Mysterious Skin (16 page)

The animal’s mother mooed, and the silence closed around us. We sat there, no one in the world but Avalyn and me. I tried to persuade myself they were watching us, hidden away in some cubbyhole of the heavens, analyzing our every move with their infinite black eyes, waiting for the upcoming day when they would once again touch us with their mushroomy skin.

Avalyn pulled me closer. After a while, she took her hair from its bun; it cascaded across her face like a black veil. The hair smelled extravagant and secret, the smell of a rare flower that only bloomed at night. Avalyn rested her head against my shoulder, and I breathed that scent.

Minutes passed. I tried to erase the picture of the boy from my mind, because I knew that whatever had happened then—whatever I’d done, the unspeakable thing he’d wanted me to open my eyes and see—was beyond anything I could handle. I stopped crying and pressed into Avalyn. “It
was the aliens,” I said. My arm grew numb, still inside the calf. “It was, wasn’t it.”

“Yes,” Avalyn said. “And it’s okay. As hard as it is to believe, it’s going to be okay.” Her right hand gripped my shoulder, and then, gradually, her left hand snaked into the wound. I felt the warm slide of her skin as her fingers reached, reached slowly up, searching higher into the calf’s carcass until her fingers stopped to intertwine with mine.

New York beckoned, two weeks away. Both Mom and Eric avoided the topic, choosing instead to speak about the twenty-cents-an-hour raise offered by the grocery store (Mom) or the grandparents’ latest dessert concoction (Eric). Neither wanted me to leave. Mom did everything she could to keep me at home; Eric went so far as to buy me drugs with the weekly allowance from his grannies.

Whenever opportunity knocked, I tricked, usually on nights Mom was working. I had saved enough to survive a while in the city, and Wendy promised I wouldn’t pay rent until I could manage. But Kansas sex began boring me. As my departure date neared, I spent evenings watching horror films on the VCR with Eric. On the Wednesday during
Nail Gun Massacre
, he fell asleep, his head on my lap. I wanted to be elsewhere. “Sleep tight,” I said. I kissed Eric’s knuckle, something I wouldn’t have done had he been awake.

The Impala stalled at traffic lights. It was on its last legs, but at least the stereo worked. I blasted the volume on a song’s whirlpooling guitar feedback, rolled the window down, and burned rubber. A cluster of kids gawked from their spot on the corner of Eleventh and Main. I recognized them from school: their drugged faces, their short-on-
top/long-in-back haircuts, their clothes advertising heavy metal bands. They conformed to a past I’d soon forget. I yelled “Fuck you” out the window and thanked god I wouldn’t live in Hutchinson much longer.

I headed toward the far east end of Seventeenth. For a Wednesday night, Rudy’s was busy. Cars crowded the curb and parking lot. I eased into an empty space, stepped on the emergency brake, wedged my hand into my back pocket. A folded envelope housed the acid tabs I’d bought that morning from Christopher. He’d written “Lead My Thoughts Unto Sensation” across the envelope’s front. I selected a square of paper that showed a tiny sailboat and dropped it under my tongue. It fit there perfectly, like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. “Mmmm,” I said to no one in particular. I sat in the car until the tape ended, then switched off the ignition.

The bar had no sign, just a yellowed piece of paper on the door, its name inked in capital letters. When I set foot inside, everyone turned to stare. I remembered a dumb saying from childhood: “Take a picture, it lasts longer.” Then I said that exact thing. In seconds, a tubby bald man grabbed my shoulder. He had shifty shark eyes and a wounded trout mouth. He wore a studded leather bracelet and a Rudy’s T-shirt: white logo across pink triangle. “Let’s see an ID.”

I handed it over. “Shit, you know I’ve been here before.” Fatso tried his damnedest to detect the ID as counterfeit. No such luck.

Rudy’s, the only queer bar in Hutchinson, always seemed caught in an extremely twisted time warp. I’d read somewhere once how trends and practices of the east and west coasts usually took three years to catch on in the Midwest. If that were true, Rudy’s lagged a decade behind. On that night, for instance, a late seventies tune pulsed from the jukebox. “I wanna disco with you all, night, long,” the singer wailed.

Another thing: the customers were perfect. Most were men I wanted, men I found myself picturing before I dozed off at night. They looked nothing like the guys that starred in the current pornos Eric and I saw on display at video stores, those poofs with blow-dried hair, shaved chests, glistening and steroided muscles. The guys at Rudy’s sported facial hair, beer guts, and expressions that weren’t practiced in front of home mirrors. Not everyone was attractive, but they were
real
. In the couple of weeks since I’d discovered the place, I’d already met several of them, had gone home with three, had even accepted fifty bucks from one.

