That afternoon when he dropped off Gregory and gave him his five-dollar bill, Fisher seemed reluctant to look at him. “Tell you what. Take a few days off now. I’ll pick you up Tuesday morning when I’m back around here.”
Gregory wanted to protest so badly he had to take care not to cry, but he turned to his boring house where he lived with his nosey mother and stupid brother and, wondering if he was being punished for something, walked up the broken steps. He waved to Fisher as he pulled away but Fisher didn’t wave back.
“How’s your commie pervert friend?” Dougie said as he came through the door.
“Shut up, stupid.”
“I heard the Russians have pictures of every little kid in America so they can follow them around and kidnap the stupid ones—that would be you—for ransom money to build more nuclear missiles.”
“That’s dumb. Besides, I’m not a little kid!”
“I’ll bet old Cleaner-than-Clean already took your picture, didn’t he?”
Gregory blushed.
“See. It’s probably already on its way to Moscow.”
“Is not.”
Dougie drew a finger across his throat, rolled back his eyes, and made gagging and dying sounds. “I tried to warn you!” he yelled after Gregory, who was already heading upstairs.
In his room, Gregory flopped on his bed and turned on his transistor. Roy Orbison matched his mood:
Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight.
Only the lonely
Know this feeling ain’t right.
He soon convinced himself that he was pining for Margaret, but when he closed his eyes he kept seeing the people in the private photographs that he wasn’t supposed to see in the first place, that he shouldn’t have looked at, and he felt shaky inside and hot and very confused.
The whole next day, Thursday, those people returned to his thoughts whenever he was quiet, and once he almost wiped out on his bike when he hit a deep pothole that he had always steered around before. He found himself looking at people, grown-ups, and imagining them naked, in positions like the ones in the pictures. He felt like a spy. It was just like Fisher had said: like having a secret no one else knows; it was exciting, and it didn’t hurt anybody; everybody just went on about their business.
Friday he rode his bike on the sidewalk past Margaret’s house, standing up on the pedals as he coasted over the root-broken sidewalk and looking into the house, but no one was home.
Saturday it rained all day. Dougie went over to Kenny and Neil’s. His mother tried to get him to take Gregory, but neither of the boys would hear of it.
“You’re going to mope around in your room all day again?”
“Ma-ahm!”
“What is the matter with you? You’ve hardly eaten a thing for days. You don’t go out. You don’t talk. I’m just worried you’re getting sick.”
“I’m fine, Ma. Just quit it.”
He lay on his bed all that afternoon, flushed and sweating as if with a fever, remembering the people in the pictures and animating them in his imagination—excitement, fear, and shame licking over him like flames.
Sunday was Mass, the ten o’clock this week because Dougie was scheduled to serve. Next year Gregory would be old enough to begin training. He already knew most of the Latin responses from helping Dougie memorize them.
Introibo ad altare Dei.
“Ad Deum qui laetijicat juventutem meam.”
During the Offertory, men strode from the back of the church with long-handled wicker baskets on their shoulders like rifles, two down the center aisle and one down each side; with the precision of a color guard, they genuflected in unison, then began working the rows with their baskets, collecting the envelopes, labeled according to the liturgical calendar and numbered for identification. Fisher was with them, collecting from rows on the other side of the church. Gregory’s envelope, gendered blue, said “My Offering,” with a boy and girl kneeling in prayer, their guardian angels bending over them. He dropped it in the basket with a five-dollar bill inside, a self-imposed penance for his dirty thoughts. He prayed, hard, to be forgiven for his new sin. He was sorry for looking at the pictures and sorry for remembering them over and over.
Monday Gregory slept late and woke up wanting to cry. It was strange and even scary to feel so sad first thing in the morning and without even knowing why. Maybe it was because the day before, as he and his mother were leaving Mass, he had seen Margaret next to her father in the vestibule and, when he said “Hi,” she turned and looked at him in a way that absolutely paralyzed him. He had never seen a look of such cold, impersonal hatred, ever, on anyone, and he thought she must be angry at him because he’d taken her place as her father’s assistant. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, but he wanted to be her fathers assistant; couldn’t they both be assistants? Couldn’t they be assistants together? All day he thought of riding his bike around the corner to see her, to tell her he was sorry, to let her see how much he cared for her:
Venus if you do
I promise that I always will be true.
I’ll give her all the love I have to give
As long as we both shall live.
But he couldn’t. He could hardly move. While his mother was at work, he lay on the sofa, without even listening to his transistor. When she came home, she asked him if he was sick. “I’m just tired out, Ma,” he said.
“What’ve you been doing all day?”
