"Even mass murderers need love too, right?"
"Yes! Brilliant!"
"And you want me to love you? When you bear the same relation to me, as Lou does to you?"
"I don't know. I don't care. " I was sitting down now, hugging myself. The bowl of soup was on the ground by my foot, tomato sludge creeping out of it. I kicked it. "Sorry I hassled you. "
"You didn't hassle me. "
"All I want is one little part of my life to have a tiny corner of goodness in it. Just one little place. I probably won't, but I feel like if I don't find it soon, I will bust up into a million pieces. Not love. Not necessarily. Just someone nice to talk to, who I really like. Otherwise I think one day I will climb back into one of those trains. " When I said it, I realized it was true. I hadn't known I was that far gone. I thought I had been making a play for sympathy.
Royce was leaning in front of me, looking me in the face. "Listen, I love you. "
"Bullshit. " What kind of mind-fuck now?
He grabbed my chin, and turned my head back round. "No. True. Not maybe in the way you want, but true. You really do look, right now, like one of those people on the train. Like someone I just unloaded. "
I didn't know quite what he was saying, and I wasn't sure I trusted him, but I did know one thing. "I don't want to go back to that bunkhouse, not this afternoon. "
"OK. We'll stay up here and talk. "
I felt like I was stepping out onto ice. "But can we talk nicely? A little bit less heavy duty?"
"Nicely. Sounds sweet, doesn't mean anything. Like the birds?"
"Yes," I said. "Like the birds. "
I reckon that, altogether, we had two weeks. A Lullaby in Birdland. Hum along if you want to. You don't need to know the words.
Every afternoon after the work, Royce and I went up the mound and talked. I think he liked talking to me, I'll go as far as that. I remember one afternoon he showed me photographs from his wallet. He still had a wallet, full of people.
He showed me his mother. She was extremely thin, with dark limp flesh under her eyes. She was trying to smile. Her arms were folded across her stomach. She looked extremely kind, but tired.
There was a photograph of a large red brick house. It had white window sills and a huge white front door, and it sagged in the way that only very old houses do.
"Whose is that?" I asked.
"Ours. Well, my family's. Not my mother's. My uncle lives there now. "
"It's got a Confederate flag over it!"
Royce grinned and folded up quietly; his laughter was almost always silent. "Well, my great-grandfather didn't want to lose all his slaves, did he?"
One half of Royce's family were black, one half were white. There were terrible wedding receptions divided in half where no one spoke. "the white people are all so embarrassed, particularly the ones who want to be friendly. There's only one way a black family gets a house like that: Grandfather messed around a whole bunch. He hated his white family, so he left the house to us. My uncle and aunt want to open it up as a Civil War museum and put their picture on the leaflet. "Royce folded up again. "I mean, this is in Georgia. Can you imagine all those rednecks showing up and finding a nice black couple owning it, and all this history about black regiments?"
"Who's that?"
"My cousin. She came to live with us for a while. "
"She's from the white half. "
"Nope. She's black. " Royce was enjoying himself. The photograph showed a rather plump, very determined teenage girl with orange hair, slightly wavy, and freckles.
"Oh. " I was getting uncomfortable, all this talk of black and white.
"It's really terrible. Everything Cyndi likes, I mean everything, is black, but her father married a white woman, and she ended up like that. She wanted to be black so bad. Every time she met anyone, she'd start explaining how she was black, really. She'd go up to black kids and start explaining, and you could see them thinking ‘Who is this white girl and is she out of her mind?' We were both on this program, so we ended up in a white high school and that was worse because no one knew they'd been integrated when she was around. The first day this white girl asked her if she'd seen any of the new black kids. Then her sister went and became a top black fashion model, you know, features in Ebony, and that was it. It got so bad, that whenever Cyndi meant white, she'd say ‘the half of me I hate. '"
"What happened to her?"
"I think she gave up and became white. She wanted to be a lawyer. I don't know what happened to her. She got caught in LA. "
I flipped over the plastic. There was a photograph of a mother and a small child. "Who's that?"
