Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  Blaylock’s office was just a slot in the department suite, with a door he would never shut.

  Wesley smelled the oil off Blaylock’s scalp—the essence of failure, disappointment. The cigarettes, maybe a little alcohol from the night before. Living on plastic-bottled Diet Pepsi.

  Blaylock said that unfortunately Shauna had pancreatic cancer. She had a golf ball–sized pancreas, or actually a tumor in her pancreas the size of a golf ball, and she wouldn’t live more than a year. She was sending her homework in by email attachment. Wesley was twenty-seven and felt eighteen. He wanted to drive into the night, farther south, keep going, maybe die in the knowledge that everyone would do the same. He’d never gone to church, ever.

  What was your fucking pancreas, like your gallbladder or appendix, some hidden squirm?

  He’d wanted to send her a card but didn’t have her address and wouldn’t ask Blaylock for it. He wanted the man with a burning like a tumor and was ashamed because he was already in it with another man already, and that wouldn’t have been professional—and Shauna had since died.

  He’d had a couple of manhattans at the Atlantic Beach Olive Garden. He needed an hour for a quick thing in the Crescent Beach house that Royce rented out but was empty now. He was woozy, though he could train his head to nod up and then it was fine, nodding, blinking brightly.

  He entered St. Johns County and it was fine. Civilization was thinning out. On the right, the low bush of the natural preserve, on the left along the beach the developments of the rich, the whims and egos of people with money building up their gnarly jungles of local flora. He was so hungry, but never ate, wanting to be boy-beautiful for Royce. Everybody knew about Royce and his wife hating each other, and some knew about Royce and Wesley, none important. But forget it, Royce was leaving Candy like it was going to rain frogs, but Wesley needed to believe in shit. To believe, that was his religion from Walt Disney’s example. You had to will dreams into being.

  At Wagon Wheel, where he felt slender, their hugest customers commented that obviously he hadn’t partaken of the restaurant’s filling outlays, its starches and saturated fats. He wanted to deserve Royce, great complex Royce who tanked him up on happiness when they were apart and that was often. Royce texted horny shit constantly, fuck-ape Royce grooving, baby-Royce ape.

  Up ahead there was a knot of traffic—along here where there was never a problem at all. He wanted to feel Royce big over his back. Royce was big but not quite fat. He ate and said he was fat and ate more. Big you became in the rush of success. And Wesley’s job was prettiness.

  Then the Candy drive. Royce kept threatening to pave it but Wesley said it was romantic, like they were going to move in there together. It was Royce’s perfect place and he wouldn’t let too much grow up around the cement-block, flat-roofed, and admittedly quite modest home since the first tropical storm would come in and bash everything through and insurance was high. Tree trunks were missiles. Royce said at these rents people expected asphalt, so they could keep their undercarriages clean and salt-free. It was easier to power-wash under there atop a hard surface.

  The light was on and there’d be Maker’s Mark, Gilbey’s, Absolut, and Wesley’s favorite, Skyy. Recently Wesley had tasted Boodles at one of Royce’s clients’ Ponte Vedra house and said it was the work of the devil, it was so clean. It was like floating in a boreal forest (Royce had told him a lot about trees and their native zones, what he read a lot about)—and breathing in deep and getting some of the little pink and purple flowers growing on the mossy green forest floor in your nostrils, which made up half your sense of taste. Royce was sensual and troubled. That Boodles.

  “Another taste, one more taste of that and you’d have to drown me in a tub of that mess.”

  “Gladly,” Royce then said, his blond-dyed hair glinting, “all that and more, Poodly-Boo.”

  When he talked, Royce was no Robert Frost. He wasn’t a great lyricist like Sting even.

  Royce was waiting for him in the front room. He was wearing his reading glasses with a glass of bourbon on ice resting upon the wood crate end table beside the fat padded chair with just the freestanding brass lamp turned on beside him facing, without looking up at, the drama of the Atlantic through the line of big picture windows as he turned the pages of his USA Today.

