by Roan Parrish
It’s just so ridiculous. That something like grief could course through each of these people, desperately contained, as the ritual unfolds, for the sake of… what? And the idea that my father is now a dead body inside a wooden box—absurd.
For a second, my mind wanders to the cholera epidemics, when fear of accidentally burying a family member alive resulted in coffins fitted with strings tied around the toes of their loved ones that led to bells, so that if they awoke, interred, they could signal for help. I’ve taught Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial” in classes before and always pictured these suitably dark, crumbling, atmospheric tombs. But it’s 2:00 p.m. and the sun is shining and it’s muddy. There’s a man talking about my father who never met him and never will. My brothers are pillars of grief, mourning a man they adored. And I’m standing here thinking about nineteenth-century American horror stories. It’s too fucking absurd. I make a noise that sounds disturbingly like a giggle.
Colin’s head snaps up and his eyes meet mine. His face is red with pain, his lips bitten to blood. His look is disgusted. Murderous.
My brothers hate me.
Or, at least, don’t care about me.
And I don’t like them.
I’m standing between the only two people in the entire world who give a shit about me, and who the fuck knows how long at least one of them will stick around.
The service ends and Luther and the others walk off after hugging my brothers—manly, aggressive hugs, with back slaps and shoulder squeezes—and nodding uncomfortably at me. Luther shakes my hand.
Liza’s still holding Sam’s arm, but now she takes Brian’s hand too, and he leans into her like a little kid. They stand there gazing at the grave.
Colin is nearly vibrating. He’s wearing a suit that’s too short in the arms and a raincoat that I recognize as my dad’s, which is tight in the shoulders. His shoes are worn and polished, now spattered with mud. Colin’s losing his shit. Crying audibly and shaking his head like it’s happening to someone else and he can’t understand it. He takes off toward a copse of trees. I shake off Rex’s arm and walk in the other direction, toward the bathroom, thinking that if I’m going to throw up I may as well do it in a toilet.
I can see Ginger take hold of Rex’s arm to stop him coming after me. Bless her.
My face and ears feel hot and flushed. Once, when I was five, just before my mom died, we went to the Jersey Shore and I played in the water all day. Brian would bury me in the sand and I’d have to break free before a big wave came. I built a sand castle and waded into the waves to pee in the water so I wouldn’t have to leave the beach. It was, I thought at the time, the best day I’d ever had. I got a terrible sunburn and my skin peeled for a week. That’s how I feel now: so full up with heat that my head is throbbing.
I make it to the bathroom and puke into the toilet. I feel like something that’s been lodged in my guts for years has come loose. Everything I said to Ginger and Rex last night was the truth. I do feel a kind of regret that I’ll never be close with my father, a kind of mourning for what could have been. But I’m also so angry that it feels like poison is coursing through my veins.
My head is throbbing and my mouth tastes like puke and I’m making a sound I don’t even recognize. In my head is only screaming.
Screaming because you loved my brothers more than me even though, at first, I tried to do everything you wanted—anything to make you smile after Mom died. I tried to put on a play to distract you and you told me that only girls put on plays. I made it onto the track team and you tried to act pleased, but we both knew if it wasn’t football or basketball or hockey then you didn’t care.
Screaming because you let my brothers tease me and beat the shit out of me and made me believe that was normal.
Screaming because when I told you I was going to college you told me that it was a lot of money to let someone else tell me what to think. Because when I got into grad school you said, “That’s nice, son,” and never mentioned it again.
Screaming because when I got my PhD, you didn’t care.
Screaming because when I moved away, you couldn’t talk to me about anything except a damn car.
Screaming, screaming, screaming because when I told you I was gay—even if you never said it—you looked like you wished I were dead.
I throw up again, until there’s nothing left to come up. Acid is burning my throat and the back of my nose. I drink a bunch of water from the tap and stuff gum into my mouth that Ginger gave me earlier. She said, “Chew instead of punching.” Smart girl.
