Mississippi Sissy (40 page)

“I don't know. They've always worked pretty well in my own life,” I said, able to joke now, however privately, however bitterly, about Dr. Gallman.

“Don't tell me you're another one of these gay guys who've had sex with youth directors at their churches,” she said. “Youth directors are the choreographers of Mississippi.” We laughed and began to gossip about our classmates at Millsaps and in which part of New York City I should try to find an apartment, as she was an old hand at city living compared to me. Carl subscribed to
The Village Voice,
and I had been scouring the real estate ads for places to live while I was naked and sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed.

“It's so expensive up there,” I told her. “I've been living for free at Frank's. Carl pointed out an ad for a one-bedroom on Bleecker Street—that's in the Village, right?—that was $400! Can you believe it? Shit. I was hoping for something more in the 100-to-150 range. Carl only pays $150 for that great place he lives in in north Jackson.”

Lynn looked out the window, her little upturned nose turned up a bit more at the mention of Carl's name yet again. “Let's shut off the air conditioner and roll down these windows,” she said. “I want to feel my hair in the breeze.” She was pretty irresistible herself so we did just that, and with her dark shag (shorter than my own shoulder-length hair) blowing about her face she was even more beautiful, her perfection sexier when she allowed herself to be mussed up a bit.

Bobby Thompson's butt was all that I had hoped for in the tennis match, but Lynn was right about the church service. It wasn't conducive to dating—though Bobby was certainly as beautiful as ever, sitting between us on the pew, a bit of the light coming through the stained glass adding a hue or two to his blondness. I began to get the giggles at one point, remembering another line from
Love and Death
that Miss Welty had mentioned to Frank when they were talking
about the movie. (“If Christ was a carpenter, I wonder what he charged for bookcases?”) I could tell that Lynn and Bobby bonded a bit in reaction to having been left out of whatever had amused me. After stopping to say our good-byes to Mom and Pop, whom we'd seen at the tennis match, we visited at the Thompsons' house for a while before heading home. We both regretted on the drive back to Jackson that we had tried to combine religion with sexual longing. Who the hell did we think we were, we concluded, after I told Lynn some more of the lines Frank had been spouting for the last few days from
Love and Death,
Woody Allen?

Still hungry and not out of conversation, we decided to head downtown when we got to Jackson and get something to eat at the Mayflower, a restaurant where a lot of the Millsaps students hung out, not only because it was one of the few places in town that stayed open late at night but also because of its funky charm. We finally got to Lynn's apartment on one side of an old shotgun house sometime after midnight. I walked her to her door and sat on the house's porch swing where we came to our whispered final truce about Carl: Carnality would be the only reason either of us slept with him during the weeks the three of us had left in Jackson. It was a pact that was easy for me to make, for it was basically the only reason I slept with him anyway. It was because her feelings for him were stronger than mine that I was dealing from a position of strength. Irony. The complexity of human emotions. Something Frank had earlier called “transference.” All of that had replaced hymns and prayers and altar calls in both our lives, Lynn's and mine, since we had first met at the House of the Rising Son, barely teens, and dared to confide in each other without laughing, dead serious, our most theatrical of dreams. I kissed her good night on her cheek and headed back to Bleak House.

I parked next to the Jewish cemetery and bounded up the steps to Frank's vast old front porch satisfied by the events of the day. I'd been able to be in Bobby Thompson's presence and not completely ache
for him, as I was beginning to realize the limits to his blond charms. He wasn't bland exactly, but after my time away from Forest, fucking, it seemed, everything that moved, I realized that Bobby Thompson was sort of a tabula rasa presence in my life, someone on whom I could project the purer longings of my past. I also felt better about being a big brother to Kim and Karole (whom I had mostly ignored in the solitary sorrow I lived in after our parents' death), since I had made the effort that day to see them in their tennis tournament. They had been basketball stars—they must have gotten Daddy's gene—during high school, and selfishly I had missed most of their games. I had not let political arguments ensue, either, during my time with Mom and Pop that afternoon. And I had sat inside a church without getting angry at Dr. Gallman. All of that, plus Lynn and I had de-Carled ourselves and Frank and I were back to our old routines, having truly forgotten about our
Butterflies Are Free
falling-out. But most of all, and on top of everything else, I was moving to New York City in a little over a month. Juilliard, by accepting me, had made me feel finally just that: accepted. I had certainly never really felt that way in Mississippi, though I had felt as close to it as I had ever come when Frank befriended me and included me in his dandy little sphere of like-minded Mississippians, all scaldingly smart, irrefutably liberal, capable of the kind of laughter that still lingers inside me long after the sound of it has subsided. I dared to feel happy as I bounded up the front steps of Bleak House that night. Even hope was making itself known.

