The Color of Trees

by Canaan Parker

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’re going to throw T.J. in the fish pond,” said Gary Acheson.

  “It’s a school tradition,” said Captain Zero. “When varsity football beats Whitehaven, somebody in the form goes in for a swim.”

  The little beast in me was instantly aroused by this idea. For a moment I felt disembodied, as my body and feelings left my thinking in the lurch. A voice usually silent spoke its piece. T.J. had teased and bothered me on the corridor. He made me nervous, and now I — all of us — were going to have our revenge.

  We rushed through the doorway onto the corridor. Ashley Downer was standing in the hall. He stepped backwards suddenly as if he thought we were coming for him.

  “Where’s T. J.?” Captain Zero hollered.

  “He’s in the bathroom,” Ashley told us.

  We charged down the hall and grabbed T.J. as he came out of the bathroom. He started to laugh at first, until Gary Acheson ducked under his armpit and hoisted him by the waist.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” he said, his face turning red.

  No one answered. Boys were pawing and clutching at T.J.’s arms, legs, ankles, shirttail, and collar. In an instant he was swept up horizontally. I grabbed him by the pant leg, near his thigh. I felt his warm skin beneath the cloth. Wanting more, I let go and pushed my hand further up his leg. My fingers now were grabbing his inner thigh and my wrist was tucked in his crotch. Along the base of my thumb I felt a small, tender lump, warmer than his leg, slippery. I pressed my wrist in tighter. What a hypocrite. Here I was, copping a secret feel while T. J. was getting mugged! I walked sideways down the hall with the crowd of boys, my head cocked to the side and my arm stuck into the tangle of bodies, clinging with my hand to T.J.’s leg. Ashley held open the door for us. In stumbling half steps, we carried T.J. across the quad and down a dirt path to the bottom of the hill. I couldn’t see his face, just a sliver of his midsection arching up in resistance. His shirt was pulled up and I could see his writhing navel. As we neared the base of the hill his body went slack, with just an occasional jerk of his legs. We trampled a path through a patch of waist-high yellow weeds until we stood at the edge of the fish pond. Then we calmed. We turned our heads towards the rustle of an invisible animal running for cover through the tall grass. Hands dropped away from T.J.’s body until just four boys were holding him. He hung still and slack like a hammock, his head sunk into his shirt collar so that he looked like a flustered child in too large a suit.

  “Catch your breath, T.J.,” said Gary Acheson. Then they swung him back and forth and tossed him into the pond.

  T.J. fell into the water with a resounding plop. A half second later, a spray of green water and mud droplets splattered onto the shoal.

  “Agghhh! Gross!” yelled out Ashley, spitting mud off his tongue.

  “What are you complaining about, Downer? Isn’t this your natural habitat?”

  “This is where Ashley comes for his midnight snack of flies and mosquitoes.”

  T.J.’s head popped up out of the water. His drenched hair was hanging to one side of his face, clinging to his ears. He dog-paddled towards us until he could stand up. Then he pulled off his shoe, scooped up some mud, and swung it at us furiously.

  “Fuck you guys,” he yelled, his voice warbling like a whippoorwill. He kicked off his other shoe and tossed his head to flick his hair out of his eyes. Through his disgust with the mud and the moss on his shirt, I could see he was trying not to laugh. He wiped his hands on his pants, then wiped his forearm across his mouth and plucked a soaked brown leaf out of his hair.

  “You fucking assholes,” he said, now smiling brightly. I smiled too, as I watched him stripping himself of wet leaves and weeds, and slapping clumps of mud off his pants. T.J. knew he deserved to get dunked, and I couldn’t help admire how he accepted his just deserts with humor. No one of us was his match, and we’d admitted it with this gang attack. It had taken twelve of us in a crude show of force to achieve even this much equilibrium — an equality T.J. now dismissed with brattish laughter.

  “Let’s get Kent Mason,” someone said.

  “Only one person is supposed to go. That’s the tradition,” said Gary Acheson.