I leave the bathroom, just wanting some fresh air, and start walking in a random direction. I’m sweating, the kind of cold, oily sweat that comes with puking, and the cold air blowing through my clothes is making me shiver. Goddammit, I should go back to the grave and find Rex. I either want to fuck him so hard I can’t think of anything else or drink until I pass out.
The smell of cold dirt clears my head a little and the breeze freezes the snap of mint in my mouth. I feel a little better and veer toward what looks like a storage shed, thinking I’ll duck inside to sit down for a second and text Rex that I’ll meet him at the truck in ten minutes. The door’s open and I walk inside.
At first, all I see is Colin’s back, shoulders shaking, and my only thought is that I should turn around and walk out, because the way Colin looked back at the grave site, if he gets me alone it won’t be good.
I don’t even notice the other figure at first because it’s so dim in the shed. Then it registers that Colin is crying on someone, someone whose arms are wrapped around my brother’s shaking form.
A man.
A man is… holding my brother. There’s no other way to describe it. A man is holding my brother gently, and Colin is clinging to him, crying his heart out.
The man is broad and taller than me and Colin—much taller. His dark eyes meet mine over Colin’s head. I can see him tense and Colin must feel the change in his body because he turns around, though the man keeps hold of his shoulder. Colin looks destroyed from crying, but when he sees me his expression changes to something I’ve never seen before. Absolute panic. And it’s so clear that I almost laugh.
“Holy fucking…,” I start to mutter, but I can’t even get any words out. I drop into a crouch, my elbows on my knees, just looking up at Colin. With a man. My brother, who has treated me with nothing but revulsion since he found me giving Buddy McKenzie head in an alley, is gay. I can see it all in his panicked face.
Colin looks back at the man, as if he’s going to help, and then he holds out a hand to me, as if to placate. I stand up.
“Look, Dan,” he says, “don’t—”
But I throw myself at him before he can finish the thought.
“You fucking liar,” I yell, grabbing him by the lapels of our father’s coat and dragging him close.
My vision blacks out with fury. I thought I was angry at my father before, but this is murderous rage. I ram into Colin, every single nasty, homophobic word, every disgusted look, every punch and slap and shove slamming into me with the force of a brick wall. My weight bears him down to the dirt floor and I get in two punches to the face before he shakes off his surprise and fights back. He boxes my ears and gets me once in the stomach, but I am filled with a heavy rage so strong it feels like I could rip his head off and barely even break a sweat.
I push his shoulders to the ground and put my forearm to his throat. His fist slams into my lower back, just missing my kidney, and I rear back. A punch to my mouth, one to his stomach, and then we’re just wrestling on the floor, grappling, grabbing whatever parts of each other we can, both trying to inflict the maximum amount of pain. It’s only when a strong arm rips me away that I realize I’m still screaming at Colin.
It’s Rex.
The man who was with Colin is still standing exactly where he was when I walked in, watching.
Rex pulls my back tight to his front and I break off, my voice gone. Colin scrambles t
o his feet, bleeding from his nose and mouth, and spits out blood on the dirt floor. I can’t catch my breath.
Colin hangs his head.
“I—” he starts to say. “I—please, Danny—”
“Don’t fucking call me that, you fucking liar,” I yell at him, lurching forward, but Rex holds me back. My voice is broken.
“But, can I—?”
“How could you?” I yell, and my voice gives out completely. I’m vaguely aware of tears running down my cheeks, but I never look away from Colin. His expression is pure self-loathing and I realize that I’ve seen echoes of this expression my whole life. It’s just that I always thought they were directed at me, not reflected back on himself.
Rex is holding me up, now. I can’t believe it. I cannot wrap my mind around it.
And I can’t even imagine how destroyed Colin must be over our dad if he let a man hold him at the cemetery where we all were.
Rex is making desperate eye contact with the other man, clearly trying to figure out what’s going on, but the guy is stone.
I shake my head when Colin doesn’t say anything, and turn to leave.
