Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  “He’s got a knack for it,” Connie said. uHe could be a really good sailor.”

  “I thought he would be. That’s part of why I dragged us all up here this summer. Time to get this boy out on the water.”

  “He’s just got to finish in the Sunfish,” Connie said. “He’s got to log his hours, three more days. Then he can graduate to a faster boat.”

  “This one never wants to wait,” his grandfather said. His grandfather swarmed with pride the way a tree swarms with bees. “Bigger and faster, that’s his motto.”

  Jamal stood proud and quiet, semi-visible. He looked down at the dock, waiting for this to end and the next thing to happen. His eyes were his own. His shadow touched Ben’s.

  The evening was cool and blue. Shards of cloud, sharp-edged and fragmentary, like pieces of something shattered, held the last orange light from the vanished sun and laid a shimmering slick of it on the tidal flats. Ben and Jamal walked barefoot among tangles of green-black kelp, rocks fat and fetid as sleeping walruses. In pools of trapped seawater, shadows of minnows darted under the rippled, orange-streaked surface.

  “There are porpoises out here,” Jamal said.

  “There aren’t.”

  “They come in after the fishing boats. They jump around in the bay at night.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  uYou are.”

  “This is too far north for porpoises.”

  Jamal paused, considering. “I saw one last night,” he said. “I saw it jump out there.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Will is coming,” Jamal said.

  “No he’s not. He was invited and he said no.”

  “He changed his mind. I heard my mother talking to him on the phone.”

  “Uncle Will gives me the creeps,” Ben said.

  “Why?”

  “He just does. Grandpa doesn’t like him, either.”

  “He’s Grandpa’s son.”

  “That doesn’t mean they have to like each other.”

  “I like Will.”

  “You like everybody.”

  “Not everybody,” Jamal said.

  Heat rose to Ben’s ears, a high buzz of blood.

  “You like me” he said.

  Jamal bent over and picked something out of the sand. “Look,” he said. He held up a little plastic head, hairless and eyeless, bleached white.

  “Hey,” Ben said. Jamal always found things: animal bones, money, single playing cards, a thin gold bracelet. He just seemed to see them, to pluck them out of empty landscapes.

  “A doll’s head,” Jamal said. The head was black-socketed, sedately smiling. Jamal held it up for Ben to see and then stooped and put it back, carefully, as if it needed to be returned precisely to where he’d found it. As if it was part of some huge, precarious purpose.

  “Aren’t you going to keep it?” Ben asked.

  “No. Why would I want to?”

  “It’s probably old, it might be worth money.”

  “I think it should stay here,” Jamal said. “I’d rather think of it in the bay.”

  Ben picked up the doll’s head, put it in his pocket. “If you don’t want it, I’ll keep it,” he said.

  “Sure. If you want it.”

  The light turned violet. The clouds gave up their orange stain and blanched to silver. A minute before, it had been the last of the day; now it had begun to be night. Lights shone on the dock and in the windows of houses and on the boats moored out in deep water.

  “We should go back,” Ben said.

  “In a minute.”

  He never obeyed. He did what he wanted to.

  Ben threw stones that vanished in the dimness, sent back the sound of soft invisible splashes. A commotion of gulls flapped and fought over something they’d found, a dead fish or a juicy piece of garbage. The gulls beat the air violently. One flew straight up, too white against the sky, holding a ribbon of something toul in its beak.

  “I think Will is coming tomorrow morning,” Jamal said.

  “Fuck Uncle Will,” Ben said.

  He would turn into himself. He would want a girl like Connie.

  He touched the litde head in his pocket.

  Back at the rented house the windows were steamed, the paneled walls orange in the lamplight. There were the smells of mildew and old cooking, of cold ashes in the fireplace. In the kitchen, Ben’s mother laughed and then Jamal’s mother laughed too.

  “I can’t do it. It’s up to you.” Ben’s mother had had a drink or two. Ben’s father was at home, living his life of work. He didn’t mind the pleasures of others but considered pleasure too small for his own use.

  “Okay. Here goes.” Jamal’s mother had AIDS but everybody treated her as if she was just herself, crazy and fragile, with a history of bad behavior.

