Hey, Joe

by Ben Neihart

  "I'm not much of a dancer," Seth called across the water. He was clapping his hands on the count of three, submitting to the rhythm. His knees shot up to his waist and his arms pumped like a relay runner's.

  No, Joe thought, not much of a dancer. But they were sweet fucking buff muscles on those arms. Joe splashed toward the far wall of the pool, and Seth, from the opposite side, made his way there, too. "You're gonna lose your towel," Joe said, "or throw your back out."

  "Nah, I'm coordinated. It's all mental. I can hold this towel around my waist by sheer force of will."

  "That's a cool trick."

  Barry White grunted over some diaphanous strings and low-rustling drums.

  They stood facing each other now, a few yards apart at the deep end.

  Seth dropped from the dry cement into the overspill trough and slid up against him. "It's not a trick." He stood on the backs of his feet; the muscles above his knees bulged and shifted; their structure and functional, inevitable movement reminded Joe of the models of tectonic plates that his geology teacher kept on her desk.

  When he looked up from the legs, he saw that Seth was grinning. "Cocky sumbitch," Joe said in a joking voice. He had floated a foot or two into the air; his stomach was still catching up. The way Seth was looking at him was different than when they were in the shower. It was the look that studly guys on TV gave their girlfriends after learning the girlfriend was pregnant. It was sickening and irresistible and it had its own smell. Joe couldn't look away. He touched his belly.

  Seth's eyes were the color of walnut shells. His nose was blunt and spread across his face. He was a half foot taller than Joe, and he smelled of dandruff shampoo and aloe lotion. Lumps of the lotion remained on his shoulders and stomach. Before he knew what he was doing, Joe reached out to smooth a knot of the goo into Seth's shoulder. He held his hand on the shoulder cap for a moment and then drew it back and wiped it across his own stomach.

  Seth didn't say anything for a while; he just stared at Joe's hand. Then he said, "That felt really good. You wanna rub these?" He pointed to a white squiggle on his chest, near the hollow at the bottom of his neck; as his wrist turned, his biceps plumped into an apple.

  Joe tossed himself into the pool. He pulled his way to the bottom, pressed his belly to the tile, and then floated to the surface. He kept his eyes blared open in the burning water.

  When he was out of breath, he lifted his head and bobbed to the side. He hooked his armpits over the apron, dangled his hands and forearms into the overspill trough. The water lap lap lapped along the edge.

  Seth was gone.

  "Damn," Joe said. He looked around the pool area: hanging plants, tile walls, the glazed windows that overlooked the service entrance at the back of the building. He ran his gaze along the far tile wall, to the point where the symmetry of the squares disappeared among the leaves of two potted trees that stood sentry before a dark storage recess. And there was Seth's face, wreathed in green.

  "Hey," Joe called, pushing himself out of the pool, knees bumping against the slippy tile. "What you doing over there?"

  Seth made a sharp whistle.

  "What?" Joe said, and then he realized that his trunks had slid low on his hips. He pulled them up as he plopped across the floor; even though the room was humid and warm, goose pimples rose on his legs and arms and stomach.

  Seth slipped into the dark alcove.

  When Joe got there, he saw that it was just big enough to hold a refrigerator. He stopped on the pool side of the trees. "What's going on?" he whispered.

  "I want to show you something," Seth whispered back.

  "What if someone sees us?''

  Seth laughed. "If you just come in here right now, then there's less of a chance."

  "I'm here," Joe said, stepping past the tree line. Two steps, and his belly was against the towel around Seth's waist.

  "Hey, Joe," Seth said softly.

  Just the sound of Seth's voice in the dark made Joe feel all muzzy headed. His wet dick was getting hard.

  Seth's hands were behind his back. "What's your deal?" he asked.

  Joe didn't answer.

  "Can I touch your face?" Seth asked.

  What for, Joe thought, my stupid face; but he said, "I don't care."

  And, like that, Seth's big hand was touching the side of Joe's neck, and then the fingertips were drumming his cheek.

  "Can I kiss you?" Seth asked.

  "That would be cool. Can I kiss you?"

