by J. G Hayes
We almost lost Sully one night. That’s when I started telling them all about Terry, Terry Love, when Sully came back from the infirmary. You know, I just wanted Sully to know, and then eventually the others, about Something Good. Something … Saving. You needed something like that to make it in this place. One Good Thing, anything.
What happened with Sully was, I guess he snuck out and broke into the fuckin’ infirmary here around two in the morning and got hold of some pills. Just like Sully. He was quiet too, like Paul, but in a different way. Sully was dirty blond and quiet with faraway eyes, whereas Paul was quiet with darting, anxious eyes and twisting hands that he’d crack the knuckles on every three minutes—I’d time it sometimes. Wherever he was Sully would just sit there, his arms folded across his chest, his light blue eyes a thousand miles away. “Sexy Eyes” all the girls used to call him back home when we were growing up. There was a Rod Stewart song out then by that name and we used to kid him. The ladies were all after him all the time then. Young and old, single and married. Even some of the angry young mothers when Sully had his paper route when he was fifteen for crying out loud. He got one of them pregnant as it turned out. He’d been showing up late for school every day for like two months because he’d been screwing the daylights out of a certain someone over on West Fourth Street, and she had the baby and passed it off as her husband’s. We used to kid him all the time; he was seventeen and had a two-year-old son for cris’sake. He was wild then, always laughing, but then over the years, you know, he put on a few pounds from all the beers and got a little bit beefier, then lost a few of his front teeth in that brawl that night over at Debbie Morrison’s graduation party. Before, you know, he kinda lived on that stuff, having all this action and all these girls. I mean, some people do; it’s their whole life. Though even then Sully would get quiet and get that look in his eye sometimes. But now like I say he was a bit beefier and the missing teeth and all, and as a dry waller working for himself he didn’t have no benefits like most of the rest of us. And of course being a candidate for being a Friend of Bill (also like the rest of us), well… that’ll fuck you up and derail your life (if you ever had one) better than anything.
Anyways, getting back to that night, of course Sully had been extra quiet when he first got here, everyone is. Except for the Bad Boys that won’t be broken no matter what, until they break themselves. I guess there’s a gene somewhere, I call it the Rebellion for Its Own Sake Gene. In a way I hope they never find it, because if they do they’ll flush it out and everyone will turn gray and we’ll live in a world where no one ever disappoints their parents. That’d been in the Southie pool since day one, that gene, but me and Fitzy and Sully and Paul (even though Paul wasn’t from Southie) had had it flushed out of us (if we ever had it). This place’ll do that to you. It’s not anything they do to you here really. They’re all very nice, to tell the truth. It’s just you see that you’ve ended up here, number one; and number two, you don’t have the distractions of life that you do back in Southie—back anywhere I guess—that let you duck behind yourself. And your issues. Not a word we’d ever used in Southie, but after the first week we were all saying it. Issues. We all had Issues.
Anyways. It was our second week here when Sully did it. He must have done it awful quiet, because high-strung Paul’s a wicked light sleeper, so many nights you’d roll over in the middle of the night and you’d see Paul, staring and spitting out the window, cracking his knuckles. But Sully snuck out the window and somehow broke into the infirmary across campus (as they like it call it here). He never really did tell us exactly how he did it. I wish I’d seen it though. It’s always interesting when the animal comes out in any of us, especially people that are so quiet and dreamy-eyed like Sully. I don’t mean like in the Now It Can Be Told or True Cop Videos violent intrusive feasting-on-each-other’s-pain kind of interesting. I mean interesting like in, when that stuff inside us—that ancient and wild stuff that’s usually self-controlled and self-contained and policed and frowned upon from day one—when that stuff pushes itself out and all you can do is watch, cuz you see it as your own. Interesting because we all have it. Most people forget they’ve ever had it, it’s been squashed on so much. First by parents: sit up straight, go to the bathroom here, not in your diaper, how come you got a F in English? Don’t touch your body there! What did you do to that girl? You can’t have the car for a freakin’ month! Then later in life by that most efficient cop of all, ourselves: don’t go screaming through the South Shore Mall, pushing over mannequins and ceiling-high displays of His and Her Leatherette Grooming Kits for no particular reason other than you want to, don’t do that, don’t think this, what will everyone say? As long as no one gets physically hurt, it’s interesting when that wild stuff finally gets out. Like one time in high school they dragged us all to this panel discussion in the auditorium where they had all these bearded experts, none of whom had ever lived in Southie, and they forced us to listen to their presentation, “The Triumph of Busing in the Boston School System.” Halfway through it Danny Doherty stood up, turned his back on the panel up on the stage, dropped his pants, and bent over and bellowed out, “Shakespeare!” Why? Why did he say Shakespeare? That gene.
That guy Thoreau, they got some of his books in the library here, he said our preservation is in the wilderness, but I think our preservation is in our interior wilderness too. But like the one outside us, it’s pretty endangered at this point.
