The Color of Trees

by Canaan Parker

  On a broad, oaken bureau in the back of the cabin was a photograph of the three Adams children — T. J., Jeffrey, and the oldest brother, Rick. The boys were standing on a dock with fishing gear. Jeff looked about fifteen years old in the photo, Rick Adams about seventeen. That would have made T.J. about twelve, though he looked younger. The gray background of the black-and-white photo was ambiguous; was it foggy or sunny on the day that picture was taken? And who was the cameraman? Of that there was no doubt.

  It was their superimposing father, framing his three boys in the photo lens, inspecting his sons, dominating them.

  I stared at the photo for a long time, trying to fill in the story. I pretended I didn’t know any of these boys, that this was a lone photograph hanging in a once-visited gallery. There was symmetry and sequence in the photo — three boys standing in order of age and descending height — a chain of emulation, metamorphosis of themes. All the same and yet each different. The two older boys were imposing even in this still photo. Rick was plain-faced and robust, stockier and more ordinary than his brothers; he looked squarely through the lens into the photographer’s eyes and soul. Jeff was a character study: tossed white hair, young and willful, wispy, freckled smile. Filled with rightness and purpose even when enjoying himself, the roughest and most boyish of the three.

  Though T.J. was surely a member of this team, in some uncertain way he seemed not to quite fit in. T.J. looked away from the camera and toward his older brothers with a glow of babyish excitement on his face, but also a trace of trouble, a faint longing for separateness. Did he know even then that he was gay? Did he fear that his father would one day discover his secret?

  I lay back down on the bench where I’d slept and tried to stave off an increasing dizziness. Craving solidity, I rested my head on hard wood. The door of the cabin creaked open and T.J. walked in.

  “Hello, Thomas Jerrett Adams.”

  “Hello, Peter Joseph Givens.” T.J. and I had taken recently to calling each other by our full names. It made me feel like a special person, and a complete entity.

  “DT was great last night, huh,” I said.

  “Incredible. I wish I could write songs like that.”

  “I realized something last night. It’s a good thing I don’t play the guitar.”

  “But you do play guitar,” he said, curiously.

  “But I’m not really good. If I was a really good guitarist, that’s all I would ever do. I wouldn’t go to college, I wouldn’t work. I’d just play the guitar and go broke.”

  “Maybe you’d be famous.”

  “Yeah, like DT. ‘Hey, baby, don’t flap your lip on DT, your lover man.’” DT was a white man with long black hippie hair and wild wolf eyes, who’d accent his songs with bits of Negro vernacular and an exaggerated southern drawl.

  “Hey, baby.” T.J. mimicked DT’s low-down growl. We always imitated DT when we were together. It was our theme song, our private joke.

  T.J. was wearing a blue t-shirt and baggy, blue-striped white shorts. He sat in a white wicker chair with one foot lifted onto the seat, one knee tucked between crossed arms, and raked his toes and the ball of his foot over a rip in the wicker. A stream of white sunlight cut across the shadows and fell on a corner of his face and the tip of his knee. I could see dust particles floating slowly in the beam of sunlight, miniscule satellites orbiting some invisible center. T.J. smiled at me silently for a moment, as he often did lately, harboring some private opinion of me, some personal thought he wouldn’t share. His orange pekoe eyes gleamed with happiness as they peered peacefully into mine. He rubbed his bottom against the wicker seat; his rectum was tingling, I knew, making its presence known. The sun felt warm in the cabin. T.J. sucked the cool morning freshness through his nostrils into his lungs. He felt good this morning. I could feel it. Lately I thought I could always tell what he was feeling.

  I’d been sensing a certain pathos about T.J. because of his degrading affair with Chris Thayer, and because even I had seen him as second-best to Chris. T.J. was a more earth-bound, organic creature. Even the colors of his skin, hair, and eyes — all autumnal browns and wood-like shades — had been eclipsed by Chris’s regal shower of gold, white, and yellow.

  But since the springtime the balance had shifted. T.J. was real. Chris was a ghost. In the end, I would cry when T.J. left me. I would pound my bed with my fists in infantile fury, feel far more than I’d ever felt for Chris, or Cady, or anyone.

