Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  A man in the bleachers’ top row shot up from his seat. He was the typical softball moron, dressed in his straw hat, his yellow-framed sunglasses, his black socks with jogging shoes. He turned, glaring at Neil. “It’s Nock-Shtitt,” the man pronounced. He shook a noisemaker at us, one he’d brought in case his chosen team won the game. Neil gave the okay sign, and the man sat back down.

  Nock-Shtitt flied out to left field. End of inning. I felt like saying, He couldn’t hit worth shtitt, but just as I opened my mouth, Neil’s mike clicked again. “No runs, no hits, no errors,” he said. “After one full inning of play, the score is First National Bank zero, Auto-Electric zero.” He reached for the keyboard to the electronic scoring device and punched a button. I looked toward the left field fence; on the scoreboard, the inning changed from one to two.

  While I sipped from the bottle, Neil pointed out men he thought handsome. During game number two, he said, “Look at that one,” indicating the third baseman. “Oh, baby.” At first I thought he was kidding. The guy had huge sideburns, a toast-colored mustache, and a bald spot the circumference of a hubcap. “I’d have him for free,” Neil said.

  A player hit a foul ball. I watched it loop over the fence, bounce into the parking lot, and disappear beneath a Jeep. “Please bring all foul balls to the press box,” Neil said into the mike.

  Seconds later, there was a knock on the door behind us. “Enter.” The door opened, and a boy stepped into the box, his hair cropped short, sweatbands cuffing his wrists. He presented the grass-stained ball to Neil, cupping it in both hands like something sacred. “My daddy hit this,” he said.

  Neil reached into a box beside the scoreboard buttons. Inside were wrapped pieces of bubble gum and some shiny dimes. “What do you prefer, little man?” I’d never seen Neil around a kid before. He’d seemed the type who would ignore or torture them, but that wasn’t the case. He shifted his eyes from the game and scrubbed at the boy’s hair. “Will it be the money or the bubbles?” The boy shuffled forward to get a better look at his choices, and Neil patted his shoulder. “I’ll decide for you,” he said. He held out three dimes and five pieces of gum. The boy took them, the smile practically cracking his tiny face, and scampered out.

  “When kids do well, you’ve got to reward them.” Neil looked back to the game. “Jesus, look at that catcher’s ass.”

  The second game was ending, and Neil and I were drunk. His fingers drummed the vodka bottle in time to the music. I wanted to kiss him, but that part of our relationship was over. In the sky, a low-flying plane trailed a banner that advertised something, its letters unreadable in the waning light.

  On the drive home, I could only think about Neil. If what I felt was love, it had happened unexpectedly, like a slap from a stranger or a hailstorm of cherries from a cloudless sky. We’re supposed to be just friends, I told myself. He likes only older men. I stepped on the Gremlin’s accelerator, figuring the best thing to do was get home and write some really fucked-up, drunken lines of poetry in my journal. I was contemplating moronic possible poem titles—“Raining Tears of Blood”; “The Bottomless Pit Called Me”—when I zoomed through a red light. I didn’t see the pickup. I slammed into its back end.

  I sat there, dazed. I took a breath, paused, breathed again. I carefully rearranged my thoughts. A picture of my mom and dad took shape in my mind, and I forced it back into some far, neglected corner. I’m alive, I thought. They weren’t so lucky.

  The pickup was illegally parked alongside Fourth Street, in front of an apartment complex. In the apartment’s lot, partygoers whooped it up, speakers blaring an old Led Zeppelin tune at top volume. I picked out the words “woman,” “baby,” and “shake that thing.” I waited, but the music didn’t cease. No one came cussing or flailing out. Gradually, the fact dawned on me that I’d hit the windshield. The glass had spiderwebbed.

  I felt an ache in my forehead, like a hot scalpel along my right eyebrow. I guessed no one had witnessed the wreck, because I sat for minutes without anyone approaching. Fingers of steam plumed from the new bend in the car’s hood. I thought of Neil, less than a mile away in his press box, as drunk as me but unscathed.

  I touched my head, swiped away some blood. The sight of it made me strangely happy. I shifted into reverse. When I tried to move, the Gremlin’s wreckage caught a little on the pickup’s back end. “I am so fucking wasted,” a partygoer’s voice declared over the Led Zeppelin. I waited for the guitar solo to crescendo, then revved the engine. The car separated from the pickup. I steered back onto Fourth and headed home.

