Lawnboy (8 page)

“Who won the softball game?” he asked.

I swallowed. Had he known I was looking at him?

“Huh?”

“Greens,” I said finally. “Greet hit a fly ball over the fence.”

He nodded. He turned off the faucet, reached for a towel on the hook. “Don’t use up all that hot water,” he kidded. He stepped past me, mere inches away. His dick swung gently as he walked. I shuddered. If his towel had been bigger, he might have snapped it against my butt.

I stood under the showerhead for another five minutes. The water felt hot, consoling upon my shoulders. Why had I waited so long? I shampooed my hair over and over, waiting for someone to step around the corner. But when no one did, I turned off the faucet, and stepped into my clothes, letting my hair drip so all my cabin mates would know that I was just like them.

Two nights later, we all sat around the campfire, singing “The Circle Game”—an old Joni Mitchell song that Miss Mastrangelo strummed on a busted guitar while everyone squinted at their song sheets. We were due to leave Saturday morning, and I was already feeling nostalgic. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go home. I still hated it here, there was no doubt about that. It was that looking into the flame-lit faces of my classmates around the campfire, I thought,
Time is already sweeping us forward. Our bodies are changing. We smell like our parents. Soon enough we’re going to separate and move away, and some of us will die sooner than we think, and as a group we’ll never be together again.
Was this a pop song? I was shocked by my corniness. But maybe it was only because we’d all fallen into our respective routines, learning new skills, growing more relaxed with one another. And unfortunately, there was that other thing: Mr. Albertson had announced earlier that evening that Douglass Freeman was leaving camp two days early. He’d had a hard adjustment and had come down with a sore throat. And there was the sticky issue of contagion. “It would be best for everyone,” Mr. Albertson assured us, “if he left us.” He was right, for the announcement of his departure made an immediate difference. Everyone relaxed, became themselves, as if the world were returned to its proper order.

It was dusk. I was walking down a path through the woods. I wasn’t supposed to walk alone, not without another camper, but it felt good to be lost in my thoughts, listening to the cheers and yelps of my classmates in the distance. I stepped up on a riverbank. I looked at the sawgrass weaving in the water, the impossibly vivid sky, thinking about how nice it would be to go back home again, to sleep in my own bed, to take a hot bath while my mother sat on the closed toilet seat listening, pretending she was interested in my stories. I wouldn’t even let my parents’ fighting bother me.

I stepped closer to the fallen log beside the shore.

And all it once it moved toward me.

My whole body clenched. I didn’t yell. I’d seen alligators in our very neighborhood, where on winter mornings they’d crawl up out of the canals, sunning themselves in the backyards, looking for handouts of marshmallows. They seemed almost benign,
bovine
in that context—dumb, leaden beasts too stupid to fend for themselves—and yet they were known to have swallowed a neighbor’s Boston Terrier in one gulp, a veritable raisin. But this was the wild. It came to me that alligators had the capacity to run up to 60 miles-an-hour in short distances. The peach fuzz bristled on my neck. I started running, feet pounding the sand, all the way back to the dining hall.

On the way I ran into Dickless standing in the path. I’d actually seen his face only three times all week.

My chest heaved. “Alligator—” I said, winded.

Dickless smiled in utter calm. “Oh really?”

I swung my head back and forth. “Big. thirteen feet or more. Tell the teachers. Dangerous.”

“Fuck the teachers,” he replied.

I stared at him, blinking. I caught my breath. He’d never talked like this before. These simple words unsettled and mocked me, more than I could say.

“I’d like to see it,” he stated.

“Get out.”

“I’m serious.”

I slapped at a mosquito on my wrist. “You sure?”

He followed me down the path. By the time we got to the shore, the alligator was gone, leaving no wake in the river, no imprints on the sand.

“Liar,” he smiled.

“I’m telling you. I saw it
right here.
” But for some reason I found myself smiling along with him. Had I been imagining things?

We sat upon the shoreline, watching the pelicans gliding inches above the brackish river. An air boat whined faintly in the distance, diminishing. The sky darkened a notch. Above a hammock of palms, a lone planet sparkled. The first star.

“I thought you were leaving,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” he said, leaning forward. “My dad’s coming. Sometime after breakfast.”

