by Lee Durkee
Slumping deeper in the car seat, Noel recalled another day yet to come in early spring, a sunny day that would find him standing outside the school cafeteria in the jock Skoal-dipping circle when a linebacker named Jimmy Rey announced that he’d heard Layle Smokewood had pulled a train for the whole backfield at Beason. Jimmy Rey was a monster, even taller than Noel and much wider. “Pulled a god-dog train!” he repeated, jerking down the cord of an imaginary whistle. “Hey, you used to date her, Spider, how far’d you get with her?”
Just then Tim Weiss passed by on the cafeteria sidewalk, and Noel felt a sting of tenderness for his old friend, whom he had been shunning of late. Noel raised a hand, but Tim pretended not to notice. All the jocks laughed. They thought Noel was making fun of Tim.
“You know what I heard about his old lady?” someone asked. At the same moment someone else said, “Damn jewboy fag. Y’all know what they believe?”
“He’s awright,” Noel said.
“His mama eats pussy is what I heard,” someone else said.
“So how far’d you get with her, Spider?” Jimmy Rey insisted.
The group fell silent. Finally Noel shrugged and said, “Ahh, just an ol’ blow job, Jimmy. Out at the Beverly Drive-in.” He spat into the dirt and added, “Same damn night it burnt to the ground.”
That detail sidetracked the conversation, just as Noel had hoped it would. Now, while half the Skoal circle continued to roundtable the Jewish faith, the other half began to embellish the night of the drive-in arson. I heard it got lightning struck. The damn KKK did it, I heard. Shit, them devil worshipers did. You see them pictures of it in the paper? You could see angel wings in the smoke. I heard it was Satan’s face you could see. And they killed Jesus too. Hell, they go to church on Saturday and celebrate killing Jesus like it’s their Easter.
Jimmy Rey stopped this discussion by spitting a stream of bug juice near Noel’s boot and asking if Layle Smokewood had swallowed or what.
Noel had been trying to imagine Layle pulling a train and how that worked exactly. He knew that if she had, it was his own fault. Slowly Noel lifted his hooded eyes and replied, “Naw, Jimmy, she didn’t swallow. It wasn’t much of a blow job, if you wanna know the truth. Not nearly as good as the one your mother gave me last night.”
Noel landed a few punches going down, then just shut his eyes and let the darkness take him.
Slumped inside his Mustang and still waiting for Layle to return from the bathroom, Noel could see these events as clearly as if he had the all-powerful lens of the Aleph 2000 trained on the future. So when the fire started, this too seemed to be something he was remembering. He did not react at first other than to grip the steering wheel. Then, after a minute or so, he reached down onto the floorboard after his Nikon and stepped outside the car. The movie screen seemed to undulate as smoke formed a backdrop then plumed upward from the bottom. A brown flowerlike stain spread across the picture, as if the film had jammed and the projector were searing that one frame. But the movie kept playing, even after flames had eaten holes through the stain, even after the entire screen was solidly ablaze, a wall of fire. Images played like holographs inside the flames until the screen collapsed backward.
CHAPTER SIX
AFTER EIGHT MISSISSIPPI, and with a cough of smoke, Matt asked, “Hey—I tell you? Guess who I got a letter from.”
They were driving to church. Noel let another car slip between his Mustang and Roger’s new-used Lincoln, then he guessed Tommy Weatherspoon.
“Who?”
“Our uncle.”
“Oh. No, not—I mean, yeah, I got one from him too—but that ain’t the one I mean.”
Noel, who had written a barrage of letters to Tommy and had not received another reply in almost a year now, asked what it had said, the letter from Tommy.
“Beats me, I couldn’t hardly read it. You know something weird, though. He thought it was you, not me, made all-stars. I think that’s what it said.”
“Mom musta wrote him and he got us mixed up.”
“Yeah.” Matt pondered this. “Hey, you think Rog ever hits Mom?”
“Rog?”
