by J. G Hayes
“What about if you kill somebody!” he sobbed when it finally broke out.
“There is no problem to which love is not the solution,” I said. And Sully, shocked, staring behind him, reached out his hand and rested it on Paul’s shoulder while he wept. The wet spot on Sully’s shorts coming through was like his tenderness finally being born again.
Another knock on the door, and it’s someone I don’t know, from the other side of the building.
“Tomorrow night again?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Tomorrow night again and every night until we’re out of here.”
WE HAD THIRTY-SEVEN nights left as of that night, I remember. I told them about Terry Love for thirty-five of them nights. One night I was sick, stomach bug, and couldn’t do it; the other night I needed a break. On both nights they met next door; I could hear them through the wall, recounting their favorite Terry moments from my stories.
WE “GRADUATED” a little over a month later—a dubious booby-prize term, graduating from a detox center, but, really, no tasseled know-it-all has ever been prouder. They said, and would say, years after, that no “class” had ever done better. Only one out of sixty-four of us didn’t make it when the sluice opened that would spill us back into Life. It’s someone you don’t know so you don’t have to worry about it, but he was angel-faced and one time I saw him still, intently looking at a bird singing down to him from a tree out back here, and don’t ask me what kind of tree it was, and he extended a finger that had fought and stole and poisoned himself with booze and he held his breath and cooed whimpering in words I couldn’t hear to get the bird to land on that small piece of finger he was extending into the world. For about an hour, and me watching him unknown. But it never did. Kind of ironic that he killed himself by launching his lean booze-pickled body off a five-story apartment building onto the parking lot below. Unless he found some other world on his way down.
Listen, this is what happened.
Paul. He never left with us. They offered him a job and he’s still up there, assistant director by now and with a doctorate or whatever they call it if you can believe it. I saw him on a local cable talk show one night, debating about some pilot program that needed funding with a cheap fuck-fat Republican from somewhere out in the sticks. Handsome as ever, Pauly-Boy, and nary a knee-bounce, though of course you’d think everyone would get nervous in front of them hot lights. He did crack his knuckles once though. When I laughed at that, Terry next to me in bed half-asleep smiled and asked “What?”
Sully does triathlons now, those running-swimming-biking things. In fact, he runs one every year on the South Shore now to raise money for a new alcohol treatment center for kids he wants to set up next to the projects back home. He had a slip once. Took the money and went on a boozin’ spree of girly-wildness down to one of them Indian gambling places they got way in the woods in Connecticut there. But in spite of what you might’ve heard, Southie is a forgiving place, and now sober again he’s almost got enough money again to open the place, except now his Aunt Teresa the ex-nun holds all the money for him and you will recall, if you know her at all, that St. Peter himself could not get a dime out of that one if it cost that much to get into heaven.
Fitzy. Fitzy finished his heating ventilation air conditioning training and got a really good job with the government up in Maine. He met a nice girl and they got three kids now. He takes pride, as well he should, in being utterly mundane. “We’re going to Sears this afternoon to buy shit if you can believe it,” he told me a month ago over the phone, laughing. “I fuckin’ love it.”
BUT GETTING BACK to our last day there. A Sunday morning it was, early September. The sky like that, endless and blue, and the light going all tender through things, trees, patches of grass. A shed that you’d never look at otherwise. There’s a bus right outside back to town. You know, it goes right by Shady Oaks too on the way back to Southie, back to the civilization that is waiting to crunch, seething as it waits to make us other people’s snarly animals again. It’s funny— the worse you get, the farther out they send you, is what I’m saying, this bus. Sully had gone to church. Did I tell you that about Sully, how he went to church every Sunday? They were holding our bus for him, and the sound of the bells and him came drifting up the hill, but Sully never ran. Smiling, showing off those new pearly whites he’d gotten at the infirmary his last week here.
“Where the fuck were you?” Fitzy asks as the bus rumbles off. We’re all a little nervous. Paul waves good-bye and then he’s gone. But some are more nervous than others. It’s not just this new life I’m starting, this whole new life, this whole new world—
—it’s they all want to meet Terry when we pull through her little town there right where Shady Oaks is, where I’ll be getting off forever. That little town, and Big Terry.
“Lucky you,” Fitzy says twenty times, while I comb my hair in the reflected glass window, do five hundred push-ups in the bouncy aisle to let loose a lot of tension because they all want to meet her, to see her.
“She might not be there,” I say when we whiz by the sign that says ENTERING RUTLAND. “She said she might have to work today.”
“Where, at the stables?” Sully asks.
“Yeah, yeah, the stables,” I say. “The stables. Or maybe making furniture there where she works. Her workshop at home there.”
“She won’t be there?” Sully asks. “She’s waitin’ for you and she won’t be there?”
“I … dunno,” I say. “I dunno, I dunno. She mentioned something about sending her brother if she couldn’t make it herself.”
“I can’t believe she wouldn’t be there to meet you, Danny,” Fitzy says. “She ain’t the Terry you made us believe she is if she can’t come down to meet you.”
