by Poppy Brite
“Maybe,” Zach told him, “but I don’t hold it against you.”
It was obvious no one had ever said such a thing to Trevor before. He didn’t know what to make of it. He looked wary, then surprised, and finally tried a tentative smile.
Zach thought Trevor might indeed be quite insane, but was developing a healthy respect for him in spite of it. Terry, Victoria, and Kinsey were fun to hang out with, but if he was going to stay in Missing Mile for any length of time, he wanted Trevor for his first friend.
He’d have to sublimate the attraction, though. He’d done it before, once he realized that he actually liked someone. He didn’t think it would be a problem: whereas Terry gave off the wrong kind of pheromones, Trevor didn’t seem to give off any. It was as if he had no sexual awareness at all. Zach caught himself wondering how hard it would be to teach him.
He watched the raindrop finish its navigation of Trevor’s spine and disappear beneath the waistband of his jeans. There was a dusting of the palest golden hair there, slightly damp, right in the hollow of the back …
He bit his lip painfully and realized that Trevor was asking him something. “Huh?”
“I asked what you do.”
“Oh.” After the raw honesty Trevor had shown him, Zach could not entirely bring himself to lie. “Well, I work with computers.” With great relief he watched Trevor’s eyes glaze over. It was the look of the willful computer illiterate, complete with the hasty little nod that said that’s enough, that’s all I need to know, please don’t start talking about bits and bytes and drives and megarams and all that incomprehensible mojo. Zach had seen that look hundreds of times, welcomed it. It meant he wouldn’t have to answer any uncomfortable questions.
He dug into his pocket and found his last prerolled joint, flattened and mauled but more or less intact. “Do you mind?” he asked. Trevor shook his head. Zach produced one of the lighters Leaf had given him and set it afire.
Trevor’s nostrils flared as the smoke drifted past his face. “I better not,” he said when Zach offered him the joint, though Zach saw his fingers twitch as if wanting to reach for it. “I smoked some pot yesterday and almost passed out. I’m not used to it.”
Zach gathered all his considerable nerve. “Want a shotgun?”
“What’s that?”
Oh god. How to explain a shotgun without making it sound like the obvious scam it is? I’m not going to take this any further, I’m really not, I LIKE him, dammit, but there’s no harm in a little innocent frustration. “It’s, uh, where one person breathes in the smoke and then blows it into the other person’s mouth. See, my lungs filter the smoke before you get it, so it won’t be as strong.” Yeah, right. Heavy science goin’ down.
Trevor hesitated. Zach tried not to slip into social-engineering mode, but he thought he could feel the power radiating in great joyous waves through his brain now. He felt as if he could convince absolutely anybody of absolutely anything. “C’mon,” he said. “Pot’s good for you. It relaxes you, clears out your brain.”
Trevor eyed the smoldering joint, then shook his head. “No, I better not.”
“What?” Zach couldn’t hide his surprise. He had known Trevor would say yes as surely as he’d known Leaf would give him those damn lighters. “Why?”
Trevor studied Zach’s face as intently as anyone ever had, more intently than most of his one-night lovers had done. Zach felt almost uncomfortable under the scrutiny of those striking, serious eyes. “You really want me to do it, don’t you?”
Zach shrugged, but he felt Trevor had looked straight through his skull to the whorls of his devious, treacherous brain. “It’s more fun getting stoned with somebody, that’s all.”
Another long searching look. “Okay then. I’ll take one.” Zach thought Trevor might as well have added, But don’t fuck with me too much, hear? He realized that his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, that his blood was surging and his head felt like a helium balloon ascending fast into an achingly blue, cloudless sky. No one ever got to him this way; this was the way he liked to make other people feel.
