Boys of Life Read online

  When I looked up at him he was completely passed out. I poured myself another big glass of bourbon and sat in the living room and watched a little bit of White Christmas with Bing Crosby, which was the late movie on TV that night. When I looked in the bedroom again, he was still passed out, only now he was snoring. I left him like that on top of the covers, sort of half on and half off the bed, and I walked back home feeling pretty drunk but okay.

  He never mentioned what happened, and I sure wasn’t going to, but he kept the whisky coming, and I guess probably four more times we did the same thing, always more or less exactly the same, with him being drunk and me sucking him till he was about to come and then jerking him off the rest of the way. We neither of us ever said anything about what we did, and after about six months Wallace up and moved to Detroit. I never saw him again after that.

  Now that I’ve told the truth about Wallace, something else comes back to me. I’d totally forgotten about it till just now, but about a year before the stuff with Wallace, my mom and I were driving back from Paducah, and I had to piss. We stopped at a rest stop on the interstate, and I went into the toilet. At the next urinal, there was this older man. I thought it was odd he wasn’t pissing—he was just standing there holding his dick—but I didn’t really think anything about it. So I went on and pissed and when I was through, before I could stick myself back in my pants, he reached over and put his hand around my dick.

  I was shocked as hell, but also hard in no time. I just stood there, I couldn’t move a muscle. He jerked me off and himself at the same time, and I came almost instantly. I was back in my pants and scooted out of there before the guy had time to come or anything.

  The strange thing was, the instant I was out of there it was some thing behind me, it was just something that had happened to me and that was that. I didn’t think about it on the car ride home or anything.

  I never thought about it again till just now, when thinking about all that other stuff must’ve dredged it up. Carlos would like that.

  IN THE DREAM, WHICH IS ALSO A MOVIE THAT’S BEING filmed, they’re wearing gas masks that make them look like people from some other planet—big round empty eyes and elephant trunks that hang down, plus heavy clothes and gloves. When I first see them, they’re coming over a rise, about five people trudging toward the camera. It looks like some World War I battlefield with craters and mud and no trees or anything except some blasted trunks and branches.

  No matter what’s happening in the dream, I never forget it’s all being filmed, even though I never actually see the camera crew. But I know they’re outside the frame, and somehow that’s comforting because I know if they’re filming it then it’s all just acting. But it’s also scary because somehow I realize—but they don’t, and this is what makes dreaming it so bad—that they think it’s all being acted but it’s really not. It’s the real thing.

  The people in the gas masks stop in a grove of dead trees where the bark’s been peeled away and is hanging down in big strips—like it’s been burned off by acid. Somehow in the movie the bark hanging in strips is connected with the melting sickness. Because there’s some kind of melting sickness in the air that the suits and masks are supposed to protect against. One of the people in the group—a kid—has gotten exposed. His skin’s melting off like some snake shedding its skin: only not clean and dry like that, but wet and horrible. He’s not wearing the same protective suit as everybody else, instead he’s wearing this army flak vest that leaves his arms and chest exposed.

  They come to a stop in the grove of trees. Everything’s happening with no sound, like in some silent movie. The leader of the group holds up his hand to tell the others they should halt here. The kid lies down because he can’t go any farther, and his father, who’s the leader, kneels down beside him and takes out a handkerchief. He dips it in this can of gasoline that’s there beside him. He cradles the kid in his arms, and I can see now how his skin is melting off in these horrible pools of flesh. The father very gently takes the handkerchief with the gasoline on it and smothers the kid, and that’s the end of the movie—only the people who’re filming it don’t know yet that it’s not a movie, that there really is this terrible disease in the air that’s making people’s skin melt off.

  I DIDN’T GUESS I’D SEE CARLOS AGAIN. THE NEXT DAY I moved the bottle of Canadian Club he’d bought me down to this hollow tree stump in the woods where I’d stash stuff when I had it. If it wasn’t for that bottle, I probably would’ve thought I was crazy and made the whole thing up. But the bottle was there, and I remember resolving how I was going to make it last as long as I could. Every time I took a hit from it, I thought, Carlos bought me this bottle—and that made me feel empty and charged up at the same time. Carlos who I’d never seen again, who I couldn’t even really remember what he looked like once a couple of days had gone by. But there were things I didn’t forget—his mouth on my dick, all slick and warm and me feeling like I belonged in there. I could jerk off to that, and I did—and thinking about him kissing me too, which didn’t feel so bad to think about. Especially since it wasn’t something that was ever going to happen again.

  Then one day I was riding this beat-up old bicycle I used to get around town on, and here comes a car horn beeping practically in my ear—it’s the kind of thing that annoys me like crazy, when cars do that to me and I’m on my bicycle. I turned around ready to give the finger when I saw it was Carlos in the orange van.

  “So I guess you think that’s funny,” I told him. He was grinning at me, this mean ugly grin that made me hate to see him again. I felt all sick to see that face and remember everything it’d done to me.

  “Not really,” he said, “but I had to get your attention somehow. I’m so happy to see you.”

