Boys of Summer

by Steve Berman

  “Your eyes, my dear. I don’t trust my own. We wish to be sure there are no fragments of glass or splinters in Luke’s wounds. Tweezers, if you find anything.”

  She’s not simply holding his hand, Luke realizes: she’s clamped fingers and thumb tight around his wrist in a kind of flesh-and-bone tourniquet. He wonders, should he be worried?

  Breathing thinly through his teeth, Levent squints over Luke’s palm, swabbing up blood with a wad of cotton, probing gently with fingertips, then the pointed tips of a pair of bright steel tweezers. There’s a momentary wince when he pulls something out of Luke’s flesh but whatever it is so small Luke can’t see it. Levent goes back to work.

  Now nausea begins to rumble in Luke’s belly and a fog of some kind of great weariness creeps up his unnaturally extended arm. If his tears nurtured vines within the fossil flesh of the mummy in his dream, he wonders, what would blood provoke?

  “Ow,” says Levent.

  Luke blinks back to alertness.

  “What is it, dear?”

  Levent doesn’t reply. Wielding the tweezers with the wrong fingers, thumb and middle, he picks out another invisible fragment and drops it into Roisin’s free, open hand. “I believe that’s all,” he mutters, peering hard, then sets the tweezers aside. His fingers are gummy, rusty with thick stains. “Luke Bey’s hand needs to be washed. Then we can look again.”

  “Yours too,” Luke blurts just as Levent sucks the bloody index finger into his mouth. Roisin lets out a little gasp and Luke, angry with himself, says, “You cut yourself!”

  When Levent withdraws his finger it’s not really clean, filmed with saliva and diluted blood, but cleaner than the others. Knuckles left red smudges on his chin. He regards the index finger’s tip for a moment, his expression blank, and mutters, “A minuscule scratch.”

  “Let me see.”

  Levent smiles—not the grin that turns Luke into a quivering pile of yearning, just a twitch of the lips that’s somehow more affecting. “Of course, Luke Bey.” A tiny bead of blood forms on the pad of the finger Levent’s showing Luke before it dissolves into red feathers penetrating the slick of spit. “See? It’s nothing.”

  Roisin hmmphs and releases Luke’s wrist. “Go wash your hands, boys,” she says, pushing Luke away—into Levent’s arms.

  As Levent helps him upright, Luke sees the thing he must have tripped over. Kicked nearly into the scuppers, the flat basket had scattered crumbs of earth across the deck, but not much. Less than two days after he watched the seeds sown, the basket’s already crowded with seedlings, their roots knitting the soil in place. Then Roisin moves into his sightline, hiding the thing. “Tread carefully, boys. Watch for more glass. I’ll clean it up in a moment.”

  It can’t have taken any time at all. Perhaps glasses are always being broken aboard the Esin. Altan Efendi didn’t come running from the bridge to see what was up, Perla and Sam didn’t pop out the door Levent’s leading Luke through, his steady arm strong around Luke’s back, holding him upright as though he was unsteady.

  He is unsteady. It’s just a scratch, a couple of scratches. He’s unsteady because Levent is holding him. He’s unsteady because Levent licked his blood, both their blood, off his finger. Sucked the finger into his mouth like it was something else.

  Unexpectedly, Levent half pushes Luke right past the galley. At the top of the companionway, Luke almost balks but then clatters down, half dragging Levent after, and pushes open the door of the little head next to his cabin. There isn’t really room for two full-sized people inside, so Luke has to practically climb onto the toilet lid before Levent can close the door behind them. Clambering down, he wonders, hopeful, why the door needs to be closed, and pulls a mad notion from the back of his mind. “Let me see your finger again.”

  Just reaching for the faucet, Levent hesitates. His lips tilt into the unearthly, close-mouthed smile and he lifts his right hand. Before Luke quite sees the tiny jewel-like blob of blood, before he’s quite sure what he’s going to do, the finger’s sliding between his lips.

  It doesn’t really taste like blood. He doesn’t think it does. Salty.

  Levent’s eyes narrow a bit and his smile widens just enough to reveal the wet pearls of lower teeth. In Luke’s mouth, the finger twists, scratching at his tongue. Lower, outside his mouth, Levent’s thumb pushes into the fleshy spot under Luke’s chin. Slowly, Luke’s face is drawn forward. This time they’re really going to kiss.

