An Exaltation of Larks

by Suanne Laqueur

  I will do this and you will give me… Nothing. This does not come at a price.

  “Thank you,” Val whispered against his coat. “You’re so good.”

  He took her head and kissed her above the eyebrows. “You guys are my family,” he said. “I’d do anything.”

  Val patted him, stepped back and reached for a jacket on the row of pegs. “I’m going. Don’t burn the house down.”

  “You never told him about us, did you?”

  Val glanced at him as she drew her hair out from under her collar. “No. What purpose would it serve?”

  He nodded and drew pinched fingers across his lips.

  Jav went down the back steps into the yard. Sheba lay on the ground by Alex and didn’t get up. Roman came running though, with a tennis ball in his mouth.

  “Hey,” Alex said, without breaking the rhythm of his work.

  “Hey.”

  “Sorry I didn’t text you back. I’m in a foul mood.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  Jav tossed the ball to Roman a while. Alex went on splitting logs and Jav started picking up the wood.

  “Where do you want this stacked?”

  “Back porch. You’ll see where I started.”

  They worked for nearly an hour. Alex said barely a word but somehow, Jav sensed his company was appreciated. He kept quiet and let his presence do the work.

  “Want a beer?” Alex finally asked.

  “Sure.”

  He brought out two bottles and they sat on the steps. Sheba came to sit between Alex’s feet, her muzzle on his knee.

  “I’m so fucking angry,” Alex said. “All day it’s been building up.”

  “I don’t know what to say, man. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing you could say. Nothing you could do. There’s no fucking thing for it, I just have to take it out on the woodpile until I don’t feel pissy about it anymore. Son of a bitch…”

  He stood up and fired the beer bottle across the yard. It hit the side of the shed and shattered in an explosion of foam and green glass. Sheba stared up at Alex. Roman trotted toward the shed, barking

  “Feel better?” Jav asked.

  “Yeah.” Alex sat down again. “No. I wasted a beer and now I have to clean that shit up. Roman, get out of there,” he called, then gave a sharp whistle through his teeth.

  “Throw another one.” Jav drained his beer and handed it to Alex.

  “Nah.”

  “Throw it.”

  “I don’t need to—“

  “Throw it, bugarron. Don’t be a fucking pussy.”

  Jav reared back a little at the speed with which Alex seized the bottle in his right hand. He flipped it to his left as he rose to his feet and lobbed it like a grenade at the shed. It hit dead center in the splash of beer from the previous bottle and disintegrated. Sheba put her front paws on Alex’s hip and stretched up to sniff at him.

  “Yeah, that was pointless,” Alex said, petting her. “It’s all right, honey. I’m okay.”

  “I didn’t know you were a southpaw,” Jav said. Which seemed to strike Alex as hilarious because he started laughing. Kept laughing as he and Jav shooed the dogs inside and started sweeping and collecting the glass from the concrete slab under the shed.

  “You got a picture of your parents?” Jav asked. “I only saw the one of your dad when we were in Chile.”

  “Sure.” Alex ran his foot across the gravel path, picked up another piece of glass and chucked it in the garbage. Then he looked at Jav. The sun glinted in his eyes and sparkled off the silver in his beard growth. He smelled like dust and metal, like sweat and sadness. He smelled like war. He smelled like a brother.

  The brothers served under Captain Trueblood until his demise, Jav thought. The ship was theirs then, and they swore a blood oath to sail together until their death.

  Jav’s mouth was dry and he could feel his eyes growing wet. He looked away.

  The love was strong between the brothers. Although for one, it was too strong.

  “Be right back,” Alex said, and went inside.

  Jav stood alone in the yard, staring at the back door, his feelings hurt.

  Where the lark went, the tiger longed to follow.

  Then he thought about being inside. Alone with Alex in the empty house.

  They would burn the ship before they let it be taken from them.

  A flame ignited in the center of his mind, curls of orange around a blue-black heart.

