For a moment, the dance music halted, and feathers hung in the air. Doors flew open, all ears turned to the galley, and out of nowhere Miss Teary de la Place burst into the room. When she caught sight of Miss Carriage, her shriek echoed mine. Her chest rose, her wig shook, and she yelled “LEON!” long and loud as a siren wailing over the whole ship.
In a rush, a flock of queens raced across the deck to answer Miss Teary’s call. They soon figured out the whole story and resolved to find the beast who’d struck Miss Carriage. The music started up again, and the leather daddies, cowboys, and jocks turned back to dancing, but the queens turned to riot. They hurled empty rocks glasses, loaded beer cans, and extra large high heels across the deck. They threw glass vials and amber bottles. They shot pint glasses and shakers into the air, and the wind picked it all up and slammed it against the bow with a great crashing sound. Treats pumped a fist and led the hunt for Leon past the bridge and down the gangway. The sky filled with glitter dust and silky down and barbed bits of feather, and the floor covered over with a silvery powder. Heads turned port and starboard and port again for any sign of the long-haired bar owner. Suddenly, Treats let out a screeching sound and grazed Leon with the sharp edge of a broken bottle, just before he leapt onto the plank.
“Drown the Lion!” Treats shouted to the air.
With a clap of thunder, he went racing down the bouncing strip of lumber, and I ran in his hot footsteps. The acid surged in my head, and the cones of light on the water trembled like underwater speakers pumping heavy voltage. A shock of motion agitated the surface, radiating like a strobe, and the current cast eyes everywhere, as the river filled with floating faces. Treats threw his hands up and streaks of powder ran down his cheeks. My chest throbbed and vision wavered. Leon had jumped; he might’ve been anywhere. He might’ve pulled himself onto another ship and disappeared into the night, like the killer who battered the angel boy. We’d never know the killer’s name, never know where he lurked, and we’d never know justice. Red dots pulsed before my eyes and gray smoke hung overhead. Even if we could rid Leon of his mane, rid the scene of Leon, we’d lived in his den without ever catching his scent. Was it too familiar? Too close to our own? Heat rose up like vapor, as the muddy Mississippi swallowed each cone of light. The whole scene went dark, and my ears echoed with vanishing beats, until a curtain of silence dropped overhead.
Treats turned on his heels, and I turned around too. My chest throbbed again, louder and louder, yet when I looked back, I saw that the water wasn’t filled with floating faces. There was merely one face, blurry and dim, in the distance. Next I saw a golden flash, a mane of hair, and heard a far-off gasp for air. My tongue stammered, and my mouth stuck on one odd sound. But my lips finally let fly a whole word, steady and clear: “Vengeance!” It was only one word, still it brought back Miss Carriage’s vow. As the smoke cleared, I shot a finger straight at Leon’s dim figure in the water, and every pair of eyes looked dead ahead. Treats jumped, I jumped, and a dozen others jumped overboard, all of us flapping madly to stay afloat. The Lion was a hundred strokes away, swimming like a hunted catfish, but he faced only the opposite bank. He couldn’t see what we saw: a crest of waves parting in our path, light beaming from our eyes. He couldn’t hear what we heard: a chorus soaring at our back, a song beating in our ear. No, he couldn’t escape us now. Long legs, long necks, sharp beaks, we were a siege of cranes. Red crowns, white napes, we were ready to trouble the water and charge the air. Together, we were ready to take wing.
12.
Makeup
In our prom picture, my date was the pretty one, not me. With raven hair, ivory skin and an angular face, she looked designed for the banner: Forever Hollywood. She fit the role of Prom Date like an ace actress. Yet I didn’t fit and knew it. I’d only been cast in the role as a last minute stand-in when another guy bowed out and Jazz, who’d arranged a double date with two sisters, called my number.
Jazz counted on me for essays, exams, and an extra arm for anything he didn’t care to carry: textbooks, duffel bags, even the bulky keys to his truck.
“Can’t kill the silhouette,” he said, while assessing himself in the mirror or in the faces of girls passing in the hall.
