by Dale Peck
A crow cawed. Ty giggled.
The center of the river undulated with its dark fast current, but where it lapped the bank a grayish scum had accumulated, studded with twigs and leaves and bits of trash. The layer of flotsam was almost two feet wide and so thick and stagnant it looked like it would hold you up if you stepped on it, but every once in a while an air bubble popped through from underneath, though whether it was a fish or just the riverbed farting out some gas was a mystery to me.
Ty reached for his pants again. I heard his zipper this time.
I stiffened. Arms and legs this time, abs and chest. I couldn’t take a breath.
A moment later, I heard a sound that all boys instinctively recognize: the piddle of liberated urine splashing against defenseless earth.
I jumped back. “Are you taking a whiz?”
Ty giggled again, his shoulders and back shaking slightly. A few amber drops splashed off to either side of his legs.
When he was finished he tucked himself away with exaggerated gestures, as though he were stuffing an elephant’s trunk in his Fruit of the Looms (or FTL as his waistband said, which is also the acronym for Faster Than Light, but, um, yeah, off the subject). Then he pulled out the gun, grabbed the bag of phones, and set off upstream. After a moment’s hesitation, I followed. A part of me was glad for the distraction of the gun, since without it I wasn’t sure what else we might do. But another part of me (I’ll let you guess which part) wanted to grab the gun and throw it in the river so that there wouldn’t be any more distractions. (Actually that part of me couldn’t grab the gun, because it didn’t have any fingers, but I think you know what I’m trying to say.)
Up ahead the corpse of a cottonwood lay across the river’s breadth, and this, apparently, was Ty’s destination. “Wait here,” he said, and handed me the gun. He kept the phones with him, however, and, carefully—more nimbly than I could’ve done it, that’s for sure—he used the fallen tree to cross the river.
I touched the gun barrel, which was still warm from where it’d been tucked into Ty’s pants, then shoved it in mine. Immediately I felt a sharp pain. There being no bang, however, and no blood, I was pretty sure I’d just rammed myself, and not actually shot off my privates. I shifted the gun to the right slightly, and it promptly fell down the leg of my pants. I suspected that the whole gun-in-waistband thing probly worked better with briefs than it did with boxers, or at least with a belt. I shook my right leg till the gun fell out of my pants and then just held it.
On the other side of the river, Ty had broken off a good-sized branch of the fallen cottonwood and was driving the sharp end into the soft bank. When it was more or less firmly in place, he found another branch, long and on the thin side, placed one end on the top of the post he’d just set up, then rested the other on the fallen cottonwood, so that it formed a surprisingly level bar. I was pretty sure I couldn’t’ve done that in a million years, with or without the complicating factor of a liter of rum-and-Pepsi in my system. I thought about asking him what he was doing, but I also thought about sleeping, since the alcohol had made me drowsy. I decided to compromise, found a branch that was seat height and sat on it. The gun was still in my hands. I found that if you turned it upside down it made a sort of V shape, and I rested my chin on the trigger guard.
“Don’t shoot your face off,” Ty called, his voice so unexpected that I, well, nearly shot my face off. I decided the best place for the gun, at least for right now, was on the ground.
By that point I’d figured out what Ty was doing: he was using the horizontal branch as a shelf for the phones, which he stood up one by one down its length. No doubt you have at some point tried to stand a cell phone up like a salt shaker or a beer bottle and found it hard to do so, most phones being rather narrow at the base, and curved, and generally not given to standing upright. It is therefore understandable if you wonder how Ty was able to do just that with no fewer than sixteen cell phones, and on a rounded branch to boot. I myself took it as a sign that there really was a God, and he was looking down on us with approval. On the other hand, the moment Ty stepped on the cottonwood tree to cross back to my side of the river, nine of the phones immediately splatted to the muddy riverbank, so who knows.
“Screw it,” Ty said, and made his way back over the water. “Now then,” he said when he reached me. “First of all”—he grabbed me and kissed me—“and secondly”—he bent over and picked up the gun, proffered it to me handle first. In a professorial voice, he said, “It is time that Daniel Bradford learned how to shoot.” Well, maybe it wasn’t professorial. Let’s say teacherly. Student teacherly even.
I looked at the gun. “Daniel Bradford thinks he would like to practice kissing a little more, please.”
