by Aaron Gwyn
In the past, George had been a quiet man; now he was utterly silent. He did not answer his wife’s questions, and when visitors called, he would retreat to his work shed behind the house. He was in considerable pain but took nothing for it. His lower back had deteriorated, his shoulders and hips. Some mornings it would take him upward of an hour to rise from bed. The dreams, as ever, continued to shake him, and he spent much time weighing the benefits of life and death.
Then one evening, Sadie fell from the back porch. She was putting out bread for squirrels, and she slipped, snapping her leg below the knee. From the shed, George heard his wife’s screaming. He managed to position her in the backseat of the car, drive her to the hospital. When they sent her home with a cast and crutches, it was George who helped her to bathe, brought her meals, took her from place to place.
“George,” Sadie would say. “I need to go.”
George would trundle in, assist her to the bathroom, stand outside the door waiting.
It was late that summer when the First Pentecostal brought in Leslie Snodgrass, an evangelist of fifteen, already known across Oklahoma and much of Missouri. People said amazing things of the boy. They claimed signs and wonders, miracles and healing and salvation of the lost. He preached repentance, prayed over the hopelessly ill. The young man came from a small town outside Tishomingo and had been preaching since the age of six. He was short and fair, very thin, but his voice was that of a man three times his years, and audiences watched him with an amazed look. The elders in the crowd would shout and sing, and sinners sat with whitened faces, sinking quietly in their seats. When Snodgrass ended his sermons, old and young alike would fall into the altars to seek mercy. He knelt among them and, when moved, stood to his feet and walked about, laying hands on the sick and troubled of spirit.
Sadie soon heard of this and began asking George to take her to one of these meetings. She wanted to see her leg heal quickly.
George had decided some time before he could not endure another service; he told his wife to find someone else. But Sadie was persistent, and in a matter of nights George found himself sitting along the rear wall of the church, listening to the young evangelist’s words.
He watched with an expression no less amazed than those around him. It was indeed a sight to astonish. The boy moved like one possessed, his eyes tightly shut, wads of tissue clenched in his fists. There were hard men who had heard him preach and could not return to their former lives, but by this point George believed only in anguish, for that, he felt, was the truth of the world, and though entranced by the young man pacing the platform above him, he did not recover his faith.
The boy’s sermon ended with an altar call, and the altars were soon full. George sat with open eyes, staring over the bowed heads. People knelt, wrestling with their spirits. Occasionally, an elder among them would raise his voice in travail. All prayed for what seemed a very long time, and then Snodgrass rose, approached the platform, and asked those in need of healing to come forward. Sadie began tugging at George’s sleeve, wanting him to help her there.
George pulled her to her feet, positioned the crutches beneath her arms. She hobbled out into the aisle and began inching toward the altar, her husband following a few steps behind. They reached the row of people standing along the front of the sanctuary, found themselves a place at the far right. George made sure of Sadie, then leaned against the wall to take the weight from his back.
He watched Snodgrass make his way down the line. The boy had no microphone, no handkerchief or oil. He would stop and speak quietly with each, bow his head and whisper, sometimes laying a pale hand to the person’s shoulder, his demeanor one of tranquillity, calm.
George was shocked to see the people remain standing. They did not fall; they did not quake or run the aisles. They stood their places with broken looks, the wise looks of the condemned.
George noticed his wife was also watching the boy, but her face held a bitter expression, more so the closer Snodgrass came. She seemed to understand that the evangelist would not lay hands to her forehead. He would not send her to the carpet, and no assistant would stand waiting with arms and a blanket. Sadie would leave just as she came, and realizing this, George began to chuckle quietly.
The boy came closer and Sadie’s face grew harsher, and as Snodgrass was praying for the man next to her, she spun suddenly from the line, casting George derision as she turned.
George watched his wife go up the aisle, past the pew where they’d formerly sat, out the double doors into the lobby. A louder laugh escaped his lips, and when he turned back around, his face was cracked from smiling. Snodgrass stood in front of him.
