Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  Then I'm drumming my fists on his shoulders, shrieking, as he staggers through the cactus. At the edge of the lawn he stretches upright with a groan, releasing his grip around my thighs. I slide to the ground with an ache of regret, and Brian buckles to the grass. He's panting and laughing at once, splayed on all fours.

  And I have no headache whatsoever. My brother's hetero mania for making life a contest has saved me a probable blackout. Beyond the water the sunset glow is absolutely painless, silvery pink at the rim of the world. I know it's only a matter of time before Brian recovers his breath and his equilibrium. In the meantime I take up the slack. I don't know what to give back to him for the ride, except the picture of me standing here erect, so at least he won't have to remember me sick.

  After a minute he pitches over on his back with a groan of relief.

  He grins up at me. Nothing further needs to be said—except good-bye, of course, but that will come later. For now it's enough that we found the time to play together, a game of our own devising. My answering grin is as giddy as his. We are home free. Here on the last day, we have finally managed this boys' thing of putting together a team.

  The first time I woke up clean, without any dislocation. My eyes blinked open, and I knew right away that the rustle at the foot of the bed was Gray. I flicked a look at the clock—11:06. Gray was draping his pants over the ladderback chair, getting the creases right. That poignant WASP exactitude for keeping up appearances, pouring tea as the ship goes down—milk or lemon? My own clothes were flung in an angry heap, my enduring protest against the rules of parochial school, where a tidy desk promised a tidy life. I made no move to unbend from my fetal curl on the moonlight side of the bed, or otherwise let him know I was conscious. I wasn't sure why.

  He drew back the covers with excruciating care, lowering himself beside me without a sound. Well, perhaps a small contented sigh. I could feel him just a few inches away, mimicking the S curve of my body but making no move to touch me lest he jar me awake. The first thought always for me. This man I'd been waiting to meet forever, who banished all the mismatched ghosts of my previous tilts at love. So what was I so pissed about, that I should suddenly shrink and feign slumber like a mauled bride?

  Certainly not Gray's fault. If he'd known I wanted to be alone with my brother to say good-bye—if I'd known—he wouldn't have dreamed of intruding. In any case, it was only an hour ago that Brian checked in with Nigrelli from the Chevron and found out the agents would be by to fetch him at 7:00 A.M. We'd have to be up before the sun to fit in a glassy-eyed breakfast.

  I'd been in bed myself since shortly after the sunset caper, having a proper crash. Brian had been in twice, once with a mug of soup and then to announce the revised hour of his departure. The soup was there on the nightstand, cold. But even half-comatose, I'd promised myself to be present and accounted for at dawn. I would section the grapefruit and griddle the hotcakes, returning the favor at last for those years of breakfast on West Hill Road. A private exchange between me and my brother, meaningless to an outsider.

  But how was Gray to know? He came back tonight for one reason only, to make sure I was safe. Besides, all I would have to do in the morning was slip out of bed as stealthily as he slipped in. Once I'd got it choreographed in my head, I was seized with a rush of tender feeling. I rolled over into his arms, burrowing in. I could feel him grope to the surface, the fastest sleeper in the West.

  "You all right?" he murmured thickly. I nodded against his chest. He was already tipping back over, his head filling with white noise. Then he snorted and cleared his throat, swiping at the cobwebs. "Don't forget," he rumbled. "Twenty-four hours. No excitement."

  Yessir. Flat on my back with the drapes closed. No tap-dancing on the beach stairs. "Graham," I whispered, "you know what else? I love you."

  He was more under than not by then. His assent was hardly audible. "Good," I think he said. I most assuredly didn't require a declaration in return. It went without saying now. But what he did instead was reach a hand between my legs and cup my balls. I don't even suppose it was conscious, certainly not erotic. The perfect combination, in fact, of capture and protection. Not a job for the school nurse, men, indeed! I was fast asleep in half a minute.

  The second time I woke was quite, quite the opposite. I came roaring up out of a sea cave with my lungs on fire, pursued by something horrible. I thought I must've screamed as I broke the surface, jolting up onto my elbows, except Gray hardly stirred beside me. I was drenched, truly as if I'd been underwater. Though I couldn't recall the monster's shape, the fear had survived my breaking through the membrane of the dream. Instinctively I shrank from the sleeping figure beside me, not so much to keep him dry as to spare him the taint of my dread.

