Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

  Except he hadn’t fought alone. Steven had been right next to him, and as I listened to the boys tell their tale, it seemed that it was Steven who had taken the initiative in, as he put it, “shutting up their trash-talking mouths.” Robbie glowed through the telling, with his eyes riveted on the boy who had come to his defense.

  See, Sean? I thought viciously. That’s the way it’s done. Friends backing up friends.

  Finally George got the cast and crew to calm down, take seats on the floor again, and listen to the bad news.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that the Gunning School Board has decided that Rent is not suitable subject matter for a high school play, and they have canceled all performances.”

  I was sitting on a chair behind George as he made the announcement, and I looked down at my fingers. This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? But I couldn’t feel good about it, even if now I thought I’d be safer. Safer... for what? For retreating to my house and locking the door against Kevin? The people who’d spoken at the meeting the previous night had won; their impassioned, frightened, ignorant views of my sexuality had carried the day. I was a man they had to protect their town and their children against at all costs. My fingers wanted to curl around something, to choke somebody, and to pound some sense into all of them as I showed them how wrong they were. I burned inside. But like always, I couldn’t let anyone know why.

  Even though they’d been expecting the news, many of the cast and crew were devastated. There were groans and a few tears, but mostly the kids were vocally angry, with jeers and catcalls. Those bastards! and They don’t get it, do they?

  Channing was the one who started saying Let’s do it anyway! We don’t need them! Her determination swept through the group. I saw face after face catch the possibility. Soon half of them were saying the same thing, all of them beseeching George. Can we do it, Mr. Keating? Sure we can! Their naïve confidence broke my heart. Life didn’t work that way.

  George had to explain to them that it wasn’t possible because we needed the board’s approval for the play’s budget; money didn’t come out of thin air. Besides, he told them, nothing could happen in the school without the approval of the principal, and Mr. Watts supported the board.

  After that the kids deflated. More than a few of them clustered around me, saying, I just don’t understand it. Mr. Smith, how could they do that? We’ve worked so hard.

  I didn’t have any answers for them. The world was a shit place sometime. A lot of the time.

  I couldn’t fault George for the way he conducted this last meeting. He took the high road, insisting that everyone accept the board’s decision. “That’s the way it is,” he said. George apologized too, telling them that even though the committee over the summer had approved the play, he should have realized that the community would have something to say about it. He didn’t criticize the school board or any of the speakers from the previous night, and he didn’t join the kids in their anger and lamenting, but disappointment was written in the bags under his eyes and the absence of his habitual sunny smile.

  Finally everything that could be said had been said, by both the students and by George. I’d kept silent, mostly, still mired in the heavy quicksand of memory and fury and lost love that I’d been walking through all day. Besides, feeling the way I did about this production of Rent, I didn’t have the right to speak.

  “Go home and try to enjoy the weekend,” George told them. “I’ll pick another play over the next few weeks and you’ll all—”

  “You’d better get the board to approve it first,” Sam said sourly.

  “I will,” George said flatly. “Don’t you worry about that. I promise you that anybody who wants a role in the new play will get it, though of course I can’t promise what kind of role that might be. But we’re a family, right?”

  “Right!” they all agreed.

  “And we’ll have a chance to work together again. We’ll bring some other marvelous play to life on stage. There are other good plays besides Rent.”

  Some of the students shook their heads. “Not the same, Mr. Keating,” Marie said.

  “We would have wowed them,” Channing agreed.

  “And we’ll wow them this spring with the new play, don’t you worry.”

  “But Rent really meant something,” Steven said.

  George paused at that, but finally he simply said, “Yes, you’re right. It did.”

  He was right. Rent meant that Mr. Smith’s life had turned upside down. I never would have met Kevin a second time without it, and the wickedness of my graduation night I would have kept buried deep. Instead, my memories throbbed like raw wounds that had never healed. This was good? Why couldn’t I have been left alone to slide unobtrusively through life, shunting my past to the side, averting my eyes, pretending?