On that particular Wednesday, most guys stood around in plaid flannel shirts and jeans. At the bar, the rips in the knees of their denims formed a straight line that resembled a row of singing mouths. For fun, I counted mustaches; divided the number by the total people there. Seventy-nine percent.

The air smelled like a mixture of smoke, spilled beer, the cedar chips that littered the floor, and a musky cologne that had probably been all the rage in New York one decade previous. Walking through that air felt like breaststroking through a murky lake. I ordered a Bud and reflashed the ID to the bartender. On the TV above the bar, a St. Louis Cardinal cracked a single over the shortstop’s head. In a water-stained poster on the wall, collies and Saint Bernards were involved in what looked like a pretty interesting game of poker. I snuck to a corner, holding the beer bottle like a magic lantern.

The jukebox light cast a liquidy pink over my face. I hovered in front of it, searching its selections for anything I might want to hear. Ever since I was a kid, Mom had craved a jukebox. She’d point to the TV screen when a game show host unveiled one. “When we win the lottery, we’ll dance around the house to
that
.”

Dancing with Mom was my earliest memory. I must have been three or four years old. We had been in the kitchen, the radio blaring. She had grabbed my hands and lifted me, standing my bare feet on her own, larger, sandaled feet. She had led me, stomping and twirling through the room, holding on all the while, moving me with her. There, in Rudy’s, I could still sense the rhythm of her movements, could still smell her perfume. Mom, who danced whenever she drank. Mom, who wanted to plug a jukebox into the living room socket. I wondered how difficult it would be to unplug the jukebox and carry it out the door.

I surveyed the crowd again. I recognized some faces; the guy at the end of the bar was one I’d slept with last week. Robin. Since I’d last seen him, he’d shaved his beard into a goatee. He wore the same ripped-sleeve flannel shirt and too-tight Wranglers.

Robin chatted with a guy who could have been his brother. The familiar way they watched each other and the casual positioning on their barstools told me they were just friends, not the night’s bed partners. Guy number two wasn’t bad-looking. I thought I’d seen him before at Sun Center. He noticed me staring, raised an eyebrow to Robin. His mouth formed the words, “You know him?” They looked over. Robin nodded his head. I slid through the cedar chips toward them, and the entire crowd rubbernecked.

“Robin,” I said. I acknowledged his pal by a jerk of my head. “Who’s this, Friar Tuck?” That was ridiculous, but I knew they’d love it.

Bingo. Both laughed, their heads thrown back. “Whatever,” the unfamiliar one said. “You can call me that if you want.”

“We rob from the rich and steal from the poor,” Robin said. He looked at Friar, apparently amused by the way he was gawking at me. “Are you rich, or are you poor?”

I remembered the Robin Hood tale, the one Mom read to me at bedtime, eons ago. “Very poor,” I said.

“Then we’ll have to give you something,” Friar said. They laughed again. I had to gnaw my lip to keep from rolling my eyes.

Robin plucked a pretzel from a basket on the bar and crunched it in half. “Neil here’s new in town,” he told Friar. “His dad’s an actor out in Hollywood, and his mom’s an international stewardess. They’e only in Hutchinson briefly.” I barely remembered telling him those drunken lies.

“An actor,” Friar said. He turned to me. “What’s he starred in that I might have seen?”

I hadn’t anticipated this. Lying’s best when it’s spontaneous, so…. “He’s starring in an upcoming film called
Blood Mania.
Plot: tainted meat supply infects already-weirdo family. They go nuts, cannibalizing all who near the vicinity of their spooky, off-the-beaten-track farmhouse. The end. Mom and I are flying to France for its premiere next month.” I swigged the beer.

“Wow.” Friar winked. “Are you planning on starring in movies? You could do it. You look a little like, oh, who’s that cute star?” He sipped from a snifter of a thick and chocolatey-colored liquid in which two ice crescents tinkled like bells. I’d seen Mom drinking something similar, only she often decorated her glass with a mini umbrella she’d saved from a date with someone whose name I’d forgotten.

The jukebox blasted a country-western song from years back. Once, after the Panthers had won a Little League game, that same song had played as moms and dads celebrated in the parking lot with barbecued hot dogs and a cooler of beer. The space of pavement became a hoedown beneath the buzzing ballpark lights. My teammates and I watched, stunned, as the parents square-danced and sang
along. I remember rushing for Coach. “Drive me away from this,” I’d said. “Now.” He took me to his house, not mine.

Robin hummed the chorus off key. “Work’s been hectic since I last saw you,” he said. I couldn’t recall any specifics about his life. I vaguely remembered a brown-paneled studio apartment on the city’s south side, next to the railroad tracks. I must have been really stoned that night.

I clunked my empty bottle on the bar between their elbows. “Need another?” Friar asked. He was already reaching for his wallet, a gesture I’d grown familiar with in men his age.