  Seth's throat rumbled as his hand squeezed the back of Joe's head, and they were all of a sudden kissing: Joe's tongue along the underside of Seth's lips, inside his cheeks; and Seth's tongue filled up Joe's mouth, and his whole body shook, and his heart beat so loudly that Joe could feel it against his own skin.

  Abruptly, Seth stopped. "Fuck," he panted. "Would you wanna do something with me—in a couple weeks— fuck!—a month, a month; I'm starting jury duty next Tuesday. Things are gonna be crazy."

  "Yeah," Joe said.

  Seth bent down to snatch his towel off the floor.

  "Okay. You go out first. Make sure the coast's clear."

  Joe's mind's eye had sunk lower—through his face, throat, chest, stomach, down into his dick. He whispered, "But we could do a little more back here, maybe." He tried to catch his breath, stood there huffing, watching Seth fasten the towel. "I'm afraid I'm going to go home—me, just me, alone with my mom— and what if we die in the car or something and I never get a chance ..." The sound of his breath was filling up his ears. "This is more than I thought was ever going to happen on just a fucking Tuesday night... I mean ..."

  Seth made a soothing noise in his throat. He was already cloaking himself around Joe; his hands went down the back of Joe's bathing suit, pulling it down. "We got some time," he said. "I can always find time."

  Joe's hands flopped across the front of Seth's body. It was full of contrasts—hairy, smooth, tight, bulky, wet—and in his sickening nervousness Joe found himself groping Seth kind of passionlessly, as if he had no desire for him at all. But, fuck, that wasn't true. From a distance, like when he watched Seth lift weights or talk to the girl beside him on the stair machines, Joe time after time experienced internal instantaneous carnal transmogrifications; the backs of his eyes and the canals of his ears and the bone at the base of his spine had all burned in unison.

  Joe thought that making out had always gone pretty easily for him. It was something he loved to do. Girls or boys, just lie down somewhere and kiss. At parties, in backyards, at school. But he had never really kissed around with anyone older than him—experienced and filled out and dead set on going from kiss to grope to pin to penetration.

  "This isn't the right place, is it?" Seth said, separating from him.

  "Maybe not."

  "Well, is it or isn't it?"

  "I guess not."

  "No, boy. Yes or no. You wanna do—"

  "No. Not here."

  Seth was already leaning over, picking his towel and Joe's bathing suit up off the floor. "Here," he said, "step into them."

  Joe took them out of his hand. "I can get myself dressed, sunshine."

  Seth's voice was suddenly distant. "I'll call you when this trial is finished, how's that?" He wrapped the towel around his waist.

  "That rocks."

  "Okay, we'll just walk out there like nothing. No one's out there."

  Joe threw his hearing outside of the immediate space. All that he could hear was the continued moaning of Barry White over the most sticky-sweet, high-tension strings.

  As Seth stepped past the potted trees out into the bright lights, Joe's veins filled up with relief and he could breathe, and his hands and feet began to tingle as if they'd been asleep. He leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes, listening to Barry White murmur.

  He was feeling almost normal, ready to go downstairs and find his mom, when a voice boomed from the other side of the trees—"But what have you been up to?"— and then a woman's face pushed through the leav
es and she shouted, "But I want to meet him! Seth, I want to meet him."

  A pretty, pale face, hair pulled back, leaves hanging below her ears. Big smile. The woman's arms extended toward him like an octopus's or a starfish's. "Seth," she said, "who's your little friend? What's his name?"

  Joe's balls had drawn up into his belly. He was lightheaded, breathing too quickly.

  "Rae ..." It was Seth's voice, irritated.

  The woman stepped over the trees and into the alcove. She wore a one-piece that showed off her rack. She extended her hand. "Hi, I'm Rae Schipke."

  "Joe," he said, and held out his hand; as he shook with the woman, he slid past her along the wall and out into the bright natatorium. His feet peeled along the tile floor. He was just in time to see Seth's backside disappear between the swinging doors of the locker room.

