Between Men

by Richard Canning

  It was a low-slung bridge, and I had to stoop to keep from hitting my head as I scaled the small incline of bare dirt beneath it. Dizziness caused by the excesses of the night before, as well as a sudden rush of fear, suddenly overcame me. The rain was coming down in sheets, and I doubted I could make it back to the Jeep and attempt a belated get-away without falling in my suddenly enervated state.

  Halfway up the bare-dirt incline under the bridge, there was a depression in the earth. It was almost the exact shape and size of a mummy’s coffin, with what could have been the outline of a human head at the top and a swelling in the curve halfway down to accommodate the arms. Just like a preserved, bandaged corpse, I lay down inside it; its curves fit almost perfectly around my prone body; and it was deep enough to shield me to some degree from the spray-laden wind, which came in gusts through the open spaces on either side and concealed me as well, I hoped, from any prying eyes.

  From my position, I couldn’t make out the person who jumped from the back of the cab through the sheets of rain, so I stayed pressed into the earth. But I supposed there was as good a chance as any that it could be Jukka.

  Then I don’t know what happened. The rain suddenly began to come down with such ferocity that all images and sounds beyond the underside of the bridge were cut off by it. With each gust of wind, sheets of it were flung at me under the bridge, and my body was bathed in its iciness. But for the first time, I blessed the rain, because I knew it was my only chance of remaining concealed. There even seemed to be something ritualistic about it, a strange, violent baptism toward which other experiences in this region had been leading.

  As those in a panicked state of suspension are wont to do, I let my eyes move around in an attempt to distract myself from the eternity of those moments. If I thought about it, it really wasn’t very different from the inside of a mummy’s tomb. There were calligraphic scrawls on the walls that from that distance could have been thought of as cuneiform, and around the rear side, where the incline at its steepest met the bottom of the bridge, which I could see by straining my head backward with all my might, someone had left a trail of artificial flowers and leaves. One of the inscriptions was large enough to make out from my position. It said, “Thank you, Curt. All I knew I learned from you.”

  Who was “Curt”? And why did this place, punctuated by the continual hammering of rain and the hysterical gurgle of the river, with a view of broken pilings like stalactites in the water beyond, feel so sepulchral? I wrestled with the thought only for a few moments, before passing into unconsciousness.

  Pennsylvania Story

  Tennessee Jones

  There is a town in central Pennsylvania that has been on fire for twenty years. A vein of coal ignited underground that no one could put out. The town is an almost unnoticeable spot on a gray asphalt highway, yellow lines faded away to nothing. Most of the houses are gone, and the ones that are left have been taken over by a strangely symmetrical overgrowth, kudzu obscuring what was once front-yard trees, chimneys, and crumbling storage sheds. Some days the smoke from beneath the ground is visible, other days it is not.

  Kenneth and Dale searched for that smoke during a weeklong camping trip. They drove a pickup Kenneth had bought and fixed up with beet harvest money. Kenneth knew about the fire in the way he always seemed to know about things, as if he had simply been born with the knowledge of them. They found the town easily, saw a red fire hydrant growing from a squall of grass, a desolate bus stop bench, but could not find the fire. They talked to an old lady who still lived there, but she claimed she didn’t know how to look for the fire. Talk to my son, she said. Her voice was like bits of freshly dug potato hung on the tines of a fork, bleeding clear juice and covered with mud. She said they were two of twenty people who had decided to stay.

  After talking to the woman, they drove over miles and miles of two-lane blacktop to find beer in the middle of the country on a Sunday afternoon. They came upon a mining town called Shamokin, two-story houses stacked up on each other, squeezed between the road and the mountains. They looked like they would fall over, pushed forward by the shadows of the mountains in their backyards.

  Just before a little bridge leading out of town, they saw a slag hill with a mining road winding up it. Dale realized many of the big hills they passed were giant heaps of slag coal with trees and bushes taking root in it. The mountains growing themselves up again. He had expressed surprise, but Kenneth had only nodded and told him a little about coal-mining history. The town of Shamokin seemed half made up of those displaced hills.