  The next afternoon, I woke and realized it was true: without warning, I’d fallen in love with Neil McCormick. It was a doomed, impulsive, and criminal sort of love. I felt the vicious effects of both vodka and accident, and in the mirror I saw the purplish black crescent beneath my eye. It would turn purpler and blacker. I touched a peroxide-soaked cotton ball to the eyelid, and the sting made me flinch. “I’m the ugliest son of a bitch on earth,” I said in my best Clint Eastwood.

  It was raining outside. Soggy leaves fell everywhere, clinging to my bedroom window, their greens already sunburned to yellows. I telephoned Neil, hoping the sudden storm had temporarily postponed Sun Center’s tournaments. He picked up; drowsily answered, “Yeah?”

  “I take it they canceled the games,” I said.

  “Praise the lord.” On his end of the line, his mother was singing along to a TV jingle.

  I asked if he wanted to hang out. He coughed and said, “I don’t feel too hot. I think I’ll sleep most of the day. Call me later.” Click.

  Grandma waddled around the kitchen, grilling cheese sandwiches. She had skewered black olives on each finger like ten miniature hats, and she periodically bit them off. She spooned a kidney-size wad of butter onto a plate and dipped a slice of bread. “Yummy,” I said. My head was ready to implode.

  She regarded my eye, one olived finger on her chin. “You’ve been hurt.”

  “Um, yeah.” I figured as little as my grandparents used the Gremlin, they wouldn’t notice the damage. I let my tongue spew forth the lie. “Last night, I was so tired, while visiting Neil, I stumbled down the steps leading to his Sun Center press box. Nothing else was hurt, but oddly enough I landed face first on one of the steps….” Grandma wrapped three ice cubes in a paper towel and held it to my eye. When I used to have headaches, my mom would do the same thing.

  After lunch, I went back to sleep. I didn’t wake until the early evening, crawling from bed into a graceless and disarranged world. I waited for it to arrange itself again, then found my journal.

  A Saturday night, and I’d spent the entire day at home. I wrote the word BORED across the top of a page. Then I wrote LONESOME, decorating each letter with art deco swirls. “Better get used to it,” I said aloud. “He won’t be here forever.”

  Seven o’clock, eight. The rain stopped, but it was still cloudy. I watched the claustrophobic trailer park from my window. The neighbor family, replete with mom and dad, obviously couldn’t wait for Independence Day. They touched cigarettes to firecrackers, tossing them toward the street. Their two children applauded as Roman candles spat pebbles of red and blue over their trailer. I picked at the dinner plate Grandpa had brought to my room, forking the cornbread, hominy, and butternut squash into a colorless mash.

  When my grandparents retired to the TV room, I ran a wet comb through my hair, took another gander at my eye, and said, “What the hell.” The mobile home’s door slammed behind me. The neighbor family turned their heads to look, and I strutted toward the car.

  I drove the familiar route, imagining how Hutchinson would look on fire. The Impala wasn’t parked in Neil’s drive, but I tried anyway, ringing Neil’s doorbell one, two, three times. No answer. I prepared to jam my finger into the bell a fourth time when I noticed the note, written on a small grocery list that bore the logo of the store where his mom worked, attached to the screen with electrician’s tape. The note’s edges harbored thumbprints of milk chocolate.
He hadn’t addressed it to either his mom or me. It read: “G—At Sun Center. There all night due to rain delays. Meet me @ 10ish. You won’t regret it.—N.”

  G? I thought. And “won’t regret” what? My answer wasn’t hard to figure. “He’s hustling again,” I whispered.

  The sky was almost dark, the sun leaving an umber residue across the bank of clouds to the west. Below them, Sun Center’s stadium lights glowed in a silvery nimbus which, if I hadn’t hated the place so much, I might have found beautiful. I returned to the wounded Gremlin and hightailed it over there.

  By the time I arrived, the rain had begun again. Under the ballpark’s lights, it looked like billions of needles. No games were in session. The bleachers had emptied, save for a few random fools under umbrellas. The players huddled in dugouts. On each diamond, ground crews layered the infields with shimmering tarpaulin, skittering from base to base to secure its blue corners.