“In his letter, he kept asking me all these questions about Rog. Like Rog was some kind of escaped criminal or something.”
“He better not hit her, I’d fuckin’ kill him.”
“Y’all two went at it pretty good last night.”
“Yeah. I can’t wait to finally graduate, get the hell outa here. He invite you out to Key West?”
“Who?”
“Tommy.”
Matt opened the top of his window and aimed a stream of smoke outside before replying. “He said his restaurant was losing money, but that it was supposed to lose money for a while, and that we could visit him after things turned around. Said he’d have us cleaning shrimp.” Admiring himself in the sideview, Matt added, “I ain’t cleaning no damn shrimp.”
“He said us?”
“Fuck a shrimp.”
“He said both of us can visit?”
“Yeah. But that ain’t even the letter I’m talken about.”
“He didn’t send you a shirt or nothing, huh?”
“Guess who it was from, the other letter?”
“Ernest Hemingway.”
“Who?”
“How the hell do I know who it’s from?”
“It was from State. From Coach Tylerson up there.”
“Coach Tylerson?”
“At Starkville. Said he’d been hearing good things about me and I should come visit campus, said he’d give me a personal tour if I did.”
“Hey, keep it low, Matt, we ain’t advertising.”
“Sorry.”
“You going there?”
“State? Hell, I got two years to decide that. I don’t even want to go to college. Fuck college.”
They pulled into a drugstore parking lot to finish the joint and they watched across the street as the rest of the family filed into church.
“What’s that Mom’s carrying? Looks like a damn baby.”
“Care basket,” Matt answered.
“Yeah, who for?”
Matt bit his upper lip but allowed the grin to escape.
“I ain’t gotta be the one to always tell you, do I?”
“To tell me what, Matt?”
“I thought the whole damn town knew by now.”
It took a full minute for Noel to extradite the information from Matt, who finally shook his head and admitted, “Layle Smokewood. Ran off to California. With the drummer of some band called Furry Merkyn.”
Matt went on to explain that two days after Layle had run away, the Smokewoods’ maid had found the reverend unconscious in his library and had called an ambulance. “An accidental overdose of tranquilizers,” was how the paper reported it, but Matt knew better. “They’re not even letting him do sermons no more after today, that’s what Mom heard. Hell, who’s gonna listen to some preacher tried to kill himself like an old lady does with a bunch of damn pills?” Matt made a pistol of thumb and forefinger and inserted the fingertip into his mouth. “Didn’t even up and do it like a man.”
Noel whipped the Mustang into the church parking lot. They sprayed the car with Ozium and rubbed their fingers in Skoal and sweetened their breaths from a bottled Coke.
“Hey, you know what Furry Merkyn means? What it means in French?”
Noel was using the Clear Eyes. He wiped his eyes with the tops of his shoulders and said, “I don’t even wanna know, Matt, just—”
“Hairy pussy,” Matt told him. “She ran off with the damn drummer from Hairy Pussy.”
The church stairwell was cordoned off with a velvet rope the same burgundy color as the carpet. Matt and Noel straddled the rope, sprinted up the stairs, then sat hunched low in the first row
of the otherwise empty balcony. Above them, in the bow of the A-frame chapel, a stained-glass Jesus knocked on a large wooden door. Jesus had a lamb tucked under one arm. The sun was rising behind the pictorial and splashing watercolor light over the pulpit, where Reverend Smokewood sat dressed out but deflated-looking inside layered purple and white robes.
Noel checked to make sure Matt wasn’t paying attention then closed his eyes and began to pray.