He took a deep hit off the joint, held it in for a second, then leaned over and exhaled a long steady stream of smoke into Trevor’s open mouth. Their lips barely grazed. Trevor’s felt as soft as velvet, as rain. Ribbons of smoke twined from the corners of their mouths, swathed their heads in an amorphous blue-gray veil. Zach kept his eyes open and saw that Trevor had closed his, as if being kissed. His eyelashes were a dark ginger color, the pale parchment of his eyelids shot through with the most delicate lavender tracery of veins. Zach thought of putting his mouth against those eyelids, of feeling the lashes silky against his lips, the secret caged movement of the eyeball beneath his tongue …
… and he was doing a damn fine job of sublimating his attraction, wasn’t he?
He pulled back, shaken. Once he decided he wasn’t going to be turned on by someone, he just wasn’t anymore. At least that was how it had always been. He let himself have anyone he wanted unless he had good reason not to want them, and his libido had always paid back by giving him complete control.
Until now.
Trevor lay back on the damp grass and put a hand to his forehead. Zach saw pine needles snarled in his long hair, fresh dirt under his fingernails, tiny beads of water trapped in the fine hairs around his nipples.
“So,” said Trevor, blowing out his shotgun, “how did your parents try to kill you?”
“My dad beat the shit out of me for fourteen years. My mom mostly just used her mouth.”
“Why did you stay?”
Zach shrugged. “Nowhere else to go.” From the corner of his eye he saw Trevor nod. “Sure, I could have run away when I was nine or ten, but there would’ve been a lifetime of stiff dicks in Town Cars waiting for me. I waited until I knew I could take care of myself some way besides giving blowjobs. Then I ran. Just disappeared into another part of the city. They never tried to find me.”
“What city?”
Zach hesitated. He still didn’t want to lie to Trevor, but he couldn’t start giving different stories to different people.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“New Orleans,” Zach said, not even sure why. “But don’t tell anybody.”
“Are you on the run or something?”
Zach’s silence spoke volumes.
“It’s okay,” said Trevor. “I’ve been running from this place for seven years. But you know, you get sick of it after a while.”
“Yeah, so you come back and it tries to make you bash people’s brains out.”
Trevor shrugged. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
Zach started laughing. He couldn’t help it. This guy was so fucked up.…but smart, and despite his weird asexuality, entirely too beautiful. Trevor stared at him for a moment, then tentatively joined in.
They grinned at each other in ganja-swirled camaraderie. Suddenly Zach found himself wondering again if it mightn’t be possible after all to love someone and make love with them too. Something about such a spontaneous sweet smile on a face that didn’t smile too often made him wonder why he had always denied himself the physical pleasure of a person he truly cared for. Wouldn’t it be fun to see someone—all right then, someone like Trevor—smile that way just because Zach knew how to make him feel good? Maybe even more fun than getting sucked off by a cute, all-but-anonymous stranger in the back room of a convenience store in a state he might never see again?
Probably not. Probably it would end in cutting words and tears, pain and blame and regret, maybe even blood. Those were the risks of such a relationship, almost guaranteed.
But where along the line had he decided that he could not take those particular risks, while cheerfully taking—indeed, seeking out—so many others?
Trevor was watching him closely. He looked as if he wanted to say What are you thinking? but didn’t. Zach was glad. He’d always hated that question; it seemed people only asked it of you when you we
re thinking about something you didn’t want to share.
Instead, very hesitantly, Trevor asked, “Have we met before? Do I know you?” He frowned as if that weren’t precisely the question he wanted to ask, but he could not find the words for the right one.
Zach shook his head. “I don’t think so. But …”
“It feels like we have,” Trevor finished for him.
Zach snuffed the half-burnt joint and put it back in his pocket. They sat in silence for a few minutes. Neither wanted to be the first to say too much, to take this strange new notion too far. Zach mused on how irretrievable words were in the real world. In many ways he preferred the simplicity of the computer universe, where you could revise and delete things at will, where you acted and the system could only react in certain ways.
But there you ran up against an eventual wall of predictability. Here the slightest shift in semantics could make a situation run wild, and that appealed to him too.
The rain had nearly stopped. Now it began to come down harder again, though they were still protected beneath the canopy of branches and vines. The sky rumbled with nascent thunder, then erupted. All at once it was pouring.
