Shaking the Sugar Tree (12 page)

“I did the best I could.”

“And you don’t think it was enough?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“I’ve only been around Noah a little bit, but even I can see he loves you more than anything. You should give yourself more credit. He’s a really nice kid.”

“He certainly doesn’t get it from me,” I said.

“Why are you beating up on yourself?”

“I’m just… thinking out loud.”

“What am I not getting here?”

“Every time I turn around, there’s someone standing there telling me what a bad parent I am.”

“Like who?”

“For starters, my mom. Then there’s my brother. His wife. Her family. Her church. My own church. My priest. The whole society I live in. It’s not like there’s a lot of people down here saying, yeah, you go gay parent, go!”

“You don’t feel anyone supports you?”

“Maybe they don’t support me because I don’t deserve support.”

“What kind of bullshit is that?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Doesn’t sound like I want to.”

“Well, there you go.”

“I didn’t mean that. You’re a touchy bastard, aren’t you?”

“I’m just tired.”

“Tired of what?”

I looked around at the faces feeding themselves in the cafeteria, faces full of suspicious, judgmental eyes.

“Tired of what?” he pressed. “What is it, Wiley? Why can’t you just spit it out? You don’t like me? You want me to get lost? What?”

“It has nothing to do with you,” I said.

“It must have something to do with me or we wouldn’t be talking like this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to get hold of myself. “I shouldn’t be talking about any of this. I don’t know what I’m talking about. There’s a reason why they don’t let me talk to adults.”

“Are you finished now? Can I get a word in? Maybe two?”

“Sure.”

He looked at me for a long time without speaking.

“Well…?” I prompted.

He laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re so cute.”

“Cute?”

“And hot. Really, really hot.”

“Hot?”

“Oh yeah.”

“That’s… interesting.”

“And you’re complicated,” he added. “I like that. Most guys would have been into my pants by now and gone about their business and I’d never see them again. I can’t seem to get you into my pants at all.”

“What would I do if I was in your pants?”

“You’d think of something.”

I nodded because yeah, I certainly would.

“But I don’t just want you to get into my pants,” he said. “I want you to get into my life.”

I frowned, not sure what to make of that.

Noah, who had finished eating, looked up.

Can we go to G-a-m-e S-t-o-p?

We can look, but we don’t have any money today,
I signed, wiping more tomato sauce off his chin
.

Just one game?

We’ll see.

Can I play in the arcade?

There was a game arcade in the corner of the cafeteria next to where we sat. He always spent some time there after we ate.

“For just a little bit,” I said. I fished out four quarters and handed them to him.

He quickly found himself an arcade game, careful to position himself so that I could see him.

“You must think I’m really shallow,” Jackson said. “I’m not looking for somebody to go to nice restaurants with, although there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not looking for anybody at all, as far as that goes. I wasn’t looking, but I found you. And I want to know you. I want to know all about you. I want to be part of your life. You make me laugh. You make me horny. You make me think maybe I could spend my life with someone like you. You make me think about things like getting married and settling down and maybe being a father myself, or at least a stepfather. I had never thought about what it would be like to be a father, to have a kid around the house. But that’s the kind of stuff I want. Traditional, boring stuff like getting married and being true to one person the rest of my life. It’s not just sex, although I have to admit that I want you in the worst way and I’m getting a little tired of you playing hard to get.”

“I’m not playing hard to get,” I said. “I’m just being honest.”

“Well, so am I,” he said. “I want you.”

“So how does the marrying thing work?” I asked.

“I suppose if we dated for a while and decided that the chemistry was right, we might want to move on to the next level and make a commitment.”

“That’s a scary word.”

“I don’t think so. Not with the right person.”

“And who would the right person be?”

“He’d have to be sexy,” Jackson said straight off. “He’d have to have smoldering eyes and a smoldering sensuality about him.”

“You like that word.
Smoldering
.”

“It’s a good word. It doesn’t get much better than smoldering. And
smoldering
is not the same as
hot,
which
implies a certain superficiality, a good-looking man who doesn’t have much underneath the hood. You’re a good-looking man, but you’ve got a lot under the hood.”

“So you’ll be looking underneath my hood?”

“Of course. I might have to apply a bit of lube to get under the hood. You know how that is.”

“I seem to recall something about that.”

“I give as good as I get, which I think is an important point. I like to mix it up, keep it interesting. You can never have too many sex toys, I’ve been told.”

“I thought you weren’t going to talk that way in front of the children.”

“You bring out the beast in me.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“So what is all this talk about being a bad parent? If you’re such a bad parent, where the hell is his mother?”

“She’s a meth head,” I said. “I was into it, too, for a while, until she got pregnant and I realized I was going to be a father. I tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t. After Noah was born, she hit the road and took up with a new boyfriend who ran a meth lab down in Monroe County. Got busted several times and was eventually sent up the river for shake and bake.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a way to make crystal meth. You put it in a soda bottle, shake up the ingredients, let it sit in a cool, dark place for half an hour. Shake and bake, they call it. Popular down here. If you’re out driving around in the country and you see empty soda bottles by the side of the road, that’s probably what it is. People dump them after they use them.”

“She got sent to jail for that?”

“She spent five years at Central. She’s been gone Noah’s whole life, in one way or another. She just got out.”

“Does she want custody now? Is that what’s bothering you?”

I laughed.

“Is that funny?” he asked.

“She doesn’t want anything to do with him.”

“That’s horrible.”

“We went down to Pearl the other day for her release. I thought maybe if she saw him… maybe she’d change her mind… maybe she’d see how great he is, how much fun he is… but she just got into her boyfriend’s car and drove off and left us standing there.”

“And
you’re
the one who’s the bad parent?”