  Ben’s grandfather and Magda sat watching the news in the living room, in the salt-dampened bamboo chairs upholstered in orange starfish and shells the mottled yellow-green of limes. Magda filled her chair, filled her dress, which crawled with thumbnail-sized yellow butterflies. The television showed a fire somewhere. Animals were dying. A horse ran, blazing, through a neighborhood of neat prosperous houses. Magda scowled, interested.

  “Hello, guys,” their grandfather said. “We were wondering where you were.”

  “Some fool with a match,” Magda said to the television. “Some idiot, and look. They should shoot him when they catch him.”

  Magda believed in shooting people who were careless. She believed in protecting animals, who could not make mistakes because they lived in a state of inspired ignorance. Ben still loved Magda but had come to fear her, too. She’d begun treating him with more than her usual suspicion.

  “Shooting’s too good,” his grandfather said. “They should set him on fire.”

  Magda nodded. She and Grandfather sat in a frowning ecstasy of judgment. On television a column of smoke rose, gray and yellow as a bruise, bearing the souls of dead animals.

  “Hey,” his mother called from the kitchen. “Is that the boys?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Ben called. His voice sounded fine. Probably.

  He went to the kitchen, stood in the doorway. “Hi, honey,” his mother said. She kissed him, while Aunt Zoe slid a lobster into the pot.

  “Murder,” Ben said.

  “I know,” Aunt Zoe answered. “But it’s the food chain, what can I say? Nature isn’t pretty.” She wore black jeans, a shirt with the purple face of Chairman Mao. Ben’s mother had on a white blouse, plaid shorts. The gin and tonic in her hand rang softly with ice.

  She smoothed his hair, put out a soft phosphorescence of perfume and gin, a low hum of interest in him. Ben imagined that she started every day counting, silently counted all day long, starting from one. She was calm because she knew the number of every minute.

  “Have a nice walk?” she asked.

  “It was okay. The tide’s all the way out, you can go way past the dock.”

  “I can smell it on you,” she said, sniffing his hair. “The salt.”

  She had all the beauty in the room. Outside of her it was just this old kitchen, scarred salmon-colored Formica and pine cabinets with big black whorls and knots, like someone had put cigars out on the wood. Outside of her it was just Aunt Zoe, sick and crazy, skin white and patchy as a plaster saint’s, tossing lobsters into boiling water.

  Jamal came and stood beside Ben.

  “Hello, Jamal,” Ben’s mother said.

  Jamal nodded, smiled shyly, as if they’d just met.

  “Jamal is a vegetarian,” Aunt Zoe said.

  “We know that, honey,” Ben’s mother said.

  “I was a vegetarian, too,” Aunt Zoe said. “For fifteen years. And then one day I walked into a McDonald’s and had a Quarter Pounder. Just like that.”

  “I know,” Jamal said. He stood in his coiled way, as if he were gathering himself up, getting ready to leap. He was himself, neither masculine nor feminine. He was Jamal, brave and unconcerned, quiet, with living
eyes and spirals of heavy black hair.

  ‘I’ll make the salad,” Ben’s mother said. She kissed Ben’s forehead. She went and broke a head of lettuce with her hands.

  “I went deeper and deeper into it,” Aunt Zoe said. “I got so I couldn’t stand the idea of ripping carrots out of the ground, or pulling tomatoes off a vine, or cutting wheat. It seemed like even vegetable life had some kind of consciousness. Like a tomato plant suffered. I got so that I’d only eat things that had fallen off on their own. Windfall fruit, nuts. My diet got tinier and tinier. I couldn’t slap mosquitoes or swat flies. Then one day I walked into that McDonald’s, almost without thinking, and ordered a Quarter Pounder. It made me sick. But the next day I went and had another one. And that was the beginning of my downfall.”

  “A Quarter Pounder has, like, seventy grams of fat in it,” Ben said.

  “Well, fat is part of life, I guess,” Aunt Zoe said. “Death and fat and, you know. All kinds of things.”

