Uncle Sean

by Ronald L Donaghe

  We had several star rodeo riders come out of school, too. Only they didn’t come back, except when there was a big rodeo or something in Arizona.

  I got a taste of the idea that Animas and Hachita and Lordsburg were slowly dying, as more people left than moved in or were born here. But sometimes I had my hands too full to really notice. I worked like hell on the farm. January turned to February and, still, the winds cut through like knives made of ice and I took over the plowing, turning the old stalks under and the new soil up to the top. I was hoping I might be able to just freeze the pimples off, because when I looked in the mirror, I sure got tired of seeing all those puss-filled bumps, and I was hoping that I’d get my clear skin back.

  The girls didn’t look much better, except that they could cover their pimples over with makeup, and I got kind’a sick the way the scarred and pimpled boyfriend/girlfriend pairs sprang up around school, like it was some kind of Twilight Zone, where no matter how ugly or deformed people in this high school became, they thought each other was pretty.

  Then, too, it seemed like the guys in P.E., especially, were turning into sex maniacs, and all we talked about was jerking off. It was easy to join in such talk, since I finally knew what they were talking about—really knew, that is, since I had learned how to have wet dreams while I was awake. Only then I knew it was called jerking off. All the guys seemed to be in a frenzy about it, but I just kind of sat back and nearly quit doing it. I began to think that Uncle Sean was right about kind of saving myself for the right boy.

  I missed Uncle Sean, and I wore his dog tags day and night, and reread his letter and raced to the phone when he called and when I was in the kitchen, alone, I’d tell him what I’d been doing, and always tell him that, nope, nobody as pretty as him had come along. I always tried to make myself laugh and joke with him, even though sometimes I was sad and gripping those dog tags.

  Four

  ———————▼———————

  When I turned sixteen, last year, I looked back to the time when Uncle Sean had come to visit and saw what a kid I was, how immature, how emotional. Now that I’m a junior, and my skin has cleared back up, I try as best I can to look presentable, just in case there’s another boy here in school that might take a liking to me. But that seems unlikely, since I know every one of them. Some of them are better looking than when they were freshmen, but I dream of meeting someone really special, someone that grabs me in the guts like Uncle Sean did. Since I got my driver’s license and Daddy trusts me with all sorts of things, he’s let me take the pickup and go just about anywhere I want. He says a good-looking boy like me ought to be dating, and even Mama puts some pressure on me in that department. They don’t like it that I still wear Uncle Sean’s dog tags, and Mama even said, “Will, I just don’t think your attachment to them is very healthy.”

  I remembered that Uncle Sean had said Mama knew about him, but was probably keeping it a secret from herself, so now I keep it a secret from both Mama and Daddy that I still wear the tags. There was even one boy at school, Dick Lamb, the hot-shot quarterback last year that eyed me suspiciously in the shower one day after practice. On the team, I was a tight end and one of his best receivers, and even though we worked well on the field, he had this anger (or something) against me for some reason I didn’t know why. And he said, “ain’t it kind of faggoty to wear your uncle’s dog tags?”

  Since I wasn’t so emotional anymore and knew exactly what I wanted, which is a boyfriend, I just let his remark roll off me like sweat and soap down the drain. Then when I was drying off, and the rest of the team was more or less finishing up, he tapped Ronald Spencer on the shoulder and got him and a couple of other guys to come up to me. We were all naked, but I noticed just the slightest beginnings of an erection on Dick’s little pecker. It was already angling away from his balls.

  “What about it, Barnett, are you a faggot for your uncle?”

  There had been a lot of racket in the room up until then, but everybody got real quiet, and the four of them, led by Dick, sort of surrounded me. I turned my back on them, and put one foot up on the bench and started drying my butt with the towel, then I looked back at him sideways, looking straight at his pecker, which was now about half mast.

  Then I looked up from his pecker, right into his eyes. “No,” I said. “I wear my uncle’s tags out of respect.” Then I looked back down there, which made the other guys look down there, too, and they saw he was growing. “But I get the distinct impression you might be interested in me.”

  All the guys broke out howling as they had all seen Dick’s half-mast stiff-on.

  It wasn’t so much that Dick Lamb was trying to start a fight, because I can’t recall that any of us on the team ever got into it with our fists. But it might have been his way of fending off his own interest in other boys, to lead the attack against it. It just seems to me that if some guy is too interested in guys who might be homosexual, they have a problem with it, themselves.

  Dick backed off real quick when I called his bluff and didn’t say anything more about it. But there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t catch him looking at me across the cafeteria, during practice, in the shower, even in class. As long as he kept his distance, that was fine with me. It might’ve been completely different if Dick Lamb had been half-way good looking, but there wasn’t anything about him I wanted to kiss. Besides, I was saving myself for just the right boy, like Uncle Sean said I should. I wasn’t going to settle for the first one that came along. I saw what he meant when he made me promise that.

  Five

  ———————▼———————

  At school, things really improved from my freshman year, and on through my sophomore year. I got a taste of what it would be like to be a good student. I think back to when I just had to have that Big Chief tablet to write about Uncle Sean, and then how the teachers reacted to my theme about Daddy. I even got a story accepted in the Farm and Ranch magazine Daddy subscribed to, like how ours was the only farm in the Hachita area, what we raised and why, and Daddy sure was proud of that. I was proud of the check for $25 they sent me, too.