“Dan,” Colin says from behind me, his voice strained. “Don’t tell Brian and Sam. Please. Please?”
I spin around to look at him. He’s crying, tears running through the blood from his nose and leaving pink tracks down his face. His scraped up hands are out to his sides, beseeching. For a moment, all I want is to do exactly that: tell Brian and Sam and watch Colin’s world come tumbling down. But I take a deep breath and give Colin a single nod. Then I close my eyes and leave, because I don’t have a voice for any of my questions, and I’m pretty sure Colin doesn’t have any answers for me.
Rex catches up to me a few yards from the truck, where Ginger is standing, waiting for us. When I see her chomping on a huge wad of gum, I realize I must have lost mine sometime during the fight with Colin, but I don’t know if I swallowed it, it fell out, or what. I lift a nervous hand to my hair, hoping I won’t find it there.
“What in the fuck happened to you?” Ginger says, blowing the gum out of her mouth like a spitball from a Bic pen. I shake my head in disbelief.
Ginger looks at Rex, who’s by my side again.
“Seriously, babycakes, what the fuck is going on?”
“Colin’s gay,” I say, and it’s a screech, like how my voice is after a particularly late night of bar tending when I’ve had to shout at people all night.
Ginger laughs uncomfortably and cocks her head.
“I don’t get it,” she says.
“Colin is fucking gay, Ginger,” I say. “I just saw him.”
She searches my face and when she sees I’m not joking or messing around, her mouth drops open.
“Holy…,” she breathes out.
Rex tries to put his arm around me, but I feel like fire ants are crawling all over me. I’m covered in dust from the floor of the shed; I can feel that there’s blood on my face in addition to tears, and traces of the puke taste are creeping back into my mouth. For all that, I can’t stand still. The idea of getting in the truck makes me nearly come out of my skin.
“I’m going to walk,” I say, though it sounds like every word scrapes my throat. “I’ll meet you guys at Ginger’s.”
“Are you kidding? It’s like six miles,” Ginger says.
“I’ll be fine,” I say, shoving some more gum into my mouth. “I just need to get some air.”
Ginger and Rex are looking sideways at each other in an extremely irritating way.
“I’ll walk with you,” Rex says.
“No,” I say. “Thanks, but you don’t have to. I’ll see you later.”
“It wasn’t a question,” Rex says, and tosses Ginger the keys to his truck.
I walk in the general direction of Ginger’s, looking at the city I’ve lived in my whole life as if I’ve never seen it before. Rex trails along gamely beside me, not saying anything, but never letting me more than a few paces out of his reach. At first it’s fucking irritating and I want to turn and yell at him that I’m not a child. That I’ve gotten along just fine without him for this long and he can fuck off back home. But the truth is that I haven’t.
I haven’t gotten along just fine. In fact, I’ve barely gotten along at all. And always, always, some of it has been because of Colin.
I’ve been mad at him and—if I’m being honest—scared of him for so long that I’ve forced myself to forget that I used to worship him.
When Mom died, he was the one I ran to after the nightmares woke me up. When I was eight and he was fourteen, I’d watch him get ready for high school, wishing that I looked just like him. He was the one who first got me into music, blaring rock stations whenever he was in the shop instead of sports radio. He had a great voice too, and he would wail along with Steve Perry, Axl Rose, and Freddie Mercury while he changed oil and rotated tires. I’d sit in the doorway to the kitchen and listen, thinking maybe we’d start a band someday.
When I was ten and he was sixteen, even though by then he was too cool to bother with me, he crashed our dad’s car and broke his arm and I ran back and forth from the kitchen to the living room to bring him sodas and chips, desperate to make him feel better.
He was never exactly nice to me back then—he’d always pat me on the back a little too hard and take the last cookie out of my hand—but it felt fraternal, just regular brotherly shit, the same as he gave to Brian and Sam gave to him.
