When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  At the school parking lot, he stood outside and watched the kids throw snowballs at one another. He saw Shane through the crowd of snowsuits and mittens and waved to him. The boy ran over, then hesitated, wondering where his mother was, a little shy. “There’s pizza,” Paul told him, and Shane scrambled into the back of the vehicle. He buckled him into his car seat and handed him a slice. “That’s using your noodle,” the boy said with the practised air of someone who’d repeated the arcane phrase a hundred times that day.

  “Hey.” The voice froze Paul. He closed the door carefully and turned. Billy marched toward him, his ears a bright pink beneath his ball cap. He was hunched over slightly, his jacket collar up.

  “He’s coming with me,” Billy said.

  Paul shivered under his jacket. “It’s Gina’s night. Until the weekend. That’s the agreement.”

  “Who the fuck asked you?” Billy took another step forward, and Paul stumbled back against the passenger door. He heard a rubbing sound on the window, and he and Billy stopped to look. Shane, blank-faced, was wiping the fog from the glass, tomato paste smeared in an arc.

  Paul said, “You’re going to beat me up in front of your son?”

  A loud, cowboy’s guffaw, a friendly clap on Paul’s shoulder calculated to trigger an explosion. He had to bear that without flinching, not give him a reason. Billy squeezed his shoulder again, condescending, trying to set him off. Paul gave him nothing—he was just as tall as Billy, he realized, but probably a hell of a lot weaker.

  “I should,” Billy breathed. “Show him how bullshit you are.”

  Paul risked a glance back. Shane was looking down at his lap, his mouth and chin buried in his jacket. Billy backed off a step and waggled his fingers at his son and forced a thin smile. He said, “This isn’t right. Gina’s supposed to be picking him up. What if I hadn’t come by and he was left alone?”

  “Elsie’s sick. I’m helping out.”

  Billy stomped his feet in a quick jig of frustration, comical in his shin-high snow boots and tight blue jeans. “Mind your own fucking business. Stay out of everyone’s lives.”

  “You mean Gina’s life, or Hardy’s?” Paul, angry enough to dare, pushed himself away from the car.

  Billy shook his head slowly, eyebrows raised in astonishment. “You’re in real need of a serious ass kicking, bud.”

  “Do you wonder what Hardy told me? What he said?”

  Parents had stopped dragging their kids toward their cars and were staring. Billy backed away. “He didn’t tell you shit,” he hissed, then turned and jogged, head down, to his truck. He tore out of the parking lot and down the road. Paul slowly opened his door and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “So, like, I’m freezing now.” Shane liked to imitate the snooty tone of the teenagers on Glee.

  “Sorry.” He turned the ignition and cranked the heat.

  “That’s okay,” the boy said. Shane grabbed another slice of pizza and devoured the rest of his piece as they drove. “Dad says you’re a goof,” he told Paul in a kind and conspiratorial tone.

  “Your dad’s probably right.” Paul tried to smile.

  Encouraged, the boy added, “Says you’re a home renter.”

  “A home renter?” He studied Shane’s face in the rear-view mirror, the shape of his jaw beneath the baby fat. The boy was like a translucent shell, the Wentz blood clearly running underneath.

  The entrance to Elsie’s place smelled musty, like clothes dampened by sweat, and Gina urged him not to stay long or even cross the threshold of the apartment. “I don’t want you to get sick,” she said, although she didn’t seem worried about Shane.

  He handed her the pizza boxes as the boy kicked off his boots and raced into the living room. No point telling her about Billy. She looked completely rundown. “I’m sorry about things,” he said. “I was just frightened that day. Hardy freaked me out. The way he acted.”

  She smiled wearily. “Quit apologizing, goddamn it.”

  “You sure you don’t need help?”

  She kissed him on the cheek, dismissing him. She had fallen into things too quickly with Billy and wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Or maybe she found it easy to keep her bearings with Paul, not get swept up in things or leave herself vulnerable. He inspired a careful apportioning of passion, rational doses of lust.

