Pins: A Novel

by Jim Provenzano

  Dink held two pinched fingers to his lips.

  “Look, if they do and even if they don’t you are no longer Dink to me. Dya unnastand what I’m sayin’? We are gonna have to put up a tough front, okay? What you said, about the Orange and Black.”

  “What?”

  “It’s always Halloween.”

  Dink’s eyes registered, his mouth open. He just wanted to kiss him once, those open lips, his stupidly cute face. Dink leaned in, put his hand on his shoulder as if knighting him. “Joseph most just. Joseph most chaste. Joseph most cute.”

  They were staring eye to eye like they had never done before. He was obliged to do it now.

  He leaned in, kissed Dink, just once, on the side of his face, expecting a shove or a push, something that would help him do what he knew he might have to do, narc on the boy he loved.

  But Dink moved his face toward Joey’s kiss. His lips parted just a moment to where it was wet and their tongues met. He wanted to think of it as a sexy love kiss, but even a dumb jock Laps Catholic knew about kisses and betrayal.

  Joey pulled back, slightly amazed. They pulled apart at the crunch of a distant locker. Dink hovered close, whispered, “We got about an hour.”

  “Till what?”

  “Till your dad or my mom figure out we’re MIA. Till the end of the world. Alone. In my house.”

  He waited, gulped.

  “Joseph.” He pressed his partner’s nose, transforming him. “Are you with me?”

  “And Joseph dreamed a dream,

  and he told it to his brethren,

  and they hated him yet the more.”

  Genesis, 37:5

  They knew all the moves, they’d just never done them naked, but they knew each other’s bodies, knew their limits, how far to pull a leg and grip an elbow and how long it can last before another shift exposes slowly with no whistles to stop a visit along an underarm always too rushed past by a mouth or nose. Now he could see that mole on a left lat, an island in a milky muscle sea. Instead of grabbing, he licked. No more secret stolen drops. He could lick long and slow, remain inside and over every corner and curve. He grabbed tight, holding him, humping him, until he peeled him off, muttering, “Stop.” “What?” “Stop wrestling.” He grabbed his wrists, held him, kissed him again, as if pouring a slow wet love into him, to slow him down, hold back the rush. He straddled him, humped his cock up along the crevice of his butt. He let his cock bap up and down with every one of his thrusts, until he grabbed it, tugging it closer to him. He jerked his neck up from the pillows, opening his mouth in a wet silent shout. He aimed for teeth and got tongue. He caught the first glop like a grape. They laughed as it happened. He felt a flood of relief as jets of him exploded on his face, his neck, licking it up, pulling him down, sucking his face, gluing himself closer. Entangled, encrusted with each other’s fluids, they dozed for what felt a night, a lifetime, as if they levitated over fields and plains. Half-awake, he feared movement, for it would initiate departure. The light was gray, half-night as they lay in silence. He was asked if he wanted to shower. “No,” he whispered, holding his sticky belly like an unfinished painting, a souvenir for the ache inside. “I love your back muscles,” he said as he kissed his back. “Latissiumus dorsi.” “I love your nose. It’s so horsey.” “Horsey? Fuck you.” “Next time.” He nestled closer. “You know, your nose muscles flare when you’re mad.” “Nose muscles?” He kissed his nose. “Snortissimus dorsi.” They kissed more and coughed and shared spit and extracted hairs from their lips and swallowed and dry-kissed each other. They dressed slowy, traded clothes. He led him to the door, holding hands solemnly as they descended the steps. He remembered the first time he’d been in this room, wondered about all this. He remembered climbing these stairs months ago, his partner’s skin peeking from his sweats. What would it have been like if they’d been able to just date like straight kids? There never would have been a thought about befriending the others and no one would have been hurt, no one would. They kissed again, slow and tender, the skin around lips chafed. Descending the porch steps, walking backwards as the sidewalk took him further and further from the house, he tried not to cry, but joy and pain formed tears too wondrous to halt, too wondrous not to rush back up to lick away with their last kisses. “I’ll see ya tomorrow.” “Maybe.” “It’ll be okay.” “No, it won’t, dude. It won’t ever be okay.”

