by Craig Moody
Moving to join her at the cutting board, I accepted the duty of slicing tomatoes as she fervently pounded out a collection of chicken breasts. I began to fade into my own thoughts, the sound of her non-stop speaking lulling me into a trance while the beat of the knife as it sliced the board hypnotized my thinking. It wasn’t until Aunt Mert tugged at my shirt did I resume my place in reality.
“I wanted them sliced, dear, not diced,” she teased, moving my attention toward the cutting board with her eyes.
“Oh, sorry. I just got a bit carried away.” “It’s quite fine, my love. I am just appreciative of the help.”
She moved past me, the waft of her lilac scent eliminating the smell of the fresh tomatoes that covered my fingertips.
“Now,” she continued, “I need you to take this back to Gauge and tell him that dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes.”
She shoved Gauge’s worn navy-green knapsack into my tomato-juice-covered hands.
“But—”
“Ah, no buts,” she declared, turning my shoulders with her hands. “You just go on and tell him.”
I stood still, completely frozen as if attempting to conceal my existence from a prowling grizzly bear.
“Also, tell him that you will be joining us.”
I thought to protest but instead found my feet moving from the kitchen and into the hallway. Before I could gather any thought or nervous fear, I was standing at Gauge’s closed bedroom door, the dim light of his bedside lamp glowing through the crack between the floor and door like a beacon in the night.
My heart pounded its rhythmic drum so loudly in my ears that I could barely hear the command of my brain as it urged me to lift my arm and knock on the door.
Just as I was about to do so, an arm grabbed me from behind and spun me in a complete circle. The pack dropped to the floor as Gauge wrapped his hands around each of my wrists, lifting my arms above my head and against the closed bedroom door.
I stared in wonder as I watched his face close in, his body still wet from the shower, an off- white towel wrapped tight around his waist. I swear that my heart stopped beating as he pressed his lips to mine, the taste of his mouth warm from the heat of the shower water.
He pulled back, his face slightly illuminated by the distant light of the kitchen doorway. I could see his dark eyes as they appeared to spin in the shadows. I felt his heartbeat as he pressed himself against me, his lips touching my ear. My breath escaped as he dropped my wrists and moved his hands to cup my face. I could hear the struggle of his breathing as he again connected his soft lips with mine.
This time, the warm glide of his tongue slid over my mouth and into the space beyond my lips. The taste of Colgate toothpaste replaced the memory of Jack Daniel’s that defined our first similar encounter.
I felt my body begin to drift down the door.
Gauge pulled me forward, our open mouths still connected, moving us to the wall across from his bedroom. The kissing became more passionate, more intense. I wasn’t sure if I was still breathing.
Somewhere in the distance, there was movement, slow but steady. We both turned our heads to see a shadowed figure staring at us. An icy layer of terror solidified over my aroused flesh as I recognized the identity of the stranger. It was my mother, her eyes wide, her mouth twisted in horror.
“Mom?” I gasped, my disbelief matching hers.
“I knew it,” she growled, reaching her arm for the wall. “I knew this was going on. That’s why I just let myself in. I wanted to see the truth.”
She clutched her chest and fell against the wall, closing her eyes and resting in place. I moved toward her as she struggled to breathe.
“Mom!” I cried, gripping her sunken shoulders with both hands.
“No!” she screamed, every ounce of her strength bellowing from her throat as she launched from the wall.
I saw a flash of red as her closed fist slammed against my head. I opened my eyes just in time to see the other fist hurling toward my eye. I fell to the floor as she struck me, lifting her body like a wildcat onto my upper frame. I saw Gauge scrambling to reach us as I fell, my head landing on the wooden floorboards with a bouncing thud. The scratching of her fingernails singed and burned my flesh like heated steel branding a cattle’s backside. The sensation of her saliva as it showered over my face stung like acid rain, her clenched fists opening to grip my neck. She began to tighten her hands, when she was lifted into the air.
