by Ben Neihart
"Way."
Welk reached his hand across the space between them and flicked a wasp from Joe's shoulder; it buzzed its way to the front door, rested on a window. "How'd I just end up meeting you? How'd that happen?" He looked up at the sky; with his chin still pointing up, he glanced at Joe out of the corner of his eye.
The Jeep horn beeped again, twice.
"Yeah, I wanna meet up," Welk said. He brought his face back to its normal position; his mouth and eyes were serious. "Absolutely."
"Oz? Midnight?"
The horn went longer.
"I'll be there from eleven on," Welk said.
"Cool." Joe held out his hand; they shook.
"Tonight."
"Later." Joe watched Welk saunter toward the Jeep. Man with a mission, he said to himself.
The other orphans stood in their seats, saluting as the Jeep pulled out of the driveway. They stood with their feet apart, shoulders squared. Welk gunned the Jeep engine and settled back, letting one arm hang out the side.
When they were gone, the street was quiet. All of the trees and windowy house facades and curbside cars were just sitting there, heating up beneath the ragged, black, boiling sky. Joe watched it all.
Back inside, he walked slowly toward the rear of the store, where Kel and Donna were sharing a cigarette. He could smell it burning and see its red ember floating in the dark lounge.
"Hey," he called out.
"Hey."
"Who dat?"
"Us."
"Doh!" He lingered just on the threshold of the lounge, peering in at the women, who lay side by side on the beanbag. On the stereo, a guitar was making hollow, orange noises over a steady drumbeat.
"What's going on?" asked Donna. "How're those orphans?''
"One of them's the shit," Joe said. "Welk? And I think he's into me."
"Into you?"
Kel groaned. "Our boy's growing up. Joe, you're making me feel old."
"Wait, wait," Joe said. "Don't judge me. I have a question for you guys."
"Us? We tired."
"Don't be all wretched," Donna said. "Leave it to us nasty wenches to be all wretched." She dropped her chin onto Kel's shoulder.
"You guys," Joe asked, "do you think anybody really got abused?"
"I'm telling you, it's supposed to have been the little kids at the home. Not these guys."
Joe shuffled toward the beanbag. "I don't know what to think about them as a group. I guess I don't even give a fuck—about them as a group. If I'm going to be honest."
"So there are some sparks flying betwixt you and Welk?" Kel said.
"You know, he calls me a lot," Donna said. "How weird is that? Guys don't call me. When I get past the opening conversation, I get into some good shit with Welk. Like, sometimes I don't want to get off the phone. Which for me is unusual."
"You're not being honest. You're so different on the phone. Kind of sweet, kind of moral." Kel rubbed the back of her hand down Donna's neck.
"I like when you talk nice about me. It's so weird. I'm just getting a shiver. My defenses are falling."
"I'm nice to you a lot of the time. Most of the time."
Donna said, "I know. I guess I'm confusing you with my boyfriend, or my mother."
"Are you guys going to talk to me or not?" Joe asked. "Are you just going to ignore me? Be all adult and shit?"
"But back to you a minute, Joe." Kel sighed. "I get a good feeling from Welk. And I think that he is totally gay. I think that's what I've heard. I don't know very much about his history or anything."
"Neither do I," Donna said.
"That's amazing," Joe said, and pressed his palms to his heart. "I'm supposed to hang with him later." He dropped to his knees beside the girls. "Can I have a drag?" Kel handed him the cigarette, from which he inhaled deeply. Blowing smoke, he said, "I am head over heels. If I could just make something happen, some sort of love life, then I think I could concentrate on the rest of my life. I mean, I kind of wanna develop into a complete person."
Chunky drums joined the orange guitars on the music that billowed from the stereo.
"Well," said Donna, "that's good."
"We want that for you," Kel said. Then, in a sad voice, she added, "I wonder if there's any hope for me."
"Don't," Joe said, his voice going higher. "Don't make me be the one to offer advice. That's totally not fair."
"Um..."
"I'm serious."
"I can hear that in your voice."
"Well, then don't. I want you to show me the ropes. Fuck. What do I know?"
"You don't know very much, do you?" Donna asked.
