Beautiful Children

by Charles Bock

  That set it off. Media outlets would pay different partygoers for photos and video footage from the gigs, with the photos appearing beneath large-point headlines, the footage accompanying a special weeklong report, repeated at five, six, and eleven: Is your child attending illicit drug and sex bacchanals? Stay tuned for what every parent ought to know.

  As Kenny remembered it, the coverage effectively put the kibosh on the parties, giving local teens one less thing to do, until the promoters found a new location. Kenny would also remember Newell's parents driving him straight from the desert to a police station, the day extending, continuous, refusing to end. Newell's dad urged his wife to have a doughnut. Haggard, frail as a dry leaf, she refused even a cup of coffee. They were filling out paperwork when someone took Kenny aside and said they needed a statement. He was guided to a small dingy room and left there, underneath lights that were hot and bright. When the officer exited, he locked the door from the outside. Most of Kenny's afternoon was spent sweating, wondering if he was under arrest. Every once in a while an investigator checked in on him, said someone would be by soon. Nobody ever brought the water he asked for.

  Even after the girl backed up his version of events, a surveillance car followed Kenny, parking down the street from his dad's trailer, his mom's place, or his aunt's. The cops called him in for follow-up interviews, went over his story untold times, even asked him to take a lie detector. If the bald chick's testimony hadn't corroborated his major points, he'd still be locked up. Thank goodness for that girl. The officer in charge had been forced to admit that a couple of lie detector inconsistencies, story gaps, and some unexplained questions, all together they added up to zero tangible evidence against Kenny, certainly nothing that could hold up to a prosecutor's scrutiny. The kid's parents hadn't been happy, but what could they do? Pretty much they'd been forced to call off the dogs.

  A little bit more than five months afterward, Kenny's aunt said he had a visitor. Waiting at the front door: the woman who had first provided him with a real-life notion of feminine beauty.

  She wore prewashed jeans and a formless purple blouse, and seemed so very small, fiddling with the sunglasses in her hand, closing and then reopening the frames. No makeup. Complexion pale, her eyes too large in a gaunt, haunted face. When Kenny appeared, her eyes went larger. Her lips pursed and for long moments she stared at him.

  She stared at him, Ken recalled, and in her stare he felt the unfathomable depth of her loss—You are the one who did this, the one who took my child.

  She needed to know.

  “About that night,” she said. “About Newell.”

  She said this and it was as if something broke inside her, as if she had no more room for anger, no more strength for rage. On the front steps of that crappy little starter home, she shuddered and conceded defeat in her fight against tears, and Kenny did not know what to say. All he could do was take her hand, bring her inside.

  Every few months afterward she stopped by. Sometimes she took him to lunch. Other times she just drove by, slowing down her sedan, letting the car idle across the street.

  Kenny would come to understand that the visits coincided, more or less, with new sightings—if he remembered correctly, there was one in Tacoma, another in a small Arizona town. A call traced to a pay phone on the corner of Heart Attack and Vine. Other times the boy used one of those prepaid calling cards, or called collect and just held the phone to his ear, listening to those he'd left behind.

  Lorraine told him these things. She was the one who had urged him to apply to art school, the one who had helped him fill out the financial aid forms, even putting down the deposit that secured his seat in the fall class that first term.

  And he had never been able to tell her everything.

  Kenneth turning to his lover: How could he?

  Somewhere else, a New Age Ken sat in the lotus position and cried for all of our inner children.

  Projections are endless, as innumerable as towns that may be ventured to from any specific point on a map. And there would be other formative events, other people and places to shape his identity. But no matter what life held in store for Kenny, no matter which fate he'd end up occupying, which reality he'd inhabit when he remembered this event, no matter if his eventual reality was, in fact, none of the aforementioned, whether Kenny would choose to admit the facts of his childhood, whether he chose to embellish, or fabricate, or deny the circumstances of this Saturday night, this much was true: over and over, the man he would grow into would remember certain instances exactly the same way, in the same order.

  He was never good with names, but he would remember the name.

  And his face. Yes.

  Just a kid. Like fourteen or something.

