Lawnboy (23 page)

His smile clenched. He looked amused. “I knew them for ages. Miguel, the shorter one—he was my lover for two and a half years.”

“Really?”

We both looked over at their picture. Together, they seemed so radiant and self-contained, so oriented toward a future, that I couldn’t help but feel included. They unsettled me, too. They reminded me of the fact that I’d never believed in the possibility of my own future, how my lack of faith had infused all my decisions, a low-grade fear and rage burning at the heart of everything, from why I’d stopped going to the dentist to my lack of organization to my hasty decisions about college, money, boyfriends. Wasn’t it better to extinguish oneself than to lose one’s light, little by little? Wasn’t this what all those silly rock songs told us? But looking at them, I felt differently.
It isn’t so bad to get older.

I said, “Why is it we only see pictures of young men? All these magazines. You might think queer life was only for kids. What about the older guys?”

“What older guys?” Hector mumbled.

“Hmm?”

“They’re dead. Don and Miguel—all these older guys are dead.”

My stomach pitched. I thought of their contentment, their absolute confidence in each other. They’d known what they’d wanted: how could anything
not
have gone their way? Something fleeting coursed up the column of my spine. I might have been lifted, for the briefest instant, off my feet.

Outside, the palms were drenched with an oddly golden light.

“What were you going to ask?” Hector said.

My swelling pressed against the waistband of my jeans, resisting it. Blood hummed, murmured within my veins. I looked at him: there really wasn’t very much time.

I’d make my move on Friday.

“Would you mind cutting my hair?”

“I’m tired,” he said.

***

My haircut was growing out, stray strands curling over the tops of my ears. It required more maintenance than was initially promised. Though it didn’t need to be combed or washed every day, it looked dingy if it wasn’t cut once a week. I looked more like my old self, the diffident, milky self I’d been before Hector had gotten a hold of me. But it didn’t matter now. The swelling on my belly was healing, along with all those ghastly feelings I’d attached to it.

Still, I felt distracted, possessed by an emptiness I couldn’t name. Wasn’t there someone, someplace in the world, who was being told that he or she was dying right at this very minute?

Late Friday afternoon I walked into the Nurmi wing, where Hector had room duty. He was studying the bottom sheet of a bed, checking it for stains, sand, crumbs, or offending odors, deciding whether or not to change it for the next guest. I knew the ploy; I’d practiced it myself on occasion, though it was a lousy one. From the boom box, Laura Nyro wailed at top volume, pounding out parallel triads, Motown-style, on the piano.

I stood inside the doorway, watching the deliberations crossing his face. Then he glanced upward, startled. “Would you mind cutting my hair when you get the chance?”

“Huh?” He turned down the volume.

“I said—” And I repeated my question.

His brows lifted. He swigged from a can of watermelon soda. “I’m really busy.”

His response, however subtle, carried an accusation: I was demanding, pushy, self-absorbed. But I’d never asked him for anything.

“I mean, could it wait?” he said, face thawing. “This is a bad time for me. Maybe Tuesday?”

I tried not to be miffed. I pulled one side of the bottom sheet, helping him fit it around the corners of the mattress. He replaced Laura with Kate Bush’s
Lionhearted
album. “What about that barbershop in Naples? Have you heard anything about it?”

“Porkchop’s?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s pretty good,” he replied, glancing up. “And cheap. I’ve gone to him one or two times myself.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, too loud, forced.

I walked down the hall. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was asking for much. Five minutes, not even that. After all, wasn’t he the one who’d insisted I’d look better with a shaved head? And wasn’t I the one who’d been sprucing up his rooms, which had seemed increasingly flagrant in their ineptitude, just to keep him in Peter’s good graces?

I stood at the window in the eastern stairwell. I watched Peter standing in the parking lot, waiting for something. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It seemed to me that his entire story was encapsulated in his waiting, from his jerky glances toward the road, to his nearly constant pacing, to his wringing hands, which he kept twisting and pulling as if they hurt him. He was nothing but uncomfortable in his own skin, and it was the loneliest thing I’d ever seen, and it repelled and frightened me, knowing that we were a part of each other.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I trudged down to the office, swiped the key ring off the rack, and walked outside. Over the Gulf, clouds hurried toward the south, swarming, tornadic.

