In a furious cloud, they raced each other for their room, which exploded again. I imagined everything that I’d set into place flying into the air and landing in a tangle on the floor and figured I’d spend another night sleeping on the couch and another day cleaning up after the boys.
But then a voice down the hall hollered out, “Captain!” It was Coon’s voice calling. “Captain Fag!” And I found myself running to my name.
When I got to the room, the scene was worse than I’d imagined. Not only were the mattresses back off their frames, but the boys were out of their pants and in their underwear, as if they’d been in the middle of changing into pajamas and started wrestling instead. Coon wore a sheet around his neck like a cape. What’s more, he had Hog on the floor with that butcher knife at his throat, Duck had Coon in a half-nelson grip, and no one seemed able to budge.
“You gotta say it,” Coon stared at me.
“Say what?” I asked.
“Say ‘fag,’ say which one is the fag.”
All around me, the room started humming. Not a church tune but something lower, almost growling. That butcher knife shone in my eyes, and the fan buzzed in my ear, and I could hear the sounds of the TV, the minister and his weeping wife, and the sounds of the bayou water churning outside. In that moment, Coon’s dare sparked like foxfire in the air. Each of my cousins lined up across the room, and each took on his name with greater force. Hog’s chest swelled and nostrils flared, Duck’s feet shuffled and weight shifted, and Coon’s fingers stretched and eyes blazed. My own eyes filled with dust, as I stood on my toes, ready to take flight—but where? I started to speak but stopped. How could I answer the dare? How could I call any of them a fag? A tremor ran up my leg and into a coil just below my waist, and my forehead started to throb.
“Say it,” Coon repeated, “say who’s the fag.”
“Say it!” Hog and Duck chimed in, “Say it!”
Just then, a stream of warm piss ran down my leg and onto the floor.
“Jesus,” Coon said, as he dropped the knife. “Jesus.”
In the days after, the boys let me into their circle, but they looked at me strangely, as if at any moment I might break down and start crying. They tossed underhand balls to me and showed me how to catch. They snared a wild rabbit and showed me how to twist its neck and run a knife under its flesh. They taught me how to hold a rifle and hit a tin can off a fence. My cousins even went on calling each other fag, down the hall and out in the marsh, but they stopped saying the word in front of me. Soon, I started to miss the sound of it, the heat of their eyes when it left their tongue and the wild mess it always set into motion. So on the last night, I decided to say it out loud. When Coon grabbed the butcher knife, in the middle of one of their fights, I threw my own neck under his blade.
“Me,” I said.
“Me what?” he asked.
“I’m the fag.”
And, in a flash, he dropped his underwear before the boys.
“Touch it,” he dared me.
Right then, I went dizzy and cross-eyed with want. I lifted my hand into the air. But before I could touch anything, Coon brandished the knife and exploded in laughter, and the other boys laughed wildly too. They began running helter-skelter in a circle in the room, and I ran along with them. Round and round we went, the three beds spinning before me, the three boys spinning too. Everything spinning in circles before my eyes.
Then the whole world turned upside-down as Coon brandished the knife again and, with a bright grin, slid the blunt edge into my skin and I fell back onto the floor. He stood over me and ran the butcher knife into the slit on my hand a second time and a third until a tear opened and blood ran out.
“Faggot,” he said, laughter still shining in his eyes, that word burning before us.
The name flashed in yellow letters before me, and I studied it for a long time. While the boys watched, my shoulders spread wide, and my stance widened too. My chest filled with air. There were no tears on my face, not one, but there was a fine mist everywhere as I opened my mouth, stretched out my arms, and unbent my knees.
“Right,” I said, with a straight-edged tongue, “Faggot.”
This time, no one laughed.
Even the TV went silent. No one called out a number. No one spoke of a battle to win or a direction to follow. Now I’d never be a real boy. Never. Under the sharp edge of a blade, at the tip of a knife, in a line of blood and dirt, the whole story just ended.
6.
Skinwalker
Hulking over the desk, his elbow jerked back and forth with the thick inky lines of his pen marks. My lines jittered on the page, thin and curvy. My letters fell against each other like a row of hastily dropped gowns. Yet from the seat behind, I watched his letters rise up in sharp edges. Each word he wrote belted its trousers and squared its shoulders with the hard stance you’d expect of a boy at Holy Cross.
