Boys of Life Read online

  “Tony,” I said. “That’s right.”

  He was this big ape of a guy, greasy black hair all tucked up in a red kerchief and this huge black beard. He studied me like I was something the cat dragged in. I could tell he was sizing me up, which is a thing that always makes me bristle when people do that to me.

  “Hmm,” he said. “So how tall are you?”

  It was sort of an odd way to start up a conversation. I didn’t like him much.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Tell me how tall you are. Five nine, five ten?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t go around measuring myself all the time,” I told him.

  “You’re still growing,” he said—not like it was a question, but something he just knew about me.

  How was I supposed to know if I was still growing? I didn’t say anything, and he rubbed his beard with the palm of his hand. These big flakes of dandruff fell out of it. I could see them raining down, they were so thick. He took another big swig of beer.

  “You know what causes that?” he said.

  “Causes what?”

  “Dandruff.” He rubbed his beard again, and again it started to snow. I had to shrug one more time. I never liked tests, I was never very good at them.

  “Deficiency of zinc and selenium,” he said. He swigged from his beer again. With his sleeveless denim jacket and army boots, it was like he’d taken me prisoner in some kind of jungle battle, the way he was crouching in front of me and me with my back up against that tree. I practically expected him to come out with the bamboo torture instruments any minute now.

  “Do you know,” he said, “what causes a deficiency of zinc and selenium in the human body?” He looked at me like this was something any idiot’s supposed to know.

  I just looked back at him.

  “You jerk off too much,” he said; “You lose zinc and selenium through your semen. Now isn’t that interesting? I bet you didn’t know that.” All the time he kept peering at me, pinning me to that tree trunk.

  “There’s lots I don’t know,” I told him. Anyway, he was the one with the dandruff, not me. “Are you trying to tell me not to jerk off too much?”

  He laughed his bear laugh. “Consider it a friendly warning,” he said. “Take me as an example.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “You and my gym teacher.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “We all got vices. You smoke?”

  I shrugged again—sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. I used to smoke when I was around Wallace, because he did. Kools, which I always thought tasted pretty grim.

  “Well—either it’s yes or no,” he told me. Suddenly it was like he was angry with me for no reason. “I guess that means the hell no,” he said.

  I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be saying to him. But just then he took out this joint from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth.

  I never smoked dope. I knew my way around booze like a pro, but I’d never touched any dope. I knew what a joint looked like, but that was basically from TV. Believe it or not, even though it was I979 there weren’t a whole lot of drugs in Owen, Kentucky—even the homegrown kind.

  He went ahead and lit up right there in my face. Then he blew smoke at me. It smelled smoky and sweet.

  “That bother you?” he asked.

  “No,” I told him. This treatment of his was sort of freaking me out. Suddenly he jabbed with one hand to the left of my head, then to the right, these two split-second moves so fast I hardly had time to react.

  “Hey,” I warned him. It seemed crazy this guy might be trying to pick a fight.

  But he only smiled. “You’re just fine,” he said. He stood up and looked down past his big belly at me. Then he walked away without saying another word.

  Okay, I remember telling myself. Fine. You’re just hanging out, you can get up and walk away from this any time you want. Because I was pretty rattled. It was sort of the same way I’d felt with Carlos in the laundromat—how somehow this guy I’d never even met before knew all these things about me. Things I didn’t even know. I wondered if he could tell just by looking at me how I jerked off too much.

  It never occurred to me Carlos might’ve been talking about me to these people. It never occurred to me one bit.

  In the field on this side of the shack were some tents set up and people milling around. There was Carlos’s orange VW van, and a pickup truck with an old homemade camper on back and this ancient church bus painted sky blue with the words RISING ZION HARDSHELL BAPTIST on the side. Hardshell is right, I remember thinking.