“Your throat still hurts?”

He laughed through his nostrils. “My throat feels fine. It’s never been better. I just needed to get out of here.”

I laughed. I was going to tell him about the time when I, too, wrangled my way out of a school obligation, mimicking a sprained ankle after a basketball game, when I noticed the stricken, unsettled look on his face.

“Do you hate it here?” he whispered.

I glanced at his muddy shoes. I thought of all the things that had been said about him, things I knew he’d heard, how his time back at school would never be the same. The inside of my lip tasted like a penny. I couldn’t say anything but yes to him.

“I thought so. You don’t seem like you belong with them.”

“I don’t?”

He rested his sneaker atop mine. For a few seconds I tried to ignore it, but the gesture was intentional, a game of sorts. He wanted me to play. I didn’t like such games, thought them childish and beneath me, so I slipped my shoe out from under his and dug my heel into his toes so that he winced, tears springing to his eyes.

I looked in his face. He was laughing now. I had an uncomfortable feeling, an odd buzz of shame, excitement, sadness. Then something else took hold of me, something comfortable and friendly that told me I could be what I was with him. Why wasn’t I afraid anymore?

“Hold still,” he murmured.

It happened too smoothly for me to stop. I pulled in a breath. He fumbled for my fly and—to my discomfort—reached into my pants, pulled out my dick, holding it, watching it harden in his grasp. It would be years before it would even reach its adult size. Still, he looked at it like he’d never seen anything like it before. I thought of Mr. Albertson standing under the showerhead, confident, at peace with his body. “Amazing,” Douglass whispered, moving his small brown head.

I leaned backward on my elbows. He began stroking me, dutiful and tender, the leaves turning silver, vermilion above us, making me forget that anyone else could even travel up the path, though, thankfully, they didn’t dare.

William came back from Key West on schedule, tanned and fit, more energetic and relaxed than he’d been in weeks. He knelt down to embrace the Dobermans, and they rushed to him, licking his face, nuzzling, nearly knocking him over until he shielded his head with his arms.

“How are my children?” he asked them. His voice was sweet, in the manner of Mr. Peabody. “How are my pretty, good-for-nothing, well-behaved children?”

They rolled on their backs, scuffing their hindquarters against the rug.

He looked up at me, smiled. His eyes were nearly bloodshot. “And how are you?” he said merrily.

“Good,” I said, and squatted down beside him.

We kissed. I was relieved to see him back, though a small part of me already missed the longing, the empty space I’d contemplated in his absence. The week had been odd. Once I stopped resisting my aloneness, I gave myself over to it, relaxing, even cultivating this new privacy. There were certainly worse places to be. I felt confident, capable. I took a greater interest in the house without anticipating the repercussions of my gestures. I threw out the stained bathroom rugs. I threw out a malfunctioning lamp—a hurricane lamp, a divorce present from Lorna to William, which William had actually liked. I taped a picture of some sexy young daddy to the refrigerator, his smile, his black furry chest on display for the whole household. And all the while I read, staying up half the night, immersing myself in projects I’d been putting off for months: Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor,
the Osteology and Lymphatics sections from
Gray’s Anatomy.

William undid his tie. He flopped into the sofa, loafers up on the coffee table, telling me about his adventures of the week, how Lilo Patrick had been arrested outside Sloppy Joe’s, drunk, sobbing, after taking a poke at a female tourist who’d made fun of her purse. The station was doing everything in its power to hush-hush the incident. He seemed overly excited, manic, as he relayed this tale to me. Spittle dried in the corners of his mouth. A bleak thought crept into my head: this is the person I missed so much?

“And how was your week?” He looked at me directly. Had he recognized anything foreign, the stranger’s hands upon my body?

“Stayed at home. Cooked, cleaned, walked the dogs, read.”

Before we could get too settled we put on our jackets and left for Arigato, our favorite restaurant. I loved Arigato—the koi pond at the front door, its cool, tinkling music of koto and gong, its overly solicitous waitstaff, clad in their blacks and whites, smiling just a tad, never talking louder than a whisper. I followed William past the cash register; the inner legs of his 501s made loud rubbing sounds. I thought, since when did your ass get so big?

