Formaldehyde leaked clear from the antler tips, one fat drop at a time, diluting the puddle of blood on the tile. Its edges trembled with surface tension as they stretched wide. Slowly, carefully, Frank pulled our hands out, back down the length of the neck. The skin fell in a curtain away from the muscle, a pale, dull pink webbed with white fat and gray sinew. The whole world felt raw and exposed.
He hurried to the sink, his hands shaking. He scrubbed them until they were pink, scraping away the blood, the dried paint. We couldn’t look at each other. When he was done, he flung the water from his hands into the basin and looked around for a clean towel on which to dry them, but every one was soiled. He held his fingers dripping out in front of him, afraid to touch anything. A little paint was left at the bottom of his thumbnail. For his sake, I washed my hands too, the water so hot at first I had to yank them away while it cooled.
“I try not to think about them,” I said. “My parents. We did our best to love each other. That’s all anyone can do.”
I wiped my hands on my britches.
“Wendell.” His voice was low and hoarse, scraped raw by desperation, and shame, and by supplication. “I—” He shook his head, looked away, rested his hand on the counter. With one finger, I scraped the paint from his thumbnail.
He leaned forward, resting his forehead on mine, and breathed a long, heavy breath. It sounded like giving up. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. The words broke across my cheek, hot and loud as thunder. “I’m real sorry.”
I kissed his jaw. I kissed the pink razor burn across his Adam’s apple. His stubble scraped my lips tender.
On his biceps, clouds unwound from a dark skein about the buck’s antlers, scudding motionless along his pale underarm; they tangled into the tuft of damp hair in his armpit. Two of the other boys had had to hold his arm over his head so he couldn’t yank it down, while another shoved a folded-up belt in his mouth so he didn’t crack a tooth gritting them, left permanent marks in the leather. I lifted his arm and kissed him there, the clouds warm and wet on my cheek, I breathed in their muggy air. He shivered and tensed, his eyes squeezing shut. He smelled like the street right as it starts to rain.
On the other side of his arm, those same clouds twisted and piled into thunderheads that condensed black into the night sky itself, studded with pale stars of bare skin. “It must have hurt,” I said, running my palm over it. It felt cooler and smoother than the rest of him, as though it really were the night. Every time I pulled back to get a better look, there on the bed in the hot, cramped efficiency where I lived above my shop, every time I stopped to ask him what something meant, or how it felt, he laughed with mild desperation and looked as though I’d sentenced him to death, and pulled me quickly against him again.
“It bled black for a week,” he said, his lips on mine. “Soaked through my shirtsleeves.”
The sky stretched across his shoulder to his collarbone, from which a flock of birds of all kinds, swallows and sparrows, hawks and owls, bluebirds and red, emerged, their bodies and beaks overlapping, the sky’s darkness fractured and furling into them, drawn into the curves of their wings and the feathers of their tails, dragged with them as they strained toward his breastbone. The blond hair on his chest blurred the lines of their bodies. Their wings beat against my lips.
Above his belt was a tiny, still-forming scar, shiny and tender as a plant stem, where shrapnel had grazed him just enough to split the skin. He leaned back as I worked my fingers underneath his waistband, he held his breath as I found it there, that warmest part of him, and pulled it free, barely curved like the branch of an antler, long and hard, the velvet just rubbed away from the bone. Its musk was unruly, wild, the kind that lingers on bark, marking to whom the land belongs. I felt the heavy pound of his heart inside it.
He wrapped his arms around my waist and dragged my hips to his; he pushed my legs up, my knees to my chest, but held himself just slightly above me, squinting a little, looking at me much longer and more closely than I was accustomed to, and in a way no one had ever looked at me before: as though he were seeing, all of a sudden, the answer to a question he’d been asking for a long, long time.
In the last thin film of evening light, he blushed, hives rising in patches up from his collarbone, dappling red the skin of his throat. And then he grinned, open and expansive, and in that moment he seemed happier, more animated, more alive, than anyone I had ever known.
He ran his thumb along my eyebrow. It had been years since a hand had touched my face.
The birds rode the ragged currents of his breath, rising and falling. Trembling, he rested against me all his heavy weight, and pressed his face into my hair, and gasped as he pushed slow and straining inside me, where he waited, rigid and pulsing and still, until my body believed he was just another part of itself.
SEVEN
I’m in the den, playing my solitaire video game—it’s a little handheld thing they were giving away as a consolation prize on one of his game shows, lets you play solitaire without having to shuffle the cards, so it’s easier on your knuckles—when a Special Breaking News Update comes on the television: the mother’s finally confessed to killing her son. All the stations are playing the grainy video from the police interrogation. Somebody in the department leaked it, which they promise will be the subject of a thorough in-house review. It’s taken from overhead in the dingy little interview room, so the only thing you’ve got a good clear view of is the part in her poorly-dyed hair, the dark roots creeping like fingers out of her scalp and into her blond curls, and her own hands flat on the table, fingers spread wide and painted nails chipped. The sound of the recording’s real scratchy, so they’ve put captions on the whole thing.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she says. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I was trying to give him a bath, and he kept crying. He wouldn’t stop. And I was so tired. He cried all night, no matter what I did, he just kept crying, so I couldn’t sleep. My apartment was so small, anywhere I went, I still heard him. I got earplugs and everything. I tried. But I just wanted him to be quiet, just for a second, that’s all. Just for a second. So I held him under the water, I just dipped him, really, just for a second. Just to muffle the noise. It was only a second. And then I pulled him up again, I pulled him right back out of it, right back out of the water, and he wasn’t breathing. It was only a second. I didn’t mean to do it.” Her hands stay still the entire time.