Even so, Blaze looked like no one else in junior high. In the morning, all tight corners and abrupt angles. By noon, taller, broader, threatening to burst from his clothes. He had heavy brows, dark unflinching eyes, and—rumor had it—saw through doors and chests and right into the heart of any subject. He never raised a hand in class yet barked out the answer to any question. He never knocked on a door yet nosed his way into any room. Already, stubble shadowed his chin and neck, which stretched half a length over any other boy. With the nuns out of view and the sun a halo overhead, his feet left the ground and he rose straight into the air with his arms out in the shape of a cross. Then his feet met the ground again, and he swung a tail like a whip. The other boys tightened their lips and glowered, but my mouth opened in wonder.
Before Blaze walked onto campus, anyone odd sat in the back with a shut mouth, sat solo in the quad, sat in the bleachers with a pair of stone feet. At least that’s where I sat, the class sissy, the school puss. Even the yellow-eyed priest called me by that name when I lisped during Catechism.
“For the love of God,” he said, “shut your puss, Puss.”
On cue, all the boys jeered and made loud cat noises. From history, whether on campus or in textbooks, I’d learned what happened to puss boys: we ended up with knuckles in our face, a knee in our groin. Or worse: in gutters, gallows, and garrotes. Maybe the story was old, but it felt new every time I swallowed blood, and by eighth grade, I badly wanted a new ending.
Now the odd new boy sat wherever he wanted and spoke whenever he wished. Before us, Blaze walked right out of his skin into shape after shape. If the nuns returned and spied his tail, he snorted at their habits and pulled his brow into an arch or turned his uniform blazer inside out and ran barefoot across the church altar. Once, he unzipped his pants in the school quad and sprayed a perfect circle of flame-yellow piss around the flagpole. The fragrance rose in vapors, and the grass singed to a sooty black. Yet Blaze soon was the star athlete, the A student, the polymath, and he argued his way out of every corner with his blade of a tongue. I had no such weapon, so I hid behind his biggest-in-the-class back and prayed for cover. When he moved his arm or his head, I moved in turn. When he coughed, I coughed in echo. Before me, his hair shone like ink, and his shoulders spread like wings.
Even on the bench next to the principal’s office, his head was unbowed, his shoulders unhunched. A nun had nabbed him for an inked image on the back of his hand: the reproductive cycle of the paramecium. He called it a study guide; she called it a cheat sheet. There was no exam scheduled that day, and it wasn’t the first time Blaze had drawn on his skin. Sometimes in class, he coated an entire side of his hand with correction fluid. Then he wrote words in Latin or drew glyphs over the white field. I studied his hand drawings, like blue tattoos, while the nun jabbed a stick of chalk at the board, underlining lessons in our science class. A cloud of dust surrounded her head when she reviewed outlaw sexual phenomena, what she called “nature’s deviants.” Mostly, these were creatures that ate their
sexual partners or changed their sex at will or mounted their own sex. Dragonflies, gypsy moths, clown fish, black widow spiders. As the nun—and the biology section—droned on week after week, Blaze’s drawings grew larger, more elaborate. The nun warned of skin poisoning, accused him of distracting the class and disturbing her, yet that only made him square his shoulders and widen his grin.
On the Friday when she eyed the paramecium on his hand, drawn in the “deviant” act of self-fertilization, her chest rose nearly to her chin in anger. Her eyes narrowed and her wimple shook. Days earlier, she’d denounced the paramecium, along with the earthworm and the slug as “lowly hermaphrodites.” She’d marked an X in the air with chalk, as if to censor an illicit image. Yet Blaze’s drawing featured a paramecium splitting itself in two. With a hairy footprint shape, it hardly looked pornographic. From a crooked angle, though, the nucleus might’ve passed for a nipple on a weirdly shaped breast. The nun stared at the sketch a long while, her chest rising and falling, then she announced a closed-book quiz: on the reproductive cycle of the paramecium. When I raised my hand to object—we hadn’t even finished the lesson yet—she called me an accessory to the crime and accused me of plotting with Blaze to cheat. Then with two X marks overhead, she ordered us both to the principal’s office.