  I snapped out of my reverie and saw T.J. looking at me, perplexed. I forced a cheery attitude.

  “So when’s the wedding, T.J.? I already picked out your wedding present. A year’s supply of Pampers.”

  T.J. giggled. He liked it when I teased him about girls, the absurdity of it. “Oh, nothing happened, Pete. We just talked all night.” Another boy might have invented a tale of sexual conquest, but T.J. knew how that would upset me.

  “Good,” I said. “’Cause I would never do something like that to you.”

  A tense look flashed across T.J.’s face. I thought I had reminded him of the night Chris Thayer screwed Jenny Richards in their room while T.J. covered his head with the blanket and pretended to sleep.

  T.J. had told me about it only once. Jenny Richards kept saying, No, what about your roommate? Don’t worry about him, Chris insisted. There was silence for a while. T.J. thought they had gone to sleep. But then he could hear they were doing it.

  He must have felt so horrible. Just imagine it: Chris absorbed in Jenny’s mouth and pussy, Jenny absorbed with Chris’s body and sweet, fat sex organ. The sloppy sounds of wet, mushy flesh. Whimpers of submission, Chris’s foghorn tenor gasping to climax. And T.J., forgotten in the moment of orgasm, reduced beyond the status of trivia to virtual nonexistence.

  Perhaps he watched them do it — breathless, mesmerized by the pornographic thrill of Chris’s straining buttocks twisting and shoving under the sheet. Or perhaps he hid beneath his pillow. Somehow I knew what T.J. felt that night. And for some unknown reason, the knowledge felt like memory: girl squeals pierced T.J.’s eardrums like needles; the sounds shot down his spine into his legs; his leg muscles spasmed and his eyelids fluttered, his brain and vision charged with oxygen, his nerves under assault.

  “Don’t worry, Peter Givens, don’t worry,” T. J. whispered, more to himself than to me. For the time being, he wanted to be good to me. He passed up his chance to seed my imagination with the terror of bisexual betrayal.

  T.J. stood up from the wicker chair. “You want some breakfast, Pete?”

  “Sure.” We walked out of the cabin and up a short hill to the main house. I started singing in DT’s Alabama drawl.

  “I had a boa constrictor wrapped ’round my neck.

  The long black sucker was chokin’ me to death.

  If I don’t die before I wake, I swear to God…’’

  T.J. joined me on the chorus:

  “I’m gonna hang that heavy lovin’ Snakelady.”

  We sang together like plantation Negroes. T.J. and I were close enough to feel each other’s body heat, like radiators. I guess the DT concert was the social event of my life.

  Moonshot and John Bragg were in the house when we got there. We crowded into the kitchen and cooked eggs, bacon, English muffins. T.J. made pancakes, really good ones. We sat on the outdoor terrace and stuffed ourselves under the morning sun.

  Moonshot interrupted the munching and chomping, his mouth full of English muffin. “So, T.J., when are your parents coming back?”

  “My dad’s playing in a golf tournament in Old Lyme. They should be back tonight.”

  I felt a chilled rush at the thought of meeting Mr. Adams. Jerrett William Adams. How could I not be excited? T.J. had talked about his father often: “My father says you can get anything in life if you go after it,” “My dad will kill me if I get a C in calculus,” or “People are afraid of my father.” I couldn’t help but be scared myself.

  I had come so far from my pointless obsession with Cady Donaldson. From
reading about Cady’s father in Who’s Who in America to now, actually meeting T.J.’s dad. From searching on a roadmap for Cady’s hometown to spending the night in the cabin where the Adams boys had slept as children. I imagined eight-year-old T.J. playing hide-and-go-seek under the cabin rafters with big brother Jeffrey, who was starting to think this game was silly. I thought of them sleeping together, nestled under blankets on those cool summer nights when their father would let them camp out in the cabin. T.J. loved his brother so much, spoke of him so often. I speculated about incestuous longings, but rejected the thought. Still, their brotherly love was so beautiful it saddened me and thrilled me.

  We spent the day swimming at the home of the Peck family, friends of T.J. in Point O’ Woods. A beautiful woman in her forties whom I’d met at spring commencement recognized me by the pool and came out to say hello. She told me she was spending August with the Pecks. T.J. acted snooty and affected in front of the Peck sisters by the poolside; I’d never seen him act that way before. I wondered how well I knew him.