George’s laughter died, and he watched the evangelist with an anxious look, failing for a moment to blink or breathe. The boy was utterly ashen, and he walked sternly up, raised his hand, and placed it to the old man’s chest, closing his eyes to mumble a few words. George did not catch them. Only, the moment they left the boy’s lips, the audience beheld George Crider fall like lightning.
It did not seem so to George. To him his descent seemed to take a very long time. At first there was the feeling his legs had given way, his limbs wilted to nothing. He sensed his arm go numb and a terrific burst go off in his chest just to the left of where the boy had touched him. He felt warm there and very still and the air that buzzed about his ears was like fire.
There was time for George to consider many things before he struck the ground, to consider a time before dreams troubled his sleep, before an injury placed him in a hospital bed. He considered walking forty miles through the Quashita forest, under the pines and cedars of southeast Oklahoma, and then the time of his boyhood under the dense trees, before his brother had fallen, before he had a brother at all. He considered when it was only he and his mother and his father, when they would pick him off the ground, only a child of four years then, place him in the center of a patchwork quilt, and lift him, allowing him to leave the fabric for a moment before he sank back to its folds. They repeated this for what seemed like hours—though it could not have been so long—the thin child rising and falling, caught up, snapped into the air.
It was weightless, that sense, the stomach a rush, face and arms and legs prickling, the heart feeling as if it might split. Rising and falling, and again, and over. If it had always been like that, there would have been point in nothing else but to live in the instant when gravity first took hold and pulled you to its center.
George considered this of all things as he abandoned himself to the fall, unaware he would expire some sixteen inches above the carpet, that his body would strike the floor with a hollow sound.
COURTSHIP
For every female who makes
herself male will enter heaven’s kingdom.
—THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
JANSEN WOULD NOT believe gay the right word for it. In high school he courted several women and liked it just fine, the way they looked and touched him. He did not act in a manner you’d think queer, didn’t stare at other men or grow excited when he saw one on TV. He’d decided that his yearnings for Wisnat were not, by definition, homosexual, for surely this label treated of appetites universally, not cases specific. There had to be another term, a word not yet invented. The bartender spent his days pondering this, for it mattered to him greatly what things were called. The issue, he began to think, was less about male and female and more about feeling—the emotions divorced from gender. Unfortunately, in his case this feeling was strong: heart drooping toward stomach, head buzzing, bowels in a clench. Often, his tongue held a steeled taste at its tip and his eyes jerked nervously about. After much deliberation, many soul-searched nights polishing his length of counter (dictionary lying dog-eared just beneath the register), Jansen concluded he was not gay at all. He concluded his sexual proclivities were straight as the next man’s and the emotional maelstrom he weathered about one thing alone—love.
Dennison Wisnat was the vortex of this storm. Jansen could remember sitting across from
him at Sunday school (plastic veneer table, coloring books of apostles, Pentecostal matron with her hair woven into a great gray bun). He was barely ten, but there was already something about the brows of the boy that drew him. They were not, as are those of the average child, smooth arcs; nor were they the circum-flexed ridges of children more starkly handsome. Wisnat’s eyebrows ran level across their tops, falling sharply at their ends toward the crow’s-feet that would appear in later decades. The effect of this was to give his face a solemn cast, to make the boy appear dejected and, in Jansen’s view, wizened by that dejection. He didn’t know quite what he wanted to do with Wisnat’s features, whether sculpt or pencil them into a sketchbook, mold a thin facsimilar mask and wear it atop his own. He shook away such thoughts (others more disturbing riding, inevitably, their heels), telling himself, at any rate, that such was the relationship of Peter and the Lord, such the rapport of anyone worth the title of friend.
But regardless of pretext, it was there that the bartender’s love began, directed toward his playmate and fellow parishioner, festering over the years to come. Wisnat and Jansen grew inseparable, the latter failing to understand his feelings (little enough confess them), the former gathering every attractive woman that steered along his path. Wisnat was not a high school athlete but managed to accomplish his goals otherwise, keeping at bay the impending darkness through relations with the opposite sex.