  “Let’s wash up, Luke Bey,” Levent says, voice low and amused, and Luke realizes he’s about to plaster a bloody palm print on Levent’s chest.

  The finger pulls free with a liquid slurp.

  Shoulder to shoulder, they wash their hands under trickles of tepid water. The soap stings Luke’s wounds. Levent makes sure he does a thorough job. When Luke’s hand is clean, the tiny cuts welling sluggish blood, Levent inspects it meticulously. He finds no more glass. Before he smears it with antibiotic ointment (Luke hadn’t noticed him bringing the first-aid kit with him) and mummifies it in cotton gauze, he raises the palm to his lips and kisses it. “I feel your accident was my fault,” he murmurs.

  Luke can’t process the suggestion, as ludicrous as it is accurate, and merely gapes while Levent tends to his hand. Levent’s fault? Because he’s distractingly beautiful and Luke’s an infatuated klutz? A glimpse of pastel colors prompts him. “Tell me about your tattoos,” he blurts, desperate.

  “My flowers?” Levent turns up his left forearm as if to inspect the tattoos himself, faintly surprised by their blossoming under his skin. “They’re pretty, aren’t they?”

  They grow up from the tangle of blue veins at his wrist, five sinuous stems intertwined with shorter stems of foliage like Italian parsley, each surmounted by a single open blossom: lavender, white, blue, pale blushy pink, blue again. “We call them mountain tulip, dağ lalesi, though they aren’t tulips. I don’t know the English name.”

  “Anemone,” Luke says, certain now.

  “Really? We have a flower called anemon. It’s similar, I suppose, not as showy, and it blooms in the spring, not summer like these.”

  “One variety of anemone—the prettiest.” Luke grazes one of the blue blossoms with the tip of a finger. Its purple-black center gleams, surrounded by a corona of blue-black stamens. Levent’s skin is warm. “Or windflower. That’s the antique English name, because the petals bruise so easily. You don’t have a red one.”

  “Not yet.”

  Something’s happening. Levent’s other hand’s coming up, open and defenseless as a windflower, to brush fingertips against Luke’s stubbly cheek. “There’s a story about the red flowers,” he says, eyes still lowered, “an old, sad, Greek story.”

  Luke wonders if the tiny cut on Levent’s index finger is still open, painting his own cheek with filaments of red. “The blood of Adonis.”

  Unsurprised, Levent raises his eyes, his chin. They kiss.

  They jump apart when heavy footsteps sound on the companionway outside the closed door and Luke’s dad says, “Luke? We’re all waiting.”

  “Sor—” Luke can’t get in a breath. “Sorry, Dad. Just a minute.”

  Sam’s feet thunder back up the stairs. Levent’s grinning at Luke, as if they were merely friends, before he turns to latch and heft the first-aid kit.

  “Kiss me again,” Luke demands.

  “Your parents and my employers are waiting.”

  “Kiss me again.”

  “Very well. With great pleasure.”

  *

  Sam and Perla and Levent swim ashore but Luke’s ordered into the dinghy with Altan Efendi and Roisin Hanım. He feels clumsy, the hand bandaged into a useless paw so he couldn’t row if they needed him to—they don’t, Altan powers up the noisy outboard—and gazes yearningly after Levent’s supple golden back and flutter-kicking feet. That luscious ass, his trunks the same scarlet as an anemone’s petals. Two brief kisses. No tongue, even. Barely an embrace.

  It’s hardly a moment before Altan groun
ds the dinghy prow-first on the beach. Luke’s no help fetching out the cooler and baskets, not even spreading the beach blanket. “How did this happen?” his dad wants to know, inspecting the white gauze wrapped around his son’s hand.

  Luke’s relieved not to see any blood spots seeping through. He imagines Roisin has already told the story and Sam only wants confirmation. “I tripped and broke a glass and fell on it. It’s not much, really. Lev—” It’s hard to say the name without making it a revelation, as if his friend were just anybody. “Levent overdid the bandages. It’ll be fine tomorrow, just scabs.”

  Salt water drips from Sam’s hair onto the gauze, darkening it. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Okay.” Sam squeezes, then releases the bandaged hand. “Let’s have lunch.”

  After they eat, a bewildering array of savory finger foods (some, Roisin confesses, from cans), and drink (Turkish beer for the grown-ups, sour-cherry juice for the boys), Altan and Levent ferry baskets and cooler and dirty dishes back to the gulet. Talking—what about? Luke wonders, then stops wondering—Perla and Roisin wander along the beach, Perla in her swimsuit splashing through the shallows while Roisin Hanım on dry sand is still wearing a shirt and white pants. Is her modesty, if it is modesty, Turkish or Irish, Luke wonders, Muslim or Catholic?