  They made love freely. Wesley liked having his kitty punched, what Royce called it.

  “My little heaven,” Royce said raspingly, poignantly, sweetly, filling his condom. In the middle of the sex he’d say, “You like that? Way up inside your whore pussy? You like it, slut?”

  Wesley desired it bareback but Royce was protecting himself and said that he and Candy might have one more baby, another not-good sign. Only now would Royce look him in the eye mid-fuck, having worked up to it. “Tight hot little pussy,” Royce said, “I’m plowing that skank.”

  Wesley had always liked and even desired Royce’s filth. At Fletcher High School, where Wesley went a generation later, Royce had conquered cheerleaders, nerd chicks, big-titted babes desired by all kids, and the experience fifteen or so years later left Royce shrugging dry-mouthed or so he said. The mysteries folded into this guy. His favorite place was Australia, where Royce had his first boy. If he could be completely honest, he’d marry a tree then become one somehow. Royce was an alcoholic. Wesley looked down that tunnel trying to spot himself but just couldn’t see himself. You pitied men with addictions, and what housewife didn’t need a drink?

  People desired a crazy, remote faith. Sunday morning TV. Housewives, all Christian.

  When they were done Royce said, “We have to go now, baby. No whiny tears now …”

  Before, Wesley had liked Royce’s forthright honesty. A word like “forthright” was good.

  Don’t look at me like that lingeringly unless you’re ready to do something about it, dig?

  The sadness of going back. The ride so beautiful in the near dark, with the moon-clouds shining but the land below black, the trees and structures on the ground dark. The emptiness. He wanted to ride away, just once, on the passenger side with Royce—lover and giver, quiet couple.

  The clotted traffic right when you got to the disgorgement of J. Turner Butler Boulevard, all the cherry slashes of brake lights ahead and the flashing gauzes of oncoming headlights.

  And you know what else? The dream between the living we were all doing and the dying everyone eventually would do. It was constant. It hid itself, making itself known in drowses.

  The verge was Candy and he pulled over where some low, salt-blasted oaks could conceal him in the Toyota, unless Royce turned his head and looked around as he passed. In the tortured cave of branches twisted like witch’s hair away from the ocean, he could just see the strip of road behind him out his side-view mirror. Royce’s Lexus had Xenons, bluish headlamps. Headlights, in the parlance of auto brochures, were called headlamps. Wes’s Toyota still smelled new inside.

  In his side-view Wesley saw a regular pale-yellow pair of headlights drawing forth at the speed limit. He panned right a little and looked ahead. A truck was headed his way faster. The two opposing vehicles would pass each other right about where Wesley was parked. Then an SUV speeding up and gaining the oncoming lane tried passing the truck, which was wrong, overtaking it too late.

  He bolted in the seat of the Toyota Royce had helped him buy checking the side-view, but it was late, a bit offbeat. Light all in his face. Light everywhere then darkness. Claustrophobia, car folding neatly around him and crumpling in, no crushing sensation yet, neck and back pain slow to bloom.

  The Imagineer had tried talking her into a cell phone—but she was always at home and her only contacts were Wes and Sadie. Sadie was ninety and had been married to one of the partners, one of Jeanette’s bosses—Tom, the one she’d liked too much—who had died listening to a speech on investments at the Sea Turtle Inn. Sadie lived in a condo in Neptune Beach and was going gaga already probably. Jeanette hadn’t heard from her in a while. And after Sadie there would just be Wes.
Jeanette had gotten comfortable, relatively, being by herself a while ago. Wes had to work and get his life together, which he just might. Anyway, Jeanette was old now. She’d die soon.

  She had been born in Green Cove Springs. Her father had been a bank clerk up until the Crash, when he’d gotten work feeding logs into a pulper at a paper mill—dying young of a heart attack. She didn’t remember one iota of this man’s personality or aura. Actually, Jeanette didn’t believe in auras. She knew customers at Jo’s Reef often believed in such. She had lived through the Pork Chop Gang period in Florida. People believed in anything, “No Taxes!” They believed in stuff no rational being could believe in, nonsense. Florida was a nutty business. She believed it would be better hanging out with the Jews in South Florida than these rope-swinger nut-jobs.