  “Go on, take everything.

  Take everything. I want you to.”

  – Hole, “Violet”

  1

  “Oh my god, did you hear?”

  “Yeah.”

  His mother went to hug him. He pulled away, afraid she’d smell his lover on him. He didn’t know what she knew, what would come out if he started bawling.

  “You’re all wet. Why are you still sweating? Were you just running?”

  “Yeah. I gotta take a shower.”

  “Where you been?” his father’s voice commanded from the kitchen. He was that late.

  “Come and eat first.”

  The cloud of steam, signifying the pasta’s readiness, had long before settled over the kitchen. He was that late.

  But that was not the bother. The bother was trying to pretend nothing had happened when less than an hour ago he’d been splooging all over his best friend and accomplice.

  “Well, open a window,” his dad suggested.

  “It’s freezing outside.”

  “Take something off. Take off your sweatshirt.”

  “I’m okay.” Maybe it was the sweatshirt, or the pasta burning his throat, or the third glass of water. He wasn’t concerned about the sweat droplets falling onto his plate. They came out of him. They could just as well go back in. He wondered how long before those particles of Dink he’d licked would become a part of him. Would he taste more like Dink?

  Food, he reminded himself. You are sitting at the table. Pick up your fork.

  “Wipe your face.”

  He used his sleeve.

  “Your napkin.”

  “It’s Sophia’s turn to say Grace.”

  “Dear Lord. . .” she started.

  From the living room, the tube answered. “An altar boy’s bizarre murder leaves a New Jersey town in shock. Coming up on Eyewitness News.”

  “Hey, that’s about Anthony.”

  “I need some water.” He bolted from the table.

  “I’ll get it.” His mother scooted her chair out. “Sit. Sit.”

  “I’ll get it!” He darted out of the kitchen, pulled off his sweatshirt, tossing it on a chair.

  “It is difficult to understand the logic of murder, but in this it is simple to understand the pain the Lambros family is feeling tonight. In Totowa, New Jersey, John Soto tells the story.”

  The reporter stood solemnly a moment, the microphone poised near his chin. A car alarm went off a few blocks away, on the tube or outside.

  He grabbed the remote. POWER OFF.

  “Why did you do that?” his mother yelled.

  “I’m sick of news while I eat.”

  “I want to hear about that.”

  “Well, I don’t, not while I’m eating,” his father said. “Leave it off.” He agreed with his father, but for all the wrong reasons.

  “Dino, this was one of his–”

  “I wanna watch it!” Mike yelped.

  “It’ll still be on when we’re done eating. You. Sit. Let’s calm down here.”

  Everyone returned to the table, but his mother wouldn’t let up. “What do you know about this?”

  Her look pierced him. He dropped his head, paced around the living room, considered escape. No. OOTQ.

  He headed back to the table, sat. “I heard about it. We had a talk in practice. The principal made announcements and everything.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it.” Everyone at school did, though.

  “Why not?”

  “‘Cause I’m upset! Okay?”

  “Keep your voice d
own.”

  Forks clattered against plates and teeth. Gulps. He hung his head, staring at the patterns in the plate. Was Dink taking a shower now? Was Dink lying to his mother now? Was Dink ever going to do any of that fun stuff with him ever again? His ears were ringing. He felt as if they could see his blood pulsing.

  He looked up. His entire family stared at him in the sort of silence that precedes an earthquake.

  “He was a fag,” Mike blurted.

  In response, the entire contents of his plate landed with a thup sound in the middle of Mike’s chest.

  His mother’s gasp matched Mike’s. She leaned forward, smacked his head. The entire table rumbled, a smash of dishes, liquids, arms.

  “Don’t you ever say that again!”

  He shut his eyes as the sting of his mother’s slap set in.

