Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  El

  trae

  la

  verga

  bien

  parada.

  He tries to have a very good parade.

  It means, Flaco said, “He has a good hard-on.”

  I was glad it was dark because not only were my ears red, I think my whole body was red. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say, what words. Plus I was waiting to see if I was going to barf or not. But then again what do you say to two men you had a hard-on in front of? I was as surprised as you? Who knew? Please don’t think I am weird.

  And then I said it.

  Please don’t think I am a queer, I said.

  Queer, such a loud word. Soon as I said queer, I wanted to capture it in the air and cup it back into my mouth.

  Queer? Flaco said. What is queer?

  Oh jeez.

  You know, I said. A homo.

  Homo? Flaco said.

  Homo, Acho said.

  What is homo? Flaco said, almost yelled.

  Fuck.

  Shh! I said. Not so loud.

  It’s only the cows, Flaco said, and us.

  I grabbed the Winstons in Acho’s red shirt pocket and had me a cigarette out and lit in no time. I hunkered down so far into myself I almost disappeared.

  Flaco and Acho were looking me in the face. The night wasn’t dark anymore. It was bright, way bright, moon bright, and Flaco was on one side of me and Acho on the other. Both of them staring, staring at me.

  Acho slapped me on the back and the smoke came out in one big silver billow.

  A man who does it with men, I said.

  Does it? Both Flaco and Acho said, Does it?

  Has sex, I said. Makes love, I said. You know, a man who has sex with other men.

  Beer and cake in my stomach. The smell of burnt plastic. Oh my heavens pretty woman so far.

  Then: Fuck, I said. A man who fucks other men.

  Now that I look back on it, you know, I don’t think I really knew what queer and homo actually meant until that moment when I spoke the words out loud.

  Flaco and Acho were trying to get air, they were laughing so hard. Snorting, coughing, they were clinging onto each other, jumping around the straw stack like jackrabbits. My breath started to go, and my arms had the weak feeling in them.

  But you are not a queer, Flaco said. He said the word queer careful so he could hear the word in his mouth.

  A queer, Flaco said, is a puto or maricón.

  Ma-ree-con, Flaco said real slow.

  A maricón is a man with a cock and balls, Flaco said. But really he is a woman.

  Acho got up then, grabbed the cigarette from me, unbuttoned his shirt to the last two buttons, pulled his shirt down over his T-shirt shoulders like an evening gown décolletage. Acho walked through the spread straw, moving his shoulders and his ass like you see prostitute women in the movies walk in high heels. Acho puckered his lips and held his hand with the cigarette in it, wrist up, and his hand, the palm of his hand, trailed along.

  Flaco was, of course, laughing. Acho too. Then Flaco had to get in on the act, and Flaco pulled his shirt down like Acho’s décolletage, and they both walked, shaking their shoulders and their asses, running their hands through their hair, puckering their lips, their lips making sucking sounds.

  Ai! Ai! Ai!

  Oooh la la, chingada tu puta madre, maricón.

  Flaco reached down and grabbed his guitar. He started playing, long dramatic strums on the guitar wires. With each strum, Acho flipped his skirt and danced like a woman with a fan dancing flamenco.

  Come on, Eleanor Rigby John, Flaco said. Join us in the queer parade.

  Verga bien parada.

  Myself, I hadn’t dressed like a girl or acted like a girl for over five years and I’d be go to hell if I was going to start that again, so I put the beer to my lips and took a long, long drink, swallowed the whole damn bottle of beer.

  Who knows how long those two carried on that way, like girls, putas, maricóns, whooping and hollering, singing and dancing and shaking their asses. The beer was going to my head, and everything was loud laughing and fast Spanish. Up above, the moon, a gibbous moon, some kind of miracle hanging up there in the sky. The sun shining on the moon, the moon shining on the straw, sunlight on the moon, moonlight onto us dancing and drinking and singing, human damn fools.

  Gringo loco.

  Then somewhere around in there, out there, someone was out there grabbing me by the shoulder, saying something in my ear.

  It was Flaco.

  Flaco was back to being Flaco and no longer a puto maricón.

  Flaco’s dark eyes in the moonlight, so close to my eyes, I saw clean down to the Jesus inside his soul.

