Between Men

by Richard Canning

  Kenneth fell asleep with the smell of a million grasshoppers in the desert in his nose. A few years before they had driven through Utah, and on their way to see the only undammed river in the West, they had come across a migration of grasshoppers. They were huge, black, covering the asphalt completely. They made a sickening popping sound under the tires, and the smell was so pungent they had to turn the car around. He had felt their bodies were right between his teeth, the dark alien blood in his mouth. The thin vein of fluid between his brain and skull turned arid as the shelled wings on their backs.

  Where they had turned the car led them to something unexpected: a crater in the earth from some ancient meteorite, two blackbirds over the abyss who had abandoned their wings. They clutched each other talon to talon and let themselves drop, uncoupling and flying at the last possible moment, again and again. The two of them had stood side by side, watching, for as long as it lasted.

  The next day Kenneth watched the one-lane road for the approach of his father’s truck. Jake had told him what to look for: an old green F-150. When he finally saw it a couple hours after lunch, he stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another one. He wished for an endless row of drinks. “My fucking dad is here,” he said, just loud enough for Dale to hear.

  Dale came out onto the porch and watched Jake’s slow approach up the road. The sound of his truck door slamming reminded him of every family dinner he’d ever been to: that little bit of dread at the arrival of each new person. He wore jeans and work boots. His hair was silver, still cut the way he might have worn it as a teenager in the fifties.

  Jake must have been a young man when Kenneth was born, Dale thought. He walked up on the porch with the wide gait Dale had copied from other men his entire life, similar to the cocky and defensive walk of his own father. If that way of walking were a story, it would be about escaping from the police, but having to crawl through a quarter mile of shit to do it.

  Kenneth met his stride, hating the way he walked differently because his father was there. His steps were just a little too wide, his shoulders squared off too much. His hand clapped loudly on his father’s back. The sound was like a flock of birds lifting off at the same time.

  Dale half expected something sinister to snake out of Jake’s rough palm when he shook it, but his smile was genuine enough, the lines around it and his eyes not so much crinkled as greased, and his grip was warm and easy. Dale was immediately aware of how little Jake knew about his son’s sexuality.

  “Nice to meet you, Jake,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Dale didn’t quite smile at him, but held his rough hand a little too long.

  “You, too,” Jake answered. “I mean, nice to meet you. Today’s the first I ever heard anything about you.”

  “You want a beer, Dad?”

  “Yeah. Bring us a few out here. It’s hot as hell.”

  Jake sat in one of the two old iron chairs on the porch. Someone had painted it many times years before, and the thick layers of paint were visible where it had peeled. He crossed his arms behind his head, and Dale noticed the dark patches of sweat in his pits.

  Kenneth opened the screen door and gave them their beers, dripping from the five-gallon bucket of ice in the kitchen. He loved ice, made special trips to the store just to get it. He leaned against the porch railing, too uneasy to sit down. Dale sighed and took the iron chair beside Kenneth’s father.

  “So how long you boys been on the road?” Jake asked.

  “We ain’t really on the road,” Dale said. “Just borrowing this place for a little while. It’s in one a my ex-girlfriends’ family. We’ve been on lots of other trips though. Out West and through the south. I’m not much of a hiker, but I like to camp.”

  “Oh, uh-huh. I used to have a big army tent, weighed thirty or forty pounds, I used to take Kenneth and his mom out in. ’Member that?”

  Kenneth nodded and drank from his beer. He watched how his father’s big hands moved, and looked down at his own.

  Dale, terrified of what might rise from silence, kept talking. “Me and Kenneth spent a lot of time out in the desert, too. Two months one time, camping out every night and driving all day. There’s a helluva lot of country to see out West.” Kenneth glared at him from his perch on the porch railing. Dale felt like a child again around Kenneth’s father: the peculiar pull that had plagued him as a child—to both be someone like Jake and to touch someone like him—confounded him in a way he hadn’t felt in years.