  Kenneth parked the truck by the side of the road and they walked up the mining road. It was creased with big tire ruts, bits of dried red clay crumbling into the crow’s-wing black of the coal. The mining equipment at the top looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time. The debris of teenagers was scattered across the hilltop: fire pits, grayed-out beer cans, turned-out, blackened condoms.

  They separated wordlessly to explore. Dale was overwhelmed by the feeling they shouldn’t be there, and it made everything that much more precious. That was one of the things he loved about traveling, how being in a place you would never expect to be in collapsed time, made the past and future converge on the now. Even the ruined mountaintop, invaded and destroyed, became sacred again. He touched the machinery, marveled at it. They had taken many trips together over the years, and the silence of discovery was one of the things they loved sharing with each other.

  Landscape tugged at memory in ways that were unexpected. A mountaintop a heartbreak, the desert a forgotten memory, a reservoir the anatomy of someone you’ve always longed to be. Each place was distinct, but sometimes conversation and landscape ran together, so that a certain idea was always bound up in a certain place.

  Dale climbed into the sooty cab of a Caterpillar bulldozer. He watched Kenneth poke around in the trash around a ruined building with tin walls, a crooked roof. From that altitude, he could see the matchsticks of trees that had been felled by forest fire on a nearby mountain. And farther away, the horizon defined not by city lights, but by shades of green and purple that would disappear with the setting sun.

  Dale heard Kenneth scream and saw vultures, greasy and half-dead looking, boil up into the air above his head. The air touching his spine shimmered and turned cold, the same way it did whenever he saw a big black snake crawling through grass. Kenneth ran back toward Dale, sliding all over the loose slag.

  “Fuckin’ vultures flew right in my face,” Kenneth said. “I smelled ’em. Felt ’em.” He reached up for Dale’s hand.

  Dale slid down off the bulldozer, trying to cover his smile. He curled his hand into Kenneth’s, pulled him so that their chests almost touched, grinned against his ear.

  Kenneth looked back over his shoulder, breath heavy. “Man, that scared the shit out of me.” His heavy knuckles pressed against Dale’s smaller ones. Dale’s body shook and he could not stop himself. He laughed until tears brightened the coal dust on his face.

  Kenneth pushed him against the giant tire and put his forearm against Dale’s throat. “You gonna stop laughin’?” he asked.

  Dale smiled. “Uh-huh.”

  Kenneth smiled back at him and pressed him back against the giant tire, knocked Dale’s feet further apart with the sweep of his boot. He twisted the hand he held behind his back and stepped in so their foreheads touched. Dale sank into the shadow of the wheel well, relished the heavy smell of grease coming from the machine’s guts. From the road, they would look like two men in a fight.

  Kenneth dropped Dale’s arm and put both hands around his throat, body pressed tight against him. He felt the shadow of Dale’s erection, was careful not to rub against it too hard. Kenneth’s smile sharpened, his eyes narrowed. Dale’s eyelids fluttered and he looked toward the sky, his head resting inside the wheel. The sky blue, the vultures gone. His fingertips began to tingle, and he sensed the onslaught of what he had experienced with Kenneth in so many different places, the sensation not of leaving his
body or consciousness, but of truly finding them, gone almost as soon as it happened.

  Dale wanted so much to turn around, brace his hands on the coal-covered tire, feel Kenneth’s hands covered with black dust and carrion wind rake down his jeans, his cheek bruised or flayed open by one of the bolts in the wheel. Instead, Kenneth pulled him forward and split his upper lip open with the force of his kiss. A moment of sacredness in a devastated place, a moment that could make you free or get you killed.

  The summer after Shamokin, Kenneth invited his dad to visit him at a summer cabin Dale borrowed from an old girlfriend’s grandfather. The cabin was about fifty miles from his dad’s house in Portland, Maine. They hadn’t seen each other in five years, despite Kenneth’s travels. There’s some things I need to talk to you about, Kenneth had said and his father had agreed to come, no questions asked. Kenneth wanted Dale to be there when his father came, but he would be introduced only as a traveling partner.

