The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “Can’t anybody around here get it through their head? This is who I am. Period. And anyway, it’s nobody else’s fucking business. Why can’t you all just leave me alone?”

  “Don’t get mad at us just because you’re not happy,” Lynn told him.

  “I don’t even want to talk about this anymore,” Tracy said. “Just let me get my things and I’ll be out of here.”

  “Just remember,” Lynn reminded him—it was how she’d spoken to him when they were kids—“once you calm down, you’re going to see things differently. You’re going to feel ashamed of yourself.” His temper in those days had been famous.

  “Maybe I will,” he told his sister evenly. “But then again, maybe I won’t.”

  “Families,” Arthur said, his distant voice soothingly close in Tracy’s ear. “What can you expect? The more dysfunctional the better, is what I always say. Though yours does sound like it takes the cake.”

  “It’s not even that my family’s so dysfunctional,” Tracy complained. He sat on his futon, bare legs out straight, pillows cushioning his back against the wall. “It’s like—I’m the dysfunction.”

  “Funny how that is, isn’t it? So you stormed right out of there and drove back in the middle of the night. That’ll teach them.”

  There was no doubt he’d behaved badly; and yet, for all his uneasiness, he felt unrepentant, even exultant.

  “What a grueling drive,” he complained. “The New Jersey Turnpike at two o’clock in the morning. All the demon truckers come out.”

  “Then I hope you made a potty stop at every single rest stop along the way. The Vince Lombardi is my particular fave. Or is it the Joyce Kilmer?”

  “That’s you, not me,” Tracy admonished his friend. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be back in my own house with my own dog and a weather forecast that says we’re supposed to get two feet of snow. Is it snowing down there yet?”

  He really did want to stay in this beautiful house of his forever, though he knew he’d have to move out next year; the house was meant for families, not single instructors. Doug Brill had already let him know the place was as good as his.

  “Well, what do you know?” Arthur said with a flurry of static that meant he was moving around his apartment. “I believe it is snowing. Good golly, is it coming down. Oh, I’m going to go out and scamper about for a while. I love New York in a snowstorm. How much did you say? Two feet?”

  “That’s what they say. Can you wait a second? I’ve got another call coming in.

  “See,” Arthur said cheerfully, “already your family’s calling to apologize.”

  But it wasn’t his family, and he hadn’t expected it to be. He felt both desolate and strangely relieved. At first he didn’t recognize the low, hesitant voice on the other end of the line. “Noah,” he said cautiously. “How are you, Noah?”

  “I’m at the train station here in Middle Forge. So I guess that means I’m not so well.”

  It could have been an attempt at a joke, but Tracy wasn’t so sure. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “What’s going on?” He resisted the impulse to say, “Go away, leave me alone.”

  There was a pause. “Hey Trace,” Noah asked, sounding even more uncertain than before, “would you mind to come get me?”

  Tracy hesitated. Desperately he cast about for excuses; finding none except for perhaps the weather, he asked, aware how foolish it sounded, “Noah, are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Noah sort of laughed, or at least that was how Tracy heard the sound. “Head trouble is all,” he said. “Nothing a little heroin wouldn’t fix. I don’t mean to put you out or anything. I mean, if you’re busy with something. I just feel like I sort of could use a friend right now.”

  The words had their allure. If Noah was perhaps something of a schemer, Tracy thought darkly, he was nonetheless pretty good at it.

  “The train station, huh?” No doubt he’d have ample cause to regret all this, whatever this turned out to be. And you don’t know what it is, he told himself. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll be out front, by the phone booth,” Noah said helpfully. “You can’t miss me.” Then the line was dead. Feeling confused, skeptical, exhilarated, Tracy clicked back to Arthur, who was oddly, sweetly, humming to himself.

  “Gee, I thought you’d forgotten me,” he said. “The family must have been very, very sorry.”

  “Aargh,” Tracy told him. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go pick up somebody at the train station.”

  “Really? Now that sounds mysterious. Were you expecting this person?”