After three beers, I’d heard enough bits and pieces about Robin to remember he was a lawyer, owned a poodle named Ralph, had celebrated his thirty-ninth on the night before we’d screwed. Friar was his “business associate,” in from Wichita for the night. “You guys should get to know each other better,” Robin said, his eyes darting between our faces. I loved that sort of blatancy.

The acid was beginning to affect me, and I closed my fist, pressing my fingers into the ball of my palm. The heavy pulse in my hand thrummed against the weaker pulse in my fingertips, blood eddying beneath the flesh. My skin felt elastic. Right then I wanted to knead it against someone else to get that amazing sensation of two skins pulsing together, that pliability and friction. I held out my hand and placed it squarely against Friar Tuck’s cheek. He smiled. His muscles tensed, and I felt the line of his gums, the ridge of each individual tooth.

“I need to take a piss,” he said, but the words were a code for something entirely different.

Friar clomped to the bathroom, looking over his shoulder once, twice. “He wants you,” I heard Robin whisper beside me, but the voice seemed fathoms away, as if coming from a secret cavern beneath the bar’s floor. “Go get him,”
the voice said. Friar paused before he opened the bathroom door. I followed his path.

A ring-nosed bull had been drawn in the center of the bathroom door. I shut and locked the door behind us. At that instant, the remainder of the acid soothed into me, and my body felt delicate, glistening, a figurine on a shelf. “Hey,” I said, and I smiled. Tuck repeated the word and the smile. I said it again, because I knew it was the stupidest possible thing I could say, and he’d love that. This time I reached up to touch his hair. “Heeeyyy.” The word lingered in the air, not really my voice at all. It sounded like it had blown in on a wind.

The faucet dripped. The water in the toilet bowl glowed sapphire blue, a wad of TP blooming in its center like an immaculate lily. I looked up; saw a crown-shaped gray stain on the ceiling.

The meat of my forearm met his. Hundreds of his hairs brushed against me, tickling like insect legs. “My little actor,” he said. That did it. I shoved him against the wall, slapped a hand on his butt and kept it there. I stood tiptoe and maneuvered my chin into his open mouth.

He raised his arms above his head and crossed his wrists. I was in control. I held him pinioned, my hand a clamp over his wrists, pushing him against the cold tiles as if the wall were a barrier I had to break with his body. He kissed at my ear, still sore from when Eric had pierced it. I moved away. He struggled a little, and I pushed harder, immobilizing him. “You’re one strong kid,” he said. “I bet you could do some damage.” I nodded, but inside I was thinking
shit
: what he said hit the bull’s-eye, but the way he said it wasn’t right, his voice high and tinny. I remembered something Christopher Ortega had said once about a guy he’d screwed:
Looks like Tarzan, sounds like Jane.
Friar started to speak again. I crammed my tongue between his
teeth, stretching it far into his mouth to shut him up.

My free hand tore at his shirt. It seemed as though I were moving in fast motion, and he in slow. His ivory shirt buttons popped open to reveal his chest. There, the tattoo of a whale skimmed across waves, a geyser of water shooting from the top of its head. I bent and bit it. He made a sound like “yeah.” He wriggled so his nipple met my mouth. I took it between my teeth and nibbled, grinding my teeth on its tough gristle.

I wasn’t hard—typical when I’m tripping—and I nudged his leg away when he tried to maneuver it up my thigh. I thought how this wasn’t sex, really, just another experience. Yet it was what I wanted: the heavy contact, the two bodies shoving and slamming together, the stuff that could be proved the next day by bruises. I also wanted the thrill of knowing I made him happy. I wanted him to return to Wichita and tell his buddies about it. “Guess what, I made it with an eighteen-year-old tonight.”

I stopped biting his nipple and returned to his mouth, sucking his bottom lip as if extracting poison. This was something I excelled at, something I’d learned long ago. Friar tried to say a few words, but they garbled without the use of the lip.

In ten minutes I’d ascended over him. I could take him like a vampire. The words “at mercy” flashed on and off in my head, and I wanted to do something neither of us would forget: scratch my initials into his shoulder, plunge my dick into his ass without a condom, bite the lobe from his ear. He knew nothing about me, nothing but a first name, four measly letters that could have been another lie. He didn’t know a single truth about my life. He didn’t even know my face, a face that wouldn’t be the same tomorrow, in the mundane light of day.

I jerked my tongue from his mouth, leaned my head
against his shoulder, and in that second I saw myself, a flash of tanned skin in the bathroom mirror. His body blocked mine, and my head hovered above his back like a swollen trophy. I realized he was naked, although I couldn’t remember stripping him. For some reason, that struck me as uproarious. I smiled at my face. The reflected expression didn’t seem anywhere near a smile. It must have been the acid.