In Mike We Trust

by P. E. Ryan

  Garth let his eyes linger undetected on Adam’s smooth back, the nape of his neck, the slope of his shoulders. Correction: not undetected. Lisa was observing this examination. He caught her gaze and bugged his eyes out at her. He really didn’t know whether to scowl at her for putting him in this spot, or thank her.

  “It’s a wonderful view, isn’t it?” she said, then immediately added, “The skyline, I mean. All that green, and then all that silver.” She nodded toward the buildings downtown, across the river.

  “Yeah,” Garth uttered. “It’s great.”

  “I can’t decide whether it’s more impressive from a distance, or when you’re right up close to it.” She arched an eyebrow, then lay down herself.

  He remained propped up on his elbows. Next to Adam, he felt like a squishy little (he hated thinking the word almost more than he did hearing it come from someone else’s lips) shrimp. Was this what being attracted to someone else of the same sex—in such close proximity (and with so much exposed flesh)—had to be like? Did you have to see your own bodily faults in order to appreciate their assets?

  Relax, Mike would have told him if he were here. So he decided to.

  He lay flat, closed his eyes, and listened to the treetops stirring in the slight breeze. The traffic clopping over the bridge. Farther down, the rapids—so faint that he might have been imagining the sound. When he opened his eyes again and glanced over, Adam had his head bent back and was squinting at the woods that stretched out behind them.

  “There used to be a prison on this island, right?”

  “The whole thing used to be a prison,” Garth said.

  “It would make a good white-collar prison,” Lisa put in. “With a spa and mud baths—and nature hikes.”

  “Well, it wasn’t that kind of prison,” Garth said. “When the North took the city, they just stuck all the Confederate soldiers out here with no food, no supplies, nothing. They had to, I don’t know, eat each other to survive.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Lisa said. “And you know what? When we read about that in American History, I thought, The river’s not that wide. Why not just swim back to civilization?”

  “Because there were guards posted all along the bank. They’d shoot you if you tried.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, ouch,” Adam echoed. “But I was just thinking, that would be a great story for a film. A love story, in fact.”

  “A love story?” Lisa asked.

  “Yeah. Two prisoners stuck out here on this island, fighting to survive. One helps out the other in some skirmish, and they bond, fall in love.”

  “Sort of like Romeo and Juliet meets Escape from New York?” Garth asked.

  Adam laughed. “Exactly! Well, Romeo and Romeo meets Escape from Belle Isle.”

  “The problem with that idea,” Lisa said, “is that it would have to be about a bunch of Confederate soldiers. That would be like making a love story starring Nazis. It can’t work. No one would sympathize.”

  “I disagree,” Adam said. “You’re taking brainwashed kids off farms and putting guns in their hands, sticking them on the front lines, giving them no choice. You can’t expect them all to rise to your moral standards.”

  “Plus,” Garth said, “you could always have your characters become a little…conflicted about the cause.”

  “Right? That’s what would make the story interesting! Conflict and the steamy island sex.”

  “Wait,” Lisa countered. “Two rebel soldiers having sex? That’s hot?”

  Adam glanced at Garth. “Hello?”

  “That is so twisted,” she said.

  Garth shrugged.

  “I have a project in mind, too,” Lisa said. “I want to photograph my probably soon-to-be sister-in-law once a week throughout her pregnancy, naked—her, not me—and then once a week naked with my niece-slash-nephew for the first ten years of her-slash-his life. Same pose, every time. I want to call it 129 Months.”

  “That sounds like a recipe for one messed-up niece-slash-nephew,” Garth said.

  “Seriously,” Adam grinned.

  “Not everything is about sex,” she declared.

  “Oh? No one told me.” He turned to Garth. “So what about you? Any artistic flair?”

  “Flair?” Garth asked.

  “Interest. Pursuit.”

  The wording threw him. He opened his mouth, then closed it. You, at the moment, he imagined saying.

  “Garth,” Lisa announced, “is going to become the world’s greatest veterinarian.”

