The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “Of course I believe you,” she said. “That’s not even the issue. This is just—it’s too wrong. We’re not doing it. That’s what I came to tell you. Okay?”

  I didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait. I walked out with her, watched her walk down Warren Street.

  Blue and red cop car lights strafed the surrounding buildings a couple of blocks away. I wondered whether it was Tom. What he was up to.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “We keep this shit between us,” Chief Propst says, scowling down at the bloodshed.

  He tells Dom to take the license plates off the truck and orders Officer Van Vleck to hang a tarp over the wide, splintered hole in the wall.

  Dom gets it. He doesn’t like it, but he gets it. Half of Hudson knows that truck belongs to Steve “Stubby” Coffin, and nobody can know that the mayor’s son’s truck drove a hole in the wall of the mayor’s son’s former best friend, who was subsequently murdered. Black boys downstreet don’t get the same courtesy, but Dom knows in his gut that the Hudson Police Department’s corruption is casual, surface-level stuff. Chief Propst plays the game he has to play, but he’s going to get the fucker who did this. Even if that someone is his boss’s broken kid.

  The smell in the house is scorched toast and blood and shit and beer. The cold calms it down, though, and that’s a blessing. Standing there in summertime, the stink would be unbearable.

  “Gotta be six hours since this happened,” Dom says. “How the hell didn’t anyone hear anything?”

  No one called it in until morning, when a neighbor on his way to work saw a house with a truck-size hole in the side of it.

  Chief Propst curses. He feels it, too, Dom knows. The tingle up the spine. The knowledge something’s extremely not right.

  “Stubb’s in the wind,” says Van Vleck, reclipping his radio to his belt. “Officers at his place said the doors were wide open, no sign of him.”

  In the wind. Such a weird expression. It rubs Dom raw, opens him up to the chill of the wind through the wall, around the edges of the tarp.

  What is happening in Hudson?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  RONAN

  “Just don’t break your neck, kid,” said the guy who ran the bowling alley, and just like that, Wick had permission to walk up and down the lane dividers to take pictures. All Dom had had to do was ask nicely. Amazing what a cop in uniform could get. “And don’t step off the divider! We just waxed the lanes.”

  Dom was right—the kid was a trip. In the ten minutes since we’d met, he’d probably uttered a hundred thousand words. About Dom, and how great he was, and about what a shithole Catskill was compared to Hudson, and about my Instagram, which he’d apparently spent an awful lot of time on. Maybe it was just the manic counterpart to the depressive episode he’d described with such eerie self-awareness in a text to Dom, or maybe this was just who he was—either way, I already loved him.

  “Remember the light is not so great in here,” I said, kicking off my shoes and following him out onto the narrow isthmus between lanes seventeen and eighteen. His excitement was infectious. His skinny little body buzzed. “You’ll need a wide aperture and a relatively slow shutter speed.”

  We’d gone to the Catskill Hoe Bowl for Wick’s photo lesson. Attalah was at the counter ordering us burgers and french fries and sodas. A regular All-American family outing: me and my secret gay boyfriend and his wife and the preacher’s boy, our surrogate gay son.

  “You ready?” Dom asked, holding up his ball at the end of the lane.

  “Wait!” Wick said, scrambling to adjust his camera settings.

  “With a slow shutter speed, the ball’s gonna be a blur,” I said.

  “Okay!” Wick said.

  Dom released: a mighty throw. Wick snapped the shot at the decisive moment, and whooped in delight when the photo showed up on his screen. The ball was a bright green blur, jetting down the center of the shot.

  “That’s amazing!” I said, rubbing his shoulder. “You’re a natural.”

  “I don’t like the way Dom’s blurry,” he said, pointing to the man in the background, midway through stepping back from his throw.

  “So tell him to hold still once he’s thrown,” I said.

  Wick relayed the instructions. The ball clattered back up the ball return. Dom threw, and froze. The shutter snapped. Dom picked up the spare. The photo was perfect.

