by Brian Hodge
His clothing didn’t seem right for him now that Jamey was in his place of final repose, so we stripped him, grateful that upon death he’d been considerate enough not to have soiled himself, or had simply neglected to eat that last day or two, what with bigger things on his mind. His pale body was very thin and slat-ribbed, with concave stomach and long toes with dirty unclipped nails, and a cluster of needle tracks.
Since leaving him on the floor seemed no better here than in the other room, Nathan and I hunted down a bedspring that had been around for fifteen years or more, junked by suburban white trash, and laid him out on that. But this seemed not a very pleasing use of space, given the soaring, vaulted quality beneath that steeple-like tower, so since there were still chains hanging from pulleys up there, we ratcheted them down and hooked them to one end of the springs, and wove Jamey’s limbs in and out of the rusty coils so he’d stay in place. We hoisted him aloft so that the springs stood on end, and Jamey hung serene in the metal, facing the doorway we’d carried him through, so that on walking in you couldn’t help noticing him, arms welcoming, something almost benevolent about him, although his head did tend to droop forward. Rachel took care of that, looping the tourniquet around his brow and tying it back to raise his chin off his chest. Mae wedged the syringe into a spring coil near his head, angling it away from his scalp like an exclamation point, or the first ray of light from a fledgling nimbus, and finished, we all stepped back to admire the effect.
“I wouldn’t’ve anticipated this ten minutes ago, but that’s just about the most holy thing I’ve ever seen,” Nathan said, and coming from him that was high praise.
It occurred to us that since Andre and I had played here as boys, there was no reason to think the place any less irresistible to kids today, so we did need to insure Jamey’s privacy. We were well into morning by now, so Rachel and Mae and I left Nathan and Andre on guard while we drove to a hardware store. I used Visa to buy a screwdriver and the heaviest hasps and padlocks they carried, securing the slaughterhouse doors again after so many years, making sure we’d all jotted the combinations for whenever we got the urge.
We paid our respects one more time, and Mae kissed Jamey’s unspoiled cheek. After she began to cry a little I held her, and her so tiny against me, sniffling with her black black hair in her face, and on the way to our cars Rachel motioned me to fall back a few steps.
“If you want to go spend the rest of the day with her, that’s fine by me,” Rachel said, and I was about to say all right, maybe I should, but Nathan couldn’t give her a ride home because he had a job to hurry to, and Andre lived nowhere near her, so we decided to take her home with us since Mae didn’t want to be alone.
As we were about to leave the Lutheran car lot, Nathan turned his pleasant potato face to gaze in the direction we’d come from.
“You kno-ow,” he said, voice dropping and breaking the know into two syllables, in that analytical Nathan voice of his, “once you start safeguarding something that’s essentially worthless, and making it a group secret and spotting the odd miracle or two, what you’ve got is the basis of a new religion.” He shook his head. “I really should know better than this.”
When Jamey brought Mae Pak into the fold, it had only been in the past few years that I’d gained any real experience with anyone of different ethnicity than my own, which is to say extremely white, white nearly to the point of appearing blue from the veins beneath my Protestant-sired skin. Such daily homogeneity wouldn’t have been the case had I grown up in the city, but out in the ‘burbs there are enclaves where the majority clings to its status with tenacity so fierce you’d think the real estate consists of cotton plantations.
Still, I remember Jamaal.
We went to the same junior high and walked the same direction home each afternoon, and weeks went by before I’d first heard the sound of his voice. I remember now his smooth caramel skin and the shiny black curls of his hair, and how mysterious his brown eyes looked, not like anyone else’s. The word wouldn’t have occurred to me then, but now I would have to regard them as stoic.
Jamaal had the sort of build that American mothers describe to their friends as husky, and couldn’t run very fast, in every way a stark contrast to his brother Jameel. Jameel was older by a year, and taller, wiry as an Olympic sprinter. He never smiled and never spoke, suffering each day with a scowl terrifying in its maturity, and whenever he walked through crowded school hallways his passage was as clean as a razor’s. It was this image that dominated when my mother told me to watch myself around them, all of them, both boys and their older sister and their parents, and while my mother and her chatty friends weren’t sure which Middle Eastern country the parents had come from, it was an awful place.
“They hate us, every last one of them,” my mother would warn me. “For no better reason than because we’re American. They aren’t Christian there. They wish us dead.”
So I steered clear, the terrible Khashab brothers going their way, and I mine, until the afternoon I rounded a corner on the way home from school and saw Jamaal’s broad back, thirty feet ahead of me. I dropped my pace so I wouldn’t overtake him, giving him cause to cut my throat, and I was so careful that I stumbled and dropped the big armload of books I was carrying. They scattered across the sidewalk with an unnerving racket and papers burst free, strewn like fall leaves, and he turned around.
Jamaal turned around.
He said nothing, silent as his viciously mum brother, and as I stooped to retrieve everything he backtracked, so I kept my gaze low, the way you do with animals who might take eye contact as a challenge. His shoes came into view and they stopped, planted firm as pedestals, and I saw a knee, then the other knee, and then the rest of him as he knelt to help me pick up the mess.
