“Who dat?” Cormac whispers.
“Screw you,” Matt says.
“She’s cute,” Cormac says.
“Up yours,” Matt says. “She’s nice,” he adds, a thrill passing through him. Hearing more laughter from the girls, he says, surprised by his own daring, “Interested in the friend?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re not serious,” Cormac says.
“Why not?”
“They’re black.”
“So what? Let’s.”
“Let’s what?”
“Talk to them. Do something.”
“Not me.”
“Come on.”
“Jesus, I’m not that hard up.”
“Don’t be such a drag. This town is driving me nuts.”
“Not me. No way.”
“Thanks,” Matt says. Seeing that the magazine in his hand is Electronic Music and realizing there is no likelihood of his ever owning anything from its pages, he returns it to the rack. Jerk, he thinks. You have no idea what a jerk I think you are.
Seeing that the girls are moving away, he says, “They’re taking off.”
“Look at this,” Cormac says, his face back in his magazine.
“Who cares?” Matt says.
Cormac looks up. “What’s your problem?” he says.
When they have left the store, however, and are walking along the sidewalk, there are the two girls, returning toward them, and Matt sees at once that he and Cormac are being given another chance in a continuing game. “Look, here they are,” he says. Cormac doesn’t respond.
Laughter is coming from the two girls as they approach. Matt laughs, too, and at a dozen feet, in someone else’s voice, he says, “You came back.”
There is some giggling and tittering, and as Matt pulls up to circle, so do the girls. But Cormac keeps walking, and Matt mutters, “C’mere, Cormac, you idiot.”
“My friend, Barbara,” Vanessa is saying, although both glance at Cormac.
“Hi,” Barbara says.
Matt, too confused to know what to say, says, “Cormac, what’re you doing? C’mere!”
“Nah,” Cormac says.
“Oops,” Vanessa says.
Matt glances from one to the other; there is a flash about Vanessa’s fingers of her gold rings.
“Let’s go,” the other girl says.
The girls are walking away, just like that. Laughter breaks between them all at once, and the way their shoulders move makes Matt wince. He turns away, too disappointed to speak.
“Look, I’m not about to hang out with jungle bunnies right in the middle of town,” Cormac says.
Matt cannot speak. He walks along. What a jerk, he thinks. He will end this friendship, he is telling himself.
“I mean it,” Cormac says.
Matt is still unable to speak.
“Well, do you really—” Cormac starts to say.
“Forget it!” Matt says, as next to each other they continue along the sidewalk.
CHAPTER 8
THE ACTION ON THE SCREEN HAS TAKEN TIME TO MEAN anything. A young boy and girl dressed in Victorian-looking clothes have peeked for a time through a partially opened door into a lighted room. Vernon has felt like he is coming out of himself, although he hasn’t shifted physically from his withdrawn posture in a seat he has taken near the wall. The boy and girl in the dark hallway are young; however the film may have made its way here, they look to be little more than twelve or thirteen.
His interest has begun to grow. Within the lighted room—it appears to be on an upper floor of a mysterious Victorian mansion—a young woman, naked and heavy-breasted, is tied with leather thongs, arms outstretched, to a wall. Of the two men standing by, one is holding a cat-o’nine-tails, the other a switch. The two men wear Victorian dandy clothes. The two children, to be sure, Vernon realizes, will shortly be discovered, bound, and similarly punished.
So it follows. First, though, as they spy through the door, the boy and girl become aroused. They rub into each other and utter how warm they feel. The girl asks what the bulge is pressing against her thigh and the boy tells her she will know soon enough. From behind her then, as she kneels on the floor to gaze into the room, the boy lifts her several ruffled skirts onto her back and gets down in a crouch to kiss and caress her openings. Making no move to resist, only to accommodate, the girl asks what he is doing and why it feels so hot down there.
It is after he has lowered his knee-length pants and entered her from behind and they become lost in their passion that their sighs give them away and they are discovered. “Well, what have we here?” one of the men says. Dragged and pushed into the room, the two children are ordered at once to undress to be punished for their transgression.
Vernon watches from his corner of the small cinder-block theater. The boy is tied first, with leather thongs, his wrists tied both together and between ankles, causing him to kneel in an exaggerated anal presentation. The two men all along offer comments and touches. One of the two men undresses from the waist down, removing velvet knee pants and white knee stockings, “to allow freedom of movement,” he says. His own nearly erect penis visible between his shirt ends, he takes up the switch to lay on the first swat.
Vernon stares, aware from breathing and movement that someone not far from him in the darkness of the theater is masturbating. His own desire is to rescue the boy on the screen. He would care for him and make him happy. He knows what it is to be happy. He would give him attention and toys, food and clothes. He would walk with him and listen to him. He would be his friend. Sensing someone is moving to the seat directly beside him, angered at the interruption, Vernon gets up and pushes his way to the aisle—“Well, sorry,” a man’s voice whispers—and a moment later, Vernon is outside in his car, rolling once more along the highway.
Was he actually in there? he wonders. Was it another time lapse? Was it himself he had run away from? Why was the interruption of his fantasy so maddening?