  “You’re so good,” I said.

  “Thanks, Ronan.”

  “What now?”

  “The pins.”

  “Excellent.”

  I followed him farther down the lane. Bad classic rock came through the overhead speakers. We couldn’t hear anything but ourselves.

  Wick said, “Did you know Jark Trowse was sixteen when he started his first website? An e-commerce site for artists to sell their stuff. I’m almost sixteen and I got zero good ideas.”

  I could see it in his eyes, how starstruck he was. “I don’t know much about him at all,” I said. “And I’m sure you’re full of good ideas.”

  “I met him, once. He came by my mom’s church. Got my picture taken with him and everything! He was twenty when he started Penelope’s Quilt. Twenty-five when it went public and he became a billionaire. Some people say he’s the richest gay man in the world.”

  “Stop here,” I said. “Any closer and you risk getting hit by an errant pin. Photography is about taking risks, but you shouldn’t take the risks until you know your basics.”

  “Sure,” he said, and then hollered “Okay!” down to Dom. But Dom couldn’t hear. I waved my arms until he saw, and flashed a thumbs-up.

  “Use a slightly faster shutter speed,” I said. “The pins are gonna move a lot faster than the ball.”

  Wick nodded and made the adjustment effortlessly. The kid was a quick study. I remembered being that wide-eyed about photography, that eager to learn everything I could. That skinny. That scared, and that happy, sometimes at the same time. That hungry. I wanted to give him a hug.

  When the ball hit home, Wick caught it exactly. The pins in his picture were opening outward, like the petals on a flower or the birth of a mushroom cloud. Only a slight dimness marred the photo, a consequence of a shutter speed just slightly too fast for such low lighting. I pointed it out with supreme gentleness, but he looked like he’d been punched in the gut. “It’s okay,” I said, touching one shoulder as gently as I could, for fear of snapping him. “You did amazing.” I wondered what kind of criticism he was used to getting, that even such a small piece of it could deflate him so quickly. “Let’s try it again with a different—”

  “No,” he said, stepping off the divider onto the forbidden lane, almost slipping on the waxed surface. He walked around me, got back on the lane divider, walked to where Dom and Attalah were eating all the french fries.

  I followed. We sat down, and I could see by the way he drank his soda that he was sulking.

  “Wick did great,” I said. “Show them your photos.”

  “Later,” Wick said.

  “Hudson used to have a bowling alley,” Attalah said. “Where the Walgreens is now.”

  Wick shrugged, uninterested in ancient Hudson history. But his anger ebbed, as we sat and ate and no one pressured him to cheer up or chat or anything.

  “They’re trying to make an art museum, for local artists,” he said, when the french fries were all gone.

  “Who is?” Dom asked.

  “Jark Trowse. Part of the Pequod Arms. Maybe you could get your photography in there, Ronan.”

  “You and me both,” I said. And at that, he smiled. It was a radiant smile. Its rareness made it more so, and also sadder. “Which reminds me. I got these for you, Wick. They’re some of my favorite artists. You should learn about what you love—what speaks to your soul—because that will teach you what kind of artist you need to be.”

  I handed him five photography books, huge and heavy. Richard Avedon, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Sebastião Salgado.
<
br />   “Holy shit!” Wick exclaimed, and then covered his mouth with his hand. “I’m so sorry!”

  “No one here gives a shit,” Attalah said, in a stage whisper, and we all laughed, and watched Wick tear off the plastic and dive on in.

  Dom and I bowled a game, while Wick devoured the art and Attalah worked on a folder full of papers she’d brought. Every four or five minutes she took out her phone and sent off a quick message. Getting people to place public calls for a postponement of the election, citing fear over what happened to Rich Trappan. Facebook posts; Instagram comments. That afternoon we’d brainstormed some samples to send people: I don’t feel safe in my own town anymore and that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Bad enough they’ve been pushing us out, now they’re murdering us. Etc.

  “Poor kid,” Dom said softly to me.

