“I don’t recall anybody asking in the first place,” Joe Ray said.
Sitting on the patio glider, Tice Flaherty picked out a tune. On a visit to San Francisco, Rose Ella had bought a fake grass skirt on Fisherman’s Wharf, which she pulled out now for Brother Hippolytus to wrap around his robe. He and Brother Cyril climbed atop the carriage rock and threw familiar arms around each other and sang Broadway musical hits in harmony, Cyril launching into a falsetto to counter Hippolytus’s contrabass. With the first plink of the ukulele Joe Ray brought out spoons, which he banged while Tice Flaherty played. “Now it’s Mother’s turn!” Joe Ray cried, and though she argued and balked, in the end Rose Ella let herself be hoisted to the rock, where she sang while Cyril and Hippolytus improvised a little soft shoe. Tice Flaherty wound things up with a hot little ukulele lick. “The best in the county!” Joe Ray cried. “There was a time—I was there, Mr. Flaherty, don’t you deny it—it was at the county fair, and Bill Monroe, and one of his boys got sick.”
“Accident,” Rose Ella said. “He’d had an accident.”
“Whatever, it was last-minute and they got Mr. Flaherty up there with his banjo—none of this ukulele business—and he played like the dickens. And at the end of the night Bill Monroe himself turned to him and said, ‘Mr. Tice, you can play in my band anytime you want.’ Isn’t that true?”
“It’s the ones that went before—you take Samantha Bumgardner,” Tice Flaherty said. “She’s lost even to the rememberers, her name don’t mean nothing to nobody no more. But she was a real player, she and the ones like her. They played all the old songs and played ’em best, because they never had to learn ’em—they were born with ’em in the blood and grew up with ’em in the blood. My daddy he played good but not so good as them, and all I do is try to remember how he remembered how they played it, is all. The ones of us that remember best are the best ones left.”
Joe Ray looked around mournfully. “It’s not like it once was,” he said. “Was a time when there’d be seventy or eighty of us, and four or five different circles all singing, and everybody with something to make music.”
“There was a time when we had to walk a hundred yards in the snow to get to the outhouse,” Elizabeth said.
“I don’t see any frostbit toes, Miss California,” Joe Ray said.
“Where are all those people now?” Cyril asked.
“Oh, here and there,” Rose Ella said vaguely. “Those that are still alive, of course. I’d show you pictures—photographs—but you’d have to ask Miss Camilla’s father for those.” She told her story then, the old story whose many versions they all knew—how Miss Camilla’s father had come through and taken Rose Ella’s parents’ wedding photograph, only to run off with Miss Camilla’s mother, a local girl who was never seen again, any more than the photographs themselves.
“’Course, it wasn’t Miss Camilla’s fault,” Tice Flaherty added generously. “For all she knows those pictures never even turned out. Ain’t that right, Camilla?”
“I expect my father had his mind on more important things,” Miss Camilla said brightly. Rose Ella managed a polite laugh—it was as close to a joke as Miss Camilla came, at least on this subject.
Joe Ray was shooting again—he had attached a spotlight to his camera and was taping at the picnic tables, where Dwight and the Hardin grandsons were playing poker with a scrabbling of bills and change anted up. “In those days we’d take up a collection for Mr. Flaherty,” Joe Ray said, “and feel honored to empty our pockets.”
“Can’t dance,” Dwight said.
“Joe Ray, why don’t you see if anybody needs a refill,” Rose Ella said.
Catherine lifted the video camera from her husband’s hand. “It’s getting late. And when it gets late we get hard to deal with.”
Joe Ray clapped Tice Flaherty’s shoulder. “Mr. Flaherty’s careful with his talent—that’s because he’s good. But stick around till midnight. We work on him long enough, he’ll get that banjo out. That’s when the party really takes off.” But Mr. Flaherty tucked his ukulele back in its case. “Airish out here,” he said. “Fingers are too stiff.”