  The heat spread through him, setting the grass alight. A line of flame straight to the porch steps, rearing up high and hot at the door. He burned with images of walls to lean against, couches to sink into, stairs to go up. Beds to lay in.

  Two desire-filled voices in the ship’s cabin now, still calling softly to the velvet dark, “Trueblood.” A secret code word. A signal their blood was high.

  His blood running molten in his veins, Jav thought of Flip at the door of his apartment, smiling back at him for the last time. The skies of Manhattan filled with ash. A smoking crater in the earth of Pennsylvania. Second chances carelessly wasted. He took a step toward the house, his unblinking eyes fixed on the door.

  Don’t let him go. Don’t let him slide through your hands again.

  He put a foot on the bottom step, about to follow, but then the door opened. Alex came out with two more beers, some pictures and an antique-looking knife.

  “This was my dad’s,” he said. “Bequeathed to me for safekeeping.” He reversed the hilt over his wrist and let Jav take it. “Went right through customs with that in nineteen seventy-three. Can you imagine me getting on a plane with it today?”

  His heart pounding hard, Jav managed to laugh, drawing the dagger out of its sheath. “You’d be calling your lawyer. Wow, look at that.”

  He looked at the faded Kodak snaps of a young Alex and his parents, posing at home, on the street, at the ski slopes. He listened to Alex tell of a mass grave found at a site called Patio 29, and how Alex had registered with the database maintained by the Medical-Legal Institute in Santiago. All he could do was wait while the DNA analysis was done. And wonder.

  “I’m sorry,” Jav said, feeling useless and impotent, even as his blood boiled and an erection kicked from within his jeans, wanting out. Wanting in.

  I want him.

  His breath burned in his chest.

  This is happening again. It’s all happening again. I have it in my hands and now I have no choice but to let it slip away, because he relies on me. Because Val relies on me. She told me not to burn the house down.

  He passed the photos back and their fingertips grazed. Jav bit the inside of his lip. He wanted to put his hands not only on Alex, but into him. Touch the pain he kept buried inside. Cup it in his palms and taste it.

  I want to come into your house and touch things.

  He gripped his beer bottle tight between his hands and kept his gaze forward.

  Don’t fucking do this. Don’t want. I lose this and I’m done. I can’t do it again.

  “Thanks for coming over,” Alex said, getting up. He collected his mementos and beer bottles and went inside. Jav stayed where he was.

  Don’t go in there. This is not your second chance. This isn’t for you.

  “I wore myself out,” Alex said. “Think I’m going to crash for a while. I don’t know what’s going on tonight but I’ll ping you later, maybe we can hang?”

  “Sure,” Jav said. He faked a non-committed yawn as he stood up and turned around.

  Alex lounged against the door frame, arms and work-booted ankles crossed. His eyes surveyed the yard, then he looked down and smiled at Jav.

  The smile of a mariner.

  It caught Jav under the ribs and his teeth trembled together. He felt the ground tilt beneath his feet. His heart flailed, making desperate minute adjustments, frantically trying to find center. Find his way home, even as home insisted it was here. Right here in this house. With Alex.

  Let me come in. Let me stay. Let me tou
ch you.

  I want to come home and talk about it.

  March 2007

  Winter break and Alex was pure joy on the drive up to Stowe, Jav riding shotgun and Ari in the backseat. Deane and Val had gone up yesterday and Trelawney might come later in the week. All of them together at the Lark’s ski house, which Roger now owned.

  “He doesn’t live there full-time, does he?” Jav asked.

  “Only from January to March, when he’s not working. Then Trelawney rents it for him.”

  “Will he be there now?”

  “Yeah, we’ll overlap a few days.”

  Sunset colored the western skies pink and orange behind hills and through trees. Excitement colored Alex’s heart bright red. He was on his way to his happy place. Rog was waiting for him and Jav was coming.

  “You ski?” Alex had asked Jav when he extended the invitation.

  “Sure.”

  “Where’d you learn?”

  “I had one client with a place in Aspen and another who took me to Switzerland.”

