Between Men

by Richard Canning

  Kenneth heard Dale’s boot heels clump against the wooden floor in the next room. He imagined him walking straight up to his father, crowding him, pulling the beer from his hands, setting it onto the floor. Dale would come on to him just the way he would to any man in a bar, direct but gentle, the kind of way that if he wasn’t into it Dale could just back away and turn it around on the other guy if he needed to. Kenneth didn’t feel anger, but a kind of wonder and befuddlement that had been with him for most of his life. It was an interest, a curiosity, to know what would happen next. If Dale did fuck his father, would Kenneth get something back he’d been owed for a long time?

  Kenneth stepped quietly across the faded linoleum floor and looked into the living room. The doorway was made with wood that had obviously been cut by hand. It might have come from the woods in the backyard. The wood was the color of the shadows lamplight throws in summer dusk.

  His beer sweated cold in one hand, and he squeezed the dark-handled knife with the other. Dale was on his knees in front of his father and Jake leaned forward in his chair, like he was waiting for Dale to tell him something. Dale brought forward the bottles, grazed Jake’s cheeks and lips with the round mouths of them. The sound in the house was the change of the seasons.

  Jake jerked back his bottle of beer and swallowed long. Dale, distant enough to just be about to tell him something a drunken man would say, was also close enough to kiss him. Kenneth’s heart jumped. His memories folded over.

  Jake’s hand dropped, twining tendons, the marks of years of hard work, and he leaned farther back in his chair. Dale said something to him Kenneth could not hear. Dale took Jake’s beer and set it onto the wooden floor, the only sound in the house. Kenneth watched him lay his hands on his father’s brown leather belt. He wondered if it was the one he’d unloosed in the reflection of the mirror in Texas, the same one he’d used to beat him. Jake leaned his head back in the chair; Kenneth couldn’t tell if he’d passed out or not. Kenneth raised his hand to his cheek, almost expecting to find blood.

  Kenneth remembered all his summer evenings, suddenly pressed together, the way night had stretched out long and black and made him so lonely, the way he had felt when the boy in Galveston had turned him over. He saw how all the things he’d wanted had not been obliterated but changed, by only a few afternoons.

  Kenneth could see his father’s boot heels, worn on the outside, pointing toward him. He thought of the light of storms coming in not over the mountains, but over the ocean. That was why he’d been able to see him, he realized, not because the curtain had been drawn, but because it was dark enough outside to cause his reflection to appear in the lamplight on the glass. That storm had rolled in over the beach in Texas. He’d never seen anything so gray or angry. Nothing with so much hard beauty and potential to kill.

  Kenneth stepped backward into the kitchen. He put the knife back on the counter, listened hard for what was happening in the next room. He felt revulsion so deep it turned within him, took him to the place he was always trying to go, that place beyond. He leaned against the counter and unbuckled his belt. He imagined everything happening in the next room by the sounds he could not hear. Kenneth took his cock in hand, and became both wretched and free.

  Dale, in the warm lamplight of the living room, existed in the pit where Kenneth had seen the vultures emerge, the shadows of the slag, the fire smoldering beneath a town burning for twenty years. There is a place where damnation ceases to be damned, and he had always searched it out—and occasionally found it—with Kenneth. He glowed the color of a dying star. Nothing had ever come up between his ribs the way touching that man’s belt had. At the same time, he wanted to take it back, to take everything back. That split second before he hit the ground was perhaps more than he could stand.

  Marge

  Michael Lowenthal

  Marge had long blond ringlets and eyes like poached eggs. He only ever wanted to be a housewife: the slippers, the curlers in his hair. Plus I think he maybe craved an accent. He talked like he was trying to keep from downing a bite of mush.

  His mother had won the lottery years back and bought a building with ten rental units Marge could manage. Pronto he hired a crew, turned the ten into twenty-five—so measly, folks said, that if you sneezed in one apartment, everyone God-blessed you in the next.

  Marge rented to pimps and prostitutes. The first of the month he slippered through the halls: “Pay-up time,” would come his porridge voice. The pimps rarely paid. They beat him up. He loved it.

