doesn’t have this problem. He still gets along with Hanson.”
I was badly stung. “So. fuck Moonshot if you want to so bad. He’s your hero. He saved your life.”
T.J. put his head down on his pillow. “I wish this hadn’t happened. Pete.”
“I know. It’s fucked up.”
“That’s not what I mean. I wish it hadn’t happened to you. It’s going to make you worse.”
“What are you talking about. T.J.?”
“I’m talking about what Gusto said. About seeing black and white?”
“Don’t talk to me about Gusto. You went upstairs and fucked.”
“We didn’t fuck. We stayed up all night talking.”
“Really? I thought you went upstairs to have sex.” I walked over and sat on the bed next to T.J. My eyes could have lit up China when I heard this news.
Keith approached me in the Common Room in Chase Hall that afternoon.
“I have to talk to you.”
“Go away, Keith. I think you’re dangerous. You attack T.J. You talk like a Nazi.”
“Nothing happened to him, did it?”
“I didn’t say anything happened. I’m just telling you we have nothing to talk about.”
“You choose the white over your own kind. That’s wrong.”
“I don’t want to hear that, Keith. We used to be friends, right? But now you’re into totalitarianism. That makes me so fucking mad.”
“That’s it, isn’t it? It’s just some kind of rebellion. You’re not really a homo. You just refuse to love sisters. Like a little boy who won’t eat his carrots. It’s a Freudian thing.”
My head started pounding. “That did it, Keith.”
“I know how your mind works, Peter. Remember how we used to talk?”
“That did it, Keith. You are too weird.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t fucking say that.”
“All this bitterness. You’re a racist! Why don’t you just leave this school? You don’t want to be here.”
“I have a right to be a racist. The white man killed my brother.”
“What?”
“I said the white man killed my brother.”
“What?”
“Cliff is dead!” he screamed. “He got shot by a white cop. They pulled him over, ‘Get out of the car,’ discharged the pistol right into his head.”
“I’m sorry. You never told me.”
“You’re right I never told you, you house nigger.”
“When did it happen?”
“It happened after Christmas. He was driving back to Colgate. An accident, they said. Mistaken identity. Someone else in a black Chevy. The same old bullshit.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Why should I talk to you? You probably think it was justifiable homicide.”
“No, I wouldn’t—”
“And now you want to suck whitey’s dick. And the worst ones, too, none of the cool ones. That T. J. is right out of the Roaring Forties. And that snot-rich bitch Chris Thayer.”
“Chris Thayer?”
“Yes. You think I’m not watching. You’re so obvious. You wouldn’t sit with us at breakfast, you wanted to suck blondie’s white ass so bad.” I was stunned. Keith sat down on a sofa. He looked exhausted.
“I’m really sorry about your brother.”
“Yeah, you’re sorry.” I reached out my hand but Keith pushed it away. His eyes had filled with tears. I didn’t know what to say.
I spent that evening in Keith’s room. It was the first time we’d really talked since winter. My head was spinning. No one was acting like I expected anymore. T. J. didn’t trust me. Chris was a delusionary closet case. And Keith hadn’t even told me when his brother died.
I had only met Cliff Hanson once, at the Whitehaven game our Third Form year. He had a good sense of humor, I remembered, and he’d made my mother laugh. Cliff was the same age as my brother Malcolm. Malcolm. My head always started hurting now, whenever I thought his name.
“We come up here,” said Keith. “We come up here with these white people, but we’re still niggers. We can get shot in a drop. In a drop, Pete. Shot for nothing.”
“What’s fucked up is, if Cliff really were a criminal he probably wouldn’t have been shot. Criminals know how to act with a cop. My brother Malcolm told me. No false moves, don’t give them any lip. If you’re innocent, you get nervous or you cop an attitude about your civil rights.”
“You go on believing that, Pete. If they want to shoot, they shoot.”
“My oldest brother Jackson died. I told you about it, right? The worst part was the effect on my mother. It was horrible.”
“I thought my mother was going to have a stroke. She still might. Then it’s double murder.”
We sat silently for a moment. Keith got up and put a Quincy Jones record on his stereo. “This album was my Christmas present from Cliff,” he said. A perfect trumpet voice filled the room. Very spare, very dark and sweet. Keith tapped his fingers in time with the drummer. Then he turned and leaned against his desk.
“So you’re really, what, gay? Homosexual.”
“I’ve always known that you knew.”
He came back and sat down next to me.
“I’m in love with T.J., Keith,” I said. “But he’s not in love with me. He used to be, but not now. I think he’s in love with somebody else.”