  It was getting dark. That whole scene started to look like some kind of strange movie I was making in my head. Sammy in that KILL THE BASTARDS T-shirt of his over there stirring something in a big pot, and Verbena still down in the field walking around in circles and farting. Nobody there knew they were in my movie right then, but for a minute they were. Which was weird—I’d never looked at anything like it was a movie before. But it sort of worked.

  Everybody was gathering over where Sammy’d started dishing out food. I looked around for Carlos, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I remember thinking—of course he was going to go off like this, and all these strange people around. But I couldn’t leave—and I guess I didn’t want to. I stuck my hands down in my pockets and wandered over to where everybody was sitting around in a circle on the ground. There were bottles of wine, which cheered me up, and everybody was talking and laughing.

  “Come on, shy girl,’’ Verbena said. “Sit yourself down. We don’t bite round here.”

  I sort of had to laugh. But I sat down anyway. Verbena poured me some wine into a paper cup, and I took a big swallow.

  “Watch you don’t lose your head on that stuff,” she told me.

  “I’m okay with it,” I told her, and with another swallow I finished off the cup. I was pretty nervous, and I needed some calming down. “Fill her up again,” I told Verbena. I held out my cup to her.

  “This boy,” Verbena told Seth, “he’s a regular gas guzzler.”

  “He’s okay,” Seth said. “He’s just frisky.”

  I didn’t like Seth. There was something about him that bullied me. And I kept watching all that dandruff flake down his chest. I tried not to imagine him jerking off—it was too gross.

  Finally Carlos showed up. He sat himself down next to me but he didn’t say anything—he just patted me on my thigh to show me he was there. Carlos, I wanted to say—but then I didn’t know what’d come next. So I didn’t say a word but just dug into that stew Sammy’d made, which actually wasn’t bad if you liked that kind of thing.

  Carlos wasn’t eating anything. I noticed that in a minute—my spoon was scraping the bottom of the bowl and he was just sitting there studying everybody, watching all of us eat like it was the most fascinating thing. He could’ve been taking notes in that spiral notebook of his and it wouldn’t’ve looked any stranger.

  All of a sudden, like it was something he’d just remembered, he said in this loud voice that interrupted everybody else, “This is Tony. I haven’t introduced him the way I should, but he’s a very good friend of mine and I want everybody to like him, okay?’’

  Not the greatest way to introduce somebody, I thought—telling everybody else they have to like him.

  Everybody in the circle sort of nodded at me, except Sammy, who I felt really disapproved of me for not knowing to leave the peels on his stupid potatoes. They all seemed a little stressed by having me there, which I could understand, since I was a little stressed by being there.

  Carlos didn’t exactly make it better. “You’re new to all this. It’ll take time.” He laced the fingers of both his hands together. “We’re strong, like this. We hold together. Utopia is what we are. And now you come in from the outside. It’s hard.”

  While he said that, Sammy was handing around blackberries he’d dished into bowls. When everybody had a bowl, Carlos held his up in front of him. “It’s been good,” he said. “A good day, and they can’t t
ake it away from us. Whatever happens tomorrow, we’ve had this.” Nobody said anything—they all just lifted their bowls up. Like a salute—not to Carlos, just a salute to everything. It impressed the hell out of me, it sent chills down my spine, and I thought about the way Carlos had laced his fingers together, and said that word Utopia.

  Everything that’d been going on for the last several days just focused right then for me, because I remember looking around at those people and thinking, I’ve got to remember this. And that’s what I realized Carlos had been doing earlier, when he first sat down. Looking around and trying to remember it all. I thought about him lacing his fingers together, and I thought to myself, so clear it was like saying it out loud—These people trust each other totally, like people never do. It was stunning for me to suddenly think that, because I’d never before had any cause to think about trust except in ordinary ways, and now suddenly I was saying to myself, looking around at Carlos and Verbena and those bowls of blackberries—These are people who totally trust each other. I thought about Verbena sending out that spout of fire right in front of everybody, which should have been gross and disgusting but somehow wasn’t. It was just something that could happen if you wanted it to, and it was okay, it was one more thing. You might think it’s strange to say, but I was glad I’d seen that. It was something I wanted to remember. It was stuff like that that held them together, and I wanted that stuff.

