Martin and John (7 page)

Then we were tramping across the fields, my feet sweating inside my boots. Martin looked more comfortable in my sneakers. He’d been wearing penny loafers when I found him,
but they’re useless for trekking. Eventually the land grew boggy and started to sink in on itself and I said, “We’re almost there.” In the distance a darker spot of brown gradually revealed itself to be a small pond. The pond was surrounded by a long lazy half-moon of limestone, a twenty-foot-high strip pocked by small black caves that glowed white in the distance and served as a narrow border between the brown grass and the blue sky. But it was the pond in the center of this canyon that held my eye. Coffee-colored, it bristled at the edges with tangled junipers and the muddy imprints of animal tracks. A light breeze across its surface gave the illusion of waves. “It’s a puddle,” Martin said. “You swim in that?” “We used to all the time. I haven’t been for two years.” “Well, I guess we’re here now.” Martin took his clothes off, slung them on a bush. Taking slow steps, he minced his way to the pond, stopped in the muck at the water’s edge. “Ugh. This is like walking in diarrhea.” “Isn’t it great?” I said. All of a sudden I felt happy, happy to finally be here again. I had my clothes off and tried not to fall on my way to the pond. Martin bent over, picked up a handful of mud, flung it at me. The mud struck my chest, but it was the rattle’s sound that made me laugh nervously, not the sticky mass splatting on my skin. “Darling,” Martin said, and his eye had a strange, faraway glow. I thought for a moment that he was calling me darling, and I blushed. Then he spoke again: “It’s just darling,” he said, and my blush cooled as though a chilly wind had blown across my skin.

Hours later, under a juniper tree. A residue of brown silt on both our naked bodies, Martin leaning into my stomach. Short muddy lines on his back where his hair dripped, water collecting in the crease where our bodies met. The pond was still, as though no one had ever disturbed it. Martin’s voice: I wasn’t looking at him and it seemed to come from the air, the pond, my own mind. “This is where he drowned, isn’t it?” “Sshh,” I whispered, “look over there.” A deer, a small long-eared doe, stood at the pond’s far edge. “Ooh,” Martin breathed. Slowly the deer lowered her head. Without thinking, I tapped the rattles suspended from my neck. The deer’s head shot up. Martin turned to me, the scab dominating his face. He shook the rattle, and the deer’s head twisted from side to side, and mine did too, but Martin saw only me. I put my hand over his. “Don’t,” I whispered, but too late: the deer leapt away, white tail flashing in the twilight. I closed my eyes for a moment, but when I opened them Martin was still there, and he continued to look at me expectantly. There was too much knowledge in his eyes, too much
story.
“Yes,” I finally said, and his right eye blinked. “Yes, this is where he drowned.” And then I was up, grabbing my clothes, finding my shoes, and, not dressing, carrying my things pressed to my chest to keep the rattle quiet, I ran away like the deer.

MY FATHER, A know-nothing about horses, handed me my mother’s paring knife and said, Trim her tail. Her coat was
softened by age and she was bald over her shoulders. Her tail was tangled, full of burrs, and standing behind her, face turned from the farts she let out every five minutes, I sawed through coarse thick hairs. I felt the knife jab her skin, and the next thing I knew was waking in the hospital, and everything had changed. My head was swimming and Justin had been dead for months. My parents sat at the foot of my bed. My father was weeping, my mother had pulled her long dress into her lap. Suddenly my father was on top of her, straddling her, his hand around her throat. Your fault! he hissed. It’s all your fault! He smacked her face back and forth with his free hand. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. I tried to speak, but couldn’t. It was like he was choking both of us. That’s when I closed my eyes. That’s when I closed my eyes, and I prayed that when I opened them he would be gone. But when I opened them he was still there and my mother’s neck was ringed with a collar of purple and black bruises, and we all looked at each other, but no one said anything.