  He left his door open so the guys who loathed his type could stomp in and fuck with all his stuff: light his stove, melt his plastic plates. Next day, he’d chip the melted plastic from the stove and bustle right down to the five-and-dime, where he’d buy a new set of pink plates. Ah, he’d say, the landlady’s life!

  He also adored the young boys. Eleven, twelve, thirteen. (Marge himself was always not quite turning thirty.) The whores and I would sit downstairs and watch the kids go in, then watch them come out twenty minutes later. If a boy left with a chocolate kiss in addition to his cash, it meant that he was very, very good. A tangerine or a gum-ball, only so-so.

  “I want to die smiling,” Marge said. “Boys make me happy.”

  Sometimes a boy gave me his tangerine as he left. Maybe he knew he’d been a disappointment. He would ask if that dude’s name was really Marge. Someone would say sure, of course it is. It might not have been the name that Marge got from his mother. How much of the truth do our mothers ever give?

  Mom and I lived in the building next door. Mostly I stayed home alone. Who cared? Mom worked for one of the guys who clobbered Marge on rent days. My father was dead, or might have been.

  One day I was cutting school, ants were in my pants. Hotter than it should have been for June. Crank a hydrant, maybe? Suck some ice? I went down to the street in my boxers, nothing else. Sunlight sharp and dogged as an itch. There was Marge, lounging on his stoop, next to ours: flimsy housedress, hair pulled back and tied. It made his face look bigger, flexed like muscle.

  Out from Marge’s robe came a leg as long as lightning. Now I saw the bowl, the shaving cream. He used a Lady Schick, just like Mom’s. Stroke, stroke—one leg, then the next—stroke, like harvesting a crop. His skin got pearly, catching all the light. I peered into the rinse bowl: bits of hair sprinkled, all those zillion tiny twists of fate. It felt like the legs he stroked were mine.

  “I’d shave you, too,” he said. His voice made me sizzle. “But your thing’s more a toe than a leg, ain’t it?”

  He pointed down. It poked clear through my fly.

  I ran inside, locked the door, and panted prayers to God. I begged him not to let me be like Marge.

  The old neighborhood, two decades on, is getting chic. Bargain hunters troll the streets with ponytailed Realtors who talk about upswing, vested interest. Switchblading open their silvery cell phones, they call their mortgage brokers and say “Buy.” Way back then, we could have used those cells. One day Ma Bell came and yanked the public phones—stripped for coins too often to be worth it. Mom couldn’t afford a private number. How was she supposed to call for help?

  We were natives waiting for our continent to be found. Street signs said NO STANDING, so we sat. Best seats in the house for Marge’s show. At last, would Marge discover true love?

  Merge was what I dubbed him in my mind: part one thing, part another, all mixed up. But the pimps always called him Marge of Dimes, grand marshal of the freak parade.

  He joked about the colors of his bruises, naming them with catalogue-type terms. Strife, he called a certain purple shade just shy of black. Yellow tinged with blue: Mottled Remorse. Beneath the flippancy, was that his mood?

  Looking back, I think of him as Marginalia. His commentating made life almost graspable. “Prodigious!” he might say of a scorching August noon. “Hot as the hole of an overtime ho!” He evangelized his own low-down church. “Jesus and the holy-rolling three-way,” he once barked at a b-boy who wouldn’t
mind his paws. “I’ll whup your ass to dingleberry jam!”

  Most everything reminded Marge of food. The moles on a preteen Puerto Rican kid’s cheek were currants in a bowl of oatmeal. A chulo’s backside was his hot cross bun. (Best to lick it, Marge assured us during Lent.) Once, fifteen yards before I turned onto our block, I heard him call someone’s face tragically shapeless. “God must’ve forgot,” he said, “to preheat his griddle before he poured in that bit of batter.” From the way that he cackled when I cornered into view, I figured he was talking about me.

  I was already too old for his taste, maybe. My upper lip was fuzzed with hair like lint. I was a tall drink of juice, he told me once. In two years, I grew thirteen luckless inches.

  I was a good enough cheater to just get by. I studied boys: how they strutted, pop-’n-locked; the way they picked their hair but not too much. I cribbed moves and epithets, snuck peeks.

  The juice was in my privates. Did Marge know?

