The Bells of Times Square

by Amy Lane

  Walter grunted and clenched his hands—seemingly unwillingly—around Nate’s fingers. “Why can’t we just run?” he grumbled, and Nate thought maybe he was trying to run more from Nate, from his unyielding declarations of love, than from this tiny home that he had established in the heart of chaos.

  “Because,” Nate said, stroking the backs of Walter’s knuckles with his thumbs until they relaxed, “somewhere nearby is an OSS transmitting station. We can call for pickup—if someone lands and takes us home, I can send my film in. It’s important, I feel it. You can find your unit—”

  “And what? Get shipped to another front?” Walter asked bitterly. To Nate’s horror, he started to cry rolling, angry tears. “Is that what you want? To see me shipped out again? To fight— I can die like Jimmy, and this can all be a big mistake.”

  Nate had never struck another human being in his life. He was so surprised that he’d done so now, at this moment, with this person he claimed to love best in the world, that he simply stared at Walter, the crack of his hand against Walter’s cheek still ringing in the air between them. A welt, red against the white, began to rise, even as Nate watched.

  They stared at each other in horror.

  “Why did you do that?” Walter asked, sounding stunned, as well he might.

  “You hurt me,” Nate whispered, the red bloom in his chest raw and aching. “You hurt me. I had to make you stop.”

  “I don’t under—” Walter raised his hand to his cheek.

  “I don’t want you to die, Walter,” Nate said bitterly, turning away and staring out the one window in the house not covered with boards. “Can we just leave it at that?”

  “Then what—”

  “This war is terrible,” Nate murmured. “It is terrible. There are things happening to Jews and Gypsies and . . . and everybody that I am afraid to think about. The rumors are bad enough. What if the rumors are true?”

  “I don’t—”

  Nate cut him off again, turning to meet his eyes, to see the confusion, the bruise on his face, both things that he had done. “I am not thinking about the war here,” he said bleakly. “Looking at you, I am thinking about after the war. I am thinking about how we would make a life together, somewhere quiet. How I would learn to live away from Manhattan and you would learn to live away from whatever hole in Iowa treated you with shame. The world would think we were friends. Bachelors who never married—there are many of them. I know a pair—and nobody thinks, ‘Oh yes, they are lovers, married like a man and a woman,’ but now that I’ve touched you, I’m pretty sure that is exactly what they are. And we could be them.” A magpie landed on the bush outside and fluttered his wings with due arrogance. Would there be a flock nearby? Would they devour the garden or seed it? Nate didn’t know about such things, but he could hope for the best.

  “We could be what?” Walter’s voice trembled with hope, and Nate allowed himself to think of him beyond the shame—both the shame for what he’d done to Walter, and the shame for what they’d done together.

  “Together,” Nate said softly. “Don’t you want to be together?”

  Walter closed his eyes. “It’s a pretty idea,” he said. “Nothing I can believe in, but it’s pretty.”

  “Can you believe in it enough to stay?” Nate asked, closing his eyes and aching. “To stay and hope? To take a chance on tonight and tomorrow, and see if together we can imagine a time without a war?”

  Walter’s hand on his cheek was enough to make him open his eyes.

  “I can’t imagine that,” he said frankly. “My whole life is some sort of war. But—” he grimaced, rolled his eyes, made light of it as though it were nothing “—I can take a chance on tonight. I can take a chance on tomorrow night. I think I’d risk about anything to see what could happen in that room upstairs, with a bed and you.”

  Nate smiled and kissed his palm. “Food first,” he said soberly. “It is growing toward afternoon. Food first.”

  Walter nodded. “That fried bread ain’t getting any fresher.”

  Breakfast was a little greasy but tasty, and they chopped the greens up and put them in the oven with the rabbit Walter had caught the night before, a century ago, before their safe little haven had been invaded. Afterward, they cleaned up, careful to put dishes in cupboards and remove all traces of themselves, stowing everything from the books to the playing cards in a slit of fabric behind the couch.