When it was done, books dusted and papers salvaged, he looked at me with long-lashed brown eyes so shy, and some worse flavor, as though he’d guessed what I’d been thinking, and he said:
“You really should have a backpack.”
So we became friends, and as we were in seventh grade we were too old to play together, so instead we just hung, but never at my house and never at his, because I suppose each of us had things at home we wanted to shield the other from.
It was inevitable that I would show him the slaughterhouse, initiate him into its secrets and decline, and we would prowl its corridors as if searching their shadows for hints of our futures and how to reach them. Or we’d look for valuables left behind and sometimes even find them: the odd dirty magazine, select pages already brittle; warm beer, cached by older kids for later.
Sometimes we would just sit, ignoring the underlying residue of death as we trusted each other with the reasons why neither of us wanted to go home for dinner, me talking about my stepbrother and what a world-class stoolie he was, and Jamaal saying he could never study for all the yelling going on, his sister nineteen, with very definite ideas of what she wanted to do in a day and who she wanted to do it with, and their father not seeing it that way at all. He already had someone in mind he expected her to marry.
“Jameel sees what’s coming for him in a few years,” Jamaal told me. “He’s next. He coughed blood last week. The doctor says it’s an ulcer.”
And when, after the tragedy, no one knew where to look for Jamaal, I was the only one who thought to check the slaughterhouse the next day, but while he’d look at me, he refused to talk, or couldn’t. I could still smell smoke on him. He didn’t resist when, after an hour, I took him by the arm and steered him out of the slaughterhouse and past the thin young trees growing where once had been a drive, and brought him out to civilization and those who said they had his best interests at heart. I was afraid he might stay back in there until he starved.
Their father never denied locking Jamaal’s sister in her room after dousing her with gasoline and setting her ablaze, claiming that where he’d grown up a father had that right, when there was nothing left to be done with a rebellious, disrespectful daughter.
; The area Shriners launched a fund drive to help with the skin grafts, but I never heard how she was doing because the rest of the family moved away to live with other relatives.
“Now do you see why I never wanted you exposed to people like that?” my mother said. “Their children are just cattle to them, is all they are. Not precious like you are to us.”
So I never knew what became of Jamaal, although years later, when I was in high school and needed some cash, I was going through my mother’s dresser drawers and beneath a jewelry box found three old letters, unopened, that he’d mailed to me, and only then did I realize I never had gotten around to asking him what country his parents were from.
After insuring Jamey’s eternal rest, nothing much else seemed right for the day, so back at our apartment Rachel called in sick to the current temping job she had, and Mae did the same at the music store, although it was late enough by now that both places should’ve already gotten the idea, so we made coffee and drank it, and then a little later on we went to bed.
It’s hard to say why it happened, Mae feeling not much better about things, so I kissed her on the cheek, and she continued to tilt her face up, so I kissed her again but a little lower, and by the third or fourth time I was squarely at her mouth. It was one of her very best features, a size or two too large for her face if you adhered to strict proportional criteria to condone beauty, but perfection is ultimately so boring. Rachel would sometimes remark what a great mouth Mae had, so wide and dazzling when she smiled, neither lip overpowering the other when she didn’t, and always looking so moist, and when I was finding out how true this was, I felt another nose nudging in, so we made room for Rachel.
We grieved our way toward the unmade bed and sent our clothes to the floor. Sometimes I was right there and other times felt entirely apart from everything, entranced by the differences in us, in our bodies, even between two of the same gender. Our hands. Six hands hypnotic, gliding like butterflies, and our smells and tastes none the same, whether from outside our bodies or from within, and the hair so varied in color, texture, thickness. I couldn’t think of us configuring as two-and-one, more like three entirely separate creatures belonging to no particular evolution.
Everyone got a turn as the focus of attention, but all things must wind down sometime. Our mènage concluded with Mae straddling my hips, as Rachel laid a cheek against her back, one arm around Mae’s tiny middle while rubbing her other hand, slick and steady, along the place where we joined, and after we’d disengaged and stretched out beneath the covers, Mae lay between us, but scooted a head lower, falling asleep immediately with her mouth at one of Rachel’s breasts.
“I hope she’s not a teeth-grinder,” Rachel said. “She’ll bite my nipple off.”
“Spread your hair across the pillow more,” I told her, and she got a funny look on her face, like the time for that was past, and asked why. “Never mind, just humor me.”
So Rachel arranged, rolling her eyes and trying not to jostle Mae, until her hair fanned in chestnut waves. I repositioned her hand to caress the back of Mae’s head, with fingertips only, and she finally relaxed into the sculpting, and when I got her to give me that tiny frown the look was just so perfect.
“Lady Madonna, baby at your breast,” I said. It was the only Beatles I could remember, too. “This is a whole new image for you. Who would’ve guessed?”
Rachel glared, saying, “I do hope you’re amused,” but started to smile, lying back with her eyes drifting shut and her free hand reaching toward me.
Her hands had always been subtly weird to me, the undersides at least. From fingertips to heel there was hardly any definition, her palms so smooth and flat they looked unfinished. She’d been five weeks premature, and I could imagine some telepathy between her and my mother going on even then, Rachel telling herself in a watery prenatal voice, I have to get out of here, have to put some more distance between us or there can only be trouble.