“All in good time, Peng-you, all in good time.” He placed the gun in my hand, then stepped behind me. I turned to follow him but he shook his head and pointed me back towards my target. “Aim, please.”
I lifted the pistol with both hands. Before I could aim, however, Ty said,
“First of all, you are not Charlie’s Angels. You are a man. You shoot a pistol with one hand.”
“You’ve seen Charlie’s Angels?”
“Just the posters. Now. Listen. Are you looking at the gun?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you do a stupid thing like that? It’s already in your hand. Look at your target, Bradford. And don’t say, ‘Oh. Duh.’ ”
I shut my mouth, refocused on the cell phones. It occurred to me that I couldn’t actually point the gun at “the cell phones.” I had to, you know, pick one. They all seemed so lonely and vulnerable all the way over on the other side of the river, but I finally settled on a pink one towards the center of the branch.
“Okay,” Ty said. “So if you think about the gun as a gun, you’re never gonna hit anything. But if you think about it as a substitute for your index finger, you’ll hit your target every time.” He paused. “You picked the pink one, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“You are such a homosexual.”
He stepped close to me. Pressed his stomach against my back the way I’d done to him a moment ago. But instead of circling his arms around my waist or my chest he squeezed both of his hands in a tight circle around my right arm and ran it all the way down to my wrist. A wave of tense energy ran ahead of his fingers, bursting so palpably from my hand that I was surprised the gun didn’t go off.
“Relax,” Ty said quietly into my ear. “You’re firing the bullet, not throwing it.”
He was stiff against my body, and I hope you don’t think I mean his arms and legs.
His hands were on my wrist now, lightly, steadying my aim. “Mrs. Miller took ’em all from kids in her class, yeah?”
“That’s what she said,” I said just as quietly, more of my attention focused on what was behind me than what was in front.
“She just teaches the advanced classes, right? Stuck up pricks.” Ty’s voice was just a whisper now. “Steady, Daniel. Get ’em in your sights.”
I tried to still my arm, but even with Ty’s hands supporting me I couldn’t hold it level. My whole body was shaking. I tried to tell myself it was the alcohol, but it wasn’t the alcohol.
“Who do you think she took the pink one from?” Ty whispered, and I was about to say I had no idea when he hissed, “Ian Abernathy?”
And there it was. The thing about Ty that scared the crap out of me. The sudden shift from playing to real life. The hatred in his voice was so sharp I was surprised it didn’t puncture my eardrum. It was just so specific. I mean, it was a pink phone—it was obviously a girl’s. Why not say Ruthie’s name, or any of the 250 other girls at BHS? But no. He’d gone straight for Ian, who’d never once picked on Ty, but who picked on me all the time, and got us both detention. It wasn’t just random hatred, I mean. It was jealousy.
Suddenly I was completely sober. I know you’ve heard that expression before, and I know you also probably know it’s impossible, at least from a bio
logical standpoint. But it was true. The wobbling stopped, the blurry parts at the edge of my field of vision snapped into focus, and I no longer had any desire to sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The pink phone on the other side of the river swelled in size till it was as big as the proverbial side of a barn. I couldn’t miss it if I tried. But just before I squeezed the trigger the barn door opened and there was Ian’s face, staring at me with that pleading, helpless look he’d given me yesterday in Ruthie’s car. Just say it, that look said. Say it so I don’t have to.
Ty didn’t speak. Just breathed in my air.
I pulled the trigger.
Click.
I pulled the trigger again.
Click.
Click. Click. Click.
The—
gun—
wasn’t—
loaded.
It seemed like there was an earthquake then, but it was just Ty. He was laughing so hard his whole body was shaking, and a moment later, when the sound of my imaginary gunshots faded from my ears, I heard it too. Shrieking peals of laughter so loud and uncontrolled they dropped Ty to his knees.
“Oh—my—God!” He grabbed his stomach as though someone had kicked him in the guts, but he still couldn’t stop laughing. “The—look—on—your—face!” He extended an arm, cocked a finger. “Blam!” he said, and fell forwards on his hands and knees in the mud, laughter and snot coming out of him in equal amounts. After what seemed like forever he managed to sit back on his heels. “Jesus, Daniel. You didn’t think I’d bring a loaded gun on a joyride, did you?”