"My son," said Royce. "that's his mother. Now she thinks she's a witch. " An ordinary looking girl stared sullenly out at the camera. She had long frizzy hair and some sort of ethnic dress. "She'll go up to waiters she doesn't like in restaurants and whisper spells at them in their ears. "
"How long ago was this?" I felt an ache, as if I'd lost him, as if I had ever had him.
"Oh ten years ago, before I knew anything. I mean, I wouldn't do it now. I'd like any kid of mine to have me around, but his mother and I don't get on. She told my aunt that she'd turned me gay by magic to get revenge. "
"Were they in LA too?"
Royce went very still, and nodded yes.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He passed me back the wallet. "Here. That's all of them. Last time we got together. "
There was a tiny photograph, full of people. The black half. On the far right was a very tall, gangling fifteen-year-old, looking bristly and unformed, shy and sweet. Three of the four people around him were looking at him, bursting with suppressed smiles. I wish I'd known him then, as well. I wanted to know him all his life.
"I got a crazy, crazy family," he said, shaking his head with affection. "I hope they're all still OK. " It was best not to think about what was happening outside. Or inside, here.
It was autumn, and the sun would come slanting through the leaves of the woods. It would make a kind of corona around them, especially if the Boys were burning garbage and there was smoke in the air. The light would come in shafts, like God was hiding behind the leaves. The leaves were dropping one by one.
There was nothing in the Station that was anything to do with Royce. Everything that made him Royce, that made him interesting, is separate. It is the small real things that get obliterated in a holocaust, forgotten. The horrors are distinct and do not connect with the people, but it is the horrors that get remembered in history.
When it got dark, we would go back down, and I hated it because each day it was getting dark earlier and earlier. We'd get back and find that there had been—oh—a macaroni fight over lunch, great handprints of it over the windows and on the beds, that had been left to dry. Once we got back to the waiting room, and there had been a fight, a real one. Lou had given one of the Boys a bloody nose, to stop it. There was blood on the floor. Lou lectured us all about male violence, saying anyone who used violence in the Station would get violence back.
He took away all of Tom's clothes. Tom was beautiful, and very quiet, but sometimes he got mad. Lou kicked him out of the building in punishment. It was going to be a cold night. Long after the Grils had turned out the lights, we could hear Tom whimpering, just outside the door. "Please, Lou. It's cold. Lou, I'm sorry. Lou? I just got carried away. Please?"
I felt Royce jump up and throw the blanket aside. Oh God, I thought, don't get Lou mad at us. Royce padded across the dark room, and I heard the door open, and I heard him say, "OK, come in. "
"Sorry, Lou," Royce said. "But we all need to get to sleep. " Lou only grunted. "OK," he said, in a voice that was biding its time.
And Royce came back to my bed.
I would hold him, and he would hold me, but only, I think, to stop falling out of the bed. It was so narrow and cold. Royce's body was always taut, like each individual strand of muscle had been pulled back, tightly, from the shoulder. It was as tense through the nigh
t as if it were carrying something, and nothing I could do would soothe it. What I am trying to say, and I have to say it, is that Royce was impotent, at least with me, at least in the Station. "As long as I can't do it," he told me once on the mound, "I know I haven't forgotten where I am. " Maybe that was just an excuse. The Boys knew about it, of course. They listened in the dark and knew what was and was not happening.
And the day would begin at dawn. The little automatic car, the porridge and the bread, the icy showers, and the wait for the first train. James the Tape Head, Harry with his constant grin, Gary who was tall and ropey, and who kept tugging at his pigtail. He'd been a trader in books, and he talked books and politics and thought he was Lou's lieutenant. Lou wasn't saying. And Bill the Brylcreem, and Charlie with his still, and Tom. The Boys. Hating each other, with no one else to talk to, waiting for the day when the Grils would burn us, or the food in the cart would have an added secret ingredient. When they were done with us.
Royce talked, learning who the cameras were.
There were only four Grils, dividing the day into two shifts. Royce gave them names. There was Alice and Hortensia, and Miss Scarlett who turned out to be from Atlanta. Only one of the Grils took a while to find a name, and she got it the first day one of the cameras laughed.