“I’m taking the van,” I called to Peter.

The breeze lifted, blew through his thinning hair. His eyes looked impossibly green against the palms. “Where’re you going?”

“Haircut.” And before he could insist I didn’t need one, I shifted the van into reverse, and headed north.

***

The sky darkened as the squall line approached. I was lost somewhere inside Golden Gate Estates. All the streets bore numbered names, qualified by quadrant directions (Northwest, Northeast, etc.), and I couldn’t quite remember whether it was SW 130th Street or SW 130th Place. I pored over my memory of Peter’s address book. It troubled me to think that anyone actually lived here. Like its better-known sister, Cape Coral, the landscape was jungly, dense, overrun with escaped tropical species—Brazilian pepper, Chinese tallow, punk tree—not a shred left of indigenous beauty. It was the kind of place that wasn’t civilized enough for comfort, nor remote enough to point up the pleasures of solitude. The axle bumped over a tiny sinkhole in the street. There was no point in continuing on.

Just then I spotted her gold Tercel. It sidled up alongside a long, narrow trailer in which all the lamps inside were on. A funnel of light illuminated the front yard. To my surprise, Ory, her six-year-old, was sculpting sandcastles beside a weaving pyracantha bush.

I slowed the van to a crawl. “Storm’s coming,” I said through the window.

“Lightning,” he said, pointing a plastic shovel to the sky.

“Yes. It’s dangerous. Do you know what happens if you get struck?”

“Boom,”
he said, throwing up his hands.

“Does your mom know you’re outside?”

The boy nodded avidly, then smacked at the sand with his shovel.

“Ory,” Holly said. She stood at the screen door in a black T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and motorcycle boots. Her hands were fisted on her hips. She squinted. “Who’re you talking to out there?”

I couldn’t leave now. In truth, I’d only wanted to see where she lived. I’d only wanted to see the trailer, then get the hell out of there.

Her smile revealed her upper gum. “Peter?”

I froze, stricken.

She stepped closer to the van.
“Peter?”

“It’s Evan,” I said finally, and looked away.

“Oh my God,” she said, breathless.

“What?”

“I didn’t have a clue. I’ve only seen you from a distance.”

I shook my head.

“I mean, your hair’s shorter, and you’re a lot younger and all that, but—” She exhaled through her mouth and stared. “Say something.”

I frowned, waggled my head.

“
Please.
Say something.”

I mumbled, “What do you want me to say?”

She started laughing, a little pained. Her eyes were vibrant. “You even
sound
like him. Oh my God. This has to be, like, the weirdest experience of my life.”

We stared. I had no business here. I should have gotten my hair cut.

Her face quieted down. The wind picked up, palmettos scouring the surface of the trailer. “Do you want to come inside?”

“No,” I said. “Just out for a little drive.”

She laughed knowingly. Her absolute familiarity with me was both unsettling and comforting. “Yes, Evan. You just happened to be driving through beautiful Golden Gate during a severe thunderstorm warning, a full thirty miles from the King Cole.”

“But—”

“Oh, just for a minute. Come.”

She placed her arm around me as we walked toward the door. I wiped off my boots on the grass mat. “It’s so good to finally meet you,” she said.

Inside, the trailer was as long and narrow as a boxcar. Nearly everything had a dual purpose: a sofa that opened up into a bed, a coffee table that doubled as a chest. On the table stood a tiny lamp, no taller than a wine bottle. The whole space was possessed by the spirit of order, a spirit determined by its limitations: one thing left out and the place would be a mess.

“So’s it time to go to bed?” she asked Ory.

He was sitting on the floor, looking up at me on the sofa, curious and amazed.

“Ory?”

He stuck out his lip, showing off the linings of his eyelids, then shook his head no.

“Stop that,” Holly said. “Don’t make monster faces at Evan. He’s our friend.”

Ory’s face relaxed. He reached up, fingers scrabbling toward my belt loop.

“Oh,” Holly said, and smiled. “I know what he wants.”

I stood, picking up Ory. He was almost weightless, lips moist, sticky against my cheek. I kissed him back, bouncing him slightly. I wished I felt more at ease. His grasp tightened around my neck, flooding me with self-consciousness.

