by Megan Kruse
His arm was still warm where Don had touched it. He was nice, Jackson thought, or at least he’d seemed nice. But what did it matter? He was probably imagining that the hand on his arm meant anything. Even if it did, even if Don wanted something from him, Don would want him like Chris and Eric had wanted him. He was doomed.
“Jack!” yelled Ed. He had the air hose wrapped around him, halfway up the ladder with the nail gun. “What the hell happened? You been taking a shit?” He grinned at Jackson and Jackson laughed. Ed was cool to him. Forget Don, he thought. He wasn’t going to think about him anymore, if he could help it. He flipped Ed off, picked up his gloves, and went back to work.
THE BELATED EASTER party was to be held that Saturday night at A-frame A, the most complete of the new houses. Just a few beers, and then the Longhorn, according to the much-circulated plan.
Who had an Easter party? Jackson didn’t care. He was going to see Don. He hadn’t seen him since Honey brought him to the East side on Tuesday; each day that Don’s truck didn’t appear, Jackson tried to pretend he wasn’t disappointed. Now he shaved in the pocket mirror, the one he’d stolen from Lydia, and put on a clean shirt. He did everything slowly, meticulously. He drank the rest of the bottle of wine. What a girl he was. He thought again about the lock of hair he’d given to Chris. In his imagined, more perfect life, he discarded sentimentalities. Into the trash with the birthday cards, faded photographs. A better Jackson would scorn them all.
It was a little past seven when he made the walk to A-frame A. Already the light was draining away; he hadn’t remembered a flashlight. The lake was lapping against the shore, a dark, bright line that curved like a knife blade in the dim evening light. The clouds had lifted, and the faintest web of stars was beginning to stretch over the water. There were crushed cans along the path.
When he got to A-frame A, there was already a crowd. Jackson was a little late, because he hadn’t wanted to be too early, but now it seemed like he shouldn’t have worried. He could hear Jay Donahue and Bill inside, shouting and laughing, already drunk. The floor was still not sanded, but the windowpanes were up, the electrical wiring coursing through like veins. Someone had set up a card table and filled it with bags of chips, open plastic cartons of donuts, and cupcakes. There was a group of men sitting around it, drinking from a small cityscape of open bottles. Don was nowhere in sight. He had the feeling of walking onto a stage.
“Jack!” Bill flagged him over. “You gotta hear about this. Tell him, Jay.”
The whole room smelled of men – a different smell from the high school cross-country locker room, which had appealed to Jackson in another way – wispy, ephemeral slips of running shorts, clean sweat, shampoo. The men in Silver smelled dirtier. Beer sweat, sawdust. No one had touched in the locker room – all of the runners were virginal, clean, and of themselves, communal only in their dedication to noble pursuits: a second shaved from the half mile, a lighter pair of running shoes. The Silver crew touched with beery, cheerful abandon, and Jackson was one of them. Their meaty hands palmed him. Was it possible they weren’t thinking of sex? All of the things that had marked him in Tulalip, in Portland, evaporated. It seemed like no one saw. Then there was Don, he thought. Don saw or he didn’t. Jackson looked around for him but he couldn’t see him. Josh, the crew leader on the north side, was holding up a pen, one of those naked lady pens, and laughing loudly. Jackson laughed loudly, too, slapped his own skinny leg – A broad! And her top falls off! Was it really this simple? Men and their simple wants. Josh turned the pen and the woman’s top slid down again.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jackson saw Don climb the steps to the open house, knocking his boots against the doorframe. Don was wearing a red sweater that pulled against his stomach, his round shoulders hunched forward. He was carrying a case of beer and smoking a cigarette.
Don didn’t look at him. He gave a wide, encompassing smile to the room, and Jackson concentrated on an open fifth of Early Times. He took a long drink, and then another. One of the guys slapped him on the back. “Good man!” he said, knocking his own bottle against Jackson’s.