She'd been called Greta, I think because she had such a low, deep voice. Sometimes Royce called her Sir. Then one morning, Lou was late, and as he came, Royce said. "Uh-oh. Here comes the Rear Admiral. "
Lou was very sanctimonious about always taking what he assumed was the female role in sex. The cameras knew that; they watched all the time. The camera laughed. It was a terrible laugh; a thin, high, wailing, helpless shriek.
"Hey, Sir, that's really Butch," said Royce, and the name Butch stuck.
So did Rear Admiral. God bless all who sail in him.
"Hiya, Admiral," gasped the camera, and even some of the Boys laughed too.
Lou looked confused, a stiff and awkward smile on his face. "It's better than being some macho prick," he said.
That night, he took me to one side, by the showers.
"Look," he said. "I think maybe you should get your friend to ease up a bit. "
"Oh Lou, come on, it's just jokes. "
"You think all of this is a joke!" yelped Lou.
"No. "
"Don't think I don't understand what's going on. " the light caught in his eyes, pinprick bright.
"What do you think is going on, Lou?"
I saw him appraising me. I saw him give me the benefit of the doubt. "What you've done, Rich, and maybe it isn't your fault, is to import an ideological wild card into this station. "
"Oh Lou," I groaned. I groaned for him, for his mind.
"He's not with us. I don't know what these games are that he's playing with the women, but he's putting us all in danger. Yeah, sure, they're laughing now, but sooner or later he'll say the wrong thing, and some of us will get burned. Cooked. And another thing. These little heart to heart talks you have with each other. Very nice. But that's just the sort of thing the Station cannot tolerate. We are a team, we are a family, we've broken with all of that nuclear family shit, and you guys have re-imported it. You're breaking us up, into little compartments. You, Royce, James, even Harry, you're all going off into little corners away from the rest of us. We have got to work together. Now I want to see you guys with the rest of us. No more withdrawing. "
"Lou," I said, helpless to reply. "Lou. Fuck off. "
His eyes had the light again. "Careful, Rich. "
"Lou. We are with you guys twenty-two hours a day. Can you really not do without us for the other two? What is wrong with a little privacy, Lou?"
"There is no privacy here," he said. "The cameras pick up just about every word. Now look. I took on a responsibility. I took on the responsibility of getting all of us through this together, show that there is a place in the revolution for good gay men. I have to know what is going on in the Station. I don't know what you guys are saying to each other up there, I don't know what the cameras are hearing. Now you lied to me, Rich. You didn't know Royce before he came here, did you. We don't know who he is, what he is. Rich, is Royce even gay?"
"Yes! Of course!"
"Then how does he fuck?"
"That's none of your business. "
"Everything here is my business. You don't fuck him, he doesn't fuck you, so what goes on?"
I was too horrified to speak.
"Look," said Lou, relenting. "I can understand it. You love the guy. You think I don't feel that pull, too, that pull to save them? We wouldn't be gay if we didn't. So you see him on the platform, and he is very nice, and you think, Dear God, why does he have to die?"
"Yes. "
"I feel it! I feel it too!" Lou made a good show of doing so. "It's not the people themselves, but what they are that we have to hold onto. Remember, Rich, this is just a program of containment. What we get here are the worst, Rich, the very worst—the sex criminals, the transsexuals, the media freaks. So what you have to ask yourself, Rich, is this: what was Royce doing on that train?"
"Same thing I was. He got pulled in by mistake. "
Lou looked at me with a kind of blank pity. Then he looked down at the ground. "there are no mistakes, Rich. They've got the police files. "
"Then what was I doing on the train?"
Lou looked back up at me and sighed. "I think you probably got some of the women very angry with you. There's a lot of infighting, particularly where gay men fit in. I don't like it. It's why I got you out. It may be something similar with Royce. "
"On the train because I disagreed with them?" Everything felt weak, my knees, my stomach.
"It's possible, only possible. This is a revolution, Rich. Things are pretty fluid. "
"Oh God, Lou, what's happening?"