“T.J.,” Keith snorted. “I can’t see it.”
“He stood up for you, you know. He was mad at first, but th
en he stood up for you. You complain about stereotypes, but then you stereotype him because he wears yellow pants.”
“You guys should be careful. You really are obvious, you know.”
“The real freak is that Chris Thayer. Don’t repeat this, Keith, but Chris likes guys as much as I do. He just can’t admit it to himself. He led T.J. on.”
“He won’t accept that he’s gay?”
“Right.”
“Just like you won’t accept that you’re black.’’
I stared at Keith for a moment that felt like an hour. I didn’t have the energy to object to what he had said. I closed my eyes and just listened. Quincy Jones was holding a long note, impossibly long, longer than that note was meant to live; in the end it just evaporated. I opened my eyes and looked at Keith again. Maybe I was judging Chris too harshly.
Two days later Keith got into a shoving match with Dean Press. Keith had insisted on eating his roast chicken with his fingers (“like we do in my house,” he said) instead of with a knife and fork. When the dean objected to his table manners, Keith called him a fat white honky pig. He was expelled from school immediately. His mother and father drove up to school to get him. I went over to his dorm room to help him pack.
“Well, Keith, you’ll go home, you’ll get it together. You’ve got so much talent. The world is just waiting for you to kick its ass.”
“We all get what we want,” Keith said. “Like you said, I didn’t want to stay here.”
“I can’t believe you tried to punch out Press. Remember how we used to kid about him?”
‘“Don’t mess with Press.’”
“Remember when he kicked out all those guys for smoking cigarettes? Just for smoking cigarettes.”
Keith imitated Dean Press in his best Paul Robeson baritone. ‘“You’ve got five hours to pack your bags and leave.’”
“Yeah, Press is a bad dude.”
Keith’s mother came into the room. She was older and heavier than my mother. She was dressed in a black dress with a colorful, black-and-pink kerchief around her neck. She looked around the room and picked up tidbits Keith might have forgotten, like his hairbrush or a photograph of his family. She looked very grave and she kept quiet until Keith spoke.
“Mom, you remember my friend, Peter Givens.”
“Hello, Peter Givens,” she said. I looked at her but I couldn’t speak. Mrs. Hanson picked up a photograph of her dead son and stared at it. My heart muscle squeezed. All I could think of was my first night at Briarwood, and my mother making friends with the boy I had fallen in love with.
I wondered for days if I had betrayed Keith. I’d been blind to the fact that he was hurting. And I had drifted away from his friendship, so consumed was I with Chris Thayer, and more and more attached to T. J. Still, I wasn’t worried about Keith. After I explained to Mr. Chase about Keith’s brother being murdered, he changed his expulsion to a voluntary withdrawal to keep his record clear. Keith would go back home to public school, then off to engineering college. I was more worried about what T. J. thought of how I had treated my best friend.
I was worried because betrayal is the worst, the most bitter feeling. The wolf in the field, you can fight. But the evil that sneaks into your bed and crawls up your skin, the two-faced troublemaker, the unknowable liar, the evil that destroys truth and trust and faith — this gave off the most repellent stench. I knew how T.J. valued honesty. And I knew how he felt about Chris — who had led him on and betrayed him. If he thought I was a traitor to my best friend, I knew he would never love me.
Part 4
14
T. J., Ronnie, and I worked in Briarwood’s summer school program for disadvantaged youths from Hartford. Chris Thayer was offered a counselor’s job, but turned it down to spend the summer on his family’s ranch in Wisconsin. I taught music, T.J. was a teacher’s aide, and Ronnie worked with the grounds crew. We lived on campus and had our pick of rooms in Milburger. There were also girl aides on campus, from Sarah Waters School; they stayed in Chase Hall across the main lawn.
It was grand to be with T.J. in the summer. Most nights after dinner we relaxed on the front stoop of our dormitory, drinking beer and playing music. T.J.’s brother had sent him a tape by a gravel-voiced roustabout named DT who sang folk ballads and bluesy rock and roll songs. T.J. really loved DT. One night he kept me up until morning listening to his records over and over. When we found out DT was giving a concert in Stratford, T.J. invited a group of us to go to the concert and then spend the night at his summer house in Point O’ Woods.
Six of us squeezed into T.J.’s Peugot sedan and drove down the interstate to Stratford on Saturday night. Besides T.J., Moonshot, and me, three other aides were in the car — John Bragg, Susie Blomberg, and Meg Buckley. The trunk was loaded with six-packs of beer. Ron and John smoked marijuana on the trip. Neither T. J. nor I smoked pot.