  The rain drenched me, plastering my hair to my head, and I smelled the black dye again. I took the stairs that led to Neil’s press box three at a time, half-knowing what I’d find. Then I stood on tiptoe to peer into his window. I saw Neil’s shiny black hair, the top of his ear, his closed eyes. He sat in his scorer’s chair. Mmmm, his voice said, the sound as lazy and as one-step-shy-of-genuine as the noises the actors in his porn films made. Then another head—G’s, I assumed—entered the square frame of the window: this one nearly bald, a neck so sunburned it looked smeared with scarlet paint. I couldn’t see the face. The head kissed Neil, then moved down, out of the frame. I heard an audible slurp. Neil’s eyes opened, his gaze locked on wherever the head had maneuvered itself.

  Below, between the diamonds, a softball player cowered beneath an umbrella. As I moved away from the window, the player stared up at me. “Are the games called off or aren’t they?” he asked through the pounding rain. I shrugged and walked back to the stairs. I could hear muffled car doors slamming, people yelling good-byes. None of them knew that nearby an eighteen-year-old boy was receiving a blow job from another in a long list of johns. I wondered about the sunburned man’s age; how much he’d negotiated to pay. Mud bubbles splattered the boots Neil had helped me shoplift, and I deliberately stomped through puddles until I reached the car.

  Before I left, I squinted back at the shadow of Neil’s press box. I won’t deny I love you, but you’re basically an asshole. I doubted he’d receive the message.

  I couldn’t stomach the trailer park, so I detoured toward North Monroe. I needed to hurt him somehow, to raze and weaken him, or, as I suddenly longed to scribble down as the line of a poem, “to scissor through the starched gristle of his heart.” Looking back, all that seems senseless—I’d known all along Neil was a hustler, understood I had no hold on him. But to know it was happening was one thing. To see it was another.

  I ran through the rain to Neil’s front door and tore away his note. I reread it, wadded it, aimed for a puddle and pitched it. When I tried the door, it was unlocked.

  The house reeked from Neil’s mom’s cooking, in this case a dish she’d obviously sprinkled with too much cumin. In the kitchen corner’s trash can, charred onions and beans rested beside a recipe card marked MULLIGATAWNY. I hurried through the hall and opened Neil’s bedroom door.

  The place appeared virtually the same as the day before; Neil’s sheet twisted into a new configuration, and he’d spilled some pot across his night stand. Yet things seemed different. I danced around the room, toppling stacks of tapes, kicking pillows, shoes, letters from Wendy. I pushed the lamp from the table. It knocked against the floor with the vacant clunk I imagined a decapitated head would make when striking pavement. I ruined his meticulous stacks of pennies. I closed my fist around a baseball trophy, the points and ridges from the tiny gold figurine’s face cutting into my palm. “Most RBIs, Summer 1981,” I screamed, my voice raising with each syllable, and on the “eighty-ONE!” I flung the trophy at the wall. It didn’t break. I ran toward it as if it might scurry off, then threw it again. No luck.

  The key, I thought.

  It was still under the mattress. It burned its forbidden shape into my hand, catching a ray from the streetlights outside Neil’s window. It turned easily in the dresser drawer’s lock.

  The drawer’s contents were divided into two sections. On the left were wads of bills—I noticed tens and twenties among the fives and ones—plus pills, acid tabs, a bag of pot. The right side contained a thick stack of things. Rawhide rode the top of the mountain. I brushed aside some random pieces of paper, skimming through an unintelligible letter from Christopher Ortega and a torn Panthers baseball line-up, the name “McCormick” fourth from top. Finally, I pulled out what looked to be an enviable collection of porno books and magazines.

  Neil’s magazines were beyond belief. I couldn’t venture a guess where he’d gotten them. Most boasted glossy, hardcore photo spreads of rough-looking men. I recognized one guy as the ranch hand from the movie; once again, he was being dominated by a mustached muscleman. The others had similar appearances. But these pictorials of older guys sucking and fucking were tame compared to the magazines at the bottom of Neil’s stack. In one, the photos were so amateurish they seemed taken during a tornado. Bracelets and cummerbunds of leather secured a young boy to a wall. In the magazine below it, a grinning, obese man paired up with a different boy, this one sporting closely cut blond hair and freckles. On the cover, under the title of “Free Range Chicken,” the handcuffed preteen knelt before the man. The kid’s jeans bunched at his ankles. I turned the pages, skimming the photos, and saw an arm with an anchor tattoo wrapped around the kid’s body; an erect adult dick pressing against the kid’s obviously terrified face; a close-up of two stubby thumbs as they meticulously separated the kid’s ass like the seam of an overripe peach.