  Kenny had started off by reaching for the fun cup. Then his hand had inched upward. Along the inside seam of the boy's thigh.

  As if trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, the child's body had curled away from the attention. He'd snapped out of his drowse, his eyes uncertain and sleepy. If he was surprised he did not seem to show it, not all that much. There was murmuring, his voice garbled.

  And now he sat up.

  “Dude. What're you doing?”

  “What?”

  “That.”

  Underneath folds of denim, the boy's dick becoming swollen; Ken remembered it jerking.

  He remembered the car silent except for the sounds of the engine's vibrations. A thin smoke drifting from underneath the FBImobile's hood.

  The boy staring at him, fear growing in his eyes. “So,” he asked. “You're a butt pirate?

  “If you're not a butt pirate,” Newell said, “why don't you get your hand off?”

  “Why don't you take it off?”

  In future years, when they told this story the adult Kennys would remember another spasm of life from the boy.

  They would recall increasing the pace. Pressing back on the boy. Saying: “If you're not a butt pirate, why don't you stop me?”

  The adult Kennys would fixate on their next question: “Do you want me to stop?”

  They would recount the silence of the next seconds and the palpable terror, the feeling that the heads of their Kenny penises were going to burst. And also, they would recall a sense of calm, this placid sensation that lay underneath all the obvious errata; this thing each had discovered about himself.

  For Kenny it amounted to a feeling of liberation.

  But the emergence of his sexuality, the initiation of his first sexual act with another real live person, by necessity, this would forever be linked with the boy's disappearance.

  And there was no language to explain how this would affect him. His adult selves could not even begin to try.

  And so the Kennys would leave this story now, they'd head back to their lives, their lovers, the rest of that distant evening becoming extraneous to their purposes.

  But Newell sat up. He turned in the bucket seat. More accurately, he moved away from Kenny's hand.

  The boy rolled down his side window, allowing summer inside the compartment, a flooding mess of heat and noise. On the sidewalk, not too far away, a disposable camera flashed.

  Purposefully avoiding Kenny's eyes, Newell chucked a nickel into the night, his sleepiness now replaced by certainty, his befuddlement by will.

  “Maybe you should take me home.”

  Chapter 5

  5.1

  The shirt was ragged, faded to the gray of an oncoming thunderstorm. Its trademark lightning bolts no longer jutted proudly from the first and last letters of the band's name, but had flaked and faded into a couple of scratchy lines, and the insignia itself was a ghost, just a trace of an imprint across the chest. The shirt's collar and sleeves had been cut off with a rusty pocketknife, and ventilation gashes ran down the sides in a style common to musicians who sweat a lot while they performed. A mess, all in all, bearing little resemblance to the bootleg T that Ponyboy had purchased when he was sixteen and raging with the testosterone of a chang
ing body; when, little brother in tow, he'd attended his first ever Metallica concert. Metallica may have gone soft and corporate, and that old shirt may have been messed up to the nines and back; even so, if Ponyboy felt like hauling it to a vintage store or posting it on some online auction, it would have brought him fifty bucks, easy. Vintage stores and online auctions weren't Ponyboy's style, though. He didn't make a habit of thinking about that long-ago concert, nor the demise of a once-great band, especially not about his dearly departed little bro-bro—all the tubes and wires that Ponyboy never even got to see connected to the poor kid. Fuck that. Ponyboy's style was hauling ass, blazing through smoldering afternoons, pedaling like hell over blacktop that had steam rising in waves from it. On a mountain bike whose lock he'd snapped outside the comic place where all the dorks hung out, Ponyboy's style was to arrive in different low-rent industrial neighborhoods, deliver small brown packages at different adult video stores. His style was to pick up a payment strongbox for every package he delivered. Although that wasn't style, when you got down to it. That was orders. Jabba's orders.

