Toby's Lie

by Daniel Vilmure

  At lunch I didn’t have much of an appetite—and I didn’t have money, so my appetite was moot. I was wandering round the lunchroom fingering my glands and swiping orphan french fries when Kickliter idled over.

  “Howdy there, Toby,” K. said and lit a Kool. He exhaled a plume of smoke at the ketchup-stained ceiling. Occasionally a packet would dislodge and pelt his head. “How’s that new community service project coming—the AIDS ward at St. Osyth’s? You’re quite the brave lad.”

  “I just want to go to the prom,” I assured him. “Bravery has nothing to do with it, sir.”

  “Does a certain somebody have something to do with it?” K. asked insouciantly.

  “Maybe you should ask him.”

  “I’d like to, I’ve tried to. That’s the problem. Dr. Sligh. Seems his mom and dad have been out of town all week and somebody’s been phoning in sick for him, Toby.”

  “Really? And are you as free with my secrets as you are with Somebody’s?”

  “You are Somebody’s secret.”

  Juice walked over, and K. turned to greet him. He liked Juice a lot; Juice probably sold him pot.

  “Do you like me, Dr. Compton?” K. said.

  Juice shrugged.

  “Am I one of the good guys?”

  “I’d say you was, K.”

  “Then how come your buddy Tobias doesn’t like me?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Maybe you should ax him.”

  Kickliter put a hand on Juice’s shoulder and inhaled. I was feeling faint again; I decided I’d hold on.

  “Have you ever, Dr. Compton, thought someone was your enemy, when all he really wanted was to help you out a lot?”

  “Yeah, G., been there. The other way, too. Like when you in tight an’ they stab you in the back.”

  Juice blew a smoke ring; Kickliter blew one through it. I could feel a wave of sweat breaking out across my forehead.

  “Toby doesn’t trust me.”

  “Why should he truss you?”

  “He’s taking somebody to the prom.”

  “I know he is.”

  “Who’s he taking, Juice?”

  “Who you taking, T-Sly?”

  “Angelina Fishback,” I said, and stared at K.

  “That’s not what I think,” K. answered, singsongy. “I heard from someone else that he was taking someone else”

  “Well then, I guess you heard wrong, Kicks my man. ’Cause Toby himself say he takin’ Angelina. You can ask Bubba Fishback. He right over there. An’ Bubba kill Toby if he doan’, you know tha’ss right.”

  Across the cafeteria we could see Bubba Fishback, two cheese-toasties dripping grease from either fist.

  “All I know, Juice, we counselors hear things, and we’d really like to help, before things get outta hand. You tell your friend Toby I’m one of the good guys. You tell him he can trust me if he wants to talk it out.”

  “You tell him yo’self. He right here,” Juice told him.

  K. walked away, whistling.

  “Cocksucker,” Juice said.

  Juice had to catch me in a wrestler’s headlock to get me to go with him to Dr. Wu’s at lunch. And though I felt faint, and my temperature was zooming, and I didn’t have the energy to put up any fuss, the funny thing was it made me feel sorta better to be nestled down deep in Juice’s Brut-smelling armpit. But I told him he was crazy; he’d get caught and be expelled. And then who would I have left to love me in this world? Juice just ignored this and shoved me into his Porsche, and we drove past Kickliter, who was waving bon voyage.

  “Now Kickliter saw you and he’ll go tell McDuffy and your ass will be grass,” I said, using K.’s pet phrase.

  “No it won’t, Toby,” Juice said and cracked a smile. “ ’Cause that pot I couldn’t sell to your moms and pops, remember? I sold it to K. An’ I got him tape-recorded.”

  Juice produced a shoebox from underneath the carseat. In it were dozens of microcassettes—some with teachers’ names, some with coaches’ names, and one with “Kickliter” scrawled in marker across it.

  “He ain’t gonna squeal to nobody, Tobias.”

  I blinked and leaned over and spoke into Juice’s cufflink.

  “One, two, three. Testing one, two, three. My name is Toby Sligh, and for the record—I am innocent!”