  Walter decided to risk splicing some plywood into the closet, thinking that the wood there would make the alcove disappear even more effectively than the shadows. Nate told him to pull up some of the floorboards while he was at it and see if there was any way they could hide under the slightly higher end of the house.

  The space was small, and Walter in a taciturn mood, so Nate concentrated on eradicating their presence, at least from the downstairs. The upstairs had two bedrooms, the main one where they’d slept the night before, and a secondary one with empty library shelves and a dresser. Nate chased out some spiders and a couple of field mice, and used the dresser to stow their clothes. There was a mattress in this room too, but the spaces between the wooden boards over the broken windows were bigger, so the water damage from the winter was worse. It smelled of mildew, and Nate was pretty sure there were creatures in the mattress that he hadn’t had the honor of meeting in the main bedroom.

  The last thing he stowed was the automatic pistol he’d had holstered when the plane went down. He’d cleaned and oiled it twice since he’d recovered, and had even worn it tucked into the waistband of his pants the other day when they’d walked to the plane. If he was going to sleep in the upstairs, cut off from the exit, the food, even the playing cards, he at least wanted his .45 nearby.

  While Nate was stowing gear, he put two big cook pots full of water on the wood stove to heat. They weren’t quite boiling by the time he was done hiding his and Walter’s presence in the house as completely as he could, so he left the pots to heat and tromped up the stairs to root around the magic cupboard where Walter had gotten all of the linens.

  There were still a few linens left but no toiletries, so Nate tried the washroom. He sighed once he saw it—delicate blue tiles, a toilet, a claw-footed iron tub. Oh, if only Walter had found the water main and the boiler.

  Nate stared at it, though, thinking, and found the rubber plug hanging over the faucet and plugged it in. It seemed like it would hold. Then he rummaged under the cupboard, scaring some spiders down there and wishing heartily for a broom. It was worth it. A small glass bottle of bath salts lurked in the corner, unbothered by the webs. Nate fished it out and set it on the back of the toilet, and then began the arduous task of filling the bathtub with water. He was on his third trip with a bucket when Walter looked up from the game of solitaire he’d initiated after he’d finished his task in the closet.

  “What are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Filling the bathtub.”

  “But the water’s got to be freezing!”

  Nate nodded—some of that freezing water had sloshed down his leg. “Yes, but once it’s sat out in the tub for a while, it will be warmer, and easier to heat with the water boiling on the stove.”

  “What’s wrong with a navy bath?” Walter queried, eyes narrowed.

  “Were you or were you not the one who yearned for a shower?” Nate asked shortly. “It was wise not finding the water main or the boiler. It’s been risky enough just using the cook stove. We were lucky we hadn’t started the fire in two days, or we’d probably be dead. But since we have one going now, I have an idea.”

  He wanted to see Walter’s hair, bright and orange, like he’d seen it sometimes after the sponge baths, when he’d scrubbed particularly hard. He wanted Walter to feel healed and reborn, the dirt of his battle, his time as a medic, his escape, to be washed away.

  He wanted Walter to feel clean and perfect, the way Nate had started to see him in the past month.

  And Nate wouldn’t mind feeling the same way.

  He con
tinued his trek, feet creaking on the boards of the house from the kitchen and the pump to the bathroom, shoulders aching but healed lung mostly sound. By the time the tub was half-full, long shadows stretched across the boarded windows, and the front window that opened for the pump was completely shaded. The water in the pots was almost boiling, and by the smell of it, dinner was close to done. Nate checked the rabbit and pulled the pan out, setting it on the counter.

  “Walter,” Nate said, moved by impulse. Two nights—isn’t that what they had given themselves? Two nights to continue to play pretend?

  “What?”

  “Come here. If we sit on the porch, we can look to the west and see the sun set.”

