by J. G Hayes
“Then we just stared at each other. I felt like I was falling into her eyes. The longer we stared, the more we … the more we both knew. And then … and then …”
—I was shaking again just to remember it, the way it had been that night—
“And then she … reached out and touched me.”
“Holy shit,” Paul mumbled.
“Where?” Sully asked.
“On my lips,” I said. I closed my eyes. “My lower lip. Her eyes never left mine. But she raised up her hand, slowly. This look came into her face that made my heart stop, like all the joy and all the sorrow of the world mixed together. What a chance she was taking. You can’t understand. She extended her finger. I could see it out of the corner of my eye, coming in close. Coming, coming. She touched my lower lip, gentle like a snowflake falling onto another snowflake on somebody’s windshield.
“‘Is that okay?’ she murmured.
“‘Oh Jesus. Who … who are you’ was all I could say, losing my breath.
“‘Terry,’ she said, but what I really meant was ‘Where do you come from? Who are you? What the hell do you see in me?’ You know, all the questions we ask when love, when anything good, finally comes our way. We just can’t believe it, so we throw it away. But I knew this was too big for even me to throw away—”
“Lights out, gentlemen!”
Even I jumped this time. Ed looked up at the clock on the wall like he couldn’t believe it was 10:00 already; none of us could.
“Fuck, ” Fitzy said.
“Tomorrow night?” The other guy from next door asked, getting up, arranging his stiff dick in his sweatpants.
“Tomorrow night,” I said. I headed for the bathroom while Paul put the chairs away. Sully was going to hit the head too, but he stopped short when he saw me.
“You go first, bud,” he said. Which wasn’t really like him.
AFTER THE NOONTIME meeting the next day, I spent my one hour of Independent Study in a deserted corner of the library, reading The Art of Tale-Telling and It Pays to Increase Your Vocabulary. I picked a sunny corner. I just wanted to make sure I got the story right. I was only just beginning myself to realize the power of Terry Love. Amusement. Audacious. Auspicious. Adroit.
The last fifteen minutes of my free hour I wrote a letter to Terry.
I’m telling them about you here. Telling them all about you. If you still feel the same way, if you really meant what you said, I’m getting out of here in a month. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. If you still mean what you said, let me know.
THERE WERE NINE in the room later that night. Fitzy wanted to charge a two-buck admission but Paul told him to forget about it. Fitzy made his bed before everyone showed up, and even took a shower and shaved. Sully came back from his jog with these orange-berried vines and stuck them in a glassful of water on one of the windowsills. Fitzy watched with amusement from his bed, but when he opened his mouth to make a wisecrack I gave him a look to keep him quiet. An audacious look, it was kinda audacious.
“Maybe they’d look better in that glass jar on the bookshelf instead o’ that plastic cup, Sull,” I said.
“They would?” Sully asked.
“WHERE WERE WE?” I asked.
“On the train tracks,” Paul said instantly. His arms were crossed so tight and his knee bouncing so rapidly I thought he was in danger of losing his limbs at any minute. His limbs looked stiff and not at all adroit.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said.
That had been our first night together and the experience was still too … too something to talk about. Too hot, too raw. Too fiery. It had whacked me to my foundations. I was still hearing the echoes.
“Aw, man!” Fitzy’s groan was the only one I could make out above the general tumult that followed. My hand, raised up slow, silenced them all.
“I’ll tell you about the garden,” I said.
“You did it in the garden?” Sully gasped.
“They did, you know,” I heard Fitzy telling one of the neighbors lowly. “In the kitchen, too. They fuckin’ did it everywhere.”
“What’s the difference,” I said. “What’s the difference between spring and summer? It can be just as hot in May as it is in August.”
Nine squirming faces looked at mine.
“It’s in the nights donchaknow,” I said. “It’s all in the nights. It’s like three seasons out of the year, you’re in a box. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, Terry’s!” Fitzy joked.
“Shutup, Fitz,” Paul murmured.