"You see why we have to be careful? People have been burned in this station, Rich. Not lately, because I've been in charge. And I intend to stay in charge. Look. "
Lou took me in his arms. "this must be really terrible for you, I know. All of us were really happy for you, when you and Royce started. But we have to protect ourselves. Now let's just go back in, and ask Royce who and what he is. "
"What do you mean?"
"Just ask him. In front of the others. What he was. And not take no for an answer. " He was stroking my hair.
"He'll hate me if I do that!" I tried to push him away. He grabbed hold of my hair, and pulled it, smiling, almost as if he were still being sexy and affectionate.
"Then he'll just have to get over that kind of mentality. What has he got to hide if he needs privacy? Come on, Rich. Let's just get it over with. " He pulled me back, into the waiting room.
Royce took one look at us together as we came in, and his face went still, as if to say, "Uh-huh. This is coming now, is it? “His eyes looked hard into mine, and said, "Are you going to put up with it?" I was ashamed. I was powerless.
"Rich has a confession to make," said Lou, a friendly hand still on the back of my neck. "Don't you, Rich?"
They all seemed to sit up and close in, an inquisition, and I stood there thinking, Dear God, what do I do? What do I do?
"Rich," Lou reminded me. "We have to go through this. We need to talk this through. "
Royce sat there, on our bed, reclining, waiting.
Well, I had lied. "I don't really know who Royce is. We weren't lovers before. We are lovers now. "
"But you don't know what he was doing, or who he was, do you, Rich?"
I just shook my head.
"Don't you want to know that, Rich? Don't you want to know who your lover was? Doesn't it seem strange to you that he's never told you?"
"No," I replied. "We all did what we had to do before the revolution. What we did back then is not who we are. " See, I wanted to say to Royce, I'm fighting, see I'm fighting.
"But there are different ways of knuckling under, aren't there, Rich? You taught history. You showed people where the old system had gone
wrong. You were a good, gay man. "
Royce stood up, abruptly, and said, "I was a prison guard. "
The room went cold and Lou's eyes gleamed.
"And there are different ways of being a prison guard. It was a detention center for juveniles, young guys who might have had a chance. Not surprisingly, most of them were black. I don't suppose you know what happens to black juvenile prisoners now, do you? I'd like to know. "
"Their records are looked at," said Lou. "So. You were a gay prison guard in charge of young men. "
"Is that so impossible?"
"So, you were a closet case for a start. "
"No. I told my immediate superior. "
"Immediate superior. You went along with the hierarchy. Patriarchy, I should say. Did you have a good time with the boys?"
"This camp is a hierarchy, in case you hadn't noticed. And no, I kept my hands off the boys. I was there to help them, not make things worse. "
"Helping them to be gay would be worse?" Every word was a trap door that could fall open. The latch was hatred. "Did you ever beat one of the boys up? Did you deal dope on the side?"
Royce was still for a moment, his eyes narrow. Then he spoke.
"About four years ago, me and the kids put on a show. We put on a show for the girls' center. The girls came in a bus, and they'd all put their hair in ringlets, and they walked into the gym with too much make-up on, holding each other's hands, clutching each other's forearms, like this, because they were so nervous. And the kids, the boys, they'd been rehearsing, oh, for weeks. They'd built and painted a set. It was a street, with lights in the windows, and a big yellow moon. There was this one kid, Jonesy. Jonesy kept sticking his head through the curtain before we started. ‘Hey everybody! I'm a star!'"
Royce said it again, softly. "Hey everybody, I'm a star. And I had to yell at him, Jonesy, get your ass off that stage. The girls sat on one side of the gym, and the boys on the other, and they smiled and waved and threw things at each other, like gum wrappers. It was all they had. "
Royce started to cry. He glared at Lou and let the tears slide down his face. "they didn't have anything else to give each other. The show started and one of the kids did his announcing routine. He'd made a bow tie out of a white paper napkin, and it looked so sharp. And then the music came up and one of the girls just shouted. ‘Oh, they're going to dance!' And those girls screamed. They just screamed. The boys did their dance on the stage, no mistaking what those moves meant. The record was ‘It's a Shame. '"
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