Our waiter—middle-aged, unfamiliar, Caucasian—seated us in an alcove near the front, not where we usually sat. William regarded the gas grill in the center of the table, stricken. This wasn’t good. He didn’t take well to change.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He looked up. “Waiter,” he called out across the restaurant.

The man walked to the table. “Yes, sir?”

“What’s this?” he said, gesturing at the gas grill.

“A grill, sir. Does that bother you?”

I knew what was going on. I got the “sir” thing, the slight sarcasm of it, the waiter’s recognition that we might be a handful at the end of a long day. But I didn’t get the look on William’s face, a look which said, I don’t like you, though he’d barely given the waiter a chance.

“Where’s Hatsuko?” William said. Hatsuko, a pretty long-haired woman from Nagasaki. Our usual waitress.

“She’s off for the night, sir.”

“She’d never seat us here. You can tell your manager that, he knows us. We come here all the time.”

The waiter looked to me then, flummoxed, his face softening as if he felt some concern for me. He clearly didn’t know what was motivating William’s anger, and nor did I, for he’d seemed buoyant and cheery only a few short minutes ago. Or had I misread him? A hot, waxy bubble swelled inside my chest. The waiter left us now, shifting to another station.

“What’s the matter?” I said, frowning now.

“Oh, that
guy.
” His eyes drifted over the menu listings. “It’s weird. He reminds me of my brother.”

“Your brother?” This was even more of a surprise.

“Yeah, Henry. You know, the one who never paid my parents back, who wouldn’t talk to me after I left Lorna.”

His family was off limits. I knew better than to open up that subject. “That’s no reason to hate the waiter.”

“I don’t hate him,” he declared.

I heaved a sigh. What were we talking about? “Forget it,” I mumbled, propping up my head with my hand.

A tense quiet stood between us. Across the room an older couple broke open their fortune cookies, scrutinizing the printed messages with great interest and pleasure. They laughed, then chewed the broken pieces with calm, measured satisfaction. It was clear that they were happy together.

“So I’ve disappointed you,” he said suddenly. “All right?”

I looked down, attempting to dazzle myself with the renderings on the placemat: yellowtail, sea urchin, salmon roe, sunomono. But I wasn’t hungry anymore. Too bad, I’d been looking forward to our first night together again.

***

The funny thing was I’d been thinking about my own brother. Not in the usual sense, in which I couldn’t forgive him for leaving my parents, but in a stranger, more complicated manner. Many years ago, I spotted him in the powder room one day. He lingered before the mirror, examining the recent changes of his body—the weight of his genitals, the dense tangle of pubic hair—proud, excited, frightened at once. I was five, he thirteen. Odd, I thought. What we choose to remember.

***

Standing in the bathroom one morning I saw a bump—a tough, painless eruption on the base of my penis. I shrugged it off. I went back to my projects for the day. I transplanted the bottlebrush to the backyard; I opened up the circles of the royal palm beds. Two days later, though, when I saw it again—its margins still hard and not at all diminished—I literally moaned out loud.

“Are you okay in there?” William said.

He was working on the opposite side of the door. It was Friday, his day off. He’d gotten it in him to paint the hall ceiling the palest yellow, and I pictured it misting down on him from the roller, a cool citrusy rain stippling his forehead. The smell of fresh latex leaked beneath the door.

“I’m fine. It’s just a backache.”

“A backache? Since when do you get backaches?”

“Always.”

My secretiveness got the best of me. I should have opened the door, pointed, and shown him what the problem was.

“Don’t worry,” I said, and stood behind him. I scraped some paint off his forehead with a fingernail.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Absolutely I’m all right,” I said, a little peeved now, and wandered outside.

I lay down on the backyard lawn in the sun, panting, the blades of Floratam scratching into my back like quills. I’d all but banished the arcade incident from my mind, but here it was back to haunt me, as if my life were some great morality tale from the Middle fucking Ages. We hadn’t been having sex much—a whole other issue that completely eluded me—but what we’d done was enough to transmit it to him. He wouldn’t take it well. Not only had I done something completely behind his back—a spite fuck—but I’d done something worse: I’d shown him, in the most trenchant terms, how completely inadequate he was to me.