“I THOUGHT I’D find you here.” Darkness was punctuated by an even blacker shadow, and straw rustled as it crossed the stall. There was another, indeterminate sound, low, raspy as well. The Glue Factory murmured in her sleep, and then a brief spurt of laughter played through the still air. “Your parents think you drowned.” “What? Why?” “Didn’t you hear them tear out of here?” “I was sleeping.” “When I
showed up your old man had me by the shoulders, shook me like a doll. Where’s John? Where’s John? he kept saying.” For the first time he actually touched me: grabbed me, shook. That noise again. “Hey, where’s your shirt?” “I was hot.” He pushed away from me silently. A few feet away The Glue Factory pawed the straw. I felt him waiting. “Accidents don’t just happen, you know,” I said. “Why not?” “People don’t just drown in three feet of water. There’s got to be a reason. It’s got to be someone’s fault.” “So what happened?” “He drowned.” “What
really
happened?” “I fell asleep and he drowned, dammit! I was supposed to be watching him and I fell asleep and he drowned! And my father said it was her fault and, and that’s how we’ve lived ever since.” Sitting back, I felt the individual slats of wood press against my back and I heard that noise again. I realized then that it accompanied me, as though at some point—when he questioned me, when I answered, or perhaps just when he touched me—he had transferred a part of himself to me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t talk about it anymore.” He leaned forward in the straw and put his hand on my chest. “I won’t talk anymore.” There was no reason for his touch, no meaning, and his fingers wandered aimlessly across my torso. He kissed me. “Stop,” I said. “The horse will see.” “Sshh,” Martin whispered. “We’re on her blind side.”

For a moment I accepted everything. I accepted it because he had, and still he’d kissed me. Sudden relief filled my body, and I started laughing, a deep laugh that rumbled out of my chest and burst into the stall with a powerful extra dimension
of sound. The Glue Factory lurched awake and started shuffling around, but I hardly noticed. Still laughing, I pulled my legs to my chest to avoid her hooves. “John—” The Glue Factory’s hoof crashed against the wall. Martin and I stood simultaneously, and that’s when I pinpointed the sound. “John,” Martin repeated. “The rattle.” “I know, I know.” “Take it off. Get rid of it, quick.” I pulled at it, which only made it shake louder. “It’s tied too tight. We’ve just got to get out of here.” The Glue Factory lashed out again, her hoof striking the wood hard enough to crack it. We vaulted the wall just before she crashed against it. I grabbed Martin’s hand and we ran outside. Outside, I laughed again, loud this time, louder than the rattle bouncing off my chest. I stopped when I heard my name. “John.” It was Martin. He looked at me in the moonlight but he didn’t say anything else. Quietly I said, “Let’s go inside. Let’s go to bed,” and Martin’s sigh seemed less relieved than resigned. I remember finding his scab in the darkness with my hand. “Who did this?” I asked. Martin laughed, and his laugh frightened me more than the rattle’s rattle. “Someone I loved for a little while,” he said, pushing my fingers away. In the morning, I reached to pull his arm across my body, but it wasn’t there. He wasn’t there. He’d gone.

WE ONLY REALLY met in little ways: a line of sweat, muddy trails of water, a traced scab, a kiss. My mother cooked
him food, my father tried to boss him around. I don’t think we were ever quite aware of how we depended on him, but he filled a space in our lives, the space created by Justin’s death. That’s obvious. But we labored for too long under the idea that we knew him better than he knew us, when all we really knew was what we wanted him to be. So in the morning, when he was gone, the house seemed incredibly vacant, and we realized that we didn’t know what had left it this time, nor what to use to fill the space left behind. Here it is now: a brown thing, long and rectangular, a little white on the bottom. In the back is the forest, filled with evening shadows and nesting crows. In the front the empty field stretches past our fence to the horizon. My father sits on the tailgate of his truck, cleaning my rifle in the half-light. I can just make out my mother hanging clothes up to dry. I’ve turned the whole thing over and over in my mind, worked at it the way the water worked at the piece of driftwood I found wrapped in my parents’ muddy clothes this morning. How long did it take before the water seeped in, how long before the wood split and revealed its secrets? I could look into it now if I wanted to, but instead I’m taking it to the pond so it can float back where it came from. It may seem like I’m walking away, but I’ll be back soon. I’ll be back for dinner. There’s no point in looking too deep. Because if you stare too hard into the open veins of a piece of driftwood, eventually you’ll see that all the dark places reveal is more wood.

People think my arm’s hurt, but it’s not. Just my fingers. I hold myself this way so people can’t see them. Better they think my arm’s hurt than see what my fingers look like.

I tell them it’s not my father’s fault my fingers don’t go straight. At school, they call ours a broken home. I used to think they meant the kitchen faucet, which dripped. But they meant my mother.

David, who calls himself my friend, advises me: Keep the kitchen clean. Keep the radio down. Keep out of his way. But he doesn’t know much, what with two parents and plumbing that works.

