by Paul Russell
I looked, and up there in the night these big sheets of color were folding down across the sky, red and green and blue, like wispy curtains some wind was blowing. And no sound—just these long snaky gauzes of color and the cold air, and I was shivering not because I was freezing, which I was, but because I was scared. I didn’t want to take my eyes off that sky. But I had to—I remember craning my head around to look at the woods, and then back at the sky, and then the woods again. Because I thought something was in the woods, watching us, ready to come out at us, and those lights in the sky had something to do with whatever was in the woods. If I didn’t keep watching for it, if I got too caught up in watching the lights, then it was going to get us.
It’s one of the few times I remember being with my dad. I think I used to remember a lot more, but now for some reason I’ve forgotten it all. I can’t remember a thing about him except that night, and the Red River Valley song he used to sing, and then the way, which was years later, he used to tug Ted out from under the bed whenever he’d come home angry at our mom.
I’ve never been sure whether any of that with the night and the sky really happened, or whether it was just something I dreamed, maybe my first dream ever. My mom wasn’t out there on the lawn with us—at least I don’t remember her. It was just the three of us. Whenever I’d ask her about it, years later after my dad left us, she’d tell me nothing like that ever happened—I must’ve dreamed it. But I sometimes think maybe when we were little she used to go away and leave us with our dad, and then who knows what happened with just him and us? Ted of course was too young to remember anything, and anyway it was something I never asked him.
Carlos was the one who finally told me about the aurora borealis—how winds from outer space are pouring over the world all the time, how they scatter down these weird lights that sometimes on winter nights shower from the North Pole even as far south as Kentucky, maybe once every twenty years. How I was lucky to have seen that; most people go through their lives and they never see anything like that. He told me about the Eskimos, too, who live in the far north—how they believe those lights come from some other world, where the spirits of the dead go on living. How those lights can come snaking down to the ground and carry you away if you get caught out in them. Those ghost lights that can dazzle you and you’ll never come back.
THERE’S NOT A WHOLE LOT MORE TO TELL.
I was stunned, I was out of breath, my dick was aching, and my whole front was covered in Carlos’s blood. One thing you never realize till you’re covered with somebody’s blood is how fast it dries. It starts to cake up on your skin in no time—something I guess only murderers and a few other people would know.
The first thing I did was find a policeman. I knew exactly what I’d done, I knew Carlos was dead, so I wasn’t about to go pretending it didn’t happen. I probably could have. I probably could’ve walked out of there and disappeared and nobody would’ve known. Maybe I was taking my cue from Carlos one last time, but this was some blame I wasn’t going to shirk. At least one thing I think you can say about me is, I’ve always taken some kind of responsibility for whatever I did. I’ve always tried to live with the things I decided, whether it was my brain deciding them or my body. Still, it was me, and I lived with it and never regretted any of it.
The policeman I found was this black man with one of those pot bellies every policeman you see’s got—I guess from swaggering around all day.
“I killed somebody back in the park,” I said. “You’ll want to get an ambulance up here, but it’s not going to do any good.”
He just looked at me, like I was trying to put something over on him. I guess it was then that he saw, even in the dark, how I was covered in blood.
He stepped back a couple of steps and said, “Oh my God.” Then he pulled his pistol out of his holster and pointed it at me, which I guess is what they teach you to do. But then I guess he felt a little silly since I wasn’t doing anything. I was just standing there with blood all over me, and he’d probably seen worse. So he just held the pistol without pointing it at me.
“I don’t believe this,” he said.
“It’s for real,” I told him. “It’s definitely reality.”
We walked over to his car, and he radioed for some other officers, and then we waited by the car till they got there. He offered me a cigarette, but I don’t smoke. I guess what I felt mainly was just relief—I hadn’t known what was going to happen, and now I did. Carlos wasn’t going to touch me anymore.
It’s been a year since all that. The trial was a foregone conclusion, though I understand there were people out there—Earl’s definitely one of them—who thought I should’ve gotten off on the grounds Carlos Reichart was the sort that needed killing. I don’t happen to think they’re right, but that’s not here nor there. What is here is all the thinking I’ve been able to do, and what I want to say may sound strange for somebody’s murderer to say, but I know now that I did to Carlos exactly what he wanted me to. I may have thought it was what I wanted to do, and maybe it was—but it was definitely what he wanted.