“Okay, that’s enough now,” Holly said. “Time to say good night. Time for bed.”

“Good night,” he said to me.

“Good night, Ory,” I said.

I watched them walk hand in hand down the hall. I wandered over to the mini-china closet, an oversized toy, and glanced at the clear green tumblers on the shelves—the free kind from service stations—while Ory fussed and sobbed in his room. I looked at his pictures on the wall. Ory, at one, fed by an unseen hand, chocolate syrup smeared all over his mouth. Ory, at two, standing at a dock, eyes shining, holding a minnow in his palm. Ory, at three, in a straw Hawaiian hat, brim swallowing up his head. I kept staring at his face, the narrow forehead, the benign smile, pure and unassuming as a dolphin’s. My stomach hurt. A queasy notion passed through my mind: Ory was my brother’s son.

The rain picked up, pelting the windows. This was Peter’s separate, hidden life.

I roved down the hall to Ory’s room. He was still crying, squealing, voice pitching higher with each explosion of thunder. Water pooled on the sills, seeping through the cracks. Holly perched on the edge of the bed, eyes merry, twinkling, but clearly within two seconds of coming undone. I stepped through the dump trucks on the floor, past the wooden blocks and the spotted pink anaconda. Bright tempera paintings covered the walls, edges curling inward.

“He’s scared,” Holly said.

“Am not,” he said, face pressed to his pillow.

“Are too.”

He gazed up at me with a single eye.

“But you liked it outside,” I said to him.

He pressed his face to the pillow, shook his head no.

“Be still,” I said, then turned off the lights. “Be absolutely still.” I motioned to Holly, and we climbed into bed, lying on either side of him, bodies tight. Ory flipped over on his back. The trailer rocked and pitched, wind nearly wrenching it off its footings. The lightning was upon us now. I pictured the palms outside flaring up, one after the other, blazing around us like torches.

“Shhhhhh,”
I whispered. “It’s taking our picture.”

The room flashed. Ory frowned, whimpering.

“Look, the sky’s taking our picture.”

It flashed once more, and then again and again. Ory’s eyes widened in the dark. And the three of us leaned into one another, breaths falling into sync, various smells commingling. Warmth passed from body to body, a single unit now.

Gradually, the storm subsided, thunder fading to a distant hush. The branches outside stilled, dripped. Moonlight poured through the room, illuminating Ory’s mobile, his finger paintings. Down the hall clothes tumbled in the dryer.

“Thank you,” Holly whispered.

“I can’t believe he’s actually sleeping.”

“He likes you.” She sighed hugely, then held herself with her arms. She lay absolutely still, eyes closed. I imagined a heaviness—the weight of a truck tire—pushing down upon her chest.

I whispered, “Are you okay?”

“Listen,” she said, “do you mind if I kick you out?”

“No, no. Not at all.” And I didn’t, actually. The roads would have drained by now. It was time to get home.

She turned on her side. “Am I being rude? Tell me if I’m being selfish.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Her smile was enormous, melancholy. “I’m glad you understand. This was very nice.” She reached over Ory and latched her damp fingers through my own. “Let’s get together sometime soon, okay?”

I nodded.

“And tell your brother I’d love to hear from him.”

I nodded again. My chance: should I tell her about the call, that I’d pretended to be Peter on the phone? I straggled by the potted fig, rubbing my thumb across a dust-coated leaf.

“What’s the deal?” she said in a hushed voice, as if talking aloud to herself.

I turned to look at her again. Coward: I didn’t say a word.

“It’s just—” She stopped. She seemed hopelessly, utterly baffled.

“He cares about you,” I said, surprising myself.

She shook her head. “It’s not like I’m going to get anywhere with him. I should have known what I was getting into.”

My ear felt hot, as if I’d knocked it against a post. To myself, I counted backwards from 100, trying to calm down: 99, 98, 97 … “I mean, he really cares about you more than you know. He’s crazy about you. You’re all he ever talks about.”

She glanced downward at her crossed legs. A dog barked at regular intervals in the distance. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“But—”

“But what?”

She lifted her face and looked at me. Her eyes were dolorous, hopeful, full of feeling. “What does he say about me?” she murmured.