Daisies

by Joshua Senter

  The next morning was when the reality of what they had done the night before hit Lonnie with a numbness as real as Michael’s touch had been only hours before, and it was debilitating. If in the moment of their shared inky blackness Lonnie had felt utter and complete clarity, he now felt shrouded in a suffocating fog. He could think of nothing distinctly. He sat through an entire breakfast and didn’t hear a word that was said by his tablemates. When he saw Michael as they were emptying the finished contents of their food trays into a trashcan, they both quickly looked away from one another. He couldn’t pray. He couldn’t concentrate on the service that morning or the games that afternoon. When pool time came around, Lonnie was glad to submerge himself under the cool water and disappear if even for a few seconds. It was strange. He realized he didn’t feel guilty, not at first, because when the guilt finally hit Lonnie, it was actually a relief. At least he felt something, even if it was self-loathing and utter defeat. He was worse than a sinner, he thought. He had not only committed a sexual act outside of marriage, which next to doing drugs seemed to be the thing all the church leaders railed against the most, but he had committed this act with another guy. He hated Michael. He would never speak to him again. All Lonnie wanted was to leave camp and never look back.

  The rest of the week, Michael and Lonnie avoided one another as much as possible, and Lonnie turned his eyes away from Blayne and all the other guys when they were getting changed. If Michael took showers early in the morning, Lonnie now took them late at night. Every service, when the altar call was made, Lonnie would head to the front and pray fervently that God “heal” him. He didn’t want to be the way he was. He wanted to have “sunflowers” for girls the way Kenny had them for Angie. Whatever he had done, whatever sin he had committed that had saddled him with this nature as punishment, he would rather die a hundred times than attempt to live with it. But for the first time since he had begun to pray, his intercessions were to no avail.

  When Darrel finally revealed the fruits of his long laborious days and nights up in the barn, it was a tree cutter that looked like a giant pair of stub-ended scissors, which, when attached to a tractor’s hydraulics, would cut down a tree at the base of the ground, eliminating stumps. He called it the Predator, and though it took a few years to become the success that Darrel believed it could be, it finally found its niche in the rural marketplace as a revolutionary way for farmers to clear-cut quickly and efficiently.

  Six mechanics were hired to help construct Darrel’s design plus a salesman. And when the sun went down, Lonnie donned a navy blue work uniform and rubber dairy boots and walked up to clean the two new manufacturing buildings Darrel had been forced to build to support the operation. Lonnie loved this job. For twenty bucks a night, he worked at least two hours putting away the tools that had been used by the mechanics throughout the day, blowing grit off work tables, sweeping up floors, disinfecting the work bathroom, and singing. He sang songs from church and ones he made up. He danced and twirled and more than once was embarrassed when one of the mechanics, having decided to work late, appeared out of nowhere while he was in the middle of one of his performances. Mortified silence followed these encounters, with Lonnie chastising himself in his head for not being more like one of the other workers—men, who were muscled and scruffy and steadily quiet, who on summer days would doff their shirts and sit out under the large white oak tree next to the newest building drinking Coke and eating the lunch their wives sent to work with them in Tupperware containers. But even if he failed in growing a hairy chest and developing muscles like theirs, Lonnie tried to at least pretend he liked hunting, which was the only sport the men around Nebo cared anything for. In the fall, there was deer hunting. In the spring, there was turkey hunting. In the summertime, there was fishing, and in the wintertime, there was trapping. But eventually even being an accomplice to Darrel’s perfect aim was more than his gentler sensitivities could bare.

  There were two incidents in particular that sealed Lonnie’s fate as a rural sportsman. The first was in the winter. A recent snow was just melting so that the world around the McAllister farm was a slushy mess of ice and earth, and Darrel and Lonnie were out on the four-wheeler checking traps they had laid weeks before. Trapping was a new activity for them. Darrel had made a deal with another farmer at a farm show over the summer: thirty steel foot traps for five hundred dollars off one of his Predators. And that fall, Darrel and Lonnie had spent a few Saturday mornings shooting crows to use with peanut butter as bait for the traps, which they laid along the edges of the woods all around the perimeter of the property. The promise of all the laborious groundwork was going to be animal hides that Lonnie could tan and sell for money like Darrel had done with raccoon hides when he was Lonnie’s age. But weeks after setting the traps, nothing was taking the bait, and Lonnie and Darrel’s four-wheeler rides where becoming nothing more than a continuously disappointing waste of time. Then one morning, just below the house near the wheat field in the bottom, Darrel elbowed Lonnie to get his attention. “Look.”