  Alex glanced in the rearview mirror. He kept forgetting Ari was in the car with them. The kid had been silent the whole drive, either plugged into music or sleeping while Alex and Jav talked the miles down.

  “Is it mostly regulars these days?” Alex asked quietly. “Or do you still get new clients?”

  “I don’t actively look for new clients anymore. They typically find me through word of mouth. I’m more picky about who I take on.”

  “But you don’t…have to take on anyone. I mean, it’s not your sole income and if you stopped, you wouldn’t be financially screwed.”

  “Nah.”

  “But you still do it.”

  “I like it.”

  Something in Jav’s tone made the three words into a closing statement. Alex let it go and reached for the radio dial to turn up the volume a bit. They drove to the music, not speaking. A dozen convoluted questions tried to sort themselves out in Alex’s head while Jav stared out the window. His lips moved faintly. Paused. Then moved again, shaping silent words.

  “Private conversation?” Alex said.

  Jav flicked his head and looked over. “Hm?”

  “You look like you’re talking to someone.”

  “To myself. I swear it gets worse as I get older.”

  A few miles of silence rolled by.

  “What was your dad like?” Alex asked.

  Jav put a foot on the dashboard and an elbow on his knee. “Simple,” he said, after a reflective moment. “Simple and spiritual. He didn’t like conflict, didn’t like messes, didn’t like complication. Wanted everyone to get along, be happy, not worry. Work hard and good things would happen.”

  “When was the last time you saw your mother before she died?” Alex asked.

  “The day I left home.”

  “No contact at all?”

  Jav shifted in his seat. “I tried… The last time I called her was on Nine-Eleven.”

  “And?”

  “She called me a few names and hung up.”

  Alex’s cheekbones winced, as though he’d been slapped. “Jesus.”

  Another few miles went by and the silence in the car swelled. Ask me, Alex heard it say.

  “What happened that made her…treat you like that?” he said.

  Jav started to speak but then paused, as if weighing the risk against their friendship. Alex’s mind ran a gamut of dire scenarios—murder, rape, grand larceny, embezzlement, drugs, an illegitimate child—that would make a family cut off one of their own. He felt cold all of a sudden, genuinely anxious this confession would drive him to do the same.

  Please don’t have killed anyone. No rape or murder. Anything else I can deal with.

  “I got caught messing around with a cousin,” Jav said.

  The crime was so benign, Alex almost laughed. “Messing around. In the biblical sense?”

  “Yeah. Not full-blown sex. Just kissing and hands where they shouldn’t be.”

  The anti-climax kept building up as laughter in Alex’s throat. He had to swallow hard and tell it to cut the shit, this was serious. “And that was the big scandal that got you disowned?”

  “Well,” Jav said slowly. “It was a male cousin.”

  The laughter beat a hasty retreat, leaving Alex’s mouth open in a silent “oh.” He studied the road, rearranging his thoughts. “I guess that’s different.”

  Jav’s laugh had no humor in it. “To a Dominican family, it’s unforgivable.”

  “Why?”

  “Short answer is Tiguerismo.”

  “Tigers?”

  “Long answer is homosexuality goes against everything my people see as the ideal male. The tiger. Being gay isn’t only against the laws of God and man, it’s against what it means to be Dominican. The tribe doesn’t like foreigners.”

  “But you weren’t… I mean, you aren’t…?”

  “Gay? No. But…” Jav shrugged. “They saw what they saw. I won’t lie, we were kissing with a hand down each other’s pants and I’m not sure where it would’ve gone if my uncle hadn’t shown up. He went ballistic. I couldn’t escape because we lived with him. My dad sheltered me from the abuse as long as he could. Then he died and it was open season. My cousin threw me under the bus and sicced his posse on me. My uncle went on a campaign to get rid of me. I tolerated it until my mother joined in. Then I left.”

  “What about your sister?”

  “Naroba was a follower, not a leader.”