  It was all very out-of-body, even for a night sweat. I knew it was Gray next to me, knew he was my lover, and yet I was nagged by a vague anxiety that I wasn't in the right room. Silently I slid out from under the covers, leaving my wet bodyprint on the sheets and pillow. I swayed in the moonlight, catching my spectral image in the mirror above the dresser. At least I wasn't a vampire. But otherwise I scarcely recognized myself: How did I get so old?

  I took a step closer and peered at my haunted eyes. The night wind from the balcony sent a shiver up my spine, as the specter in the glass seemed to direct me by telepathy. Go to your room.

  I thumped into the bathroom, groping a towel from behind the door. Methodically I rubbed myself dry, in the process making sure

  I was all there, no fingers or toes lost to the beast. Grounding was what was required to reconnect the synapses, a sort of metaphysical version of name, rank, and serial number. PWA's who went to parochial school undoubtedly kept half-gallons of Gatorade in the medicine chest, to goose their electrolytes, but I was a lost cause in the preparedness department.

  I turbaned the towel around my head and sat on the can to pee. Like a girl, sneered the censoring voices of Chester. No! It was only that I didn't trust my aim in the dark and didn't want to wake the rest of the house.

  I looked up sharply at the door beyond the tub. A woozy grin slithered over my lips as my bladder emptied. Of course—the rest of the house. Thomas Francis Shaheen, said the voice in my head, 210 West Hill Road, It surfaced now like a mantra, drummed into us by the nuns, what to say if we ever got lost. The door opposite glimmered, the crooked line of my life having come full circle at last. Right through there was my room.

  I stood up from the toilet and pressed the flush. The clinging fear of the beast was gone as I padded across the tile toward the past. The mirage was total. Had I glanced in the mirror over the sink, I would surely have seen a ten-year-old. I turned the knob as carefully as the combination on a safe. Then felt a tilt of unutterable relief as the door swung wide.

  For a moment I saw what I wanted to see: the jumble of baseball gear, the crossed pennants on the far wall, Notre Dame and the Yankees. The moonlight was the ally of my memory, heightening the feel of the otherworldly. In the far corner, my father's dun-green sea trunk from the Navy, used by us as a toybox now. Under the window a hamster's cage, complete with runwheel, previously home to a green snake from the Essex marsh, and before that a pair of salamanders who willfully refused to mate. Unquestionably the same place, down to the Mickey Mantle nightlight grinning from the baseboard.

  I made a move toward the bed, and the dreamhouse began to falter. For obviously there should have been two beds, with a nightstand in between supporting a deadlocked chessboard, the game abandoned as soon as Brian realized he couldn't win. In its place Cora's oak four-poster stood its ground, mocking me. I grappled to reconfigure, blinking to change the channel back. But once you see better than you remember, the mirage is over. I wasn't home on West Hill Road at all. It was now and getting later by the second.

  And Brian wasn't there.

  I lunged for the bed, swirling my hands in the sheets to see if they were still warm. Barely. The agents had only just bundled him out. It was Brian's muffled cry that had roc
keted me awake in Foo's room. I pitched for the door to the upstairs hall, frantic now, ready to run up Highway 1 till I caught them. No one was going to take from me my chance to say good-bye.

  I grabbed the newel post and swung around the stairwell. Then I froze with a stab of relief at the sound of voices below. I was in time! Problem was, I was also stark naked. I squirmed a moment in confusion. From where I stood I couldn't tell which one of the agents was talking, or maybe it was Nigrelli. Biting the bullet, I yanked the towel from around my head and cinched it about my waist, locker-room style. The sight of me half-naked, scrawny and pocked with lesions, ought to rattle the agents nicely. Then they'd damn well wait in the car while Brian and I got off a final volley of brotherly feeling.

  I clutched the banister with both hands and began a labored descent, working it like a performance, focused only on my shameless bid for sympathy. The surly voice of the agent stopped midsentence as I came into view. I fixed my doleful eyes on Brian, sitting in tank top and sweat pants on the sofa, barefoot. I had an instant's curiosity as to why he wasn't dressed to leave, but I was busy smiling bravely, trying to project the vast nobility of my dying wish. The footlights of the moment had me blinded.

  "Well, well, well," declared the agent smugly. "If it ain't Tommy the Tattle."