  I replaced the stuff as I’d found it. I picked up the trophy again, threw it, watched it fall to the floor and bounce. I wanted to open my mouth and scream. I needed a soundtrack for my rage. There was a tape in Neil’s stereo, so I turned up the volume and pressed play.

  I scattered more pennies, gave more kicks to the pillow, and then stopped. Slowly, the things I heard came into strange, acute focus. I had expected Neil’s tape to be some earsplitting, rhythm-heavy band with just the right brand of self-possessed and mournful lyrics to match my mood. But the tape wasn’t playing music at all. Two people spoke in voices I didn’t recognize, the voices of a man and a little boy. The boy giggled, and weird buzzes and blips echoed in the background like noises from a cartoon. This one’s going to be a good one, the boy said. Pause. Then I heard a burp, an extended hiccup at once obscene and undeniably cute. It was the burp, I thought, of a prince in the guise of a toad, of an angel on the outs in Heaven.

  That was a bi-i-i-ig motherfucking burp, the older voice on the tape said. Go ahead, into the microphone. Say it.

  The child took a deep breath. That was a big motherfucking burp. The kid giggled again, and the adult joined him. In the midst of their laughter, I heard another high-pitched bleep, and I recognized the noise as the sound effect from a video game I’d played years ago. Pac-Man, I thought. No, Frogger. There was a recorded rustling and a bump, as if an arm had brushed the microphone, and at that second I remembered Neil, just yesterday, leaning over his mike at Sun Center, the mouthpiece padded with red foam.

  I knew the identity of the child on the tape. It was in the warped vowel of the boy’s fuck, the lilt of his giggle. I loved that voice. Whether then or now, I would know it, and I would love it.

  The tape’s voices paused again, and within that silence I heard someone moving in the house. My first thought was, burglar; my next, more realistic, was, Neil. I leaped up, clicked the stereo off, and took the tape out. Written on its label was NEIL M.—JULY 81. It wasn’t Neil’s handwriting. I shuffled to the dresser drawer, slammed it, and returned the key to its precise hiding place.

  “Neil?” someone asked, and a shadow entered the room. It was his mom. “Whatever’s going on in h
ere, I have to ask you to keep it down a little, because—” She stopped, seeing I wasn’t her son.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  I put my hands in my pockets, then took them out again. Mrs. McCormick bit her bottom lip. Her face was shiny and apologetic. “I thought you were Neil,” she said. “But that’s okay.” She surveyed the room’s damage, then glanced at my hands, perhaps checking if I was armed.

  “There was a fight,” I said. I took the trophy from the floor and replaced it on the table. “I went slightly crazy, I guess. Now it’s time to clean up.” I reached toward the penny avalanche. “The ball games are still going out there. Neil’s great at that job, you know.” I sat on the bed and began stacking the pennies, one after the other, rebuilding the gleaming copper tower on the night stand.

  Mrs. McCormick found some letters I’d scattered and put them on Neil’s dresser. A photograph fell from one, and Wendy’s face smiled out, two fingers raised in peace. Neil’s mom saw the picture and watched it, her eyebrows raised. Her movements were labored and effusive, as if she’d just crawled from a sea of bourbon.

  “I need to fall asleep,” I said. “I’m so tired.” I wasn’t, really. Somewhere outside the house, a cricket chirped. “Kansas is horrible. All it does is rain here. School is over at last. Do you think my hair color is too severe? Neil won’t give me an honest answer.” These words meant nothing to either of us. I had to say it. “Oh, yeah, I’m in love with him.”

  Neil’s mom didn’t look away from the floor. I sat on the bed, and she sat beside me. She inhaled sharply three times, and for a moment I believed she would cry. What did she know about the voices on the tape? What did she know about Neil’s current whereabouts?

  “Why are you telling me this,” she said. “I’m his mom.”