Boys of Life Read online

  I WROTE ALL THAT DOWN YESTERDAY IN ONE SINGLE breath—at least that’s what it felt like. It came whooshing out. I don’t want you to think I’m just writing a bunch of porn, though if it gets you off, fine. Why shouldn’t it get you off?

  I keep talking to “you,” but I don’t even know who you are. All I know is, there’re a lot of folks out there clamoring to hear about Carlos Reichart, I guess because most folks are basically buzzards when it comes to famous people. And you know what? There’s nobody in a better position to tell you about Carlos than me. Because I was there. I know.

  I also know you’re probably not that much interested in me. But if you’re going to get the dirt about Carlos, then you’re going to have to hear about me too. I say that because I want to be honest and tell the truth. There’s a lot I could be tempted to make up, but I’m not going to. I’m going to try to remember the way things happened, connect them all together—the way Carlos told me I should do that first day I ever met him.

  It’s funny—when you’re a kid, you think you’ve got forever to figure things out. Then one day you’re not a kid anymore. One day, before you ever thought it’d happen—time’s up, the movie’s over.

  Here at the Eddy—which is what they call this place—the movie’s definitely over. I have to face up to that.

  Though nobody here seems to care one way or the other about what I did, unlike the newspapers. I guess I sort of respect the Eddy for that—I’ve always had to respect people who felt they could be indifferent about things. Not that I see anybody much—this protective custody stuff gets pretty exclusive. There’s this one guard, Earl, who comes to see me, and we’ve gotten so we talk. I’m not a suspicious sort of person, so I don’t really care what he’s up to with his visits. Maybe they pay him to talk to me on the off-chance I might say something, but I don’t think so. I think he’s just curious about me. I think, of all the people here, he’s the one who thinks he’s got something in common with me. Or maybe I should say he’s worried he does.

  I’m not sure what I mean by saying that. Earl’s a regular family man and everything. But four different times now, he’s brought me this picture of his two kids. He never says anything, he just shows it to me, like it’s always the first time he’s showed it to me. Maybe he doesn’t remember he’s showed it to me before, though that’s a little hard to believe.

  They’re about seven or eight, his kids—twins but not identical twins. It’s odd—whenever he shows me that picture and I look at it, I can tell he’s watching me. Like he’s trying to figure something out. Like that picture’s going to have some kind of effect on me and Earl’s going to be able to tell by looking at me what the effect it’s having is. But I don’t think he ever gets the effect he wants, and the reason he keeps showing me the picture is, he knows there’s something there and he’s desperate to find it. At least I think that’s what it is. Maybe he’s just weird—he’s a prison guard after all.

  I said those kids were twins, though you wouldn’t really guess it unless Earl told you. They’ve got sandy hair, but that’s all you can really tell about them because the picture’s sort of blurred. And anyway, it’s winter so they’re all bundled up.

  It’s not such a great picture, it’s just a snapshot. But I guess the one thing about pictures I learned from Carlos is—how they always say a lot more about the person who took them than about the people who’re in them.

  “Don’t be naive,” Carlos would say. About everything, even about some snapshot a dad takes of his kids. So since Earl took the picture, you might say I don’t know anything about Earl’s little boys, but I know a lot about him.

  And I think I can definitely say this—Earl’s scared for his kids. That’s what that picture says to me loud and clear. They’re at a sliding board, it’s in some park and it’s winter, and one of them’s standing on the ground beside the sliding board with his head crooked to one side.

  He’s holding up his left hand to shield his eyes from the bright sun, while the other kid’s perched up at the top of the sliding board just ready to go down the chute on his stomach. They don’t seem aware of each other, those two kids—like each one thinks he’s the only one in the picture.

