The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  He’d considered calling Devin with the news about Holden, since the two of them had been friendly, had even tricked together once at a frat party a few weeks before Devin met Tracy, but he hadn’t talked to Devin since October, when he’d seen him in the city, their silence mutual as the months slid by, as if, after all this time, their friendship had inexplicably come to some kind of an end. Funny, he hadn’t suspected anything at all was amiss when he’d said good-bye that Sunday morning—but somehow, somewhere along the way, something had irrevocably changed.

  And in all his relations, he thought as he wended his way through the town, inexplicable shifts seemed to have occurred, as if it really were possible for one’s stars to be in inauspicious alignment. That unnerving dinner with Louis and Claire, for instance, after which Louis, especially, had grown markedly more distant and reserved. He now knows I’m gay, Tracy told himself, trying at the same time to reassure himself that that distinctly unsurprising revelation could hardly be the sole cause of Louis’s withdrawal.

  And then there was the Noah situation. Or there had been the Noah situation—which now, thankfully, was over. Determined to defuse things before they got any farther out of hand, for the last four weeks of the semester he’d kept his student as gently at bay as possible. It was undoubtedly for the best, and he felt, all in all—when not visited by the occasional pang of wild sorrow that could arrive without warning—relieved that their ill-advised and inappropriate friendship had cooled.

  Leaving his car in the visitors’ lot by the football stadium, he strolled onto the deserted campus. Only five years had passed since he graduated, hardly any time at all, really, and everything seemed remarkably unchanged: the elegant, ivy-wreathed Georgian buildings; the herringboned brick walks; tall dark magnolias with their waxy, brooding leaves; the allée of crepe myrtle; the sunken garden, where he used to pause on spring afternoons to watch shirtless young men play soccer. All at once, he keenly regretted having given in to his sister’s insistence that he kennel Betsy back in Middle Forge; it would have been nice to have his dog frisking alongside him on the sunken garden’s expanse of lawn. The campus’s emptiness was eerie, unnatural. Of course this was a place ghosts would return to, seeking the paths they had walked and the dorms they had made love in and the classrooms where they had dreamed of the unimaginable future.

  Standing all alone in the center of the sunken garden—he was never sure why they’d called it a garden, exactly, since there was nothing but lawn—he felt a shiver of unidentifiable dread so intense it compelled him to say out loud, the way, in an abandoned building, you might try to reassure yourself by whistling, “Holden, you southern queen, you. Stop making me have such gothic thoughts.” The sound of his voice startled him in the empty air. But now he knew why he’d come, and where he needed to go.

  In the woods behind the sunken garden, a brightly painted Japanese bridge arched gracefully over a quiet pool. William and Mary lore had it that Playboy had once ranked the secluded dell the most romantic spot on an American college campus. He and Holden had shared a yummy late-night kiss there early on in their relationship; he’d then led his boy into the bushes for one of the most stirring blow jobs he’d ever given anybody. It was one of the few times in his life he’d ever swallowed. There were, in retrospect, perhaps a million reasons to regret that mouthful, one for each spermatozoon swimming in the warm gooey mix, but now, leaning on the bridge rail and staring into the tranquil pool where orange smudges of goldfish lurked like lesions waiting to surface in as yet unblemished skin, six years after the two of them moved on to other things, Holden to Jake and he to Devin and then Japan, where he’d seen any number of arched bridges and koi-filled ponds, the real things and not imitation, he was glad he’d wanted Holden’s seed in his mouth, glad he’d taken it. And if this wTere to turn out to have been the very spot on earth where the virus had entered him, the most romantic collegiate spot in America, well then, he thought defiantly, so be it.

  But his defiance was short-lived. The old panic set in. What if he really did carry the virus in his blood? He felt a strange throb go through his torso. Could you feel its tongue of fire flicking inside you?

  He knew from experience that such thoughts could only plunge him farther into panic. The solution was so stupefyingly simple: get the test, be done with it. But his predicament was just as stupefyingly simple: he could not bring himself to do that.

  In flight from phantoms there was no fleeing from, he forsook the pond, cut back across the quad, past the Christopher Wren building, and entered into Duke of Gloucester Street. Colonial Williamsburg was surprisingly congested with tourists. He remembered vividly his own first visit to the place: the reconstruction he found so kitschy in his college years had enchanted him utterly as a ten-year-old, and he had vowed then and there that when the time came he would go to college at William and Mary.

  In front of Bruton Parish a legion of smiling Japanese tourists stood at attention, waiting for their leader’s camcorder to be done with them. Up ahead, on the commons in front of the Governor’s Palace, a man in colonial dress tending two oxen yoked to a cart lectured a small, palpably uninterested audience on oxen commands. “Haw means left,” he told them, gesturing with his hand. “Gee means right.” Somewhere in the distance a musket demonstration was being given. In a fenced-in lot a chestnut horse grazed on a pile of hay. Resting his crossed forearms on the split-rail fence, a boy of thirteen or fourteen watched with a pensive expression on his lean face. He wore cowboy boots, jeans, a spangled denim jacket; beneath that, a fancy black shirt stitched in silver. His hair fell in black bangs over his eyebrows.