  Kenneth opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. The afternoon sun leaned onto the porch. The shadows were the fat, edgeless shadows of summer.

  “I was thinking we oughta go fishing,” he finally said.

  “Sounds all right to me,” Jake said. “As long as there’s more a that beer to take with us.”

  “Yeah, plenty a that. Dale, you wanna come?”

  He looked at Kenneth’s face, but it told him nothing. It was the same blank look he wore when he was reading to kill time and thought no one was looking at him. “Yeah. I’ll come,” he said.

  They pulled an aluminum boat out of the shed and dragged it down through the grass in the yard. The sun did its melted-butter trick, and the summer people filled the air with the smell of their barbecues, the noise of their radios turned to the classic rock or new country stations, the trill and bark of their voices, the roar of motorcycles and Jet Skis. They paddled to a quieter place on the lake, a recess of cool and shadow out of sight of the summer cabins. In not too long, that part of the shoreline would probably be developed, too.

  Kenneth sat in the middle slat of the boat, with his back to Jake. Dale faced both of them, and he tried not to look into their too-similar faces. He slit his finger baiting a hook with a fat, sluggish grub. Its split body poured sap onto his bleeding finger. Kenneth watched him with trapped eyes. The water close to the shore was colored with the reflections of trees.

  Jake chose a long pink night crawler to bait his hook. Dale watched him past Kenneth’s shoulder. The worm sent out little ripples in the water. Kenneth impaled a grub straight through its entire body and cast his line. They shifted uncomfortably, trying to find a way they wouldn’t get their lines tangled. The silence lasted for a long time before Jake spoke.

  “This a nice place your old girlfriend’s got, just for the summer. What’d her family do to get the money?”

  “Grandpa had a big paper mill. He sold office supplies.”

  “How the hell about that! Knocked down half the state and got a freaking summer cabin for it.” He turned up the long neck of his beer. “Glad you all get to enjoy this, at least.”

  It was after dark by the time they pulled the boat up the dew-damp yard. It didn’t matter they had come back empty-handed. They’d all had too much to drink to care about eating.

  They sat on the porch for a while, drinking and smoking, before they went back inside. Most of the lights around the lake were out before Kenneth flipped on the kitchen light. They settled into the living room, and Kenneth and Dale both watched Jake, careful to keep their eyes hidden by the bills of their caps.

  Jake made the cabin seem more like home to Kenneth, the home he missed and knew he could never quite go back to again. Jake emitted the spice he and Dale were still growing into. It was a smell Kenneth remembered from childhood. It made Dale think of his grandfather at the end of a day in the field, new sweat layered on old dried sweat. The smell was enough to knock you down some days.

  The light in the living room was dim. Yellow enough to hurt all their eyes. Dale turned up his beer, cold from the freezer, and looked down his nose at Jake’s sledgehammer fists. He had to close his eyes, and took another long swallow of beer, cold enough to stab his forehead with an ice pick. Memory flooded in, and he immediately thought of how he might tell it to Kenneth; it was too big to keep inside of himself.

  There had been a day in the fall when he was a kid that he’d lain on a sledgehammer for hours. He’d been curious about the strings of drying chili peppers
strung up on his grandpa’s carport, so he slid one off the string and split it open. Knowing somehow the meat would be hot, he had put the little white seeds into his mouth instead. They lit into his cheeks like embers popping off a campfire. He ran around the house, grass cooler under his bare feet, turned the spigot like it was salvation itself, so hard his white hand would hurt the next day, and found no relief in the pouring springwater. He ran up the cold concrete steps, mouth burning, and in desperation laid his cheeks, first one then the other, on the cold reddish brown sledgehammer that belonged to his grandfather.

