Boys of Life (2 page)

"There's these two theories about my dad," I told him.

"Theories?" Carlos asked.

"Depending on who you talk to," I told him. "One theory he's laying out in the Wahrani swamp."

"What?" Carlos seemed really alarmed.

"Yeah. Where he got knocked off by some of Mr. Hodge's men for getting himself involved in this liquor running scheme over in Christian County. See, it was a dry county hack then six years ago. So that's one theory. But then this other theory goes, m\ dad just up and left one day. My mom thinks he's in Louisville living it up right

"And what do you think?" Carlos asked.

"I don't think anything. I was just this little kid hack then. All I know is, my d,\d used to heat up on mv mom a lot. Of he'd go lighting into one of us."

"What do you mean, lighting into you?"

"Well, it she wasn't around. You know, at night. He'd go askmu us where she was, and it didn't matter what we said, he'd still light into us. So we just always made sturf up."

Z PAULRUSSELL

I had to laugh—suddenly I was remembering something.

"What's so funny?" Carlos asked. He was taking all this in, like it was serious stuff—which I guess it was.

I told him, "I was just thinking." I had to laugh again before I could go on. "This one time, my brother, Ted, heard my dad stomping back to the bedroom where we were sleeping, and I guess Ted just couldn't take it one more time. So he went diving under the bed. Which when my dad saw that, it gave him this total fit. He completely forgot about my mom and went tearing after Ted, and the whole time Ted's yelling, Leave me alone, and my dad's yelling how Ted better not be hiding from his own dad. He's cussing and screaming, and Ted's screaming, and my dad finally manages to grab hold of Ted's underwear, which is all Ted's wearing, being asleep and everything. So here's Ted screaming and my dad tugging at his underwear to try to pull him out and Ted hanging onto the bedpost for dear life. Then pow! The elastic band just pops and my dad goes flying across the room."

Carlos was still studying me.

"I guess you had to be there," I told him. The way he watched me made me sweat.

"It's a pretty funny story," he said. "It's a hoot." He said it in this way that you couldn't tell whether he thought it was a hoot or not.

"It wasn't too bad for me," I told him. "Live and let live— that's my motto."

"It's a good motto," said Carlos. "It's my motto too." He handed me another beer, my fourth or fifth I guess. I remember thinking how

I ir felt to he talking like I was. I didn't have too many friends,

K since everybody I knew at high school was so feeble minded 5< i most of the time I didn't s.i V anything much to anybody.

But Carlos really did seem to want to know about me. It's funnv 1

i thought th.it w,is weird, it was just something 1 accepted about

( .irl<>s from the very first. This 1 never minded telling him amthin

now, which I wouldn't normally <\^ with somebody. He just let me t.ilk, and lu- listened, and he nevei told me much a himself In retun >u could say thai even ten yean latei I

still don't hi. w majOl mi him.

• that majoi facts tell you anything, ["he Carlos I knew was

erybody i 1m hi^us his m< I his

hat ill the 11. ! about him Wh.it I kneu

D H

BOYSOFLIFE □

the Carlos who'd sit there and listen to you ramble on about anything and study you like you were the most interesting person he'd ever met.

It's stupid little things I remember—the way he never ate a slice of pizza till it was cold. I chalked it up to his being so interested in listening to me talk—but later I learned he always did that. He was scared of burning his tongue; I mean, the way other people are scared of drowning, or snakes. Maybe that's bizarre, but it's why Carlos never drank a hot cup of coffee or ate a bite of hot Umk\ straight from the oven.

That's a stupid little thing, but it's Carlos. It's just as much Carlos as all those movies he made and everything the newspapers said about him after he got famous, or maybe I should call it notorious.

"So what I want to know, Tony," Carlos asked me, "is what did you think about all that stuff with your mom and dad? I mean, when you sat down and thought about it. That's pretty rough stuff."

I had to shrug. "I guess I never really sat down and thought about it," I told him.

"But don't you ever try to put it all together? How one thing leads to another/what it all means?"

All I could do was make a face.

