That night I slept in my parents’ big bed, the boxsprings underneath me protesting my invasion.
Where were my parents? And what were they doing?
Maybe they had found each other.
Maybe they were making love… .
Bubba’s sister Angelina telephoned at midnight and apologized for having to call up so late, but the prom was on Monday, she’d been trying to reach me, and she hoped I didn’t mind, but we had to get things straight.
Angelina Fishback was a wonderful girl. She had an extra- large body and an extra-large soul, and her mind was constantly bopping with ideas like Ping-Pong balls in a bingo bin. Like Ian, Angelina had been accepted to Yale, but she’d turned New Haven down for a community college. She adored her family— Bubba especially, whom she liked to slug full-force in the stomach in front of her friends, just out of affection—and she couldn’t bear leaving her home to go north, even though she had an air of independence about her. “I bagged Yale for spite,” she said through her nose. The better part of Angelina’s charm was vanity. She had a tattoo displaying her SAT scores—which were way off the charts, and eclipsed even Ian’s. But her wit was so sharp and her tongue so incisive you had to have a rhino’s skin to hang around with her. She intimidated Ian, who kept his distance from her, and she described herself aptly as a human tornado—sucking friends and family alike into her wake and spitting them back out again, loved but devastated. I’d always had a spiritual crush on Angelina: if I had been a woman, I’d’ve wanted to be her. She carried herself like a Mardi Gras float and draped herself in pastels like one of Monet’s haystacks and covered her girthy and ungirdled frame with dozens of politically incorrect buttons—“Kill The Poor,” “Right To Die,” “PMS Is A Lifestyle Option”—that were more humane than their self-righteous targets. Angelina didn’t like me—not in that way—but we made a fetching couple, and we had a blast together. What she wanted was a body to escort her to the prom: someone to strut with, someone to gossip with, someone to get in everybody’s fucking face with. And she was pissed off I hadn’t telephoned her sooner, what with the prom only three nights away. She woke me from a sleep I felt I’d never really earned, her voice like a rape whistle shrieking through the phone.
“Bubba’s tux, Toby! It’s tangerine-colored! He got it from, like, a televangelist garage sale! He’s going to be healing fucking spastics on the dance floor! Satan, begone! SWEETJESUS-YOU CAN CONGA!” There was something narcotizing in Angelina’s stridency as I lay beneath an open window drifting off to sleep. “ ‘Big Brother!’ I said. ‘You look like a circus peanut!’ It sorta made him cry, but the moron needs to know.’’ I couldn’t see then, or was only half aware of the shadow of a figure approaching the window. It looked like the trunk of a palm tree swaying and taking two sinister steps in the moonlight. “And then I got in trouble with my dyke Religion teacher—ever notice, Tobe, how your class is called ‘Theology’ and ours is called ‘Religion’? It’s so fucking sexist!—because I said that Jesus—have you ever thought about it?—was probably forced to carry his cross upside down, with the arm bar dragging on the ground. It makes sense, ’cause it would be more difficult to, like, get a grip on, and Christ would get all these nasty splinters in his fingers that would make the nails feel like— GAWD!, acutherapy!” In the vanity mirror above my mother’s dresser I could make out the shadow in the window taking shape, arms extended outward, no longer a shadow, but fleshy, and creeping, and emerging in the moonlight. “Toby, you know, you are shit for conversation! Whenever you guys get quiet on the phone I assume you’re masturbating. Put your cock away and talk!” But the receiver was already tumbling from my hand as the face of a stranger, damp with tears and crusted blood, blossomed darkly in the mirror like a gory moonflower. “Toby!” I screamed and catapulted from bed. “Toby !… Its me! … Its your friend! … Let me in!”