  When he opened them, Mike’s chair had fallen over, Mike himself hung by the scruff of his sauce-spattered neck from his father’s grip. Sophie’s tiny mouth ripped open, winding up for a really big howl.

  “Dino!” Marie shrieked while Mike milked a choking sound. Dino dropped Mike, who fell to the floor.

  “Pick it up!” he commanded.

  Mike pulled his chair up meekly, rubbing his throat for sympathy.

  “It’s true,” Mike muttered, then glared at his brother with the pure hatred a ten-year-old never hides.

  His father shook Mike again, then shoved him down. “Shut up. Eat.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  “Then go to your room! Sophie! Stop crying.”

  Mike darted to the living room. Marie extracted Sophia from her chair, held her close. Her little limbs clamped around her mother like a starfish. Her cries became muffled in her mother’s arms. He and Dino followed them into the living room to see on the tube, that sad little beat-up Pinto.

  That’s when he lost it.

  He bawled all the way back into the kitchen, howling like a cub in a trap, almost out the door, before his father grabbed him, yanked him back. He collapsed to the floor, shoved off his father’s attempt of a hug. He was unworthy, untouchable.

  Doors upstairs closed, muffling a tandam crying jag. He leaned forward, grabbed paper towels from the roll under the sink, snorted a blast of tear-filled snot.

  “You were there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re telling me everything right now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before they were done, his father told him to make the phone call. While they waited, his mother goaded him into eating. He did, but more in the motion of comfort than comfort itself, fuel for his trip to the realm of minors and major miracles.

  He didn’t finish dinner. The cops show up a lot faster in Little Falls.

  2

  “You said that after you all attacked him–”

  “I didn’t attack him!”

  “Sorry, after they attacked him.” Another man entered the room. They murmured something.

  “Will you excuse me a second, Joe? Sergeant, come with me a moment.”

  He looked at the hard blank walls of the room the policemen brought him to, where he’d spent two hours spilling his guts, telling them everything. He wondered if he would now spend his days in jail. He wondered what his dad thought about while he waited in the hallway, waiting to smack him, ground him for the rest of his life. Maybe a police van awaited him, then prison and a career as butt boy for guys with tattoos up to their armpits.

  The men at the police station were bigger than his father, thick in the face and belly, looked as if they’d never laughed at a joke in their lives.

  One of the detectives twirled a set of keys in his hand.

  “C’mon, Joe. We’re going for a ride.” The way he said it sounded a lot like Bennie.

  They took Joseph into a police car, sat him in the back again, behind the caged front seat. When he figured out where they were taking him, he got a sick feeling in his stomach.

  “The site” was being dutifully, meticulously inspected, searched under bright lights by a dozen men on their hands and knees with magnifying glasses looking sideways across the ground. One of them, who had been trained in the Marines before joining the police force, Joseph heard, had made a joke about looking for tiny land mines.

  They had him point to the area where it happened. Police cars guarded the surrounding area, a little piece of offramp.

  The roar of traffic blocked words in the darkness and harsh floodlights. The POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape glowed a sick yellow, fluttering in the breeze. Above the main road back toward home, a restaurant sign beaconed; Anthony’s.

  He looked down to the stain in the gravel where he’d lost it. He felt ridiculous having to identify his own barf.

  “You see, what we’re trying to determine here, Joe,” the detective said as he patted his shoulder, “is what you, your friends did or didn’t do. We’re telling only what we know, not what just you remember. We’re pretty sure it is, but we want to be really sure. Now, go over again what you said.”

  He looked around, trying to remember this patch of road through drunken eyes. Beyond it, he could see sprinkled lights in the darkness, under hills. Somewhere across that highway sat his new home, where he felt he should want to be.

  “You said you’re not from here?” one of the detectives said.

  “Newark.”

  “And Italy before that?”

  He nodded. Joseph didn’t know if he was pumping him for more information or trying to relax him.

  “Mine are from Italy, France, Germany and Spokane,” the detective smiled.