  There, with its paw stuck in one of the traps, was a rather sour-faced bobcat. It was a gorgeous animal that looked like a regular domestic cat except that it was twice as large with a thick, spotted beige-and-brown fur coat and long hair that tufted off the top of its ears and cheeks, giving it a distinctly surprised look. It jolted Lonnie’s heart to suddenly see one of these creatures in real life so close.

  “Dang it,” Darrel said as he slowed down the four-wheeler.

  “What?” Lonnie asked, his whole body pumping with the adrenaline of staring into the eyes of the magnificent yellowed lynx that had also caught sight of him and was now hissing.

  “I forgot my gun,” Darrel said.

  Darrel had always brought along a twenty-gauge rifle to shoot their prey in the head when he and Lonnie went to check the traps, but after so many weeks of returning to the house empty-handed, they’d both become rather lax about the excursions.

  “Can’t we just go back up to the house and get it?”

  “I don’t wanna risk it. He’s already been gnawing on his paw. See there?”

  Sure enough, the bobcat’s trapped paw was bloody, as the animal had decided at some point to escape its situation by biting through its own front foot. Seeing this made Lonnie sick to his stomach. Poor bobcat, he thought. Then Darrel grabbed a tire iron that was in the toolbox on the back of the four-wheeler and approached the bobcat, who went into full on cries of rage upon Darrel’s approach. These roars of vitality collided with Lonnie’s conscience, sounding too familiar, too much like the farm cats when they got upset over something. Lonnie wanted to cry out himself, to stop Darrel from hitting the wildcat over its head. Even after the first crack on the animal’s skull, Lonnie wanted to rip the tire iron out of Darrel’s hand and set the bobcat free. Lonnie knew killing the animals they trapped was the reason they had laid the traps in the first place—this was part of the sport. And maybe Lonnie could have swallowed the empathy he had for this animal had the bobcat not been so keen to fight back against Darrel’s clobbering, so intent to survive even with its head deformed and bleeding irreparably after a few more blows from the tire iron. But even as it was happening, even as the bobcat failed to defend itself against Darrel, even as it finally lay there still and dying, Lonnie knew there was nothing sporting about this. And what was the point? Did anyone really need a tanned bobcat skin these days? Did he really need the money that skin would bring him?

  Still, it wasn’t until later that spring that the last straw came. For after the nightmarish death of the bobcat, Lonnie had told himself that Darrel’s other pursuits of game were worth being a part of because they provided delicious, lean protein for the McAllister clan, a substance which would have been much more scarce were they forced to buy it. Then, on Darrel’s birthday, he received a new rifle from Sheila. She was eager to please him with the gift and had secretly consulted Darrel’s hunting buddies and the local Pro Shop in earnest about the latest and b
est firearm out there for shooting slugs and spray bullets. Unfortunately, though Sheila had pleased Darrel with the gun, she had not spent the extra two hundred dollars on the top-of-the-line scope to go along with it, a fact that Darrel pointed out with obvious disappointment after Sheila had given him his gift at the end of the special birthday dinner she and the kids had prepared. So he attached his old scope to the new rifle, and despite the fact the McAllisters’ deep freezer was stuffed with more deer and turkey and fish meat than they could possibly eat, Darrel took Lonnie and off they went to hunt whatever they could rustle up with his new piece. What they surprised was a flock of turkey—all hens—down near Miller’s Bottom. Immediately the hens took flight, and Darrel took aim. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Two of the hens dropped from the overcast spring sky and hit the muddy earth, one of them still, the other flopping around vigorously. The second turkey had barely been nicked by Darrel’s shot, but either the bullet or the fall had broken the hen’s wing and twisted its leg. Otherwise the hen was fine. Darrel and Lonnie approached the anxious bird cautiously. Then Darrel grabbed for the turkey’s legs and flipped it onto its back. The naked blue head looked back at the two men accosting it, and in the turkey’s little beaded, black eyes Lonnie could have sworn he saw fear and knowing that its end had come. But even Lonnie wasn’t sure how this end would play out. Would Darrel blow the turkey’s head off at close range or wring its neck? What happened was somewhere in between, but seemingly far more vicious. Darrel took the heel of his boot and stepped on the turkey’s head to crush its skull and put an end to its misery quickly. However, with the ground beneath so soggy wet from all the spring rains, the only thing Darrel managed to do was squish the turkey’s head into the mud and break a chunk of the poor bird’s beak off. Still not dead, Lonnie saw one eye of the turkey blink, trying to rid itself of the mud now caked on it. And Darrel attempted to crush the turkey’s skull again. Still without success.

