Fox Tooth Heart

by John McManus

  “I mean, how about a laugh?”

  “Keep the clothes. You’re right, I like being naked.”

  “So you opened those curtains on purpose.”

  “The bus came each day at seven and three,” Stephen said, and right away the offenders’ trance was as rapt as any angry jury’s.

  He had them. “There was a girl named Piper with coppery hair and a blue backpack,” he said, thinking maybe he understood what Jeremy had been doing at meetings. He’d been proving people’s sheer gall to believe.

  “And?”

  “And this,” he said, swinging the tree branch like a bat toward Bruce’s head. But it was so rotten that it broke in midair.

  “I’m not one of you,” he said, while Bruce laughed. “What I just said was a lie.”

  “It’s the truth according to Georgia.”

  “I’m leaving Georgia.”

  “If you don’t know reciprocity, you’re a shitty lawyer.”

  “That’s only with bordering states,” he said, a bigger lie than the high-placed friends or the bus. He’d had the friends; the bus had come at the hours he’d named, even if there was no Piper, no girl, no boy, no one but Seamus.

  They left him alone to pull on his pajamas, but he was too drunk to be alone. He carried a beer to the fire, where the others were talking about some quarry.

  So Jeremy had been telling the truth.

  He sat down opposite Gus, who turned and said, “Look, dude,” cutting his bucktoothed twin off midsentence. “Most days you won’t even talk to us.”

  “I was framed by a judge. You’re rapists.”

  “How do you know I wasn’t framed?”

  “Were you framed?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  Stephen tried to think of a clever answer. None came. He thought of replying that there was a bathhouse called the Downtown Men’s Club, where after Seamus died he took to sitting in the pitch-black darkroom. With nothing left to live for, you were free to go where you wanted and pursue hard dreams. Seamus had jumped without even trying—unless his hard dream had been sobriety—but Stephen was ready to try. Even after posting bail, he kept it up. After a month he knew the regulars by the feel of their bodies. Sometimes in the locker room he saw faces, too, like the corporate lawyer’s who’d beaten him in a suit over swing sets. Baxter Philpotts. About once a week Baxter sucked Stephen off in the darkroom and didn’t know. One day Baxter showed up with the judge assigned to Stephen’s case, a round redhead named Harold Hawkins. They were soaking in the hot tub when they saw Stephen passing by. The judge pursed his lips, and Stephen smiled. The slightest smile back might have meant join us, but neither man gave up that gesture, and Stephen was left to wonder upon conviction if the encounter was his true crime.

  “Are you gonna answer?”

  “I forget the question, but I imagine the answer is I don’t care,” he was saying when he heard footsteps. Good, he thought, having chosen what to tell Jeremy. Forget Alaska. You’re on the no-fly list and if you drive they won’t issue a passport. Then he would sit back and watch Jeremy grapple with never going north. It would serve as punishment not only for portraying Stephen in the meetings but for being young, for having a future.

  This, said a voice in Stephen’s head, was how he treated the people he liked.

  The footsteps weren’t Jeremy’s after all, but Patrick’s.

  During the pandemonium, Stephen guzzled one of Patrick’s malt beverages. I don’t care, he kept telling himself every second of the next hour. If he hadn’t been drunk or in shock, he might have fled. For safety, for good. Mourning the deaths of child molesters didn’t involve him. Dragging their bodies around. Planning what to do. Bruce proposed pitching camp deeper in the woods. Allen said he could find a fair-minded official to hear their case. “Practice Gandhian nonviolence,” Stephen suggested, just to make fun, as they burbled on.

  Had they not heard him? Should he take further offense?

  To prove once and for all that he wasn’t a part of them, he brought out a book, hastily chosen from his stacks. The Confusions of Young Törless. Too drunk to read, he opened it randomly and moved his eyes over the words. There had always been something that his thoughts could not get the better of, something that seemed at once so simple and so strange. There had been pictures in his mind that were not really pictures at all.

  Before he could learn whose thoughts, or pictures of what, Bruce snatched the book away and tossed it into the fire.

  Stephen turned from Bruce’s soft, pudgy face, which appeared amused even in anger, toward the flames engulfing Young Törless. The spine curled and was gone.

  “Somebody’s got to show you how it is,” Bruce said.