I don’t know why he decided it was time, or why he wanted to go out the way he did. I don’t know whether it was because of all the stuff with Ted, or whether Ted was just part of it too, part of his way of going out. But I’m positive that some day came when he made this decision, and once he decided that, he looked around for the most loyal person he could think of to help him.
Or maybe he only recognized it was already decided the minute he faced it happening in me—the way he knew Seth would always manage to get it on film when something real was going on, and I was just being his decision for him.
But there I was. Here I still am. He’s got me in his hands—from the very first instant in the Nu-Way Laundromat that day ten years ago in the rain, he’s still got me. To the very end.
You’ve probably noticed how I have this habit of not saying goodbye—just out the door at some crack of dawn. What I’m remembering right now is the very end of Next Year in Gomorrah, my favorite movie of Carlos’s—maybe because it was the first one I ever made with him, and everything seemed clear and okay back then. The ocean, waves, and a little boat out on the waves. Some seagulls flying in this gray morning light. Then you hear the character played by me—it’s not my voice, of course, it’s somebody else’s voice dubbed—saying, “I decided to go with them, a ship running guns or contraband. I never knew exactly what. But I heard for the first time the names of Silifke… Mersin…On the docks at Antakya a young Jew introduced himself and told me that in the year…”
Then in the middle of the sentence that voice just stops talking, there’s no more ocean, no more boat or flying seagulls—the screen’s just blank.
It’s the way I’ve always left.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Elliott Russell is the author of seven novels.
He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, in a neighborhood called Scenic Hills. After graduating from Raleigh-Egypt High School in 1974, he attended Oberlin College in Ohio, and also spent time in Germany and London. He then went on to study at Cornell University, earning an MFA in Creative Writing in 1982 and a PhD in English in 1983. He has taught at Vassar College, The College of William & Mary, and the University of Exeter.
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, published by Cleis Press, won the 2012 Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction. The same title received a Silver Medal for the Independent Publisher Book Award in the Literary Fiction category, and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Russell also received the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction in 2000 for The Coming Storm. His 1994 novel Sea of Tranquillity was chosen as one of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of All Time by the Triangle Publishing Group. Other Russell novels include The Salt Point (1991), War Against the Animals (2003) and Immaculate Blue (2015).
His nonfiction book, The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (1995), has been translated into ten languages. He’s published poetry, e
ssays and short fiction, and edited Best Gay Erotica 2013.
Russell received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writers Fellowship in 1993.
Read more about him at paulrussellwriter.com.
“Picaresque and symbolic, raffish yet lyrical, told in one of the most compelling and authentic vernacular voices in American literature—Tony Blair is the peer of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield…an awesome achievement.”
—Booklist
“A vivid and often compelling work. Many of its scenes are startling in their beauty and haunting in their horror.”
—Harlan Greene, author of
What the Dead Remember and Why We Never Danced the Charleston
“A powerful coming-of-age story, a tragedy about an emotionally battered gay youth with appeal that easily extends beyond a gay readership…. Russell has crafted a timely, involving tale that explores the outer limits of gay sexuality and the point at which art or artiness slides into exploitation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Paul Russell’s stunning achievement…irresistibly we are led into the dark, beautiful, disturbing world of filmmaker Carlos Reichart and are asked to watch in what becomes a terrifying and thrilling complicity.”
—Carole Maso, author of The Art Lover
“This is no treacly account of boyish victims and demonic older men, but a forthright vision of love’s darkest possibilities.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Trash and Bastard Out of Carolina
“Chilling…contains powerful scenes that display Russell’s talent.’’
—Los Angeles Book Review
“A deeply disturbing novel, full of scenes that leave you queasy and uncertain whether you should keep reading. But you do.. Russell is an artist.’’
—The Lexington Herald-Leader
“A provocative but balanced study of the artist as pioneer in the far reaches of human experience.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A kind of long examen de conscience that is both personal and historical…Russell has a keen sense of moral and psychological nuance, and all his characters are presented as richly complex beings.”
—George Stambolian, editor of the Men on Men anthologies
“The hero of Paul Russell’s new novel says he can be ‘talked into anything.’ He can also talk about it all, in a tone that has an eerily consistent believability. The book is a tremendous feat.”
—Thomas Mallon, author of Aurora 7 and Arts and Sciences
“Paul Russell strikes again! Readers who enjoyed The Salt Point will find even deeper pleasure in Boys of Life. Frankly explicit, funny and sweet and tragic by turns, it is a rich and compelling adventure.”
—Dan McCall, author of Jack the Bear