From the darkened haze of my clouded vision, I saw Gauge holding my mother above me, her arms flailing like some wild creature materialized from the conjuring of the devil. I began to taste the blood that trickled from the open wounds clawed across my face. The lingering sensation of Gauge’s tongue was replaced by the coating thickness of my own blood. In an instant, a moment of unexpected ecstasy had darkened and morphed into a nightmarish reality. I struggled to lift myself from the floor when I heard my mother break free from Gauge’s grasp, scrambling her way across the floor like a crab escaping a fisherman’s net.
She pounced on me just as I was inching myself up the wall, dragging me back to the floorboards with the pounding of her balled fists. I could hear both Gauge and Aunt Mert crying out as they struggled to pull the raging woman from on top of me. Though I knew I could try to resist her, I didn’t move. I simply lay still as my mother unleashed her fearful terror onto my body.
Tears began to intermingle with blood as both liquids seeped across my skin. It wasn’t until I heard Aunt Mert’s voice as she gripped my shoulders that I realized that my mother had again been removed. The blasting assault of her limbs had become so fevered and constant that my nerves began to dull and paralyze to the pain of her blows.
I opened my eyes to see Aunt Mert carefully pulling my body toward her. I felt my face stick to her blouse as the coated mixture of blood, tears, and saliva pressed into the neatly ironed garment. In the distance, I could hear Gauge attempting to calm my mother.
“Get off of me, you sick piece of shit!” she snarled. “Look what you’ve done to my son! Look what you’ve done to my boy!”
Her words curled over my wounds like streaks of vinegar. The sound of her voice stung and irritated my battle-wounded flesh like salt over a slug’s back.
Aunt Mert slid me into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The echoing drone of my mother shouting insults at Gauge filled the space around us like thunder over a mountain range. Aunt Mert began to crack corny jokes in an attempt to distract me as she slowly dabbed a warm washcloth over my face. I didn’t speak as she cleaned me, wiping the blood from my skin as if it were no more unusual than the tomato juice I had splattered over her kitchen cutting board just moments ago.
It was then that the bathroom door flew open, my mother hunched in the doorframe, her hair matted, her face blackened with dirt, debris, and blood. Gauge trailed behind her, gripping her shoulders before she could enter the small space between us.
“I have just one thing to say to you,” she stated in between labored breaths. “If this is the life you want, if these are the people you want to live it with…then you just go ahead and live it.”
She forced herself out from under Gauge’s grasp.
“But know this, my boy,” she continued, her voice darkening with the shadows in her eyes. “You no longer have a mother if this is who you choose to be.”
She glared at me, two tears streaming in unison down her cheeks like falling stars hurled from the universe. No one moved. Everyone could only stare, the shock and disbelief of the entire encounter too cumbersome for our brains to compute and process.
Wiping her face, my mother turned and moved out from under Gauge’s arm and into the darkness of the hallway. I watched Gauge’s face as he carefully observed her movement beyond what Aunt Mert and I could see within the confines of the bathroom. He moved to follow her, leaving only the gaping black hole of the doorway as evidence to the nightmare. We heard muffled voices before the slamming of the front door.
“Now,
you listen here,” Aunt Mert spoke directly into my face. “You just rest and stop thinking about all this while I get you cleaned up.”
She moved to the sink to refresh the washcloth. I could see the clouded water as she wrung out the fabric, the collection of my tear- soaked blood pouring from the rag like streams of diluted oil. It took several more cleansings before Aunt Mert felt satisfied with her effort. Slowly, she assisted me to my feet, inching me toward the doorway. I glanced in the mirror as we moved, the reflection of my bruised and battered face staring back at me as broken and pathetic as my current self-worth. My swollen eyes peered at me as if from the face of some outer space creature. My lips looked like two undercooked sausages, massive and sliced with a series of abrasions that streaked across the tender flesh like the markings of a serpent. I was tempted to collapse in tears, but the firm grip of Aunt Mert’s lead was stronger than my weakened impulses.