  “Kent Mason!” yelled Captain Zero. The boys turned and ran back up the hill, screaming Indian war hoots. I walked away more slowly. I wasn’t interested in dunking Kent. When I got across the patch of weeds, I heard T.J. behind me coughing. I turned and looked at him. He’d taken off his socks and shirt and was wringing out the pond water. I wanted to talk to him, but couldn’t. I wondered if he knew I was the one feeling his dick. He didn’t appear to know or care. I watched him for several moments, then turned and walked slowly up the hill, headed back to my room.

  My mother spent the night in the Bennetts’ guest room and we had breakfast with the Bennetts the following morning. I was still trying desperately to show off. When she mentioned our beagle puppy at home named Caesar, I explained to Mrs. Bennett that I had named him that because he was born on the Ides of March. My mother didn’t get the reference to Shakespeare, though she didn’t appear concerned.

  After breakfast, I called a taxi. We stood in front of the building and waited.

  “How do you like it here, Peter?”

  “Great. I like it a lot.” v

  She looked at me keenly, still sizing me up. “Prep school,” she murmured, shaking her head.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Nothing, Peter.” She took hold of my chin and looked into my eyes, searching for tears, I thought. I felt guilty because there were none. For a moment I became confused and frightened. The taxi pulled up.

  “Do you want me to tell your father anything?”

  “Tell him I’m fine. Say hi to Seth, too.”

  She got in the cab and slammed the door. “I’ll be home for Thanksgiving,” I said. She waved as the driver pulled off. I stood on the steps and watched as the car drove around the quad and disappeared through the bushes atop the hill.

  I felt mildly ill as I watched her ride off, as though my breakfast hadn’t agreed with me. There was a dull thickness in my chest, and a very slight quivering under my skin. I needed to walk, and headed towards the athletic fields. The morning had turned windy. The school groundskeepers were out cleaning trash from under the football bleachers. I walked further. A group of Third Formers were on the JV field playing a pickup game of lacrosse. Sean Landport was one of them. He had on denim shorts, the cuffs rolled up over his thighs, a black jersey, and black high-top sneakers without socks. “It’s too cold for him to dress like that,” I thought. I sat down on the edge of the field and watched the game. Sean saw me and waved his lacrosse stick. I waved back. I felt much better.

  Sean could always make me feel better. We’d become good friends by now, playing together on the JV football team. After practice every day we would dry off by the boiler in the equipment drying room. It seemed almost perversely sweet that I could stand there naked with Sean, enchanted, while he bemoaned the absence of women. Sean’s body was like a bottomless ice cream sundae; I lapped and lapped with my eyes (my pleasure was just that palpable) and never got a stomachache. It didn’t bother me at all that he was straight.

  Sean played wide receiver on JV football, and he was a natural, with his hypnotic, long stride and big, sure hands. I had never played sports before (in New York I was afraid to go out and play), but Coach Craig was patient with me. I couldn’t catch or throw a football, so I was positioned at defensive tackle, which required only that I hit people with my body.

  Football was intense, though we were only pony-league level. Every Wednesday we played against rival prep schools. We’d dig up the grass with our cleats, pound our bodies together, grunt, and holler in mock falsetto fury. One or two fluttering footballs would fall by chance into someone’s arms, or the defense would slip in the mud and some lucky fourteen-year-old would run free for twenty yards and score the winning touchdown. Then we’d line up
and shake hands after the game, disavowing our earlier hatred. After the game I’d take a long shower, bowing my head under streams of steaming water, my body still tingling from tackles. I watched out of the corner of my eye as my friend Sean tugged off his muddy socks, wriggled out of his padded football pants, and then ran around the locker room in his jockstrap. The memory of the most solid thuds replayed itself in my nerves, the way you still feel the rock of the ocean hours after swimming at the beach.

  Football and classwork took up most of my time that fall. But my brightest memories of my first year in boarding school are of boys — an endless parade of boys in jockstraps, boys in basketball uniforms, boys in corduroy cutoffs and bare feet, nude boys toweling themselves to excess in the dormitory showers.