  I never know what to say. I say stupid stuff like “cute kids,’’ and then Earl tells me they favor their mother, or that he’s sending them to Olive Branch Christian Academy because the public schools’re no good anymore. He says to me, like it’s a secret only him and me are supposed to know, “Tony, the problem’s not drugs or blacks or Hispanics per se, the problem’s people who come here not understanding fundamental American values.” He always leans close to me when he talks like that, and lowers his voice even though of course there’s nobody to hear. He says, “This country’s letting itself go to ruin because it’s just opened its borders wide to anything that wants to come through. A country that can’t control its own borders, now where’s that country going to be?”

  I never have much to say to all that. I guess my life’s pretty much been one big open border. And anyway, it’s what you’d expect from Earl. It’s what I grew up with in Owen and if things hadn’t been different, it’s probably what I’d be like now. There’re even times when I wish I was still like that—everything would be a lot easier and clearer. Anyway, who’s a murderer to go saying to Earl’s face how it’s bad attitudes like his that start to break a country down, not people coming in across its borders because they don’t have any other place to go?

  But back to that photo. I think it’s odd for some prison guard to be showing a murderer pictures of his kids. I think Earl looks at that picture and he knows there’s something there he’s not getting. Then he looks at me, and I think somehow he’s pleading with me to tell him what it is. That’s why he’s so interested in me—he thinks if you kill somebody then you know things other people go through life never knowing. Terrible things that a man who’s got kids needs to know if he’s going to keep those kids safe.

  Maybe that’s why, last week, instead of showing me that photo again, he went and pulled out a newspaper article he had all folded up in his wallet.

  “So what’s that?” I asked.

  “Something I thought you might want to see,” he said.

  I wasn’t too surprised—it wasn’t the first time in my life I ever saw my name in print. “Tony Blair’s long nightmare is over,” it started off, “and another one begins.” I read a little ways into it, and it made me pretty sick to my stomach what they said about me. Not that it was a bunch of lies, but just that they didn’t have a clue. So I told Earl that. I told him what really snared me was how whoever wrote that article thought they could figure something out about me—like they had some kind of inside information.

  “I got a drawer full of clippings if you ever want to see them,” he told me. “Newspapers, magazines.”

  “I’ve got no interest,” I said.

  “I’m keeping them if you ever want them. I made a sort of album—you know, to keep things straight for you.”

  It struck me as sort of creepy, him pasting away at that scrapbook in his spare time. I could just see him sitting around the kitchen table at night, sipping coffee—I’m sure Earl doesn’t drink. I’m sure his wife won’t let him. I guess it’s a free country, though—if that’s what he wants to do.

  I asked him, Did he read those articles?

  “I read them all the time,” he told me. “There’re some things you just can’t get out of your head.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “I still can’t figure you,” he said. “Nobody can.”

  Which made me laugh. “There’s nothing to figure,” I said. “I mean, once you know. It’s just that nobody ever asked me my opinion about any of it.”

  Earl didn’t say anything to that. He just shuffled off in that Earl way of his, and I didn’t think any more about it till about a week later he brought me this spiral notebook and a blue ballpoint pen. He said he’d been thinking about it, and he thought if everybody
else was going to have a say, then maybe I should write my own side of it too. He said he was sure it would be fascinating, and he thought I could sell it to some magazine for lots of money.

  “What’s a person like me going to do with lots of money?” I asked him.

  “Well then,” he said, “write it to tell the truth.”

  So here goes, Earl. Though there’s just one other thing I want to say before I get on with it.

  The summer when I was fourteen I got this completely strange idea. I thought a wood tick, one of those little brown things about the size of a pinhead, had managed to crawl up into my dick and get lodged in there. It made this itch I couldn’t get at; kept me squirming all summer long. All I could think about was that tick getting fatter and fatter. I could feel it getting fatter, its little, brown body bloating up like you see ticks on dogs, till it was a big gray pellet all mushy with blood. Every time I pissed I kept expecting to somehow be able to piss it out—but I couldn’t because of course nothing was up there.