His name was J.S. but the whole campus called him Jazz for his flashy out-of-town style. He’d moved all the way from Dallas and brought satin jackets and gelled hair to campus. On him, a turned-up collar, blond streaks, and a pierced ear looked more guy than girl. Even his no-sock shoes hit the ground with certain force. Neither a jock nor a brain, a nerd nor a geek, he made his way through the halls with slick hair and slick poses and seemed to know how to do nothing better than anyone else. One leg propped against a post, one foot kicked into the air. One arm wrapped around the back of a desk, one hand raked through his hair. Jazz had a half-there half-gone look in his eyes that allowed him to slip through the rope of high school rules. Only a jock should’ve asked the head cheerleader on a date, but no one was shocked when Jazz held up a sign with the question—right in front of the quarterback and right in the middle of class—or when she said yes.
Her younger sister, Delta, was part of the deal, and now I carried something else for Jazz: an ill-fitting tux. The borrowed suit was meant for a guy with football shoulders and soccer legs. I cinched the waist with a skinny belt and pulled the loose fabric into a new seam with a zigzag of safety pins. Then I double-knotted a tie and pushed up the sleeves. If you squinted from across a very dark room, you might’ve imagined you saw a guy in a suit. Yet in the light, the suit still billowed and was so misshapen that I looked like a popsicle melting in the sun, with the stick ready to snap out of its molded form. When she opened the screen door, Delta pursed her lips but said nothing. Maybe she saw the baggy tux as another odd piece in a disarrayed puzzle. Or maybe she saw past me to the prom, where she’d be the only freshman, and who cared how she got there?
What Delta saw, at least at first, worried me less than Jazz. What did he see—or not see? Was I his secret, so out in the open no one would notice? When Jazz first took me as his sidekick, with my bangled wrists and flame-red hair, the kids and teachers chalked it up to another of his eccentricities. Maybe his Roman nose, his square jaw, and his steady eye cast him as more young man than teenage boy, and maybe that role placed a permit in his hands. A young man was independent. A young man was allowed certain risks. He could stand next to a teenage boy, especially a teenage fairy boy, and his stance would look even tougher. Beside him, I must’ve looked submissive as a pillow or a punching bag. Jazz never swung a joke at me, though, and never hit me with a name. Instead, he let me shadow his silhouette and walk the halls by his side.
Yet at prom, it was the head cheerleader, not me, by his side. It was her sister, a girl four years younger, next to me. Someone might shout a name, my name. Someone might point at the Jenny Woman in the tux, the sissy in the suit. The air might explode in stormy laughter, ridicule raining down like a turned-over bucket of confetti, scorn flashing from bared teeth. Every party began with a sacrifice, I knew, and ended with a confession. It was one thing to show my feathers at school by day, to dangle charms and beads. It was another thing to tuck my wings and hide my colors, to pass as a guy on a date with a girl, or to pass as a normal guy at all. Who’d cuff my hands first? Who’d call my bluff? Who’d muffle my mouth and deliver my penance?
By senior year, I had much to confess but few secrets left. The lock had long blown off my cover. Even so, an empty chest doesn’t mean fear has left the room. In the schoolhouse of the disco, I’d learned courage in a gay bar with gay men, but courage away is not courage at home. Also: virtue in one world is vice in another. And at a Catholic high school, castigation follows vice every time, no matter how false or unfair the charge. Every week, the kneeler in the church confessional groaned while I opened my mouth to let loose a new story. Every week, the priest leaned closer to the screen, listening to my voice rise higher, the lower the act, the more twisted the end.
What everyone knew: no crayoned valentine, no sweetheart carnation, no origamied love note, no aching heart mixtape had ever passed between a girl’s hands and mine. What everyone knew: instead, a boy’s hands had passed over my head and pushed me to my knees, a boy’s hands had pulled my pants to the ground. What everyone knew: it happened more than once, with more than one boy, then it happened with a man, an older man, a teacher and even a priest. What everyone knew: I was fallen, I was graceless, I was doomed, I was one lost sheep.
What no one knew: I liked it that way. I wanted it that way.
What I knew: I was not the only one.
When we walked through the prom door, though, what everyone saw was Jazz and the cheerleader, their grins wide and bright and easy. Delta and I slipped in behind them, and the band blasted a whistle while a singer belted, “You dropped a bomb on me!” Jazz cast a look my way: no bucket turned over my head, no confetti rained down. Maybe he was right.
“Gotta fake it to make it,” he’d told me before meeting the girls.
Prom was fairy tale night, after all, with a grand theme, swollen-faced characters, dazzling old-world costumes, and fantastic settings. Even so, no one ever mistook the dwarf for a giant or the elf for a prince. And no one, I was sure, mistook me for a romantic lead.