"No, I don't. I'm not even trying to pretend like I do."
Donna rolled out of the beanbag's lap and pushed herself into a standing position. "If you want advice, you're gonna have to think of specific questions. I'm sorry, but I can't just, like, extemporaneously settle your heart. But ask me a question."
"Okay." He settled into the warm spot where Donna had been lying, and dropped his head into the fragrant crook of Kel's elbow.
"Hey, sweetie," Kel said. She kissed the back of his neck.
"Hey, Kel." His shoulder was pressed against her rib cage; as she breathed, her side rubbed against him.
"So ask me a question," Donna said; she'd disappeared in the dark next to the stereo. "I'm willing to put some heart into this one. Take your opportunity."
"Okay. Okay, here's a question."
"Shoot."
Joe spoke softly into the beanbag chair. "I'm not unreasonable. I know that I'm maybe going to have to meet and deal with all different people before I meet someone who's like the right person for me. I totally accept that."
"Good start," Kel said.
"So what I want to know is how thick of a skin I have to grow. Like, how hard is it to keep connecting and tearing away from people—in a romantic context, I mean, 'cause I really don't know, in that way?"
"What do you think?" Kel said, almost impatiently. "You have instincts. You've had some experience in this love thing. We've talked about certain people, certain kisses."
After a while, over the stereo's hissing synthesizers and echoing drumbeats, Joe said, "See, I'd guess you'd need to have maybe medium skin, maybe alligator, 'cause you wouldn't want to be too tough. Wouldn't it be a tumoff, if you were too tough?''
"My advice," Donna said from her dark corner, "is to go to one extreme or the other. Have no skin or have metal armor. But let me tell you something about metal armor. It gets a shitty rap. You can be thinking and feeling as genuinely as anyone else and still have metal armor. You can love somebody with four or five hearts. You totally can. And you can still have the metal armor, protecting you, preventing you from getting unduly messed with. You don't have to show every little piece of yourself. And I'm saying this as someone who does not have the armor herself. Who has like never had the armor. Who, for herself, does not want the armor. I know a lot of people say they can take it; they can take whatever heartache gets ladled on top of them. A lot of them are liars. But I'm not. I've been to hell and back, have I not?"
"You have," Kel said.
"Yeah, you totally have," Joe said.
"I've put my righteous love and devotion right out there in the open, and it's been stomped on, and I'm still here. For me, it's the noble route. For you ... ?"
Kel giggled. "Oh," she said, "I wish we were dykes, Donna. That's how much I'm in love with you."
Joe, his heart constricted with jealousy, closed his eyes and sighed.
7:50 p.m.
Over the course of the summer, Al Theim had put away his Sega and his chemistry set, his medieval role-playing games, his comics, major league pennants, and the tattered, dart-holed poster of past Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert, who'd chumped the team to join the Falcons. Al and his sister had scraped off the Chincoteague wallpaper and painted the walls white. Now the bedroom reflected his resolve to begin anew, to forge unintimidated through his final two years of school at Country Day, whe
re, previously, he'd always been part of the loosey-goosey Joe Keith crowd. The room was austere, just bed, dresser, desk, Macintosh, a wall of mirror tiles, a boom box that his brother, who'd just moved to Durham, North Carolina, for college, had passed down to him.
Al was in position on the hardwood floor, pumping out push-ups and singing along with a song he'd been turning on to all summer—a wiggly little guitar line, some candy-girl strings, fussy cymbals, and that low-down piss-ignorance coming out of Barry White's mouth. Joe Keith had introduced him to Mr. White's fables, and for that Al would be forever grateful; this music was about as close to lovemaking as Al had gotten all summer. Enough said.
Al had goals for himself, and the most important was an end to his virginity, but first he had to make himself presentable. So far, since beginning this regimen, he'd put on what—ten pounds? That was a shy, scrimpy number. His chest was no longer concave and his legs weren't still just sticks, but Al wanted veins, and peaks, and density, and distortion. He wasn't going to be satisfied until he was the most Mike Tysonish Al Theim that he could be, and distress to those who sweated the old Al.
"Hooh!" he groaned, attempting to one-arm the twenty-first push-up; he had a wobble on the extension, so he let the other arm help on the downward trip.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-three.