  The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart. Feigning interest in the chestnut horse, he broke his stride, but as he sauntered over to the fence a man’s voice called out, “Git on over here or yer gonna git left.”

  “Ya’ll wait for me,” the boy called out to his family, who had walked on ahead, father and mother and two younger brothers, perhaps nine and seven. Their voices were deep country drawls. The father turned to look back, rail thin, his face showing the toll of hard years. He too wore cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat as well. He motioned brusquely with his arm to hurry up, and his son obeyed.

  Tracy followed at a little distance. He enjoyed watching the boy’s wide buttocks, his gait made ever so slightly precarious by his cowboy boots—the male equivalent, Tracy mused, of walking in high heels. A trucker’s wallet, secured by a chain to his belt, bulged in the boy’s left back pocket. He kept running his hand through his hair, pushing it back out of his eyes. You cute little tramp from darkest Appalachia, Tracy thought playfully, his mind inventing reckless fantasies, all perfectly harmless of course, a melancholy game to while away an afternoon. He was not particularly eager to get back to Richmond and his sister’s house. He had spent the week there in a vaguely disconsolate torpor, sleeping twelve hours at a stretch, eating too much, getting no exercise. It would be a relief, the day after tomorrow, to make the long drive home—if home was what Middle Forge was for him these days.

  The family had stopped to peruse the menu posted at one of the taverns. Tracy stationed himself on a bench on the opposite side of the street whose only traffic was pedestrians or the occasional carriage. Disappointingly, he couldn’t hear the family’s words, only the rural music of their voices, but he had a clear view of the boy absentmindedly scratching his shoulder, a charming gesture to contemplate. And he hadn’t noticed the boy’s belt buckle before, a bright silver oval boldly embossed with the letters CSA. Splendid, he thought, just splendid.

  He and Holden had loved strolling among the out-of-town hordes—boy gazing, Holden had called it. “Oh my Lord, that man pushing the baby stroller just cruised me!” he’d exclaim, or, whenever his companion’s attention seemed too obviously caught by some beauty guarded by his watchful entourage of family, he’d playfully slap Tracy’s wrist and say, “Stop that, you pervert!”

&nb
sp; “I’m just looking,” Tracy would complain. “I have no intention of touching.”

  And he didn’t have any intention of touching, either then or now. Deciding he did, however, want to hear the southern boy’s voice one more time before the family disappeared into the tavern, he got up to move closer—but as he did so, the parents must have decided the tavern was overpriced, or it was too early to eat, or perhaps the authentic-sounding fare, pigeon pie, smoked ham on biscuits, was too like their own country diet, and they preferred to eat somewhere more exotic, perhaps one of the innumerable waffle houses out on the strip. In any event, Tracy was glad his little idyll had been granted a momentary reprieve. What better way to spend a dull winter’s afternoon than following a beautiful boy around town? And about white trash youngsters like this, unschooled and volatile, there could be a particular kind of edgy attractiveness.

  Look but don’t touch, he admonished himself, wondering nonetheless what might happen if he were, in the right circumstances, to touch? There was a friend of Arthur’s who hired local boys, sixteen-and seventeen-year-old rednecks, to do miscellaneous chores at his weekend house up in Columbia County. Trim and fit from his Chelsea gym, the very picture of reassuring masculinity, Ron would invite them in after an afternoon’s work for a couple of beers, and at some point he’d pop a video into the VCR, “a straight video, mind you.” They were happy enough to lean back on the sofa, close their eyes, and pretend. Tracy’s response: they’re going to find you murdered in that house of yours one of these days. Still, he thought ruefully, everybody had to die sooner or later. At least Ron would go to his grave knowing what Tracy only dreamed about.

  Admiring the cannons, the coat of arms, the young ladies paid to parade in colonial dress, the family from darkest Appalachia milled about on the grounds of the House of Burgesses, while Tracy, lingering safely on the periphery, reserved all his admiration for the serendipitous combination of genes that had produced, out of such unpromising parents, so remarkable a creature.

  “Down this way’s the jail,” the beautiful fluke of nature called out. Excitedly he pointed to a sign, the cuff of his denim jacket riding up to expose a bony wrist. “Ya’ll come this way.” As the family flocked eagerly past him, Tracy lowered his eyes as if engrossed by the broken oyster shells that composed the path beneath his feet, wondering what on earth poor Louis would think, were he to glimpse his protégé in his truest element. Perhaps it was for the best that their relations had cooled. It hadn’t, after all, been an honest friendship; he’d concealed too much of himself beneath that veneer he’d long ago perfected, while this lone wolf of a self scrambling hungrily down a steep path in pursuit of a ravishing morsel of adolescence was—he thought with a surge of rebelliousness—his purest, most profound self.

  Down by the old gaol an enchanting tableau awaited him: the boy’s younger brothers had locked him in the stocks and were dancing around him merrily, clapping their hands and singing, “Clay got caught, Clay is a thief.” Tracy of the stolen heart drank in the spectacle eagerly. It aroused him to see the young offender on display for all the world to see, his slender wrists shackled, his shapely hands hanging limp, level with his ears, his sheepish grin.