“Look at her.” Rachel raised the covers and we peered down Mae’s length, between us. “The way her body’s so straight, hardly any curves or angles to it. It’s not unfeminine, but it’s almost like a boy’s.”
“Well, looking at you, that’s all just relative.”
“Maybe she appeals to the latent queer in you, you think?”
“I didn’t realize we’d ever established I have one, did we?”
“If you say so,” Rachel shrugged. “But I’d say this afternoon we established that I sure did.”
“Oh come on. You had to know. You’ve kissed girls before.”
“Kissed, yeah. But this is the first time I’ve ever had one squatting on my face.”
“Well then, progress has been made.”
“I feel so … needed,” Rachel said. “How can I feel so much older than her when we’re just two years apart, that doesn’t make any sense.” She looked down at Mae’s mouth. “Can we keep her?”
I figured Rachel was kidding but gave it some thought the way you’ll preview lives you’ll never live or people you’ll never kill even when they deserve it, then realized she was serious.
“She doesn’t own much,” I said, “so I guess there’d be room.”
Rachel shook Mae’s shoulder, saying, “Okay, come on now, the bar’s closed,” pulling her nipple from Mae’s mouth, and when Mae was awake and smiling with fuck languor, Rachel said, “Um, I need to ask you something, but it’s personal.”
Mae blinked over her shoulder at me. “Okay.”
“What was it you saw in Jamey, mainly?”
Mae wasn’t sure what to make of this.
“Two years ago when we first met you, and you know how much Nathan loves to dissect things, he said he was pretty sure you saw Jamey as some sort of father figure. I’ve always been curious how on target he was, and today … today seems the day to ask.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” said Mae.
Rachel nodded. “I kind of thought so.”
“I mean, he did so much for me, and really I do love him for that. But if I was going to settle on a father figure it’d have to be someone more … stable.”
“Stability? How does stability figure in?” Rachel said, but sounded purely rhetorical, then she pulled Mae’s head down to her breast again, and Mae cuddled closer and reached back to drape one arm over my waist and pull me closer too. I watched the sky in the window like shades of pixel gray, rooting for the sun but it never came, another lesson in misplaced faith.
Rachel was a month from premature birth when my stepfamily was forced on me, two of them, a father and a son, who was called Thumper because of something to do with that Disney movie. He was four years shy of my six, and a few days before they were set to invade, my mother called me to the living room and there he was. My mother beamed as though he were the cutest thing since cartoon rabbits, and said, “Meet your new baby brother. I bet you didn’t know you had a baby brother, did you?” Thumper was carrying a toy hammer, and shortly after we were introduced he threw the hammer into my forehead so hard it knocked me down, and as soon as everyone had ascertained I wasn’t bleeding they said how funny it was, because anything a two-year-old does is adorable, especially when done to an over-the-hill six-year-old.
He loved tools. Thumper loved tools and taking things apart, and when he was all of five he dismantled the air compressor of my aquarium while I was at summer camp, and all my fish died. Coming home was like finding one of those mysterious towns you’ll hear about, from years before telecommunications glued us all together, that were found empty but with uneaten meals still on the table, and no one knows what happened. I came home and looked in upon a tankful of still, cloudy water, and nobody was swimming around the castle and the lid to the treasure chest wasn’t slamming up and down in a gush of air bubbles. Only the skeleton looked at home.
“I’m sure he’s sorry,” my mother told me. “But we shouldn’t discourage Thumper’s natural talents. How else will he learn?”
Later, when I told Andre a
bout it at the slaughterhouse, over experimental cigarettes, he just said, “Good thing you don’t live in an iron lung.”
She stood up for Thumper a lot, I was noticing, a habit gotten into early and never broken, to prove to my stepfather that she wasn’t playing favorites. Of course Thumper caught on quick, and now it’s obvious to me why he’d set about trying to dismantle as much of my life as he could get his hands on, if not how he’d gotten the idea I’d even want to steal his father.
“You’re not my father,” I used to tell the guy any chance I got, and he would look expectantly toward the nearest door, saying, “Of course not … I’m here,” until it had become a game and one of us had to wear the other down.
I won, I suppose, one evening in preteen cockiness reminding him who he wasn’t, and he fixed on me with nullified eyes while chewing at the insides of his cheeks, then in a low voice I’d never heard before said, “You know why I’m nothing like your father was? You know what was different about him from me?”
Whatever I’d forced out of him, it had to be big.
“You ever hear the word ‘impotent’ before? Know what it means when a man’s impotent? What that can drive his wife to do?” He nodded with the conviction of natural law. “That was your father for you.” While I wasn’t sure what the word meant, I could read from his face that it was truly terrible, shameful beyond telling, and that the dictionary would back him up.
Thumper watched, and even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant either, still snickered into his hands. Later, after I’d consulted Webster, Rachel brought her stuffed panda into my room to leave it with me, so I let her stay too because I knew she was afraid of Thumper, and that he grew suspicious whenever we got together and looked as though we were talking about him.