  After describing my illness to Dr. Wu, a stylish young woman fresh out of Johns Hopkins, and after she had taken a look at my tongue, the first question she asked me was “Like, are you gay?” At the same time she jabbed a syringe into my forearm and drew a vial of bubbling purple blood from my vein.

  “Have I got AIDS?” I asked her.

  Wu giggled. “It takes more than two days of flu to get AIDS! Have you had anal sex?”

  I answered in the negative.

  “Oral sex?”

  “Yeah, but I never, um, swallow.”

  “Have you ever shared needles?”

  “Only with doctors.”

  “And are you a hemophiliac?”

  “Emotionally, yes.”

  Wu left the needle in and drew a second tube. I was looking away: I always had to look away.

  “I don’t know how much you know about these things,” Wu continued in an alarmingly lighthearted tone. “But you don’t get AIDS until you get HIV. First you get the virus, then the other stuff! Someone who tests positive for antibodies, Toby, they may have eight, ten, twelve years to live! We can’t even be sure that they’ll get AIDS at all!”

  “But they usually do.”

  “Yes, they usually do.”

  “And they usually die.”

  “Yes, they usually die.”

  Wu drew a third tube of blood from me now; I felt like a Last Chance Texaco in Transylvania.

  “Why do they call it ‘positive’ if you’ve got antibodies?”

  I already knew the answer; I was just messing around.

  “Keep still!” Wu said. She slapped my head. “Excuse me?”

  “Why do they call it ‘positive’? Shouldn’t it be ‘negative’?”

  “The results are positive. It makes you feel negative.”

  “So negative is positive?”

  Wu coughed slightly. “Yes.”

  “And they’re called antibodies ’cause they don’t like your body?”

  “Antibodies are good!” Wu cried. “They fight the virus!”

  Having just drawn a fourth tube of blood from my arm, Wu pulled up a stool and sat squarely on it and sneezed into a handkerchief and wiped her nose and said, “Enough of your questions. Now let me ask you something.”

  I was saying a rosary over the vials of blood that lay benignly in Dr. Wu’s lap.

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you gay?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you happy?”

  I thought a bit about. I finally said, “No.”

  “So if it’s positive when you’re negative, and if antibodies help your body, how can you expect to be gay and be happy?” Dr. Wu concluded, and stood up, and clicked her pen, and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics plus a note for McDuffy—both impossible to read.

  “But we have so much help from society,” I told her.

  “Since when did society ever help anybody?”

  I took the slips of paper and rolled down my sleeve.

  “The least you can do is be happy,” Wu said, and took Juice’s credit card, and zapped it with a laser.

  “So that blood there, um, it’s going to be tested?”

  “Not for AIDS, Toby. For the HIV virus.”

  “Can I go on kissing my boyfriend on the mouth?”

  “With your tongue, do you mean?”

  “Mm-hmm, with my tongue.”

  “And with his tongue on your tongue?”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, as far as we know, you could spend a thousand hours liplocked and slobbering and you wouldn’t have to worry.”

  “Unless our mouths were bleeding.”

  “Unless your mouths were bleedi
ng.”

  “But that’s just your opinion.”

  “Everything is my opinion. That’s what doctors do; we give informed opinion. In many ways, we do not know shit about AIDS. The only thing we know is, if you don’t want to get it, you have to—”

  “Stop having sex.”

  “Yes, stop having sex. Which is okay, you know, if you don’t like sex, or if you’re a eunuch, or if you’re not in love. Are you in love, Toby Sligh?”

  I looked at her and nodded.

  “Love makes you stupid. Are you stupid, Toby Sligh?”

  I told her I was.

  “Then buy lots of condoms. They’re a bargain compared to, like, terminal illness.”

  Wu opened the door.

  “You’ll have the results in—?”

  “Two weeks. Think positive!”

  “I think you mean negative.”

  Wu smiled. “I think you know just what I mean.”

  As I went out, Wu bowed theatrically and said, “And tell Leonard Compton I would like to see him, please.”