But no one saw Sully when he tried to kill himself that night. One of the night wardens found him halfway between the infirmary and our dormitories, sitting up with his back against a tree. His arms hanging limp on the ground and palms up by his side. His eyes open like draining sewers. Fortunately it was September and not so cold yet. He was almost dead from the pills, but they pumped his stomach out and whatnot and three days later he was back in our room, quiet and nonchalant as ever. Like he’d gone to Atlantic City for a bus-trip gambling weekend. He’d left the three of us a note, if you can call it that. Just the word SORRY on the bathroom mirror, smeared in his own blood. He’d sliced his finger open with a razor blade to write it; we saw the Band-Aid. But other than that nothing had been said by any of us, and you didn’t ask Sully questions—you had to wait for him to volunteer information. You’d get that look.
The worst part of it all was, we were all pretty much in the same boat as Sully.
It was the second night since Sully had been back with us, one hour before Lights Out. Usually that’s Quiet Time, when you just hang in your room with your dorm mates or write letters back home. But none of us had anyone back home that really wanted to hear from us, so usually we’d just hang out or talk or chill or read or play cards. No TVs in this whole place if you can believe it, though they say the Director has one in her office. Just to keep up with the outside world, I suppose.
Something had to be said because Paul was biting his fingernails and Sully was sitting in a chair under the windows—all of which had bars on them now, thanks to his antics from five nights earlier—and Fitzy was lying on his bed facing the wall, breathing out depression in time to Paul’s and Sully’s desperation. Now that Sully had tried it, it felt like we were all fated to try it sooner or later. Unless something got changed, switched. Some rerouting of things.
I stood in the middle of the room for a second and felt like I’d scream. My own shit, and everyone else’s. Thank God I had that One Good Thing to grip onto: Terry Love. Unbelievable how just the thought of that would calm me like the hand of God.
It hit me that I had to share it.
I gulped and closed my eyes and blurted ‘‘I got something to tell you all.”
Paul jumped, and his head snapped up so quick I thought his neck might break. His eyes darted back and forth between mine and his half-bitten fingernails. Fitzy didn’t move. He’d always wait, look around like a cat. Sully just stared, those eyes.
Things had gotten so bad no one even asked, “What?”
“I met someone last sum
mer,” I said.
The silence still, globs of it dripping down the walls.
“I met someone last summer,” I repeated, and I hoped they didn’t hear the quaver in my voice.
“You did?” Sully asked blandly, in his cracky little-kid voice. You’d think he was ten years old sometimes instead of twenty-whatever like the rest of us. (At twenty-seven, Paul was the Old Man of our room.) He’d say that about anything, Sully, when you yanked him from his baby-blue world—you’d mumble “I gotta pee,” and he’d ask from across the room, “You do?”
Fitzy was still facing the wall, but his head lifted a little.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I did. Last summer.”
I ran my tongue over my upper lip, and grabbed a metal chair behind me and slid it into the middle of the room.
Sully and Paul were both staring at me now. Paul sitting backwards in his chair, bouncing his knee desperately, Sully with his dreamy eyes.
“Who?” Paul mumbled. He shoved a finger back into his mouth.
I stared down at my bare feet before answering.
“This hottie. Fuckin’ model material.”
They all looked at me.
“So what happened?” Paul asked, cracking his knuckles.
“When?” Sully wanted to know.
“Last summer. When I was up at ahhh … Shady Oaks.”
Now, Shady Oaks was the place you went to if you had three DUI arrests within three years, a one-month involuntary program. If you got busted again after that, you came here, for three months, and had to attend the AA meetings they had three times a day in the cafeteria down the hall. If you got busted again after you left this place, you’d never drive again and you’d do time. Long time.
“Shady Oaks?” Fitzy scoffed, half turning round. “When I was there there weren’t no babes there. ’Cept for the fuckin’ seventy-year-old cafeteria ladies. Those ‘Lunch Bags.’ ’Member, Sull, how we called them ‘The Lunch Bags’?”
“Yeah,” Sully said, long and drawn out, like he’d been defrauded.
“This one lived next door, on a farm,” I said. I nodded my head at the truth of this.
I said it so low that I had everyone’s attention now.
“Would come over a few mornings a week to work in the stables. ’Member them stables they had there? How everybody got assigned to working in the stables with the horses? Like one day a week?”
“Yeah,” everybody said at once.
“You mean the barn up there on the hill there?” Sully asked.
“Yeah, the barn. Barn, stables, whatever.”
Paul let go a deep breath and cracked his knuckles again.
“So what happened?” he asked. His knee-bouncing got faster. He was the oldest but also probably the strongest, all lean and wrangly muscle and those simmering eyes.
“What was her name?” Sully blurted, sitting up a little straighter.
I looked around at each of them, then paused and took a deep breath.
“Terry.”
“Did you fuck her?” Fitzy asked, rolling over in the bed and propping his head up on his arm. Everyone held their breath.
“Did you ever,” I said, slowly, looking around again, “did you ever just look at someone, and when your eyes meet … you just know? There’s nothing that can stop what will happen?”
“Yeah, but did you fuck her? Did you fuck her in the barn?” Fitzy asked querulously.