  Which is how I feel these days, only the tick isn’t stuck in the slit of my dick anymore—it’s crawled all the way to my heart. I can feel it hanging there, attached to that blood pump, feeding off it and itching me like hell. But no matter what I do I can’t get at it.

  I’M TRYING TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING I CAN AND BE completely honest, so if I think about something and find I haven’t exactly remembered it right, or told the truth about it, I’m going to go back and change what I said, or add to it. Which is what I have to do right now—meaning, I wasn’t completely honest when I told Carlos about me and Wallace, watching each other jerk off. So I should tell you the whole story now, for the record.

  By the time I was sixteen or so, I guess I was probably an alcoholic. Maybe you already guessed that from what I said earlier. It wasn’t my fault, exactly. What happened was this: ever since I was a little kid, I had these terrible nightmares. The kind you wake up screaming from in the middle of the night. And something new every night. I’d be standing in front of a mirror picking at my nose, and my nose would come off like raw hamburger. I’d go on scratching at my face, and it would just peel off under my fingers. Or I’d be in this dark room and something would be in the room with me, and I knew if I yelled out it’d go away—but I’d keep trying to yell and nothing happened. Then I guess I really would yell out loud and wake myself up in a sweat. You get the idea.

  I remember my dad would come into the bedroom and take me up in his arms and walk me around, singing this song to calm me down. “Red River Valley’’ was the song, and I always used to think Red River Valley was the place where we lived. When he sang, “From this valley they say you are going,” I always felt sad and empty—and then when he up and left us, a couple of years later when I was eleven or so, I knew why I’d felt that way.

  With no more Red River Valley, I was pretty much on my own—but when I was fourteen, I made this great discovery. I remember that afternoon: I was in the trailer watching after my two little sisters, who at the time were about four and five, and because I was feeling restless I decided to have a shot of Mom’s whisky to maybe relax me. I knew she kept it in the cupboard and did shots of it at night before she went to sleep—but somehow it just never occurred to me to try some myself. It was bitter-tasting, but nice to feel go down warm in my throat, and then spread out in my stomach. I decided to have another swallow, and then after a few minutes I was feeling so good I had another, and before I knew it I was drunk.

  I remember walking outside—it was a cloudy day in the middle of summer and the green of the trees about knocked me over, it seemed so close and heavy and I couldn’t get enough of looking at those trees and taking it all in. Then I came inside and fell asleep on the sofa, which was the first good sleep I’d had in, it seemed like, years.

  Pretty soon I was taking so many shots of Mom’s whisky that I had to figure out how to get some on my own. There was only so much doctoring it up with water that I could get away with. Which leads to Wallace.

  I can’t really remember how I met him—it seems like he was always around, and we always sort of knew each other even though he was four or five years older than me. I never really thought about it at the time, but now I think probably he and my mom had something going for a while. But then it must’ve stopped, and they stayed friendly afterward. That was more or less the way my mom was with her men—after my dad left, she didn’t get too emotionally involved. I think she was out for a good time and that was all.

  I liked Wallace because he was funny and smart, unlike most of the people I knew. We went hunting a few times, and I remember he took me to a turkey shoot once where he won a turkey that he gave to my mom on the condition she invite him over to Thanksgiving, which she did. After the meal Wallace and I went on a little walk in the woods behind the trailer, and he brought out this pint of bourbon and we sat on a log and drank it and talked about girls and what a dead place Owen was, and how he had these big plans about moving to Detroit, where he had a cousin. With the bourbon and all, we got to talking about various things about ourselves—I don’t know what got into me, but I up and told him about the dreams I was having, and how I needed to get whisky so I could sleep.

  He sort of laughed and said, “Yeah, sure; we all know how it is.” But then he went on to say, if I could pay him he could get stuff for me, no problem.

  The only problem was, I didn’t have any money because I wasn’t working, and they wouldn’t hire at the lumberyard till you were sixteen. So Wallace said he’d think about some way I could pay him, and in the meantime he’d get me stuff from the liquor store.