“What the hell is wrong with this family anyway,” Joe Ray said, but already Dwight had the stereo cranked up—they weren’t going to suffer silence on his account.
Nick pulled Raphael aside. “They’re still growing great pot in Kentucky,” he said. “In case you’re interested.”
They walked out behind the garden, where they were hidden from the party by the old, gnarled trees of the apple orchard. That spring Tom Hardin had been too ill to prune the orchard or to plant a garden, and with a supermarket at hand Rose Ella didn’t see the point in all that work. The garden had grown rank, a weedy jungle of volunteer tomatoes and potatoes overwhelmed by head-high lamb’s quarter and amaranth and a few spikes of bright yellow mullein. The unpruned trees bore hard, wormy fruit, dark little globes against the darkening evening sky.
Nick tapped marijuana from a matchbox into a cigarette paper creased between his fingers. “You think I could make a living in California?”
“It’s not as easy as people believe,” Raphael said. “Picking up and moving twenty-five hundred miles.”
Nick gave the joint a practiced lick. “I hear San Francisco is a crazy place.”
“Don’t believe what you see on television.”
Nick handed the joint to Raphael, then struck a match on his jeans. His face loomed large in the flaring light. “I’ll bet you seen it all.”
“Not all,” Raphael said, then, “a fair amount.”
“Tell me some of the things you seen.”
Raphael sucked on the joint, smoke leaking from his lips. “Nothing you don’t see here in Jessup County. Just different, and more of it.”
“You seen guys kiss other guys.”
“I’ve seen that,” Raphael said. He let the smoke ease out, a white cloud against the black branching apple trees. “Plenty of that. But don’t you believe that doesn’t happen right here in Jessup County.”
“I know that. I know that myself.”
Only the white limestone cliffs across the valley stood out now, and the fireflies, no more than a few in this dry summer, scattered across the fields that rolled to the dark fringe of woods bordering the ravine. Music boomed from the yard—rockabilly music now; Dwight’s concession to the old order.
In this hot weather Nick wore only an old cotton work-shirt, worn so thin that even in this dusky light his nipples showed as two dark circles through the cloth. Half-moons of sweat darkened his underarms, and on the still night air his scent brought a surge of blood to Raphael’s skin. Desire was something he thought he’d left behind, that had been crowded from a heart too full of fear and anger and grief.
Nick stepped to Raphael’s side. “Stand here next to me. No, closer. Open your mouth.” Nick reversed the joint. “Shotgun,” he said. He took its burning coal into the hollow of his own mouth, holding the joint between puckered lips. He put his mouth over Raphael’s and exhaled, blowing a thick stream of smoke from the tip of the joint into Raphael’s parted lips.
Lust rose in Raphael’s body, a shiver through his shoulders, a fist in his throat. How long had it been since he’d been seized by desire so strong it created its own demands, outside of time and place? Nick’s long, narrow self under his own body, hard as a plank and permeated with the musky, sour taste of tobacco—this old, timeless, fooling, joyful thing, with its own ways and means.
Above the music they heard Catherine’s voice, sharp-edged. “Right now, young man!”—then an explosion of laughter.
“You ever kissed a guy?” Nick asked.
“It’s been known to happen.”
“When you were a kid?”
“Well. A kid. The first time I was out of college already—twenty-one, or twenty-two. Does that make me a kid?”
“No. Not a kid.”
A firefly flashed nearby; Raphael snatched it in midflight. Its golden glow filled the cup of his han
d.
“Did you like the guy?”
Raphael told his story then. “I was right out of college—I was twenty-two—I’d just moved to San Francisco. I’d never lived in a city before, not a real city—you don’t know what it’s like to be alone until you’re alone in a city. And I was alone, I hardly knew a soul, and then I met this guy at a party and we got to be good friends, for a year or so.” The firefly reached the tips of Raphael’s fingers. It spread its wings, but Raphael flipped his hand and the firefly began its climb again. “He lived in the suburbs and I got up every Saturday morning at six A.M. and biked fourteen miles to his house, and sometimes on Sundays, all the time thinking we’re just friends, except that we were calling each other every day, sometimes twice a day, and we couldn’t wait to get together every weekend and sometimes in between and hang out.