  I remember mostly legs — T.J. and Sean had the best, along with Billy Green — and the golden flesh tone, a natural-looking, light bronzing of the skin that stopped short of redness and faded gently at the curved edge of the muscle to its pale, native color. In that first Indian summer, cutoffs were a delightful discovery, as were boxer shorts indoors year-round.

  At fourteen, sex for me was primarily a visual affair. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to do anything. All I wanted was to be aroused by sight of skin, genitals, and adorable faces, to express my feelings through body language — spread crotch, crossed legs, and lingering stares. And to talk, however briefly, with those few special boys with whom I fell in love. In high school I liked boys with light or dark brown hair and eyes — earthtones, the color of my own skin.

  There was nothing subliminal about my homosexuality. I knew that I fell in love with boys, and I knew that I liked to look at their dicks (I hadn’t yet developed an interest in rear ends). What I did not know was how to actually go about having sex with another boy. I visualized something that resembled frottage, but couldn’t quite see the point of it. Knowing only the heterosexual model, my fantasies took a heterosexual form. To have sex in my dreams, I had to imagine myself as a girl, which did not trouble me or seem odd.

  T.J. Adams was the most intriguing boy at school. He must have gotten wind of my queerness, because he became more aggressive in his pursuit. He stared back at me hard in ancient history class. And in the gymnasium, too; he didn’t just undress me with his eyes, he put out cigarettes on my skin.

  But looking didn’t satisfy T.J. He wanted to talk about it. “Wow, Peter Givens in the nude,” he said in the bathroom one morning, his eyes bright with pep, as I fumbled half-asleep with the rings of the shower curtain.

  Another time by the urinals he shocked me with a fistful of morning hard-on, tugged reluctantly from his pajama bottoms. T. J. looked at me blurrily as he urinated, his tight, red muscle forcefully spewing piss against the back of the John while he breathed hard through his nose. When he finished, he touched the tip and his dick grew stiffer while he looked up the bathroom wall and yawned. Stiffness seemed T.J.’s natural state, his erection fueled inexhaustibly by the streams of air I could hear him sucking into his nostrils.

  I must have been staring conspicuously, because he smiled sleepily and asked, “What’s so interesting?” I packed up my shaving kit and hurried out of the bathroom, toothpaste still dripping down my lip.

  Two days later, as I was walking towards the athletic fields to watch our home soccer team, T. J. strode up beside me.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To watch the soccer game.” I frowned out of surprise and walked a little faster.

  “You come from Harlem, right?”

  “Yes. East Harlem.”

  “So what, are you a tough guy?”

  “No, I’m not tough.”

  “You ever beat anybody up?”

  “Not yet.”

  T.J. laughed, a clucking, aborted chuckle. “Oh, are you going to beat me up?”

  “Probably not.”

  “How do you like school so far?”

  “It’s okay. Except it’s too strict.”

  “You don’t seem to be having any problem.”

  We were behind the gymnasium now, and there was no one else in sight. The path to the fields was strewn with brittle brown leaves, a few of them dancing fitfully in the wind, inches above the ground. T.J.’s hair was fluttering across his forehead. He looked at me with a soft, direct expression. I glanced at him and thought again that his eyes and hair, like my skin, were the precise color of living wood.

  “You play football, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I’ve been wanting to get to know you,” he said.

  I started walking faster. T. J. was beginning to bother me. I wasn’t sure what his intentions were, but I vaguely felt he had stepped out of line by approaching me alone behind the gym. “I’ll see you later. I have to go to the game,” I said. I was very brusque and rude. I stepped sideways away from him and then cut through a side path and walked the long way to the fields.

  After that day I wouldn’t speak to him at all. We were assigned to the same table for meals but I acted completely disinterested. He made me feel very strange. Whenever he tried to talk to me, a yellow haze would block my vision, as if I’d risen too quickly from a deep knee bend.

  “You want to study for the ancient history test tonight?”

  “I — No, I have to work on geometry.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes, all night,” I said indignantly. “I’m behind in geometry.”