  Juice was in with Dr. Wu for over half an hour, so when he got back to Sacred Heart, he would be late, and if he got caught, he would be expelled. Unless, of course, he had microcassettes of McDuffy and the Jesuits negotiating crack deals, which I would not have put past him, not at that point. There had always been something supernaturally lucky surrounding Juice Compton from the moment we met. Our first day of school— freshman orientation, or freshman disorientation, as some preferred to call it—my father had dropped me off two hours early and I’d wandered around the campus like an adolescent alien, a little blue space saucer beanie on my head that said to all predators: “I am your prey.” Several hours later, when I lay in the quadrangle wriggling on my back like a piece of frying bacon to the cackling approval of a pack of upperclassmen, I would experience the first in a series of doubts about the efficacy of a Jesuit education—as would Leonard Compton, who lay wrigging beside me, his mouth hissing “Sssssss!” impersonating Sizzle-Lean. That morning I had seen him in the same quadrangle knocking over a statue of Ignatius de Loyola while no one was looking—no one except me, no one except me and the unfurling dawn that pointed accusatory purple fingers at him. The vandal had vanished underneath the chapel’s eaves, his immaculate blue beanie wadded up beneath his arm, and when he’d gotten out of sight, I approached the toppled statue and stood looking at it, my back turned to Juice. I didn’t even know who St. Ignatius was; I thought he was Christ’s stunt double or something. All I knew was, he looked like a decent guy, and his nose was in the dirt, which no decent guy deserved. Would the freshman class deserve it hours later after lunch when all of us lay writhing in the same dirt together pushing number-two pencils with the knobs of our noses? Would the freshman class deserve it at the end of the day when we squatted with our heels under one another’s armpits running wheelbarrow races through chattering sprinklers? Would the freshman class deserve it at the raucous pep rally when a barnyard of jocks gave us ‘Wedgies for Others’?

  No, we wouldn’t; and neither did he. So even though I didn’t know who this angry black kid was, or why he had toppled this mild white god who looked like your average messiah-in-training, I cast a quick glance at him over my shoulder as I bent down to lift the stricken St. Ignatius up. I was just a tiny fella, just turned fourteen, and the statue was heavy, much heavier than me. How Juice had knocked it over was a thing I’d never figure; he must have had a big bowl of Wheaties for breakfast. I strained and I strained, but the statue wouldn’t budge—till I managed at last to roll it over on its back and it lay staring up at the blind eye of God crying out, “Help! I’ve fallen and I cant get up!” After a while, when I too had surrendered and lay beside Ignatius staring at the callous sky, Juice came over and said, “My name’s Leonard. Who bus’ d’uh statue?”

  “I dunno,” I replied.

  Leonard bent down and helped me up off the ground, and together we knelt and put our arms around Loyola. “The sun’s throwin’ down like a motherfucker now,” Leonard proclaimed as we wrestled with Ignatius. At last, with a Jesuit watching from the chapel, we succeeded in standing the statue on its feet; and as it posed with its arms in a V against the dawn, like the night had scored a touchdown, like the horizon’s referee, the figure in the chapel doorway disappeared within, and we gave each other high-fives and headed inside, too.

  “You know what?” I told Juice, upon entering the chapel to stained glass and silence and lingering light. “I thought when we finally got that statue on its feet it would come straight to life and give us anything we wanted. What would you want from it, Leonard?” I asked him.

  “I would want outta here, damn it,” Juice said. “What would you want from it, Toby?” he asked me.

  “I guess I’d want someone to help me up if I fell down.”

  “You take the Porsche.” Juice handed me the keys. There was a pinpoint of blood on his sleeve. “I’m taking a taxi. I’ll get Baby later.”

  “Who’s Baby?”

  “My Porsche.”

  Juice called his Porsche Baby.