  “You got a knack,” he told me one day, reading the magazine and beamed at me over the dinner table. But he couldn’t imagine what you could do with a knack for words—except I could, though I hadn’t told him, yet, that I wanted to go to college. We didn’t even have to talk about it, because it was understood I’d stay right there on the farm, while the girls would get married and move off. That’s just the way it was.

  Only at home, things grew worse. Like I said, after Uncle Sean had left, Daddy and I argued a lot, and then when he was hospitalized with his ulcers, he never was quite the same. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to keep up with the equipment. He couldn’t. And I tried, but I just didn’t have as much time as was needed. We had quit raising cotton the year before, because all the trailers we used to haul it from south of Hachita to the cotton gins in Animas began to need major work. Axles getting bent and needing replaced, tires blowing out with a load of cotton sitting by the side of the highway for days at a time. The cost of diesel shooting up, out of site. And my sister Rita got way out of control with some boy and she and Mama began fighting all the time like me and Daddy had been.

  We just weren’t happy, anymore. Maybe we never were, but I was growing up a lot and seeing things that maybe were always the case, only I was too much of a kid to see them, back then.

  I figured once I graduated from high school, I’d up and leave like Julianne and Marsha had. I knew a lot of the boys would be taking over their family ranches, and it seemed like ranching wasn’t nearly as costly as farming, but I guess I just didn’t know the facts of the matter.

  And Mama went downhill some, herself, though she wasn’t put in the hospital. Just like Uncle Sean, though, I thought maybe she was sad and mad, and she kind of took it out on May and Trinket, because Rita wasn’t around to help any more, except to make sure her own clothes were washed and ir
oned.

  So that’s when I took up writing again, every day.

  I ached for something to change, even though school was good. I was lonely, again, as I had been right after Uncle Sean had gone away, but with my driver’s license, I was able to get out and get away—always, though, only when I had done my chores and things were settled. But those were my restrictions, not Daddy’s. I didn’t want to leave anything for him to have to do.

  With my own spending money, which I’d made by selling corn to the grocery stores and cafés in the area, I could afford gas and so, for awhile, I’d drive to Deming and Common, looking for those two guys in the yellow pickup that Uncle Sean and I had seen that night at the movies in Deming. I don’t think I will ever forget what they looked like, together, especially the blond, especially when he smiled and said “howdy” to me when he was getting out of the pickup in the parking lot there at the Rio Grande Theater.

  To have gone to the movies in Deming, I thought they’d be from Columbus, Common, Deming, or Lordsburg (though I doubt Lordsburg, since I’d never seen the pickup there, and I go into Lordsburg a lot). And sure enough, they didn’t live in Animas. I knew just about every pickup and cowboy in the whole town, since I spent more time there than I did at home.

  If I had ever met them, I only wanted to ask how they met and stuff, and maybe how they got to be so brave like they were at the movies that night. The only problem with staying too long in the towns where we played was that my farm work came first. Daddy still wasn’t very healthy, and sometimes when it was really hot out, and he’d been working alongside me in the fields, I’d take a close look at his face, and it was kind of gray, and not his usual leathery brown. Which is also why if he yelled at me for something, even if it wasn’t my fault, I’d just swallow the hurt and anger, and maybe later mention it when he’d cooled off.

  So on the day of a game, I would get up before the sun came up and if I had chores around the barn, I used the spotlight I’d rigged up over the bay doors so I could see. Mainly, it was changing out the sweeps on the cultivator or switching out discs. During harvest or planting, of course, it was a whole different set of things I had to do. If I had to set the water and move pipes, I just had to work in the dark.

  So for a few months, I tried to find those two guys, and drove myself crazy, sometimes, and ended up feeling more lonely, lost, and frustrated than ever.

  But I never did see them, again.

  So I spent time in places like Lordsburg and Animas and Cotton City. I sometimes took some of my friends, so we could get bored together, but mostly I was a loner, because I wanted a boyfriend, and I couldn’t tell that to them. I still wore Uncle Sean’s dog tags, but nobody said anything about it, any more.

  To make matters worse, even May was pulling away from the family— not like Rita with her boyfriend—but with all her own extracurricular activities, and even though we were still pretty close, as she entered her senior year, we only saw each other at home for short periods. She still worked in the field with me, but she wouldn’t tell me too much about her own business and, frankly, when she’d ask me stupid questions about myself, I didn’t really want to tell her that I was lonely, and I sure couldn’t tell her why.

  Six

  ———————▼———————

  From our fields out north of the house, I could see the new smelter plant being built near a new town they called Playas. It was one of those company towns, built by Phelps Dodge, just for the workers at the new plant. That smelter plant looked like something out of the future, and I sometimes drove to it over some of the dirt roads the ranchers used and watched the plant going up. Sometimes getting in close enough that I could watch the shirtless guys scampering up and down the buildings, close enough to see the sheen of sweat glistening off their backs, but too far away to get a good look at their faces. I could hear the clang of hammers on steel and drills and saws—all kinds of racket. And I wondered if there were any guys there as pretty as Uncle Sean.