  Eleanor Rigby John, Flaco said. Where are you? Are you borracho so soon? Where have you gone?

  There were big tears in my eyes, and when I first started to speak I couldn’t speak.

  Finally: Where do all the lonely people come from?

  That smile of Flaco’s some kind of resurrection.

  From God, Flaco said.

  When Flaco said God, his whole flat palm cupped my shoulder. His palm rested on my shoulder with the intention of being on my shoulder. Then out of nowhere, Acho’s big calloused hand on top of my head rubbing my hair back and forth. The moon on their hands on my shoulder, on my head.

  Mira, negro, Flaco said to me.

  Negro.

  Moments of gesture.

  It is only natural running in the sun, Flaco said, and jumping in the water to be a hard penis. It happens to me all the time.

  Flaco spoke fast Spanish to Acho for a moment and then:

  All all all all the time hard-on in the sun, Flaco said, and the water running. It is only natural for a man. He feels good so he gets hard. Isn’t it beautiful?

  Beautiful. Friends loved one another, and my friends who loved me, their hands were on my shoulders, on my head, touching me.

  Beautiful.

  Sí, I said. Me gusta.

  Ai, cabrón, Flaco said. You are knowing so much Spanish!

  Oh my heavens pretty woman so far, Acho said.

  Quiet again all at once.

  At once, Flaco’s hand, Acho’s hand, their fingers, their arms, moved away. On my shoulders and my head still on my flesh in my bones the palms of their hands where they had touched me.

  We were out of words and each of us sat alone holding a beer, passing the cigarette, like when we hauled hay, all at once everybody talking, talking, then, just like that, the world tipped on its orbit just enough, or the moon got brighter or darker, or the sun went from high bright afternoon to the first gold of evening, or a comet passed somewhere above us, huge fire and brimstone roaring through space, and suddenly we were alone again and we didn’t touch and we sat quiet.

  So you liked our song? Flaco said.

  I didn’t say te amo this time.

  I loved your song, I said.

  Quiet again, way off no train, no cows, no crickets, just quiet.

  I got to say, though, I said, Eleanor is not a name for a boy. Eleanor is a girl’s name, and I thought you were calling me a girl.

  Flaco snapped his long fingers.

  So that’s why you thought we thought you were maricón, Flaco said.

  Well, that and the hard-on, I said.

  Then: Have you ever fucked a girl? Flaco said.

  Flaco’s question landed right on my heart. Something stung.

  The truth was, Scardino and his friends were all fucking girls. I was sixteen too like Scardino, and I hadn’t even wanted to fuck a girl. I knew I should want to fuck a girl, but the truth was I didn’t. Fucking was a sin, a mortal sin, same way as masturbating, but with masturbating it was just you abusing yourself, not anyone else.

  No, I said.

  Flaco said some fast Spanish to Acho, Acho said something back.

  Would you like to? Flaco said.

  I didn’t know what the fuck. There I was, a man, almost a man, and the thing a man mos
t wants to do, if he is any kind of man, is to fuck a woman.

  Sure, I said.

  Mira, Flaco said. Acho and I have met two girls.

  Thindy, Acho said. And Cricket.

  They are white girls, Flaco said.

  Flaco’s white teeth. Acho’s white teeth. Sun on the moon and moon on their teeth.

  When did you meet them? I said.

  In Pocatello, Flaco said. Last Saturday when my family went shopping in the town. Flaco took the cigarette, inhaled.

  Mira, Flaco said. There were two girls in the magazine section of the Wyz Way Market. Acho and I saw them and we went directly to them. Acho began to read Hot Rod and I True Confessions. Thindy has long, beautiful brown hair and was reading True Confessions also, and Cricket with short blondie hair was reading Seventeen. It is a small place where the magazines are, and as I read slowly I moved until my ass was touching Thindy’s ass. Thindy didn’t move. Then we started talking.

  Acho took the cigarette, put the cigarette between his lips. The cigarette bobbed up and down with Acho’s English.

  Thindy and Cricket, Acho said, love Mexican men. They want to fuck us tomorrow.

  Fuck us.

  Did they say that? I said.