  “His wounds do seem pretty deep.”

  “Deeper than yours were at that age? In Hudson?”

  “You can’t really compare,” I said. “I had a thick invisible armor called white privilege to protect me. He’s dealing with a whole set of other shit, on top of the shit I survived.”

  “Hudson High has a Gay-Straight Alliance now,” Dom said. “Couple years ago, two boys were the Homecoming Couple. Things are a thousand times better for boys like him, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy.” He picked up his bright green ball but then just stood there.

  “What?” I said, finally.

  “I mean . . . shouldn’t a boy like him—a boy like you—have a chance to grow up with as few scars as possible?”

  “Of course,” I said. “That’s not even a question.”

  “What I’m saying is . . . Hudson’s transformation is changing things. Five years from now, boys like Wick—or like Katch—will only have to deal with the same old bullshit adolescent agony as everyone else.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “If you stop it—things will go backward.”

  “You don’t know that.” He stared at me until I had to nod, conceding the point. “I can’t accept that the only way to make things better in some ways is to make them so much worse in others. Why can we only have music and culture and gay rights by gentrifying the city past all recognition, driving out the people who made this city in the first place?”

  Dom shrugged. “It’s like God or the Easter Bunny or fascism. Whether they’re real or not has nothing to do with what you want or accept. You and Attalah need to really think about what you’re doing, and what the consequences might be. This whole YOU ARE HATED thing? You’re playing with fire.”

  “Thing about fire is, you can’t burn down the bad guys’ house without it.”

  “Fire doesn’t care what it burns,” Dom said. “It just wants to burn.”

  He held a straight face until we both broke out in giggles. We played the rest of our game like that, laughing often and talking shit, serious subjects left behind.

  “Any favorites so far?” I asked Wick, when Dom had soundly beaten me and we went to rejoin the rest of our magnificent momentary family.

  “I love these,” he said, flipping back and forth between spreads in Avedon’s In the American West. In one, a boy held up a beheaded rattlesnake, split down the middle with its guts arcing elegantly. In another, a slaughterhouse worker held a bloody severed calf head over his own. Dead blank eyes stared out accusingly.

  “You like the gruesome stuff,” Dom said.

  “My mom won’t let me watch horror movies,” he said, smiling gleefully. “I love this shit.”

  “Look at that kid’s expression,” I said, pointing to rattlesnake boy. “He’s proud and he’s scared at the same time. That’s what makes the photograph great. We know so much about this boy, who he is on the inside, based just on what Avedon captured of his outside.”

  “Totally,” Wick said, touching the boy’s face so reverently I could see that he did indeed get it. We watched him turn the pages, eyes widening at each new marvel.

  But even in that blissful moment, I couldn’t keep my mind off what was happening. Your hate helped immensely, Katch had said. You’ve helped so much more anger blossom. We’d given it life, Attalah and I, fed it on our hate, and now it was feeding our hate back to us and to everyone else in town.

  Wick said: “I was born for this, you know. My mom named me Jeremy, after that mysterious Hudson photographer from the fifties. Jerremy with two Rs. She always said she felt a special kinship with his work.”

  “I didn’t know you had a first name,” Dom said, laughing. “Jeremy Bentwick. That doesn’t seem like you at all.”

  The kid laughed, too. “Why do you think I go by Wick?”

  “You should practice portraits,” I said. “Telling a story with nothing but a human face is half of the fun of photography.”

  “Let’s do it!” he said. “Who’s my first victim?”

  We three parental substitutes exchanged glances. In that instant Wick could have captured a brilliant portrait of any one of us. Equal parts embarrassed and proud.

  “Do me,” Attalah said, standing. “These two boys are too pretty. Anybody can take a good picture of someone handsome.”

  Dom booed. “I accept your compliment, but I do not accept the implication that you’re any less gorgeous than us two beautiful boys.”

  “Try the arcade,” I said, pointing to a nook of brightly strobing colors. “Dramatic lighting.”

