Between Men

by Richard Canning

  The two boys didn’t even notice they were particularly friends, until Jane smirked one time, “You’re as thick as thieves.” Several other adults dropped similar aren’t-you-cute comments. Which made friendship feel disgusting, but the boys had to admit, now that they thought about it, they were always together. Other kids were matter-of-fact. If they wanted to know what Darius thought about something, they asked Barry. And vice versa. They addressed the two, even when one of them wasn’t around, as “you guys.” Poetry was written about them: “Very hilarious / Are Barry and Darius.”

  The boys even traveled together. When she heard about their trip, Jane got perfectly jealous. The emotion shocked her. It was torture how each boy came to her to report happily about spring break. And even worse torture hearing herself needle them about it over several days like some—well, some Claggart. Needle them and also probe for more and more detail. She wanted to know everything.

  Barry was unusual in getting along with people of all ages. Not just the elderly Malcolms. Another pal was a cousin, a freshman at Rutgers, who invited Barry to tag along on spring break that year. The cousin rented a clapboard house in Belmar with ten schoolmates. Because parts of explanations were omitted and because the Jersey shore was so close and because “cousin” sounded all right, Darius was allowed to go. Then Barry, who hadn’t been given permission himself, was allowed to go, because his mother savored the fancy Van Nest family connection. The boys handled the circular permissions nicely. As for the cousin, he had two contradictory reasons for wanting them along. Partly he meant to use the boys the way a lady-killer uses a puppy. Partly it was a sincere and sentimental pantomime of fatherhood.

  Like most New Jersey shore towns, Belmar is built along a narrow beach in strips, boardwalk, traffic-congested street, jostling bars and shops facing the Atlantic, then a quieter swath of modest summer houses. The town is overrun with black teenagers during Greek Week, white during spring break.

  Neither boy had the words to get the idea across to Jane, but the world is marvelous when a bunch of doting teenagers are the grown-ups. Adulthood looks unbearably beautiful and energetic and free. Belmar wasn’t anything like the madhouse locals grumbled about. Barry and Darius were so happy they panted when they talked. The first day they spoke as loudly as possible.

  “SHAKE IT, DARE!”

  “I AM, BARE.” Darius turned to a voluptuous girl in a green bikini and purple kimono. She was the only one who was up at that hour. She’d fixed cereal for them and was now fumbling with a cigarette. “Should I help clean up?” Darius asked her.

  “Uh, no,” she answered, unsure about letting them run off to the beach on their own. But Barry was so determined.

  “I GOT YOUR TOWEL, DARE!”

  “COMING! WEAPONS?”

  “GOT ’EM.”

  The girl made an expression like, “Yikes!” She blushed when she noticed Darius staring at a couple of black curls peeking from the bikini-strangled apex of her thighs. Tugging at her kimono, she turned abruptly and blew an uninhaled mouthful of smoke through the screen door. From the humid dimness of the house a mucous-y, male voice said, not unkindly, “Get out or shut the fuck up.”

  On the beach Barry shouted, “SEE THAT OUT THERE?”

  “NO. WHERE? WHAT?”

  “THE BOAT UNDER THE BANNER-TOWER. HURRY! UNDER THE TAIL OF THE BANNER—‘QRL EASY-PISSING MUSIC’ I THOUGHT IT SAID!”

  Darius laughed, gripped his belly. His too-large mirrored sunglasses, already askew, slipped off when he bent forward. “OK, YEAH. I SEE IT. SO?”

  “ILLEGAL DUMPING. THAT’S WHAT HE’S DOING.” Barry shrugged and pretended to inject his forearm with a hypodermic. Darius squinted at the horizon. He couldn’t see that the ship was dumping anything, illegal or not. “CAPITALIST SCUM!” Barry screamed.

  “Hey!” a stranger in headphones barked. “Pipe down, f’Chris’! S’with you, you two?”

  Barry and Darius gave one another a long look. Barry arched his back, thrummed his belly like a duffer but deftly lifted his towel to his hand with a foot. “THINK WE CAN PIPE DOWN, DARE?”

  “DON’T THINK SO. THIS IS JUST THE WAY WE TALK.”

  “WE JUST TALK THIS WAY?”

  “YU-U-U-U-UP!” Darius screamed.