  No, cabrón, Flaco said.

  And what Flaco said next he said while he flipped his index finger against his thumb and middle finger. Snap.

  But we know, Flaco said.

  How do you know? I said.

  Flaco, that smile of his.

  Because we are men, Flaco said. And we know.

  Perhaps we can ask Thindy and Cricket if they have a friend for you? Flaco said.

  They’re coming here tomorrow? I said. What time tomorrow?

  They have no car, Flaco said. And we have no car also, so they are hitchhiking. They will arrive here sometime in the afternoon.

  Will they walk through our yard? I said. Or cut through the field?

  Flaco spoke fast Spanish to Acho, Acho spoke back. Back and forth, back and forth, talking for a long time.

  They will be coming through in the yard, Flaco said.

  I took the cigarette. It was hot-boxed as always. I took the last puff. A long puff, all the way to the filter.

  Then Acho hit Flaco on the arm with his fist, and Flaco and Acho were laughing again.

  We will fuck them right here in the straw, Flaco said.

  The clock on the stove when I closed the kitchen door said eleven-fifteen. Inside the house was hotter than outside. Dad was snoring, or Mom. My room downstairs was a little cooler. Mom had opened both the windows wide, but there was no breeze. I took my clothes off, pulled the covers back, lay only on the sheet. Moonlight on the sheet.

  In the middle of the night, I was sweating and woke up. In my nightmare, all around me there was smoke and the straw stack was on fire.

  Sunday afternoon, it was about two-thirty when Mom turned the oven off, slipped the red-checkered oven muff over her hand, opened the oven door, and reached down and pulled the chicken out. Chicken grease and Crisco snapping and popping. On the stove, the spuds were boiling in the big kettle, in the little kettle, the string beans.

  Dad walked into the kitchen in his Sunday outfit, a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, Levi’s, and his boots. He was folding the Sunday Idaho State Journal.

  We sat down, a family, made the sign of the cross, bless us O Lord and these Thy fucking gifts and you know the rest. I got a drumstick and a wing. For dessert, we finished up the birthday cake.

  Then it was the sign of the cross after dinner, the prayer of thanksgiving, the sign of the cross again.

  Sis and I scraped the plates into the kitchen garbage bucket and stacked them. Mom started the hot water in the right side of the double sink and poured in two drops, only two drops and sometimes three drops, of Joy dishwashing liquid. Mom washed, and Sis and I dried. Dad went back into the front room to read the paper. He was snoring in no time.

  Mom filled the black skillet with water. Sis finished drying the last knife, the butcher knife. I was just finishing two dinner forks when I looked out the window.

  Just past the two corral poles, on the other side of the wagon wheel and the Austrian Copper rose, two people, two young people, two girls, Flaco and Acho’s two white girls, Thindy and Cricket, walked into our yard.

  Tramp started barking and in that moment everything stopped. The washing and the rinsing stopped, the drying and the wiping stopped. Mom shut the water off, and Dad quit snoring.

  I quit breathing.

  Mom’s almond-shaped hazel eyes under her glasses.

  Mary Margaret? Mom said. Rigby John? Do you know who those girls are?

  Sis was looking at me, eyes wide open, mouth open, that look that says, Holy shit.

  I quick gave her the furrowed brow, clenched teeth, shut-the-fuck-up look.

  Sis stayed with her eyes looking right at me. As her eyes scrutinized me, Sis said in her high singsongy, best Catholic schoolgirl voice: No, Mom, I don’t know who they are.

  Still no breath inside me.

  I’ll go out and see, I said.

  And before anybody had the chance to say Arbeit macht frei, I was down the steps and out the back door.

  As I walked out on the sidewalk, Tramp came to my side, and I patted his head. It’s OK, boy, I said, but really who knows what I said, it was so trippy walking out to meet the two girls, Thindy and Cricket, who Flaco and Acho were going to fuck in the straw. There I was, one foot on the sidewalk, then the other, getting closer and closer to Thindy and Cricket, while my mother and my father and my sister stood at the windows and looked out the windows at me.

  As I got closer to Thindy and Cricket, a horrible feeling started coming up inside me. Thindy and Cricket were two girls from Pocatello High School. I recognized them right off. Who wouldn’t. The whole town knew them.