  T.J.’s brown eyes flickered and went blank. “Suit yourself. Let me know when you’re working on ancient history.”

  It wasn’t guilt that turned me away from T.J. I felt my ability to respond to the beauty of boys, a beauty that surrounded me in abundance, was a private personal asset, like a box of pudding cups sent from home that I kept under my bed and wouldn’t share with anyone else. It was harmless, and it felt too good to be wrong. In my deepest private world, an amorphous, nonverbal world of unasked questions and aborted thoughts, I felt that liking boys was as purely natural as the grass and the trees that populated my school so richly. I continued to play Peeping Tom with T.J. in ancient history class and on the corridor.

  But I thought something like that was supposed to be kept a secret. That was the issue, secrecy. I was conditioned, like a spy, not to reveal such confidential matters. To be explicit, to violate the code of silence — even the thought created yellow static fields before my eyes, strong enough to blind me. And T.J. was drawing me alarmingly close to the static barrier charge between the inner and outer worlds of queerness.

  4

  It was obvious Ashley Downer didn’t like me. Perhaps he needed someone on the corridor to have a lower status than he did. Or maybe he thought making me a target would take the pressure off him for being the class nerd.

  He was too shrewd to make race the issue, at least not explicitly. My hallmates wouldn’t have gone along with that. Ashley made it a question of money.

  “When are you going to pay me the money you owe me, Givens?”

  “I beg your pardon, Ashley?” I said.

  “I’m subsidizing your scholarship. Everyone on this corridor is. What are you going to do for us in return?”

  Being fourteen years old, I’d rarely been confronted with such direct hostility. I’d endured enough physical threats, of course — from the boy in fourth grade who tried to steal my coat, or the three girls in junior high who tried to take my bus pass every month. But Ashley’s tactics caught me off guard.

  “I think you should be working in the kitchen. Or mopping the floors. You should make up our beds every morning. It’s only fair. My father is paying your tuition. All of our fathers are.”

  We were sitting in the Common Room on Saturday. It had been a pleasant winter afternoon, quiet and cozy, until Ashley started his tirade. Barrett Granger was there, and Kent Mason and Captain Zero. T. J. was sitting in the corner reading, one of the few times I’d ever seen him quiet.

  “Say something, Givens! If you had any decency, you’d see I was right
. You come all the way out here from Harlem to go to our school, and you refuse to pay your share.”

  “Calm down, Frogger,” said Captain Zero.

  “Ribbit, ” said Kent Mason behind Ashley’s back.

  “I’m serious. Don’t you know what the school could do with all that scholarship money? They could hire maids. They could build a new hockey rink.” Ashley turned towards Kent Mason. “I don’t know about your family, Mason, but I have a maid at home. Why should I have to clean up here when there are scholarship students?”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. I looked around the room for support.

  “I think working in the kitchen is fair for scholarship students,” said Barrett.

  “You guys could probably cook better,” laughed Captain Zero.

  “That’s right. And if the Headmaster won’t impose it, you should volunteer to clean our rooms. We should make it corridor policy,” said Ashley.

  “Frog, why don’t you go lay some eggs under a rock somewhere?” T.J. interrupted. Ashley ignored him and turned his back. “Just because your father is on the board of trustees—”

  “That’s right. He is. And I’m going to propose it to him.” Ashley turned towards me and spoke impersonally. “It’s for your own good. So that you don’t become confused. I’ve noticed lately that you’ve been acting confused about your background. As though you were one of us. You aren’t, you know. I’m just being truthful. Your confusion could cause you problems in life.”

  Ashley sent a memo to the Headmaster threatening to complain to his father. The mood of the campus changed in the following days. I didn’t speak to any white student. The eleven black students and the one Native American student on scholarship showed the pressure. We sat together in the cafeteria, in chapel, and in the library. Keith Hanson said we should all withdraw if the Headmaster implemented Downer’s proposal. I felt awful at the thought of being forced to return home. Everywhere I went I felt like an outsider. Ashley, through his pure viciousness, received more respect from the Third Form than before. On the corridor, he glared at me with a sullen malice.