  “No,” Tracy said. “Definitely I was not expecting this person. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  The streets were much worse than he’d imagined, the snow thicker, the wind harsher. Traffic was practically nonexistent, New Year’s Eve festivities effectively canceled by the storm. Only the Heidelberg, a dreary little restaurant on Main Street that turned into a dreary little gay bar at night, hopefully flashed a welcoming Dinkelacker sign in its window. No plows had come through, and wouldn’t, Middle Forge being Middle Forge, till morning.

  It wouldn’t have been out of the question for Noah to walk to campus from the station, but Tracy was glad the boy hadn’t come pounding on his back door without any warning. At least this gave him time to think—but about what? He really had put Noah almost completely out of his head, he told himself, though when he rechecked that adamant assertion just to make sure, he was alarmed to discover how uncertain he actually was.

  Despite his care his little Toyota was describing leisurely fishtails back and forth across lanes. Prudently he slowed to the speed of a strolling boy; if he went slower and slower he’d never have to arrive, or when he finally did arrive Noah would be long gone, grown safely into manhood and out of the reach of hopeless longings.

  A spell of strangeness seemed to lie over the slumbering village. There had been snows like this in the Black Forest the year he lived there, great blanketing storms that put the whole landscape to enchanted sleep. A word seemed to surface in his brain, but then sank back, elusive, into the depths as he turned carefully into the Metro North parking lot only to discover that the Toyota, sliding in a wide, slow-motion arc, seemed to have other plans. For a single gorgeously dilating instant he had lost control; he went with the spin thinking, I could die now. I could fall asleep beneath this snow. I could wake in the dark forest. With its gables and sharply peaked roof, didn’t the little brick station itself belong in a medieval fairy tale? And there, forlorn and shivering in the sulphurous light, a bloodred rose amid the field of deathly white snow—why was he wearing his crimson warm-up sweats from cross-country?—stood Noah Lathrop.

  He looked so terribly young as the car glided safely to a halt in front of him, and Tracy had forgotten how beautiful he was, how finely etched his features, how striking his blue gaze. This boy had asked him to come for him. He had no winter jacket, no luggage, only a knapsack slung over his shoulder, too small to contain even a change of clothes.

  “Spectacular,” Noah observed as he slid into the front seat. “Have you been practicing your counterterrorist driving?”

  “You must be freezing,” Tracy told him, at the same time silently asking his hapless student, What on earth were you thinking? What were you planning to do if I wasn’t here?

  And yet what Tracy felt was not disapproval but elation, startlingly powerful, as if he himself had been rescued from the storm.

  Noah, however, seemed a little less than elated. “I hate your town’s weather,” he complained, clutching thin arms across the Forge School crest that emblazoned his chest.

  “Don’t you believe in listening to the weather report?” Tracy was conscious of pulling back, restraining himself within irony’s safer embrace.

  “Actually—no,” Noah told him, reaching down to massage his bare ankles. He was wearing no socks with his sneakers. “You could say I believe in trusting to fate. Are the roads bad?”
r />   “The roads are fucking terrible,” Tracy said. “As you’ll see.”

  “Fucking terrible,” Noah repeated. He seemed to like the epithet; it seemed to relax him. He settled more comfortably into his seat, and it was uncanny, Tracy mused, how little either of them resembled who they really were. They might have been brothers, the older picking up the younger after sports practice; or father and son; even a teacher and his star student; but not who they were, which was none of those things, not even the last, but rather something unmapped, mysterious, dark in its way as Africa.

  He’d ask no questions; let Noah, for the time being, volunteer whatever he volunteered. Though for the moment, as Tracy negotiated the empty but treacherous streets of Middle Forge, the refugee from the cité radieuse seemed content to sit in silence, as if their estrangement of the past month and a half had never happened, as if nothing needed any explanation beyond the two of them in a car on a snowy night.

  His house was lit and shining like a beacon. He didn’t remember leaving so many lights on, but from the road it looked remarkably inviting, as if sense and order and contentment, those elusive household deities, had taken up residence. In the driveway, the tracks the Toyota had left were already disappearing under the relentless onslaught of fresh snow. The towering conifers by the side of the house hung heavy with their gleaming burdens.