“There was this one crew that I worked on,” Jay was saying, “and I worked with this guy, his name was Cliff, and he had this freakish strength. I mean you don’t mess with him, he’ll kill you, he’s got a full-blown psychopathic streak. And he’s working with this kid, seventeen years old, who’s trying to prove himself.” The other men, Bill and Don, and someone Jackson hadn’t met, nodded. “And the kid starts lipping off from a sixteen-foot scaffold, and Cliff grabs him by the throat, dangles him over the edge, says ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’ And the kid says something smart and Cliff grabs him and throws him off and he broke his fucking ankle.” Jay looked around, waiting. “You don’t lip off at Cliff.”
“So when the kid’s ankle heals he comes back to work. It’s hot again, a hundred degrees, and we’re doing a roof on the barn, and it’s hotter than hell up there. I mean, you can fry an egg. The kid finds a barn swallow nest and knocks it down. They’re baby swallows and he just smashes them, and then he puts their bloody, crappy bodies in Cliff’s water jug. He wants to show Cliff, you see. It’s really fucking hot, three in the afternoon, and Cliff picks up the water jug and it reeks, and he opens it up and its full of dead birds.” Jay opened his mouth wide and laughed.
Jackson glanced up quickly and Don was looking at him, smiling a little. He felt immediately grateful. It was the worst party he’d been to since he’d gone to one of the cross-country parties three years ago, where everyone had eaten pasta and talked about shin splints. In fact, this might be worse, Jackson thought, but at the same time he was enjoying it, watching the men, deciding who was good and who was bad, who was liked and who wasn’t. Then men stood around the card table, putting their dirty hands into the chip bowls. A small group had gathered at the window and was looking out at the lake, talking about the eventual town, the new Silver. The rest slumped around, leaning against the raw wood walls. He kept thinking about the kid with his broken ankle. And those poor smashed birds. He drank the terrible whiskey as quickly as he could and hung around another young guy named Greg, listening to him talk about a band he was starting. There was some question about whether or not Jackson could play bass, which he couldn’t. Finally, someone brought up the Longhorn.
The trip to the Longhorn was made in several pickups. Jackson found himself in the back of Bill McPhee’s Toyota with two of the contractors, both drunk. He was drunk, too. He lit a cigarette and realized too late that the windows were closed; he kept smoking it. His father had done that, smoked with all the windows rolled up so that the smell stayed in all of their hair for the rest of the day.
Jackson didn’t see what car Don had climbed into. Probably his own truck, weaving drunkenly down those dark wet roads. Jackson was glad; he didn’t even want to think about how to talk when he was this drunk; everything he said was sure to be wrong.
There were a half-dozen cars in the Longhorn parking lot. Some of them looked to have been there for a long time, judging from the leaves on the windshields, the ruts under the wheels. The Longhorn, Riley explained to him, was for the working lonely, the tired. It was a bar full of men and the women they dated, but the conversation was about the town and the project. It was a drinker’s bar, for people who held their liquor. On the other end of the strip was Mona’s, for the heartsick, for people temporarily in trouble. The music at Mona’s was slow and sorrowful, one sugar-sad ballad after another. Pete’s was a little shanty of a place, shoehorned into the middle of the main block, and that was where you went if it was all you had, your life in a bottle.
He looked around the Longhorn more freely this time, since he was no longer worried about getting in. It was a squat building with a chicken-wire roof and a strand of perennially blinking Christmas lights. The walls were papered with B-grade bikini models, and the ceiling was festooned with lingerie – lingerie that might have been donated by patrons but that Jackson suspected had been placed there
by the owner to make the Longhorn seem sexy and exciting, to make it feel wild, like you might just turn around from your game of darts to find the woman next to you unhooking her bra.
The owner was a stocky man who seemed to have been in Silver all of his life. The men who’d been in Silver back when the river was still creeping into basements told stories of the early days of the bar, when the owner had cared for most of the men of Silver like a mother, nursing their furies, phoning their wives. Before the rerouting, on hot nights, someone said, he would open the back door and the men would strip down to their underwear and swim, their beer glasses raised above their heads.