  There was a stillness then, and Nate peered over his shoulder. Walter was shuffling the cards carefully before he set down the deck.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice small. “Okay. That’s . . . that’s a nice idea.”

  The concrete stairway was narrow, so Nate sat on the top step and Walter sat on the step below him, between his splayed knees. The sun was only a few degrees over the horizon when they sat down, and Walter rested his elbows on Nate’s thighs.

  Nate leaned forward and put his hands on Walter’s shoulders and his chin on the top of his head.

  Together they watched as the sky turned the spangled gold of a burnished peach and threw the green and brown of the forest around them into stark purple relief.

  “This is nice,” Walter conceded, his voice hushed and reverent. “You got this in Manhattan?”

  “Not like this,” Nate said appreciatively. “But the brownstones, as the sun sets, loom like people with eyes. The happy houses seem to smile, the stern ones look forbidding. You can imagine them, klatching and kvetching at each other, sharing the news like yentas. In the evening, after traffic calms down in the summer, boys will play stickball in the alleyway, scattering like fish when cars turn down that way.”

  “Did you do that?” Walter asked, his voice curious as a child’s.

  “No,” Nate said, at peace with who he was. “I did not. After my brother died, I was solitary, you know? My father . . . well, he loved Zev better. It was really that clear. And at first, I was always trying to be the good boy. And then high school arrived, and children were going to their bar and bat mitzvahs and planning who they would marry and . . .” He kissed the top of Walter’s head. “It was clear to me at least, that was not the life I would have.”

  “What did you do?” Walter was as avid as he’d been when Nate was reading an adventure story.

  Nate laughed softly, the sound blending seamlessly into the quiet noises of the woods. The cooling air smelled of pine and warm grasses, and of the lake, which he still had not visited.

  “I became a superlative student,” he said truthfully. “And I studied photography and took pictures of all the athletes, male and female, and nobody knew I liked the men better. So when I signed up for the air force, I was easy pickings for the OSS—exactly who they liked.”

  “Poofty as a queen,” Walter chuckled, and Nate didn’t take offense.

  “As are you,” he said mildly.

  “Yeah.” Walter closed his eyes. “It’d be so much easier if I’d never seen that Indian kid wink, you know?”

  Nate kissed the back of his ear. “Something else would have done it,” he said softly. “You would have enlisted, and Jimmy would have found you, or worse, you would have gotten sweet on an officer when you weren’t stranded in a cabin in the woods like survivors on a desert island.”

  Walter tilted his face up to the last rays of the dying sun. “Have you ever heard church bells, Nate?”

  Nate grunted. “Yes, sometimes. They are supposed to chime in Times Square for New Year’s Eve, you know, as long as the war lasts. Why?”

  “They used to ring through our town, every Sunday. My folks didn’t go, but the sound . . . It was beautiful, right?”

  “Yes. I think they all chime that way.”

  “See, that’s what God’s voice was to me. When I was a kid, I thought God’s voice was the church bells, because the preacher said God was supposed to speak to everyone. And you know, everybody could hear them.”

  “Yes,” Nate said, amused. “Even the Jews.”

  Walter turned in Nate’s loose embrace, putting their faces close together. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said earnestly. “It was like God was calling all of us. The Jews, the white kids, the black kids who went to the church with no bell. The Indian kids, even the two-spirit ones. I believed that, you know? And then I smiled at an Indian kid and my daddy blackened my eye, and it was like . . . like the whole world was one big lie, because God didn’t talk to us all.”

  Nate closed his eyes then and simply breathed Walter in, the ugly and pure of him. Mostly the pure.

  “That is an amazing thought,” he whispered, moved in ways he couldn’t voice. “Maybe that’s what the bells at Times Square are for, on New Year’s Eve.”

  “To call all of us,” Walter said, his voice burning with that surprising idealism. Who knew? All of the cynicism, all of the doubt—all of it had been armor to the most tender of hearts.