  “I hope you’ve got enough food stashed away,” Noah joked, his first words since the train station.

  “I hope you’re not too hungry,” Tracy told him.

  They stamped the slush off themselves on the back stoop, left footwear in the mudroom. Noah’s sneakers were soaked through, his bare feet pink with cold. Betsy nuzzled them with her wet nose. “Hey Bets,” he moaned, scratching behind her ears, kneeling to allow her to plunge her face into his. “Long time no see, huh?”

  Tracy resisted mightily the temptation to order Noah out of his wet track suit—which, on closer inspection, looked relatively dry. He comforted himself with the thought that at some point, tomorrow perhaps, a change of clothes would still be necessary. Noah in a borrowed shirt and pants lounging around the house while the world beyond lay in the thrall of a different kind of beauty: the idea was positively moving.

  In the kitchen he busied himself making hot chocolate for them both while Noah took his time in the bathroom. The fairy tale spell he’d felt on his way to the train station had not entirely left him, the shimmery sense that perhaps he had crashed after all, right through the thin wall separating an ordinary life from an enchanted one, and he found himself checking the mudroom just to reassure himself that those were indeed Noah’s sodden sneakers lying there beside the bench and not some trick of the light. And then there was Noah himself, no trick of light either as he stood in the doorway. The past month and a half—their estrangement, their flight from each other—seemed trancelike and unreal. They were friends, soul mates—a bond not to be taken lightly. Why had he ever thought the right thing, the responsible thing, was to flee all that?

  “I’m a real pain in the ass, aren’t I?” Noah said cheerfully, taking the mug of hot chocolate and settling into a corner of the sofa, where he drew his bare feet up onto the cushions.

  “Depends,” Tracy told him, refusing to look at those feet, Noah’s long toes and shapely nails, looking instead at his own steaming mug. “So what’s the story here?” he asked.

  But Noah didn’t answer. He sat there testing the chocolate’s temperature with his lips, blowing across the surface to cool it down. There were moments like this in class when Tracy asked a question and faced total, uncomfortable silence from the room; at first those long empty seconds had unnerved him, till he’d learned to wait them out. Take your time, he told Noah silently. I’ll be here. I have nowhere else to go.

  As if at some private joke that had formed itself in the steaming chocolate, Noah smiled. He shook his head, dismissing who knew what ghost of a possibility. “You know, Trace,” he said bemusedly. “I’m sitting here trying to figure out what to say. And I can’t.” He looked up, still smiling, but Tracy thought he saw nothing but misery in that smile. “I just don’t know that I want to say anything right now.”

  Tracy tried to sound gentle, though he felt a burr of irritation. “You’ve got to try, Noah. I mean, what’s going on? There’s some story here that I need to know if I’m going to be your friend.” He hesitated for a millisecond over that last word, but decided the circumstances warranted it.

  “No,” Noah said. “It’s not that—it’s just…” He stopped again, perturbed, frustrated, running once more into some invisible, baffling obstacle. And Tracy thought, Noah, I haven’t got a clue. He thought: go ahead, tell me you’re sexually confused. Tell me you love me. He thought: I can’t stand this. Please go back home and leave me alone. He thought all those things as a single, complicated thought whose strands would not unravel from one another.

  “Why did you run away?” he asked Noah point-blank.

  “I’m always running away,” the boy answered evenly. “Remember?”

  “I understand that,” Tracy told him. “But this time you’re not even wearing a coat.”

  “I just decided to come up here, okay?” Noah said sullenly. “I didn’t know what I was going to do till I was already practically on the train. Trust me.”

  If this was what it felt like to be a parent, Tracy thought, it wasn’t a role he much relished. “I’m not trying to get on your case,” he said, riding the case as hard as he could. “I’m just trying to, I don’t know, figure out where we are here. Did you get in an argument at home?” With a sudden sense of panic the situation sank in: however noble or base his motives, he was a gay man who’d taken in a runaway kid, who happened to be one of his students, and now they were stuck here together for the night.