  Her mother had then moved them up to Jacksonville to live with her relatives, working as a secretary in the insurance industry: a widowed mother, living with her sister and sister’s family. These should not have been important things, but Jeanette had been aware that she was looked at in church pityingly as a little girl. Not much later, Jeanette had been “taken up.” All a blur, truly.

  After she was grown she would never know her cousins because, as she’d realized slowly, they hadn’t wanted to know her. All Jeanette had done was be a victim and no one liked or could account for victims. She’d been told only later about her mother’s alcoholism: a disease that had isolated her mother and that had been presented to Jeanette—when she was told she was ready to hear—as something practical, medical, and scientific. They at least had been good enough not to mention sin or Satan or any of that. The father of the First Methodist family who’d taken her up, as Jeanette was turning five, after all was a doctor. He’d explained everything to her in his office when Jeanette reached her majority, as a cautionary tale before she went out on her own never to come back to them. And the world did work best that way, when it managed to work, because of reason and compassion. Faith was one thing, what you whimpered over in the middle of a really dark, terrible night, while the daytime mechanics of the human animal, subject to the decisions it had to make, the hundreds of choices it grappled with and fluttered its fingertips graspingly at in order to bring to fruition some semblance of dignity and independence—the unflinching mode of survival it had to assume merely to eat and move on, in order to wake the next day and start all of itself over—well, real life didn’t have anything to do with ideas. She hated to sound un-idealistic or idealistic in an unorthodox way. She’d found it hard to believe in anything intangible but then who was the one who walked always beside you? At noon with no shadow at absolute meridian, which one was there to prick your conscience, the Lord or the Devil? Jeanette’s mother had been a believer. Striding beside you all through the day—this rasping-voice thing, whispering yes, no.

  She’d known she was the only person to keep stride with little Wesley, aim him straight.

  She’d wondered about this walking home from Jo’s later after the blood-boiling encounter with Sam Garth. Jeanette had never left the Little Reef without Wesley and it worried her. Sam had tried to hug her. Tried. She’d shrugged a shoulder pad and said, “Give Wes a call then. I’m sure he’ll be interested to hear from his father. You look good, Sam Garth. Good night, now.”

  It wasn’t like Wesley, at all, not to call or show up. There was this gnawing in her, maybe it was some disease. More and more she thought about disease. It naturally happened to folks as they got older. Her waking each morning after a spotty night’s sleep could be timed to a sense of doom that would progress toward morning. But after she got up it would abate. She had heard that depression lifted like a cloud as the day ripened into fullness and suggested evening as a nice alternative to death, just. Her phone didn’t ring. She waited drinking chamomile tea and still the thing didn’t ring. And then at midnight it rang. It stopped. A moment later it was ringing again.

  Of course she did not believe in visions, but later she would say that for an instant before picking up the receiver she’d thought she was having one. At least when it began to ring she had imagined the worst, then chased it from her thoughts when she finally picked it up, and it turned out to be the worst possible thing she could imagine. Oh Miz Blake, Miz Blake, I’m just so sorry.

  pascagoula

  There the mood was coy and fey, and the crowd followed the mood like the sun as it yearned toward the horizon outside the door. Now the bar was in a particularly tender phase. It was near the end of summer when expectations had either been dashed or were suddenly waning.

  A boy entered and became the fulcrum of frustrations. He was sturdy with a long torso: a nice back to serve as support, strong shoulders. The guys paid attention, trying to figure out how to get an in. An in was a smile back: a joke was hollered from across the way, but unfortunately deflected. This was a hard boy. He was a hot one, but at some point they just gave up. Because some things just weren’t worth it. You had to get your drunk on. You had to retain your dignity. Then in came the drag queens, precious species. They livened things up a bit. They said, “How are you, girl? Honey, big sturdy man, could you spot me a drank?” These were hard days.