  I didn't react at first, except to brace myself against the banister, for the fugue state apparently wasn't finished after all. I was back in Chester, just as before, when Cora's room was the lost world. For "Tommy the Tattle" meant one thing only: the schoolyard at Saint Augustine's. A cruel misnomer, since I'd never told on anyone, but who said life wasn't cruel? I cast a puzzled frown at Brian, to see if the past had claimed him too, but his own face was oddly blanched.

  I shifted my eyes to the agent standing on the hearth, his leering grin as wide as his bull neck. He made a beckoning gesture with his gun. "C'mon join us, kid," he said. "We was just talkin' old times."

  "He doesn't know anything," Brian hissed.

  But I hardly heard him, so loud was the ring in my ears. I floated the rest of the way down, spellbound by the beckoning gun in Jerry Curran's hand. Not afraid of him yet. Too stunned—too fascinated. For the tube and the Hartford Courant hadn't done him justice. He weighed two-fifty easy, the tire at his waist like an eighteen-wheeler, a pig Republican fatcat. The armpits of his white button-down shirt were bluish circles of sweat. Nothing remained of the brawny mick linebacker, except the sneer.

  "That don't surprise me a bit," retorted Jerry with a dry laugh. "Tommy Shaheen never knew shit. Played fourth base—right, Tom?"

  Question rhetorical, no reply necessary. He kept waving the gun to the left, nudging me from the foot of the stairs across to the sofa. I sidled that way till he motioned me to sit, in the opposite corner of the sofa from Brian. The gun was a sleek machine pistol, matte black.

  Jerry clicked his teeth. "Brian and I was having a little disagreement about how we managed to misplace seven million bucks." On the "mis" his lips simpered with contempt, as he darted a black glare at my brother.

  "I told you, Munson ate it," Brian growled in answer. Another name I hadn't heard in fifteen years. Scotty Munson: center in the fall, catcher in the spring. Sewer-mouth.

  "Oh yeah, them pension funds." Jerry wedged his tongue between his teeth, and the laughter came spitting around it like an adder's venom. "I sure hope you're wrong, Bri, 'cause Munson's real dead. And he died real slow."

  Brian snorted. "You were always a cheap hood, Jerry. Scum for brains."

  This much hadn't changed in twenty years: it was like I wasn't there. Unless there had been some reason to tease or torture me, I was so far beneath their notice that I cast no shadow. Though I'd lately conquered my invisibility with Brian, to Jerry I was the same fag cipher I'd always been. It made for a strange detachment in me, even with the pistol in his hand, as if I was too insignificant to shoot. Stripped like this, I realized my insignificance was a kind of shield.

  "This is my last stop, buddy boy," Jerry said, swagging his arms behind him along the rough-wood mantel. "Nobody knows where I am, and nobody's gonna. I'm history. And listen, it's not like I need the seven. I got a mint out there." He waved the pistol toward the ocean, as if he had a pirate ship moored in the bay, its gunwales to the water from the weight of gold. "I just don't want you to have it, Bri. 'Cause you tried to put me away. Your best buddy. Shit, I put your first rubber on you—with my own two hands."

  He boomed with laughter at his own joke, lolling against the mantel, his outstretched arms making him look like Miss Jesus on the cross. He was ripped on some kind of downers. The thought of which finally made my blood run cold, to realize how very loose was the cannon in his hand.

  "Fuck you, Jerry," snarled my brother. "So how come my name was on all your toilet paper? You set me up, jerk-o." He slammed a fist into the sofa arm, snapping Jerry to red-faced attention. The barrel of the pistol swung dead-on, trained on Brian's skull. My brother didn't so much as glance up, let alone stare it down. In his sullen disdain he seemed singularly unmoved by the presence of firepower. A twist of fear cramped my belly as I realized Brian would play this scene like a game of chicken.

  Jerry gave an impatient shrug, and the hand with the pistol fell to his side. For the moment the score was even, as far as the hurling of accusations. Jerry flashed a gelid smile, a used car in every garage. "Gee, I was hopin' to say g'bye to Susan and Daniel." He swiveled the smile to me. "Ya know, I'm his godfather."

  "How very comforting," I replied tightly.

  "All right, Tommy," Brian declared, "I want you to go upstairs and stay in your room. This is between Jerry and me." The last bit was clearly a warning, as if there were still some rules of battle here, a kind of Geneva Convention that covered the blood feuds of bandits.

  "Hold it, hold it," snapped the hulking grizzly in the white shirt, though I hadn't moved a muscle. "Tommy and me, we hardly had a chance to say hello."