The story made no more sense to the layman principal than it did to us, yet he asked Blaze to repeat parts over and over again as if he were memorizing the lines. Each time, Blaze added an extra twist, his hands scissoring the air into new shapes, while I sat on my own hands and screwed my mouth shut. A hellish fate awaited us, I was sure, already falling into the role of doomed criminal and damned sinner. Extreme punishments flashed before me: tongue tearer, knee splitter, thumbscrew. No doubt, if my clothes were pulled away, I’d be revealed as a quivering hairless animal. Yet the principal hardly even looked in my direction, and Blaze faced the desk while a pair of antlers seemed to crown his forehead. He bucked against every charge made by the nun, not just the cheat sheet but accusations of disorderly conduct, destruction of school property, and defiance of the dress code. Blaze turned each charge into a joke, delivering the punch line with a jab of his hand. After examining the paramecium tattoo, the principal coughed, stood up and hitched his pants. From a drawer, he pulled out a long paddle that all the boys called the Ugly Sister. Passing in the hall, you could hear a boy let loose a muffled shout when that rough cypress hit his rear end. Most of the time, the principal executed the law of the church and the rules of the school with more force than any priest. Yet when Blaze stared across the desk and locked eyes with him, tapping the floor twice with a heavy foot, the principal brought the paddle down on the chair instead, air whistling through the holes. After several loud hard smacks, he laid it down and hitched his pants a second time. Sweat glistened on top his lips. His hands shook a bit and his eyes creased with near-laughter. Then he looked long and hard at Blaze.
“What kind of lizard?” he asked again.
“Whiptail,” Blaze said. “The all-lady lizard.”
“And what did the Sister call it?”
“Parthenogenesis.”
“Right,” the principal said, with a hand to his shaking mouth. “Virgin birth.”
Whether Blaze had mesmerized the principal into releasing us, I couldn’t be sure. Yet free of the paddle and free of school for the weekend, he turned his eyes and looked straight at me for the first time.
“Come over,” he said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.
Instead, as if surrounded by a narcotic cloud, I followed the skinwalker home, lights bursting in my head and sounds echoing in my ears. You could be odd and not get flogged—not even in the principal’s office? You could speak up and not get strangled? You could stand up and not get kneecapped?
Shifting from cloven hooves to spotted paws to the long whirling feet of a sprinter, Blaze dashed through his house, throwing off the school uniform and picking up a bottle of cola and a bag of Roman taffy. In his backyard, he jumped onto a trampoline and shouted after me to join him. As soon as I climbed up, he leapt from his haunches, the canvas bounced me into the air, and he exploded in laughter. My ears, oversized and nearly pointed, flashed with heat and I could feel them turning red. My arms prickled with every little hair standing needle-sharp on end, like a set of quills, and my nose filled with the smell of grilled meat and ripe fruit and wet grass and damp earth. All around, the world rose up and down in a shaking blur while blood rushed from my hands to my feet and back again. Under it all, I smelled a strong musk that flared my nostrils and dizzied my head. I wanted to remain weightless, high from the trampoline, from the heat, from thoughts of Blaze, but one leg overshot the frame and I landed with a splat on the ground.
Through my shirt, you could see my spastic rib, the one that pulsed with a strange twitch anytime my chest filled with too much air. Blaze crouched over me and pulled up the tails of my shirt. His eyes widened at the sight. That rib looked blue now, and it quivered out of sync with my breathing, making my whole chest throb like an animal under a spear. Then he looked closer and found my birthmark, a crimson-colored arrow on one side of a nipple.
“Deviant,” he said then repeated it louder. “Lowly deviant!”
He howled between laughs and spat a mouthful of cola on the ground. His eyes glared, daring me to disagree. He’d invited me over for just this reason, I guessed, so he could pin me with an exclamation mark.
For a moment, I stood still as the breath rushed in and out of my chest. Then I jumped back on the trampoline and jumped into the air with that word ringing in my ear. Deviant. The nun had said it in class, of course, too many times, but never in the way Blaze said it, like a grunt of recognition. The word rang inside my head in echo after echo. All the perfume of the world rose up again, along with Blaze’s face, his unblinking eyes and jutting chin and his mouth open wide in easy laughter. Soon, I overshot the trampoline once more and landed on my back, breathless, wordless.