  He woke up from a dream of a chaotic brawl—things clattered and fell. An uncontrolled, mindless noise from upstairs. Something knocked hard and steady against a wall—a bed frame, a kitchen table. With each percussive slam came male grunts and curses, a girl’s explosive, staccato sobs.

  He was awake and not awake, lucid and mindless as a sleepwalker, still gummed up in the residue of a dream. The sound of her crying out made him rise from the bed, his body tingling. He stood, and his cock pulsed and swayed, solid and heavy in his hand. There was a door hidden in a wall somewhere. He was certain, in an instinctive, animal way, that the door he wanted was in the living room where the wall was blank and white. He pawed and scraped at the wall looking for hinges, cracks. Nothing. Someone had superimposed a new house over the old house, and the bedroom door—but whose bedroom?—was gone. No echo of hollow space behind the wall. His mouth filled with a thick, salty saliva, and he emptied the spit into his hand and rubbed it over his erection. The noise upstairs had faded, but now someone was crying, a muffled sound. Sonya upstairs, or the woman in the room he couldn’t find. He needed to be in that room, but the house’s foundation had been turned in some direction to confuse him. The unfindable room in the centre of the house. He went into the bathroom and flicked on the light, saliva still draining into his mouth as though from a wound, and came. The orgasm buckled his knees, not from pleasure but from a sharp throb of pain—and the surreal absence of ejaculate.

  He thrust a hand against the mirror to keep upright and stared at his clean, empty hand, the pristine rim of the sink. There was no proof, other than the fading pain in his groin, that he’d come at all. This was like a dream in which you flew without wings, were cut but did not bleed, shouted but did not make a sound.

  He slumped to the cold tile floor, fully awake now. The crying upstairs had stopped, or had never been. There was no bedroom hidden behind the wall, his apartment was bare and plain. The memory, the eerily tangible presence of the old house, was gone. He’d never lived in such a place.

  3

  Sex was not a route on which he could travel backward. It had propelled him forward, inexorably and mercilessly, from that first dizzying, alien spasm at adolescence, onto whatever so-called sex life he was granted, for as long a time as it was granted. Could he pass through the damp crucible of incontinence and impotence and come out the same old Paul?

  In the morning, he soaped and palmed his groin while in the shower and achieved nothing. As the day went on, he tried to focus on sex, as though a type of mental discipline were required. His body remained mulishly indifferent, refusing to be pulled and tugged toward arousal. Truthfully, he didn’t even feel like thinking about it. By lunch, he was convinced that last night’s events hadn’t taken place, or had been a strange fluke, an accidental jolt of nerve endings.

  Gina came by in the late afternoon to tell him Elsie was getting better, but she’d stay at her mother’s for a few more nights to make sure. She’d just dropped Shane off at Billy’s.

  “Was he angry?” Paul asked.

  “About you picking up my kid? Shane told me about that right after you left.”

  “I didn’t want to add to your worries.”

  “Billy said it was a misunderstanding. No big deal.”

  He didn’t believe her—such diplomatic words didn’t feature in Billy’s vocabulary. “Well, never mind then.”

  She had a few hours of spare time and wanted to spend them in bed with him. When her questing hand crept between his legs, he pinned it against the bed with his arm and moved his mouth and free hand over her aggressively. He was afraid of her ministrations, her patient hands and the soft nest
of her mouth. What if she coaxed just enough of a twitch, a surge of blood, to fill both of them with false hope? Before last night there had been no possibility of performing, and therefore no real sense of failure. It had been easier to have nothing—now he risked a deeper humiliation.

  A relief when she finally fell back, satisfied, and her hands stopped struggling to reach him. A reprieve. “You’re all right?” she asked, as she always did. How could she not be bored of him already?

  “Perfect.” His body was silently reconfiguring itself, remapping channels and pathways. Last night may have been an aberration—or maybe his capillaries, nerve endings, and drive were conspiring against him. Better to tell her nothing.