  It’d gotten completely dark. Even though I was feeling totally at ease, I also thought I should be getting back home. It’s like the way you wander into deep water. You’re surprised you’ve gotten that far, and you know you could probably go farther, but you don’t want to trust your luck anymore. You want to turn back with just what you have.

  I touched Carlos on the arm to say I had to go. He looked at me like he was surprised I was still there. He’d let me see these things I’d seen, but I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me with them. “I’ll walk you a ways,” he said.

  I was scared. Some funny bone had gotten struck deep inside me, and I was ringing from the inside out. It just didn’t seem likely, after this afternoon, we could go back to being the way we were. That Carlos could just scoop me up out there in the dark and go down on me like he did before. Every step, as we walked out into the dark where my bike was—anything could happen. But Carlos seemed relaxed. He put his hands in his pockets and sort of whistled a tune. We didn’t have that much to say but that was okay.

  It made me feel better, somehow, to know he was in some kind of control. And it made me feel better to know he was connected to those people back there around the fire that Seth had managed to make roar up in a big flame with some leftover gasoline from the shoot. It made me feel better to know Carlos hadn’t dropped in out of nowhere, which is the way it’d felt at first.

  When we got to where my bike was, he stopped and said, “Well.” But he didn’t say anything else.

  “Maybe I’ll stop by tomorrow and see how things are going,” I told him. “That was all pretty interesting today.” I wanted to make it sound like I was in control too. Like I wasn’t quivering.

  He still didn’t say anything, and I remember thinking it was like he was calculating something in his head. Finally he said, “We won’t be here tomorrow, Tony. We’re leaving.”

  “For good?” I said. “You didn’t say anything about going tomorrow.” I think it probably sounded like a whine.

  “We finished up early,” he said, the way you might just shrug somebody off. But then he grabbed my arm so hard it hurt. “Look, this is crazy,” he told me. “I haven’t slept in three days. I’ve been up all night. Writing, see? I’ve got this great idea, it’s a magnificent idea for a movie… And you should be in it. It’s for you, Tony. I wrote it for you, a script and everything. To star in.”

  It took me a second to get it.

  “A movie for me to star in?” When I said it, it didn’t sound right at all. But he suddenly seemed to believe in it.

  “We’ll start shooting in, I don’t know, about two months. We can get some money, I know where we can get some money I’m pretty sure, and we can start shooting it and go from there. Two months. Start to finish. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  He made it sound like an ordeal, but I sort of liked the idea of starring in a movie—even though I have to say it freaked me out a little too.

  “That’s what I have to offer,” he said. Then he sounded sad, and it kind of swept me off my feet. “That’s all I have to offer,” he told me.

  “But I don’t get it. How are we going to make this movie when you’re leaving?” I pointed out.

  “You’re leaving too. You’re coming with us. The instant I saw you, I knew you were perfect. I’ve been looking a long time for the one perfect person for this movie, and you’re it, Tony. You’re that person.”

  “What kind of movie?” I was suddenly suspicious. “I’m not going to be in any porn film.”

  “No, of course not,” he said. And kind of laughed. I have to admit I wasn’t exactly thrilled either with the idea of my movie career being to drive a pickup truck around in circles till I fell out on my face, or to go farting fire out my butt or some stupid stunt like that. Not that I’d ever spent too much time thinking about my movie career up to that point.

  “I can’t just up and leave,” I told him.

  “No, I guess not,” he said.

  “Wow,” I said. “I have to think. I mean, there’s school and things. I have to take care of my brother and little sisters.”

  “I guess so.” He sounded disappointed, but not as disappointed as I guess I wanted him to sound. I was going up and down on his movie idea like a seesaw.