The skinwalker stood over me, no longer grinning. His face the face of a sphinx. He stopped breathing too, it seemed, and his eyes shut for a long moment. Would he open those eyes soon and see a coward, a puss? Would he see a suspect boy? Would he jeer and catcall me like all the others?
When his eyes opened again, Blaze shook his head, tugged his lips on the cola bottle, then spat a caramel waterfall over my face. The ground fell away, and my whole body rose up. Blaze locked eyes with mine. Weightless, I opened my mouth in the shape of an O, letting the cola and spit rain into my throat while his grin returned and widened. Under his steady eye, I grew out of my shoes and floated over the backyard. I floated out of my clothes too, driven into a daze with his mouth on my neck and his hand on my waist. Master of letters, master of shapes, he cast that kind of spell.
In his bedroom that night, I kept my face to the pillow. When I was sure that he’d fallen asleep, I opened my eyes and turned toward him. Blaze slept with his shirt and pants off, and the sight of him thrilled me. My ears burned and my throat was dry and I knew every why. Why the priest mocked me at Holy Cross. Why the boys taunted me. Why my letters were odd curlicues, feathers and fans, ribbons of silk. Next to the skinwalker, I wasn’t a standup boy or even a daredevil. I was only an accessory to the plot, a stock character, an end page waiting to be filled.
Yet now, in his bed, I didn’t care that I couldn’t match Blaze, that my own letters failed or that I was the sissy, the puss. As I lay alongside him with the rustle of sheets, his heart beat in my ear. I bent my hand, slid it under his arm, and musk rose around me. Heat rose too, followed by a grunt deeper and longer than all words. I drew my fingers back and pressed them against my face. Then the bed filled with steam. Grinning wide, with his long teeth, the skinwalker rose over me and clawed into my skin, the blood glistening before running off in tears. A set of initials branded me, three letters in ink, a fresh tattoo on my arm. My brow pulled into an arch. Maybe I’d never turn into a boy l
ike Blaze, maybe I’d never square my shoulders or sharpen my tongue, maybe I’d never walk out of my skin or master anything at all, but he was my author now, and I was his sentence.
7.
Revelator
Late at night, with a perfumed wrist and a sudden click of her tongue, Mama put the magazine in her lap aside to tell me cautionary tales—odd, twisting stories about her outlaw father, about how he punched his way from parish to parish in lower Louisiana in pursuit of a ring and a championship belt. After quitting the ministry, he sought fortune as a boxer then left the Bayou State for work as a croupier, a bookie, and finally a bounty hunter, but a rash broke out on his hands each time some Texas boss in pointed boots called him a coonass. Did those cowboys think he was an animal? A trash-eating animal in a mask? Other times they called him Otterfoot. Did they think he was a web-toed weasel? He’d show them; he’d shift his shape again. Now he was a snaggle-toothed wolverine, a claw-footed bobcat. Now he was a fox-eared traiteur, a swan-necked revelator. And now, now he was the hot tongue of breath over their head and the hairy finger that tapped on the window at midnight before the panes exploded and the house burst into flame. He was a rebel-yelling prophet, a vein-hunting warrior, a junk-shooting preacher. And if he was an animal, he was a champion loup-garou, a teeth-gnashing, bone-crunching werewolf.
Until the day they finally wrestled him onto a gurney and into a hospital and shot voltage through the electrodes on his head. Once, when I was eleven, Mama brought me to meet him. He was living in a cinder-block government home with a woman who had the same odd name as him and two boys who took turns sitting on one knee. The other knee was gone, the fabric of the pant leg dangling like a lady’s handkerchief. His hair ran onto his back in a tight double ponytail, making his nose look sharp and long. His teeth were sharp and long too, all yellow and twisted. Syringes lined his dresser like firearms. You could smell the riot of perfume. Soon, he’d be dead, not of old age, though, or disease or even an overdose. No, he couldn’t live in one shape, and he couldn’t bear that he’d been robbed of wild thought by strangers wearing surgical masks.
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