  They made Puke Price look like Steve McQueen.

  Thindy and Cricket were what everybody who was anybody in Pocatello steered clear of, never spoke to, wouldn’t be caught dead with, who nobody knew the real names of, and knew only either as the Slit Sisters, or by their particular names of Sewage and Slut.

  For the longest time, I called them the Slip Sisters. Then Sis made fun of me and told me it was Slit, you dumb shit. And I said, What is slit? And Sis told me.

  One story goes, Sewage fucked Scardino in the back seat of his ’59 El Camino in the Dead Steer Drive-In on a Saturday night while a group of boys stood around the car watching.

  In another story, Slut took on a whole fraternity at Idaho State University, Phi Sigma Epsilon, doggy-style, up on Pocatello Creek.

  And not only were these girls nasty. They were ugly, and they were weird. Sewage wore high heels and ankle socks and nylons with a seam in them and big full skirts with lots of petticoats, red petticoats. Slut always tried to look like Sewage, or maybe it was the other way around, so that was pretty much how Slut dressed too. The differnce between them was Sewage wore cat’s-eye glasses and had long brown hair that came down in ringlets, and Slut was blond, with hair cut short. She looked like a boy who pierced her ears.

  That Sunday, Thindy white, Cricket light blue, in Peter Pan collars and big, wide, white shiny belts that looked like marshmallows with gold buckles, and the both of them with those little shell sweaters with beads on the shoulders and down the fronts, came around the blue spruce, stopped in their tracks, and took a good long look at me.

  The wind was blowing Thindy’s long brown hair, but Cricket didn’t have to worry because she didn’t have any hair. Necklaces, charms on the necklaces, and Thindy with her cat’s-eye glasses with rhinestones at the tips. Cricket with tiny gold loops punctured into the flesh of her ears.

  There was a moment there when all there was in the world was wind and sun and the scratching of petticoats against nylon hose.

  Then Slut, I mean Cricket, shaking her head so her earrings shimmered, said: Hello there, cute boy, she said. What is your name?

  Her earrings went right into her e
arlobes. I wondered if it hurt having pierced ears.

  Rigby John, I said.

  Cricket took a step toward me, but Tramp growled, and I moved one foot back and stood mostly on that foot.

  I’m Cricket, Cricket said. This is Cindy.

  Thindy.

  We’re looking for Flaco and Acho, Thindy said. Do they live here?

  I pointed with my arm to the east, up past the wood granary, down the lane to the boxcars.

  Just follow the lane, I said. When you get to the boxcars, turn left, then turn right after the cattle guard. Keep walking, and you’ll see their house up by the feedlots.

  From the windows I looked like I was doing what I was doing: talking to two girls, pointing, but what I was really doing was trying to figure out a way I could explain to my mother and father what the Slit Sisters were doing in our front yard.

  The long walk back into the house, up the stairs. I put my hand around the kitchen doorknob, turned. My body slipped through the door, and the kitchen door closed behind me.

  Behind me the Slit Sisters, in front of me the Inquisition.

  It was the first time ever I decided to lie to Mom and Dad, and since it was my first time, I decided it had better be fucking good.

  They’re missionaries with some church, I said. They want to help Mexicans.

  Mom’s almond-shaped hazel eyes looked over her glasses at me. The wrinkles that started up her forehead.

  Dad was glaring too like a Hereford steer. Drut.

  I didn’t even look at Sis. Sis was way too much to look at.

  First Church of God in Christ or something like that, I said, Baptists who think Mexicans are equal and want to convert them.

  Sis spun around so fast I thought she’d fall over. She was out of the kitchen in a split second.

  There I stood on a blue tile. Mom mostly on a white tile, Dad on a white tile. The light coming in the window made her hair look really gray.

  Baptists? Dad said. What are Baptists doing in this country?

  That’s when Mom started.

  I’ve told you some of the things that I could make Mom do. Well, there were some things she could make me do too. And she started to do one of those things she can make me do right then.

  The eyes, always the eyes. It’s like she turns a huge floodlight behind them on, and in the floodlight you disappear, and all that’s left of you is the big fat lie you’re telling.