Zach saw a chance to defuse the awkwardness. He caught Trevor’s arm and pulled him up, noticing how Trevor’s flesh seemed to simultaneously cleave to and cringe from his touch. “Come on!” he urged.
“Where?”
“Don’t you want a shower? This is our chance!”
“Out here?”
“Sure, why not? Nobody can see us from the road.” Zach ducked out from under the curtain of willow fronds and ran to a clear patch in the yard. He kicked his sneakers off, pulled his shirt over his head, stuck his glasses in his pocket, and started unbuttoning his pants. Trevor followed, looking doubtful. “Are you going to get naked?”
Zach undid the last button and let his cutoffs fall. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. Trevor raised his eyebrows, then shrugged, unbuckled his jeans, and pushed them down over his skinny hips. If he’d grown up in an orphanage, male nudity was probably no big deal to him.
The rain sluiced over their bodies, washing away the grime of the road and the old crumbling house. Trevor was only a wet blur several feet away; Zach could barely see him flinging his arms about as if dancing or performing some wild invocation.
Zach raised his face to the downpour and let it fill the tired hollows of his eyes, wash the taste of smoke from his lips. He was not aware that he was grinning like a fool until he felt rain trickling between his teeth, over his tongue, and down his throat in a little silver river.
Kinsey was mopping up the last of the water as the early evening barflies began to drift in. Terry was closing up shop at the Whirling Disc and wishing Steve Finn were in town. The new guy had fucked up an invoice and ordered twenty copies of Louie’s Limbo Lounge, an obscure album of exquisitely bad strip-club music, instead of the two Terry had meant to special-order. Now they could hear such classics as “Torture Rock,” “Beaver Shot,” and the amazing “Hooty Sapper-ticker” by Barbara & the Boys whenever they so desired.
Terry started to call Poindexter’s in Durham to see if they wanted any, but decided fuck it and went instead to buy his girl a beer. A gaudy sunset bathed the downtown in red and purple light, and the slowly darkening streets glistened with the rain that had fallen all afternoon.
One by one the streetlights flickered on. Terry remembered a summer two or three years ago when there had been a plague of Luna moths. The huge insects beat against windows and swarmed around streetlights, their broad fragile wings catching the light and making it shift strangely, their color like nothing else in nature—the palest silver-green, the color of ectoplasm or the glow of radiation. You could find drifts of them tattered and dead in the gutter, their fat furred bodies shriveled to husks.
Soon a flock of bats descended upon the town, roosting in the treetops and church bell towers by day, swooping out at night to catch the Luna moths in their tiny razored jaws. If the show at the Sacred Yew was boring, the kids would congregate on the street and watch the shadowplay of leathery and iridescent wings, strain to hear the high needling squeal of the bats over the churn of guitars and percussion from the club. One night Ghost had mused aloud that to the bats, the moths’ blood must taste like crème de menthe.
Terry wondered what had become of the new kids. He thought Zach might have just hit the other side of town and kept driving; that boy looked like he might have someplace to be in a hurry. And he guessed Trevor was still out at the murder house. Hell of a thing, Bobby McGee’s son coming back after all these years.
Well, Kinsey would know the lowdown. Terry hastened his step toward the Yew, toward friends and music and the taste of a cold beer in his favorite bar on a summer’s evening.
By ten o’clock Terry had had five cold beers and had forgotten all about Zach. But Zach had not hit the other side of town, had not even returned to his car except to check the locks and pull it around to the side of the house. He had found a place he liked, and he had every intention of setting up camp here for a few days unless Trevor objected. But he didn’t think Trevor would.
When they came in from the rainstorm, Trevor excused himself to put on dry clothes and disappeared down the hall. Zach followed a few minutes later and found him sprawled on a bare mattress in one of the back bedrooms. Naked and almost painfully thin, long hair spread out around his head like a corona, he was already deeply asleep.