  He had told the story occasionally for a laugh, but hadn’t remembered what had come after it until seeing Jake’s hands hanging between his knees. He remembered something that had been forever bound up in the heat of where the pepper seeds had touched the insides of his cheeks and burned well into the orange and purple dusk. His cousin, Morgan, the one whom he’d visited a few times after he’d finally packed up and hitchhiked out of the mountains, came upon him and asked him what the hell he was doing. Dale, his cheeks painful, had only sobbed. He had held out the crushed pepper pod, still in his hand, and Morgan had laughed at him. The concrete was too cold on his bare knees, but he couldn’t take his face off the sledge. It smelled like icicles just starting to melt. It might have tasted like chilly sunshine if his tongue hadn’t been on fire.

  His cousin had taunted him while he lay there, in too much pain and half panic to move. Then he grew quiet, and the air became heavy and silent the way it might before an especially bad summer thunder-storm, the colors of dusk brought on early, the silence of midnight in late afternoon. They had sat on the lichen-splashed concrete steps a hundred times before, hid in the giant boxwood their grandpa had planted in the backyard when he was just a boy, cracked beechnuts that fell there in late summer. As if it was just as familiar, Morgan lay down on top of him, stuck his warm and acid fingers into Dale’s burning mouth. Dale had felt shock but no real surprise, and the day, warm, but with the hint of coming cool and promise of crisp leaves, had simply become nothing at all. Dale was not there, or here, or anyplace, and the awful burning in his mouth momentarily ceased, even as the air between them mirrored two warring fronts, one hot, the other cold. The feel of Morgan’s hard dick hot against his back and the cool of the concrete as his shirt rucked up over his belly was not something he’d thought about for a long time before seeing Jake and his ham hands. That storm feeling was similar to the heaviness he and Kenneth had experienced in many different landscapes, when it was uncertain whether they would clash together. It was the gravy-thick feeling just before teeth hit skin and blood was shed.

  Kenneth watched Dale from his seat beside the little woodstove in the common room of the cabin. The tin flue had been welded clumsily around a hole in the wall. It made him feel a certain affection for the old man with the dead wife who had built the house. They were among the artifacts of their lives; he couldn’t take a step without feeling like he was rattling bones.

  He looked at his father’s face and saw they were similar. He was beyond finding something to say to fill up the silence in the room. He looked at Dale, his beer empty, staring at different points of the room. Kenneth saw how he looked at his father, and realized Dale was angling for him. Maybe it had been there since the moment he’d arrived or maybe it was just the booze. He could feel it in the air like poison oak on a vine rubbing against his cheek. Dale, wanting to touch the man who may or may not have been responsible for the way reality would forever be like a freight train he could never quite get on board of—Dale, wanting surely to touch the valleys between the relief maps of his knuckles, wanting to know the shape and line of his pulse. Those were the kinds of things Dale would think about before sucking a man’s cock.

  His own hand, wrapped around his almost empty glass, felt tight enough to shatter it. But it wasn’t anger so much as the familiar feeling of reality folding in on itself. Time, forcing itself back up through the rings of trees, announcing, Everything is always here.

  When Dale looked up, Jake’s almost-gray DA made him feel peculiarly exposed. There was his older cousin, still hanging over him, a lit bottle rocket dangling from his teeth, daring him to come forward. The smell of beer was suddenly new, the same as when he’d first smelled it, like ocean foam when Morgan had poured it against the resin-veined trunk of a pine tree after he’d taken his first drink.

  The silence in the room gathered weight. Dale sucked the bitterness from his brown bottle of beer, but the taste could not hold back the murky undertow of memory. Kenneth sat in a far corner of the room, his beer warm as bathwater.

  “Anybody else need a drink?” Jake asked. “Never mind, I’ll git you all a drink. Always need another one.” He stumbled off to the bathroom.

  He lumbered out of the room, but his presence invaded every part of the house. They heard his long stream in the toilet, the way he moved heavily in the kitchen. Kenneth expected to hear one of the old woman’s teacups break.

  Dale wanted Kenneth’s father to be gone, and for him to fill up the room at the same time. Something about him reminded him of his cousin, and something of himself. Something he’d always wanted to be, tried to be, was wrapped up in the way he moved, smiled, talked, the easy way he drank a beer. It was the edge of masculinity that shapes itself as archetype, the line of a jaw so perfect it becomes more than just flesh and bone, and is strong enough to reroute desire itself.