Jackson was conscious, the whole time, of Don next to him, of the occasional drunken, accidental touch of his thigh under the table. He wondered for a minute at how stupid it was, to like someone only because they paid you five minutes of attention. What did he know of Don, besides that black hair, that smile?
He sank into his beer, waiting out Don next to him, trying not to speak and not to be too quiet, listening, making little noises when he should, laughing. The conversation was tumbling around, over him: The concrete guys aren’t pulling their weight, they never do. They spend most of the morning in the bar, that is proven fact. That new bartender down at Mona’s, Lori, is that her name? Have you seen that ass? Seems like she wants to talk, but it seems that way to everybody who goes in there. Levi on the East side quit. Levi’s brother Mac on the West side got crabs, and not from Lori but someone else from Mona’s, watch yourself there, you never know.
Now out of the noise came Don’s hand, heavy and warm, on Jackson’s shoulder. “So you’ve never shot a gun,” Don said.
“I’ve never shot a gun,” Jackson said. That far-off day with his mother, the .38. “I’m showing you what this does,” she’d said, “and I never want you to touch one again. Promise me.” She’d sold it shortly after, and he suspected it was because she was afraid. Later, he’d grown to hate the idea of guns, had checked the house periodically. If his father had one – just one moment, he thought. Just one second that you couldn’t take back. Any time his father left he prowled the house like a thief.
“Well, fuck, let’s go,” Don said. “I’ve got a .30 –.30,” Don said. “And an empty whiskey bottle. We’re gonna shoot some whiskey skeet.”
He followed Don to his truck and climbed in. The seatbelt was like a long loose rope he was trying to tie around his waist. He was squinting one eye and he felt embarrassed, wished he could hold his liquor – where was Don taking him? Then they were in a field and Don was handing him a gun, steely and cold. He held the barrel up and squinted again and couldn’t see a thing. His hand on the trigger – suddenly Don was pressing into him – “Against your shoulder!” he yelled, his arms around Jackson from behind, pulling the butt of the gun into Jackson’s shoulder, his chest. “Put it – It’ll punch your shoulder right out –” and they were kissing. He let the gun fall down at his side.
They couldn’t go to Don’s trailer because it was directly in the thick of crew housing, and they couldn’t go to Jackson’s cab because it was just too sad and small. “Here,” Don had said, “follow me,” and led the way, the two of them crashing around the lake on foot, and then – from nowhere! – Don’s pickup; Jackson made a move to say he shouldn’t drive, but then laughed instead and climbed into the front seat. His neck felt loose on his shoulders. The truck lurched forward, narrow road between the trees, black against black sky. The headlights tossing against silver leaves; the branches whipped the windows; he reached his hand across the cab and rested it on Don’s jeans, on his hard cock.
Don stopped the truck down the road from A-frame B and they climbed out into the cold night air. Don pulled a sleeping bag from the back of the cab and they were stumbling, half-drunk, up the stairs of A-frame B. When they made it inside, Jackson sat on the raw wooden floor. The ground was so comfortingly solid beneath him.
Don half-fell against him; Jackson unrolled the sleeping bag and pulled him back against it and they were kissing. Don’s mouth was rough and hot and his tongue thick and powerful against Jackson’s own; he could feel himself shaking with nerves and want. Don groaned and reached for Jackson’s cock and Jackson tried to undo Don’s jeans. It was dark, and he wished he could see Don better, wished that he wasn’t fumbling with the button on Don’s jeans. Don reached down to help him. Jackson jerked himself, waiting for Don to get the jeans off, and finally there were Don’s warm, bare legs; Don reached out and touched him and gasped. “Oh fuck, Jackson,” he said, his voice thin.
Jackson didn’t have a condom – of course he didn’t, but now it seemed so stupid – and so he grabbed for Don and took him in his mouth.