  I learned people like all sorts of things. There was the bald guy who forked over two crisp Franklins weekly for Mom to twiddle her thumbs up in his ass. Another man—she called him Reagan, rich and overtanned—wanted lead fishing weights hung from his nipples. All manner of noises came from next door. People craved. People paid. There was no shame.

  Except for me. My itch for Marge? I couldn’t.

  Where did he find the guys who would? The Y, maybe. The chop shop by the river. I envied their brassy finder’s-keeper’s view of pleasure, their bootleg happiness.

  In some other neighborhood, or some other city, people like Marge marched and waved flags. They’d have hated him more than they hated the guys who beat him. Every time that Marge smiled at a fist, he set them back. The last thing Marge wanted was toleration.

  The plate-melters asked me along once. Damon, whose crackerjack moonwalk I’d tried to copy. Pedro, whose track pants always bulged. It was Halloween. The air reeked of dried-up country stuff. The smell of plastic jack-o’-lanterns melting.

  Shaving cream was part of the night’s plan, and rotten eggs. A can of Crisco, too—who knew why? This would be my chance, I thought, to look at Marge’s life. My chance to prove what I didn’t want.

  I’d been in his building a bunch of times before, but now it felt a shade of unfamiliar. The light was like a stain on normal light. Behind a hollow door, someone’s hand slapped someone’s something. I heard: Feels good. And: No the fuck you don’t.

  SWAT-style, we slithered up the stairs, down the hall, rotten-egg grenades set for launching. As per legend, Marge had surely left the door unlocked, but Damon karate-kicked it anyway. In we blitzed, screaming skinned alive.

  And when we slowed enough to see past our own bluster, there was Marge, in his bathtub, knitting. His creation, pink and cabled, looked to be a baby blanket. He might have had a niece we didn’t know.

  The room was all lace and fake flowers. Flesh-colored candles like dildoes on every shelf. Foil-wrapped kisses in a pink plastic bowl. You know how, when you’re sick, puking actually feels better? I wanted to spit up my whole self.

  “Trick or treat,” Damon said, with goblin eyes.

  “Nah,” corrected Pedro. “Dickless freak!” He hawked hard, spat into the bath.

  Marge just kept on knitting. He locked his jaw.

  “Faggot,” Damon said. “You a man, or what the fuck? Stand the fuck up, show us what you got.”

  “Yeah,” I said, wanting the guys to know that I was with them. Plus because I hoped to catch a glimpse.

  Damon cocked his fist. “Hear me? Up!”

  Marge grimaced. Knit one, purl two.

  The bath soap smelled like killing us with kindness.

  “Let’s fuckin’ stomp him,” Pedro said.

  Damon’s arm stayed cocked but didn’t move. Above his elbow’s hinge, a tiny pulse showed. It fluttered. He wasn’t yet fifteen.

  “Fuck ’im,” he said. “Her. Whatever the fuck: it. I hate the way it won’t quit lookin’ at me.”

  “We’re just giving it its jollies,” added Pedro.

  They scrammed, spurting foam across the walls and on the bed. Damon hurled the Crisco at a lightbulb-bordered mirror. Two bulbs popped like back talk: yap yap.

  “Ready, aim,” yelled Pedro.

  On “fire” they launched their eggs. I chucked mine, too, a wicked sidearm fling.

  The way you see a lightning bolt before you hear the crack, at first I watched the yolk ooze down in streaks. All three scored: the jaw, above each eye. Pretty in a certain way, like drippy abstract art. Then boom! came the thunder of the smell. A death stink. Abortions, gangrene.

  “Get the fuck,” yelled Marge, then caught himself.

  Egg yellow clashed on the pink of baby blanket. Red, then: blood above his brow. I guess his skin wasn’t all that thick.

  The other guys hoofed it out to the hall, and I followed. But when I hit the threshold I stopped short. My brain was a coal that Marge was fanning.

  I turned back and found one of Marge’s bath towels, as soft as my grandmother’s cheek. (Bull! I never met my grandmothers.) I stepped up and handed it to him.

  Closer, inside the smell, it wasn’t quite so bad. Nasty still, but flowery, too, perfumed. Marge had his left eye half closed like a wink, which made him seem forgiving, even charmed. Slimy white stuff dripped along his cheek.