"I'm dead serious," he said. "You really should think about these things." He leaned forward, like he had some secret to tell me, and I remembered thinking how he was looking right through me like some maniac, all bright black eyes I couldn't look away from. "Otherwise," he said, "if you don't think, then who're you going to be? How're you going to know anything? Look—try this: every ni^ht before you go to sleep, choose one thing you remember and then think about it. Try to think what came before it, and then what came before that, and try thinking back as far as you can."

"Okay," I said. "Sure."

"See where it gets you," he told me. "I guarantee—you'll find out all sorts of things. Useful things. You'll be amazed." He pointed to his head. "It's all in there. You discover you're a totally different person from the one you think you are."

I'd stuffed myself on pizza and he hadn't had a bite. But his eyes were fired up with a kind of excitement. I was prett) skeptical.

"The kind of nightmares I have," I told him flat out, I can just see the trouble I'd go getting myself into it I wis to lie there thinking about things before I went to sleep."

"Exactly," he said. "Exactly. That's why you have- those night-

□ PAUL RUSSELL

mares. You're not thinking about those things you need to think about. And they have to get out somehow."

Maybe if Carlos had left me just with that—gotten up and walked away right there—then that would've been enough. That would've done it. Who knows? Here I am ten years and a few thousand miles down the road, and there's not much else to do except lie around and think. And think and think. Who knows? It hasn't helped the nightmares any—Carlos was wrong about that. But sometimes I get the feeling, if I think about things long enough, if I try and remember the way things happened and not the way I might wish they'd happened, then—who knows? Maybe I might really be able to think my way to something that's on the other side of all this mess. I don't know.

Carlos finally took his first bite of pizza, which by that time was bone cold. He folded the wedge in two before eating it, and I noticed how his fingernails were cut smooth down to the quick. While he ate, I told him about the part-time job I'd had for a while loading flats at the lumberyard till it closed down and I hadn't found anything else since then, and how I was going to drop out of school and as soon as I was eighteen I wanted to apply for a job as a penitentiary guard since they made good money.

All of a sudden, in between bites, he looked up at me, right in the eye, and said, "I bet you're a big hit with the girls around here. I bet you've got fifteen girlfriends."

It kind of rook me by surprise. "Don't I wish," I told him. "It's emptier than the moon around here, girlwise."

"Tell me about it," he said. He wasn't eating anymore, just looking at me.

I tried to rhmk oi something interesting to tell. "Well, 1 used to go om with this girl," I said. "It's sort ol amusing, I guess. There was this guy Wallace, he worked .it the lumberyard too in fact, he was

llOU I got the job there-, lie w;is older th;in me h\ 1 guetS about five Anyway, we used tO gO 0U( With these tWO ^irls. What happened

ters, and Wallace wanted to go out with the younger •nK her mother wouldn't let her go out unless her older sister was

Wallace got around that was, he let me up

with tin- lister, who was about three years older than me, and Wallace

• .nit with the ''tie- who Was my age. We'd go OUt "n these son nt

doubl

BOYSOFLIFE D

"Yeah. There wasn't much to it. Those ^irls weren't really into much."

It felt good and drowsy to be lounging around in the back of that van, with the rain still coming down steady and it getting dark outside. It was our last beer.

"Like what?" Carlos asked.

"Nothing much."

"Surely they were into something?"

"Oh, kissing," I said.

"Yeah?"

I had to laugh. "A little hand action," I said.

Carlos just kept studying me. He had thin dry parched-looking lips. "Tell me more," he told me.

"There's not really anything to tell," I said.

"Oh, there's always something to tell," he said.

He made me laugh, he was so curious. He had this way of sucking in his cheeks that made him look even thinner than he was.

"Well," I told him, "if you have to know."

"I don't have to know," he said. "But I'd like to—I'm new around here."

"Yeah, well. We'd park somewhere and Wallace and his girl were in the front seat and me and the sister in the back, and we'd all be necking around. You know—the windows getting all steamed up and it was almost like those two girls'd gone and rehearsed everything in advance."

"What do you mean?" Carlos wasn't going to let me out o( this story once I was into it.

"Well," I said, "they'd both say almost at the exact same time, like they clocked it—okay, that's enough, you got to take us home now."

"That's a drag," Carlos said. "So did you take them home like they wanted?"