We parked outside the concert arena and got drunk before we went in. It was always the same when T. J. drank. After a few beers a dumb, dizzy smile would spread across his face, as if he’d downed a quart of Tennessee whiskey instead of three Budweiser tall boys. Then his head would start to weave, as if attached to his body by a rolling ball joint.
“I’d say I got a buzz on now,” he always said, proud of achieving a state of brainlessness.
Ronnie and John, drunker than the rest of us and stoned, were standing with arms and shoulders interlocked, parodying DT’s boozy song-style: “Poor old lover man DT, ooooh-oooooh-eeeee-oooowwhhh!”
T.J. joined in. “Hey, baby. DT coming to getcha. ” The girls sat on the hood of T. J.’s car and stared at us curiously, like cats.
We met T.J.’s brother outside the arena. Jeff Adams had white-blond hair and eyes like brown pecans. He was sparely built, like T. J., a little more muscular. Jeff was there with his girlfriend Gina, who looked sexy in cutoffs and sandals. I instantly knew that I liked Jeff. He was handsome in a more distinctly male way than T.J., thinner and rougher in the face. Jeff was the serious outdoors type, serene compared to his baby brother, but I could sense in him the same inner charge of energy. In T. J. it burned like a flare; in Jeff it was a slow blue flame. T. J. had told me things about his brother — that he was honest and a good skier and popular with girls. Jeff and I chatted about Harvard, where he was a junior. T.J. saw us talking and smiled at me. I smiled back as brightly as I could — I wanted him to know how excited I was to meet his brother. I handed Jeff a beer from the backseat of T.J.’s car. He tossed it down and then we split up. Jeff and Gina had third-row seats, and ours were up in the back.
DT sang like the devil that night. His voice speared the darkness on killer ballads about heartless women and drugs, and his band staggered and crunched their way through old-style rock and roll songs. Since we couldn’t get six seats in a row, T.J. sat with Susie and Meg two rows in front of John, Ron, and me. John and Ron hollered and hooted through the show. T.J. kept looking up at us during the concert, as if he were missing the best fun.
After the concert we drove about thirty miles east to Point O’ Woods. The Adamses lived in the summer on a modest spread of land surrounded by a moat of trees and thick brush. An old-fashioned, black-panelled house stood about thirty yards back from the road. Behind the house about fifty yards back was a large pine log cabin. Meg and Susie, both friends of the family, went into the house. The rest of us carried the remaining beer to the cabin to party for a few more hours. We played the Allman Brothers’ Idlewild South album and continued drinking.
Besides DT, T. J.’s favorite group was the Allman Brothers Band. The Allmans featured twin blues rock guitarists who improvised guitar counterpoint that reminded me of the Bach Double Concerto. T.J. and I tossed tall boys and argued over which guitar player was which on the record. John and Ronnie were across the room sharing some secret, laughing at me and T.J. as if they were fourth graders and we were substitute teachers. Their minds had left them hours ago.
The Allman Brothers were idle, wild, and southern, mus
ically travelling over desert and mountain trails. We listened and talked and travelled with them. T.J. told me a lot of kid stuff, how his father built the cabin when he was seven years old, how he and his brothers would spend the night there when guests were at the main house.
“You’re really close to your brother Jeff, aren’t you, T.J.?”
“I don’t even think of him as a separate person. We’re two halves of the same … whatever.”
“That’s cool — that togetherness.”
“It comes from my father. He’s really big on family loyalty. My dad … is like the biggest force in my life.”
“Where’s Jeff staying these days?”
“He’s living with his girlfriend up in Marblehead. You have any brothers, Pete?”
“Don’t ask.” I didn’t want to think about Malcolm. The police had picked him up in New York driving a stolen van; he was serving his sentence now in Sing Sing.
T.J. smiled at me wearily. We sat quietly for a moment, both in soggy, post-climactic alcoholic stupors. “I think I’ll see what’s going on in the house,” he said after a while.
“Okay. Say hello to Susie for me.” I’d been teasing T.J. about Susie Blomberg all summer. T.J. chuckled, then stood up and left, letting the cabin door slam behind him. John and Ronnie finished off the last six-pack. I started to feel dizzy. It was about two o’clock in the morning when I fell asleep.
I woke up on a hard pine bench. The record changer was still playing Idlewild South from the night before. Ronnie and John Bragg had already awakened and left. I felt a little nauseated, but not terribly hung over. Inside the cabin was dark; there were only two small, narrow windows. I spent a few minutes exploring the cabin, looking for mementos of T.J.’s childhood, or some evidence of his or his brother’s private lives.
The Color of Trees Page 17