I dropped the gun on the ground, reached for Ty’s shirt instead. Grabbed a fistful and hauled him to his feet. He was still laughing, was barely able to stand up. And there it was. That other side of Ty. The side that trusted me so much he didn’t even realize I was about to punch him in the face. So I didn’t punch him in the face. I kissed him instead. Kissed him with some screwed-up mixture of anger and desire that made me wish I could eat him instead. Chew him up into little pieces so he could never pull a trick like that again, but also take him inside me, so he could never get away.
God, it was a good kiss.
A long time later he stepped back from me. All the humor was gone, and the anger, and everything else. The gun, the river, the cold sliver of Kansas sky: all gone. There was just the two of us—and a lot of itch ivy.
It says something about us, that even through a couple of liters of rum-n-cola and the acute hormonal press of our sixteen-year-old bodies, neither of us was willing to lie down in it. We set off upstream, had to stop and take a couple of kissing breaks, but soon enough we came across another fallen cottonwood. You might’ve thought lightning had split it down the middle, leaving those charred blackened edges on the trunk, but once again I knew it was the hand of God. He’d laid out this nuptial bed for his two favorite sons. The tree had lain exposed for so long that the heartwood was soft and crumbly, kneaded like pie dough between our fingers. It would have been nice to pretend we were the first people to use it as a bed, but there were a half dozen cans and bottles scattered around, and a copy of Entertainment Weekly from June 2006.
“Hey! The Devil Wears Prada got a B.”
May God strike me dead if that wasn’t the last thing I said before I lost my virginity—for real, I mean, and not some half-assed groping in the janitors’ closet at school.
Afterwards Ty lay on his back and I lay on top of him. He stared up at the sky, one of his arms curled around me, under my jacket but over my T-shirt. I thought he was watching the clouds or maybe the crows, contemplating their celestial movements while I contemplated his face to see if it looked any different. But then:
“This is as far as I’ve ever been from home,” he said, and by the time I thought of something to say to that, we’d both fallen asleep.
When we woke up we did it again. It had been early when we left and it wasn’t very late now, and we didn’t rush. There are any number of reasons why I’m not going to tell you what we did exactly, let alone describe it. I will tell you that there were a lot of giggles and a couple of “Ouch”es, one “Um, no, not yet,” and, later on, a “Now.”
“Now.”
Now.
It was only after we were finished that we got fully undressed, because we had to shake the wood crumbs and dust and bugs out of our clothing, not to mention all those other little bits and blobs and blemishes we didn’t examine too closely, this being nature after all, and nature being full of things that, like Ty, go to the bathroom outside. The cold gave us goosebumps, and there are certain parts of the body that look particularly funny when they’re covered in goosebumps. I pointed at his and laughed, and he said, “At least mine don’t have green streaks on it,” and laughed even harder, and everything was the same as it had ever been between us, only now we’d done what we’d been wanting to do for a long time.
“Since the day I told you about Holly,” Ty said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked.
“Since the day I saw you,” I said, though the truth of the matter is it felt like I’d been waiting my entire life, or at least since I moved to Kansas.
. . .
It took us about twenty minutes to flag down a pickup truck. The driver never told us his name, but he bought us five gallons of gas and towed us out of the ditch as well, which turned out to be a lot easier than it looked. Never asked what we’d been doing or why we looked like we’d just stumbled out of a lumbermill, just tipped his hat and shook his head, and though it would’ve been portentous to imagine the word he muttered as he drove away was “Faggots,” I’m pretty sure it was actually “Meatloaf,” which I’m guessing is what his wife made for the noon meal.
Ty held my hand in the back of the pickup truck on the way to the gas station, and in the car on the way home he held my leg. I thought about how before his fingers had fumbled at my flesh nervously, but now they just sat on my thigh midway between hip and knee. Sex: it calms you down.
“You want to pick up Mickey D’s?” I said.
“Who’s that?”
I glanced over, saw that he wasn’t kidding.
“Lunch,” I said. “You want something to eat?”
“Nah. I should get home before my dad does.”