  “Yeah, well,” I told him. “I could say the same. So you’re still in town,” I said.

  It was weird to see him again. He was still wearing that black shirt of his buttoned to the collar.

  “We’re making a movie,” he said. “I told you that.”

  “Yeah, you’re making a movie where?” I said. I hadn’t seen any evidence of anybody making a movie. I figured it was just this thing he’d told me to try and make himself interesting. But he sounded disappointed.

  “I thought for sure you were going to come out and see us.”

  It was honestly something I hadn’t even thought about. I’d figured—whoever he was, he was long gone from Owen.

  “So where is this movie?” I asked him.

  It turned out it was about a mile past Tatum’s Landing, where we’d gone that night.

  “Throw your bike in the back of the van and come on out—I’m going there right this instant.”

  It was the last thing I wanted to do right then. “I can’t,” I lied. “I got to run some errands.”

  “Well tomorrow, then. Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be looking for you.

  “We’ll see,” I told him.

  “Gotta go,” he said, and honked his horn again, and then he was off.

  I stood there breathing his fumes, straddling my bike. I remember saying to myself out loud, “Jeesh,” like that was going to solve anything. I never talk out loud to myself.

  But my heart was beating fast and I had this prickly sweat. I was really happy, I wanted to shout something right there, I wanted to clap my hands and high-five it. It also made me feel queasy right down to the bottom of my gut.

  Without another thought I started peddling fast as I could in the direction Carlos took off in.

  I thought—if I just peddle and don’t think, everything’ll be okay. It made my legs ache, I peddled so fast without letting up—but I liked that. I liked concentrating on the way my muscles started to burn.

  I was past the turnoff for Tatum’s Landing in no time. There was a little rise, and then the road dipped down, and suddenly what I saw was this: an old dilapidated shack sitting in the middle of a field, and in front of that shack there were about twenty black plastic buckets with tall weeds gr
owing out of them. Somebody’d lighted those weeds on fire, and they were flaming away. This huge black woman in an apron and a bright purple kerchief was hanging out of the cab of an old pickup truck, driving it around and around those burning weeds in a circle. She was whooping it up, shaking her fist at those weeds. Then all of a sudden she fell right out of the truck on her face and the truck kept going on without her, sort of in a circle but sort of not. Some old man who’d been standing on the sidelines, where the cameras were, scrambled up to make sure she was okay, while another guy took off running after the truck to jump in the cab and put the brake on.

  I hadn’t known what to expect, exactly, but it definitely wasn’t this. Carlos seemed happy to see me. He turned his back on everything that was happening in front of the shack and walked over to where I’d gotten off my bicycle. He put his arms around me; then he stuck his tongue in my mouth. I was panting like crazy from the ride. It made me squeamish, him hugging me in broad daylight like that, and kissing me, but I could tell nobody was watching because they were all still running around trying to put out the fires in the buckets.

  “I knew you’d come,” Carlos said. “You’re a godsend. See that shovel? Take those buckets out in the field, dump out the burned-up weeds, then dig and pot me about twenty more. And bring them back over here, okay? Netta’ll help you.”

  He pointed to this wild-looking woman who came up to where we were standing. She had a bug-eyed look, and frizzy black hair she kept running her fingers through. She was wearing this tight black dress that followed the shape of her body.

  “Well finally,” she said. “Let’s get this thing done right.” She went over and started pulling the burnt weed-stalks out of the buckets. I didn’t say anything—I was too surprised, and Carlos was suddenly involved in a very intense conversation with this big bearded guy with a movie camera. I followed Netta down to the field where we dug up the tall brown weeds that were growing there and potted them in the buckets.

  “You wait,” she kept muttering under her breath. “You’ll find out.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me, but I sort of thought she wasn’t. I sort of thought she must be talking to the weeds she was pulling up with her bare hands. She kept wiping her face with those hands, and her hair, and she left dirt smudges across her cheeks and her forehead, and little bits of weed in her hair.

  “Slash and burn,” she said. “When in doubt.” And she pulled up another stalk of weed and plugged it down in a bucket.

  We brought the buckets back from the field and set them in front of the shack the way they’d been last time.

  Carlos was talking to the black woman, whom he called Verbena. She was breathing hard. “Hoo,” she told him, “I ain’t that young no more.” Up close, she had the worst teeth in the universe—four or five scraggly stumps in the front of her mouth and that was it. But she kept smiling this big smile, even when Carlos put his arm around her and told her the bad news: she had to do that stunt with the pickup truck one more time. “And you’re not supposed to fall out of the truck,” he told her.

  “I know I’m not supposed to fall out of the truck,” she said.

  “Then don’t do it.”

  “I got carried away,” she told Carlos. “Maybe I’ll get carried away again.”

  “I’ll kill you,” he said, “if you get carried away again. I’ll drive the truck right over your body.”