  The stranger pulled off his earphones and feinted getting up. The boys ran down the beach. Half an hour later they were still escaping him in fantasy. Darius pretended the reverse of the “Belmar Daily” beach tag safety-pinned to the hip of his Speedos was a video screen. He sat on the gritty boardwalk and pulled his towel over his head. One of the stranger’s earphones was a camera (planted earlier), and Darius could observe the man’s thoughts on the screen. “SHIT! HE’S COMING!” He scrambled to his feet and shoved Barry in the small of his back. The boards made cooing thuds as they trotted off toward the bridge that led to Avon-by-the-Sea and Bradley Beach.

  Fantasy was heady stuff for Barry. He enjoyed Darius’s knack for it like he enjoyed watching movies. Left to his own devices, he was curious about everything that wasn’t fantastic. He almost preferred talking with the teenagers. When they’d exchange looks and teasingly make as if there was really too much he didn’t understand yet, he took it good-naturedly.

  He was fascinated by work. He pestered a pizza boy with questions about hours and wages. The pizza boy was standoffish at first, but he let himself be drawn out, scratching flour from the messy scar of, perhaps, a patched harelip. He said he’d gotten his GED. This job was a stopgap, of course. He was vague about his recent discharge from the navy. Somehow Barry had really started him thinking about his life. Barry wore an expression so adult that his smoothie’s straw in the corner of his mouth looked like a gangster’s cigarette. The pizza boy noticed the brown gaze sizing him up and was suddenly self-conscious.

  Like an uncle slightly out of true, he asked, “So what do you kids think you want to do, be, whatever?”

  Barry and Darius answered at the same time. Darius said, “Actor, I guess.” Barry’s response was a question: “You ever, like, put stuff on the pizza if the guy that ordered it’s a real jerk?”

  Darius had an inkling that his friend was a few steps ahead of him. He wasn’t too young to pooh-pooh Barry as boringly normal (privately and only if he got in a funk), but the being normal was, in fact, what he most loved. It exerted a powerful fascination. Barry—maybe all normal boys—seemed hurtling and unprotected in a way that caused Darius a kind of . . . loving concern. This tenderness was almost painful. It could make him cross with Barry. Or it could make him neurasthenic. As if Barry and he and the teenagers and a kid he’d known who’d drowned in a golf course water trap years earlier—as if they were all on a spree, splashing and ducking in the ocean, and Darius suddenly needed everything to stop. He needed to be up on the beach away from it all. Because death was going to get one of them, no matter what.

  He couldn’t explain this part to Jane and didn’t even try. He started feeling homesick, and by the fifth day the anxiety was pretty strong. The two boys and six half-naked teenagers piled into a car and sped off, jamming the clutch and bucking, speeding, swerving—Darius had no idea where they were going. Everybody talked at once. Darius was queasy.

  Toward the Atlantic the lights of freighters and Jupiter pricked the lavender evening. The car was full of scent. The crammed bodies touched with secret alertness. Cowardly, exhilarated, saliva pouring down the back corners of his mouth, Darius sat dumb among these extraordinary strangers. Even laughing Barry was a stranger. Where were they going? Anything might happen. A crash.

  They pulled up alongside the big park in Spring Lake, safe and sound. A band was playing under a panoply of Irish flags. An upstanding crowd of picnickers was scattered across the lawn. Pulling on T-shirts, the teenagers formed a sheepish group and pointed at the clarinetist, their friend.

  Barry and Darius ambled down to the pond. Their approach seemed to bump two swans onto the black water. The boys sat brushing the last feather-shaped patches of sand from their
skin. Barry made Darius hold his hand an inch from the skin of his thigh, not touching it. “My soul,” he explained. “It got so hot today it’s leaving my body. Feel it? Let’s . . . yup. You’re losing yours, too.”

  “Bullshit . . . Shit, I am!” He tried to sound amused, play along. But the rich boy who could take Borgia evil in stride was upset by Barry’s teasing hint of irreligion. This evening he was. Barry’s fantasies weren’t like his own. “What’ll we do without a soul?” His tone wasn’t so broad.

  Barry smiled. “I guess we’ll go to hell.” He threw a dried pea of excrement at the swans. A gluttonous carp made rings in the water, slow and slowing.