  Finally the students filed out. Robbie and Steven left together. I watched Steven sling his arm around Robbie’s neck, in a friendly sort of way, but it was the warm look in Steven’s eyes, and the returning gleam in Robbie’s that suddenly blasted through my shaky pretense of Mr. Smith-as-usual. Anger rose in me, strong, and trampled on me where I hurt the most.

  See that, Sean? God, I hated him. Remember that? That’s what we used to have. It was fucking good until you destroyed it.

  “Tom?” That was George, but I didn’t turn around to face him. “You told me so, didn’t you? I’m so sorry. I know you put so much work into the play, all those hours. Listen, I wonder if you’d—”

  Wildly, I thought that if he asked me to help with the next play, or call the parent volunteers and tell them the news, I’d pick up one of the chairs and break it over his head.

  Time for me to leave.

  “I’ve got to go,” I interrupted him. “I’ll see you later.”

  I barely managed to get into my Miata without howling to the sky. Damn you, Sean! Damn you!

  AT ONE o’clock on Sunday morning, I staggered out to my fenced, safe, unobserved backyard and tried to take my drunken anger out on the poor half-dead tree. With a shovel from the garage in my hand, I pulled back and let it rip, swinging it like an axe. The edge of it caught in the trunk with a thud!

  “Fuck!”

  I yanked the shovel out and tried again.

  Thud! “You bastard!”

  A huge slab of bark fell down to the ground. In the patio lights that had been shining for the past thirty-six hours, I could see the bare flesh of the red oak exposed, cracked and fragile.

  Thud! The tree quivered under my attack.

  Thud! The force of the blow traveled up my stiffened arms. “Coward!”

  And again.

  Thud! “Coward!”

  I put everything I had into that last swing, and it was too much for me to stay upright. I overbalanced, lurched backward two steps, and fell onto my ass, right next to the gas grill I never used.

  “I can’t do it,” I sobbed. “I can’t. I’m the coward, not him.”

  I collapsed onto my back. Overhead, the few remaining leaves on the oak shivered in the cold breeze, but I didn’t feel cold even though I was only wearing a flannel shirt in forty-degree weather. I was too tanked up to be cold. Too weary, too full of my own self-loathing.

  I was just like Sean. As bad as he’d been. For years I’d thought I was strong, but now I knew I’d been weak. I’d thought I was adjusting to harsh realities, when in fact I’d been hiding from them.

  My eyes stung, my fingers were numb, and I hated myself. How had I turned into what I despised the most? If I had a shred of self-respect, I would stand up and say, Kevin Bannerman? Look at me. I love you. Let’s….

  And there my imagination failed me. Let’s do… what? Nothing seemed possible. All roads were the old roads, leading to the same impossible places they always had.

  God, I was a wishy-washy, sorry excuse for a man.

  I hauled myself up by pulling on the base of the barbecue. It took a while, because my head was swimming from the upended cans of Miller Genuine Draft that littered my
house. I’d stopped off at the store on the way home on… on Friday, on the way back from school. It felt like months ago.

  Once up, I wobbled past the tree and out into the shadows of the yard, headed straight for the honeysuckle that covered the back fence until I literally bumped into it. My nose scraped against the wood, but I barely felt it. Who cared? Not me. Not Kevin. He wasn’t around. Why would he want to be?

  Blinking, I kept myself up by leaning my good arm against the fence. All around, the night was still: no dogs barking, no cars on the street, and no conversation from the stars. There wasn’t anything to distract me from my own muddled thinking.

  Kevin had said that I’d been betrayed by my lover, and no wonder I’d gone into hiding. But maybe I’d done the same to him. I hadn’t meant to, but maybe I’d passed the poison down the line: from Sean to Tom to Kevin.

  The breeze picked up and whipped the hair back from my face, and I put up a hand as if I could ward it off—the more fool me. I felt like shit. I remembered the look on Kevin’s face as he’d left. I’d hurt him. If he hurt half as badly as I did, he was down for the count, and I’d done that to him.