  Hi Paul:

  Your dad saw an interesting news clip he wanted to tell you about, but I figure I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you because he’ll never get around to calling. He’s decided to renovate the basement, did I tell you? Anyway, the story was about this river on the Olympic Peninsula off Washington State—the Elwha. Apparently they’re tearing down the dam, a full restoration of the river, which of course he found quite fascinating. Turns out it was a Canadian, Thomas Aldwell, who built the dam in 1910. It put an end to a very large salmon run, destroyed clam beds along the delta, and drowned the site of the Klallam people’s sacred creation legend (I didn’t quite get what the legend was, and I’m pretty sure your father didn’t either). After that, someone built a lumber mill on top of their ancestral village.

  There are volunteers growing native plants in local greenhouses, ready to replant the old riverbanks after the dam’s foundations are blown up and the reservoir has been drained. I love that idea, but your dad’s a bit skeptical. He figures they’ll be planting in a hundred years’ worth of sediment filled with mercury and methane. The way he sees it, the river won’t be restored so much as it’ll become something entirely different.

  A biologist said there are still salmon genetically programmed to return to the river—some continue to make the trip each year, poor lonely stragglers, and then sit at the base of the dam poking around for decent gravel until they die. I wonder what they’ll think when they find the river navigable for the first time in more than a century. Well, I guess they won’t think anything at all, they’ll just starting heading upstream, right? What with the job you had counting trout, you’re probably more optimistic than your dad about trying to turn back time.

  Watched the weather channel today—don’t go driving around in the snow too much, there’s supposedly more on the way. I do hope you’re feeling more like your old self.

  Love,

  Mom

  A group portrait beneath the flumes, the patriarchs Donald Wallace and Frederic Wentz, gnarled and stern, at the centre of a group of farm punks and weathered toughs. A young Cyril like an aristocratic version of Billy, leaning against a massive circular saw, all pride and mud. A row of smirking, scowling teenagers—the wildest and biggest of them would soon jump ship for good-paying jobs on Caleb’s crew. Easy work as land agents, maybe a future in engineering like the boss himself.

  He was sifting again through the archives’ photo collection, happening upon familiar names. Frederic Wentz, Billy’s grand­father, in his prime: an image captured while he leaned on his axe, a quick breather while clearing the new homestead at the turn of the twentieth century.

  “So many interesting lives,” Paul said. “Surprised more people haven’t written about them.”

  Elmer looked up from a series of old soil type distribution maps he was sorting and gestured to the crowded bookshelves around them, confused.

  “No, like a real book. I mean—sorry.” He laughed at the archivist’s half-offended, half-amused expression, his wiry eyebrows comically rising up his bald pate. “A novel or something.”

  “I’m not a big fan of most historical fiction, to be honest,” Elmer said. “All that guessing what a real person from a hundred years ago might have thought or felt. Too much speculation.”

  “Sounds more fun than what I’m doing. Guesswork isn’t a viable option in my profession.”

  “Those stories get too convenient. Just give me the documented facts and I’ll fill in the gaps myself, thank you very much.”

  Paul laughed. Elmer had to be bullshitting him—his desk was littered with crime novels set in ancient Scotland or Greece, pages bent and powdered with cookie crumbs.

  Finally, near the bottom of the stack, Kai Soules, a beaming, slightly paler version of his grandfather. Sixteen years old in 1964, a year away from death. The photo was black and white, faded, the men all drenched in the same mix of sawdust and oil—it tricked the mind into seeing resemblances.

  “Kai could be his kid brother, don’t you think?” Paul asked.

  “Whose?”

  “Hardy’s.”

  Elmer squinted at the photo, then shrugged.

  “Kinda has the same mouth and jaw,” Paul said. “Do you have a photo of the whole Soules family?”

  “No, oddly,” Elmer said. “Granted, they lived in the shadow of the Wallaces, but I’ve never run across anything—no photos, diaries, mementos.”

  “Probably all disappeared when Arthur moved Marcus away from the valley.” Too bad. If he had enough decent photos, he might spot family resemblances that had skipped a generation. “No chance you carry old medical records or anything like that?”

  “Now you’re really reaching. We’re not a spy agency.” Elmer was bent close to his stack of maps, jotting down dates and numbers and mumbling to himself.