  “But you have to have a soul to go to hell,” Darius said. He was recalling a childish nightmare about nothingness. “I just remembered something ...” he trailed off.

  “Oh, right. Well, I guess, maybe, we’ll be like wandering souls. And our bodies’ll be like zombies. Maybe like that.”

  “Whoa, Bare! Your foot!” Darius pointed.

  Barry examined a black crust between his toes and along the edge of his scuffed left foot—dried blood. The sole was wet with it. He recalled wincing on a broken cockleshell at some point that afternoon. Strangely, he’d felt no pain whatsoever. Then or now. A moment ago he’d thought vaguely he was stepping in mud. But he said, “Oh, yeah.” As if he hadn’t deigned to mention his suffering. The wound was too horrible and painful looking to waste. “No big deal.” He shrugged in contentment.

  “You want to wash it?”

  “Not in there! I just threw a swan turd in there.”

  “These things?” Darius stirred the pellets with a stick. “These aren’t from swans, they’re from fish.”

  “What? The fish come onto the shore to take a crap? Bull.”

  “No, they just come in this far.” He splashed the shallows with his stick. “I had a bunch of them in my fish tank at home. But they all died. But this special kind of fish, it sticks its tail out of the water and farts, and that kind of shoots the turd on shore. ’Cause they don’t want to swim around in their own . . . obviously.”

  Barry grinned appreciatively.

  “Seriously, Bare, you have to tell me for real. Do you think your soul is leaving you?”

  “Wait a second! You had these fish in your tank? In your bedroom? With all that shit flying out of there?”

  “Yeah, it was gross. Tamala cleaned it up, though.”

  “Oh, right. The ruling class. With a housekeeper! I forgot for a second you were the enemy of the people.”

  That evening Barry made a big deal about his injured foot. He was mewled over by four teenage girls. They bandaged the wound, and the elaborate bandage caused him such pride that he started limping and kept it up till he went to bed. Darius had gone to bed a little before. Darius—no one knew this—cried to himself. For two seconds he cried. He was imagining that no one knew him or knew where he was, and that if he died during the night, the teenagers would just say, “Who is this kid? Or was?” and roll him aside with their bare feet.

  At Lawrence Academy one or two teachers may have wondered. Especially after Barry and Darius came back from spring break and seemed closer than ever. Innocents are never as innocent as we think, or are they? Jane was irritable if anyone turned to her for the lowdown on the two boys—home situation, sports, homework load. Why did people think she knew specially?

  Even if they wondered, the teachers virtuously insisted you could never predict how a kid would turn out. So they said. In their bones most of them felt adulthood was going to be an isometric mapping of the shoulder-high personalities of middle school, or all but. With fair confidence they picked out the lawyers and the screwups.

  Sexuality was a more interesting guessing game; no longer too charged even to think about. But bets were taken only in short-odds cases like Tom Gelertner. No one wanted to consult openly the handful of teachers everyone knew had an eye for these things. After all, who’s asking? Ostentatious shrugs stood for tolerance. They may have wondered about Barry and Darius, but the obviousness of their crush made it seem less diagnostic. Tom Gelertner tossed his head in tragic isolation. Barry and Darius got only friendly, pro forma attacks as “You two faggots.”

  Sometimes the obvious thing is true. Or maybe half true. Barry and Darius got into an argument about chicken skin. Whose scrotum looked more like supermarket chicken skin? It had to be settled. In a couple of dreamlike steps their pants came off, and they kneaded their balls, pulling the skin over their knuckles like saran wrap. Barry’s scrotum was bumpier, more chickenlike, they decided, holding them side by side to compare. The stiff penises got in the way, dumb-seeming as puppies on Christmas morning. Wryly, Barry strangled his with one hand and knocked Darius’s in a meditative rhythm, gradually losing his smile and just watching.

  At least that was a step in the right direction. Usually Barry found Darius’s bashfulness aggravating. It was the only thing Barry got angry about that whole vacation at the shore. Salty and dusty and scraped after a long day at the Belmar beach, they were about to wash up. Barry sat on the toilet examining his foot. He tugged the shredded, filthy plastic bandage away. He picked curiously at the ring-straked gauze, red, brown, and yellow. “Hey!” he said crossly, spotting his friend. Darius had turned shyly to the corner to peel off his Speedos. “Don’t do that,” Barry said. He really seemed angry. “We should just strip down and jump in the shower. I think that’s more normal, if you’re buddies.” For some reason Barry was put out by Darius’s shyness. Maybe it made them seem less close. Or he was concerned for his friend. Maybe he hated seeing Darius give in to unhealthy habits of mind.