  “Yes.” Nate’s breath was harsh in his ears, and his eyes burned. “So if we get separated during the war, that is where we will meet, yes?”

  “Times Square on New Year’s Eve,” Walter murmured, and Nate could feel the smile against his lips. “We’ll meet at Times Square, whether or not there’s bells, right?”

  “Of course,” Nate whispered. “That is where we’ll meet. God will call us home.”

  Their kiss was warm and almost chaste, the seal of a vow, and Walter kept kissing, didn’t seem to want to break it off. Finally, Nate pulled back, mindful of the water boiling on the stove, and when he opened his eyes, purple shadows had slid over the clearing, engulfing the forest. And straight above them, beyond the tips of the pine trees, stars like glass shards threatened to rain blood down upon their heads.

  After dinner, he made Walter undress and put his clothes in the bathroom sink to soak, while he took the pots of boiling water upstairs. They had other clothes; Nate was not worried about the laundry. They put another two pots of water on the stove, warming them with the last of the wood for the day, and then Nate shooed Walter upstairs, naked, to the tub.

  He’d poured some bath salts in with the hot water, and the result was fragrant, like roses. He held out his hand and helped Walter step into the tub. Walter winced at the heat, before Nate had him lie back.

  “Here,” Nate said, as Walter’s muscles relaxed one at a time. “Let me soap your hair.” He did, using the softened bath salts to work up a lather. Walter moaned in appreciation, and again when Nate soaped his chest and his upper thighs. His legs splayed open, leaving his privates vulnerable and bare, and Nate took special care soaping those too.

  “Here,” Walter said, opening his eyes. “Give me the cloth.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get my backside real good.” Walter closed his eyes and pushed behind himself, grunting as he apparently scrubbed between his buttocks.

  Nate’s throat closed with the force of his arousal.

  “I’m . . .” He was going to say, Not sure we’ll be doing the mishkav zakhar, my people forbid it, but Walter’s head tilted back, and his cock, long and slender, began to swell, the foreskin stretching to expose the perfectly shaped head.

  And sweat started at Nate’s collar and trickled down his chest and his underarms. Suddenly, he wanted that thing, the thing Walter was preparing for—the mishkav zakhar, the most forbidden way to spill seed that was not in a woman’s womb; Nate was swollen and greedy for it.

  He wanted to be inside Walter, driving away all doubt, wrapped up in his flesh. Walter was making himself clean for it, and Nate was hungry to take that offering.

  He must have made a noise because Walter’s eyes half opened. “I should get out,” he said roughly, undulating his hips, thrusting his cock clear of the surface. “You deserve some wa
rm water too.”

  Nate reached out with one finger and stroked that marble cock from the slick end to the hairy base. Walter’s groin hair was a pale ginger, and Nate liked looking at it.

  “You are beautiful,” he said softly and then watched the flush blotch Walter’s chest, not all of it from the hot water.

  “Yeah, well, you too. Get naked. I wanna see.”

  Nate smiled shyly and began to strip while Walter stood, dripping into the tub. Nate draped his clothes on the bathroom vanity, dry as a bone, and then stood with the towel, waiting to help Walter out.

  “I’m not a girl,” Walter said, taking his hand. “You don’t have to treat me like a princess.”

  Nate wrapped him up and pulled him back against his own nudity. The towel chafed pleasantly, and Walter’s clean skin sent shivers down his spine.

  “You’re a prince among men,” he murmured, letting his lips trail along Walter’s neck. Walter’s whole body rippled against him.

  “You’re full of bullshit and sunshine,” Walter protested but without heat. “But I’ll take it, just . . . Ah . . .”

  Nate insinuated his hand under the towel and stroked Walter’s pale stomach, his abdomen like a washboard and that lovely ginger hair growing sparsely below the navel.

  “I’m going to get in the tub now,” Nate informed him, making sure his breath hit the whorls of Walter’s ear.

  “Killing me,” Walter whispered. “You’re killing me, Nate—”