  “Much obliged,” he said in a dinner-party voice, and dabbed the towel elegantly on his brow. Then the bubbles parted and he rose. He stood facing me. His skin shone.

  For the first time I understood that shameless isn’t bad, but maybe an ideal, an aspiration. Marge was so much taller than I’d thought. His hair down there was reddish—the parts he hadn’t shaved. His thing curved like a smirk. It looked like mine.

  I’d never run so fast in all my life. I caught up with the other guys and said the freak had grabbed me. “He’s stronger than he looks,” I said. “I swear.”

  I kept waiting for Marge to say something. One day. Another. A week. I was mortified and hopeful and confused. What I wanted was to never see his fuckhead face again. What I wanted was reassurance, an invitation.

  The boys came and went (Marge joked: came, came, and went). I searched their faces. Triumph? Resignation? They had a talent or a recklessness I lacked.

  The country reelected an old actor. I didn’t know a single soul who voted. Plus there was a referendum on a new subway line, an extension into our neighborhood. The verdict? It wouldn’t kill us to keep walking.

  Clementine season came: for a month that’s what the so-so boys left with. One kid, with freckles and a harelip, gave me his. “Sick,” I said, and threw it at his ass. He dodged into traffic. The fruit missed.

  Marge couldn’t find enough boys who were willing. He had to make do with real men. Their moods were unstable, their knuckles harder. New shades of bruise were soon coined. Misdemeanor (grayish). Loss of Face.

  For Christmas, Mom surprised me with a leather basketball, too nice to dribble on blacktop. I kept it in its swanky box, unopened, like a wish that still has not come true. Mom split for a week with José, the guy who kept her. Reno, she said. So they could tie the knot. (What she tied, I’d find out, was her tubes.) All week, I ate SpaghettiOs and whacked off.

  My body was like a TV that someone was channel surfing, sweat and hair and hormones, click click click. Everything was changing, up for grabs.

  Pedro and Damon formed a gang. Which side are you on was now the deal. With heated pins and ballpoint ink they tattooed their right forearms: a time bomb with a clock face that read SOON.

  Marge proclaimed that tattoos were for fools. Mutilations must be mutable, he said, and momentary, flaunting his own latest laceration. (Flaunting and flinching sometimes look the same.)

  I took Marge’s advice. I resisted. For two weeks, I kept my sleeves rolled up as living proof that my loyalties lay more with him than with Damon.

  If Marge noticed, he didn’t give a damn. I’d stood in his room, face-to-face, seen his al
l. I’d almost apologized. I’d almost begged. But that moment, so monumental to me, for him was nothing. Battered and bare was Marge’s every night.

  “Chickenshit,” Damon said one day, grabbing my inkless arm. He twisted an Indian burn. Thrilling pain.

  “Do it,” I said.

  “Now,” I said.

  I’m in.

  That spring, I tailed one of the chocolate-kiss boys. I’d seen him around school but didn’t know him. He was a mutt, skin the rust brown of the grates that barred our windows, but whetstone gray eyes: they sharpened you.

  He was probably sixteen. Me, too, almost.

  Leaving Marge’s, he walked with an extra fuck in his stride, tossing his silver kiss like a coin. He had braces that yanked sunlight, beamed come-on when he grinned. With each step, he kicked his own future.

  I followed him down Washington, then behind the Laundromat into an alley that was Bomb Squad turf. The week before, Pedro and I had bopped a kid back there, a smart-mouth who called us “fucking cretins.” All we shook loose was a pack of Camel Lights, but the heat of his cheek on my fist was worth it. Recently, we’d also lifted pints from Sully’s Liquor. We practiced pickpocketing each other. Damon talked big about going back to Marge’s and nailing him this time, no retreat. My tattoo was the color of a vein.

  In the alley, a rat nosed a Zero Bar wrapper. A broken mirror cut the sky to bits. The kid—I couldn’t think of his name, but he looked like a Leon—bent and fished fivers from his sock. Counting, maybe. Maybe glorifying.

  His money wasn’t what I was after. But how do you ask for what you really want? I gunned my hand and jabbed him. “Fork it over!”

  Leon didn’t flinch. Didn’t budge. A headband kept his curls out of his eyes.