  “You look jist like you belong there,” his grim-faced mother called out.

  “I ain’t done nothing to deserve this,” Clay said.

  “Nothing yit,” his father told him. “You jist wait.”

  While the mother snapped pictures with a throwaway camera, the rest of the family, oblivious to whatever audience they might have, took turns submitting to the stocks’ mock humiliation, laughing and pointing at one another as if their various punishments were the funniest thing ever.

  “Was you in one of these when you was locked up?” Clay asked his confined father.

  “Naw,” the careworn man told him, looking out dolefully at the camera. “They don’t have these no more.”

  Clay nodded sagely, but there was a look in his dark eyes, a tinge of sadness, histories Tracy had no clue to, but that filled his heart with longing: if he could somehow befriend Clay, comfort him, make everything all right in his dusky, thwarted world.

  But the pleasures of the stocks were soon exhausted, and the family reluctantly moved on. The streets of restored houses seemed to leave them indifferent, but mechanical things called to them. They took their time at the windmill, the brickyard, the shingle-making demonstration. Tracy shadowed them diligently, though he was beginning to lose interest in his game. What, after all, was the point of following around some boy whose only quality, really, was his boyness? Hadn’t he already, in a sense, drunk to the full whatever was possible? But at that very moment when he had decided to leave them to the rest of their lives, the backwoods clan passed a public rest room. Tracy could hardly believe what he heard. “I got to pee real bad,” Clay announced in a loud, careless voice. “Ya’ll keep on walking. I’ll catch up.”

  Tracy’s heart practically stopped in his chest. Was it possible the sly little beauty knew perfectly well he was being pursued? Ron always insisted that redneck boys were a whole lot easier than you might think. Stop that, you pervert, he thought, fiercely reining in his galloping imagination. And indeed, the moment quickly asserted its innocence.

  “Anybody else need to go?” the father asked his family. “Rory? Taylor?” The two little boys shook their heads. “All right, go ahead, Clay, but don’t dawdle. We’ll be right up the street.”

  Heart racing, Tracy hesitated. He’d tailed the family far too long; it was a miracle they hadn’t caught on to him. To enter the rest room now, however innocently, would be foolhardy. And yet they paid him no mind, turning their backs and ambling slowly up the street. Aroused, he pushed open the restroom door.

  The dank gloom smelled heavily of disinfectant. Above a line of sinks hung a matching line of mirrors, their light silvery and cold. On the opposite side of the room, Clay stood at the middle urinal in a row of three. No partitions divided the urinals. From the movement of his elbows Tracy could tell Clay was unbuckling his belt. Holding his dick with his right hand, he rested his left against the top of the urinal. Tracy stepped up to the porcelain beside him. The boy had let loose a prodigious stream; evidently he really had needed to pee bad. Taking no note at all of the man who had sidled up on his right, he stared blankly at the concrete block wall in front of him.

  Half hard, Tracy worked to free himself, discreetly glancing to his left and down as he did so, and there it was, a modest thing, circumcised, not much bigger, really, than Tracy’s middle finger. He didn’t dare sustain his gaze more than an instant, but was adept at quickly capturing what he needed: that the boy’s thumbnail was bruised dark, the head of his dick silky and reddish, his piss clear as water. Only when the long stream ended did Tracy allow himself a second, slightly longer glance as Clay shook himself dry, then stuffed his secret flesh back into his jeans. Tracy waited for his own flow of piss to begin, but his cock was still half hard, and nothing would happen.

  Completely unaware he was the object of such daring study, Clay zipped up, buckled his belt, and flushed. His cowboy boots clicked briskly across the concrete floor as he left without bothering to wash his hands. Tracy’s pulse was still zooming, but his semi-erection had begun to subside. You dirty old man, he told himself as his piss finally began to flow and his heartbeat returned to normal. He hadn’t done anything like that in a very long time, not since Germany, when he had been nineteen and abysmally lonely and occasionally found himself stealing quick peeks at the youngster he’d positioned himself next to in the rest room of a train station or a youth hostel.

  Look but don’t touch, he thought wistfully. He carefully washed his hands at the basin. Look all you want, he explained to Holden Beauregard Chance IV, who stood at the next basin and, so it would seem, washed his hands as well. There is nothing wrong with looking, Tracy assured his old companion of long ago. And what goes on in your head, no one can touch.

  Lynn and her brood inhabited a charmless mans
ionette in an affluent development in Richmond’s West End. Two years ago the forty acres had all been fields, and the new houses squatted stark and uncomfortable in the bare winter landscape. So this was the price of success, the palpably unsuccessful Tracy thought grimly as he steered his scrappy Toyota into the drive beside the gleaming new Lexus and Jeep Cherokee.

  A big house glowing warmly against the winter’s night. A spouse to come home to. Children to carry on the genetic legacy, that million-year trust he carried in his traitorous loins. A place blissfully secure in the middle of the world. I do not want these things, he reminded himself as he mounted the steps to the front door. Instead I want…But what did he want? The forbidden, illusory bliss of Clay from darkest Appalachia? Banish the ridiculous thought, he instructed himself as, taking a deep breath, he entered his sister’s house.