  Out of Curiousity, I checked out the shoebox of microcassettes Juice had shown me before. I inserted Kickliter’s in a miniature recorder Juice had stashed in a Kleenex caddy underneath the dash. I could hear Juice’s voice distinctly in the foreground; Kickliter’s was somewhere in the background mumbling. The recording was brief. It was gnarled with static. If there’d been a drug deal, I couldn’t hear it. But at the end of the tape Kickliter spoke clearly. He sounded as if he was leaning into Juice. Juice started crying, like he’d done back in the alley, and though I didn’t want to listen, I couldn’t help myself. “Picture him, Leonard!” Kickliter was urging. “Picture—!” He mentioned a name I’d heard before.

  “He’s running to me!” Juice was shouting. “E-Eye’s running!”

  Then there was a clicking sound: the tape snapped off. Almost instinctively, I popped the tape out and popped in a new one, featuring a coach.

  “To be a winner, Compton,” a football coach was saying, “you gotta blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah …”

  The sermon dragged on for interminable minutes, then it concluded. But again, no drug deal.

  And so on, with a dozen cassettes that I surveyed. Most were just lectures, or casual advice, or candid observations Juice decided to record. One—a cassette labeled 2BSLY—contained comments on friendship I’d made in Ethics class, comments I’d forgotten and Juice had preserved: “Because you don’t have to.” I was free-associating. “Because it’s not a duty, because it is your privilege . . On recordings featuring just Juice’s voice, the urban jungle jive and street profanity were missing. Juice didn’t come off so much white as less black, as if the private Juice hated housing project patois while the public Juice practiced only rap attack patter. Arranging the cassettes in the order I had found them, I realized that this was what I’d done with people’s voices—disassembled sound bites and pieces of their lives, disassembled jigsaws I didn’t dare complete.

  I locked Baby up and walked across the parking lot, my tape-recorded comments on a loop inside my head: “Because you don’t have to, because it’s not a duty, because it is your privilege to be somebody’s friend …” And it occurred to me then that I had chosen my friends, or that they had chosen me, or that we’d chosen one another; and that it was my duty, my privilege, our privilege, to love as best we could for as long as we were able. And as I entered the lobby of St. Osyth’s Hospital and spotted Ian standing abandoned and exhausted like a child who’s never known a single moment’s rest since he left his mother’s breast, and will never return, I took some money from him, and I purchased my prescription, and he led me to the men’s room, and he said, “Toby, hold me.” And I held him, and he kissed me, and I kissed him, and he held me—and already it was like we’d never even been away.

  “I’m sorry,” Ian said.

  “For what?”

  He was crying.

  “I’m sorry, Toby Sli
gh,” Ian said. “For everything.”

  At the snack bar we had our customary cups of coffee and I asked Ian if he had recovered from the flu.

  “I never had the flu, Toby Sligh,” he confided.

  “I didn’t think you had.”

  Ian smiled and wiped his eye.

  “I’ve been with your mother,’’ he began.

  But your parents—”

  “They’ve gone to Barbados.”

  “I know. I called your house.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “Heidi gave it to me. You have your own line.”

  “Uh-huh, yeah, I do.”

  He admitted this as if it had been public knowledge; suddenly I felt like Det. Thomas, Jr.

  “Has my mother been calling in sick for you mornings?”

  “She doesn’t have a phone. I go to Circle K. And if she called in, she would know we were classmates.”

  “Who does it then?”

  “The Circle K lady. I give her twenty dollars.”

  Ian was a genius.

  “Have you talked to Kickliter?”

  He said that he hadn’t.

  “He knows that we’re planning to go to the prom.”

  “Who could’ve told him?”

  “Just you or me, Ian.”

  “It wasn’t me, Toby.”

  “Well, maybe it was Randall.”

  Ian took my hand, and he held it in his hand, and he flipped it back and forth like a pancake on a griddle.

  “How is my mother?” I asked him.

  “She’s fine.” Ian let his head drop. “No, she’s not. She’s paranoid. She has this idea that somebody tapped your phone line and if she calls home—from the Circle K, even—they’ll monitor the call and figure out her neighborhood. You told her yourself your dad hired a detective. Bea isn’t taking chances. She wants to be alone.”