by J. G Hayes
“It’s almost lights out,” I said.
“We won’t interrupt no more!” Fitzy said.
“Just tell us about what it was like to kiss her!” Paul said.
“Tell us about her pussy!” Fitzy cried, but Sully picked up his Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and lofted it across the room at him.
“Her kiss,” I said, and they all froze. Fitzy dropped the book he was about to hurl back at Sully. Paul wiped a bead of sweat off his bare neck. His veins were stuck out like rip cords.
“Uh,” I said, shaking my head like I couldn’t find the words.
“C’mon, Danny. Tell,” Sully groaned.
I looked at them.
“You know how it is with most of them you kiss? You’re thinking, ‘okay, this is sweet, sweet, Jesus-sweet, but can I lower my hands to the ass? Can I lift one hand up now and brush it softly across the right tit? Or should I do it with my wrist, like it was on accident?’ You know, you’re kissing, but you’re always thinking about the next thing you can do, what next you can get away with, no? You know how that is?”
“Yeah. Oh yeah!” they all said. Fitzy’s hand crawled under his rumpled navy blue sheet. He raised one knee.
“Well, with Terry …”
I closed my eyes.
“Yeah?”
“With Terry it was like … Jesus, it was like the whole world went away. When our lips met for the first time. It was like … it was like you could stay that way forever. It was like you fell into a different planet, you fell through a hole in the ground and came to the center of the earth and you were still falling, wondering but not really caring when you were gonna land. Electricity. Like someone put one of them joke handshake-buzzer things up against your mouth, and clicked it on.”
“Holy shit,” Paul whispered.
“Lucky for you I wasn’t up there then, Danny Boy,” Sully said. “I would’ve stolen her from you!”
“Better lose that gut first, Sull-dog,” Fitzy said.
“Shut up, you guys,” Paul ordered.
They all turned back to me.
“Kissing Terry,” I said. “So soft. So unbelievably soft. Moist. Tender and warm. Like your mouth was lowered onto rose petals, rose petals … rinsed in cinnamon. Her mouth always tasted like cinnamon. You weren’t even thinking about what else you could get. Like, you didn’t even own hands no more, almost like you didn’t have a cock no more. There was lips, that was all. There was her mouth and nothing else. Nothing else in the whole freakin’ world. And you just know you have to have this for the rest of your life. No matter what. And you know you’ll do anything to get it, stop drinking, stop drugging, stop doing all the crazy shit we do, and make yourself worthy of someone like Terry.”
“Lights out, gentlemen!”
Everyone but me jumped when the hard knuckley rap came on the door.
“Whew,” Paul said, like he was waking from a dream. He looked around, then jumped up quick and trotted to the bathroom, his two hands pressed against his groin. Fitzy rolled back over to face the wall. Sully climbed right into his bottom bunk with all his clothes on, like he always did. In the morning all his clothes would be thrown on the floor; they seemed to come off one a time while he was sleeping.
The lights went out three minutes later. I think Fitzy had already cum. Next we heard Paul, trying to be quiet as his body writhed and tightened, but we could still hear that strange whimper bash out of him at the last minute, and my bunk on top of his was trembling. Sully didn’t really care. When he came every night as soon as the lights were out, he moaned loud until all of us were throwing shit at him.
But tonight we all laughed when he did it. It was the first time any of us had laughed before we fell asleep since we’d been here, I think.
“You’re gonna tell us more tomorrow, right Danny?” Paul murmured right before I fell asleep.
“I WANT TO TELL you about the first time I saw Terry,” I began the next night. We’d all rushed through Activities an hour earlier to get to Quiet Time. Sully had even signed up for the after-dinner Jog Around the Park and we knew why.
“I thought you were gonna tell us about her pussy!” Fitzy whined.
“Shut up, Fitz,” Paul said.
Our group had grown by two—Paul had invited two of the guys next door to listen in and asked, did I mind? What could I say? Their eyes were like the dead Fishes’ you’d see on ice at Foodmaster.