  I wasn’t much of a man. Kevin deserved a lot more than me. He deserved to be happy. To have somebody follow him when he left town in the spring.

  Like a man compulsively probing a sore tooth with his tongue, I wretchedly considered that as I pulled honeysuckle suckers away from the wooden slats. Oh, but I wished I could do it. I remembered the happiness in Kevin’s voice when I’d told him I’d go over to his house. I wished I could have seen his face then. It would be even better if I could tell him, Sure, I’ll go start a new life with you.

  I spent a long time thinking about that. Me, Kevin, me and Kevin, Kevin’s smile, his laugh, the times we talked. It occurred to me that he knew more about me than I did about him. A lot more. He’d always drawn me out, asked me questions, encouraged me to take one step after another and follow him.

  Did that matter? I tilted my head and realized that I was sitting on the yellow grass with my legs spread out in a V before me. I didn’t remember sitting down, but that was okay. What mattered was the injustice of not getting to know Kevin better. Not spending more time with him. Not making him smile anymore. Never making love with him again. Not continuing to live the life that I had started, ever so hesitantly, with him.

  That wasn’t my fault. That was Sean’s.

  Sean had taken control of my life, hadn’t he? Every move I made was a reaction to the assault; it was as if Sean had been raping me every day for the past sixteen years.

  Viciously, I grabbed a handful of prickly grass and yanked it up by the roots.

  Fuck you, Sean. Thanks for ruining my life. Asshole. Motherfucker. You made me like this. Without you, I’d go off with Kevin in a second. Instead I’m stuck in this cesspool of a life.

  After a while, there wasn’t any more grass around me to kill. I managed to get myself up again, and into the house I went. The bedroom was way too far away, but the couch was right there. Down onto it I went, and I fell asleep.

  THE SUN was shining brightly through the open patio door, and the temperature was freezing. My head was pounding. I blinked against the light and groaned.

  The telephone rang.

  “Coming, coming,” I muttered. I got up, slammed the patio door shut, and then stumbled into the kitchen toward the phone. Somehow I had the presence of mind to look at the caller ID before I picked up. Of course, it was Kevin.

  I didn’t answer, but I did reach out and touch the phone as if I might. It rang three more times before the line switched over to the machine.

  “Hello, Tom, it’s Kevin. I’m just checking on how you’re doing. It would mean a lot to me if you called and let me know you were okay.”

  Okay? That wouldn’t really be the truth.

  “You haven’t answered any of my calls, so maybe you’ve gone somewhere this weekend? Maybe you decided to visit your brother. Call me if you get this, so I can get some sleep. I… I won’t bug you. If you want to talk… about anything, you know where I am. Call me, okay?”

  I let go of the phone as if it were red-hot, or as if he could somehow see me and my indecision through the line, or as if I would be tempted to talk to him if I held on.

  He hung up, and my first impulse was to snatch the phone up and call him back, not to tell him anything in particular but to hear his voice again. His just-for-Tom voice. I’d heard the caress in it—If you want to talk—and right that minute, I thought I’d tell everybody in town I liked men if only we could be together. Maybe stand up in front of Hunnicutt’s congregation and make the announcement, if Kevin were in the back waiting for me.

  I took a step backward in amazement as I realized what I’d just thought. Where had that come from?

  Hesitantly, I reached for the phone and flicked through the history for the caller ID. I hadn’t heard any of these calls; I must have been really out of it. He’d called Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, this morning, and a few minutes ago, when it’d been two twenty-one on a Sunday afternoon.

  Warmth stole through me. Yeah. Kevin. I might not know as much about him as he knew about me, but a man revealed himself by his actions, right? These calls, the fact that he hadn’t left a message for me until now, delicately respecting my privacy and my pain, that was who the man was.

