Sean and Percy were in their mother’s bedroom watching television, Megan with a friend next door. St. John sat back down with his project, not glad at all to see their father miraculously alive, and especially not on his knees like a slave or a baby. St. John shot him a covert glance, since it wasn’t polite to stare, wondering irrationally (sacrilegiously) if the man had returned to life because St. John had prayed regularly for his soul. Perhaps his father’s return was his reward for working so well at self-control, but it didn’t feel like a reward. St. John worked his school scissors around the bottom of Lake Michigan while his father tugged at the hem of his wife’s waitress skirt. “Forgive me,” he said.
She looked down at him, her braid of red hair coiled around her head like a helmet.
“Mary, I can handle it now. I’m ready, I swear to God. Let me come back.”
He touched her leg. She stepped away. “Never in a million years,” she said, brisk and light as she might have said, “I hope you enjoyed your meal.” She wiped her hand on her apron and pointed toward the living room, the door beyond.
“This is my family,” his father said, rising to his feet. “These are my children. Do you have someone else?”
Her face was stone.
His father, so strong, was weak now. St. John’s hands felt weak. He thought he should say, “Give him another chance, Mom.” A truly good boy, one destined to govern the spiritual lives of other people, would know the words to reconcile his parents; his holiness would bless their lives. “Get out,” his mother said, “or I’ll call the police. I mean it, Will.” St. John opened and closed the blades of his scissors while his father went out the way he’d come and his mother locked the door behind him.
Moments later there was a knock on the back door. “Leave it,” his mother called from the sink. There was pounding. “Ignore it.” St. John ran to the door, but she pushed past him. She chained the door, then opened it a crack and yelled, “Go back to Dallas! None of us want you here! Do we?” she said to St. John, and put her arm around him. She smelled of hairspray and sour rags.
A little later the doorbell rang again, angry, impotent, and heartsore. “That man,” she said, “has a problem.” Back at the sink she Ajaxed the porcelain, shined the spigots and faucet, wrung out the rag, and set it to dry over the back of a chair. “He was stinking drunk, could you tell, John-John?” She was humming to herself. “We need him like a hole in the head.” She pulled the band off the end of her braid and shook out her hair. “Weak men make monsters out of women. Where did I read that?”
—
Now St. John is almost seventeen, soon to be, if not for the Pledge, a high school senior like all his friends, and he believes he has shamed himself beyond recovery, but it’s time for sleep. He rinses his face, brushes his teeth. Stripped to his jockey shorts, he lies down on his bed across from the twins’ bunk, hears their sweet sleep-breathing. Shame or not, tomorrow is an early shift. He doesn’t look at the clock. When a bad thought comes he shunts it away with the mantra he found in a book he ordered through the mail: A Glimpse of the Clear Light: The Path to Buddhahood. He pulls his sheet to his neck, burrows into his pillow, and chants, “Nam myoho renge kyo.” He hopes he’s pronouncing it right.
But he can’t sleep. He gets out of bed, feels his way over to the screened porch. He squats, grasping the shaft of the set of barbells his mother bought for his fifteenth birthday. He rises with the weights, meeting their heaviness, drawing the shaft to his belly, chest, neck, and then, with an extra push that ripples his back, raises them over his head. The sequence is effortless and thus useless. He performs it ten times; his back and arms heat up. Another ten and he’s sweating like crazy, but his mind won’t blank. The nearly full moon is shining through the window screen onto the slats of the floor when he sets down the barbells. He’s thinking about Vera and what she called him, thinking he ought to hate her. He throws himself down on his stomach, lifts up on his hands and toes, straightens his back and arms. Then he’s moving fast, down, forehead to the wood, then up again, not counting this time, waiting for the ache of arms and back to slow his mind. “Nam myoho renge kyo.” He’s Siddhartha by the river, ever moving and ever the same. But there are faces in the shimmery water, and they look like Vera’s.