“One time before all this I’d picked up this hitchhiker—he tried to put the make on me but I held him off, I wouldn’t let myself do it. And then once I got to California I held myself off, I just didn’t allow myself to think about love, or even sex, I couldn’t let myself believe they could happen, at the same time that they were the only things I thought about or believed in, you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.”
“And then finally I invited my friend on a bike ride and sat him down in Golden Gate Park on the benches in the bandshell, and I was scared shitless but I couldn’t stand it anymore and I said, ‘There’s something you ought to know,’ or some such line. And it turned out he had wanted to say the same thing to me but I’d talked about a girlfriend in college or something like that and he thought—well, he had a girlfriend, right then, right when I knew him, for Christ’s sake, how was I supposed to know he was interested in me? We used to sit around arguing who was straighter until—for a long time, anyway. Anyway, so we’re sitting in the bandshell and jumping out of our skin to make love and nowhere to go, I wouldn’t take him home in front of my roommates—”
“Why didn’t you go to his place?”
“He was living with his mother. He was living with his mother and I was working in San Francisco. I was a workaholic until then, I was twenty-three—”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two when we met, twenty-three by this time, and I was determined to prove to myself that I could make it in the city, and I was working till eight or nine at night and on weekends and then all of a sudden I started leaving the office every day at five-oh-three, because if I left the office at five-oh-three I could run like hell and make the five-twenty-one Southern Pacific—that’s the commuter train. He drove this souped-up, scarlet GTO with a broken muffler and he would roar up to the Southern Pacific station and I’d hop in and we’d drive like bats out of hell to his mother’s house—we’d get there about five after six and we’d have maybe twenty-five minutes before she got home from work. And we’d go in his room and make love.” Raphael grinned. “I’d tear his clothes off. He wore singlets, you know, not T-shirts but the kind of undershirts with straps—”
“Like basketball players. Or track stars.”
“Yeah. We’d be unbuttoning our shirts while we were roaring down El Camino and we’d be down to our undershirts by the time we got to his mother’s place, but one time we were running a little late and we only had maybe fifteen minutes and as soon as we were in the door I grabbed his undershirt and just ripped it off him, tore it right down the middle. And after that it got to be kind of a ritual, he would always wear one of those sleeveless undershirts and I would rip it off him as soon as we got in the door.”
“And his mother never caught you.”
“Never. Well, she always made a lot of noise driving up. What does that mean?” The firefly reached the tips of Raphael’s fingers, spread its wings, and flew into the dark. “We must have gone through a dozen and more packages of undershirts, three to a package, that summer. You go through a couple of packages a week, that underwear gets expensive.” He turned to face the sky, studying the stars through the trees. “One day at the last minute my boss asked me to stay late and I turned him down, made some kind of lamebrain excuse and Sarah, the woman who sat across the desk from me, looked up and said, maybe as a joke, I never had the nerve to ask, but anyway she said, ‘Raphael can’t stay late, he’s in love!’ And I turned beet red and they all knew it was true. ‘Who’s the little woman?’ my boss said, and I lit out for the train.
“That was the first time ever in my life that I let myself believe that love was something that could happen to me. Always before I’d thought, ‘Oh, I’m just too cold, I’m too wrapped up in myself,’ or whatever. There were people who could love other people and people who couldn’t, and I was one of the latter. And I thought what a shallow and empty-hearted person I must be, who could never be moved by another human being, who could never love somebody except at arm’s length.
“And then my officemate said, ‘Oh, Raphael’s in love,’ and it was like her saying it gave me permission to think it might be true, that it could happen to me—that I was a human being instead of a rock.