  My bladder reminded me of all the beer I’d thrown down my throat the past two days and how I urgently needed to piss, so away I went to the bathroom and did that and then splashed water in my face. I looked in the mirror and remembered that I’d seen Sean and the others in it on Friday morning, when I’d been wasted not from the booze but from misery and anger. Nobody was there now, and I was grateful for it. The tumult inside that had sent me careening into my yard with mayhem on my mind had disappeared too. In its place was a sort of watchful, expectant calm. I was hung-over, filthy, and in need of aspirin and a change of clothes, but I wasn’t wild like I’d been the day before.

  I spent a good fifteen minutes soaping up under the water, breathing deeply and trying to hold onto my newfound kernel of peace. Sean was still there, but the horror and the feelings of debasement weren’t quite as sharp. Just sharp enough to hurt like hell, and that was an improvement.

  I threw on jeans and one of my long-sleeved T-shirts and went out to the kitchen again. The table and counter—everywhere, really—were littered with empty beer cans, and I set about tossing them into a black trash sack. No way was I going to drink any more. I felt slightly sick to my stomach at the thought of downing another Miller.

  Through the house I went, collecting empties, old newspapers, and the remains of fast food with determination. Compulsively I picked up everything I’d ignored since the weekend before, when Channing had found out about me and her father. And then I kept going, because the play had shifted me into survival mode. Or maybe it was that I’d been away with Kevin so much I hadn’t had any time on the weekends to devote to house maintenance.

  The table, the living room, the front room, the bathroom, the bedroom: I concentrated on going through them all with the sack that was mostly full by the time I was through. I went out into the garage to dump it… and there I stopped.

  Kevin had said during one of our phone calls weeks ago that a man was known by his garage. Mine was a disaster, way worse than the house ever got. There was more crammed in there than a family of six should accumulate, but it was only me. Boxes on top of boxes, my old rusting bicycle, a forty-eight quart cooler missing its top, two folding lawn chairs covered in dust, fancy lawn tools I never used, my grandmother’s handmade quilt faded and moth-eaten, and that wasn’t even half of it. I never threw anything out, did I? Almost nothing here was useful anymore. I really should do some cleaning, have a yard sale, and make some money.

  Though I didn’t need any extra money now that I wasn’t dating Kevin any more. The man was incredible, but he did like to spend the dollars.

  With a sad sort of smile on my face, I went to
the big trashcan and got rid of the trash from the house there, being careful not to scrape against the Miata while I did that. That Miata was my pride and joy. It was the one luxury I allowed myself, at least before that attractive, sexy-voiced banker had shown up at school.

  I’d never given Kevin a ride; I wished I had. He would have liked it. It wasn’t all that much, as sports cars went. Anybody really into Corvettes or Ferraris or the classic Triumphs would probably laugh at it. It was a poor man’s sports car, but still a two seater with top-down, wind-in-your-hair exhilaration standard.

  Except nobody ever rode in it with me. I rarely put the top down. I’d come close that first time out with Kevin, but even he’d realized that it was something I couldn’t do, so we’d taken his Silverado from then on.

  On a whim, I opened the door, poured myself into the driver’s seat, and then pulled the door shut. My hands fit perfectly on the steering wheel, the seat molded to my ass just right, and I knew how well the car handled.

  I was tempted to go get my keys and turn the engine on, to hear the throb of its power, and as soon as I thought that, another, darker thought jumped into my head. If I kept the doors down and breathed…. That was the way people committed suicide.

  It wasn’t the first time the thought of killing myself had teased through my mind, but it had been years since those worst days when I’d first moved to Gunning. My head thumped back against the headrest and stayed there as I remembered how difficult it had been to adjust to the small town, the careful way I had maneuvered through the innocent curiosity of the other teachers, and how tough it had been to decide what small part of myself I could show.

  “I didn’t do it, did I, Sean?” I said out loud. I’d had enough gumption to keep living. If I hadn’t, Grant would have been devastated. I hadn’t been able to do that to him after all the effort he’d put into getting me back onto my feet again.