  The plain walls of the cabin stank of the spice of the old man who owned it. Thin, early sunshine filtered through the trees and dappled the floorboards of the porch with light and shadow. On the lake side of the house, the parted curtain allowed a long bar of light the color of warm butter to melt on the kitchen wall. Dale stood with his feet apart, holding a cup of hot water with whiskey and lemon in it. He stared out the open door at Kenneth’s wide back, covered by a hooded sweatshirt too heavy for the season.

  Kenneth heard Dale’s heavy boots come toward him over the kitchen linoleum before he swung the wooden screen door wide.

  “Want some whiskey?” Dale asked.

  “Too early for that.” Kenneth turned around. “Gimme a hour or two.”

  Dale grinned. “Be time then to fry up the fish you caught yesterday.” He saw them, split and silver, sizzling in a cast-iron skillet. “Wonder if they’ll taste as good as the ones we had that time in New Mexico.”

  “Doubt it. You remember those guys on Birmingham Road, the ones whose house burnt down? They caught it somewhere above the goddamn tree line. No pollution.” Kenneth stopped talking, and his jaw settled into a hard line.

  “You know what time your dad is coming here?” Dale asked.

  The jaw muscles flickered. “Later on tomorrow, I figure. Probably ’round dark.”

  Dale turned to go back into the house. Kenneth picked caked mud from his shoes and was bombarded by smells and sounds that threatened to close up time, to turn the present back onto his childhood, even though the area around him had nothing to do with it. It was a more intense version of the presence he usually found when he traveled, and the timelessness he experienced was the thing that made travel so ultimately appealing to him. It was where real life happened, instead of the other way around. He turned a beer tab in his fingers and wondered how the hell to tell his dad what he thought he knew.

  Dale sipped whiskey in the mottled bright kitchen. He poured two dollops of oil into a black iron pan and turned on the flame. His morning drink had turned lukewarm. The cabin was filled with different bits of debris: a rusted hoe with a handle gone so gray it was the color of barn dust that hasn’t seen rain or light for decades; a heavy, opaque whiskey crock; a collection of cloudy glass bottles. There were also what must have been the artifacts of the grandfather’s dead wife: a red-handled potato masher, chipped teacups too damaged for household use, a paring knife with blade worn utterly concave, the handle dark as the shell of a black walnut. It was this last thing he stared at as he cracked two eggs into the heated oil.

  Kenneth, less than ten feet away, seemed halfway across the lake, even though Dale smelled the thin smoke of his cigarette when he lit up.

  “Got eggs in here,” he yelled. “How many you want. How you want ’em?”

  “Gimme two. Fry ’em hard. Brown on the edges if you can get ’em to do that.” He spoke from the doorway, outside the screen door. The way the light fell made him half a silhouette. “’Bout time for some of that whiskey, too, but I can do that.”

  Kenneth opened the door and the cigarette smell came with him. Dale loved the smell even though he hated to smoke.

  Dale stuck a couple pieces of cornbread and butter into the oven to warm, and cracked two more eggs. Grease spit everywhere.

  Kenneth poured two big splashes of whiskey over ice in one of the little ruined teacups. “Cup’s probably fifty years old, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I was thinking about that. Maybe. Ellen’s grandma was way up in her seventies when she died.” Dale watched the stove doggedly. “They had this place before anybody else ever thought about coming around. They used to stay here for the entire summer sometimes.”

  “Yeah, we had summer people in Kentucky, too. Only they moved in and stayed the whole year. Then after a little while they started making fun of the people who only stayed for a month or two. Nobody thinks of themself as summer people.”

  Dale grimaced, slid two brown-laced eggs onto a plate. A piece the size and shape of a thumbnail was missing from the edge. “But everybody is, at one point or the other. Everybody wants a piece of something they ain’t got a right to every now and again.”

  Kenneth took his plate and laughed. “Don’t I fucking know it,” he said.

  Dale smiled and followed him out the door. “Don’t you wanna take off that sweatshirt?”