  The nights bled dark, they were vampires of a swollen, precious reality. The nights told on us all. They began with sundown, syrupy honey-like sundown when all things were possible. It was an illusion, and illusion was what made things possible. Just wish and it might be so, but the boy’s presence was a reminder, not all things might be so. I was thinking about my mother. Let me start again. My mother would cry. She’d had a good start, Miss Kumquat of 1973. Her future husband mowed my grandfather’s lawn, a not-quite-emerald expanse. My grandfather was incredibly rich but the house was of no such indication. Apparently he would say that, not being a Puritan but an Anglican, he wasn’t bound up in appearances. That old manse was something of a dump by the time I ever laid eyes on it, but I occasionally long for it now that it’s lost. I dream of hanging out in its abandoned, crumbling, drop-clothed rooms reading William Faulkner. This is an old, tired, typical, Southern gay story. My father was poor. His only distinction in life was being voted as having the best facial hair in junior high. He’d started at Auburn but dropped out of the aviation engineering program, and owned a plane for a while until we’d had to sell it. My father was vaguer to me than my mother—it was all the perfume tonight reminding me of her.

  When I was six my mother calmly put me to bed—just as outside a party was igniting in our yard, a yard in West Tennessee outside of Memphis—and said, “If I’m not here tomorrow, if I can’t report to you in the morning because I’m gone, what of it? Would it wreck your world?”

  I was naturally nervous and I remember looking at her expectantly, trying not to cry. At some point she’d made things like crying and expressing myself incrementally too competitive.

  “If I’m gone and lit out for other parts,” she clarified, “would you think it bad of me?”

  “I’m a child.”

  “Exactly,” she said confidently, then her thoughts dragged her gaze away from me.

  And she was there the next morning, boiling my oatmeal and stirring my chocolate milk.

  In the bar, the show was about to start. Several of the drag queens hung back flirting and waiting for gentlemen to buy them drinks. They went for straight vodka, nothing flamboyant.

  “Okay bitches,” said the hostess, picking her way about the narrow stage holding the mic as though her nails were drying. “Shut up, bitches, shut on up! Respect, respect—as this is some damn-sure top-drawer serious entertainment about to roll before your baby blues. Yes yours, and yours too! So now that you know what kind of mood I’m in, how are the rest of y’all tonight?”

  I’d drifted into the lounge to watch and the incredible boy took the place next to me. He introduced himself as Trevor. This was an old neighborhood in downtown Memphis. Up to then I’d never gotten out. I wasn’t so much bored as fascinated by watching Trevor watch Suzee.

  He reminded
me of my cousin Darby from my family’s more redneck, Tuscaloosa wing.

  “There’s a raffle, you know about the Sunday raffle,” said Suzee. “It’s all for charity, it’s all for the Horton Bridgeways House, so get out your goddamn tickets because I am on the rag.”

  I got out my ticket.

  While Suzee delayed things with a few of her scandalous, faintly racist, and sexist jokes, I watched Trevor, who laughed a beat behind the rest then turned saying to me, “What’ll we win?”

  “Probably dinner at Praline’s,” I said.

  “Winner gets free dinner for two at Praline’s. One complimentary drink, period, splat.”

  “You were right,” said Trevor, and I wondered if this wasn’t his first gay bar. He watched her as though watching a twisted nature special, something on the La Cage aux Folles channel.

  Suzee called out the number and Trevor said, “Shit, I won! That’s me! I’m the winner!”

  Just like that. We hadn’t been there long. Usually Suzee dragged it painfully out forever.

  “We have a winner. Come forth, native son. Or are you not? Are you a damn Yankee?”

  “Hell, no!” and the crowd yelled and clapped, indulging Trevor.

  Trevor went up to the stage, looking happy, acting the shy part. A few looked around at me, watching me, waiting for me to fail with him, which it seemed inevitable that I would do.