“And then a few months later we broke up. I couldn’t take that fear, you know, meeting at his mother’s place and her about to show up any time, it made it ugly and wrong, something to be ashamed of. We were so hot for each other—we’d go into the park at night and make love in the middle of the poison oak, just because we didn’t have anyplace else to go. One time a cop came upon us kissing—he was mounted on a horse and he came around this bush and there we were, our clothes on and everything, just kissing, but he pulled out his nightstick and said, ‘This park is for decent people.’ So then we talked about moving in with each other but every time one of us brought the subject up the other used it as an excuse for a fight. We couldn’t face anything like that—it would have been too much like admitting this is it, this is happening, we’re two men in love. And so we broke up.” Raphael’s shoulders seized up, a chill in the midst of the dying day’s lingering heat. “A year or two later and both of us had figured out who we were and what was what and we tried to get back together, but that’s not how it works, we’d lost something, it was over. I mean, we were still good friends, but we’d let something break and it was gone, it was history.”
Tee Junior found them out then. “I see you,” he sang out triumphantly. “You’re hiding.”
Raphael knelt in front of his nephew while Nick stubbed the joint against a gnarled apple trunk. “How come you’re not watching tapes of the party?” Raphael asked.
Tee Junior shrugged. “Tapes are boring.”
“Careful, little boy,” Raphael said. “Listen to your uncle. People have been exiled for lesser sins.” He smoothed twigs and early-fallen apples from the earth. “You can stay with us.”
“But it’s getting dark.”
“That way nobody will see us. We’ll be OK. We’ll stay here with you.” Raphael tousled his nephew’s hair. “We’ll all hang out together out here. We’ll stay out all night and sleep right here in the orchard.”
“Really?”
“Sure.” Raphael lay down on a bed of crabgrass and lamb’s quarter. “Lie here next to me. You look up through the apple trees long enough, you’ll see a shooting star. And then you can make the wish you never got to make awhile ago.”
Tee Junior studied the ground. “Are there bugs?”
Raphael laughed. “There are bugs.” He propped himself on his elbows, pulled some change from his pocket, slid it into Tee Junior’s surprised palm. He pointed his nephew toward the house. “You tell them Uncle Rafe and his friend Nick took a walk to get some cigarettes. A long walk. Go on.”
Tee Junior disappeared into the darkening yard. After a minute Nick lay down next to Raphael. “Frances will think I’ve gone off and left her. Not that she would mind. She would just as soon left me home. But your mother made a big deal about my coming. So I came.” Nick tucked his marijuana box in his back pocket. “Frances’s meetings with Eusebius aren’t usually so official. But you didn
’t hear me say that.”
They lay next to each other, their shoulders touching lightly. To the west the bombs and tracer flares of Fort Knox lit the night sky with bursts of light. It was August, the time of the Perseids, and as they watched first one star, then another slid down the sky’s violet chute.
“You still see him?” Nick asked.
“Who?”
“The guy whose undershirts you tore off.”
“Oh.” Raphael folded his arms across his chest. “Well, he’s dead. He died a little over a year ago.”
For a long while they lay silent, until Nick cleared his throat. “You know guys that have died.”
“Oh, sure. Everybody does in San Francisco,” Raphael said, and the casualness in his voice shocked himself.
Someone switched off the stereo. My dog has fleas—on the far side of the garden, Joe Ray had persuaded Tice Flaherty to take up his ukulele. “Some kickass bluegrass!” Joe Ray bawled. “‘Fox on the Run!’” They were gathering to sing—Raphael knew the timing; he’d seen enough of these parties.
“I think of you sometimes, out in San Francisco,” Nick said.
“Me? Why would you think about me?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “This is a small town. You got a reputation.”
“I can imagine.”
Nick was that close—Raphael might reach out a hand and touch him. His hand reached out, a mind of its own. Raphael stuck it in his pocket.
“Everybody used to talk about you all the time, they still do,” Nick said. “How you’d made the big break and how much nerve that took and all the things you were probably doing.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Surfing, and hanging out at rock concerts, and smoking pot.”
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