  “We eat a lot more grains these days,” Ben’s mother said. “I’ve tried to cut our fat intake by at least half.”

  Aunt Zoe looked at the boiling lobsters with an expression of appetite and regret.

  “Lately I’ve been on a couscous kick,” Ben’s mother said. “It’s easy, and you can do a lot of different things with it.”

  “I know,” Aunt Zoe said. “Proper nutrition is a good thing, I know that. I just had to—I don’t know. Release myself from the obsession, I guess.”

  “You don’t have to turn everything into an obsession, you know,” Ben’s mother said.

  Aunt Zoe laughed. “Balance,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing.”

  She looked at Jamal, humorously, helplessly. She was getting ready to let him be the one who worried and measured and said, Just this much and no more. Eleven years of motherhood had been enough for her. She wanted to be a child again.

  Jamal didn’t let anything happen on his face. He left the room, walked out the screen door onto the porch. Ben could see him through the window, stretching his long thin arms, looking up at the sky.

  His mother followed his eyes, saw Jamal, winked at Ben. Had she felt the movement of his thoughts when she smoothed his hair?

  “Ben, honey,” she said. “Maybe you could set the table.”

  “Sure, Mom.” He got plates and silverware, went into the dining room. The dining room had a long blue table, flying fish painted on its bare wood walls. From the living room, an announcer talked about a wall of fire marching to the ocean. As Ben set the table, he made sure the knives and forks and spoons were perfectly straight.

  Uncle Will arrived the next morning, with his boyfriend. Ben’s stomach heaved at the thought. He watched from an upstairs window. He chipped away scabs of paint with his fingernail.

  They came in the boyfriend’s car, an old MG Ben wouldn’t have minded taking out himself. But he wouldn’t get in their car, he wouldn’t want his ass on their upholstery. He watched as they got out, were met in the yard by his mother and Aunt Zoe. Hugs, kisses. Uncle Will was tall, rabbit-faced, too clever, wearing cutoffs and a white muscle shirt to show that he owned one of those cut-up unathletic bodies guys could hack out with free weights. An invented body, hefty without being fit. He looked like he’d trained for the decathlon and probably couldn’t run ten yards. His boyfriend was a professor type, with a boxy head and a distracted attitude, as if music he hadn’t chosen was playing inside his head. His skinny legs ended in a pair of high-top sneakers, which he wore without socks.

  Ben’s mother and Aunt Zoe loved Uncle Will with the hypnotized steadiness of feminine blood. They were sisters and they were women. They had no choice. Men were the ones who decided; women could only say yes or no to the love that lived inside them. Men were responsible for their devotions. Women were pulled through the world. Only the most powerful disappointment could make them stop loving, and once they’d stopped they couldn’t decide to love again. Inner valves would close. Their body chemistry would change. It wouldn’t be what they wanted.

  “—thought you weren’t coming,” he heard his mother say through the glass.

  “Hate to miss all the fun,” Uncle Will answered. He spoke in wit, a private language. Everything meant something else.

  Ben watched them walk up the porch stairs. Uncle Will carried two suitcases, and Ben’s mother and Aunt Zoe crowded around him. They let the boyfriend straggle behind, listening to his silent, unfamiliar music.

  Ben heard them come in the front door. He heard his grandfather trying to navigate between courtesy and outrage.

  “Hello, Billy,” his grandfather said. The voice came up the stairwell, patient and powerful as the house itself, this wooden fortress that had stood here looking at the bay for almost a hundred years.

  “Hello, Dad. You remember Harry.”

  Uncle Will’s voice was skittish, piping, delighted with itself. A flute of a voice. Ben got up, ran downstairs. He didn’t want to stay in the house anymore. He didn’t want to listen.

  He’d have to see them on his way out.

  They were in the living room, all of them except Jamal, who had a talent for being elsewhere. As Ben came down the stairs, Uncle Will looked up, arranged his face into a witty parody of surprise.

  “Ben?” he said.

  Ben said a soft hello, got himself down to floor level.

  “Good god, you’ve grown, like, three feet.”

  Ben shrugged. His size was his own, his right, not something he’d invented. Not something to be clever about.