I didn’t mean to scare you,” Juice said, later on, after I had put my mother’s Ginsu away and let him, hyperventilating, in the frontdoor. He was bleeding. His hands fumbled for a cigarette. He never carried cigarettes; Juice always mooched off people. “I would’ve rung the bell, but in case your folks was home … Can I smoke?” he asked shakily. “Can I have a glass of water?” He landed on a barstool, head between his hands. “I’m sorry, Toby Sligh. I’m sorry to disturb you. You the one, Toby Sligh.” I sat down next to him. “What’s happening, Juice?” “You my friend, ain’tchoo?” “I like to think I am.” He looked at me and blinked. “My moms, Toby Sligh—” He choked on cigarette smoke; his cough was deep and chesty, and it rumbled through the house. “Somebody, Tobias, somebody talked to Moms, some undercover agent, and he said I was a dealer.” “You are a dealer, Juice.” He bowed his head and nodded. “I know I is, Toby. I know I’m a dealer. But not like you think … Could I have that glass a’ water?” I went to the cupboard and got him a glass, then I went to the refrigerator and fetched the jug of water. On the door of the fridge, as I opened it, I noticed the picture of my folks and Juice together, gathered like a family around the Scrabble board. “Fuck the glass, Toby, just gimme the jug,” Juice said and grabbed it and put it to his lips, and drank the gallon down in great greedy gulps. “You might wanna wash that,” he said when he had finished. There was blood on the spout, so I pitched the jug in the sink. “It’s not like you think. Nothing ever is, Toby. I deal to people, I make money off it, but I do other things—” “Like what?” “Never mind. So anyway, Tobes, I’m home late from hoops, and Moms is waitin’ up, and I say, ‘What’s for dinner?’, and she come over to me, and ya know, she make this fist, and then she starts to hit me! In the face, she starts to hit me! ‘No son a’ mine!’ she screamin’. ‘No son a’ mine!’ And she say she seed the pictures the officer showed her! An’ I say, ‘What pictures?,’ an’ I stan’ there gettin’ hit! An’ she juss keep screamin’ and callin’ me a dealer!” Juice’s body had collapsed now, and his shoulders were heaving, and I got a paper towel, and I wiped his bloody face. “I ain’t a dealer, Toby! Not like they think! I mean I am a dealer, but it’s diff’rent, it is!” Juice, he was crying like a locomotive; then his shoulders stopped churning, and he sat there cooling down. “So I come to you, Toby, ’cause you the one, ain’tchoo? Anquanna, she doan’ want me. I ain’t got nowhere to go. Can I crash here awhile, till your parents come back? I shack up some motel it juss remind me of my mama. I pay you for the room—”
“Juice —” “I pay you for the—”
Just then there was a pounding at the door. A car had pulled up, but we hadn’t even heard it. The porchlight was out. Someone stood beside the porchswing—a big, hulking person, looming there, breathing deep.
“That your pops, Toby?”
“I don’t know who it is!”
“He woan’ wanna see me… . Maybe I should go!”
“You stay right there!”
“Toby Sligh!”
“It’s a lady!”
“I recognize that voice!”
The voice spoke: “It’s Angelina!”
Angelina Fishback didn’t need to see Juice. She was the most extemporaneous gossip in the world, and if the story got out, the rumors would be rampant. So I led Juice around to my mom and dad’s bedroom and told him to shower and sleep if he wanted, and then I threw some clothes on and staggered outside. Angelina was sitting on the porchswing, swinging. It was creaking underneath her. She wore a pink plastic trenchcoat.
“Gawd, Toby Sligh, thank Christ you’re alive! I heard you let out that bloodcurdling scream and I said, the poor boy has climaxed to death! I know the mere sound of Angelina Fishback is enough to send any mere lad into rapture, but really, Tobias, this is phone sex in extremis! What is Mr. Leonard Compton’s Porsche doing here?” she said as I sat down and stretched out beside her. “Is he inside, Toby? Are your parents awake? Mine are watching cyberfascist Schwarzenegger movies. I put on La Strada —are you into Fellini?—but my dad only watches, like, colorized movies, and once he saw the subtitles and heard the Italia
n it was time for, like, Terminator 3: Paradiso.” I leaned my sleepy head against her plasticoated shoulder. It crackled sympathetically. She fiddled with my hair. “Ya know, Sly Tobias, I don’t have to do the talking. I know I’m entertaining, but I came to save your life! I think a thank-you is in order.” I yawned and told her thank you. “Just deliver your firstborn to the following address.” She recited an address and shoved me rudely off her shoulder. “We are still going to the prom, are we not? There’s this fabtastic rumor floating around school that two guys in your class are attending the prom together! Is it you and Leonard Compton? Is that why his car’s here? Are you shacking up together right now? May I watch? Gawd! I hope your parents can’t hear me, Toby Sligh! I know I’m overbearing—earth goddesses are. Did I wake you up, kiddo? I really was worried. I thought you had been murdered… . I’m even packing Daddy’s piece!