  “Really?” Adam asked him. “So you must have a lot of pets.”

  “No,” Garth said, “just one dog—a springer spaniel named Hutch. We used to have a golden retriever named Starsky, too. My dad named them both; he was crazy about that show when he was growing up.”

  “Starsky and Hutch. Hilarious. What happened to Starsky?”

  “My parents got him before I was even born. He lived to be twelve and a half. Then he kicked.”

  “Kicked! You don’t sound like a very sensitive vet!”

  “What do you want me to say? He passed on. Expired. Went to biscuit heaven,” Garth said. “I don’t have the compassionate vet lingo down yet, I guess.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Lisa said. “Garth’s going to be the Surgeon General of dogs.”

  Garth felt his face flush. He shrugged, deflected. “Who knows, I might not be a vet at all. I just want to work with animals in some way.”

  “You could join a circus,” Adam offered. “Be an elephant trainer.”

  “Or the guy who cleans up the elephant poop,” Lisa said.

  “Thanks,” Garth said. “You flatter me.”

  Adam turned toward him. “Did you watch the film, by the way?”

  “Not yet.” Garth was suddenly embarrassed, realizing that Did you watch the film? was just another way of asking, Are you going to invite me over or not? Fortunately, Lisa didn’t know about Mike’s suggestion, or she would have run with that one big-time, right there on the spot.

  They drifted into silence. When Garth looked over again, he saw that both Adam and Lisa had closed their eyes and were basking in the sun. He felt as if he’d missed some signal that it was nap time (what was this, grade school?) and he closed his own eyes, wondering if he’d said something stupid to shut the conversation down.

  What seemed like less than a minute later, he heard a rustling next to him. He glanced over and saw Lisa standing with her towel thrown over her arm.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” she said. “I have to get ready for my date tonight.”

  “With Billy Fillmore.”

  “The one and only.”

  “The quarterback?” Adam asked, pushing up onto his elbows.

  “Half back,” Lisa corrected, then went on to qualify: “That’s twice a quarter. I’ll see you boys later.”

  She apparently recognized the slight panic Garth knew was in his face, because she gave him a wry look and—blatantly, so that Adam could see—a thumbs-up.

  When she was gone, Garth and Adam just lay there, both propped on their elbows, watching the river. Another kayak drifted by. Then a trio of middle-aged hippies on their backs in inner tubes, holding cans of beer. Adam scissored his feet back and forth. A jet passed high overhead, its engines briefly overlapping the sound of the river. They said nothing but just watched the river for what felt to Garth like a long stretch of time but was probably only a few minutes.

  “Do you want to swim?” Adam asked, rising up into a sitting position.

  “I was already in once.”

  “I know, but it looks like you’ve sufficiently dried out.” He glanced at Garth’s hair, his chest, even the fabric of his swimsuit. “Want to cool off again?”

  Garth suddenly felt aroused, nervous, and frozen all at once. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll hang out here.”

  Adam stood, straightened the waistband of his swimsuit, and walked to the edge of the rock.
His body—still pretty pale but a little pink now along the shoulders and around the back of his neck—was gorgeous. Sexy. Hot. Should he have offered to join him? Did his nervousness show, now that Lisa was gone?

  Did Adam even care?

  With the downtown skyline nearly hidden by the trees on the opposite bank, they might have been in a different world. Just as being around Mike was starting to feel like a different world from the one he shared with Lisa, or his mom. Or maybe he had that wrong. Maybe he was the one who was different around each of them. If that was the case, who was he now?

  Yet another Garth in the act of figuring out the world.

  He sat up as Adam slid off the farthest rock and down into the water. Garth kept him in his sight line, held him that way, as a narrow band of cloud snaked a shadow between them.

  The next morning, after they’d finished breakfast and his mom had left for work, Garth caught Mike up on what was going on.

  “And?” Mike said, pouring two mugs of coffee—one for him and one for Garth.

  “And what?”