“You’re in a hot room, and then you walk into another hot room, and then you run out to your car and start it up and turn the heat on … you just move from box to box. Start feeling … strangulated or something. But in the summer—the windows are open, the doors are open. You just pass from the inside to the outside and back again. The whole world is your box, you know? You can breathe. Your skin feels better. The crickets. Everything.
“They had this community garden up there—”
“We used to throw the horse shit on it in the winter,” Sully said, pulling his finger down from his nose.
“In between the main dormitory and the chapel, and out back a bit. Shady Oaks is on a hill, and the wind’s always blowing, especially in winter, but this garden was protected by a wall of bushes, like three stories high.”
“Yeah,” Paul remembered.
“Planted on the north side of the garden and the two sides like. So you couldn’t really see behind you when you were working in the garden. But looking out—anyone remember that view? How unbelievable? Way up high, and protected, and the whole world thrown out before you, rolling hills and valleys and farms and what have you. Anyway, it was one of my favorite places to be. That was probably the chore up there I liked best. We only had to be in the garden like one day a week, but I used to trade my days with some of the other guys who hated it out there, so I’d be there three days a week. It was amazing; every day I’d go out there and something new had happened. Something had grown a foot, and something else had started bearing fruit… I don’t know. I loved it. But this night turned out to be quite auspicious.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Fitzy chorused.
“Something happened. It was a night to remember,” Paul explained rapidly. “Shut the fuck up, Fitz.”
“It was one of these summer nights after Lights Out, but I couldn’t sleep—way too hot. It was the full moon that night, or close enough that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t. I was lying in my bed, sweating—I had the top bunk and all the heat in the room was stuck up by the ceiling—and I was watching the moonlight on the floor, like … spilled silver. Shifting, rolling. Like milk. Then there’d be like a cloud smudge, and the light would fade, it would be pitch-dark in a heartbeat. Then all bright again. Finally I got up, a lather of sweat. I pulled on a pair of gym shorts and my sneakers and decided to pop out for a breath of air.”
“Don’t worry. It’s gonna get real good,” I heard Paul whisper to the guy next to him, who I didn’t know. He was from some room down the hall.
“My eyes really didn’t get used to the dark until I slipped behind the hedge and came out into the garden. And then I could see what had been smudging the light out. These big navy and gray clouds were sailing across the sky. Slow, slow, like them huge oil barges we’d see out in the harbor, remember them? And as they’d float across the moon, these cloud-ships would change colors, it was like they went into an X-ray machine and you could see at last what they were made of. Not navy and gray at all, but blue, and white, and yellow at the edges, and everything would get pitch-dark when they came to the middle. And then that particular one would pass, and the world was all silver again. Except for the shadows, which were so black they were purple.
“It was when the light came out again that I saw her. Terry. She wasn’t there when the moon went in, but when it came out she was standing there, right at the edge of the garden. Straight and tall and stil
l as the corn plants, which were shoulder high by then. The moon was behind her. When it came out, it lit up her shoulders, the sides of her hair, it like silhouetted her. And I… I started to Believe again.”
I paused.
“Believe?” Fitzy asked. “Believe in what?”
Everybody raised their head to me. They held their breaths.
“Everything,” I said again.
Fitzy opened his mouth to say Bullshit, I could see the lips gather to make and thrust that “b” sound out into this world. But instead he paused and his breathing grew nostril-flarey.
I should say that Fitzy is a cynic.
When Fitzy was a kid people used to stop his mother—who was kinda a hippie-freak and had let Fitzy’s hair grow long—to tell her her little kid in the stroller looked just like The Light of the World, some baby picture of Jesus some artist painted. One time when he got busted for DUI, there was a lady cop there and as they shoved Fitzy into the back of the cruiser she recognized him and said, “Hey, I remember when you were The Light of the World.”
Fitzy looked up at her handcuffed, shitfaced, and said, “You got the wrong light, lady.”