I'd totally forgotten those girls, but now I was hating them all over again. "So what else were we supposed to do?" I said. "It wis s ( > frustrating. Jeez was it frustrating."

Carlos stopped chewing on his pizza. "Did you ever come when you were with them?" he asked me, looking at me with this look rhat made something turn over inside me.

I laughed—nobody had ever asked me anything like rhar before.

"Well, did you?" Carlos asked me a^ain. 1 got the feeling he

□ PAULRUSSELL

thought this was funny—which I guess it was, me and Wallace trying all the time and never getting to home base with those girls.

"Nah," I told him. "They'd always cut out way before that."

Hearing that must've relaxed him. He took another bite of pizza and chewed it up. "That must have been pretty rough," he said.

"Well." I didn't know why I was telling him all this. Like I said, I never talked to anybody like this. "See," I told him, "usually after we dropped them off, Wallace would ask me if I wanted a beer, which I usually did, and then he'd just go crazy about what cockteasing cunts those two girls were, and how if they didn't watch out they were going to be in for a surprise one night. Stupid pig cunts, he'd call them."

"That's funny," Carlos said. "Stupid pig cunts." He said it like he was trying it on for size.

"So then what would happen?" he asked.

"We'd sit on the floor in his living room. We'd drink beer."

"Yeah?" He daubed at the corner of his mouth where a string of cheese was.

"We'd watch each other jerk off," I admitted.

It felt strange to say that to somebody I'd just met, especially somebody who was more than twice as old as I was. Especially somebody who was making me sweat under my armpits the way he did—nervousness, I guess. But it also felt, well—exciting, like here was this secret thing I was suddenly talking about.

"Sounds kind of depressing," Carlos said. "Did you do anything

I shook my head. "The yard closed and Wallace moved away. 1 didn't see those girls again after that." "Did you want to?" I shook my head. I'd never really thought about it. "1 guess not

really," 1

We'd finished tin- heerv 1 wished 1 hadn't told Carlos that story—

suddenly 1 fell more depressed than I'd been all day. Bui all at once he reached out ind put his hands on my shoulders so that we were race to in eat h othei I felt full inside, like something

in in tuple ot sizes and was pressii I m\

heart and lungs. I was a \\^\^- drunk. I AawA myself to keep Looking Into h

1 le held me there at arm 1

BOYSOFLIFE □

us studying each other. There was this fine stubble on his chin, and 1

noticed how his eyebrows met above his nose. 1 could smell mv swc.it there in the van, and maybe his too, this sweet-SOUI smell.

I was very aware the whole time of beer building up in my bladder, and how I really needed to piss something awful. But that didn't stop me from returning Carlos's stare right back into his eyes and locking him there, not moving, just letting it go on between us to see when it would have to break.

After what seemed like forever he said in this quiet voice, "I think you're very special. Do you know that?"

"What I know," I told him, reaching up and putting my arms on his shoulders the way his were on mine, "is that I really, really have to piss."

He laughed out loud, a really loud laugh, and leaned his head forward onto my shoulder. "You're funny," he said. "You're crazy. Go piss. I have to piss too." I relaxed a little and managed to haul myself over all those garbage bags and open the side doors of the van. Carlos followed me. It wasn't raining so hard as before, but it was still raining. We stood in the rain next to each other and pissed these long streams of piss, mine clear and Carlos's dark yellow. Carlos aimed his so that it intersected with mine, and they hit the ground together in one single stream.

I could tell Carlos was staring at my dick the whole time I was pissing. Well, I thought, it wasn't like I hadn't glanced over at his.

When he finished he didn't stuff himself back in his pants. He just stood there with it hanging out, waiting I guess for me to finish. Which I did, and zipped up.

He reached over and put his hand on my belt buckle. I didn't move. I didn't brush his hand away. I didn't do anything.

He crouched down in front of me, looking up at me the whole-time with our eyes locked. Then he undid my jeans and slipped them down. I kept saying to myself, Tony, do something, but I couldn't do a thing. It was that animal thing in him, which I picked up on from the first. I felt his hands on me and I couldn't move. My dick was starting to crank up under his touch, and I realized lt'd been half-hard back there in the van when we were talking, only I hadn't wanted to admit it.