She shuffled me across the hall and into Gauge’s room. As she lowered me onto the bed, I stretched my sore and bruised body over the bedsheets as though the coolness of the linen could somehow heal my wounds. I closed my eyes as Aunt Mert worked to tuck me in, lifting my head so that she could insert a pillow. The smell of Gauge’s skin and hair streamed into my nostrils like a warm breeze caressing the frozen Arctic tundra. I pressed my face deeper into the pillow, the familiar scent heightening my ability to smell above the stressed churning of my four other senses. For just a moment, the throbbing pain of my cuts and bruises subsided, with only the familiar presence of Gauge occupying my sluggish consciousness.
“Try and get some rest, dear,” she said softly, brushing hair back from my forehead. “We will figure all of this out in the morning.”
A tear escaped my left eye as she gently kissed my scalp, her maternal kindness as keen as if I were her kin. I closed my eyes as she exited the room, no thought or memory of what had just occurred polluting my mind.
Just as I was fading into the haze of slumber, a presence beside me alerted my awareness. I jumped into a sitting position, the wailing of my abrasions jolting through my being like electricity. I sat up to see Gauge.
“Hey,” he whispered, his eyes glossy, his face captive to an expression I had yet to see on him. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, too exhausted to speak.
“I’m so sorry, Dustin,” he continued, dropping to his knees so that we were eye level. “For everything. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have let—”
“Stop, Gauge,” I mumbled, my throat still tight from where my mother had been choking me. “This isn’t your fault. None of it is. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It’s just…” he stopped.
I looked up to see him wiping away tears.
“You do something to me. Something about you makes me feel something that I can’t explain…or even understand.”
I didn’t react as I watched him struggle for more words.
“I can’t control it. It isn’t right. I shouldn’t just act out this way.”
“I love you,” I stated, as certain and strong as though I were reciting my name.
He looked up at me, tears wavering over his confused gaze.
“What?”
“I love you, Gauge. I have for weeks. Since we met. Since that first time you took me to the lake.”
I reached down, placing my hand onto his.
“So nothing you have done is wrong. I feel the same way.”
The swell of tears slipped from his eyes and down his cheeks. His bottom lip began to quiver, his breathing accelerated and slightly labored.
“No, Dustin,” he struggled through his tears.
“This isn’t right.”
“How is it not right?” I retorted, my frustration as apparent as the sliced nail marks across my face. “If it’s what you feel, then it is real. How can it be wrong? You didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose it. It just is.”
He kept his head down, droplets of water falling from his face like a leaking water spot on a rain-weary ceiling.
“To say it’s wrong,” I continued, moving my arms to my chest, “it makes you sound just like my mother.”
“No,” he replied, placing both hands over mine. “That’s not how I mean it. I just mean—”
“What, Gauge? What do you mean?”
He stared, my angered interruption both unexpected and startling.
“Because I am getting so tired of people telling me what’s right and wrong for me. No one knows what I feel. No one knows what it’s like to just feel something so strong, so powerful, that it consumes you. Even when you sleep. It’s the easiest and most natural thing I have ever felt, yet I am constantly being told it is wrong. I can’t listen to that anymore.”
“I—” he cut himself off, his eyes darting between mine as if begging for an answer.
“Say it, Gauge,” I shouted. “Say it because I can’t keep dealing with you saying things one way but acting in another.”
He didn’t blink as his gaze continued to labor with tears. I could feel his fingers as he nervously prodded at my skin.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it is,” he stammered, continuing to search my face with his eyes as if desperate to find his answer there. “I understand what you mean, though. When you say you feel it even when you sleep. I understand that. That’s what it’s like for me.”
“That’s love, Gauge,” I whispered, my voice giving way to my own tears.
He smiled before dropping his head, the chatter of his brain nearly audible within the inches between us.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said, lifting his face. “You can’t stay here anymore.”