  He looked reproachfully over his shoulder in the direction of the woman, caught her dead gaze as she climbed out of the alcove, held it for a moment before jogging the length of the pool and busting through the doors after Seth. Two skinny bodybuilders were standing just inside the room, at the head of an empty row of redwood lockers. A boom box at their feet was bellowing the play-by-play of a baseball game; the men grimaced as a player hit a pop fly. Joe passed them and looked down the next two rows of lockers. As he continued to the final row, he heard a loud cough and felt a hand on his shoulder. He spun around to face Seth, who handed him a business card.

  "Here's my numbers," Seth said. "Keep an eye on the TV. Call me when you see that the trial's over. I'm lookin' forward to it."

  The streetcar wheezed to a stop and its door folded open. Joe climbed inside the brightly lighted car, slid his dollar into the receptacle as the driver closed the door and they began moving.

  He swayed down the aisle, took a seat in the back, and settled against the side of the car, pressing his cheek against the window. The bald guy in the seat in front of him was sweating as if he'd just run an ironman. Across the aisle, and a seat farther front, two nuns were turned around, smiling at Joe with the openness of children.

  "Good evening," he said.

  "Hello," the nuns said at the same time.

  Two bearded Tulane chippies were in the seat behind him. He was sitting on top of their conversation. "I don't know," said one guy, with a pipsqueaky voice. "There's a lot of them who aren't in a hurry to find a job. Me, I'm gonna get a job. They're interviewing B. E. E. to start at thirty-five up north at Medtronic. I tried to get an interview, but they don't want Mechanical E."

  "I interviewed with them," said the other guy, whose words rushed together. "Within five years, so they say, you're making eighty. I didn't get called for the second round of interviews."

  "I owe twenty-four thousand in student loans? I should be, like, furiously searching for a fifty-thousand dollar job?''

  "Dude, you owe that much?"

  The guy in front of Joe turned around in his seat and scowled back at the Tulane guys. Then he looked Joe straight in the face with eyes that were the green of watermelon shell. His lips were plump and wet.

  " 'Sup?" he asked.

  "What's up," Joe said.

  "Hi." He perched his forearm on the top of the seat back and continued to stare at Joe. "Do I know you?"

  "Do you think you do?"

  "I think maybe I do. I've acquired knowledge. I'm seeing life. I'm seeing ... Your old men shall see dreams and your young men shall see visions. It's scary because I have visions. Are you with me?"

  "I can't help you out, hoss. I don't recognize you."

  Joe settled back into the comforting patter of nebbishy Tulane students on their way to good jobs; it was cool to take a detour into their reasonable, mellow world for a little while. They weren't visionaries.

  "I wore brown shoes," the squeaky-voiced guy was saying. "Do you think that was appropriate?"

  "Well. . .," said his friend.

  No, Joe thought to himself, picturing loafers with tassels.

  The streetcar rumbled beneath the highway overpass and stopped at a traffic light; the door opened and new passengers began climbing aboard. The wet breeze had picked up. It drew the tree branches higher, but they didn't sway; the leaves shook within a tight circumference, as if reverberating from a silent aftershock. Hurricane season, Joe remembered. The wheels began to grind along the track. He pressed his forehead against the shaking window, looking out; the sky had grown lighter with clouds, as if night weren't here. Let the rain hold off for another twenty minutes, he said to himself. A half hour.

  He turned away from the window and bent down to retie his sneakers; the laces were so frayed they barely held a knot. Resting his chin on his knee, he wondered why he was even going out to dinner. Why didn't he just hang on Decatur Street, talk to other kids? What was he going to miss if he sat in an expensive restaurant?

  As he sat up, the streetcar slowed to a stop in front of the Superdome. Roadside lights shined blue-and-yellow across the recessed entrances to the complex; some of the glow bathed the trunks of sidewalk palm trees. The nuns scurried down the aisle and out the back exit. The streetcar sat through two changes of the traffic signal while workers removed metal parade barricades from the side of the road. Joe bothered himself to read the billboards along the road. A Jagermeister ad showed a grimacing vampire who'd just sucked down a shot. To sell memberships at a new gym in the Central Business District, there was an enormous photo of a woman's perfect belly, suntanned and cut up so it looked like a chocolate bar; the bottom of her sports bra was dark with sweat.