  “Spokane? How’d that get in there?”

  “We get around. We’re all pilgrims.”

  “They tell you?” he asked.

  “You gave a statement.”

  “Um, yeah, um.”

  “Did you sign it?”

  “Oh.” He didn’t know what to say, except. “I’m sorry. Yeah. Was I not sposed to?”

  His father took that in, sighed, turned onto a main thoroughfare through town. He had that lost look in his eyes, but Joseph thought it was just the events, being confused.

  Finally, his father said, “Can we start with why?”

  “Why.”

  “Why you were out with those boys.”

  “We hang out. They’re on the team. You met them.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Bennie.”

  “But you did something, in the car.”

  “I didn’t do anything, except get sick.”

  “But they did.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Why would they do something like this?”

  “I tole ya, I dunno!”

  That’s when the smack came.

  He almost forgot he was definitely going to get one, so his slouch was especially slack, his mouth hung open a bit, when the callused palm of his father caught him about the jaw and upper neck. He didn’t open his eyes again until he’d scooted further away in the seat, almost ready to fall out the door. He couldn’t believe how his father could hit him so hard and not even swerve the car.

  They drove in silence for a while. Joseph realized that his father was driving south, too far south. He didn’t say anything. This was not the time for corrections.

  After several more minutes, Dino said, “Did you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Kill him?”

  “No, Da, I’m tellin’ ya, we went out–”

  “Who?”

  “Bennie and Hunter and Dink and me. We went out had some beers and Bennie gets this idea to go out driving I don’t know, I think to a party but we left there. Then they saw Anthony and followed him and like you know ran along beside him and they were just jokin’ but then it got outta hand and then Hunter threw the bottle, then Bennie–”

  “What do you mean, outta hand? The one ‘at threw the bottle? Did you throw anything at this kid, I swear, if you–”

  “No! I was so sic
k by then, I’m sorry, I am so sorry–”

  “Stop it, stop it. Here. Take this. Wipe your nose. So, what, what did you guys do after that?”

  “What, they tole you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well, then you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “They did it ‘cause he’s a total runt on the team, everybody hates him. He’s gay. Was.”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “‘Cause I am, too.”

  He thought it best to throw that in while the other fusillades landed, distract him.

  Instead Dino pulled over in the middle of traffic.

  Joseph yanked his neck around, looking in back at a honking car. He felt a shred of pain from his last injury. Cars behind them veered off, away. His father’s face twisted into a knot of confusion. He pointed his finger three times while saying, “Tell me…everything…now.”

  “Um, they just hated him ‘cause he’s, you know a, and…and … and I think I’m…I mean, we talked about it, but we knew, I mean we just…knew.”

  “What, you like read each other’s minds?”

  “I was…No.”

  He wanted to hit the radio, the wipers, anything, just not be inside a machine, feeling so bad about being in so much trouble. He could smell his father’s spilt coffee mixed with Sophie’s bag of Cheerios under the seat. He hadn’t scheduled this conversation, not today, while he could still feel Dink’s bites and chafes.

  His father looked out the windshield at nothing, trying to add it up. “But you’re jus’ tellin’ me that you’re…Then, why do you wanna go do that? Why would you be a part of that?”

  “I dunno. Maybe…maybe I was tryin’ to prove somethin’, tryin’ to make myself not like that. I don’t know. They’re my friends, but I mean, we say fag alla time. You don’t know what it’s like. When they say let’s go out, I go out. It’s, it’s. . .”

  “It’s stupid, is what it is. I knew this would get you into trouble.”

  “What? Wrestling? This got nothing to do with–”

  The next smack missed him, but it was just a fake. He dodged anyway.

  Cars zoomed by. The blinkers blinked. He wanted to hear music, to soften this closeness, but his father was still taking it all in, what to tell his mom, the kids, Grandmama, everybody else, that and what not to tell. Then there would be the Official Version, which would most certainly exclude his personal revelation. He tried to reason. “I thought you knew about me.”