We got into Angelina’s father’s Continental and I told her she’d phoned me in the middle of a dream, that I’d been semiconscious, and that I’d sort of had a nightmare.
“It was thanatos, then! What a disappointment! I always thought my dulcet tones might elicit eros! But I guess”—her bosom heaved, and she batted her eyelashes—“I inspire darker things. Je ne suis qu’une femme fatale!”
We cruised around my neighborhood—her talking, me listening—till Angelina anchored her father’s Continental at the library that had recently been tented for termites. The tent had been struck and lay like a busted condom, and the library rose inside it, dusty and deserted, doors and windows bolted, and all the novels sleeping. Angelina grilled me about Juice’s Porsche, and when pressed I said yes, that it was Juice’s Baby, that Juice had loaned it to me while my parents were away.
“Where are they, Toby?”
“Um, in Barbados.”
“That’s funny. Ian’s parents are in Barbados, too. Maybe they’re having a group thing, or something.”
I thought a bit about it.
“Maybe they are.”
We got out of the frontseat and squatted on the hood. It was very nice out. The moon was fat and pink.
“Bubba said you had the flu,” Angelina stated. “And Ian has it, too. Sex on the Beach is worried.”
“About what?”
“About what? That Ian wont get it up! Courtney heard he’s huge! Well, is he, Tobias?”
“How would I know?”
“I thought you guys compared … in the shower and all.”
It was true: we did.
“Bubba’s is teensy. It’s always peeking out. He’s proud of it, though. He likes to show it off.”
“Who is Bubba taking to the prom, Angelina?”
She took out a chic black cigarette and lit it.
“Clove?”
“No, thanks. They give you throat cancer.”
“That’s why I like them.”
The air became delicious.
“Bubba is taking this shy little dormouse who was raised by Mormons and who looks like Cousin It. Her name is Grace Cage. She never talks at all, except to tell people that they’re going to hell—like moi, in particular. That’s why Bubba asked her.”
We got up for a walk and strolled around the parking lot, and we made plans together while orbiting the building. At night Angelina’s brassy voice became sultry, and she glided through the darkness on invisible coasters. It was a shame I didn’t like her. In a funny way, I did. Unlike other guys, I wasn’t put off by her size. She was just another sexless female specimen to me. She could have been Madonna. She could have been Marilyn. She could have been a manatee. Her insides were important.
“Am I doing all the planning?” Angelina scolded. “You’ll be alarmed by my consultancy fee!”
So we discussed what time I would be at her house—we were meeting at the Fishbacks’ for a pre-prom get-together—and what she was wearing, and what I would wear, and the corsage she wanted, and the boutonniere I’d get, and where we thought the eight of us might want to go have dinner.
“There’s this Japanese place that serves exquisite sushi. Have you ever had sushi?”
I told her I hadn’t.
“Ooo, it’s to die for! But expensive?” Angel whistled. “And, hey, I’m not cheap. Do you think I’m cheap, Toby?”
I told her I didn’t.
“Darn tootin’, I ain’t! You’ll be paying out the butt! Out the butt, Toby Sligh!”
At the side of the building we came to an alley blockaded by a dumpster overflowing with books. I reached in and grabbed one —Arabian Nights. It was covered with bugs. I wiped the cover clean.
“I’ve always wanted to read this!” Angelina shouted. “It’s all about this girl named Scheherazade who tells stories to keep from being decapitated by this guy with a hard-on for chicks without heads!”
I gave her the book; she stuck it in her pocket.
“Thanks, Tobe,” she said. “I’m sure it’s a keeper.”