  “I’m fine.” Kenneth shook his head and turned to the plate resting on his knees. Silence fell between them. Dale watched the sun twinkling on the lake and was irritated by the sharp, flickering light. Kenneth emanated the same distance as before, and Dale realized that was the true source of his irritation. Kenneth’s way of dealing with reality—a kind of flatness that took everything as it came—had a tendency to pervade everything, to make the people around him question their own relationship to the world. The way he read a book or rolled a cigarette was dogged and deliberate, and seemed infused by an understanding of reality both difficult and satisfying. It was as if he had no natural filters to protect him from the onslaught of information he experienced every day. He was doomed to notice everything, and his reactions were slow and distant because of it. Sometimes he seemed to get beyond this when they fucked, in a certain way Kenneth might touch him, as if he was trying to get to a place where being deliberate would no longer exist. In that formless place deliberateness, along with all other things, would be obliterated.

  Kenneth finished eating and lit a cigarette, his eyes fixed on a far point on the lake ahead.

  Dale cleared his throat. “You wanna talk to me about your dad before he gets here?”

  “I decided this after Shamokin. Somethin’ about those vultures got to me. Kept dreaming about them. You know me and my dad ain’t been on the best of terms for a long time. This is a story I ain’t told you, ’cause it was one I just started to remember, the day after we was up on all that mining shit. It’s still hard for me to talk about, but it’s what I got to talk to my dad about.

  “I got this picture in my head of being in Texas with my family when I was little. Brown sand, a hotel room right on the beach, big pool right below our window. Me and my mom’s friend’s kid got a room to ourselves. He was about a year older than me. The way I remember him now wouldn’t a been the way I thought of him as a kid. He was tan and real muscley for a kid that age. It made me jealous.

  “That kid got ahold on me on our second day there, middle of the afternoon, and pulled my swimsuit to my knees. He grabbed my dick and started working it. I didn’t know what to do, so I let him. He got me on my knees and told me to suck his dick, and then he turned me around and fucked me up the ass. The thing I remember most about that is stuffing my bloody underwear behind the stove so no one would know what happened. I felt guilty. I hadn’t really thought about this in so long, but I can see and smell everything, even the fucking towels they had there.

  “That kid fucked me over and over the entire week. He pretended like it was a game, and I’m not entirely sure I didn’t like it. My mom was pissed at me when we got back home because all my
underwear was gone. I put it everywhere except for the trash, because I figured that would be too obvious.”

  “Nobody ever found out?”

  “That’s just the thing, man. I’m pretty sure my dad saw it happen, at least once. Unless I was dreaming it. There was this big window, and that kid would draw the curtains on it so no one could see in. But I think I remember my dad standing in the hallway while that kid was going at me, his reflection on the glass in the lamplight, watching us and jerking off.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. So I think he let it happen. And I think he must have let it happen other times, too. I just don’t understand why.

  “After the thing with that one kid, it was like everybody could tell. It’s almost like if it happens once and some part of you secretly likes it, the rest of the world can tell. And then they come to you, they find you whether you want them to or not.” Kenneth finished his drink. “So that’s what I got to talk to my dad about.”

  Dale touched Kenneth’s knee. Silence fell between them again and Dale stood up. “Let me go in and get you another drink,” he said.

  Dale broke ice out of the metal ice tray and dropped it into their cups. He opened the screen door with his shoulder and handed a drink to Kenneth. Dale sat down beside him, not too close, just so the fabric of their jeans touched. That bare separation seemed to almost hum, and Dale thought, as the smoke from Kenneth’s cigarette swirled around them, that sometimes it isn’t getting exactly what you want, it’s just being able to want with the force of the world.

  Later that night, after Kenneth poured water over the fire they’d built at the edge of the woods, they fucked like they were camping high in the desert, red sandstone grit blowing into their eyes and hair. Kenneth grabbed up Dale, punched him in the mouth, and brought his lips to knock against the bloody teeth. Big knuckles squeezed tight on Dale’s throat, until his fingertips and eyelids fluttered and one of them shot across the other’s stomach, and then the throat was released, those same knuckles smearing blood across Dale’s cheek. They fell asleep on the weathered mattress in its wrought-iron frame, each dreaming memory. Every movement had already been made; they were just waiting to rediscover it.