“I dunno,” I say. I fold my arms and swallow hard. The bus takes a mean bounce, a lurch, and I wait for it to start going again but it doesn’t. The snake-hiss of air brakes, then “Rutland!” says the bus driver. “Anyone for Rutland?” And my eyes narrow and blind for a second with the turmoil of it all. I jump up, grab my hockey duffel bag from the rickety rack above me, and lurch forward to the front of the bus. Then I stop and turn around; I’ve forgotten to say good-bye. But Fitzy and Sully are doubled up at the window like little kids, noses pressed, looking out.
“Is that her?” Sully asks, pointing an unbitten finger.
“Naw, that can’t be her,” Fitzy says. “No tits on that one, and lookit the defeated look about her, no?”
“Ahh … see you guys,” I say.
They both turn. We stare. Mountains pass between us, but I can’t stay. We shake hands, a cryptic neighborhood handshake that we laugh at, yeah, we still remember. Fitzy has tears in his eyes and we end up hugging hard like that.
I turn around and head back up to the front of the bus. An old lady is lifting herself onto the bus, carefully, smelling of summery dusting powder and carrying a world within a bake-shop box, all done up with miles of that cordy, happy string they have. She smiles and then I book it down the steps when she finally plops down with a delighted sigh.
I stop on the sidewalk, snap-look around. My breath’s coming in jags—
“Danny! Danny! Over here!”
If I can only not cry as I fall into the arms of Terry I still might be able to pull this off. I half-open an eye, still wrapped up with Terry, as the bus smears passed. Sully and Fitzy’s face are a blur.
A WEEK LATER after a meeting I call Sully from a pay phone down on three-block long Main Street. Just to see how he’s doing, tell him how good I’m doing. I keep grub-shoving quarters in ’til I’m broke again. We laugh, we talk. We talk.
After I hang up the phone I start walking home to where I live now, to where we live. I go up the hill. The world gets bigger with every lurch. That smell of things. Flowing down all through me, horses and hay fields and something else that’s new and open. Like the view now in front of me.
I’ve missed the sunset over the valley by about ten minutes,
but the sky’s all orange and big and everything, and I have to stop for a minute, I have to. I pluck a piece of grass from the side of the road, stick it in my mouth, chew. Think a little.
I didn’t drink today. That’s such a good thing. Terry’s working on a bureau for someone out in the workshop and later tonight in the bedroom there will be that smell that I don’t notice anymore because I am now part of the smell.
I don’t know, man. I might have to, like, reassess my opinion of Sully. I don’t think he’s as prejudiced as I assiduously assumed he was.
I start whistling this song, break into a trot, home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Hayes, a writer and teacher, is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, This Thing Called Courage: South Boston Stories (2002).
More love, loss, humor, and heartbreak from the rough streets of South Boston
Booklist said of J. G. Hayes’s first collection of short stories, “We impatiently await (his) next effort!” The wait is over. Now Batting for Boston is a worthy successor to Hayes’s stunning debut, packed with the same brutal honesty, the same muscular passion, and the same tough-but-tender prose that made his first book an essential read. This book takes readers inside the bars, housing projects, and D Street bedrooms of South Boston—where a young man can feel like a stranger in his own skin, just trying to survive growing up gay among working-class Irish-Catholics who don’t want to hear the hard truths about their sons.
visit the author at www.thisthingcalledcourage.com
‘This collection CAPTURES SEXUAL AWAKENING IN ALL ITS CONFUSING, FRIGHTENING, AND TENDER ASPECTS. Hayes tells of boys in transition, coming to terms with unexpected attractions to other boys, against the backdrop of famously rough Irish immigrant South Boston, itself in transition into a gentrified neighborhood. Hayes’s characters—like a blunt blue-collar kid spinning his cautionary tale about coming to terms with who he is through a suicide attempt, and a sensitive young housepainter whose budding sexuality is inextricably tied to his creative yearning to be an architect—will win the affections of many readers…. Hayes frequently spins his tales beginning with an enticing mysteriousness that ends in surprising and gratifying ways. He embraces his Irish literary heritage in the rich detail and dialects he employs, combining them with a cinematic quality that creates a uniquely American voice. In Now Batting for Boston, Hayes is batting a thousand.”
—James A. Lopata, Editor, In Newsweekly, New England’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender newspaper
J. G. Hayes
“Hayes’s stories show us a variety of perspectives in tension: between working-class ‘Southie’ and gentrified South Boston, between youth and maturity, between heterosexist assumptions about masculinity and gay male sensibility, between watching and being watched. While each story plays out these tensions differently, aligning its characters in sometimes unexpected ways, each story also brings along a thread from another— maybe a workman’s ladder, or a friend named Sully, or the color of blue eyes and skies—which weaves all of the stories, like the characters, together despite their differences. And in all of the stories we also see the hint of ‘Possibilities’: the imagination which might just, now and then, take flight and escape expectations. Now Batting for Boston is a collection of stories that is, at heart, about the power of storytelling as a vehicle for hope and transformation.”
— Kathryn Conrad, Author of Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse
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