Angelina and I bonded best through books; we both loved novels and had discriminating taste. Her favorites were French—Flaubert and Camus. All mine were Russian—Turgenev and Chekhov. We’d argue about Dostoevsky and Proust and the English novel, which I said was perverse, which she claimed was why she liked it: Vanity Fair especially and, in particular, Becky Sharp. The only novel we agreed on completely was Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha , which Angelina had read in the original Spanish. She claimed I couldn’t appreciate Cervantes in translation, which I said was bullshit: all good novels translate. And we’d fight about when the Don was lowered in the well and whether the paradise he found was imagined; and we’d talk about whether he loved Sancho Panza and whether he had tried to fuck his best friend up the ass; but we never argued once about how hard it made us laugh, or how sad Quixote was when they put him in his cage. Angelina said, and I still agree with her, that the difference between a classic and a classic piece of trash is that trash always manages to lie in a true way and that a classic always manages to tell the truth through lies—which was why we left writers like Mailer in the dumpster and rescued a collection of Flannery O’Connor, which was why we bypassed Toni Morrison for Zora and rescued Sterne and Swift over Pynchon and Joyce. When we finished, our arms were overflowing with volumes. They reeked of pesticides. We breathed in their aroma.
“Let’s put ’em back inside,” Angelina suggested, and with the butt of Daddy’s gun smashed a hole through a window, her big bulky body obliterating space.
Inside it was pitch black, except for schools of moonbeams swimming through a skylight to a card catalog. Clutching her books, Angelina snatched her lighter and, before I could warn her, flicked on her trusty Bic. A leafstorm of roaches fluttered in our faces, hissing and beating their chocolate-colored wings, the sound like the sound of a million unturned pages flipping in the darkness, skimmed by phantom eyes. Angelina screamed and attached her body to me, and her lighter fell with an excruciating click! to the floor. Already we could hear the flying armies retreating and dropping to the tile in a pattering of rain. It was so dark in there that we couldn’t get our bearings; we could only move together toward the distant, milky light. Our arms around each other, we advanced as a couple, roaches like potato chips crackling underfoot. At the card catalog, in a cataract of moonlight, we had a view at last of the library entire: it was like a battlefield, bug bodies rampant, on their backs and kicking their last and dying in droves atop Harlequin Romances. I left Angelina death-shuddering in silence and forayed out to find the books Scarcross had requested. Scanning the shelves with a blind man’s intuition, I located Blake, and Dickinson, and Shakespeare, and even an edition of the King James Bible. When I came back, Angelina Fishback had fled, and I spied her cornfed figure in the underwater moonlight shelving O’Connor, and Hurston, and Sterne. Returning, Angelina wrapped her ample arms around me and said, “This is the weirdest thing I have ever done.” I put my arms around her, and I looked her in the eye, and we both smiled shyly, and I asked her to dance. “You mean here?” she said. “Can�
��t it wait until prom?” “No,” I told her. “We have to dance now.” … Because I knew at the prom I’d be dancing with Ian; because I knew, when I had to. I’d abandon Angelina. So to the fluttering of roaches, and the waltzing of our hearts, and under the restless eyes of a thousand unread novels, we joined our trembling bodies and began describing circles on the floor that crunched beneath us, in a cataract of moonlight, in the mutual assurance that the best lies are honest, the best dancers awkward, and the truest stories false.
“That was really different,” Angelina told me as she dropped me back off at my house later on.
I kissed her sweaty forehead. “See you at the prom!”
“And say hello to Juice!” she cried out, and tore away.
When I got in, Juice was spread-eagled on my folks’ bed, in Bill Blass pajamas, and I crawled in bed beside him. His body was huge, and hot, and unruly. It sprawled across the mattress, his corded muscles twitching. When I woke up in the morning his arms were around me, and I lifted them off, and I climbed out of bed. I stood looking at him; he was snoring oper- atically. And his bloody mouth was open and drooling on a pillow. Juice was like a toddler who was sleeping off an illness, like a healthier version of the kid at St. Osyth’s I’d seen the first night that I went to search for Ian. When I glanced out the window it was still dark out, so I crept back in bed and wrapped Juice’s arms around me. It was nice, Juice holding me. We were funky brothers. But then he called me E-Eye and locked his arms around me and I could barely breathe until at last he loosened up. By then he was crying, and just as quickly he was snoring, and when I finally got up, he had fixed a modest breakfast. “Cornflakes or Cocoa Puffs?” Juice asked and shook the boxes. He wore my dad’s robe and my mom’s shower cap, and his cheekbones were creamy with Oil of Olay. “But you’ll have to munch ’em dry, Tobe. The milk is all spoilt.”
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