  “Or maybe some anecdote from a person who knew the extent of Donald’s injury.”

  Elmer finally looked up. “Sorry, but what are you getting at, exactly?”

  “Never mind.”

  Eavesdropping on Sonya and Jory was dark, effective medicine. It was necessary to stray into this taboo territory, to brush against the fringes of what he found acceptable. He’d succeeded in getting himself hard two or three times now while listening to the two of them—or not exactly hard, just solid enough to feel good. The erections didn’t last long, nothing to make him any braver with Gina, which, he reminded himself, was the real point of this exercise—not Sonya, not the idea of her. Part of him wanted desperately to see her—the part of him that lurked under the stairs—but he knew this was shaky ground.

  Lately he heard more arguments or silence than sex, and Gina and Shane became a constant presence again with Elsie’s recovery. He was, for the most part, relieved that his evenings under the stairs were coming to an end.

  One night, Gina took him in her mouth and suddenly there came the small, unmistakable throb he’d dreaded, a small rush of pleasure followed by a cold swell of panic in his chest. Gina made a muffled, surprised noise and worked her mouth faster. The bobbing of her head revolted him, the ridiculous sucking sounds, her apparent desperation. He pulled away, and she looked up, surprised. He slumped against the wall, knees against his chest.

  “I spotted your pills,” Gina said. “On your desk.” He’d hidden them behind a stack of papers, but the papers were always sliding onto the floor. Her face collapsed in sympathy. “They’re not working, are they?”

  “I haven’t taken any.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.”

  “I don’t know why. I really don’t.”

  “Wait,” she said. “You haven’t taken any? Not even one?”

  “Is it that important?” he asked. “That I, you know, be inside you or whatever?”

  She shrugged, defensive. “It would be nice,” she admitted in a low voice.

  “Jesus, I must bore you. I’d be bored—we’re stagnating.”

  “No.” There was a bit of steel in her voice. “We’re not. Everything’s getting better. We are. Sex is just one thing.”

  “Don’t know why I feel this way.” He rested his forehead on his knees and spoke into the hollow between his head and groin.

  Her hand slid over his foot. “It’s fine.”

  “Oh, bullshit.” Childish and defiant, snuffling.<
br />
  “We don’t need the stupid pills. We’ll take our time.”

  “We’ve taken our time. All fucking winter.”

  So why not the pills? Two years ago, healthy and potent, he might have taken them recreationally, just for the hell of it. But now he had this fucked-up notion that the pills would undo who he was becoming: either they’d work so well they’d inspire a hunger that devoured all his time, or they’d fail and he’d be utterly devastated, knocked back to square zero. None of it made sense, and it was impossible to explain it to her. But that’s how he felt. The pill was an unfeeling thing. It offered amoral erections, a prick-centric view of a man’s existence. It said he deserved sexual function, a hard-on, regardless of what he really did deserve. It obligated him. The pill was not an instrument of grace. And why was he in need of grace, except that, up until very recently, he might have been guilty of wasting his adult life?

  They had been silent a long time when she suddenly sniffed and crinkled her nose. “Do you smell pot?”

  “They’re growing it upstairs,” he said. “In their closet.”

  She nodded. “I’m pretty sure Billy was growing last summer with his buddies.”

  “He wouldn’t tell you?”

  “Afraid of losing Shane. Doesn’t want to give me leverage.”

  “You never noticed anything inside his house?”

  “It would have been an outdoor show, somewhere in the hills.” She shivered and they both slipped under the covers. “Or were you talking about Caleb Ready?”

  “No. No, not right now.” He checked to see if she was annoyed, but her eyes were half-closed as she shifted against his chest. “Ready’s death never bothered you that much,” he said after a moment.

  “I didn’t know him. Despite what he did all those years ago, or how angry I can get about the past—he’s a piece of history, nothing more.”

  “I like that you can’t make yourself hate him.”

  “Sure, but then I feel guilty, because of Mom, because I can’t quite hold on to her resentment.”