Zach watched him for several moments but could not disturb him. Trevor had spent the last three nights sleeping on a Greyhound bus, a couch, and a drawing table; he deserved some bed rest. Zach got one of Kinsey’s blankets and covered him. As he did so he saw gooseflesh shivering across Trevor’s chest, water droplets still caught in the cup of his navel and the damp tangle of his pubic hair. He imagined the salty taste those droplets would have if he were to bend down and lick them away.
Now you want to molest him in his sleep. It was Eddy’s voice, out of nowhere. Christ, Zach, why don’t you just buy a blow-up love doll on Bourbon Street and be done with it?
Fuck you, Eddy.
As he turned away from the bed he noticed drawings tacked to the walls. Monsters and fanciful houses, unfamiliar landscapes. And faces, all kinds of faces. A child’s drawings—but a child with obvious talent, with an eye for line and proportion, with an untrammeled imagination. This was Trevor’s own room.
Zach left Trevor to sleep and started exploring the house. At the end of the hall was the bathroom where Bobby had died. There was no window in this room, and Zach did not think to try the switch. He stood on the threshold staring into the unlit chamber, saw porcelain gleaming dully beneath layers of dirt and cobweb. The shower curtain rod was bent, almost buckled. Zach wondered if Trevor had seen that yet.
Something about the bathroom’s geometry seemed wrong, as if the angle at which walls met ceiling were slightly skewed. It made Zach feel dizzy, almost nauseated. He turned away and went into the room across the hall, which was the studio. He saw Trevor’s sketchbook lying open on the drawing table and slowly flipped through the pages. The drawings were very good. Zach had read one issue of Birdland, and he thought Trevor’s style was already technically better than Bobby’s. The lines were surer, the faces finer and more subtle, with layer upon layer of nuance lurking in the expressions he captured.
But Bobby’s work had always had a certain fractured warmth to it. No matter how sordid and vile his characters were—the junkies and glib beatniks and talking saxophones who got laid more often than their human counterparts—you always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line. Trevor’s work was harsher, icier. His universe was not indifferent but cruel. He knew his punch line: the crumpled, bleeding woman in the doorway, the broken bodies of the musicians, the burning cops.
And others, as Zach paged back through the book. So many others. So many beautifully drawn dead bodies.
He checked out the master bedroom
and its walk-in closet, saw little of interest—the parents hadn’t brought much of their own stuff, probably; after fitting Bobby’s art supplies and the kids’ things in the car there wouldn’t have been much space left.
He crossed the hall to Didi’s room, stopped dead on the threshold and stared at the huge dark mass boiling through the window, then realized it was kudzu. Zach wondered how long it would be before the vines filled the room from floor to ceiling. He took in the bloodstain on the mattress, the spatters high on the wall. Trevor said the hammer had appeared in the opposite corner, next to the small closet. Zach looked at the area, even prodded the kudzu with the toe of his sneaker, but found nothing unusual.
He had heard of objects instantaneously being transported from one place to another; they were called “apports” and were supposed to be warm to the touch, as Trevor said the hammer had been. Zach wasn’t sure he believed in apports, but he couldn’t think of another way it might have gotten there. If it was the same hammer.
But if it wasn’t, where had the dried blood and tissue come from? Zach didn’t even want to wonder. It had to be the same one; that made more sense than thinking Trevor had bought another one and smeared it with sheep brains or something. Zach was not an implicit believer in the supernatural, but he didn’t believe in scaring up improbable natural explanations just to rule it out, either. Nature was a complex system; there had to be more to it than anyone could understand from looking at the surface.
The kitchen was large and old-fashioned, with a freestanding sink and a gas range. A real farmhouse kitchen, or so Zach imagined. He opened the refrigerator and was surprised to see the light come on. He hadn’t tested the electricity, he realized; he had forgotten about it until now.
In the fridge was a juice bottle with a half inch of black sludge at the bottom, some kind of vegetable matter mummified beyond recognition, and a Tupperware container whose contents he dared not contemplate: he’d heard Tupperware coffins could preserve human remains for twenty years or more, so who knew what they could do to leftovers? Zach retrieved the Cokes and bottled water from the living room and arranged them on the shelf next to the juice.