  Knowing whose scrotum was more like chicken skin was a step in the right direction for Darius, too. After that issue had been decided, they spent a long afternoon together, getting well bored halfway through a game of Stratego. They were sitting on Darius’s bed. Barry was losing through sheer indifference. Darius tried to keep interest alive by talking. A loud, old window fan filled the bedroom with noise. Somewhere in the complex sound the thing made was a regular heartbeat. The doomlike rhythm distracted Darius. The strands of a bamboo curtain he’d hung in his doorway swayed and pecked their own time.

  Seeing it through Barry’s eyes, Darius was aware of something dreary, even prisonlike about his bedroom. Listening to the ticking bamboo and the beating fan, he stopped talking, just like that, in the middle of a sentence. He realized that, try as he might, none of his relationships was quite real. That old “love” he’d felt for Jane Brzostovsky wasn’t real, was it? He was experiencing one of those unnameable key changes of consciousness, which children may be more subject to than we are. He went from nothing to grief to near dizziness in an instant. He heard himself asking, “Do you ever like getting stuff stuck up your butt? ‘Cause I actually do sometimes.” It felt odd to be sitting there after saying this. He listened to the fan and gently pressed the fanged token “General” against his knee.

  Barry seemed to stop what he was doing, though he’d been perfectly still. His stopped expression, a smile, looked a little like pleasure, a little like mockery withheld. He shrugged finally, and started moving his bendable mouth. “Hadn’t really thought about it,” he said, clearly thinking now.

  “Oh,” Darius jerked his shoulders, which made his loose-jointed old spool bed creak for a long time, and the creaking was an additional marking of time—like the fan’s heartbeat and the ticking of the bamboo strands. “It’s weird, I guess.”

  A weekend morning a little after this the two boys had been on the phone for what felt like hours. It got to the point where they were just breathing to each other and going about their business. Barry was particularly bored again, which made him cranky, so in a speculative, nasty tone of voice he threw out, “You know, I think Ms. B. is losing her mind.”

  “Yeah?” Darius had taken the phone into an attic room to rummage through a broken Empire sideboard. The sideboard was full of old silver, tarnished black and blue, and bundles of ancient fam
ily letters containing creepy, beribboned curls of hair.

  “Yeah, she asked me if I ever woke up sticky.”

  “What? Sticky?”

  “Right, and then she laughs like an insane person.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know. And she said not to worry about it ’cause it was like protein or something and if I didn’t want to get in trouble with my mom, I should wash my underwear in cold water ’cause if my mom washed it in hot it would, like, cook the protein and turn it brown.”

  “What the fuck? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She was talking about it. Not only that, she’s . . . I don’t know. I think she’s turning into a bitch.”

  “Barry! Shh!” Darius sounded wounded. He still felt loyal, even if love was dead. “Don’t say that.” He opened a manila envelope full of old travel guides and spilled them onto his lap. Dresden decked out with swastikas! “Oh man! Oh man! You won’t believe what I just found. I’ve got all this Hitler stuff here.”

  At the end of the year Barry got in some trouble—drugs—a little bit blown out of proportion because of his size and the way he acted. With dour super-seriousness a juvenile referee ordered him to call her ma’am and to write a personal statement for a court psychologist. “What’s to keep me from just writing whatever to make you happy?” Barry asked.

  “‘Whatever, ma’am,’ and you’re in no position to be snippy.”

  Barry frowned, insulted. He got Jane to help him write the statement, and thinking of the snippy judge, he told her, “You should put down something like—maybe—being a kid doesn’t jibe with me.”

  Jane swallowed. With healing insistence, as if the remark made her worry for him, though, curiously, she liked it, Jane said, “Oh, Barry, you don’t think that’s true, do you?”

  “Sure,” he smiled. “The only outstanding thing about being a kid so far is being friends with Darius. That’s awesome. Maybe we should write about him some.”