  “These days you’ve got to check in at least once a week if you want to keep up,” Ben’s mother said.

  Don’t help him. Don’t give him anything.

  Uncle Will came over, put out his soft hand. Ben let him perform a parody of a manly shake.

  “How’ve you been?” Uncle Will asked. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” Ben said.

  “You look good.”

  Don’t touch it. Just leave me alone, don’t look at me.

  “Hey, Ben,” Uncle Will said, “this is Harry.” Ben didn’t know where to look. He looked down at his side, where sunlight stretched over the rag rug. Then he looked at his grandfather. His grandfather’s face was clouded as a mountain’s.

  The boyfriend shook his hand. The boyfriend’s hand was harder than he’d expected it to be, dryer. The boyfriend had a talcumed smell, not flowery, more like chalk.

  “Hello, Ben,” the boyfriend said.

  For his own sake and because his grandfather was watching, Ben didn’t look at the boyfriend’s face. He let his hand be shaken, took it back.

  “I’m going out,” he said to his mother.

  “Don’t you want to stick around for a little while?” his mother asked.

  “No,” he told her. And he left, knowing his grandfather would respect him for not being polite.

  Outside, the light hung languidly, heavy white in the August air. It was a dead-calm day, close as a held breath, no good for sailing, though Connie wouldn’t be coming around for a few more hours and things could pick up by then. Ben walked down to the bay along the short stretch of road that was graveled in pulverized clamshells, bone-white in the whitened air. The water of the bay glowed green. It foamed listlessly around the domed heads of the rocks.

  He found Jamal lying on the dock, face down on the boards. Jamal wore loose purple trunks. Ben stood for a moment, watching him. He didn’t think about beauty. He walked onto the dock.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “There’s a big fish under here,” Jamal said.

  “Where?”

  Ben lay beside Jamal, put his eye to the gap between the boards.

  “You have to wait for him to move,” Jamal said.

  Ben saw only still green water that reflected, unsteadily, the boards of the dock, like a rope ladder fluttered by the wind. He was aware of Jamal’s body beside his own, the innocent pressure of Jamal’s elbow against his elbow and of Jamal’s bare knee against hi
s thigh. He looked for the fish. He thought of nothing else.

  “He’s down there,” Jamal said. “He’s a really big one.”

  “I don’t see any fish,” Ben said.

  “There. There he goes.”

  Ben saw the sweep of a fin, spined and flat, broad as his hand. Then an eye. One staring yellow eye, big as a poker chip. Rising toward the surface. Ben sat up quickly. His heart pounded.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Jamal asked.

  “It’s huge,” he said.

  “Pretty big. I bet he’s two or three feet long.”

  “Bigger than that,” Ben said.

  “No.”

  “It’s huge. 11

  “Are you afraid of it?” Jamal asked.

  “No.”

  But his heart still pounded. He fought an urge to run back to land, scramble up the road to a high place.

  “It’s just a fish,” Jamal said. “It can’t hurt you. It’s just a fish.”

  1993/ Zoe lived in the sickness now. She could speak as herself, she could make the usual jokes. But she was going somewhere else. She felt herself changing away even as the dinners were cooked, as stars appeared in the windows and the television played its familiar music. She watched from a place she’d never been.

  Will ran up the porch stairs, shining. Harry sat with the newspaper in a metal chair shaped like a clamshell.

  “Right,” Harry said. “Run ten miles in August. On your vacation.”

  “I love it,” Will said. His chest heaved. He wore a do-rag on his head. He was cheerful and smelly and he carried with him a small, barely visible angel of hope. Zoe remembered his nipples from when he was a boy.

  “And Zoe and I have enjoyed watching you,” Harry said. He laid his hand on the back of Zoe’s chair. He propped his feet, sockless in dirty white high-tops, on the railing.

  “Hey, Zo,” Will said. He stood behind Zoe and Harry. He bent over to kiss the top of Harry’s head.

  “You’re dripping on my newspaper,” Harry told him.

  “I’m gonna drip on more than that. How’s it going, Zoe?”

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s so pretty out here.”