  “We gotta find a rock,” Darrel said, picking up the bird, which was still alive and obviously suffering.

  Lonnie looked around anxiously, but he couldn’t remember what for. His mind was a blank aside from that vision of the poor turkey gasping for life. At length, Darrel found a more solid piece of ground and stepped on the turkey’s head again. It was still not quite dead, but its wings weren’t fluttering around any longer. So Darrel flung it over his shoulder and headed for the next bird, which hadn’t moved a bit from where it had first thudded to the ground.

  As Lonnie watched after Darrel and the bird and the new gun Darrel gripped in his hand, he knew if Darrel had realized how traumatic hunting had become for Lonnie, he would have taken greater pains to keep the process more sterile. But Darrel had seen his own coon dogs murdered in front of him, and after that, he never really saw any animals that he slaughtered again. He looked past the life in them to the necessity of their place in his trophy case or on his dinner plate. But Lonnie was not so desensitized yet, and he was determined not to become so.

  With hunting no longer a viable option as a way for Lonnie to spend his time, and with his homeschool education keeping him from other opportunities that would have been available at public school, Lonnie turned his attention completely to the cultivation of the artistic talents he had displayed since he was a child. Almost without realizing it, he had become a master of oil, acrylic, watercolor, etc., winning national competitions for his lifelike renderings of that world he longed for in his mind, where fish swam in pristine waters under dappled summer light and deer gathered in solitary, autumn fields undisturbed by hunters with cocked rifles. He made so much money for these pieces, not to mention the folk crafts he sold to the housewives of Rock Harbor, that he was able to put a three thousand dollar down payment on a used red convertible Mustang the summer after he received his driver’s license, and he immediately began to think of his future away from Squirrel Ridge.

  On one trip Darrel made to a farm up near Kansas City to deliver a Predator, Lonnie asked if he could visit Kansas City Art Institute to show one of the advisors there his growing portfolio and see what things he needed to be accomplishing over the course of the next two years to be admitted into a place like KCAI for college. The advisor, Kate, a boney woman who would have been attractive except that she had a visible mustache and unibrow and looked uncomfortable in the shoulder-padded suit she was wearing, looked over Lonnie’s portfolio with a superiority that didn’t allow even a modicum of complimentary surprise at Lonnie’s natural artistic abilities.

  “KCAI is not looking for students who can simply render an image from a photograph in oils and make it look like the photograph.” Kate held up an eight-by-ten oil painting of a close-up on a ten point buck in the snow that Lonnie had painted for Darrel as a Christmas present. It was indeed a perfect rendering that, even from a short distance, could have been mistaken for the wildlife photograph from which Lonnie had copied it. This was one of many realistic examples Lonnie had included in his portfolio.

  Sheila, who being Lonnie’s only teacher felt compelled to accompany him and Darrel on the five-hour excursion up to Kansas City, squinted her eyes at Kate, trying to understand. “So what are you looking for then?”

  “We want to know what Lonnie really cares about. When I look at his art, I want to see Lonnie in it, not just a replication of something.”

  Sheila nodded, trying to translate this thought into words she could use to help Lonnie achieve Kate’s suggestion. Darrel just sat there skeptically, as he had been since they entered the city and saw the larger-than-life shuttlecocks on display on the Kansas City Art Museum lawn. “How is that art?” he’d scoffed.

  Kate shifted in her seat. She was old hat at dealing with parents like Darrel and Sheila who believed their kid had talent and brought them to the art school thinking a red carpet would be rolled out as soon as the school got a look at their kid’s stuff. “Has Lonnie taken any figure drawing classes?” she asked.