  The streetcar lurched into the intersection; as it turned, a new vista appeared through the front window: fewer buildings, fewer headlights, an open straightaway of road that seemed to disappear into the ashen sky. Just in front of the landscape's vanishing point, and far enough in the distance that Joe, without his glasses, couldn't make out the words on it, was a billboard. He identified its subject merely by recognizing its orange-and-black jumble of shapes. It was the first advertisement of the year for Scream in the Dark, the haunted house in Algiers, which would open at the end of the month. Any day now, Joe thought he could expect the fliers to come in the mail; they were postcards showing on their face the same orange-and-black shapes, and on the back a map of the route to take once you had crossed the Mississippi.

  As Joe half-closed his eyes, so the screen of his eyeball was filled with skewed, flickering light, he pictured himself walking in the blue night past the orange-clad kids who worked there, strobing their flashlights across the gravel parking lot and the grassy path to the entrance.

  Once you had paid and signed your release form, you were assigned a group number; you waited with your group in a long, low-roofed building full of metal chairs, listening to a recording of wails and creaking doors and lurid whispers that emanated from speakers mounted in corners of the building. During part of your wait, you had to watch a film about the mission of the church that sponsored Scream in the Dark.

  Last year, Joe and Al had come to the haunted house after sneaking a few beers; Al's brother had given them the ride in his new Saturn, and he'd also given them the six-pack of Dixie. Instead of the traditional tunnel, which had served as the dark entrance for many years, last year you entered Scream in the Dark on your feet; you walked through a blazing red hallway, made a sharp left into a dark room from whose ceiling hung plastic-bagged cadavers. At regular intervals, a blue light began to illuminate the darkness, and all of the dead bodies started to sway, bouncing against you with a horrible plastic crackle. From the morgue, you entered upon a garage of rusted, abandoned cars; men covered from head to toe with black grease took slow steps toward you. There was yet another sharp turn once you exited the garage, a very abrupt right, and now, letting his eyes drift open as the rattling streetcar picked up speed, Joe remembered how Al, amid all the screams and clanks of metal, had grabbed hold of his hand and yanked him around the corner into the next dark corridor.

  At Canal Street, the last stop, Joe stepped out the back door onto
the sidewalk. There were people everywhere: blacks, many fewer whites, more women than men. The road had a sparkly, crushed-glass sheen. Fast-food signs were glittering, and stereo-camera-jewelry shops were blasting mellow love songs onto the trashy sidewalks: "Completely, wanna share my love," howled Michael Bolton.

  Joe swung through the overlaps of people: hats, faces, chests, and arms peeling away as he made his way to his destination. A quartet of black girls, sweet and round-shouldered little fifth-grade girls, squeezed past him. "Hold the streetcar!" two of them shouted in unison. Their tiny voices trickled into the air.

  "Streetcar!" Joe bellowed at his top voice, watching the girls dwindle into the crowd, their sugary voices swallowed up in the clamor. "Hold the streetcar!"

  Another voice took up his cry: "Hold it, streetcar!" Then two more, and suddenly there were four guys in baggies and tank tops standing on the tracks, blocking the streetcar's route.

  Joe watched until the first little girl climbed aboard.

  Traffic crept by. In the opposite direction from the river, there was a cop barricade; above it, the black smoke of a fire hung. A bony rhythm track blew from the open windows of a passing white limo: it was Queen Latifah, rapping, "Just another day / living in the hood..."

  He crossed Canal and didn't slow until he reached the second block of Bourbon, where a curbside brass band was playing. So the street was full of tourists, he thought. Big deal. It was still an amazing, forgiving street. It stretched in front of him like a hallway: cottages and storefronts and hotels leaning inward; the sky low and white, a ceiling. In dark windows and half alleys there were the pale faces of dealers and scammers. You could smell people on the air.

  He was soaked up by the clapping crowd. They were dancing, close packed, shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm, necks wiggling and knees all liquidy, not like an audience at all. A bald black man was singing, "Sky is high / so am I. . ." Joe bent at his waist, hands on his knees, and listened to the music. After just a few moments, he felt the tune work its warm buzz up inside his spine. He smiled. He began pumping his foot up and down. He shook his ass as he stood to his full height and danced.