  Intending to throw a punch, Stephen stood up. Bruce’s face was shaped that way from having no shame. Without shame, you could grin and crack jokes. You could hide people’s clothes, wonder where sports stars would live. Bruce had probably been born that way, plus it didn’t hurt to ignore the past. The sickly mother he’d been avenging in Savannah had recently died. Never again would Bruce weaken to think of her, whereas Stephen’s mother was alive and well in Augusta, in the house he’d grown up in. She had thrown legendary Masters parties there until Stephen’s arrest. “When you were gay,” she’d said, “I didn’t mind, but this?”

  He’d called his mother callow, but those socialites had been her friends. It hurt when friends took themselves away from you. You wanted to hurt them back, or you were liable to hurt yourself instead. After Seamus died, when he knew he’d be feeling no more pleasure anyway, he purchased enough cocaine to use up his serotonin for good, and snorted it for a week. When it was gone, he poured a whole coffee bag into one filter and tapped brew, hoping to make his heart burst. Waiting, he grew ripe with sweat. Wasn’t it December? He undressed and opened every window. Raising the last one to the icy wind, he heard a pop. Steam was rising from the griddle. He’d forgotten to fill the reservoir.

  He went to unplug the machine, remove the pot. As one noise dwindled, another grew: a bus—he could see it out the living room window, pulling up.

  Where he stood, he was invisible, but the situation was too interesting not to respond to. Heart racing as he’d wished, he crossed to the front of the house, until the bus wasn’t thirty feet away. Atlanta Public Schools. High schoolers, middle schoolers; either way the boys in back were the ones to watch. The very day he died, Seamus talked about boozing in the back of the bus, getting high for the first time, in severe contrast to Stephen’s stifled childhood when he’d wanted daily to give up his forlorn front seat. The boys in back had sensed his yearning, turned against him, those same kids staring now. Carafe in hand, he stared back. Look at me, fuckers; I’m a trial lawyer. He was too old to envy them, he knew. He knew to envy Seamus was to misread Seamus’s story. A girl approached the bus stairs from inside. It was her stop. Had he been ogling her all year? Your Honor, he never even learned his neighbors’ names. The driver warned her back in. They went chugging on down the road. Blind strings in one hand, pot handle dangling from the other, Stephen wondered what he’d meant to do.

  He stood by the fire, wondering. “Show me,” he said, replying to what Bruce seemed to have already forgotten saying.

  THE NINETY-FIFTH PERCENTILE

  THE DAY THE HONDURAN BOY showed back up in American History instead of vanishing with his deported parents, Caidin Maddox convinced his friends Jeff and Adam to follow him home from school. The boy, Juaco Luna, had been wearing the same three T-shirts all spring. His shoes had holes, he carried no backpack. That wasn’t why Caidin stared at Juaco’s smooth brown arms and slender frame all through class, but it gave him an excuse to be curious. Everyone else at their West Houston magnet school, though it was technically open to teens of any income bracket who tested above the ninety-fifth IQ percentile, owned a few weeks’ rotation of shirts.

  Waiting for Juaco in Adam’s Z4, the boys discussed the driver’s exam. Caidin would be sixteen in June, and Jeff wasn’t
far behind.

  “Don’t study,” Adam said. “That test is designed for the other ninety-four percent. Jeff, when do you get your Viper?”

  “Starting to think Corvette, so me and Caidin can have matching ones.”

  “Awesome,” Caidin lied. He hadn’t told his friends the sad terms of his deal: the Corvette would come the day he joined the Air Force—same as his brother Caleb, who’d earned a Porsche by signing up.

  Jeff glanced at Juaco’s decade-old Chrysler LeBaron. “I’d take cabs to school before I’d drive that thing.”

  “Mexicans like old cars,” Adam said. “They won’t ride in a new car.”

  “He’s Honduran, but remind me why we care?”

  As Caidin sought an excuse for why, Milo Hux, the pale waif who’d founded the gay-straight alliance, walked with Juaco to the LeBaron and opened the passenger door.

  “Now do you get it?” he said.

  His friends did. They tailed the LeBaron to a Sugar Land mansion near Adam’s, where the car disappeared behind a gate. “You’ve got to admit this is some shit,” Caidin said, and they agreed, but back at Jeff’s it was like they’d already forgotten. “Bet they’re sucking each other” drew only a chuckle. When Caidin said, “I bet the gay suicide hotline’s on his speed-dial,” they were too focused on Xbox to laugh at all.