Before Vera, there was Cathy Kirk, whose mother is his mother’s employer. Cathy, who still, not that it matters, lives in the large house in front of theirs. Cathy has large breasts, which he was permitted to touch under her shirt but not under her bra; who made those rules? It seems almost funny to him now that Cathy’s breasts no longer interest him. For weeks after Cathy he didn’t speak to anyone at school, and barely to his family. And now on hot summer days, Cathy can sunbathe in her yard a hundred feet from “the servants’ quarters,” and it’s nothing to him. Cathy barely exists in the light of Vera.
Continuing his push-ups, though more slowly, effortfully, Saint pictures a woman of twenty-five or thirty, tall and fleshy, with a kind face, someone he has never met. Patient in the ways of love, she knows when to move and when to lie still, so that on the verge of orgasm they both pull back and there is only their breath, hot in each other’s faces. “Nam myoho renge kyo.” Saint breathes the words out as if they’re dirty talk. Pushing off the mat one more time, he’s at the brink without touching himself, about to come, crazy for it and for the woman in his mind, and then he does—accomplishes this feat ascribed to serious yogis!—sweat running down his sides. Vera’s insult still makes him wince, but he can now reject it, since obviously he is not that. She said it in anger and at this very moment might be wishing she could take it back. He too has said things in anger that he would like to take back, many things.
—
Saint was in junior high the last time he saw his father. It was his mother’s thirtieth birthday, and she’d stayed home from work to make herself a cake. In the late afternoon Sean and Percy were licking the beaters, Megan was talking on the phone, and he, still the good helper, was washing the mixing bowl when the buzzer rang. They lived in an apartment building; you buzzed people up. “Happy, happy,” said a male voice through the intercom. “Hey, Queen Mary! I have a present for you!”
“Shit!” said their mother. “I mean shoot.”
She didn’t seem frightened, but John followed her to where the dining room met the living room. Her hair was still red and long down her back. She held it in one hand like a rope while she opened the door. “Hello, Willy,” she said, sniffing the air theatrically. “What, liquid courage? Our little midday pick-me-up?”
By this time St. John knew they were divorced. He was pretty sure his father sent money, though his mother didn’t open the letters and sent them right back. There were phone calls, his mother calm, sometimes triumphant, always resolute, after which she’d eye him and shrug, tall and strong, a wall between the children and their bad father. That’s how she stood that birthday afternoon, her big pale freckled hands on her hips, blocking their father in the doorway like a reared-up mother bear.
Sean and Percy, who didn’t remember their father, peered with interest from the kitchen. Megan continued talking on the phone but kept an eye out. St. John, who had fully embraced his mother’s view of this man as a shame to them, an embarrassment, didn’t even try to see past her wide back. Then a muffled squeak came from her mouth. She bent over, then fell to her knees. Sean started crying. Megan dropped the phone.
Their father stood at the door with a puzzled expression on his face, as if he didn’t know what he had just done, as if it had honestly surprised him. But to St. John it was as if no time had passed; all barricades were down between thought and action. He was punching his father, right to the jaw, left to the gut, where the man had punched his mother.
They were the same height, though St. John weighed less. He doesn’t remember whether his father hit him back. He knows he got in at least two punches before he fell, and that when he clambered to his feet his father was gone. “No, we’re okay,” Megan said into the phone. St
. John locked the door and helped their mother over to the sofa.
—
Saint considers a shower, which might relax him enough for sleep, but the water creaking up the pipes will wake his mother, who gets up early to brew the Kirks’ coffee. He puts on jeans, goes out, and lopes around the house, alert as a gunslinger. The moon is down or behind clouds, and the darkness soothes him, but his jeans feel heavy on his legs; he goes back inside and replaces them with an old pair of cotton shorts. His bare chest expands, the ache of anxiety turning to energy. Strong, alive, awake as in daytime, he jogs barefoot over the soft grass through the scattered trees on the Kirk property and out to the empty, silent road.