  We drove back to T.J.’s house in the late afternoon. Mrs. Adams was on the back patio preparing hamburgers for dinner. She was wearing a white-spotted dress, and she’d cut her hair short since the last time I’d visited. Seeing her again, I could see Jeffs smile in her nearly skeletal face and the tightly drawn corners of her eyes; the features were more attractive as part of Jeffs sporty, Nordic mystique.

  T.J.’s father came out through the screen door. Mr. Adams was wearing a white sports shirt unbuttoned halfway down the chest and beige slacks. He was a tall, full-bodied main; his gene for height had evidently bypassed his children. His arms, tanned to bronze, were covered with curly white hair. He walked first towards Ron, smiling, and shook his hand fondly. “Howdy, Moonshot,” he said, his voice a scraping baritone. I hadn’t known that Ron had ever been to T. J.’s home before.

  Mr. Adams sat in a patio chair next to his wife and crossed his legs at the knee. T. J. sat behind us by the grill, turning burger patties, his legs crossed like his father’s. I studied Mr. Adams with an almost primal intensity. This man was the source of my boyfriend’s life, I thought. This man had molded T. J. into someone I could love.

  He said very little, sipping a martini and smiling to himself while Mrs. Adams talked continuously. (T.J.’s big mouth was obviously inherited from his mother.) My head was still swimming from drinking too much, and her voice faded momentarily to an echo in the background. I could barely make out her speaking to T.J., something about how he ought to try waterskiing, he’d probably like it since he liked downhill. There was pressure in my ears, and then a pop.

  Mrs. Adams’s voice slipped back into the foreground. “Peter says he wants to go to Webster College, Jerrett.” T.J.’s father was an alumnus of my future college.

  “Oh, really,” Mr. Adams said, glancing over his shoulder to see how the burgers were doing. T.J.’s dad seemed bored and itchy — out of place in his own backyard. He reminded me of a hyperactive child in a rare moment of forced good behavior, deprived of his instincts and not knowing quite how to act or what to say.

  “You should hear Pete play the bass, Dad,” said T. J. Mrs. Adams reminded her husband of the time he got drunk and played tub bass at a party. Too seriously, I asked how he could control the pitch of a rubber band and broomstick. He smiled and looked downwards, embarrassed perhaps by the memory and by the stupidity of my question.

  In the many years since that summer I’ve learned that intelligent older people develop a heightened awareness, bordering on telepathy, over time. As a transparent sixteen-year-old, I couldn’t know what Mr. Adams really thought of me. I’m sure I was staring too intently, as was my habit at that age. I tried to visualize the nights that Jeff and then T. J. were conceived, the exact miraculous instant when their father brought his marvelous children into being. Did Mr. Adams sense my almost predatory fascination with him? Did he think I was just weird, or did he suspect I was sleeping with his son?

  He was distantly curious towards me, perhaps inquiring to himself what I was doing in his home. Why were there now two black boys from the ghetto eating hamburgers on his patio? He never looked directly at me; rather his eyes scanned blankly in my direction. He turned to Moonshot and whispered something to him I couldn’t hear.

  Mrs. Adams put her hand on her husband’s thigh, pressing a finger into the muscle. “Jerrett, come inside. I have to ask you something.”

  ‘‘Yes, dear,” he said with exaggerated weariness, smiling in Moonshot’s direction; I think he even winked at him as he stood up and followed his wife into the house.

  T.J. was still turning burgers on the grill. ‘‘How many you up for, Moonshot?” he asked.

  Moonshot was grinning secretively, chewing on a toothpick. He slouched back and put his foot up on an empty patio chair. ‘‘Just keep cooking,” he said.

  “How about you, Pete?”

  I hesitated before answering. Why had T.J. asked Ronnie first? “Two,” I murmured. T.J. beamed a smile in my direction.

  “Two?” said Moonshot. “I can eat at least five.”

  Something was burning under my collar. I wasn’t sure whether I was angry or tired. I stood up and stretched. “I’m going inside to wash my hands” I said.

  “Hurry back. They’re almost done,’’ said T.J.