  I returned his pigface stare, not about to go anywhere. If I was moved by Brian's impulse to put me out of the line of fire, I was even more ready to stand this ground beside him. "You got fat," I' offered without expression.

  Jerry chortled. "I sure did, fella," he retorted with sneering merriment. "I didn't stay in training like your brother here. Mr. All-American." The hate was palpable now, a labyrinth of old grudges. "After my wife took off wit' my kids, I kinda let things go. But I guess you wouldn't know about that, bein' a fag."

  "Oh, I know about letting things go." There was something wonderfully quickening, a sort of hormonal buzz, finding myself on the old field of hard feelings. Who needed electrolytes?

  "'Cept you got skinny," grinned my nemesis.

  "Leave him alone," said Brian through his teeth.

  "Hey, who's dumpin' on him? I think he looks real pretty, all skin and bones like this. Huh, Tommy?" I froze as the gun swung toward my face. I could feel my brother clench the pillows. Jerry stroked the point of the barrel under my chin. "Isn't this how they like 'em? The muscle boys fuck the girlie ones. Right, Tommy?"

  "Jerry, don't—" Brian's voice was ashen, pleading in spite of himself.

  "Whoa." Jerry pulled back surprised, the gun veering away. "You suddenly gettin' all soft on your baby brother? Fuck. 'Scuse me while I blow my nose."

  "Let him go," whispered my brother, his windpipe choked with rage.

  "I got a better idea," retorted Jerry, practically purring now. The pistol lifted again, and he held it against the center of my forehead. "I think you were just about to tell me where that money is. Am I right?"

  Talk about chicken. I must've been on an adrenaline high. Plus, a gun at your head turns out to be a fabulous tool for gauging how little you've got to lose. "I'm dying anyway, it doesn't matter," I observed with impeccable sang-froid. "Just tell the Hemlock guys I caught an earlier flight."

  I felt the pressure of the barrel lift as his eyes darted from Brian to me. He gave me a second's blank stare, then shifted to the pale violet bull's-eye on my
cheek. The gun still pointed, ready to blow my brains out, but now his nervous eyes were everywhere. The lesion on my shoulder, the one by my left nipple, the double one on my thigh. I watched it dawn on Jerry the same as it dawned on Susan a week ago, a kind of claustrophobic terror. He swayed a step backward.

  "Don't worry, I won't sneeze on you," I declared, but not even trying to conceal the exhilaration of having shocked him. "Though if you're planning to use that"—I nodded toward the gun, a foot away now and trembling slightly—"I can't swear I won't bleed. I don't suppose you brought a rubber suit."

  His eyes still raked me, inch by horrible inch. I could've told him there were eight altogether, plus two lumps between my toes, as yet not showing any color. Blooming, Robison called it. But I wasn't feeling especially leprous, despite the appalled intensity of Jerry's gaze. No, the opposite: I was charged with a drunken thrill of power, because I had just upturned the chessboard.

  Jerry's sluglike torso rippled with an involuntary shiver. He grunted and shook his head. "Tough break, Tommy," he mumbled, eyes on the floor, almost sheepish.

  There followed a queer embarrassed silence, awkward as a baby's wake. Or any occasion where men took off their hats in the presence of great sorrow, a last vestigial link of Irish brotherhood. I strained to hold my stoop-shouldered pose of noble pathos, all the while willing my brother to make his move. Now, while the bully labored to process his revulsion, uncertain whether to breathe in my vicinity. Now, before he fell back into the wiseguy mode.Now.

  But nothing happened. No brilliant black-belt leap off the sofa—no flash of diversion—no improvised weapon. Helplessly I watched as Jerry recovered his balance, the curl of the sneer returning. "Hey," he remarked with an arched brow and a one-note snicker, "I hope you had yourself some fun gettin' there."

  With a bloodless shift of gears his cold glare fixed once more on Brian. I knew the moment of turning the tables had utterly dissipated. Stung with defeat I shot a bewildered glance at my brother, sullenly staring at the arm of the sofa, indignant and strangely aloof. Suddenly he wasn't my father at all but my mother, a shell rather than a time bomb, spent from so much bad luck and the wrongness of the world. Don't hit his head. I have no sons. The surrender of the will to escape. Here I was, the only one with enough rage to get us out of this, no fear for myself at all, and I'd lost my shot.