Frank's screen door was slightly ajar and between it and the front door Carl Davis had left a paper sack full of fresh tomatoes for him with a note saying they were from his mother's own garden. The front door was unlocked, as I expected it to be. The house was also ablaze with light, which I was not expecting. I checked my watch. It was close to one A.M. I called out Frank's name, as I always did, to make sure he wasn't reading in the nude. That was a habit of his I was
trying to break him of. No one answered. I heard an odd
tut tut tut tut tut
and realized it was the sound of the needle on his turntable at the end of one of his albums. One could only play a single album at a time and then had to pick the turntable's arm up at the end. I once asked him why he didn't get the “reject” fixed on it and he said, “Rejection, dear boy, has no place in this house.” I went to pick up the arm, first putting the sack of tomatoes next to the Margaret Walker Alexander album resting on the top of the built-in cabinet on which Frank's turntable sat, the cabinet seeming to float in space and serving as a kind of divider for the house's dogtrot hallway and the living room. Professor Alexander's smiling face was on the cover but her last name was not. Only MARGARET WALKER all in capital letters was printed across it, the M and W and R with extra curlicues on them. The record on the turntable was a Mabel Mercer one she recorded with Bobby Short, called
Midnight at Mabel Mercer's.
I read a song title, “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” as the record continued to spin and spin and spin. I thought of Audrey Whatshername in
My Fair Lady,
and hummed a snippet of the song. I turned off the stereo.

“Frank!” I called again. There was still no answer. Next, I noticed something odd: There were two comic books on the coffee table. Frank was not a comic-book reader. I picked up the sack of tomatoes and walked around the turntable cabinet into the living room and looked down at the comic books. One was something called
Doomsday + 1
. In a balloon over the head of a female space warrior, her breasts quite pronounced, were these words: “The death-machine has broken through.” One of Frank's impressionable young African-American friends, I assumed, must have paid him a visit and left his reading matter behind.

“Frank!” I called again, and walked into the kitchen. When I put the sack of tomatoes on the big round table I could see a blurry image of him lying on his bed through the back of the glass bookshelves. He appeared to be nude. Perhaps he had fallen asleep after he'd had the
date he'd kept secret from me. I stepped into the hallway to call his name again and to tell him to put on some clothes. That is when I saw what I will see for the rest of my life. Frank Hains was lying facedown on his king-size bed. The whole mattress was soaked with blood, a giant congealing pool of it. His hands and feet were tightly bound with several of his silk neckties. His mouth was gagged with a handkerchief and another necktie held it in place, pulling his head backward where it was knotted down below with the ties that bound his wrists behind his back. The crown of his head was completely gone, red masses of brain matter spilling from it and running down his neck, splattering the sheet with even more blood. A crowbar lay on the bed next to him. He made no sound. There was no movement. I started toward him and heard a loud creak, the way Bleak House could creak when one stepped on one of its old floor boards too heavily. The sound seemed to issue from Frank's room, as if someone were hiding beyond the open door and was now coming for me. I panicked. I ran from the house. I jumped in my car. I sped instinctively toward Carl.