Especially not Delta. In the blinking lights of the room, I could see her face in close-up. Makeup brought her features into focus: two dramatic streaks of blush, copper lips, smoky shadow, and cat eyes drawn with heavy liner. She wore a serious world-weary expression, like a debutante already tired of the balls and the boys and the boorish talk. If she were in a film, she’d play the ingénue turned sophisticate—or vamp—before the final act. She even smoked the clove cigarette Jazz passed around with more style than any of us, her cheeks flush as petals and her eyes blazing with secret knowledge.
The four of us found a table and sat, but not for long. Jazz kept cracking his knuckles and knocking his knee under the table, and Delta’s sister kept craning her head around the room. Maybe she hadn’t noticed Jazz wasn’t much of a talker. With all his slick poses and slick looks, no one seemed to catch on that he said very little. Yet I’d learned that he asked more questions than he answered. Even when we were alone in his pick-up, he mostly just nodded his head to whatever I said, in a dreamy indeterminate way, not yes or no but something in the middle. So to cut the silence at the prom table, I told stories about weird midnight movies or New Wave bands with space age gear and futuristic looks, my hands rising in one wild arc after another. Delta smiled in a lopsided way. Yet Jazz stared at me as if there was a question mark flashing on my face, and his date stared at the dance floor as if it was a planet spinning in outer space.
Suddenly, Jazz bolted up from the table and seized the cheerleader’s hand. The two of them cut right through the crowd with a series of quick-fire moves until she pretended to faint in his arms and he pretended to revive her with a long wet kiss and a hand on her waist. Then his hand seemed to pull a string that sent her spinning out of and back into his arms in a dizzying whirl. By that point, the other dancers had stopped moving, and the band turned their brass instruments to the couple of the moment.
When a glove grabbed my hand, I startled. Then I looked up and saw Delta. Did she expect me to dance? To move like Jazz? When she feigned a yawn and angled her head toward the photo stand, relief lifted me out of my chair. All around the gym, a series of brightly colored facades had been raised, one-dimensional homes from famous movies or TV shows. The people painted in the windows seemed frozen in time but the timeline itself seemed warped with a Victorian mansion sitting next to a California ranch house next to a French Quarter cottage next to a Manhattan penthouse. When she saw me lagging, Delta tugged me forward with her gloved hand. I could feel my popsicle stick body weaving, from the heat, from the champagne, and from the sudden fear of what might happen next.
In the long line leading up to the Hollywood banner and the glittery backdrop, a circle of girls applied and reapplied mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick, raising hand mirrors this way and that, searching each other’s faces for approval, sometimes offered, sometimes denied. Whose face could I search? I wondered. Whose head would nod yes or no? But Delta didn’t seem to wonder—about my approval or the other girls. Apart from her sister, she grew taller and her neck grew longer while I shrank further into my tux. How long until she beamed her eyes right through mine? How long until I disappeared altogether?
With that gray cloud of worry overhead, the camera snapped its own hot eye at Delta and me. I stood dazed before Jazz nudged me with the tip of his shoe to move out of view. Arm in arm, he and the cheerleader both flashed a brilliant illustrated magazine smile, a smile that shone with long walks and long plans, with a wide lawn and high ceilings and a pair of trophy-winning kids. The photographer clapped his hands in front of his face and made a splashing sound with his mouth. Maybe Jazz didn’t say much, but he knew how to impress. Suddenly, other guys clutched their dates tighter and moved in closer for the camera.
Next, the four of us plodded back to the round table where even our glittery centerpiece wilted from the heat. The glue ran in rivulets, and the glitter dotted the table in cloudbursts. Though a giant fan hummed in a corner, the heat in the gym was nearly visible, with a kind of oily vapor. Delta was panting a bit and her sister’s forehead was glistening when I caught Jazz’s eye. He stared me down, as if I was about to reveal a secret no one, not even he, had guessed. Then he slammed a flat palm down on the edge of the table.
“Are you ready, boy?” he asked.
Together, we had arrived at the prom in a rented white limo, but now we had to leave in Jazz’s stretch-cab truck, since the cheerleader had lost her pink champagne and most of her crawfish dinner on the limo floor.
“Ready, boy?” Jazz shouted again over the frantic rush of a song about a used condom and a fast car. His face winked. The fizz of dying champagne filled my ears. The room buzzed, the music blurred, and all the lights went fire red. When I looked at Delta and saw her makeup melting, I took it as a sign.