“Nothing, Ma. I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“Well, how a boy can get so tired doing nothing is beyond me.” She sat down on a chair, took off her shoes, and rubbed her tired feet one after the other. At dinner Dougie talked enthusiastically about Zack stepping on a board with a nail in it and how it went right through his sneaker and all the way through his foot and out the other side, but Gregory felt as if he was hearing Dougie from far away. He hardly ate anything. Right after dinner he went back to his room and sat by the fan with the transistor earplug in his ear, listening to song after song without really hearing them or having even once the urge to sing along. In fact, he felt so numb he tried to conjure up the pictures again, the men and women doing shocking and thrilling things, hoping to wake an excitement he could recall but no longer feel.
Tuesday Gregory wore his cargo shorts so he could carry his transistor radio and earplug in the side pocket. He waited on the front steps and heard the truck before it turned the corner, headed down the street, and stopped in front of his house.
“Well, come on!” Fisher said.
The morning’s work did not go well. Twice Fisher asked him what in the hell was wrong with him. He was slow retrieving the brown paper packages from the back, and once Fisher knocked him over heaving a bag of laundry at him. “Pay attention! Pay attention!”
At lunchtime they headed back out on the river road. Gregory held onto the door handle and leaned out as before, watching the road dust billow out behind them like smoke. The sky was clouding over and it looked like rain.
“Want to play questions?” Fisher yelled across the cab to him. Gregory sat back down in his seat. “Okay.”
“I figure to work together we ought to know each other a bit more. What is it your mama does all day?”
“She works.”
“I know. I know. But where’s she work?”
“At the linen mill.”
“Okay, your turn.”
Gregory wanted to ask about the things the people were doing in the photographs and he wanted to understand why it was so exciting to look at them. Instead he asked, “Are you a communist?”
“A communist! Now why would I be a communist?”
Gregory shrugged.
“Who says I’m a communist? Did somebody call me that?”
Suddenly Gregory felt he had betrayed his brother. “No.”
“Okay, my turn. Okay then, what else have you heard about me? Anything?”
“That you take pictures of kids to send to the Russians so they can figure out
who to kidnap for ransom.”
Fisher laughed so hard he nearly drove off the road. “Now why would I do that? Now why,” he could hardly control his laughter and he reached across and squeezed Gregory’s thigh, hard, “why would I do that? You’ve seen the kind of pictures I like to take.”
He pulled the truck into the small picnic area. Along with their lunchbag he carried a canvas Army surplus dispatch bag. “You want the ham or the baloney?”
“Baloney, please.”
“Let me ask you something else,” said Fisher as he took a bite of the ham sandwich. “You didn’t say anything about these pictures here to anybody, right?” He rested his hand on the canvas bag.
Gregory shook his head; clearly Fisher did not mean the pictures of birds. “No. No sir,” he said. “I promised. I’m honest.” Just knowing those other pictures were in the bag thrilled him. He felt his face flush and he tried to pretend disinterest. The bag had been behind the driver’s seat so he could have looked at the pictures lots of times that morning while Fisher was out of the truck—if he had only known! He was suddenly hungry and tore into his sandwich with an awakened appetite.
“All right then. Then I’ve got a good assistant, somebody I can trust.”
Gregory took a slug of Orange Crush. Fisher was staring at him. The purple vein on Fishers forehead seemed to writhe under his skin when he chewed. A few fat drops of rain splatted on the picnic table, then there was thunder, and in another moment the rain was coming down in earnest. Fisher got up, looked around, and headed toward the willow’s shelter, calling back to Gregory. “Gather up that stuff and bring it along here. Hurry up. Lets get in out of the rain!” Gregory gathered up his lunch and the canvas bag and followed Fisher to the river and through the hanging boughs and under the willows canopy.
It may have been when they began to look at the photos again, together, Fisher using words that Gregory had never heard before; or when Fisher began to touch him; or when he began to want a way out; or when they came to the photographs of Margaret, naked, with three naked men. It may have been when Fisher pressed him backward, gently, to the ground and then, not so gently, held him there, or it may have been what happened after that. In any case, it was there, with the willow weeping all around them, that the noise began that Gregory would carry in his head forever after, so harsh it was soft, so loud it was quiet, like rushing water or like the place on the radio dial between two stations, a muffled roar through which you could sometimes hear faint voices, though not what they were singing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These stories have appeared in the following periodicals, sometimes in slightly different versions:
Ascent: “Gentlemen”
Bostonia: “From “This Distance, At This Speed”
Iconoclast: “Lucky Garden”
The Larcom Review: “Are You with Me?”
The Marlboro Review: “Fortune“
Post Road: “Nothing to Look at Here”
The Sun: “Sugar”
Witness: “Harveys Birthday” and “Interference”
Words & Images: “Burning Bright“
The author wishes to thank the Massachusetts Cultural Council for two grants that provided assistance in the writing of these stories.
Essential peace and quiet was provided by David Rosner and Ellen Schutz, and by Lee Hope Betcher and Bill Betcher, who kindly provided their homes as retreats from the world of obligations. Thanks also to Kathleen Aguero, Frederick Reiken, W. Scott Olsen, and Mako Yoshikawa for keen editorial advice.
Interference & Other Stories Page 14