  About a month went by, and he’d brought me about four bottles of Canadian Club and hadn’t asked for a dime, and I thought, This is great, I’ve got it made. But I also sort of wondered what was up—though of course I didn’t say anything. Then one night he came over. It was late Saturday night, and he stood there banging on the trailer door. He was pretty drunk. In fact he was blasted—you could tell just by smelling his breath and how bright his eyes were. He leaned against the door like he was bracing himself and looked in at the living room. “Your mom here?” he said.

  I told him, no, she was out with this guy Bruce she’d met. “Figures,” he said. “Then let’s you and me go somewhere too.”

  “I can’t go anywhere,” I told him. “I’m watching the kids.” Which in fact I was.

  “So are they asleep or what?”

  “They’re asleep,” I admitted.

  He grabbed my arm. “Come get in the truck. We won’t be all night. They’ll be just fine.”

  “Sure, okay,” I told him, because after all it was Saturday night and the kids’d be fine just lying there asleep. Plus, I thought, if he’s so drunk there’s probably more where that came from. I was running a little low on my current bottle, so I thought it might be a good idea to be drinking his liquor tonight instead of mine. And who knew? Maybe he’d give me another bottle or something.

  The truck ride was pretty severe. Wallace was having a little trouble holding it to just one lane, and we kept swerving onto the shoulder—but fortunately his apartment was only about five minutes from our trailer. Even though he was already completely drunk, as soon as we were in the apartment he poured both of us two big glasses of bourbon, which was just fine with me. Then he put the Allman Brothers on the stereo and started sort of dancing around the room. I’d never seen Wallace so stoked before, but that was okay. Sometimes I thought the guy was a little too serious, but now he was being pretty silly. Definitely he was somewhere else, though I was drinking fast to try to catch up. This is great, I thought. I’ll pass out when I get home and won’t have to worry.

  “So it’s time for you to pay,” Wallace told me. He was still dancing around, not looking at me at all.

  “What do you mean, pay?” I said. He knew I didn’t have any cash.

  “Like I said, pay. We agreed, right? I was going to think about how I was going to get paid.”

  “Yeah, you wer
e going to think about it.”

  “Well, I’ve done thought about it.” He was still dancing, and as he was dancing he slipped his T-shirt off over his head.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Come on over here,” he told me. Then, when I didn’t immediately move, he danced over to where I was and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “You’re a great pal,” he told me.

  “You’re a great pal too,” I said back, still thinking he was just being drunk.

  But he wasn’t—and, well, one thing led to another and pretty soon it was clear how I was going to pay.

  “Go on,” he said, “it’s not going to kill you. Lots of people done it before this.”

  I wasn’t too thrilled, but I wasn’t freaked out either. I guess I was pretty drunk. I did some quick calculating and figured out it was probably either do this or no more whisky. What the hell, I thought—he’s right, it won’t kill me. We were in his bedroom by then. He was lying with his hands behind his head and his half-hard dick flopping across his belly. Well, I remember thinking, here goes nothing. So I went down on it.

  “No teeth,” he said.

  I tried again, and I must’ve done better because he started moaning and moving his hips around. I didn’t get any thrills from it—basically it just made my jaw ache. I don’t even remember now if I had a hard-on or anything. I went up and down on it for a while, and then when I got bored with that I started experimenting with how deep in my throat I could make it go. I couldn’t get all that far down on it without gagging—so I went back to doing what I could handle. Pretty soon he said, “I’m going to come,” so I pulled off because at the time the last thing in the world I wanted to do was go swallowing a bunch of come. Taking his dick between my two palms I jerked him off the rest of the way. He came in a big white puddle right on his belly. I’d never seen another guy’s come before, and it was sort of interesting. I remember I rubbed it around his belly with my fingers and then lifted my fingers to my nose and smelled. More out of curiosity than anything else.