  Carlos had forgotten all about me—there was nothing to do except watch. Somebody was splashing gasoline on those buckets of weeds we’d brought up from the field, and somebody else moved in with a movie camera while Verbena tugged at her dress that’d gotten twisted on her body, the way some little girl might go squirming and tugging, and then what happened next was the most amazing thing. I couldn’t believe it.

  Verbena walked over to those buckets. She hiked up her skirt and squatted down. She took out a cigarette lighter, and held it around behind her, where her butt was sticking out, and she flicked it. Whoosh! Out came this humungous fart like a cannon. It ripped right through that lighter spark like a flamethrower, this long tongue of fire that went licking out over all those weeds in the pots till they blazed right up. Verbena let out this yelp and ran over and jumped in the truck, and away she went, driving around those burning weeds, hanging on for dear life even while she kept slinging her big body as far out of the cab as she could, steering with one hand and yelling and shouting and shaking her fist while the truck went round and round and the fire climbed up the stalks of those weeds till you couldn’t see the weeds anymore, just the fire.

  The camera was getting it all down, from start to finish. And my heart, I have to tell you, was beating like no tomorrow.

  Nobody knew it at the time, naturally, especially not me, but that movie they were making was the one that’d make Carlos famous—Ur, which when they showed it in New York at this film festival got a lot of attention from everybody, and I still have the photo from Time magazine of Verbena hanging out of that truck with all those weeds on fire.

  But that was all a couple of years down the toad, and if you ask, Did any of us know we were doing something that would be famous one day? I’d have to honestly say, No, we didn’t. Except maybe for Carlos, and I know even Carlos was kind of surprised when he got to be famous—I mean, famous in the way he did. He worked such a long time with nobody paying any attention to him, he figured it was always going to be that way. And he didn’t care—he’d already made his peace with that a long time before I ever knew him.

  The take Carlos finally ended up using, by the way, was the one where Verbena fell out of the truck. Somehow, once you saw it on film, it looked totally inspired.

  After the last shot, nobody seemed to know what to do. Verbena’d drifted down to the weed field, and now she was walking around in circles, sort of dazed and farting these big watery farts I don’t think she thought anybody could hear, but they were really loud, like explosions.

  The big burly guy who’d been operating one of the cameras handed me a beer.

  “I’m Seth,” he said.

  “Tony,” I said.

  “Get drunk,” he told me and walked off. Which was a little strange, but at least I had a beer. Nobody else seemed curious about me or anything, and that was fine. I just leaned against a tree trunk and drank my beer.

  After a while Carlos showed up, totally involved in leafing through that spiral notebook he’d had in the Nu-Way.

  “Oh Tony,” he said. “Stay for supper. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, “I can do that.”

  “Then go help Sammy,” he said. He never looked up from his notebook, he just nodded over to where this little old man was cooking something on one of those kerosene stoves like hunters use. He was wearing this funny-looking cap, and this T-shirt with KILL THE BASTARDS stenciled on it. He had tiny little thin arms. I thought it was pretty funny, what his T-shirt said.

  “Kill what bastards?” I asked him.

  “Kill the bastards,” he said, like he meant it.

  “Okay,” I said. “I was just trying to make conversation.”

  “Make dinner instead,” he told me. “Slice those potatoes over there. Here’s a knife.”

  “Are you French?” I asked him. I’d never met a foreigner before, and he had this accent like you never heard. Plus he was wearing that funny little hat.

  “And you, you are perhaps a schlemiel?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. Peel the potatoes and don’t talk to me. I got things to do.”

  I pointed to his hat.

  “A Hungarian Jew invented the beret in the eleventh century, long before you were born,” he told me in that high-pitched little voice of his. “Now I’m busy,” he said, and he turned his back on me like I’d gone and offended him.

  I sat down and started to peel. There’re worse things than peeling potatoes, I guess, especially if you don’t know what else to do with yourself.

  Before I knew it he was standing o
ver me—he was about as tall standing up as I was sitting down—and he was screaming. “No, no, no, no, no,” he screamed, and each time he said no he raised both his fists up to the level of his ears, and then dropped them again. He looked like a little wind-up doll that’d run down if it went on very long.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Slice. Not peel, slice.” He made slicing motions with his hand against the palm of his other.

  “I was peeling them first.”

  “This youth thinks peels are not healthy?” he said. “Vitamins,” he yelled at me. “Roughage. Better people than you have made whole lives off the peels of potatoes.”

  This one’s a crazy one, I said to myself. His weird little accent made me want to laugh. Plus he really was upset, the way crazy people can get themselves totally upset over little things like that.

  “Okay,” I said, “sure. Vitamins.”

  “Vitamins,” he said. We eyed each other for a minute—then all of a sudden there was this twinkle in his eye, he was winking at me, there was some little joke between us. It lasted for about a second, and then he went back to whatever he was cooking in that big pot of his.

  When I finished with the potatoes, I decided it might be best just to rest out of harm’s way. I went back to my tree and sat down with my back up against it.

  I wasn’t there but a few minutes when Seth came over. He squatted down beside me and took a long swig from his beer. “So, you’re Tony,’’ he said. Which I’d already told him was my name earlier.