  By the time of the yearbook staff meeting the next day, Caidin was bursting to talk about Juaco somehow. He didn’t want to speak ill of anyone, per se, but he couldn’t go singing Juaco’s praises. All he could think to do was announce, “Milo Hux and Juaco Luna share a bed and Milo’s hiding him from ICE,” which seemed to do the job.

  A week later, Juaco quit coming to class. The week after that, Caidin’s mother looked up from the PTA newsletter and said, “Do you know the boy who got deported?” Caidin shook his head. When she passed him the pamphlet, his eyes fell to where an Agent Bret Garrity of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, same last name as the yearbook copy editor, said he respected the PTA’s opinion about Juaco Luna Ochoa but the law was the law.

  The removal would have happened anyway, Caidin was telling himself when he spotted Milo at lunch, eating alone. The law was the law. Every time he came close to Milo, he repeated that to himself, feeling gradually better, until the day his brother phoned from Lackland to ask their mom to drive the Porsche while he was overseas.

  “It’s too small for my trips to Austin,” said Mrs. Maddox, a state senator. “Caidin, maybe you could take over. But the first sign you’re being foolish, we’ll garage it.”

  It was like he’d been pumped full of speed. Unable to believe his luck, he hugged his mom, shook his dad’s hand. The last day of school, as his brother was landing in Anbar Province, he scored ninety-eight on the driving test. To celebrate, he drove his friends all over town. The faster he went, the more adrenaline he had. Soon Jeff got his Corvette. Every day they prowled in someone’s car. They cruised at the Galveston Seawall. One day Adam phoned to say he was bringing Milo Hux along to SplashTown, “since he’s just up the road.”

  “Homo say what?” Caidin said, uneasy.

  “Just for someone to make fun of, you know.”

  On the way to the water park Milo kept making eyes with Caidin as if he knew the truth. Caidin adjusted the mirror so Milo couldn’t see, but then he couldn’t see Milo either and he put it back. At one point Milo announced that he’d lied to his parents about where he was; they believed he was taking the SAT. “It’s weird someone like you has parents,” Caidin said.

  Jeff and Adam giggled. Encouraged by their laughter, Caidin picked at Milo all day—holding his head below water more than once, tossing his ice cream into the lazy river, even telling some jocks that Milo had a crush on them.

  Over and over his friends cracked up. It seemed like even Milo was stifling laughter, until he said, “You treat me like a dog.”

  “Hey, we were just having fun,” Jeff said.

  “Yeah, think of it like an initiation,” Adam said.

  “Except I’m nicer than this to dogs,” said Caidin, afraid his friends were wussing out. When everyone around you was gifted, it was hard to excel. Even in Caidin’s percentile he intended to be best at two things: driving fast and making fun of gay boys. “I won’t brake till you cry uncle,” he said on the drive home, weaving through traffic at ninety miles an hour. On the shoulder he zoomed past a slow bus. Veering back into his lane, a glance in the rearview presented Milo, tranquil as a monk, gazing serenely west.

  Caidin observed Milo’s strange sublimity, waiting for eye contact again, until Jeff shouted his name. They were hurtling toward a semi.

  He stomped on the brake, skidded, regained control. “Why didn’t you cry uncle?” he said as they all caught their breath.

  “I suppose I wasn’t paying attention,” Milo said dreamily, as if he didn’t quite know where he was.

  In July Caidin’s mother looked up from another newsletter and asked, “Do you know a Milo Hux?” It seemed that a Milo Hux had flipped his car on the Gulf Freeway and died.

  “He was doing ninety-five. Tell me you know it’s idiocy, going that fast.”

  “Mom, on the Autobahn in Germany—”

  “It’s idiocy there, too! You’d throw your life away for a fast car ride?”

  “I promise I won’t die,” Caidin said, which upset her more until he revised his words to say, “I promise I won’t drive like what’s-his-name.”

  Without asking Jeff and Adam along, he sped toward the coast. He knew his friends would blame him for Milo. No one understands me, he thought, almost happy in the idea, touching himself while he drove. He bet Caleb was jerking off in his Strike Eagle. Almost to Surfside Beach, his phone rang. It was Jeff. “Hey, faggot,” he answered, relieved.