“I’m not a bad parent,” I said. “I don’t know what it is. When my nephews and my niece were born, everyone was right there, supporting them, helping them, saying yeah, it’s so awesome, pass out the cigars, let’s celebrate, we made a baby, we passed on our genes, we did our duty. But nobody passed out cigars when my baby was born. Nobody even came to the hospital except my mother. It was two weeks before my brother Billy and his wife came to the hospital to see Noah in the incubator.”

I paused, remembering that visit with a certain bitterness.

Jackson put his hand on mine, said nothing.

“Everything about my nephews and my niece was a big deal,” I said. “The first tooth. The first word. Getting baptized. Going to school. The clothes they wore. What kind of Christmas they had. Summer camps. Everything was always a huge frikkin’ deal with everyone jumping in there to support them. Including me, by the way. I was at the hospital when each of them was born. I went to the baby showers. I bought them presents. I doted on those kids. The whole ‘family values’ thing. Family down here is huge, you know. But because I’m a gay man, somehow my child doesn’t count. He’s not really ‘family.’ Somehow he’s not really my son. People feel sorry for him. My family will buy him presents and stuff, but there’s always this feeling of being obligated to do it so that he doesn’t feel left out. It’s just not the same. On top of that, he’s deaf and they don’t know sign language, so it’s hard to communicate. Now, if one of my nephews or my niece was deaf, I’d learn sign language, no problem. I’d do it because I love them and I want to be part of their lives.”

“None of them learned to sign?”

I shook my head. “They feel sorry for him.”

“You’re not responsible for how other people feel.”

“Don’t give me that psychobabble bullcrap!” I snapped. “I’m trying to explain to you what it’s like when people feel sorry for your child because you’re his parent. Not some normal, wonderful heterosexual super-parent, but a fag. A moral disgrace. An intrinsically disordered, limp-wristed pansy boy who likes taking it up the chuff. They feel
sorry
for him. Do you understand that?”

He said nothing to this.

I did not mean to sound so bitter, so angry.

“And sometimes I think maybe they’re right,” I went on. “Maybe he would have been better off had I let his grandparents take care of him. All I had to do was fuck off.”

Still he said nothing, letting me ramble.

“On top of all of that, Noah was a meth baby. He was born addicted to crystal meth. They had to shoot him up and get him high so they could wean him off the drugs. They had to do that because they were afraid he would die. He had birth defects. And all those people looking at me—I could see it in their eyes. They blamed me. Bad enough that his mother was a meth head, but his father was a fag. That poor child. That poor, poor child. And I’m talking about people like my own mother. My brother Bill. His wife. I went to my church and asked my priest to come baptize Noah because we thought he was going to die, and the priest looked at me like I was the scum of the known universe. All those people, the way they looked at me, the way they looked at Noah….”

“I’m sorry,” Jackson said softly.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” I said, pulling my hand away, feeling embarrassed, self-conscious.

“I’m glad you told me.”

“You know what I heard the other day?” I asked.

“What?”

“Some guy on the radio—some right wing Christian whack job who probably masturbates too much—suggested that we needed to build an underground railroad, like the one they had to help slaves escape. Only he suggested we needed to build one to spirit away children of gay people and get them to safety. And it hit me: He was talking about Noah. He was talking about my little boy. Do you understand that? Do you have any idea how that made me feel?”

“That’s awful,” he said.

I wiped at my eyes and turned away from him.

“I’m really sorry,” he said.

“I don’t know what I’d do if someone took my child away from me,” I said.

“They can’t do that,” Jackson pointed out.

“They can’t hang black people from magnolia trees either, but that never stopped them, did it?” I countered. “You can’t own another human being. You can’t go out in the slave quarters at night and rape your female slaves so you can make a bunch of little baby slaves. You can’t burn crosses in people’s yards. You can’t torch their businesses or set people on fire. Don’t tell me about what folks can and cannot do.”

He did not seem to know what to make of this.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be sitting here and running my mouth like a fool.”

“You ever heard of something called gay rights?” he asked.

I laughed in his face.

“Maybe they don’t exist down here yet, but they’re coming,” he said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“While straight people are having long-winded conversations about how intrinsically disordered we are, we’re trying to live our lives. I’m not big on politics, but I’m big on my own rights. Frankly, I’m surprised. You got a girl pregnant. You decided to do the right thing and stick by her and take responsibility for the child. People are mad at you because of
that
? Really? All these deadbeat dads walking around who won’t pay child support and don’t want to be part of their children’s lives, and they’re mad at you for being responsible? Don’t you realize how fucked-up that is? And here you are, beating yourself up about it like you believe them, like you think your son would be better off with
them!
What the hell is that about?”

He held my hand, uncaring as to who saw us, or who listened, or what they thought.

“Do you abuse Noah?” he asked.

“Of course not!” I exclaimed, pulling my hand away angrily.

“Do you take him to the hospital with unexplained injuries?”

“No!”

“Do you molest him? Do you smack him around a little when you’re drinking? Do you throw him against the wall when you’re mad? Do you have people calling the DHS on you, wondering what the hell is going on?”

“What the hell is your point?”

“I’m a pediatric nurse, Wiley. I see a lot of kids every day. Some of their parents… well, you’ve got to wonder. You look at those kids and you just know something’s going on. From the way you talk, seems like some of these people would be only too happy to find any excuse to take Noah away from you. Have you ever been investigated by the DHS?”

“Of course not.”

“Have you ever been accused of being abusive?”

“Why would I be?”

“Exactly. Maybe you’re not such a terrible parent. Did that thought ever cross your mind? Maybe you’re just trying to do the best you can. Maybe you’re just a little bit mad because these people should be helping you, not sitting around and judging you and filling you with doubts about yourself.”

“Maybe,” I offered.

“It’s hard to be a parent.”