“Let ’im tell the story, Fitz!” Sully laughed, smiling and showing his dimples and broken front teeth. First time we’d seen him smile since he got here.
“Yeah, but did you?” Paul asked. His right hand dropped down to the lap of his green plaid boxers.
I looked around again and held their eyes. They could tell I wasn’t making this up.
“When it’s like that,” I said, locking eyes with each one of them for three seconds, “you make love, you don’t just fuck. You make love. You … go to this other place.”
“Okay, so did you make love in the barn?” Fitzy asked.
“In the barn?” I repeated, almost whispering. “Oh yeah. We made love in the barn. The horses staring quiet, their eyes liquidy, large. And out in the fields, behind the barn, the crickets all around like a choir in church with the lights out. And one night in the brook— remember that brook you drove over coming up the hill? And up against a tree outside my bedroom. And another time, in the kitchen in the middle of the night.”
“You did it in the kitchen?” Sully asked.
Paul’s slightly canine-looking teeth ran over his bottom lip.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“Bullshit!” Fitzy groaned. “You never said nothin’ about this.”
I held up the palm of my hand ’til they shut up.
“There’s certain ones,” I said, “a certain one. Has it ever happened to you? Guys, we been through so much together, but can we talk about this? About … love?”
Paul held my eyes, then looked down and shoved a finger back in his mouth. I winced at the crack. Sully still stared. Fitzy wet his mouth and looked away.
“You don’t talk about them is what I’m saying, not in the usual way. It’s like … you don’t know how to talk about them. They get you here, like most of them do”—I grabbed my cock and squeezed it through my white briefs—“but they get you more here.”
I tapped the left side of my chest, slow.
“Right here,” I said.
“What’d she look like?” Paul asked, dragging his chair in a little closer. It made a screeching noise on the floor.
“What the fuck!” Fitzy snarled, sitting up in his bed and putting his hands over his ears; he hated that sound.
“Uh,” I moaned, closing my eyes and shaking my head. “Beautiful. Beautiful. You think you’ve seen, you think you’ve come to know every single way a woman can be beautiful—sexy or trampy or just plain gorgeous or sharp dresser or killer body, or little-girl prude or tease or whatever. You think you’ve seen it all, and there’s nothing more you can learn about what turns you on.”
I paused.
“And then …” I whispered, holding their eyes.
“Yeah?” Paul asked.
“What then?” Sully asked.
“Then you see someone like Terry.”
Paul’s knee-bouncing got faster. He gulped so loud I could hear it. Both his hands were on his lap now.
“Tell us,” Sully said.
“Look at the boner Sully’s got!” Fitzy laughed, pointing across the room at Sully in his chair.
“Yeah, well at least I ain’t pullin’ on mine under the sheets, Fitz!” Sully accused back, crossing his legs.
“Shut up, you guys. I wanna fuckin’ hear this!” Paul complained.
I waited until it was quiet again. You could hear a monotone drone coming from the room beside us, and you knew the four guys next door there were talking about the Sobriety, the Sanity, that still seemed so far away from them God help us. A hopeful boat launched on desperate voices.
“It was the lips I noticed first,” I said. “The … lips.”
“Which ones?” Fitzy laughed. I turned and looked at him.
“Shut up, Fitz!” Sully cried.
I raised my right hand and extended my forefinger into the air.
“That was the first part of Terry I touched. And the first part of me she touched.”
I started moving the forefinger out, out, slow, slow, right there, right there. I waved my finger back and forth slowly. In a crescent. I closed my eyes and a moan came out of me, remembering.
“What’d they look like?” Paul asked. Both his hands were on his lap now too and he was leaned forward.
“I’ll tell you,” I whispered. Their bodies leaned in. I could hear them breathing, especially Sully, his mouth open, he was a mouth-breather.
I closed my eyes and saw it all again. I answered slowly, saying each word like it was a strange jewel.
“Full. Moist. Soft. The mouth open a little. Like those pouty li
ps them foreign actresses have.”
“Uh,” Paul said, shifting in his chair.
“Pink,” I said, “pinkish. And her warm breath spillin’ out was full of the taste of… cinnamon.”
“What’d she do?” Fitzy asked. “What did she do when you touched her there?”
My finger was still extended in the air.
“She shivered,” I said. “She shivered, and her eyelids fluttered down. This sound came out of her—”
Fitzy made an exaggerated moaning-fuck sound—
“Not a moan,” I said. “A sigh. An ouff. A … surrendering, like.”
“A sigh?”
“A sigh I almost couldn’t hear it was so soft. Like a very, very slight breeze going through the trees down at the beach on a humid August night. ’Member nights like that down at City Point Beach?”
“Did you kiss her? What was it like when you kissed her?” Paul asked.
“Tell us about when you fucked her in the kitchen,” Fitzy said.
“No, the barn!” Sully yelled. “Wit them horses lookin’!”
I looked at them ’til they quieted down. Then I looked at my watch.
“That’s all for tonight,” I said.
“C’mon!” they all yelled. Paul gave his stiffy a backhanded shove, trying to keep it from worming out the hole in his boxers.