What happened was: I waited too long. Didn’t tell anyone. I hid the red ball of my hand in a pocket. It hurt so bad I limped. It sounded like a rattle shaken under water. Then I passed out. I woke up in the hospital. I thought, He knows.

At first even he blamed himself. He said, I was full of beer, my mind was empty, I didn’t know what I was doing. Doesn’t that prove his innocence?

Since my mother, my father piles brown-bagged groceries on the table. He says putting them in cabinets is just an extra step to clutter up his mind. When he cooks for us, the stuff goes straight from the table into a pot, then back to the table.

Meat and milk and things like that, beer, he still keeps in the fridge.

Empties go in a box under the sink.

He pees every morning after he gets up, like clockwork. I hear him through the wall. He sounds like a waterfall. I know from peeing with him that he covers the bowl with bubbling foam. Compared to me, it’s a flood. Compared to David—ha!

David says, Maybe you should offer to take his boots off for him—David still blames my father. But he didn’t even know us then. And what’s he know now? Just what happened. Not how.

I thought I’d fix the faucet, see, impress him. You might think he’d have fixed it, but he’s got things on his mind. And I’d seen him work, I thought I knew what to do. But I’d only managed to pull things apart when he came in. The radio was loud, the kitchen a soggy mess, I didn’t hear his boots on the linoleum. He stepped on my hand, hard.

Afterward he made me mop it up. And don’t think I’m selfless or anything: I held that against him. But still, I hid my hand from him. How could he have known what he’d done?

My father wanted me to play baseball. He gave me a mitt once. He gives me this, and everything. Sometimes I dream he throws me balls, but since I can’t catch them with my hand (I was right-handed) I use my teeth.

And you might think, given this and everything, that I would love him less. But it’s just us two. And when he’s drunk, it’s like me and half of him. Or maybe twice him, I don’t know.

Even he doesn’t understand. He says, I don’t know why you love me. I want to say, I don’t know why you hurt me, but I’m afraid that would make him angry. So I just laugh instead.

Before, enough water dripped from the faucet to fill the spaghetti pot every fifteen minutes. I was kept busy, emptying it. You might think I could’ve just let it drip down the drain, but without measuring things how can you say what you’ve lost?

The faucet stopped dripping after my father fixed it. But it doesn’t get hot water now. I don’t think that has anything to do with the faucet, more with something deeper, inside our house. But my father doesn’t know this—he needs me to tell him. And me? I need him to fix it. I already know I can’t do it alone.

Something flickered in the darkness. The light, a tiny, handheld candle, wavered for a moment, then danced about like a firefly. Its illumination was too ephemeral to really be called light: it was a pallor, a skin-tone glow of marble whiteness. The sheets on the bed were white as well, crisp underneath with hospital corners and turned back on top at the perfect forty-five-degree angle. We drew in a breath, and then, with a sigh less an exhalation than a movement, slipped into the sheets, the down of our bodies ruffled by their cotton coolness. The faint smell of bleach raised the hair on the napes of our necks. With blind hands and animal instinct we made love, the candle glowing white somewhere behind us, the sheets yellowing with sweat like soft butter around our thighs, a blue night just visible at the edge of the curtain. We moved quickly, slowly, not at all; there might have been some blood, blotting rose petals on the sheet, but no pain. Then, sleeping, it was over; the sun rose behind our eyelids and washed out
the room, and everything in it became translucent. Looking in, anyone could have seen us and felt our bodies pressed together under the blanket and known what we had done; my face on his chest, our breathing synchronous, rose and fell like a wine cork on the waves.

IT SHOULD HAVE been like that: lights, camera, action, everything. Heavy on the filters, a little fog drifting in from under the bed. But I lost my virginity to my stepfather on my mother’s double bed during the afternoon’s heat while she was at work. Salty water rolled off our bodies and the bed creaked under our weight like old bones; it was far too hot to climb between the sheets. He wouldn’t look at me while we did it, and he was quick about his business. Afterward, we sat in bed and he held me, staring blankly at the door and occasionally running his fingers through my hair as he’d done for the past two months, ever since he’d started sleeping with my mother. They weren’t married at the time we had sex, not even engaged, and I was pretty sure he was the first man since my father’s death a year and a half before. He’d had cancer. Liver, spleen, stomach, intestine. Just about all his guts rotted away.