  The sun set late in the summer, so even at seven-thirty, it was like a hundred and eight out there and, usually, by the time Ponyboy made it onto Industrial, that old concert shirt would be soaked and sticking to him like a second skin; Ponyboy's biceps and triceps and pecs would be glistening, and he'd smell like the wet cunt of this skank he used to bang back in the Tenderloin. Ponyboy kept a plastic gallon jug strung through his backpack's shoulder strap, but he wasn't so great at stopping at gas stations, refilling the thing on the free water faucet, and usually, by the end of the afternoon, if any aqua was in that jug, it was all warm and nasty. By the time he'd enter the last store, Ponyboy'd need a break.

  Yo Kunjib, he'd say, pounding fists with the towelhead behind the front counter, how's it hanging? Heading down the aisle of transsexual videos, starting toward the stalls, Ponyboy would ask, Asaaf, my brother, why you always gotta be mopping that spooge? A laugh, another fist pound, then it was time to chill, flip through the channels, maybe help Asaaf with his American (“repeat after me: Live. Long. Prosper.”). Asaaf knew Ponyboy had shoplifted a few handcuffs (his girlfriend used the fur-lined ones in her act). Asaaf also had turned the other way when Ponyboy had lifted a pack of them vibrating brass ball things. (Cheri's exact words: “You like them so much, stick them up your ass.”) Seeing how Asaaf was constantly on spooge mopping detail, Ponyboy had to believe the little camel fucker was secretly happy he ripped off the place. He and Asaaf shot the shit about the various boob jobs belonging to women on the videos; they talked about the state of the National League East. When Ponyboy got bored, he tromped to the register, checked out the mad scientist lab behind the front counter, the shelves of televisions hooked up to mad crazy videotape machines, the images speeding through the screens at triple time: chicks sucking pole; dudes daisy-chaining some little spade; whatever tapes and DVDs were being duplicated right then. Kunjib—he worked up front—also kept a miniature television behind the counter, away from the duplicating equipment, and sometimes he and Ponyboy would watch part of a ball game. Ponyboy had hung out enough to know that the spooge mopper habitually used the New York Mets as the linchpin of five-team parlay bets. He'd also discovered that Kunjib was infatuated with hip-hop groups made up of preadolescent white boys. Every red-blooded American worth his dick wanted to blast himself an immigrant right about then, and Ponyboy had figured out that Asaaf and Kunjib were more than thankful to have someone acknowledge their existence as something besides the Enemy. Yeah, Ponyboy had gotten his master's from the school of hard knocks. He recognized that despite all the suits and weirdos who came in here, those two diaperheads were touched and moved and damn near overjoyed to have some dirty-ass white boy—some punk with spiky hair and all kinds of tatts and loads of steel—to have this be the sumbitch that treated them like real live human beings. Yes sir ree, Ponyboy knew all about looking in from the outside, he totally understood that Asaaf and Kunjib were omnivorous consumers of American culture. Fuckin’ ay he saw why those two lapped up his tales of homelessness and degradation, his tattoo origins and piercing anecdotes. They ate that shit up. Like high school virgins who didn't know they wanted their cherries popped.

  He couldn't hang for too long, though. The adult bookstore may have been taking it easy on its utility bills, but it still had its share of air-conditioning. Which was a relief to Ponyboy, age twenty, but also a hassle. A/C was partly why most bike messengers wore two T-shirts: your ratty and beloved concert T absorbed all the body's sweat and perspiration, while your second, more regular shirt acted as a sort of force field, keeping the gusting chill of ten thousand BTUs off your skin. Ponyboy, though, sometimes he didn't wear the second T because he liked his shoulders to get tan when he biked. Sometimes he didn't wear it because pimped out Jedi knights with the kung fu grip did not get colds. Sometimes he did not wear a second shirt because he did not have any clean second shirts and sometimes because he did not have any second shirts, and because did he mention second shirts were utterly and completely gay? Sometimes Ponyboy plain fucking forgot and other times his girlfriend started on him, Cheri and her shit about him being closed, being blocked, Cheri taking every opportunity she could to spew about the connections to Ponyboy's former life being as buried as his Metallica shirt, hidden underneath a protective layer, Cheri starting her crap and Ponyboy not wanting to hear. Shows what you know, he'd answer, I don't even wear a second shirt on top of the Metallica—so there. To which Cheri'd say, I was being figurative. To which, Ponyboy always answered with his middle figurative. But back at the start of the summer—June or so, right when the temperatures were really kicking in—at seven forty-five on this particular evening, the only things that mattered had been getting the payment strongbox, getting his docket signed, and getting back on the road. A motherfucker couldn't afford to hang around a place so much that its air-conditioning cooled his muscles. If his muscles cooled, then his body stopped sweating and then, when he got back onto his ride, he might pull something. So Ponyboy was standing around the adult bookstore, ready to hit the bricks, and he was getting antsy, wanting to get that goddamn strongbox, and meanwhile, wouldn't you know, some suit's at the front counter, waiting for his filth. Fucking Kunjib's running his turbaned ass from the register to the storage closet, all caught up in checking the number on the video box cover, then looking for the stack of black videos with the corresponding digits.