  Alex took a quick glance over his shoulder. Ari was curled against the window, ostensibly asleep, but teenagers had highly selective hearing. Plus, he suspected Ari understood a lot more Spanish than he let on.

  “Does he know the story?” Alex asked.

  “To an extent.”

  “Jesus,” Alex said. “That’s the shittiest thing I ever heard.”

  “Yeah. Well. Thanks for not freaking out.”

  “The hell you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What, you think I was going to throw you out of the car?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I got thrown somewhere.”

  “Keep your seatbelt on, this doesn’t scare me.”

  “Well, I appreciate that.” Jav’s tone was jovial but his fingers patted his thighs and ran along his arms, as if confirming he was intact.

  “Christ,” Alex said, thinking it over. “How old were you when this happened?”

  “We were both seventeen and shit-faced.”

  “For fuck’s sake, nothing counts when you’re drunk at that age. You were fooling around. Big deal. Now I’m pissed off.”

  One of his hands made a fist on the rim of the steering wheel. His mind was a jumble of outrage and curiosity, the latter subdivided into fascination and revulsion. He imagined a teenaged Jav with a hand down a cousin’s pants. Then he noticed the hand that had been in a fist was now consciously wrapping around the steering wheel. Relaxing and sliding, then gripping again, as if…

  Dude, what the fuck?

  He let go the wheel as if it were on fire and ran his palm along his hair. “Was he the cousin in those pictures you found? When we were cleaning out your sister’s place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he died, you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  Vulnerability wafted like air freshener and the single-word replies were razor swipes through it. Jav’s story sat like a stack of poker chips between them. Alex didn’t think it was necessary to raise the bet but he wished he could at least see it. Quid pro quo. But what did he have? At seventeen he was safely fostered at the Larks and loved like a son through his successes and screw ups. He and Roger shared a room through their adolescence, talking about girls in the dark, sharing their pathetic conquests and monumental frustrations. He could remember getting drunk and emotionally sloppy with Rog on occasion, but never…

  Well. Wait a minute.

  Alex started chuckling as a memory winked at him from the past.

  “Wha
t?” Jav said.

  “Well.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck. “One time, Rog and I, we must’ve been fourteen. It was before my uncle Felipe died. Rog found a porn video in his father’s closet. We’d exhausted our supply of Penthouse magazines so this was huge.”

  “Porn is so easily accessible now,” Jav said. “These coddled kids don’t know what it was like to hunt down smut.”

  “Spoiled shits. Anyway, we smuggled it up to his bedroom. His room had two twin beds, opposite sides. He’s over there. I’m over here. The tape is on the TV. And we watch.”

  “I know where this is going.”

  “After a while, his hand’s in his pants. Mine’s in mine. Next thing you know, we’re both jerking off and not a word. Not a look exchanged.”

  “Business as usual.”

  “It was so blasé. And so…not a big deal. Afterward he threw the box of tissues at me. ‘Here you go.’ ‘Thanks, Rog.’ He rewound the tape, took it back to where it belonged, I went to sleep.”

  “End of story?”

  “Well, it happened like two more times.”

  “Same tape?”

  Alex laughed. “It was all we had. We got bored with it, so I figured if Rog’s respectable father had porn hidden away, why not my uncle? So one night when Felipe was out, we snooped. And sure enough, we found a tape.”

  “Score.”

  “We set up shop, we started the tape…”

  “And?”

  “It was gay porn.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Killed the mood.”

  “Did you know your uncle was gay?”

  Alex ran a hand over the top of his head with a whooshing noise. “No clue. None. Yeah, he was a little light in the loafers but he had women around all the time. Women loved him.”

  “Yeah, women loved Rock Hudson, too. Just saying.”

  “I had no freakin’ idea. So here’s Rog and I having engaged in…not mutual masturbation but… What would you call it?”

  “I don’t know. Adjacent masturbation?”

  “Well, whatever you call it, it was no big deal to us. Now we’re watching men jerk and blow each other and whoa, is that what we were doing? We were both slightly freaked.”