Don was gasping, bucking his hips, his cock sliding in and out of Jackson’s mouth, hitting the back of his throat. Jackson was drunk and he wanted to cry, he was so happy. Here was this man he wanted so badly, and he was here, his bare skin, his clutching hands, and Don pulled out and shot across the bare wood floor and his cum was a silver shadow. Jackson’s balls ached; he wanted to hold Don and kiss him; he buried his face in his neck – in all of the spinning dark, there was this steady place. “Oh, god, Jackson,” Don said again, and reached for Jackson’s cock. He stroked it slowly, lazily, then faster, and Jackson lay back and let himself come, and he wanted to tell himself something about sex and his life and how this was different than beating Chris off, or fucking Eric, or anything, but he let it go, and his own cum was hot on his bare stomach. A wind picked up and there was the sound of waves on the lakeshore, tiny spills over the rocks. Jackson’s mouth was dry and he crawled up beside Don and pulled Don onto his own outstretched arm.
Even on the thin blanket, even with his arm beneath Don’s heavy head, he must have slept the whole night through – already it was early morning. Don stirred beside him. His chest felt full, still aloft on what had happened the night before.
Still drunk, he thought, and closed his eyes, following the delicate spin behind them. Don stirred, snored, his eyes fluttered open. He cleared his throat and coughed raggedly once, twice. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He cleared his throat again and sat up, focused his eyes on Jackson. “I mean, hey. Good morning.” He put one hand on Jackson’s back, awkwardly. “What time is it?”
Jackson looked at his watch. “Nine thirty,” he said.
“Shit. I’m late.”
For what? he wanted to ask. It was Sunday, two weeks after Easter, and they lived in a work camp. Still, he said, “Okay,” and Don was smiling, gathering his clothes, pulling his jeans on over his lean, muscled legs.
And even after Don had left, when the truck had pulled out and there was nothing to do but lie back on the bare pine, he felt happy. What was there to do? A memory of an Easter with Lydia – “What is it for,” she’d asked him, “Easter?” And he’d unwrapped a piece of chocolate for her and said, “God and rabbits.”
Finally, he stood and began the slow walk to the construction site. No one would be there, and it was a chance to get ahead. No one had said anything, but Jackson knew he was a slow worker. He had left a pile of scrap, plywood ends and cardboard and wood chips, and he needed to burn it down. Besides, he wanted to work and let himself think of Don, to tease out what was just sex and what might be something, the way Don had sighed, the feeling of his mouth pressed tight to Jackson’s own. God and rabbits. The sun was trying to burn its way through the clouds. And then he had left, Jackson thought. He had left him there in the morning on the bare wooden floor and hadn’t said a word. The happiness was bleeding away from him, and in its place was a feeling he couldn’t name, a feeling that meant being left alone in a still-warm bed by your boss, somewhere in the Idaho mountains, on the day after an Easter party, on a day that isn’t Easter. Jackson pulled a jerry can from the back of the storage locker, then tipped it out over the scrap pile until all the trash was doused. He left a sopping trail and lit it and he waited.
Amy
Women’s S
helter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010
THE NEW MEXICO SUN WAS A FLAT DISK, THE CLOUDS high above in the hard blue sky. The house was the same as all of the others in town – a brown stucco box, bleached to a bone color in places. Inside was a long hallway with six doors and part of a family behind each one. The mailbox was always empty, and it bothered her the way the mail car drove right by. Wasn’t it a giveaway? It seemed like an obvious thing to overlook when you were trying to make a building look like a home, like a place that held any whole family instead of six or seven approximations: what was left of families, after. The backyard was a scrabble of dirt and rock, where Lydia sat with a little boy against the tall wooden fence while Amy was inside talking to the caseworker.
“You can’t blame your son,” the woman kept saying to her. “You can’t blame him, and you can’t blame yourself, but you were right, you needed to go without him. You couldn’t take the chance that it would happen again.” The woman’s eyes were watering, in danger of spilling over. “This happens with teenagers,” she said gently. “They get angry at their mothers. They want their fathers’ love, and their fathers manipulate them just like they manipulated you. You had to make a decision for your safety and your other child’s safety.” She waited, but Amy didn’t say anything. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.