  I also heard talk in high school that so-and-so had got a job over there and was earning good money, though nobody thought the jobs would last—at least not those construction jobs. I would’ve considered trying to get on there in the summer between my junior and senior years, but not getting hired on after my senior year, because I still intended to go to college, moving out to California where Uncle Sean was living. He and I talked on the phone quite a bit, but there was something that always made me more sad after talking to him than I was before. It didn’t matter, though, because if he didn’t call for a month or so, I missed him, and couldn’t wait to talk to him again.

  Anyway, so every free hour or two that I had, I took off from home. Mama worried over Daddy more and more as he seemed to shrivel up. So she didn’t have that joy like she used to, and Daddy slept a lot, looking gray so often that I just couldn’t stand it. It was like trying to be the only one in the family to carry on trying to act happy. Rita was hardly ever there. May was usually off with some of her girlfriends on the baseball, soccer, or basketball teams, and Trinket, bless her little heart, she had a friend in one of the Collins girls she stayed with lots of nights. So our house was too quiet most of the time, unless Mama was fretting about bills or something; that was when Daddy would rouse himself and try to help me with the equipment or even setting the water or driving the tractors—though he was really in the way, instead. Only I sure needed some kind of help.

  So, on one of my short little trips across the desert toward the new plant, that’s when I met Lance Surfett. It was a sunny but kind of cool summer afternoon, like there were rain clouds blocking out the sun, but there weren’t. Maybe off in the west over the Peloncillo Mountains there had been a rain, and the cool air flowed over our own valley. It was the kind of day I liked, and so I drove out toward the new smelter plant and stopped out of sight of the workers and the buzz of activity and hoofed it the rest of the way, hoping to get a closer look.

  The sunlight glinted like sun on water off the shiny metal walls of the plant, and the smoke stack that reached high into the desert sky was like a tube of light, the sun was so bright. Still, the air had a cool breath to it, so I walked fast, enjoying the feel of my boots crunching over the rocks and patches of hard ground. And when I got up to an outcropping of rocks where I could climb up and be within a hundred yards of the plant, and sit my butt down, I saw this kid with kind of longish sandy-brown hair, sitting on the flat rock jutting out over an arroyo, knees drawn up to his chin, shirtless, and staring off toward the plant. When he heard me, he looked around and even though the sun wasn’t in my eyes, I couldn’t focus on his face for a moment, or see clearly.

  It was because big purple bruises covered the left side of his face, starting at his eye and ending on the left side of his mouth. His shirt was laying on the rock next to him, and it was spotted (or maybe I should say, splashed) with what I figured was blood. When he saw me, he jumped up and acted like he was about to run, only there wasn’t anywhere to run to, unless he jumped off the rock, down into the arroyo, which was at least fifteen feet down. So he just stood legs apart, braced for an attack and raised his fists.

  He was so small, I took him for a kid maybe twelve or thirteen. “Hey, kid,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you.” He spat on the ground, keeping his fists up. “I ain’t no damned kid, you son-of-a-bitch!” His voice was as deep as mine, and I was surprised, both at its sound, kind of rich and oily, with a slight southern twang, and at his raw language. So I thought maybe he was more my age (I was not quite eighteen). I wasn’t afraid of him, since I’m just over six feet, and saw that he wasn’t used to fighting, no matter that he had his fists up. For one thing, the way he folded his thumbs under the curl of his fingers was a dead give-away. For another he was so heart-breaking skinny, his ribs showed, and he looked more like a whipped puppy, standing there. I didn’t know what to do, but I kept my arms at my side, moving a little closer, since we were still six or eight feet apart.

  “Look, I w
as just coming up here to watch the work down there,” I said, cocking my head toward the smelter plant. “I didn’t know anybody even knew about this spot.”

  “Well, you just go on, then. I ain’t in the mood for no company,” he said, though he lowered his fists, keeping his eyes locked on mine.

  I kept moving in a little closer. I couldn’t help it. He looked to be in an awful state, and I planned right then to find out why he looked like he’d been hit by a truck and why his shirt was bloody. When I was close enough to get a better look, my heart just caught in my throat at the condition he was in—that, and how downright pretty he was. His eyes were almost violet in this slanting afternoon light, and even though his lips were a little swollen, they were the same pretty pink as Uncle Sean’s.

  For me, it was kind of like that morning I first laid eyes on Uncle Sean. Not that I was in love with this strange, beat-up kid, but I felt drawn to him in a way I had not been to any of my classmates or guys on the football team. At the moment, I just wanted to hug him, he looked so pitiful.

  “I’m Will Barnett,” I offered. “I live off down yonder,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. “You can see the smelter from our farm.”

  For a moment, he just glared at me, then he seemed to kind of sag. When he stuck his hand out, I was surprised and walked the rest of the way up to him. “Lance Surfett,” he said, as we shook hands. “My stepfather just up and moved us out to this god-shit-on place.” At that, he cracked a smile, then frowned. “I can’t believe a hell-hole like this even exists. There’s nothing here! How can you stand it?”