“Yeah,” I blurted, “Ready.”
Outside, Delta tugged the ends of her black corset gown into the cab then I clambered in beside her. Jazz somehow threw the truck into first, second, and third gear while holding onto the steering wheel and the cheerleader’s hand at the same time. The revved-up truck grew fins and flares and finally spoiler wings as he sped through flashing yellow lights, raced through an abandoned parking lot and over a small ditch before bringing the truck like a jet to a jerking halt. The high beam pointed toward the dark and gated entrance of the park. Jazz shut off the ignition and cut off the lights.
“Guess we’re gonna sit here a while,” he said, running a hand along the dashboard down to the cheerleader’s thigh. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Her and me.”
Though dazed, I heard the prompt, stepped out of the truck, then stumbled around the other side to give Delta a trembling hand. Without saying a word to each other, she and I walked foot by foot to a mossy bench near a pond. From our wood-slat seat, we watched the windows of the truck cover with steam. We watched geese quarrel and make up on the algae-smothered pond. We watched billowing clouds form shapes overhead then part in two. There seemed to be a script in view, and I thought I could read the lines well enough. I opened my mouth to speak before a goose honked and Delta burst out laughing.
“You’re beautiful,” I said, not exactly sure if that was the word. It sounded rehearsed and phony, and she called me on it.
“Don’t you mean handsome?”
My face pulled into a puzzle.
“Heaven knows I’m no flower. At least, that’s not what I wanna be. Flowers are beautiful, sure, but then they lose their heads and fall.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed then slapped my hand on my mouth. Delta laughed too, not in delicate ribbons but in a long great sheet of sound. Then her face grew ste
rn.
“And don’t call me pretty either,” she said. “My sister is pretty. Pretty girls lead cheers and study boys. Can you think of anything duller than that?”
Delta laughed again, looking dead at me. On the bench, she was eye-level again, no longer taller, and when she pulled her hair back, I could see her flat ears and an ankh tattoo hidden under her sleeve.
“Okay, you’re handsome,” I said. “And too smart for a freshman.”
She removed a glove and rapped my hand once with the tips of her fingers.
“I only see what I see and know what I know.”
Her eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed. Was that my cue? I worried. I thought I was following the lines but fell into confusion. Should I kiss her? Was that what she wanted? No doubt, she knew who I was, what I was, but did she still want a kiss?
When I nudged closer to her side of the bench and adjusted my arm so that it slid behind her waist, her face relaxed into a shimmering glow and her lips parted a bit.
The bench began to sweat, not from bayou heat but from a chilly fever that stole over me. Mist raced across the grass and rushed up my leg. Clouds gathered into a hovering gray mass, blotting out the moon. Each breath seemed shorter, colder. The air closed in tighter and my hands shook. Then in a mad flash, I shut my eyes and brought my lips in a rush to Delta’s neck. My tongue stung from the amber of her perfume. Almost drunk, my head grew dizzy and though Delta’s mouth was moving, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Wild now in my effort to perform, my hand squeezed hard on her breast, as if I might draw sustenance from it. She shrieked out a laugh—I could hear that—then covered my face with hers. She opened her mouth, and her tongue slid between my lips and across my tongue. I sat still and went stiff, feeling the weight of her tongue on mine. Like fur on rubber. Like velvet on eel. When she pulled her face back, my hand still held the bodice of her dress, and one breast popped out. The white globe and bright blue veins filled my eyes in an extreme close-up. Now I was ready to confess everything: every extended trip to the locker room, every hand down my pants, every boy in my mouth, every bit she already knew. Then all she didn’t know: every time Jazz called me up at night, every time he drove me out to a field and laid me on the leather seat of his cab, every time he blew a kiss out the window. My mouth hung open, the words had all rushed out. Next a heaving sound surrounded me, like a great chest exploding. The sound rippled into a scream, and my hands rose to my ears before they began slapping my face. Delta looked at me in horror, I thought, as if I might burst through my shoes to reveal cloven hooves. Yet when she spoke, her voice sounded soothing like the all-knowing debutante in a black-and-white movie. The boy she dated thought he’d fooled her into thinking he was another guy, an up-and-coming young man. But she was never fooled. Near the end as he faced doom, she cradled the moody boy and her eyes glowed like violet embers. “Tell Mama,” she said to the top of his head, “Tell Mama all.”
Black Sheep Boy Page 11