Twenty-four.
The innermost tissue of his chest burned, and his upper arms were heavy, but he had no soreness in his shoulder sockets or the machinery of his elbows. Goodbye to those timid half answers, good-bye to averted eyes, good-bye to shuffling demeanor.
Al toughed out five last reps and dropped his chest to the floor. It was time for abdominal crunches, the dullest part of any deadly dude's daily routine. As he flipped onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest for the first set of forty, the tape ended and the machine switched automatically to the radio. It was an all-talk station, and many sorts of ill human species were suddenly filling up Al's room with their voices.
Al, with a sort of disingenuously furtive glance, checked out his arm muscles as he crunched. Looking fine; looking thicker. It would be so dicky when he could actually wear a T-shirt and sort of expose his pipes. Girlies'd be so susceptible, as they weren't to the spindly twigs that Joe Keith carried on him.
A lady caller spoke sharply to the radio host: "It could have been me! Ten-thirty at night! It could have been anyone I know; we have all been in the Quarter ten-thirty at night—"
Then she was interrupted by a different lady's more professional voice: "This is Gladys Durr Smith with a WRYC news break. Deliberations continue in the civil trial of Myrtha Shaw Charity Trust executive Rae Schipke. The judge announced at noon today that he had received a note from the jury indicating that a verdict was possible by midnight; if the jury is unable to break its five-day impasse, the judge will declare a mistrial. Schipke, thirty-seven, a Dallas native, is alleged to have sexually abused two young boys she befriended from a French Quarter orphanage. More news at the top of the hour. Back to Talk Talk and Jim Woodside."
Al, his belly burning, was lost in the splendor of the news reader's voice. He wanted her to come pouring out of the speakers and kiss him.
Kiss me, he thought. Come kiss me. He hadn't had a kiss since his friendship with Joe Keith ended, but he figured he'd be better off waiting for a girl; making do, fucking around with a guy, and especially with a guy who he'd thought was his best friend, had resulted in all sorts of shitty fallout. He could have handled it all with a lot more finesse.
It had never occurred to Al, never ever, not for one moment of the last four years, that Joe would actually fall in love with him. What kind of signal wreck could have caused such a massive delusion? They had, for four years, like wrestled, and talked late at night on the phone or in person, out in the backyard; they'd gotten dressed in front of each other, and sort of pretending that one of them was the guy and the other was a girl, they had put their hands places that Al guessed they shouldn't have; and, in the same spirit, they'd whispered endearments, and kissed on the other's dry lips. But that was just fucking around; it wasn't as Joe had derailed himself into thinking, which was bad enough, and then on that stupid night earlier this summer, actually coming out and saying, with a katrillion watts of seriousness. It wasn't that at all.
When Al finished his last crunch, he picked up the Time that lay beside him on the floor and paged through it while at the same time he listened to a radio interview with a man named Marcus Damico who'd dropped out of high school to work as a professional fireworks lighter. Damico had a wussy voice, but it hadn't stopped him from acting just as he pleased, from moving city to city, to wherever he pleased, and taking charge of all the celebrations that required fireworks. Al guessed that somebody had to set the things off.
His stomach bleated pathetically. It was time for another one of his sickening high-protein, low-fat shakes.
Al could hear the blender; he could taste the wheaty chocolate. What he truly craved was a forbidden slice of sausage pizza, left over in the fridge downstairs. But there was no way to sneak down there for shakes or pizza; his sister and her sickly, milky-fingered, blue-toothed friend Angela Bell were playing Risk at the kitchen table. Angela had taken a liking to him and needed no excuse to pinch his belly or triceps and exclaim over his developing physique.
Time was not exactly the tough reading that Al had once considered it; the articles were shorter than anything he was assigned at school. You couldn't exactly linger over it, even if you were at the same time listening to Marcus Damico drone on about the mystery and danger of making fireworks. He laid it beside him with a low belch.
8:00 p.m.