He kissed me short and hard when I stopped the car in front of his gate, then jumped out of the car and disappeared up his driveway. I waited a moment, and I don’t know, maybe he heard the car still running by the gate, or maybe he just heard my heart doing its trapeze act inside my chest, cuz a moment later he was back and I was cranking down the window and we kissed one more time.
“I miss you already,” I said, cuz when you get right down to it I’m a cheeseball, and then I stomped on the gas, and, slowly, the Taurus lumbered away.
No good deed goes unpunished
The best thing about that day was the fact that Ty’s dad never found out he left. Mr. Petit didn’t like his children wandering around like stray dogs. One time when Ty came home with a long scratch on his arm that he said came from a barbed-wire fence, Ty’s dad said the nearest barbed-wire fence was two and a half miles away, and chained his son to the doghouse overnight—which would’ve been warmer, Ty said, if his dad hadn’t shot the dog three years earlier for killing a rabbit and not eating it, which Ty’s dad regarded as a sign that the dog had gone bad. Not the killing part. Killing was perfectly natural. But a normal dog—or person for that matter—ate what he killed. I didn’t want to imagine what he’d’ve done if he’d found a bitemark on Ty’s butt.
Oh, and what the hell am I saying? The best thing about that day was the sex. Hands down. Numero uno. No question. If you’ve had sex, I don’t have to tell you what I mean by this, and if you haven’t had sex, well, let me just say it lives up to the hype. But even so, the really good parts are the things you never thought about—the things that don’t make it into pictures or movies or Wikipedia. Because it’s not just about flesh. Bodies fitting together like puzzle pieces. There’s an alchemy t
hat happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to so much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that’s more complete than either of them alone. I don’t know, maybe it’s just endorphins, but I’ve run an entire marathon and it didn’t make me feel that good (actually it pretty much made me feel like cutting my legs off, but whatever). And so anyway, yeah: sex. Awesome. But almost as great was the fact that Ty’s dad never even knew he left the house, which meant we were able to get together the very next day—by which I mean we were able to have sex again the very next day, because it turns out that one of the things about sex is that once you’ve done it you want to do it again and again. But at some point while we were at it the second time Mr. Petit discovered the missing pistol, which we’d forgotten by the riverbed. I didn’t see Ty for a whole week after he went home Sunday afternoon. Not after school, not in school either. The only reason I knew he was still alive was because he called me the third night. “I’m still alive,” was all he said before he hung up. When he came back to school he was limping, his bottom lip was split and scabbed and there were purple crescent bruises under both eyes. His fingers trembled as he handed his father’s note to Mrs. Helicopter in the front office.
“She didn’t even read it,” he told me at lunch. “Just told me to get to class.”
The nidus and the nodus (no really, look ’em up)
My mom was home for eight days after her cancer treatment failed. Because she was on morphine we were required to have a nurse in the house, although, once she’d shown us how to adjust the drip, she (the nurse, not my mom) spent most of her time in the dining room, drinking coffee and reading magazines and every once in a while responding to a text message, her phone muted so that the only sound was the mechanical clicking of the keys. My mom’d had a flood of visitors at the hospital, but now she sent everyone away except for her own mother and my dad and me. She said her goodbyes individually. To be honest I don’t remember most of what she told me. A lifetime of motherly advice packed into a few minutes, but what stands out is how tightly she clutched my hand—not like she was trying to pull herself up, but like she was trying to save me from falling. She squeezed my hand. She told me to be good. She told me to be happy. Told me never to put off till tomorrow what I could do today. Never to deny myself anything as long as it didn’t come at someone else’s expense. She squeezed so tightly. My mom and my dad were both atheists and the prospect of death didn’t change that. But my mom did say death had nothing do with her love for me: a mother’s love is just a fact in the world, she said, like the ground or the sky. It didn’t matter if she was alive or not, her love would always be there and I should always remember that. Always. Tell you the truth, it can be hard sometimes. Especially in winter, when the leaves have fallen and the vines that cover our house look like a raggedy old net and the trees look like so many prison bars. But it’s just then, just when I’m looking out the window feeling trapped by . . . by Kansas, I guess you’d say, it’s just then that I realize I’m squeezing one hand with the other, and I remember the feeling of her hand on mine. How tightly she squeezed. How hard she fought to keep me from falling into the abyss. A mother’s love. A fact in the world, even if she herself was gone.