CHAPTER 9
CLAIRE AND ERIC ARE WALKING, SOFT-ICE-CREAM CONES IN hand. The chili is delivered and Claire has time to kill before going back to the Legion Hall to pull her shift. Thanking Betty several times, she told her she had to stay and set things up, but it was only an excuse not to impose too much. Besides, she had promised Eric an ice-cream cone for helping her.
They walk along working on the cones. Claire has remarked on what a nice day it is. Otherwise they have hardly spoken. It has occurred to her, though, how much she enjoys having time like this with Eric. He’s her sidekick. They can talk or not talk. She needs to be careful, she thinks, not to smother him, not to love him too much. A boy without a father. If Betty was driving them home, she’d be with Betty. This ways she’s with Eric. She likes Betty, but being with her twelve-year-old son, as Eric would say, is prime.
Meteorologists along the coast often use the term land air, as they have today. Compared to air coming in over the water, land air is usually warm and dry. Here she is, approaching middle age, Claire thinks. But she feels young today in the warm and dry air. “It’s almost balmy, isn’t it?” she says.
Eric sort of acknowledges that she has spoken.
They go along. Noting a ghetto fence over a storefront across the street, Claire says, “Things are sure changing around here. Maybe we’ll get mugged.”
Eric says, about as she expected, “Don’t worry. You’re with me, you’re safe.”
She laughs. “It’s how I feel,” she says. “I do feel safe with you.”
“Somebody tried to rob us, I’d just bash in their brains.”
Claire smiles but doesn’t say anything. They continue, working on their cones. She hears Eric say, “I’ll learn karate and all that stuff when I go in the Navy.”
It’s something of an issue, but she lets it pass. Her mind has shifted to Warren, to summer nights, as if in a dream of the past. She sees them out strolling in tiny South Berwick. Warren’s appetite always amazed her and was
the source of not a few skirmishes between them. He couldn’t abide her comments about his eating; she couldn’t resist making them. He bought the largest possible ice-cream cone—chocolate, always—and would put one away, it seemed, in three or four bites. His mouth, when he irritated her, resembled a Mason jar.
“I wonder you don’t chill your tongue the way you eat,” she would say.
He might, perhaps to spite her, do another round to the dairy bar and follow with an entire quart of expensive hand-packed ice cream, sitting on the front porch in the dark. His appetite came from his work, certainly in the summer when he might work ten hours, or twelve, out in the air and come home ready to eat a horse, and maybe she shouldn’t have criticized him. Why did she do it? Was it because food was scarce in her childhood? Or was it because she did not take the time to understand?
Or, she reminds herself, he wouldn’t come home from work at all. He’d stop along the road and fill his body, like a sponge, with liquor. In exchange for his money.
What a shame alcohol is, she thinks. Probably nothing in the world has caused more hurt and heartbreak than alcohol. Not even war.
Of course when he was drunk, she recalls, he’d get on her about getting on him about his eating. “You don’t know one goddamn thing in the world about what it’s like to be a working man,” he’d say.
At last, as she can see this warm afternoon, at this distance, he was right. She should have just fixed him heaps of food, heaps of potatoes and gravy. For food was part of his life. She had been a fool not to understand, for of course she had loved him at the time. Arguing over food was something she had no business doing.
“Kah!” Eric says suddenly, slicing the air with the side of his arm and hand, at the same time tossing his ice-cream napkin into a trash receptacle standing next to a post. “Just like that! Karate chop! Ha!”
Getting rid of her own soggy cone tip and napkin, Claire says, “Just don’t get too anxious to go off and leave your mother.”
It is his turn now not to respond, and as they go along, her thoughts slip back to alcohol. What in fact gets poured away, she thinks, is love. And life. Life of all kinds. That’s where he was in the wrong. He drank up their life.
To think, she thinks in the old rush of pain, they once had a house of their own—a porch, a garden, flowers, the boys asleep in rooms of their own, asleep in peace while they sat on the porch steps and Warren smoked one of his cigarettes. Money enough coming in. Plenty of money, really. Warren sure couldn’t handle it, but he wasn’t bad at making it. To think that both of them took so much for granted, paid such a price.
Now, for goodness sakes, karate against robbers. A boy wishing his life away to join the Navy. Her son, she remarks to herself as they turn onto the street where they live, where she cannot help thinking that streets of apartments are streets of broken dreams.
Enough of that, she tells herself. The thing to do is to keep plugging along. That’s what she needs to do. Keep plugging along, and get these two guys grown up. Then she would be someone, to them and to their children. The times of the day, the days of the week that made life whole, would fall back into place. She would have done her job.
CHAPTER 10
THEY SIT NEXT TO EACH OTHER IN THE SIDE-STREET MOVIE theater, their faces highlighted by the screen. Little from the movie is occurring within Matt, however, and when Cormac laughs, in a moment, Matt glances at him and experiences dislike of a kind that brings him close to lashing out at his friend with words, even with his fists.
He thinks of the black girl and feels some relief. Does he sort of have a crush on her? Is that what it is, even if it was only yesterday that she spoke to him for the first time? Is he hard up, like Cormac said? There beside him is Cormac’s face. It seems connected to the screen by lines of light; it smiles, its smile holds. It looks ignorant.