  I walked through the screen door and across the living room to the bath. From inside, I could hear T.J.’s parents talking in the kitchen.

  “Well, I have to leave next Friday,’’ said Mr. Adams.

  “I’ll just have to let them know,” said his wife. I turned on the water to wash, drowning them out. When I turned the faucet off, I could hear them again.

  “Who is this new fellow?” It was Mr. Adams speaking.

  “The quiet boy?”

  “Right. Not Moonshot, the other one.”

  “He’s been here before. They’re very close, apparently.”

  “Doesn’t Tom have any white friends?”

  “Of course he does, Jerrett.”

  “It doesn’t seem a little strange to you? Always bringing black people to our house.”

  “No, it does not seem strange. They’re both good boys.”

  “Well, I like Moonshot. That other one, though. He’s got something on his mind.”

  I was sure I didn’t want to hear the rest of this conversation. I dried my hands quickly and hurried back outside. A minute later Mr. and Mrs. Adams came out and we started to eat. I only had one hamburger. Moonshot must have eaten ten.

  T.J. was calm and quiet through dinner, adopting his father’s strategic aloofness. After dinner, Mr. Adams drove off in his Porsche to his country club. T.J. asked his mother if he could take the air conditioner from the study. When she said no, he abruptly exploded, yelling that he wanted it and that Dad would let him have it. No warning, no precipitous incline to frenzy; just sudden black-scowled infant fury. Was T.J. crazy? I wondered if this was his father’s way of meeting resistance, and T.J. was only imitating his dad. Somehow I felt this was not an unusual scene in the Adams house. Mrs. Adams backed down and T. J. loaded the air conditioner into the trunk of his car, his tantrum immediately forgotten. We drove back to Briarwood, arriving on campus about a half hour after dark.

  15

  That night I had trouble sleeping. I tossed about for an hour, then sat up on my bed and looked out the window. The lawn was shimmering in a mix of black and dark green light. I rain my fingers across the chipped paint on the windowsill and listened to the wind rustling through the trees outside the dorm.

  I was thinking about Moonshot. Mr. Adams had liked Ronnie so much better than me. He’d barely acknowledged me, no more than politeness required, but he and Ronnie seemed like old buddies. “Howdy, Moonshot,” I kept hearing in my head. When had Moonshot ever been to T. J.’s house?

  This jealousy wasn’t new. I had always envied Ronnie’s personality. He always had T.J. laughing. And it wasn’t just comedy. I’d seen them many times having long conve
rsations under a tree on the lawn, or sitting with their backs to the fence on the tennis court, T.J. more peaceful than I’d ever seen him. I’d so often wondered what they were talking about.

  I was certain that T.J. liked Ronnie better than me erotically. Who could blame him? At times I thought Moonshot was created in a cauldron by a witch intent on forging a god of sex. He had that freaky, wiry, miscreated body — distorted like an African wood carving. And then, that dick. That construction ball of black flesh swinging over the toilet. It screamed out sex, it affected your brain. When Moonshot walked into the shower, you instinctively felt like bowing before him. How could I compete with black reptilian royalty?

  By morning I was delirious with jealousy. Moonshot had fucked my boyfriend. I just knew he’d screwed T.J. It hurt to dwell on it — the sights and the sounds — but I couldn’t Jettison the thought. I desperately wanted these feelings to go away. My jealousy felt like a permanent wound, like a lost arm or finger. What could I do to fix the situation? There had to be some way.

  I knew. I could sleep with Ronnie. It was the only way I could think of to restore my equilibrium. If I could have what T.J. had, if I could know what T.J. felt in Ronnie’s bed, that would make us equal again, and everything would be right.

  T.J. knocked on my door that morning and asked if I wanted to go to breakfast. I said yes, though I felt like a beggar taking alms. As we walked to the dining hall, I kept zigzagging towards and away from him — close enough to feel his warmth, then away to the edge of the path. T.J. didn’t notice my ambivalence. He was in a good mood this morning, yapping away about the concert and Susie Blomberg and the summer program kids. I didn’t say much, but I was starting to feel a little better. I might have even smiled. I listened as T.J.’s skittering brain sent random thoughts to his mouth in rapid-fire sequence. He was such a screwball, sometimes, I thought. No wonder I loved him so much.