Not so long ago Noel had been one of the most popular guys in school, but these days found him fast becoming a sideshow. There were rumors about him and Ross Altman and him and Layle Smokewood and him and drug dealing, plus the ones about how he’d been kicked off the baseball team because he’d refused to get his hair cut and how he’d cussed out the coach in front of the dugout and how he’d almost gotten into a fistfight with him. But lately the rumors were spinning out of control. For instance, just the other day, Tim, whom Noel had gotten hired at Pasquale’s, had overheard a born-again girl named Mona Campsong telling a group of like-minded friends that she’d heard that Spider Weatherspoon dealt heroin and that he shot it up under his tongue and between his toes. And although this rumor was not true—Noel only dealt pot and quaaludes—it had still pleased him to hear it. It was all part of his testimony. A testimony for his love for Layle, whom he still imagined as buried by his side, a red rose growing up out of his heart, a sharp briar twisting up out of hers.
“I’m sorry,” he prayed now. “It’s all my damn fault. Just don’t let nothing bad happen to her out in California. Let it all happen to me instead.”
He checked to make sure Matt wasn’t looking, then dove back into prayer. This time he prayed not to be gay. He prayed for this because ever since the night of the drive-in catastrophe he had been failing miserably with girls, one after another. He had failed with girls in the back seats of cars, on couches and love seats and beanbag chairs, in their father’s beds, in the woods, and once in the shallow end of a swimming pool. The only thing worse than the actual failure was the next day at school wondering who knew or did everybody know by now?
He opened his eyes again. Matt was leaning forward and smirking down at the service, which was being conducted by the Reverend Blankenship, the second-string preacher from the vast liturgical bullpen of the First Baptist Church. When it was time for the sermon, though, Reverend Smokewood stood up slowly and stepped toward the podium and grasped it. For the first time that morning, he seemed to fully occupy his white and purple shroud.
His sermon concerned what he termed out-of-body experiences. As this sermon progressed, he began to throw his arms about in a jerky puppeted manner reminiscent of his daughter’s cheerleading. The reverend also seemed increasingly unaware of the congregation. At times he wiped away imaginary sweat, imaginary tears. His eyes took flight chasing invisible birds among the rafters. Lights at the end of the tunnel! emerged as his refrain. Every time he repeated it, his tone thickened with scorn, although the first time the words rang out, he had made them sound the very promise of salvation.
“Lights at the end of the tunnel! We hear this phrase everywhere these days, on TV talk shows, in bestsellers on so-called miracles, in songs, in books about near-death experiences. Everywhere we turn, lights at the end of the tunnel! Guiding lights. A star for every wandering bark. Just waiting for us to die. The Bible of course contains such episodes,” he thundered, quizzing the congregation with his eyebrows. “The most famous out-body-experience in the history of mankind!” he further challenged. Then, with measured disdain, he continued, “I speak to you, of course, of the Book of Revelations.” Turning his back to the pews and raising both arms so that the blue suit cuffs were visible at the wrists and ankles, he shouted, “And immediately I was in the spirit! . . . So Saint John tells us. John the Divine. John the disciple, whom Christ most loved. John says I was in the spirit! Not in the body . . . but the spirit . . . the spirit . . . the spirit . . .”
From then on he continued to supply his own reverberation, which mingled inside the chapel’s already disconcerting echo.
“And what did our beloved Saint John see in his quote-unquote out-of-body experience?” he asked, his back still turned to the congregation and his raised arms starting a slow-motion fall toward his sides. For the next ten minutes, as his arms continued their slow descent, he touted the vision of horsemen and of eyes melting out of sockets and of slain lambs and a sun pitch-black setting behind plagues of locusts behind a sky darkened with rain hail fire blood venom, blood swelling the rivers, rivers reddening the oceans, until even the moon high above our wretchedness yea the very moon itself was festered into nothing but one great clotted wound . . . wound . . . wound . . .
When his palms finally touched his robes, he gathered in a breath and wheeled on the congregation. Now he wiped away real sweat, real tears, and with a giant’s sadness he interrogated, “Lights? Lights, you tell me? Lights? Lights, you say? Where? I ask. Where are these lights? Where? SHOW THEM TO ME! SHOW ME THESE LIGHTS!”
He lowered his head and shook it bitterly.