Shifting suddenly, Matt says, “I gotta get some air. I’ll see you later.”
“What?” Cormac says.
Matt is getting up; nothing is going to stop him. “See you,” he says.
“You’re going?”
“See you in school.”
On his way up the deep-red aisle, Matt doesn’t look around. Screw you forever, he says to himself.
Passing through the theater doors, he takes in the brisk air. Half a block along, he angles across the street. In a sudden urge, he starts to run. His sneakers push off the pavement as he dashes around and between people along the sidewalk; he turns at the next corner, taking a direction in the city it seems he has never taken before.
He sprints along the full block of the street, into the gutter to circle pedestrians, and turns still another corner, to be certain of his escape. At last he slows to a walk, to recover his breath.
He knows—believes—Vanessa lives in the direction of the Mall, although he doesn’t know how he knows that. Going in that direction might somehow get him intercepted by Cormac, though, and he doesn’t turn back. He continues—Bow Street, around the harbor, is his destination—on a path to leave Cormac absolutely behind.
Would she be home by now? Well, sure, why wouldn’t she? It’s dinnertime, and she and her friend—Barbara, he reminds himself—would not hang out downtown into the evening. Still, it is the likelihood that she won’t be home that makes up his mind. At the first telephone, he will call her. He will do it. The decision comes in on a new thrill, a new version of himself.
She is not in the telephone book, though, and the name that the operator offers scares him. “I have a Paul T. Dineen, Lieutenant Colonel,” she says. “Woodlawn Circle.”
A pilot? Matt wonders. He imagines Darth Vader dressing him down for his presumption at calling his daughter. Still he says to himself, do it. Don’t be like Cormac, do it, and he redeposits his dime.
Clearing his throat as the telephone rings, he stares at the circle of numbers and letters before him. A deep male voice takes its time. “Hullo.”
“Vanessa there?”
Silence follows; Matt’s heart starts dropping away. “May I ask who is calling?” the black lieutenant colonel says.
“Matt Wells?” Matt asks.
He knows I’m white, Matt is thinking. Jesus. Now he’s going to let me have it.
But the voice says, “Just a moment, please.”
When the receiver is picked up, a fluid voice says, “Matt, hi.”
“Hi.”
“You still in town?”
“I took off from Cormac. He’s such a jerk.”
“Color line bother you like it does your dopey friend?”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
“This ain’t just a guilt call?”
“No. You’re—ticked off I guess, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” she says. “Barbara’s mad at me, too. I get us put down like that. Yeah, my feelings were hurt. They still are.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were cool, in school, you know. Then me and Barbara get served up a plateful of humiliation.”
“I never knew he was such a jerk.”
“That why you called?”
“Not just that. I . . . wanted to talk to you. I don’t know. I wanted to say something to you.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I forgot.”
“Come on, you didn’t forget.”
“I wanted to say hello.”
“That’s all?”
“Well . . . I like your rings.”
“My rings?”
“All that gold. You might get stolen.”
“That really why you called—say you like my rings?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, what about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t like me? That ain’t got nothing to do with why you called?”
“Sure, but I like your rings, too.”
“Between my teeth and my fingers I’m a walking gold mine. You think the rest of me is worthless?”
“Sort of.”
&
nbsp; “Funny, Matt.”
“I think you and me . . . got a lot in common, you know.”
“Baby, it’s you and I.’”
“What?” he says.
“Nothing. The grammar. I shouldn’t do that.”
“Well—you called me baby.”
“It’s just an expression. Don’t get carried away.”
“I am, though,” he says, his heart lifting suddenly.
Pausing, she says, “This ain’t a social call then, an apology?”
“What do you mean?”
“You called to be friends?”
“Yes.”
“You call back then sometime?”
“Sure. Tomorrow.”
“Okay, I have to set the table now. Slaves ain’t all been freed yet.”
“I’ll call,” he says.
Hanging up, Matt holds still a moment, as if to get his breathing straight. God, she’s neat, he says to himself.
CHAPTER 11
HIS HOUSEMATES ARE DRINKING. PERHAPS THEY ARE DRUNK; he isn’t sure. He has almost never been around the cottage at this time and wonders if it wasn’t a mistake to return here now. In a moment he knows it was. The taunt comes from Leon, who seems always to be after him. “Vernon,” he says, “are you gay?”
Leon’s roommate/friend, Wayne, sipping a can of beer, snorts suds and laughter. Duncan, though, says to Leon, “Hey, take it easy.”
Did they see his magazine? Vernon wonders. Were they talking about him?
“We were wondering,” Leon says. “All year you’ve never had one fucking phone call. Until lately. And they ain’t been from no girl.”
“Someone called?” Vernon says.
“See!” Leon says.
“No one called,” Duncan says. “Leon, those are low blows. Vernon’s phone calls, or anything—they’re none of your business.”
“Low blow, high blow, any blow will do,” Wayne says.
“Shut up,” Duncan says.
“Is he some kind of closet queen or not?” Leon says.
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