  So Ponyboy, he'd leaned in, reaching over the counter. Not to steal one of them promotional tote bags with the adult film starlets on the side. Just wanted to get his strongbox back was all, just wanted to hit the road. Ponyboy'd leaned in and yeah, he'd bumped shoulders with the guy in the suit. But accidentally, you know? Corporate dude, he didn't so much as look at Ponyboy. Not even an excuse me. Like he's too high and mighty to be in a dirty bookstore. What, like a motherfucker's got steel in his face, got some ink in his skin, he can't get any respect? Like if you own a fucking suit, you're too important to have manners? Or maybe the problem was that motherfucker'd had too many manners. Maybe the problem was, that prick had been too conciliatory. Maybe Ponyboy had been in need of a fix and was at an early stage of jonesing and still had some strength in his body. Maybe he just felt ornery. He felt like trouble. He'd taken the strongbox under his arm, told himself he'd have to plagiarize Kunjib's sorry name on the docket once more. He'd shouted Peace out Kunjiey and exited the side door. Ponyboy had secured the strongbox in the basket of his mountain bike and he'd stood in the store's shade, appreciating the last moments of the sunlight, embracing a few precious seconds of soft, hot wind on his face.

  The wind blew and slight dust specks stuck to his chin and the valley's toxins and exhaust fumes had created one of the most beautiful sunsets man had ever witnessed, and Ponyboy'd felt like he did whenever he got one of his tattoos—one of his heavy-duty multifaceted jobbers, where the work was so intricate and detailed that just the outlining took somewhere along three hou
rs, and filling in the colors had to be divvied up into individual sections, and each part of the tatt was like its own four-hour session. Yes indeedy, standing in the miraculous sunset of that June evening had been like a moment in the middle of the third hour of his fourth tatt session, a moment that always came when the Chink finished messing with his protective latex gloves, fiddled with the angle on the lamp for like the millionth time, and told Ponyboy to hold still, his L's sounding like R's—hord stirr, hord stirr; it was like the moment when the drill's electric whine was the equivalent to the feeling of a battery's copper ends against Ponyboy's tongue, and electricity lit up Ponyboy's skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravaganza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy's nostrils, and the Chink like pulled away the needle and swabbed at Ponyboy's flesh, and that little cotton poof soaked up Ponyboy's blood and, as with the man who swears he still feels the presence of his amputated arm, Ponyboy continued feeling the small sharp jolts, thousands of pinpricks through pressure-pointed parts of his body that Ponyboy did not even know were connected, and once again the Chink fiddled with the lamp angle and once again he told Ponyboy to hord stirr, and every second of successfully hording stirr made Pony-boy want to leap, shout, bark, dance, and the Chink reapplied the needle and the pinball machine lit back up, triple f’in bonus jackpot points this time, and Ponyboy couldn't think about how much time was left or how many more sessions he needed to fill the tattoo, he was physically unable to look at the nearby countertop—at the tackle box filled with paint tubes, at the anatomically correct blow-up doll covered from head to toe with lewdly drawn images, at the small shelf of reference and art books; no, the only thing Ponyboy could do in a situation such as this would be to chew his bubble gum, get lost in the chewing, his attention centering not on the objects and world around him, but on something else—this faraway point, in the distance, on the horizon.