“I was tired,” she says. “I was just so tired.”
There’s eight whole hours of interrogation, apparently, but they keep playing just the one clip, over and over. All the news stations are calling her Debbie Drowner.
I slap my knees, I’m so excited. It’s about time something good happened. I hurry down the hall. That vacuum’s still standing outside the bathroom, right where he left it. Hasn’t touched it since the day he scavenged it, but every time I come near, with even just the formless, inchoate intent of possibly dragging it back down the driveway for the garbage truck, he twists himself around in the bed, as if he can sound even my murkiest wordless thoughts, and shouts through the door, “What are you doing?”
“She did it,” I shout back.
“Don’t you touch that vacuum.”
I throw the door open. “The mother did it. Drowned him in his own bathwater.”
The bedroom smells like old socks. It’s turning fall already, starting to get cool, but the house stays stuffy. Frank’s kicked the sheets off.
“What?” he says. He looks so small, curled up there on the bed, his wrists and ankles swallowed in their cuffs. He must have lost twenty, thirty pounds already. Maybe more.
“Little Larry,” I say. “There’s finally going to be justice for Little Larry.” That’s what the shrill lady lawyer on the television keeps saying. “You were right. I thought for sure I had you this time, but you were right all along.” I wait for him to make some acknowledgment of triumph. “Now, what I want to know is why she reported him missing in the first place. After all t
hat time. She had no reason to. She’s estranged from his daddy, and from her own parents. She could have got away with it forever if she’d wanted to, just moved off and pretended to be somebody else, and nobody’d have been the wiser. That’s the mystery now. A real mystery.”
Frank rolls onto his back and stares at the dust motes lazing through the light from the bay window.
“Probably for attention,” I say, cuing him. “A sick need for attention.”
“Will you turn the air on?” he says. “It’s hot in here.”
The thermostat’s right there on the wall over his nightstand. I walk over to it and flip the switch to COOL. The walls rumble far away.
“They’ve got the actual footage of her confession,” I say. “All the gory details, straight from her very own mouth. You know she drove around with his body in her trunk for weeks? Right up until the day she called the police. Said she ‘couldn’t bear to let him go.’”
“Hm.” Looks like he’s got fuzzy gray mold growing in the wrinkles around his mouth.
“You need to shave,” I say.
“Ain’t worth the time it takes. Nobody cares what I look like.”
“I care.”
“But you’re stuck with me either way,” he says grimly, as if with great sympathy for my plight.
“The police might recall the footage at any moment,” I say. “There could be an injunction.”
He gives me a tired, resigned look, begging me not to start again. The dust floats into the hallway, gets pulled into the vent in the floor, through the long ducts of wrinkled silver foil inside the walls, and gathers in gray sheets on the filters. They gasp and wheeze as the air strains through. I walk back to the hall.
“Don’t you touch my vacuum,” he says.
“Why? It’s been sitting there for two weeks. It’s an eyesore.”
“I’m fixing it.”
“With what? Prayers?”
“You leave it right where it is,” he says. “I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
“What’s preventing you from getting to it now?”
“I’m formulating a plan.” He turns his back to me.
“If you don’t get out of that bed, I’m throwing the vacuum away.”
His voice is firm and grave, but detached, too, as if from some oracle warning, through wisps of narcotic haze, of something terrible in which he has no particular stake. “Don’t throw the vacuum away,” he says into his pillow.
I stand there a long time, longer than I should, staring at it, before I finally grab the handle and tug it behind me down the hall. The sheets rustle as Frank rolls over. I drag it out the front door and yank it down the step and onto the ground, good and hard so it makes a loud thud on each one. Frank yells something, but I can’t hear it very well from out here. I stop and wait. I give him time to push himself out of the bed and shuffle down the hall, or to pound on the bay window and shake one big finger at me. I give him a chance.
Then I drag the vacuum all the way through the trees down to the road, where those three bastard children have crossed onto our property and are writing curse words and drawing pictures of oversized breasts in bright chalk on the curb. They scramble backwards into the street when they see me, all pale and blond and mangy, like they’ve spent every moment of their lives up to this one locked in a dark cellar.
“Hey,” shouts the oldest. He blinks slowly. “That’s our vacuum!”
“He’s got our vacuum!” the middle one yells, as if it’s his very own discovery.
The youngest, four or five years old, starts to cry at the sight of me and runs away.