  Looking away, he stops wondering. The Esin floats serenely at anchor on the blue bay. Tethered to its flank, the dinghy wallows when substantial Altan Efendi clambers down into it, casts off, steers back toward the beach. No Levent. Washing dishes in the galley, presumably. Disappointed, Luke sighs.

  “Are you having a good time, Lukey?” Sam asks.

  “Huh?” For a second, more than a second, Luke doesn’t hear the question, doesn’t recognize it’s a question. “Yeah! Absolutely.” He remembers something about his dad. “I don’t even remember…wotzisname.” He does remember Douglas. Fondly, even. He’s not an utter amateur because of Douglas. Risking a glance, he sees Sam doesn’t appear convinced. “Thanks for not leaving me with Mom and Roger for two weeks, Dad, really.”

  A crease folds the skin between Sam’s eyebrows. “They’re rather…unevolved, aren’t they?”

  “They don’t believe in evolution. Let’s not talk about them. What about you? You and Perla. I’m not getting in the way too much, am I? I mean, it’s your honeymoon.”

  Sam shakes his head, a don’t-worry-about-it shake. “You and Levent seem to have made friends pretty quick.”

  Luke persuades himself not to gulp or blush, not to look away from his father’s regard. “Like Perla says, they’re friendly people, the Turks. And he’s a great guy, Dad. Really bright. Smarter than me, I bet, I can barely speak English”—Luke’s best grades and SAT scores, his only admirable grades, are in English—“let alone a second language. He’s going to college this fall, you know.”

  “That’s good.” In Sam’s world every young person should go to college.

  “In the States, Dad. Berkeley. Half a mile from our house.”

  Sam’s eyes widen.

  “So, like, it’s not just these few days on the boat. He’ll need friends in California. I like Levent a lot, Dad, and I think he likes me.”

  Sam shakes his head, an I-was-afraid-of-that shake. “Lukey, look—” Another shake, and Sam squeezes his eyes shut for an instant. “That way, Luke? Do you think you like him that way?”

  Luke blinks. He hates when Sam talks to him like he was a little kid. It makes him angry and rash. “Levent is extremely handsome, Dad, he has a really great body, of course I’m attracted to him.” He’s attracted to me, too. He kissed me. Twice.

  Looking intent and fierce, protective, like a papa bear, Sam reaches for Luke’s arm, the wrist of his good hand. “His tattoos, Luke. Five flowers, here—” He traces their position on the flesh of Luke’s forearm. “Altan Efendi told me, he was proud of the boy. One flower for each of the foreign tourist girls he fooled around with over the last five summers aboard the Esin. I don’t want your heart broken again, Lukey.”

  “Oh.” He can’t think. It wasn’t broken the first time you thought it was, he thinks.

  “I’m sorry, baby. Better to know, though, right?”

  He kissed me. Perla didn’t say anything about Turkish BFFs kissing each other, just holding hands and hugging. “Yeah, I guess.” He musters up some bravado. “Well, you know, I do have a couple of straight guy friends. Who’re good-looking enough I’d be willing to fool around with them if they were interested. So it’s like that. Levent’s still going to need a friend in Berkeley. It’s fine.”

  “Is it?”

  Of course it’s not, you stupid man. The thought makes him feel bad as soon as it forms. He loves his dad. Sam loves him, cares for him, as he is, imperfect and dumb and gay, not as he should be. “It’s fine, Dad. I’m fine. You want to go for a swim?”

  “Your hand?”

  Luke’s already tearing off the gauze Levent wound with too much, with false, care. “Salt water’s good for little cuts.”

  *

  Dozing on the warm beach afterward, all sunscreened up (the stuff stung in his cuts worse than the sea’s salt), Luke seems to recall another ominous dream. Dripping blood-warm salt water, he had clambered out of the cove onto the rocky, scrubby flank of one of the small islands. Any moment he expected to reach its crest and gaze out over the wine-dark Aegean. (Wine dark. What did that mean exactly?) But he kept scrambling and the moment never came. After a while he ceased smelling the sea, only the salt crust on his skin dissolving as he sweated. Salt made the scents of the dry brush he blundered through, the green herbs he trod on, more vivid and strange.