  “What happened next? You don’t have to give me the gritty details, but did you at least get some sort of signal from him?”

  Signals? Garth wondered. Like referee hand gestures? Two tugs on the ear, one tap on the nose: I think you’re cool? “We hung out for a while. He swam, I didn’t. We talked some more, then rode our bikes back to the neighborhood and went our separate ways.”

  “So you got no sense at all that he’s interested in you? As maybe more than a friend?”

  Garth shrugged. “How would I even know?”

  Mike groaned—as if he really had something invested in this and Garth was tampering with the market. He sipped his coffee, studied Garth for a moment, then said, “Let’s talk about tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “I called my contact at the charity organization and we’re all set to go.”

  Contact? It sounded more like spy work than charity. “What does that mean?”

  “It means we can use the old pamphlets. Unfortunately, there’ve been no new developments on the meninosis front since the last printing. I also bought us a card table, which is more effective as a ‘base’ for a charity drive than just walking up to people on the sidewalk. Oh—and poles for the banner.”

  “What banner?”

  “There’s always a banner. You think people are just going to walk up to a table on their own? Something has to catch their eye.”

  The more concretely Mike talked about the charity work, the harder it was for Garth to actually picture them doing it.

  “So let’s talk strategy,” Mike said. “How are your acting skills?”

  “My what?”

  “You know—tragedy, comedy, the gamut in between. Can you act sad, if you have to? Not burst-into-tears sad, but gloomy. Woeful.”

  Garth was pretty sure he had gloomy and woeful down pat. But were they going to put on a charity play? A benefit performance? “I don’t get it.”

  “There’s nothing to get. We just need you to look convincingly sad about the cause and, most important of all, earnest.”

  “I am earnest,” Garth said. “Aren’t I?”

  “No teenage angst. No ennui.”

  “What’s ‘on-wee’?”

  “Never mind. Act like someone just slapped you, okay? Trust me, it’ll help both the cause and us.”

  “What if someone I know sees me doing this ‘act’?”

  “I’ve thought about that. Which is why we won’t be doing it in Richmond.”

  “We’re traveling?”

  “Just to nearby towns. You don’t have to drive too far to be in some place like Hopewell or Mechanicsville. So we’re good to go?”

  Garth had the sudden impulse to back out. It just wasn’t in him, standing in front of strangers asking for money. Plus, the whole idea just didn’t feel quite…right.

  At the same time, he didn’t want to disappoint his uncle. He also didn’t want to come across as being too scared or “saintly” to do something a little edgy.

  “I’ll give it a try,” he said reluctantly.

  Mike lifted his mug as if toasting him. “That’s the spirit.” He finished his coffee and set the mug down loudly on the table between them. “Now that business is taken care of…are you going to call Adam?”

  “What does he have to do with any of this?”

  “Absolutely nothing. But are you going to call him?”

  “That’s still sort of up in the air.”

  “And it could stay that way forever. You’ve spent some time with him now. You ought to call him and invite him over so we can watch that Beautiful whatever it’s called.”

  “Beautiful Thing,” Garth said, thinking, Since when did I become everyone’s pet project? He’d gone from feeling shoved into gay hiding by his mom to feeling yanked out of it twice over by Lisa and Mike. Couldn’t there be a happy medium? Or couldn’t these decisions be made by the person they most affected—namely, him?

  Not an unreasonable thing to want, he decided, and took a long sip of coffee.

  But who was he kidding? He was thankful to Lisa for inviting him to the river, and thankful to Mike for encouraging him to make the call. And if he was going to be doing something as weird as going along with Mike’s plan in order to contribute to his college fund (as well as a charity), he might as well do something potentially good for himself on a personal level.

  So long as his mom didn’t find out about Adam. Or the charity work.

  Or the trip to the bookstore.

  Or the fact that he’d quit his job without telling her.

  When did that list get so long?