  Sheila looked at Darrel and Lonnie to see if they understood what Kate had just asked. They were as blank as she was. “What do you mean?” Sheila asked.

  “Figure drawing? Nudes? Lonnie should take some figure drawing classes. That would be a huge benefit for him.”

  Sheila wasn’t quite sure what to make of this suggestion, and Darrel smirked a little in his chair. Lonnie could see this meeting wasn’t going so well and just wanted to get out of there before his parents banned him from artistic aspirations entirely.

  “We’re looking for young people with a distinct perspective on the world. Lonnie, I want to know what you love or hate or think about when I look at one of your paintings. I don’t just want to see something pretty. You know what I mean?”

  Lonnie nodded, though he didn’t exactly understand what Kate was talking about. Why paint something you hated?

  “You should look at some artists like Francis Bacon or even Picasso and study why they painted the things they did.”

  “We looked at the Andrew Wythe exhibit at the art museum in Springfield on a field trip a few months ago. That was really beautiful,” Sheila offered.

  Kate smiled thinly. The McAllisters weren’t getting it, just like the other families. She handed Lonnie a card. “Take some figure drawing classes and try telling me a story with your paintings as opposed to just… painting something that looks like a nice photograph.”

  Lonnie took the card as Kate laid the pieces of his work back into his portfolio as respectfully as possible and handed it back to him, masking her disappointment as much as she could. “And call me if you have any more questions.”

  The McAllisters thanked Kate with pale faces. How had she shown them up? Lonnie was a master artist, not some kid to be dismissed by some woman who, if she knew anything about art, wouldn’t be sitting behind some desk at an art school in the Midwest, Darrel pointed out on the drive home.

  For a few weeks, Lonnie hardly painted a thing, and every time he did, he ended up wiping off the canvas and silently cursing himself fo
r having wasted paint. All he had ended up taking away from the meeting with KCAI was that he wasn’t good enough. He thought of Kate’s insistence that he take figure drawing classes and called up the Springfield Art Museum to see if they knew of any place offering such a thing. The museum, in fact, offered nine weeks of these classes on Tuesday nights from 6:30 until 7:30—an hour with a naked model for ninety-five bucks. All that was required to attend was a large pad of paper, charcoal sticks, a kneaded eraser, and, if you were under the age of 18, a signed consent form from your parents. Lonnie went to Sheila with this information, uncertain how she would react to the idea of him attending these classes now that they were a very real possibility. She told him he had to go talk to Darrel. So Lonnie walked up to the manufacturing buildings looking for Darrel, told him about the classes, and asked permission to attend. With a laugh, Darrel told him he could go as long as he brought along a camera to take pictures. In the meantime, Sheila had called Pastor Rick to ask his opinion on the matter, which he was not particularly fond of. Lonnie was torn between campaigning to attend the figure drawing classes because he was afraid Darrel and Sheila would take this the wrong way and simply believe he wanted to stare at a naked woman for an hour and remaining benign about the matter because it might mean he would not be allowed to attend the classes he believed would, in fact, make him a better artist. In the end, Sheila and Darrel agreed to let Lonnie attend.

  On Tuesday afternoons, Lonnie gathered his art supplies and drove his Mustang the two hours up I-44 to Springfield to sketch a lovely, sandy-blonde college student named Isabel, who was part of a study abroad program at Southwest Missouri State University from her home country of Portugal. Isabel was a perfectly proportioned woman if he drew her nose a little smaller than it really was and if she kept her mouth of slightly large teeth closed. Even in the environment of the figure drawing class, a back room of the museum constructed of white walls and concrete floors, Lonnie still felt very different from everyone else around him—a motley group of “artists,” who were all at least twenty to thirty years his senior and talked about things he didn’t understand, like Cappuccinos and postmodern architecture. He took Darrel’s recently purchased satellite phone with him on these trips into the city in case of an emergency. And it was this phone Lonnie used to call information three weeks into classes to inquire where in Springfield there might be a gay something—anything—that he could visit and possibly meet others like himself. His reward for these efforts from the operator was the number of a recently opened center for gay and lesbians there in Springfield that hosted a youth night on Tuesdays. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect! He went immediately after class.