  Dale imagined himself bending over his lover’s father’s knees, unbuttoning his old jeans, slowly taking out his cock and easing it between his lips. One heavy hand clasping a bottle of beer, toes of his boots pointed toward the far wall.

  Kenneth and Dale looked at each other across the room.

  Because Kenneth had thought of the desert the night before when he had punched Dale in the mouth, and did not know what else to say, he asked, “Them birds we saw in the desert, you remember them?”

  Sounds came from the kitchen; Dale saw the old woman moving within it. He saw her young, saw her in a flash being worn away like the blade of her paring knife. The smell of apple dumplings filled his nose.

  “I remember them.”

  And he did. Two blackbirds, in the sky over the desert in Utah. They had picked their way over rocks to sit on the edge of where a meteorite had crashed into the earth and made a deep, colorful gouge. So deep it made Dale want to throw up, sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of it, but they’d had to get as close to it as they could. Those birds had come up flying out of nowhere over the chasm. They locked blue talons together and folded up their wings. Then they plummeted downward, toward the center of the stardust crater. They dropped like stones; they dropped like they wanted to die, until they let go of each other and opened up their wings to catch an updraft. They came sailing back up and did it again, over and over. Kenneth said those birds were laughing, making fun of them. Dale had reached out, like he thought he could touch them, and inched closer toward the edge. Kenneth grabbed him roughly, said, “No, don’t do that,” but they’d both been near hysterical, laughing like they could make death a funny thing, the cavern below them the color of sunset. Kenneth let his fingernails bite into Dale’s sweaty forearm, so there were still half-moons in his flesh the next day.

  Dale wanted to talk about those crows, but his tongue felt too thick. He wanted to say, That’s exactly what it feels like sometimes when we fuck, but the words hung in his mouth.

  Instead he asked, “How’re you holdin’ up?”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Better than I have been for a long time, if you can believe that. Just seeing him again is helping me figure things out.”

  Jake walked back into the room with their drinks then. Instead of sitting, he staggered to the other side of the stove, put his hand on the sheet metal flue. His gesture made Kenneth feel protective of it. Jake turned up his beer and swallowed, one hand in the pocket of his jeans. Kenneth remembered some of the stories his father had told him when he was a kid: running through th
e woods and coming out on a cliff, not being able to stop himself before he went over the edge, saying prayers and then not knowing what had hit him when he landed in cold, black water that carried him until he could pull himself to the shore. Hiding between the mattress and box springs when the cops came looking for him, a couple years before Kenneth was born, the time he’d watched someone in his company go crazy and shoot someone in an alley in Vietnam. The time he’d almost killed a man in their hometown for looking at him the wrong way, touching the snap buttons of his shirt with fingers still grimed with grease, offering to buy him a beer. The way he imagined his father’s knuckles had felt across that man’s face had crept in to the way he hit Dale sometimes, into the way he himself wanted to be hit, to see the clear water of the last undammed river in the West.

  “Be out a booze soon,” Jake said, and slumped down into a ruined chair. Kenneth’s hands tightened around his beer again, and he drank it deep.

  Dale was bound up in disgust, felt his head begin to swim. He rose from his seat on the old man’s couch. The empty space of it had been bothering him the entire night. The dim light of the small room, the punctuated screams of summer people in the night, radios playing across the lake. Everything. It was late enough for the cool of night to have burned off the heat of the day.

  “Kenneth, will you go get me a drink of whiskey to go with this?”

  Kenneth looked at him and nodded. He got up and left the room, knowing he could wait as long as he wanted to before coming back. In the kitchen, he closed and opened the refrigerator without taking anything out. He didn’t bother making the drink. The light was too dim and hurt his eyes. He pulled open the dark wooden drawer of silver-ware and took the butcher knife, long and old and oil dark, and held it in his hand. He waited, his other hand grazing the bucket of mostly melted ice.