“Do not,” he concluded. “Do not speak to me. Do not speak to me of such fables of light.”
And he remained standing there until Reverend Blankenship grasped him by the elbow and assisted him back to his throne.
•••
In heavy post-church traffic, Matt took in a dip and complained, “Man, I’m so hungry I could eat a pale horse.”
•••
Noel spent the afternoon in the darkroom he had built inside his walk-in closet. There, among canisters of stop bath and fixer, he had stashed a shoe box of neatly baggied dope, and among the sponges and clothespins and rubber gloves, he had buried a small library of Gallery magazines. The darkroom was the perfect front. Nobody could enter without knocking and expecting to wait, and nobody could enter in his absence for fear of exposing film. He killed entire sunny afternoons on the swivel stool smoking joints in the chemical darkness.
Unfortunately, he had neither the patience nor the touch for developing film. Usually he destroyed the film while trying to spool it in the dark. Or, if he got past that obstacle, he failed to get the solutions at consistent temperatures, so that when he unwound the negatives they were cracked and corroded. Lately, though, he had come to prefer these botched negatives. They reminded him of old daguerreotypes. But more than that, the damaged negatives seemed to him to be photographs of ghosts. And not just ghosts of people, but the ghosts of an entire landscape, of tree, rock, and sun—a specter world that Noel had always sensed abided alongside his own.
Because he was anticipating the negative more than the print, his photographs had gotten so bad that even the one magazine that had previously published two of his photographs was no longer writing him back. But that didn’t matter to him, not much anyway, because the only magazine Noel cared about now was Gallery. Gallery was a men’s magazine that published photographs of women sent in by their lovers and friends. Locked inside his darkroom, stoned day in, day out, Noel plotted endless strategies to get girls to undress in front of his Nikon, and then he imagined their nakedness locked inside the pages of Gallery.
Lately these plots had centered around Amber Smith. He had a date with Amber this coming Saturday. This date had seemed inevitable, not only because Amber had boldly pursued him, but also because their reputations and tastes seemed to coincide. A year ago Amber had swerved to miss a deer and driven her car into a ditch. She claimed to have been electrocuted back to life during the ambulance ride. Later, she emerged from minor brain surgery no longer the pert cheerleader but now a boylike creature: flat-chested, rail-thin, and with a monkish head shaved and stitched. The outside corner of her left eye had been left scarred and stretched-looking so that her eyes appeared mismatched. When her hair grew back, it came in no longer jet-black and wavy as before, but straight and silvery gray, the color of lake water or mercury, and also the color of her eyes.
&nb
sp; Come Saturday Noel loaded his camera into the trunk and took Amber first to Pasquale’s and then to a party out in Petal. Afterward he did not recall failing with Amber. He recalled only the familiar rush of emotions attached to failure, though he clearly remembered holding a black rubber flashlight inside a slatternly tree house and watching Amber fit back on her yellow bra. The tree house was located fifty-odd yards into the woods behind her home, which sparkled through the branches like the evening star. Noel sipped from a tequila bottle and tried to memorize Amber’s nakedness.
“You know what he’d do if he found us out here?” she was saying. “I shit you not, Moon Man, he’d shoot us both boom-bang. He might not shoot you right away, if you get my drift. He’d shoot me first, but all I’d do is laugh at him. I been dead before, what’s the big deal?”
“Moon Man?” Noel said.
“You’ve never heard anybody call you that before?”
Noel let his eyes burn out of focus on the twinkling light under which Amber’s father may or may not have been loading a shotgun, then he returned his attention to Amber, to her nakedness that any moment now would close itself from him forever. He tried to clear his mind, to leave it a blank sheet so that her naked body could develop onto it like an image inside a chemical bath. Amber was standing before him in only the green midriff shirt and yellow panties, and stroking her short hair with a broken-handled red brush, tossing her silver hair forward and brushing it up from behind. While she did this, she asked if she could have some pot to take with her.