  “There’s no mercy,” Carlos said. He had this edge to his voice that took me off guard. To tell you the truth, it sort of scared me. “You stay in one place,” he said, “you fall behind. You fall behind, you don’t count anymore, you’re not worth shit.”

  He sounded angry. Not at me: just angry. But I didn’t know anything about what he was talking about. I said, “I don’t know anything about any of this, and you’re dropping it all on top of me pretty fast.”

  “You’ve got it,” he said. “But then we just met, right? And I’m leaving tomorrow, right? So where does that leave us?”

  “What kind of movie?” I asked again, because he hadn’t quite answered that the first time I asked him.

  He laughed. “Not like any movie you’ve ever seen before. Not by a long shot.”

  Which after this afternoon, I could pretty much believe was true.

  “It’s not just movies,” he said. “Think about it. It’s other things too.”

  “Look,” I told him, “I’m not a fag or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  I think he must’ve been smiling. But it was dark, so I couldn’t see.

  “I don’t think you’re a fag,” he told me. “I never said you were a fag.”

  He was right. Though I also had a hard-on from standing there talking with him. I expected him, any minute, to move in on me. But he just stood there with his hands in his pockets, not making any move at all, and I suddenly realized he wasn’t going to. If this was my last chance, then I was losing it even while I was standing there waiting for it.

  “We’re pulling out about six,” Carlos said. “Think about it. I want you to come, but I’m not going to say anything else.”

  If only he’d touch me, I thought—somehow all the rest would happen. But he just started to walk away.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him, though as soon as I said that, it felt like something that comes too late. Like he’d completely lost interest. I could see the fire going, and shapes moving around the fire, and hear their voices, and it made me feel empty inside, like here was this door that had opened and I’d gotten a peek inside and now it was closing. I’d never get a chance at anything like it again.

  But at the same time it was just too much to think about, and I sort of shut down. “See you a
round, Carlos,’’ I said, feeling all hurt and angry inside. But I don’t think he heard me. Or if he did, he pretended he didn’t—which is probably what really happened, now that I think about it.

  I must’ve stood there for a minute wondering what to do, thinking maybe Carlos would come back and give me a second chance. But he didn’t. I could see him settle down around the fire with everybody else, and it was pretty clear he’d totally forgotten I was even alive.

  So fuck you, I thought, and hopped on my bike and rode home in the dark—something I always liked to do, sliding along with only the whirr of the bicycle tires in my ears, this cool clean sound that’s like nothing else. The country roads around Owen get pretty dark at night, but I knew them by heart. I’d spent a lot of time pedaling them up and down trying to burn off all the things in me I didn’t know what else to do with.

  When I got home, I didn’t go up to the trailer. I went down into the woods and found my stash of whisky Carlos had got for me, and I took the bottle that was still about half full and walked way down in the woods, completely out of sight of the lights from the trailer. I sat down—it was pitch black because there wasn’t any moon or anything, there weren’t even any stars. I took a long swig and felt how it spread out in my stomach. Home at last, I thought, settling down to welcome the only feeling I was ever really comfortable with, that warm feeling of whisky in my gut.

  I remember sitting there absolutely quiet, hardly able to see even the trunks of the trees around me, just able to sense they were there, and the woods were quiet except for that cicada drone that once you get used to it, you just don’t hear anymore. After a few minutes my hearing tuned itself way up—I could pick up traffic I knew was miles away, conversations black people were having on their front porches over in what we called Niggertown, even the sounds little tiny insects were making while they burrowed down inside tree trunks.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d sat in the woods like that, just listening to everything till it roared in my head. But this time I had the strongest feeling something out there—or maybe it was inside me—was about to burst. I could feel the whole woods tense up. Some bomb was ready to drop, and I was waiting for that thing to happen, which didn’t happen yet but it was going to. Every second that went by it was more likely to happen. Now, or now, or now. I don’t know what I thought it was going to be, or what it was supposed to mean if it did—I just thought now would be the perfect time.