Small-town idyll: the drive-in in midsummer, large screen flickering, speaker balanced on half-rolled window, two couples amorous, oblivious of whereabouts. Wisnat is behind the steering wheel, grown to well over six feet, seventeen years of age, thick haired and muscular. The young lady (two years his senior) sits almost in his lap. She gropes and caresses, acts on him, he the disinterested watcher of this play, hands loosely on her back, sad eyes open, reflecting the scene. He seems not to be mindful—she no more to him than an item in a series and, after all, thinks Jansen, is he any more to her? Wisnat looks forward to the next, past the robotic arms and pulleys, down the assembly line, and seeing them extend into the hazed horizon, his eyes are a little less sad—the dream of one to whom he will be more than just an achievement, whose survival will depend on him, this illumines the darkness, makes it bearable. Perhaps for a moment, muses Jansen, who in the backseat is likewise engaged. Jansen peers over the shoulder of his date and into the rearview mirror to see Wisnat’s strange expression (open-eyed, unfocused, fogged by dream), watching his friend carefully, praying that the girl he is kissing does not open her painted eyes.
THEN THE COLLEGE years. University of Oklahoma. Jansen majoring in hotel management, Wisnat in business. They lived together in an apartment complex: single bedroom with bath and kitchen, balcony overlooking the division’s pool. Summer and spring, Wisnat held forth from this gallery, occasionally settling his beer in his lap to wave up the women who would be sunbathing below, waiting, it seemed to Jansen, only for invitation. He would open the door and lead them out to Wisnat—brows drooping at the sides of his sunglasses—then go back and sit in his recliner to observe. Sometimes the newly introduced couple would make their way back through the sliding glass doors, across the carpet, down the hall to the bedroom. Jansen registered every moan of mouth and squeak of springs, calmly recorded them, smiling. He would match eyes with Wisnat when he emerged, an inquisitive look on his face yet hardly one of annoyance.
Though one might have thought these trysts would make Jansen writhe with jealousy or, at the very least be reluctant to assist with his friend’s seductions, the converse was true. Jansen misjudged Wisnat’s desire as he misjudged his own (even then the belief that he was homosexual plagued him, and he would push it away with flawed syllogisms: I am not gay, gays are interested in sex. I am only in love). He envisioned Wisnat’s libido a pit, not bottomless but very large. When that pit was full (the quicker it was full), Jansen thought he might profess his feelings and be met with something other than a blank stare or fist. As he led each woman onto the balcony, Jansen pictured a pile of female bodies slowly rising, torso by torso, ineluctably filling the chasm in Wisnat’s cratered soul.
A month into his junior year (the pit’s bottom, he’d decided, was beginning to come into sight), Jansen’s father died. Six months later, his mother followed. He stood above her grave with Wisnat’s hand on his shoulder (the young man’s eyes still sadder than those of his mourning friend), thumbing, in his pocket, the insurance check he’d just been handed. They made the hour’s drive from Perser back to Norman: silence, whirring of tires on imperfect stretches of pavement, more silence. Back in their apartment, Jansen went into the bathroom and, cupping water to his face, found several strands of black hair wound around the stopper. He unspooled them, checked them against his own, turned on the overhead light and began to examine his scalp. Though his hair was relatively thick, though he had just come from the funeral of his mother, an additional worry began to shudder through him. The grief of loved ones gone and the anxiety over love uncaptured appeared to be taking its toll.
Over the next year he found the same black hairs along the floor in the bedroom, on the kitchen stove, along the back of the recliner. Squatting one day, naked and wet, he pulled an enormous clump of them from the drain in the shower. He conducted rigorous inspections of his scalp and could see no patches, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they began to show. He could not guess how Wisnat might feel about this, wondered if this alone would prevent their union. As if in sympathy Wisnat brought no more women into the apartment, his expression beyond sadness now, nearing apocalypse.
And then there was the day Jansen was doing laundry, stooped to the dryer, and found a dried ball of black hair spinning in the whites: a tumbleweed among the T-shirts and sheets. Clutching it in a fist, he went upstairs and walked out to the balcony to confess his affliction. The sun was setting, dyeing the world in crimson. Jansen steered his eyes away, feeling, of a sudden, very old. He approached Wisnat from behind, laid a hand to his shoulder and, looking down, saw an almost bare patch on the crown of the seated man’s head.