It changed before he ever found me with Buddy McKenzie, though. Around the time I was twelve or thirteen, I gave up on trying to be like the rest of them. I stopped pretending I was watching the football games or that I cared when they discussed the fall lineups. I didn’t hang out in the shop anymore, letting my dad tell me which tool was which. I stopped laughing at their unfunny jokes and pretending that I didn’t care when they “accidentally” ripped my library books. I stopped talking and asking questions. I pulled back every overture that I’d learned from experience would be met with disapproval and rejection because that’s when I knew.
Knew I was gay. Knew that I wanted to get the fuck out of that house. Knew that I wanted a different kind of life than beer and ball and cars. And they knew it too.
Colin was the worst, but it was all of them. They took it as disapproval. They became convinced that I thought I was better than them when the truth was that I just knew they would never like me if they knew who I really was and what I really wanted. Love me. They would never love me.
And they didn’t. Not really. They stopped. But only Colin turned truly poisonous, as if he saw my retreat as an attack.
Now, though. What? Did he see me doing what he wanted to do? I don’t think so. Colin may be gay—Christ, the sentence even sounds insane in my head—but he loves working at the shop, loves the cars, loves sports. And he fucking loved our dad. Would do anything he said. So, when he saw how badly my dad reacted when I told him that I was gay, it would have made it a thousand times harder for him to do the same. If he even knew then.
And instead of confiding in me, he turned it inside out and terrorized me instead.
I can’t imagine how it must have felt, calling me a faggot all these years and seeing my dad and my brothers go along with it. Fuck. How could he do it?
We’ve been walking for three or four miles when Rex breaks the silence.
“Can we stop for a coffee or something?” he asks, startling me.
“Yeah, of course,” I say.
We duck into a café and I order coffees to go while Rex uses the bathroom. I realize, as he comes back, that he probably meant he wanted to stop and sit down to drink a coffee and get warm.
“Did you want to sit?” I ask, hoping he’ll say no.
“Um, no, it’s okay,” he says, uncertainly.
I really think he wants to stay, but I jump on it and walk out the door. I just can’t be around any of these people right now, sipping their fucking chai lattes and triple skinny caramel whateverthefucks.
; Rex slides his hat back on and takes the coffee.
“Thanks,” he says. I can tell he wants to say something, but he just keeps walking with me.
After another few blocks, he drains his coffee and tosses the cup.
“I never went to my mom’s funeral,” he says.
“What? Why?” I ask, realizing that while I’ve been busy wrapping myself in a blanket of my own shit, Rex is probably dealing with some pretty heavy memories of his own.
“When I took up with Jamie,” he says, his voice low and his chin tucked into his jacket, “I started spending all my time with him. Just, he was the only one who talked to me, and that felt… good. I didn’t see much of my mom in the evenings because she had this boyfriend, John, who didn’t like me, and she was working all the time during the day. So, I didn’t think anything of staying out with Jamie. Maybe six months after I met Jamie, John got a job in Colorado and my mom told me we were moving out there. But I didn’t want to leave Jamie, didn’t want to start all over again.”
He pauses, looking around for something to do with his hands. I hold up my half-drunk coffee to him. He takes it, smiling gratefully and wraps his hand around it.
“I told her I was staying. We had a real go-round about it. The only time we ever really fought.” He shakes his head. “I told her I was tired of following her all over. Told her I was staying. And I did. Jamie said I could stay at his place, said his parents wouldn’t mind, but of course they did. So I’d sneak into his room after they went to bed and sneak out again before they got up in the morning. I’d eat breakfast and lunch at school and scrounge something up for dinner. Then—”
He stops short to avoid a dog-walker’s tangle of leashes and looks longingly after the dogs.
“Then, you know, That thing happened with Jamie about three months after. In the hospital, I kept wanting to call her, but I didn’t want her to worry. Gave a fake name at the hospital and skipped out before they could discharge me. Didn’t know what to do, so I hitched to Colorado. I’d missed Jamie’s funeral while I was in the hospital. By the time I got to Colorado….”