Joe sat cross-legged on the cement streetcar stop at the intersection of St. Charles and Broadway, wondering what the night would bring. Sometimes you had to apprehend the whole coming stretch—ask yourself what you wanted from the hours; otherwise, like when you just hung out, minute tumbling upon minute, expecting the best, nothing much happened. Joe had had such nights. Leaky disappointments. Tonight he wanted commotion.
Cars slipped past him. The high leaves of spruce and walnut trees swayed in the fitful breeze. In the distance, the single headlight of the streetcar approached. He was lucky to be here, in this city, full of hope.
You could be all empty and shit, he thought; you could feel like nothing here in New Orleans. Blank, blank, blank. That could be your real personality, but your skin and your soul and whatever else made up you, all of the raw materials, would absorb the city. The city did the work for you; when you didn't feel like being anything, you didn't have to: you were just somebody who lives in New Orleans. Joe thought that's why his daddy had liked the city. Daddy had always wanted to be more than he was, to make a good biography: he'd moved Joe and Joe's mom from Pennsylvania to Florida to Alabama, changing jobs from hospital orderly to handyman to waiter, and then, when he finally settled here in New Orleans, his life fell in place: he managed a big restaurant, met TV stars and blues guitarists, politicians, the casino players. Not that they remembered him when he died. Daddy would have been pissed, Joe thought, at the low turnout to his funeral.
Whatever. Tonight there were stars down low to the sky, inky blue with spills of tomato red in the clouds, and there were the big lighted houses on the Avenue, and there were the front porches of the smaller houses on the side streets. If Joe could live anywhere in the city, it would be on such a stretch of homes. He was drawn to the dark first-floor windows and the compact pillars and the peeling shutters veiled by husky, knotted vines and splayed tree trunks; and to the dark wet lairs of lawn between the houses, and the hanging lanterns pitching their light into the wind so that it might drift into the night. Maybe tonight he would have been content to sit on a front porch with a magazine and a glass of iced tea. Stretched. Reclined. Listening to the muted noises around him.
Maybe nothing as exciting as meeting Welk would happen later tonight. He'd go eat dinner with White Donna, have some beers. There was maybe a
chance that he'd see Welk, but he couldn't count on it. Fuck if that orphans' trial would just hurry up and end soon. It kept fucking up his love life. For instance, he'd set up a date with the guy he'd met at his mom's gym—Seth, who was a juror in the trial, sequestered for the duration. The weeks had passed quickly since then. Joe had been engrossed in fantasies about the guy, but now there was Welk, who already seemed like something more. Welk was closer to his age, and more intense, funkier. There had been some electricity between them, Joe thought. He wasn't just fooling himself.
But still. Seth, man . . .
Joe had kept seeing the dude, for almost a year, at the New Orleans Athletic Center on Rampart, the moldering block at the Canal Street edge of the Quarter. Watching him. Trying to be nonchalant.
Then, like a month ago... It was after nine, so the place was empty. Mom was downstairs in the Nautilus room. Sweet Barry White song shimmering out of the speakers in the spanky, tropical-steamy, white-tile natatorium. That big-ass voice on top of strings and buckets of rhythm. And there's Joe wearing swim trunks he'd made by cutting off some coal-and-red-plaid Stussy slacks; taking long, long, keep-on-truckin' strides around the perimeter of the pool, a bit off balance, snapping his fingers in time to the Barry White backup chicks. Splish, splish, splash went Joe's feet in the warm overspill trough of the pool.
He threw his hands over his head and jumped to tap the bottom of a hanging plastic planter; jumped up again, shouting "gimme!" and grabbed a handful of leaves that toppled over the planter's brim. Three pieces of leaf came off in his fist.
"Whatcha up to?" shouted Seth over the music. He'd just busted out of the locker room, which was near Joe's end of the pool but on the opposite side of the water. He was wrapped in a small white towel, hair dripping from the shower, beads of water inching down the front of his chest. When he made eye contact with Joe, he stopped in midstep and grinned.
"Nada," Joe answered faintly, and kept walking. He'd talked to Seth just a few times, when they were side by side on the Lifecycles or the leg machines or soaping up in the big shower room—the last had been kind of embarrassing: steam rising from the tile floor, Seth so cute and friendly and freckly, his dick flopping in his hands as he lathered.