  Suddenly he seemed to hear voices and rushed ahead. Suddenly he was running up a narrow, rutted alley instead of a hillside, with tall, plastered, windowless walls on either side, packed earth and pebbles underfoot. The voices came from overhead, yelling, keening, women’s voices: We mourn. We mourn him, cut down in youth and beauty. He tried to halt, to look up for the grieving women, but found he couldn’t. As he ran up the steepening street, panting, baskets and terra-cotta dishes began to fall from the sky—from the tops of the walls. Dirt scattered from the vessels as they struck the street, dirt and the wilted plants that had been rooted in them.

  Something hit him in the back of the neck and he fell to his knees, crying aloud. But now the street had vanished, or he had vanished from it: his knees crushed fragrant green grasses and all around him ghostly white anemones bloomed, bobbing on their long, springy stems. He plucked from the grass a shard of red terra-cotta, its surface crusted with dried soil engraved with the hair-thin worm tracks of countless roots. Littered across the grass were clumps of dying or dead young plants, earth still clinging to their roots, limp and yellowed as if they were rotting or dried out, grey.

  He heard laughter, masculine laughter. It was familiar, he thought. It was Levent, he was certain.

  When he rose and saw the youth standing at a little distance in the meadow of white anemones, leaning on a tall wooden staff, he nearly ran, calling, but remembered what his father had told him. Levent, if it was Levent—his back was turned, his naked ass as spectacular as Luke had imagined—was not alone.

  One woman wore black, not black clothing but darkness, the other brilliance. They were arguing in voices like harsh, incomprehensible thunder, not with the young man before them but each other, and the subject of their argument—Luke couldn’t doubt it—kept laughing, scornful. At last, he seemed to shrug, said something low and bitter, and began to turn away.

  Both women roared. Luke didn’t see how it happened. Instead of two unearthly women, a single enormous beast coughed, suddenly impaled on the tip of the youth’s staff—his spear. It scrabbled at the ground with its hooves, tearing up soil and grass and pebbles, grunting horribly as it forced the lance deeper into its chest. Small eyes gleamed red and red blood drooled around its tusks. Although its foot was anchored in the ground, the youth could barely hold his spear as the huge boar—or wa
s it a sow?—made it bow and tremble.

  The spear splintered. Unprepared, the sow nearly stumbled before her stumble became a rush. The youth laughed again before her sharp teeth opened his flank.

  “No!” Luke yelled, waking himself up.

  We mourn. We mourn him, cut down in youth and beauty.

  All the white anemones flushed blood red.

  *

  It’s hard to be cold toward Levent, especially because he keeps seeing his friend ripped open by the wild pig’s tusks, but Luke has a certain amount of self-respect and manages somehow. Despite Levent’s obvious confusion and hurt. After the long sail into dusk and then night to the next anchorage, after the very late supper, before Perla and Sam finish their coffee and Turkish white wine, Luke excuses himself and goes belowdecks. Angry with himself for being taken in, with Levent for encouraging his stupid delusion, he undresses, brushes his teeth, climbs into the narrow bunk.

  Can’t sleep. The stifling cabin still smells pukey. He’ll never sleep again.

  A very long while later, he hears his dad and stepmother come down the companionway. He knows it’s them—they pass the door of his cabin to enter the honeymoon suite, not much bigger than his cabin and oddly shaped, the bed triangled into the Esin’s pointed prow. Then, louder, Altan Efendi’s tramping feet, turning at the bottom of the stairs toward crew quarters in the stern. Luke thinks, can’t be sure, he hears Roisin Hanım’s lighter tread echoing her husband’s. He waits, counting seconds in his head until he loses track, then waits longer. Everybody aboard must be asleep.

  Barefoot and naked, Luke slips off the bunk and eases his door open. Trailing the fingers of both hands along the bulkheads to either side, he tiptoes through the dark, manages not to stub a toe on the lowest step, climbs the companionway to the deckhouse. Still no lights. First he goes to the forward windows and peers through. Moonlight and starlight just suffice to reveal the slumbering lump of Levent on the starboard sunbed.

  Coming out the deckhouse door, Luke’s distracted by the smell of something stronger than the Aegean’s salt—something green. The keklikotu? He doesn’t think he’s ever smelled fresh oregano, only dried from the shakers on the tables in pizza joints. It’s not that, not as sharp and unpleasant until cooking tames it, more like lawns and January meadows after rain.