“What?” I asked softly, my head aching with a relentless throbbing.
“Your mother…she’s out of her mind. You
can’t stay here with her.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied, leaning my pulsating skull against the headboard. “This will blow over. She’ll calm down.”
“Do you hear yourself? Dustin, look at me.”
I opened my eyes and turned my head to face him.
“This is abuse. I know you are grown, but this is crazy, man. She was beating you.”
I sighed, reclosing my eyes as I positioned my head on the pillow.
“It will be fine,” I attempted to assure him, my words no more stable than a palm frond in a hurricane.
“No, Dustin. It isn’t fine. None of this is.”
Gauge gripped my shoulders, gently turning me toward him.
“I want to take you out of here,” he said, his face only inches from mine. “Let’s go to LA. Let’s just go.”
“Gauge,” I laughed, the constant beat of my heart the barometer for my pain. “How are we going to do that? With what money?”
“I’ve got savings,” he responded immediately, his expression brightening. “It’s money my dad left. It’s a few grand. It could get us to California.”
I shook my head, closing my eyes.
“I mean it, Dustin. Let’s just go.”
“And what will we do when we get there, Gauge?” I asked, lifting my head from the pillow. “What do you think, we will just waltz into Hollywood and I will land some great acting gig and everything will be fine?”
He stared at me, his eyes sinking with the weight of my words.
“I’ve only done a few high school plays. I’m no actor, Gauge. This is all your fantasy. It’s just something I say, it’s not something I really mean.”
He looked hurt, as though I had just revealed to his six-year-old self that there wasn’t a Santa Claus.
“But you wanted to swim in the Pacific,” he replied, his voice seasoned with confusion. “I want to be able to do that for you…to get you there. I want to see you have your dream.”
“Gauge,” I sighed, replacing my head on the pillow. “It’s not a big deal. The ocean is the ocean. I will survive if I never swim in the Pacific.”
I kept my eyes closed as he inched away, returning t
o his feet and moving to the door.
“This really sucks to hear you talk this way,” he said from the doorway. “To see you just give up on everything.”
I didn’t speak. Instead, I focused on my breathing as I struggled not to lash out at him. Though I appreciated his endearing sincerity, now was not the time for me to talk about far-fetched dreams regarding crossing the country to chase acting aspirations or Pacific Ocean waves. Instead, I just wanted to sleep.
“You may be right,” he continued, his voice now steady and certain, “about how I feel and everything.”
I opened my eyes to see his face.
“I don’t really know how to put all this stuff into words, but I think you’re right.”
His soft face glowed in the faint light of the bedside lamp, his eyes the familiar jewels of my dreams.
“I just know that I wanna be with you.
Always.”
He left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
The enormity of it all pressed upon my chest like fallen boulders in a forgotten canyon. So much of me wanted to weep, for the physical pain, the psychological tyranny, and now, the emotional exuberance. I fell asleep knowing that Gauge loved me in the same way that I loved him. This alone was enough to ease my heart and coo my brain into a silent, restful sleep.
II.
Spring, 1984
Six months had passed since Gauge and I left Florida. The night after the altercation with my mother, Gauge secured his savings, which was far less than the few grand he was expecting, and we boarded the Indian and headed north. With only the clothing on our backs, we slipped into the night without witness. Gauge left Aunt Mert a note with the promise to contact her once we reached a more secure destination. He was hell-bent on making it to California as soon as possible, but the Indian had other plans.
We traveled as far as Atlanta, Georgia, when the alternator gave out. Luckily, my cousin Ruby lived just over the state line in Tennessee and was willing to retrieve us. We stayed with her and her boyfriend for about three weeks, until we attained a place of our own, a tiny room at the back of a rundown yet still fully functional highway-side motel. I worked housekeeping for the motel while Gauge found a part-time position as a mechanic’s apprentice at a nearby repair garage.