“I had duty in the stable barn that morning.”
I closed my eyes and remembered.
“It was deep in May. Deep. I don’t know the date or the day of the week or nothing like that.”
I looked up and met their eyes.
“You know how you get.”
They looked away, picked scabs if they had any. Paul cracked his knuckles.
“You … can’t believe your life has come down to this, that you’re in this kind of place. Anyway, like I say it was my day to be in the barn there. The day was one of them perfect ones that only come after a long nasty winter that you’re sure’ll never end. The apple trees were all mad with bloom—there was no place you could be and be away from their smell. The lilacs too. The sky was scrubbed denim blue and puffy white from the rains the night before. Big mother rains, lightning too. The sun was warm on my skin. A day like this, kinda makin’ you think they’d never been such a thing as winter. Though it was still like … ahh … November in my heart.”
I didn’t have to look at them; they knew what I was talking about.
“I was kicking down fresh hay from the loft, right, with the idea I’d rake it into the stalls once I got it down there. They told me to put out enough hay for six horses, but how was I supposed to know how much hay a fucking horse’ll eat, let alone six of the bastards. I figgered I’d just kick down a shitload, and they could be the judge. The hayloft door on the second floor was open, you know that opening they had there like a big-ass window. Nice view from there. Out into the hayfield. Down into the valley. Across, way across to these blue hills on the horizon. You could see a church steeple halfway between, and you start wondering about all them Other People. All the Other People that are normal and have nice lives and aren’t … ahh …drunks. You start … wondering like, what your life might’a been like if you grew up in a place like this. With, like, a regular family and stuff. I stopped what I was doing and looked out at the view.
“This line of birds dipped and sang through the sky. I thought of the word diphthong. It might’ve been the first day of the world. But it meant nothing to me.”
My eyes met Paul’s. He looked down.
“I went back to my duty. For some reason I … I don’t know, I almost started to choke up. Then … this thing, something … called to me. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was staring down at my forkful of hay. I’d been working like a bastard, as if I could sweat all the crazy shit out of my mind by working my muscles to exhaustion.” “That must’ve taken about three minutes,” Fitzy joked.
“Then I stopped. Just stopped. This feeling came over me, like a thrown bucket of water. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t any desperater than I’d been the minute before. I just stopped. And this thing came over me. Something called to me from outside the hayloft. I paused before I turned my head, just to be sure, to really feel it. Then I raised my head and turned around.
“The sun was in my eyes coming up the valley, and it blinded me. I held my hand up to my head, squinting. It was like whatever was coming—and I swear to you on my mother’s grave I could feel something coming—was coming out of the sun. I kept looking, squinting, my sweat stinging my eyes but I had to keep looking, and something did come out of the sun. A person. Someone. Coming across the fields. On horseback. Holding the reins with one hand, easy, casual like. Like the rest of us driving a car.
“It was Terry.”
A shudder zipped through the room.
“I told you,” Paul whispered to one of the guys from next door.
“Was she like dressed like a cowgir
l? Like Madonna in that video there?” Sully asked. One of the guys from next door, Ed, laughed, but I knew Sully was serious. Fitzy glared at Ed until Ed mumbled, “Ahh, sorry.”
“No,” I said. “No no, nothing like that. Just jeans and a dungaree jacket. But … so soft, you wanted to touch them to make sure you weren’t dreaming. The way they hugged the thighs so perfect. The same color as the sky, like Terry was riding the sky. Old brown cowboy boots. A flannel shirt, red and white and green, open a button or two at the neck. The skin where the shirt was open shining a little in the sun. This thin film of… not sweat. Moist skin. You wanted to smell it, lick it. And a baseball cap, from some feed store down in the valley.
“But she might have been the friggin’ governor with a pardon for all of that. Terry … some people are like a ray of sunshine, wherever they go and whatever they do, they seem perfect there, no? Un … unquestionably right. You’d no more ask her where she learned to ride or what she was doing here than you’d ask a bird what it was doing singing in a tree.