The thing I remember about that night as much as I remember Frank Hains's blood-soaked bed, as much as I remember what was left of his gelatinous head after that crowbar had done its work, as much as I remember how his body had been bound and gagged with his own silk neckties, as much I remember the instant nausea that those sights can induce in a teenage boy who discovers them, was the way my foot shook on the gas pedal after I cranked up my old Comet and headed straight to Carl's. It was like my grandmother's foot, palsied with incomprehension and anger and yet more imminent sorrow, bearing down on her sewing machine's pedal all those years before, when she didn't think she could take one more sissy demand from me but went along with Matty May's and my Halloween costume idea just to shut us up, so tired was she from taking care of my dying mother in the goddamn hospital. Unable to utter “goddamn,” she
had instead kicked my hand away that day for the very first time when I tried as usual to help her foot press the pedal, our favored ritual forever altered. I wished I could kick myself away that night as I continued to speed toward Carl's. I wished I could put that witch's costume back on, and be that age again, and head to the carnival still unaware of how it would all turn out. It was as if the shock and fright of finding Frank had puddled in a frenzy down around my right ankle. And yet the car—red leather interior, no power steering, a radio that longed for FM—did not jerk and sputter as I turned onto the Interstate. It seemed instead to head more smoothly onward with each spastic brush of my scuffed Bass Weejun against the gas pedal. That's the core of the memory that night, of all my memories really: the eery smoothness of the ride.

I could not get the image of Frank's bludgeoned head out of my mind. It looked so much like the image I had come up with when Dr. Gallman had begun to molest me that second time and I, trying not to get hard, had attempted to imagine how my father's bashed-in head must have looked when it hit the pavement after he flew from his Volkswagen. Trying not to think of Frank, I thought of that day my father had had his wreck while I tried to keep my own little car on the road as I increased my speed, the Comet's steering wheel always vibrating in my hands whenever the speedometer approached seventy, on its way to eighty. We had been visiting with Mom and Pop the day of my father's accident. My mother was squinting at her
McCall's
magazine, sunning herself in a lawn chair in the front yard. She was letting me wear her sunglasses while I perused a
Better Homes and Gardens.
My father told us he was going to look at some Black Angus cattle he was thinking about buying with Charlie “Chunkin' ” Ward, a cattle farm their latest get-rich-quick scheme. My mother did not like the idea but knew not to argue. I wanted to go with him and hopped up from my own lawn chair and headed for his Volkswagen Beetle. I climbed into the passenger side as he was trying to get the
thing to crank. “You're not going with me,” he flatly stated. I repositioned my mother's sunglasses in a more fashionable angle on my nose. “Oh, yes, I am,” I said, feigning that flirtatiously obstinate tone that my mother so often took with him. “No, Kevinator. No, you're not,” he warned me. I punched on the radio when the car suddenly started up. Ferrante and Teicher were banging out the theme to
Exodus
on their pianos. I grabbed the seat, determined not to let go. My father, getting out, slammed his door shut and fiercely strode over to my side of the car. My mother looked up from her
McCall's. “Out! Nowl”
he ordered me. “No,” I said. “Goddamn you,” he groused, his voice tinged with the anger that so often overtook it when he had to deal with me, a son whose effeminacy had become downright willful. He swung my door open. “Goddamn you,” he said again. “Goddamn you, Kevin.” It was the last thing he ever said to me. He pulled me from the car and slammed me onto the ground. He climbed back into the Volkswagen and sped off down the road, his tires screeching as he shifted gears and floored the tiny car as fast as he could make it go. My mother picked me up and brushed me off. She grabbed her sunglasses where they had fallen off my face and put them back on me. “You don't want to go see any nasty old cows,” she said. I was determined not to cry. I
wish you were dead,
I remembered thinking about my father as I continued to speed toward Carl's. I
wish you were dead. I wish you were dead. I wish it. I wish it. I wish it.
Less than twenty minutes later, he was. Frank's head kept morphing into my father's that night—back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Had my father's distaste for my sissy presence saved my life back then? If I had not gone to Forest, could I have saved Frank from his similar fate? Was God loudly speaking to me in the silenced lives of such disparate men? Was there a voice of God to hear? I sped faster. “There is no goddamn fucking God,” I spat out the words as I approached the exit I'd been waiting for. “G-god-d-damn you, Fr-frank,” I began violently to stutter. “God-d-damn you,” I kept on stuttering, hearing for the
first time not only the angry tone my father's voice could so often take suddenly surfacing there in my own, but how troubled that anger sounded. “G-g-god-d-damn you, g-god-d-damnyou! God! God! God! God! God!” I began to repeat over and over, banging the steering wheel with each “God!” that came out of me.