His bare soles hit gravel on the road’s shoulder, but he doesn’t slow down. It’s as if his feet and the black stony earth are made of the same thing. After a hundred yards or so, he becomes aware of the bob of his dick. He could use a jockstrap but doesn’t want to go back. He tries to take it in stride, so to speak, but the jiggle annoys him and the shorts are tight. Wanting to keep up his pace, he tries holding his dick through the cloth of his shorts, like meat wrapped in paper, like the stalk of a plant. Yes. Jack with his beanstalk, he’s high-stepping through the wooded subdivision, over the newly tarred road, smooth and warm under his bare feet, and his dick is hard in the grip of his hand, and he laughs out loud as he considers where he seems to be heading. He could jack off under her window, he thinks, and laughs again. He’ll throw a stone at her window and hide in the bushes and tackle her when she comes out. It’s what she wants, right?
He’s imagining sexual pleasures given and received, appreciated, and even words of love exchanged, when something comes crashing out of the woods. It’s right in front of him, a deer, a big one, antlers and all, gone almost before he can blink. But not before, in his leap away, he has ripped his shorts, right down the middle and almost to the waistband. He stands in the warm wind looking down at his jockeys, ghostly through the parted curtain of his shorts. With the flourish of someone with nothing to lose, he steps out of his torn shorts and his stinking old underpants and tosses them into the weeds.
Body and mind are one right now. Overhead, stars gleam. It’s good to run without the constriction of clothing. All around, swaddling him, is the hum of insects. The air is warm and wet as if he’s moving inside a cloud. When every once in a while a car approaches, he leaps into the roadside weeds, impelled by an arrow of fear that translates so wholly into action that it passes out of him with no anxious residue. He’ll make love to Vera under the peach tree in her backyard and afterward speak of their lives together, lives that—fuck the Pledge—will last a lot longer than two weeks. His callused soles beat the soft asphalt. He bounds down the invisible road.
Crossing Route 12 into the commercial district, he feels the skin on his back tighten. There are pools of streetlamp light. Is he nuts? To be running through town without clothes on? He ought to go home. Surely he has burned off all his excess energy.
Then awareness of his absurd and flagrant nakedness falls away as quickly as it came. What is the meaning and function of clothing that isn’t served as well, or better, by the humid night air in which his skin vibrates with strength and joy? If there’s danger, it’s not from some dry old Puritan who hates the human form divine. Danger is cosmic and inevitable, like the H-bomb; danger is worlds away, like Vietnam. There is nothing to be done, nothing to fear but fear. On the crest of his rising exaltation he runs toward Vera through the warm dark.
He has leaped the curb onto Lake Street in downtown Lourdes with a joyful, powerful rhythm that won’t flag, when a car passes. It brakes with a squeal, then backs up. It’s a police car. A window rolls down. An amused, badgering voice: “What the fuck is this?”
Trying to protect his exhilaration, Saint continues running. But his skin has begun to cool. His legs are white in the glow of the headlights. “Get your psycho ass over here. Jesus Christ. What are you high on?” The door swings open.
Completely unmanned by the tone of this voice, Saint comes, at last, to a stop. Standing alongside his car, the cop regards him with the snide jollity of low-level authority, like every cop that has ever taunted him with curfew or sent him moving along a city street. Saint’s hands ball into fists but loosen immediately. Without clothing, he is without power. He dons a cloak of humility, though it wraps his naked body in sticky, shamed outrage, and says in a voice that rings sickeningly high in his ears, “I don’t do drugs, Officer. I have no interest in drugs.”
The man glances into his eyes, suspecting mockery, and the glance stays there. “Is this a bet? Or some weird initiation? You’re fixing to join one of them high school fraternities?” He laughs like he knows something. The corners of Saint’s mouth curl, dim-witted and slavish, a response Saint despises in other people but most of all in himself. Nam myoho renge kyo. He follows his breath in a long slow stream, in one nostril and out the other.
“It takes balls,” says the cop, and directs his gaze pointedly downward. “To coin a phrase.” He laughs again, a man whose jokes don’t need an audience.
In a sudden shift of perspective, Saint sees himself through the cop’s eyes, fucked up, a real weirdo, and who’s to say he’s wrong? Not Saint, hopeless at verbal sparring. Saint wants to mow the man down. He could. He could duck his head and ram him like a bull, break his windpipe. But—nam myoho renge kyo—he still has options. With the bound of a deer, Saint is streaking around the corner toward the darkness of a side street.