“She came out of the sunlight and stopped about twenty yards from the barn. She was facing me. Our eyes met. I don’t know why she stopped. She told me later but I didn’t believe her.”
“What’d she say?” Paul asked. His voice cracked and he cleared it, then took a drink of water from the bottle between his legs.
“Like I said last night … there’s some people, you just look at them. And ahh … you know.”
Someone gave a low whistle.
“We just stayed there for … I don’t know. It could’ve been a minute, it could’ve been ten minutes. I’d opened my shirt and the sun was falling on my chest, lighting up my sweat.
“Hey,’ she finally said. The voice cut into me, like a knife made out of feathers. My mother always said it was so rude to stare, but that’s all we could do. Finally I just nodded. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“The others came up then, some to clean out the barn and others to take the horses out. Terry was leading them. That’s what she did. She came up three mornings a week and led the horse rides. She held my eyes until the last second. Then she nodded, and turned away quick like she’d made up her mind about something, and led the group across the fields, telling people what to do. But in this unbelievably friendly way. You know how so many of them treat us like dog shit. There was none of that with Terry. Just to have her look at you and smile was worth a month’s worth of meetin’s, you felt that better about yourself.
“I still couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe. My whole life had just turned on a dime. I knew it. This thing lifted from my shoulders— didn’t even know I’d been carrying it. I stared out into the valley. It was the same scene I’d looked at five minutes before, but … I didn’t know what had happened to me until later, when little by little it started dawning on me.”
“What?” Fitzy asked.
They’d put a semicircle of chairs in front of me and I locked eyes with each of them for a minute.
“It’s the most important thing you can learn.”
“So what happened? When did you finally hook up?” Paul asked, pausing for a minute from biting his fingernails.
“Well, I didn’t see her again for almost a week. Can someone get me a drink o’ water?”
Before I could finish the sentence four of them were handing me their bottles.
“Thanks. So you know, I started to think I might’ve dreamed her out of the sky blue sky. But the voice—I heard it, last thing before I closed my eyes at night. First thing in the morning, before I even woke up. Hey. That voice. The smile that went with it. The eyes, how our eyes locked. I didn’t want to ask nobody in case they told me there was no one by that name who led the horse rides. You know how it is. You … you get a little crazy sometimes. But I didn’t think I was that crazy. But then I was coming back from a meetin’ one night. You know how they have the meetin’s up there in the library eight o’clock every night? On the first floor? It’d been kinda cloudy all day and blah, just gray everywhere you looked. Especially inside yourself. The valley was in a fog all day—all you could see was that church steeple, rising out of the clouds like a needle. But then that night I was walking from the library to our dorms, and everything changed. The breeze picked up, but it got warmer. It blew the clouds and fog apart the way the streetsweepers clean up Broadway after the Saint Patrick’s Parade. The moon came out like a silver spotlight. I decided I’d just walk around a little—they’re not as tight with the rules up there as they are in this place.
“Now, do you guys remember the old railroad tracks up there?”
“No,” Fitzy said.
“They were abandoned. I don’t know if you ever saw them. They ran behind the buildings and down into the valley, they went over the river on a bridge, remember?”
“I remember the bridge,” Paul said.
“Well, I was walking along, and I cut through these woods, all spangled with moonlight, then I came up on the tracks. You know I always liked railroad tracks, ’member, Fitz? They’ve always been a comfort to me so I just figured I’d walk them for a bit. The rails were still wet from the day’s rain, and the moon hit them and turned them into two shining silver lines running off into the drippy trees and bushes and then infinity forever. There was wildflowers and weeds growing up in between the ties. I was thinking of all the people who had ridden trains on these tracks, what their lives had been like, what were the things they struggled with. What were the things that made them happy. What … what people like us did before we were given the God-given program.”
“Mmmm,” someone murmured.