“Jansen,” Wisnat told him, without turning, without raising his voice above a whisper, “I think I’m going bald.”
THE WOMEN STOPPED. Just that quickly, it was over. The balcony doors were shut and the blinds drawn across them. Jansen watched his friend in the wavering light of the television, watched him shed hair after hair until all that was left was a furred ridge running atop his ears and winding about the base of his skull. He did not know it was possible for one to grow bald so quickly and continued to check his own hair for fear the same might happen to him. But part and tug as he might (bent across the sink with a comb in one hand, a tuft of hair in the other), Jansen looked much as he always had. If anything, his hair had become thicker.
That fall, Wisnat withdrew from the business program and enrolled in beautician’s school. He didn’t discuss the decision, did not remark at any time afterward. Jansen came into the living room one evening and saw Wisnat had replaced a Cost Accounting textbook with one that detailed the procedures for and innovations in hair dye. He could not confront Wisnat. A new emotion seemed to be bleeding the cracks of his friend’s sad mask, one of complete and utter desperation. Jansen knew Wisnat was not interested in the field, didn’t care about haircuts, hair products, the proper way to give a perm. He knew the way Wisnat’s mind operated—calculating, machinelike, the logic of the assembly line dictating his ethics and morale. His friend, propped in the recliner with a hundred-page study of testosterone, was searching for a way to regrow hair.
For hours each day, Wisnat would explore his options—on the Internet, in the library, faxes coming from e-mail contacts through a local Kinko’s. He attempted every remedy he could discover: herbal or folkloric, pharmaceutical or electronic. There were pills and tonics; scalp massages and conditioners; oils, applicators, liquid vitamins; an expensive cap that plugged into the wall. He scoured medical journals and health books, ancient tomes revealing therapies by peoples no
w extinct. Using Jansen’s student ID, he registered for a chemistry course that met evenings, learning just enough to inform his doctors why their treatments were unsuccessful. Arms crossed to their chests, they would shake their heads, reminding Wisnat who held a degree in medicine, who was earning a beautician’s. The patient returned their looks, unblinking.
Upon their respective graduations, Jansen and Wisnat loaded their belongings into a U-Haul and moved into the deserted house of the former’s deceased parents, back outside the oil town of Perser. Jansen used the insurance money that had been accruing interest to purchase an isolated, rural bar, one mile south of the Pentecostal church. After renovations and six months’ business, he bought also a barbershop that had recently come up for sale, signing the deed over to Wisnat. (The man was now acquiring a belly to accompany his balding skull. Though Jansen’s love for him had not faltered, he hated to see Wisnat metamorphose into something so pale, so hairless and bloated. The desperation had faded from Wisnat’s face only to be replaced by an even more profound expression, one redolent of despair.) Jansen walked in, pitched him the keys, and as if that action had triggered an engine, Wisnat woke the next morning and dressed in his barber’s smock and slacks. He drove down Main Street, pulled in front of his new shop, unlocked the doors, turned the OPEN sign streetward, without pause pressing a button that started the red-and-white pole spinning in its cylinder of glass, this candy cane signaling to the barber neither pleasure nor sweetness but rather an attendant decay.
AND SO THEY entered a new era, a period so like marriage that the two refused to make jokes about it. Not because it did not occur to them to do so but rather because the obviousness of such comedy would have killed the laughter before it left their throats.
The bar Jansen purchased established a faithful clientele (mindful of his town’s history, he named it the Gusher), one that expanded with each new week. He would awaken late in the morning, dither about the house in his robe, drive into town to meet Wisnat for lunch. They’d walk across the street to a shop that sold coffee and sandwiches, Jansen carrying the conversation, Wisnat responding with an occasional nod. Wisnat had never been one to ramble, rationing his speech as a stranded man does water. Now he seemed all but mute. Perhaps, Jansen tried to convince himself, the customers were wearing on him—making small talk about weather and mortgages and farm equipment for eight hours a day was affecting his desire to speak. But behind his self-delusions, Jansen knew Wisnat had traversed some desert of the mind, a pair of footprints tracking an infinity of sand. His friend, as he’d known him, might not be coming back.