  They went. Dom and I drank sodas. Our shoulders touched and everything was beautiful and I should have known, then, that nothing this nice could last for long.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “This is so fucking not good,” Chief Propst says, when Dom walks into the station. At first he thinks it’s being said to him, but no, the chief’s been saying it over and over again all day.

  Word spread through the force fast, about what happened at Historical Materialism. Dom pours himself some coffee, sits down at his desk. Officer Van Vleck is typing under a blue tarp, from where the station ceiling’s leaking.

  “The fucking mayor is on his way,” says the chief. The six-foot-six man has never seemed so small. He holds his hat over his stomach like a shield. Freshly shaved cheeks shine.

  Dom reads the report. A rock through the window of the Warren Street store, and then a series of big paper bags stapled shut, all of which burst open on impact. Splattering rancid meat all over the walls and floor and countless priceless antiques. In the pictures it looks like more than one murder went down in there. The stink, to hear Chief Propst tell it, made eyes water and stomachs reject their contents.

  Rome Byles had been out on patrol that night. He was on the scene within three minutes, drawn by the siren that went off when the window broke, and says he saw someone fleeing the scene. Young, white, male, hooded black sweat suit. A little red wagon was left behind, complete with meat ooze, but there are no fingerprints on it.

  “So fucking not good. We got an election coming up, and Winter Fest right after that.”

  Dom drinks his coffee, does some paperwork, gracefully exits before Mayor Coffin can arrive.

  No wonder the mayor’s taking this seriously, Dom thinks, heading down to Second Street. The new arrivals got spooked bad enough by that billboard; this is going to make them lose their minds. They’ll be seeing hostile natives hiding behind every bush. And calling us about every loiterer and slammed door.

  * * *

  WHEN THE COPS HAVE GONE, and the CLOSED sign is hung on the door and the door is locked, Rob Creighton is alone inside Historical Materialism with the stink of death and a hundred ruined artifacts. The bottoms of his shoes are gummed with soft rotten fat. Flies buzz. Maggots from the meat already emerged from their pupae. There’s only a quarter of a bottle of bleach left, in the closet in the back of his store. I’ll have to go out and get more. I’ll have to venture into this city that hates me.

  Wind whistles through the huge wound in his plate-glass storefront. Locals gawk, across the street. He sees his old tenant Heather, looking meek and help
less as ever. He wishes he had curtains. When he moved in he’d inquired about getting a steel gate installed, but all the other store owners said it would be “an egregious violation of aesthetic norms.”

  We’re all undefended, he thinks, looking up and then down Warren Street. Our precious aesthetic norms might just get us all killed.

  * * *

  HEATHER GETS BACK to the couch she’s crashing on, and sits to savor the throb in her chest. Hate; pride; anger; ecstasy—all given physical form, it feels like, a sweet jagged pleasurable lump (blade) (tumor) of it. The stink of rotting meat is still on her fingertips. It seeped through the work gloves, and she is glad that it did.

  I did that.

  She shuffles through photos on her phone. Two girls, getting older fast. She has so few pictures of them.

  You see, girls? Your grandmother says I’m not strong enough to do what I need to do to get you back, but look how strong I am. Look what I can do. What laws I can break. What fear I can strike in the hearts of evildoers.

  She’d stopped by the store that day. So had half of Hudson, seemed like, a whole crowd of them standing on the sidewalk, so she wasn’t worried about showing her face at the scene of her crime. She saw it, the fear on the face of the man who ran it. So much fear, on so many faces.

  In her purse is a fake lipstick tube, hollowed out for holding drugs. In the tube is a sweet huge chunk of crystal. Some sexy little Latin or Arab guy with a bad whale tattoo down at the Half Moon had just handed her a baggie of it the night before, said she looked like she could use a pick-me-up.

  She pulls out the lipstick, tips the meth out onto the table. Looks at it. Puts it back in the tube. Looks at her photos some more.

  * * *