“I kept walking, and before you knew it, I found myself up at the bridge, where the tracks go over the river. The moon was shining on the water. There was bullfrogs down there, bellowing like mad. You could hear the sound of the river thirty feet below, rushing and gurgling away, away. The water was way high after all the rain, the spring snowmelts, everything. I know it sounds weird, but I felt like that sound was trying to talk to me, like it was trying to give me the answers I’d been looking for for so long. But no matter how hard I listened, I couldn’t figure out its language. Follow?
“I walked out onto the bridge a little way. I could see the shining water below me, between each tie, like knives flashing in a drawer. I sat down on the edge of the bridge. I let my feet dangle over the edge. All of a sudden I felt all grateful for my feet as I looked down at them, for all the places they’d taken me to over the years. The Little League games, the thousand walks up to Communion, my mother’s funeral when I was a pallbearer. And lots o’ wrong places too, but that wasn’t their fault. The moon was shining silver right into the water, and bouncing up into my eyes. The water was swirling. It seemed so soft, so warm, that water. I kept staring into it. My palms started getting sweaty. I … I stood up—the water seemed so comforting—”
Sully cleared his throat—
“And then I heard this noise. Someone walking. I turned my head to the right. It was Terry, walking down the tracks, crossing the bridge. Drenched in moonlight. Her head was down, watching where she was going, so she didn’t see me. I lost my breath again, like the first time. I wanted to say something so I wouldn’t scare her. But nothing would come out again.
“When she was about twenty feet away, she just stopped. Her head lifted up, like an animal’s, sniffing danger. Our eyes met. It was like she sensed me. I heard a little inrush of breath.
“You,” she said.
“I nodded, so she wouldn’t think I was the village idiot. We stood staring at each other. The moon so bright I could see her blush.
“What was she wearing?” Sully asked.
“Light chinos this time, and some old hiking boots. They were brown with red laces. And a T-shirt from some café down in the valley that a friend of hers owned. The Moose Caboose. Funny what you remember in life, no? And a mustard-colored work jacket.
‘“Excuse me,’ she finally murmured. ‘I hope I didn’t scare you. I… I walk
here a lot at night. I’m looking for barns.’”
“Barns?” Fitzy said. “Yeah, baby! She liked getting it on in barns! Yoo-hoo!”
“Barns? I asked her.
“‘I make furniture,’ she said. ‘That’s what I do. I make furniture from the wood of old barns.’
“‘What about the horses?’ I asked.
“‘That’s volunteer work,’ she said. ‘I always loved horses. I don’t own any of my own yet, so that’s how I stay close to them. Love horses.’
“The blood was thumping in my ears. And then I realized, her voice, it was the voice of the river. The same voice, but one of them was singing and the other one was speaking, one going in and out of the other. Follow?”
“Smoke another bone, baby!” Fitzy laughed, tugging at himself. “So what happened? Did yez do it that night?”
‘“So why you looking for barns?’ I asked her. She had this way of pausing before everything she said.
“‘When I make my furniture, I like to use chestnut wood mostly,’ she said. ‘But all the chestnut trees were wiped out a hundred years ago by a disease.’
“‘Oh,’ I said. We both started walking toward each other a little.
“‘The only place you can find chestnut wood now is in old fallen-down barns,’ she said, but her eyes staring into mine were like … ahh, I dunno, like the water down at Castle Island causeway where it’s all deep and rushing. Rushy. It could drown you, like. ‘Oh,’ I said again.
‘“The old barn builders used nothing else when they could find it. Chestnut was the best. It lasts forever.’
“Her voice was a murmur now. We were close by then. Face to face. I could see the moons in her eyes. I could smell her. She smelled of… the woods, and outdoors, and the earth in the spring.”
“And cinnamon,” Paul said, turning to the guys from next door. “Her breath always smelled like cinnamon.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s right.”
“‘The tracks are a good place to walk because you can see a lot of old barns that you can’t see from the road,’ Terry said, and the whole world drained away when she talked.