“Stop, you son of a bitch! Does your mother know how you run around?”
The words pepper his bare back, and he imagines the nose of a gun leveling, the cop sighting down the barrel. In a dodging run, he leaps a curb, races up a driveway toward the chain of small backyards of the houses that flank the commercial district. A car passes and he keeps on running, impelling his legs over the tiny lawns that alternate with cement driveways. There’s an occasional low hedge. These he jumps, maintaining his speed although his side hurts and his breath rasps up through his throat. Crazy barking starts up; yards away, a dog pulls at his short chain. Saint loops sideways, running even faster through the adjoining yards onto a street empty and silent except for the ever present wind.
By the time he rounds the corner of Vera’s block, his sweat has dried and his muscles feel tight and stringy. He tries to imagine holding her—her narrow back, the unexpected, unimaginable softness of her skin. He looks up her street toward the house he knows is hers but feels the return of his shame. His abject, naked body is unworthy of her.
He would like to be home now, in bed trying to sleep even if sleep won’t come, but the town is too well patrolled for return passage. Avoiding lights, he moves west and north as quickly as he can, through the woods north of the park to the wooded lake path, which he follows until he comes to a low stone wall that borders a long rolling lawn, closer-cropped, thicker, and more darkly blue in the starlight than the Kirks’. He steps over the wall. At the end of the lawn, immense and ancient-looking, is the house where CJ lives, its gabled roof rising into the night sky.
Compared to this place, the Kirks live in a trailer. CJ’s dad has bucks up the wazoo, money that needs only the slightest attention to keep reproducing itself. The Walkers have other homes in other climates. They have servants who call them and you Mr. and Miss, not playfully or even ironically, servants who have waited on rich people all their lives without resentment, as if it’s a privilege, not like his overworked, outraged mother.
He looks back once through the fringe of trees that holds off the bluff’s erosion. Here the bluff is less sheer; wooden railroad ties dug into the earth form a stairway that angles down to the beach. On the slope below him are dark patches of the Walkers’ lawn, every year more of it slipping down the dune from forces even the Walkers can’t stop. In this is something vaguely comforting.
He scampers across the soft back lawn, so kind to the soles of his feet, and along a paved walk between bushes, and arrives at a spot below CJ’s se
cond-story window. The window is dark, but he cups his hands around his mouth and emits the one animal sound he can mimic, the yodel of a cat in heat, a talent he has not yet shown the folks in Lourdes. Is the window open? He doubts it; these folks like their air-conditioning.
The first pebble he aims at CJ’s window hits the ledge; he tries the yowl again. Already the sky seems a shade less dark. Company could come at any minute—the gardener, or Mr. Walker himself out for a predawn stroll. He feels like Adam after eating the apple, appalled by his nakedness. He needs a place to hide till CJ finds him, between a bush and the side of the house, although CJ could wake up and leave without ever visiting his backyard.
What a moronic idea, this naked run. He imagines himself caught, handcuffed, paraded nude through the streets of Lourdes while the good citizens hoot from their doorways. Then he sits down in lotus position on the smoothly paved walk. Om namah shivaya.
7
Vera
Alone in the dark in the dying glitter of LSD, Vera remains fucked up. From the small bones of her neck down her spine to her aching hip bones rolls a wearying energy, fatigue speckled with kernels of anxiety, as if she were lying on electric gravel, though in fact she lies on the smooth stone of her own front porch. At her feet, concrete steps descend to a narrow walk between two neat patches of lawn. Behind her head rises the dark brick of her house—not the largest on the block but surely the sturdiest. Ropes of caulk insulate the window frames, fresh mortar seals any spaces between the bricks of the abode of the third, smart little pig. No one can blow this house down. Nor can anyone enter. In the past hour or two or three (she has no sense of time; even her heartbeat seems random), she has jiggled the knobs of the front and back doors, tried to raise the kitchen window, tried the car in the garage (four doors all locked), smoked all but one of Saint’s cigarettes. Right now all she wants is to sleep, no matter where. She lies prone facing the street, her head on the thin rubber comfort of the welcome mat.
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