You begin to understand Jesus during that moment of moments when you are not so gently get-in-there-you shoved into the rear of a police cruiser, because you have crossed that line. Otherness. Look at that person there.
“Everything,” I repeated.
Fitzy stared at the space between his beat-up sneakers.
“So what happened?” Paul asked, and he was leaning forward so far in his chair, for once he was forgetting to crack his knuckles. Everyone’s eyes were on me.
“I was staring at Terry, the moon behind. A silhouette that you want to fill in with everything you ever hoped for. When my eyes got a little more used to the dark I could see she was staring at her watch.
‘“What … what time is it?’ I whispered to her. We were twenty feet away from each other.
“‘Ssshhhh,’ she whispered back, gently, lovingly, holding up a finger. ‘I’m taking the night’s pulse,’ she said.
“‘I don’t understand you’, I said. I’m a very ignorantish person.”
‘“You can tell the temperature from the crickets,’ she said. ‘You can. Like a dog, like a lot of things, they breathe faster or slower depending on how hot it is. There’s a formula, there is. You count the number of cricket chirps you hear in fourteen seconds, and add forty to that number. And that’s the temperature.’
“We stepped closer to each other. I thought I might choke on the desire that was inside my throat, swelling up inside the top part of my chest like a balloon being blown up inside there.
‘“How hot is it?’ I whispered, and the moon went behind a cloud again and the night got underwater and purple-velvety again.
“‘Hot,’ she said. ‘It’s very hot.’
“‘I don’t know if I can do this again,’ I told Terry. ‘Don’t know if I can survive if I keep doing this.’”
“Huh?” Fitzy said.
“So intense,” I said. “Or maybe I meant couldn’t survive without it, I meant both and Terry knowing everything I didn’t say. She was right in front of me now; we were right in front of each other. I could feel her breath on my bare skin. The prickles that leapt up to eat her breath.
“‘I read something once,’ Terry murmured in a husky voice. ‘There is no problem to which love is not the solution.’”
“What were you wearing? What was she wearing?” Sully asked, his breath coming fast like mine was that night, like ours was.
My eyes met everybody’s and everything else fell away except this recitation of Passion, this sharing of a part of being human, the throbbing of things.
“Me, just gym shorts. Sneakers. Unfortunately they were smelly.”
“What about Terry?” Fitzy blurted.
“Terry was just wearing a T-shirt and cutoff dungaree shorts. A V-neck very white T-shirt, and dungaree shorts with little strands of thread dangling down here and there, little fray forays onto those soft legs, that soft skin like rose petals.”
An irrepressible moan wiggled up from somewhere in the back of the room.
‘“How hot?’ I whispered to Terry in front of me, the all of her now.
“‘It’s very hot,’ Terry said. ‘Eighty-eight degrees. Very hot. I’m sweating everywhere.” She paused to stare. “I want you to count the beads of sweat on me. I want you to lick them all off me everywhere.’”
“Oh, Jesus,” Paul mumbled. Fitzy started coughing; he’d swallowed his gum, I think. Sully was just sitting there sweating, his eyes burning. He’d gone jogging again earlier; I could actually smell him even up here at the front of the room.
“Terry lifted up her arms over her head, the way a little kid will when their mother’s about to undress them.”
I gulped and shuddered.
“Even now,” I said, “even now remembering it, it’s like I have to stare hard into the heart of that memory before I can see it, everything is still blurry and melty with the heat of that night, how hot it was, how hot what we were about to do was. It’s like them pigeons that would roost on the roof of the Projects, remember, Fitzy? How at night we’d go up to the roof and the pigeons would be behind the door fluffering and feathery-shuddering, and you couldn’t see them that good in the night, just a fluttered wing here and there, a hopping, but you could hear and smell them doing that? That’s how this memory is, even now, a blurry silhouette I want to fill in again.