“You get out of here,” I snap at the other two. The oldest throws a nub of chalk, but it bounces off the mailbox and lands at my feet, and they run away after their little brother. Don’t even stop to gather up the tools of their vandalism.
I step on the chalk, one piece at a time, grinding them into powdery neon smears across the asphalt. The feel of each one cracking apart, like an old, brittle bone under my heel, gives me a little thrill of joy.
EIGHT
We went to the beach together the end of that first summer, stayed in a little two-room shack with plywood walls so flimsy the sea breeze would have knocked them down on top of us if there weren’t so many gaps between the boards for it to slip through instead of strain against. We slept for the first time in the same bed, so narrow he crushed me against the wall and had to peel his chest from my sweaty back just to roll over, but I rested better than I had in years. I loved how deeply he breathed in the night, how early and suddenly he rose in the morning, as though sleep were a thin covering you could throw back as easily as the sheets. I loved how he had to stoop every time he walked through a door.
He cooked breakfast, humming as he pushed scrambled eggs around a dented skillet on the hot plate and waited for the last gleaming bits of moisture to burn away, while I summoned the will to get up. Even at my happiest, it always took me a long time lying in the bed, half-awake, to convince myself the world was worth waking into. He had the loveliest voice, though, could have been a singer if he’d wanted. Every note sounded like a deep laugh.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said, when the pop and sizzle and smell of bacon frying finally pulled me shuffling to the worn wood bench at the dining table. It barely fit between the walls. We had to climb over it to get from one side to the other.
“This is it,” he said. “Bacon, eggs, and toast. Don’t expect nothing else.” He’d learned it in the army. He was in his swim trunks already, and a white undershirt with yellow sweat stains creeping from the armpits. He scraped the eggs and bacon onto my plate and pressed two slices of bread into the greasy pan. Nothing I’ve ever cooked, in all these years, has ever tasted as good.
Afterwards, we walked through loose, hot sand that fell away from our feet and pulled us into lurching, uneven steps, down to where the waves solidified it into wet silt that held us up and held, for a few moments, the shape of our footprints. It was early still, maybe ten o’clock, and the light was hazy and soft, broken on the waves and blurred with salt. The breeze blew the loose sand in tumbling swirls toward our legs, then away, knotting together and blowing apart. There wasn’t hardly anyone else on the beach, just clumps of families so far away they could have been piles of driftwood, or heaps of seaweed. They may have been. Realtors had only built the rickety bridge to the island a couple years earlier, and there was just the one ramshackle motel then, and some falling-down shanties like ours tucked into the dunes for solitary fishermen.
We took each other’s pictures with the camera I’d bought to photograph my mounts for a newspaper ad. In them, he’s standing with his hands on his hips like he’s surveying the shore and not particularly pleased with what he sees, his brow jutted low to drape both his squinting eyes in shadow, the corrugated sea hammered out behind him. Just from the walk down to the water, he’s already drenched in sweat, his shirt hanging in heavy folds, his hair stringy and flat with it. His bare legs are huge, his calves almost as thick as his thighs.
He tugged his shirt over his head and grabbed my hand, pulled me toward the water. His palm felt rough and smooth at the same time, like sandpaper caked with the dust it’s ground away from wood, and his cheeks and shoulders and chest were sunburnt bright pink now, with dead skin peeling away in thin, papery scraps.
“You go on,” I said, taking his shirt.
“You can’t swim?”
“I can swim,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s no fun by yourself.”
“I don’t trust water I can’t see my feet through.”
He looked mighty disappointed.
I watched him wade out past the sandbar, where the waves crashed and foamed, until the ocean covered his shoulders and its rolling surface sometimes obscured him completely from view before it sank again toward the earth, and there he spread his arms, lay on his back, and floated as though a lighter man had never been born. I could hardly believe so
mebody of his size could float so effortlessly: palms upturned to the sun, head leaned back as on a cushion, legs lounging just beneath the water with their upturned toes breaking through it to point at the sky.
I sat just beyond the water’s reach and wriggled my fingers and toes into the wet, gleaming sand at the furthest edge of a just-receded wave. I scooped up fistfuls of it, let it run between my fingers and over the edges of my hand. When I opened my fist and spread it wide, the sand cupped inside it broke open along the lines of my palm.
Frank waved at me as if I was an old friend he hadn’t seen in years and couldn’t believe his incredible fortune to come upon here, in this very place, his tattoos warping with the movements of his muscles like the shadow of a shifting cloud upon his skin. The waves built up and passed beneath him. Sometimes the water ran across and pooled in the hollow between his chest and stomach, but it never could push him under. I understood, then, how he made it to shore while all those other boys drowned, and I waved back, the wet sand trickling down my forearm, hardening as it dried into grainy, translucent rivulets that cracked and fell away. A wave spread itself across the shore as thin as it could without disappearing, then gathered itself up as it slipped backwards beneath the next, which unfurled forward and over it, as though the two were actually separate bodies, instead of twin fibers of the same heaving muscle. I marveled at that, how a single thing could move both forwards and backwards, in two directions at once.
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