  “I bought Poisoned Wasteland. Can you be here in half an hour?”

  Jeff’s house was sixty miles away. In places the speed limit would dip as low as thirty, and there were traffic lights. “Don’t see why not.”

  “Bring those games I lent you.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, jerking the wheel hard left across the center line. He set a new course. Feeling sorry for people who’d died before there were cars, he floored it. He hoped his body would never run out of adrenaline.

  “Took you long enough,” Jeff said forty-eight minutes later.

  “Yeah, I was south of Freeport when you called.”

  “Caidin, shut up.”

  “Porsches are faster than Chevrolets,” he said with a shrug, sitting down to play Jeff’s new game. Their characters, deformed mutants who’d survived a nuclear war, wandered a dead zone in search of elixir. The fastest they could walk was four miles an hour. To circumnavigate the game world would take a thousand game hours, ten real hours. Caidin didn’t see why his dumb, trudging avatar couldn’t at least ride a bike.

  “Let’s go driving,” he said, over the game’s screaming metalcore theme music.

  “You know, cars are okay, but they’re not my life.”

  “You know, you used to be fun to hang out with.”

  “Doesn’t Milo get you to thinking?”

  Caidin’s blood went leaden. “What is your life, then? Video games?”

  “My life’s bigger than one thing, Caidin.”

  “Why would speedometers go to 120 if we shouldn’t drive 120?”

  Jeff didn’t seem to have an answer. Whatever, thought Caidin, pushing himself upright. His mutant stood still. He swung his foot. The death growls and guitar riffs ceased. NO INPUT, said a blue screen after the Xbox had hit the wall, and then he was flying west on the Katy Freeway.

  He bought an eighth of weed from his brother’s dealer. To cruise around smoking it felt way better than sitting in Jeff’s bedroom. Tousling his bangs, he looked in the rearview. He would grow his hair out, install new subwoofers, and buy a whole ounce when the eighth was gone. He did all three. High on the first day of school, he sat in back with crossed arms like some regular middle-quartile kid. When teachers calle
d his name, he waited a few seconds before saying “Here.” People liked it. There was a blond girl named Astrid who reminded him of a seahorse. Every day he would catch her glancing at him. After a week he was holding her hand. She was friends with some jocks who’d turned to drugs. At the Galleria after school they all ate sugar-cube acid together. Hank, the second-string quarterback, climbed the Water Wall with his girlfriend Izzy, laughing as the police pulled them down. That was the trick—not to care. They piled into the Porsche, whose wheel felt alive: Caidin had only to think of steering, and the car sped onto I-610.

  “Beach?” he asked, thinking he’d get them there faster than ever. Here was his chance to show how little he cared.

  “It’s too hot for shirts,” said Izzy, pulling hers off. “Astrid, hold the wheel.”

  When Caidin took his shirt off too, they cheered as if he’d shed his training wheels. Half-naked they played Twenty Questions, Izzy going first. An animal, in Texas, bigger than the car, and there was only one.

  “Your mom,” he said. Izzy laughed. On his new friends’ wavelength, he could set the cruise control at seventy and restrain the urge to prove what he was made of.

  “Shamu,” said Hank, and Izzy said yes. They kissed.

  “Every SeaWorld has a Shamu,” Caidin said. “When one dies, they capture another one and name it Shamu.”

  “There’s other SeaWorlds?” said Astrid, who had stopped looking like a seahorse to him. It didn’t matter. He stole glimpses of Hank in the mirror, stole more of them at the beach, sitting on sand in their underwear as derricks swayed.

  “There’s a hurricane out there,” Izzy said, which Caidin took to be a metaphor.

  “Did you know Juaco Luna?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, he kissed me, and it was amazing. Hank, if Juaco Luna comes back from El Salvador, I’m dumping you.”

  “He’s from Honduras,” Caidin said, wishing he hadn’t asked. They stared out to sea, Astrid’s hand feeling like warm dough in his. “Storm’s coming,” Izzy said again. Say what you mean, Caidin thought, but it turned out to be real. Back at Hank’s they watched it assault the Gulf Coast. New Orleans was five hours east, three if you drove like Caidin, and he suggested going to see it. Instead they smoked pot and lay on Astrid’s bed. When she touched him, pretending to like it was easy; he just touched her back in the same places. After two days of that, he asked when they would be returning to school.