  7

  “MENINOSIS KILLS!” The words dominated the front page of the pamphlet in thick, dark letters, the exclamation point a dagger over what looked like a lump of coal. Beneath the headline was the sentence, “Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime—But Most of All…CHILDREN.” And below that, a photo of a child’s face taken from such a close proximity that it was impossible to tell whether it was a boy or a girl, only that it was very, very sad.

  Garth opened the trifold pamphlet and began reading. It only seemed appropriate that he be familiar with the disease if he was going to spend the day asking people to donate money for a cure. Meninosis, he learned, was related to scoliosis, spinal meningitis, and peritonitis. It affected the bones and certain vital organs, including the liver. It was believed for many years to be environmentally contracted—specifically, through the inhalation of fertilizer residue found on produce grown and sold throughout the U.S. Many years later, a second “contractual vessel” was discovered: plastic monourethane. This was a most frightening discovery, because by 1994 plastic monourethane—a petroleum by-product long since banned by the EPA—had already been used as insulation in many American homes.

  “You don’t have to read all that,” Mike said. He was wearing one of the dress shirts and the pair of trousers he’d bought at the mall—much more formal than his usual T-shirt and jeans. He steered them along the entry ramp that funneled onto I-95.

  “Don’t you think I should know about it? If I’m going to be talking to people?”

  “It’s depressing. And anyway, you don’t have to talk too much. That’s what the pamphlets are for. All you need to say is, ‘Please help us fight meninosis.’ ‘Meninosis kills.’ ‘Your dollars will help us find a cure.’ Stuff like that.” He was staring forward, watching the road and mirrors. “If anybody asks you a question, direct them to me.”

  Garth turned the pamphlet over and saw grotesque close-ups of twisted spinal columns, braised skin, a foot so deformed it looked like a shaved lion’s paw. “Eww.”

  “Told you it was depressing.”

  “Have you ever known anyone who had it?”

  The Camaro swept into the left lane, passed a pickup truck, swept right again. “Thankfully, no.”

  “But you’ve seen people with it?”

  “Sure.”

  Garth winced. “Deformed?�
��

  “I can’t really talk about it,” Mike said, still staring at the road. “Let’s just say, seeing it with my own eyes is what brought me to the cause.”

  He turned on the radio.

  When they reached Hopewell—a town just thirty miles outside of Richmond—it was 10 a.m. They roamed around for a little while, checking out the businesses. Mike ultimately decided on a grocery store, doubled back to it, and pulled into the parking lot. He circled the lot, gliding right past the front of the store, and pulled into a space close to the street. “Can you manage that?” he asked, indicating the box of pamphlets.

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. I’ll get everything else.”

  Garth carried the box across the parking lot to the storefront. Mike carried two short plastic poles with round bases, a rolled-up banner, and a card table. They set up camp around twenty feet away from the sliding entry doors. “You mainly want to get them when they’re going in, not coming out,” Mike said under his breath as he doubled and then tripled the length of the telescoping poles. “When they’ve got free hands and money in their pockets. And when they haven’t just coughed up a hundred dollars for a week’s worth of groceries.”

  “Shouldn’t we be closer to the entrance?” Garth asked.

  “Nuh-uh.” He unrolled the banner (PLEASE HELP FIGHT MENINOSIS—YOUR GENEROSITY WILL SAVE LIVES!) and strung it between the poles. Then he set up the card table in front of it. “Hold tight. I’ve got to run back to the car.”

  As he left, a woman and her daughter were approaching the entrance. The daughter—around ten—read the banner, but the mom didn’t even seem to notice it or Garth. They disappeared into the store.

  When Mike returned, he had a plastic bag hanging from his wrist and was carrying a folding chair, a fishbowl, and a large blue plate Garth recognized from their kitchen. He set everything down, unfolded the chair, and placed it beside the table. From the bag he took a large package of Tootsie Pops, which he ripped open and poured onto the plate. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a small wad of bills (mostly singles, but a few fives and tens, as well) and dropped them into the fishbowl. Finally, he spread a handful of pamphlets across the surface of the table like cards fanned out for a magician’s trick.