“Was s-she wearing a bra?” Ed from next door asked and his voice cracked. He was still a virgin at twenty-two and took a lot of ribbing for that. He looked like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, as we used to say.
“Oh no, she never wore no bra,” I answered.
“What were her tits like? Did you tit-fuck her?” Fitzy wanted to know.
“Go,” Paul mumbled. “Go, keep going.”
“I lifted her shirt up, and off. Her hair got tousled, the moonlight explored it and found different places in it it could light up. She unbuttoned her cutoffs and they plunged to the ground. The noise of them I still can remember, and the hot-puffy breeze found strange places between my legs when I did the same. We were naked now except for our shoes. I licked her arms, fell down, fell, licked a spot I didn’t know about before, some place on her side just above, just below, the side of her waist. Wanted to sail up and down that coast there forever lost at sea and found like never before.”
“So what happened?” Fitzy whined, his face all flushing.
“You were lickin’ her,” Sully said. “You were lickin’ her and what did she do?”
‘“Oh, everything now,’ Terry whispered, ‘everything and everything and everything. But not here, over here, over here come, come.’
“She yanked my hand and I could feel the throbbing of it. Night-thudding. Wildness jumped between us. A tang you could almost smell and lick like wildgoat. She yanked me stumbling over to one side of the garden, this small patch they’d just plowed over all black and thick and fertile-like, yards of compost they’d chucked onto it. Our toes plunge-sank into its warm mucky-muck. We fell down, sunk into it, rolled and moiled. The moon looked for a second a beam-stab but its light fuzzy and dotty at the smeared edges of it, then it saw what we were doing and all went blackness again and the night like hot purple syrup. She slid the ooze all over me, gathery handfuls of the smell smeared on my ass and my glidey back and the sides of my chest, the rib meat attached. Spinning and revolving and evolving until so black above me I couldn’t tell when she was on top then me, we were both on top and both below. I was looking at the sky and then the grass the next second and both so black that sky and earth became one with me and Terry-Love.
“She was sitting up half sunk in the earth and me standing pronged before her and yanked me by hands on my ass into her mouth, took me into the slippery opening like it had been born to get in there and my muddy hands on her head back and forth like that and me looking to the sky and roar
ing silently then back down to see her in the darkness feasting like that, her legs an open V and the quads all wide and flexed and white and strong.”
“Talk slower,” Paul whispered, both his hands on his lap.
“And then her leaning over, looking away, one hand crawling away and beside us to where the vegetables grow, plucking cucumbers off the teepee bush she is.
‘“I want to see you like that,’ she mumbles, her mouth full up, ‘want you to feel what that’s like,’ and then she took a cucumber and into my mouth with it, in and out with it, and then she shoved another in, and then tried to do a third but I was slobbering replete.”
“Jesus, Danny,” Paul mumbled and the rest of them were half-open with their mouths except for Fitzy who was looking down, remembering I figgered Judy what-was-her-last-name-night, that fat Projects girl who used Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo who used to let the two or three or four of us fuck her. Her mother worked nights and one time when she fell asleep with me and Fitz on either side of her bare, fat ass he reached over and grabbed me that time.
“The rumble of the thunder then, way off across the valley and behind its hidden veils reverberating and you picture the people there in their dark-wallpapered rooms, in their rumply, hot beds and the rain running down hills and gutters and it’s a-walking this way.
“‘Cum all over me,’ Terry said, ‘Spray me over and over everywhere as many times as you can—’”
“Uuh, uh, ohhhhh!” Sully cried out as he came, this time seemingly without touching himself, though you never knew with Sully; he was sly. And this time no one laughed because they wished they could.
“Lights out, gentlemen!” and no one moved an inch. Then everybody was talking at once, some of them shouting as they vaulted up.
“What kinda build does Terry like? Does she mind if you smoke? What if you have a slip? Will she stick by you ’til you get sober and sane again?” But when we finally got everyone out of the room and shut the door Paul hadn’t moved from his chair and he was shaking, looking down at the floor.