  “It wasn’t an argument,” Noah said. “It was just—home. My dad and stepmom. Sometimes they’re too much.”

  “Well, okay,” Tracy said. “If it makes you feel any better, I just had a huge fight with my family too.”

  “Tell me about it,” Noah said, though his tone indicated that he did not, in fact, want to be told about it.

  “It’s the way families are. You fight with them because you love them,” Tracy said, chilled to realize how completely indifferent he felt toward both his mother and his sister. “It’s part of the package.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s what everybody says,” Noah said. “Can I tell you? I hate my fucking father. I hate my fucking stepmother. And I hate my fucking mother.” He spit the words out bitterly. His flat certitude made Tracy wince as if under a physical blow. Tracy might be indifferent, but he did not hate his mother or his sister, which was perhaps worse.

  “What would you have done if I wasn’t home?” he asked.

  “I guess I took a chance. The bigger question is, what would I have done if you’d just said fuck off?”

  The admission—the perspective it put on things—flustered Tracy, nearly brought an unanticipated tear to his eye. “I’m honored,” was all he could think of to say. “I didn’t quite know what terms we were on.”

  “I didn’t either,” Noah said quietly. “Thank you for coming to get me, Trace. You saved my life.”

  “It wasn’t quite that dramatic,” Tracy told him warily—dangerous emotions lay in wait, after all—“but you’re welcome all the same.”

  As if in answer, from somewhere outside a series of very loud explosions jolted the room. For an alarmed instant he thought the police had burst in, guns blazing, but it was only someone—quite nearby—who had set off a round of midnight fireworks. Betsy roused herself for a few barks in reply, the way she did every day at noon when the fire whistle blew, and Tracy, his heart calming, lifted his mug. “So. Happy New Year,” he said. “I think I’m going to take that as my cue and go to bed. I’m totally zonked. Can I tell you? I drove straight through from Virginia in the middle of the night last night.”

  “Running away,” Noah said.

  Tracy thought fo
r a moment. “Actually,” he said, “what it felt like was coming home.” Or an illusion of home, precarious and unreal. But he would not dwell on that now. It was late; there had been enough for one night. Before him lay a future in which anything could happen, good or ill, magic or disaster. He knew there were limits to trusting one’s judgment about these things, and that midnight, the turn of the new year, was inauspicious at best. “So let’s talk sleeping arrangements here for a second,” he said briskly. “I’m going to put you on the sofa, which unfortunately is not a Castro Convertible, and is not long enough to be very comfortable, but it’s all I can do. Unless you want to sleep on the floor.”

  “How about the futon?” Noah asked impishly.

  “That’s where I’m sleeping, you nut,” Tracy told him firmly.

  “Okay, the sofa. Better than a snowdrift. Does Betsy get to sleep out here with me?”

  “If you wish,” Tracy told him.

  In all of New York, hadn’t there been a single place for Noah to go. With that unhappy thought tugging at him Tracy pulled sheets, blankets, a pillow from the closet and stacked them on the sofa. “Good night, Noah,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. You know where everything is.”

  “Yeah, good night, Trace,” Noah told him. “I do know where everything is.”

  Tracy shut the door to the bedroom and took off his clothes. He told himself he felt neither elated nor aroused, only dead tired. If he’d behaved abominably with his family, they’d also, in their way, behaved abominably toward him. But at least his behavior toward Noah had been beyond reproach: generous, charitable, understanding. You’re going to grow up to be a great human being one day, he silently addressed his young friend. And I’m going to make sure that happens. It’s the least I can do.

  But if his noble behavior so impressed him, then why did he feel so dejected?

  The memory of Noah’s slender fingers massaging frozen ankles came back to him, and then a fragmentary phantasm: Tracy was removing Clay’s cowboy boots, tugging them off gently to reveal the boy’s sexy, unwashed Tennessee feet. Had it really only been yesterday that he and the ghost of Holden Chance IV had cruised the high street of Colonial Williamsburg? The last thirty hours were so absurdly populated with the living and the dead that what he needed more than anything else, he told himself, was an interval of decent unconsciousness in which to sort everything out.