***
Tamar’s place on West Dickens was a cold garden apartment and some mornings I awoke to the sight of our neighbor’s pit bull slobbering outside our bedroom window. On the other hand, the landlord who lived above us owned an Ed Paschke painting that he let me see whenever I wanted, and there was a cozy bar on Charleston that served several kinds of Irish lager. Tamar bought a Bijon Frise named Suki, and I was charged with walking him in the afternoons and evenings when Tamar worked late. The dog took to me immediately, causing a small bit of resentment, the only tension in our relationship.
Once I left it was as if some seal had been broken. Ben’s father got him an internship as a sous-chef in a Milwaukee restaurant. He’d be chopping vegetables all day, cleaning mussels and shelling shrimp, mixing salad dressings. He couldn’t wait. Cindy took a job back in New York, and Cammie’s mother was taking her to Taos for homeopathic treatments. Only Claxton remained, burrowed into his basement, making his wooden coasters and chess pieces. Tamar and I had been invited back for Ben’s going away party. We’d meant to go, but as the evening wiled away, we realized neither of us wanted to. I played ball with Suki in the hallway, Tamar worked on her poetry. Somewhere in Winettka, Ben was having his presents opened for him.
Then, one day, as if within a single moment, the thought of looming death disappeared; the notion that my organs were rebelling against me retreated from my consciousness—I felt whole again. Though it was the first day of spring, it was still freezing outside. We had prematurely removed the tee shirts we’d clogged the drafty windows with, and I sat there breathing in the fresh cold air that wheezed in through the seams, Suki asleep at my feet. The next afternoon I got a call from my mother.
“Have you seen Claxton. Is he there?”
“No.”
“His mother called. They’re looking for him.”
“Who?”
“The police. He hasn’t been home in days.”
“He’ll come back. He’s an adult, right?”
“They’re not looking for him because he’s missing. They think he’s committing some sort of criminal activity.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody’s been burning down houses.”
The scenario came immediately clear in my mind. “The teardowns?”
“Yes. Nobody’s been hurt, it’s just been the unoccupied ones. The new ones. But it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets killed.” My mother told me Claxton had stopped in a fire station asking about a job. He had been using meth again, even suburban firemen could tell. They remembered him and tipped the police off. Not many residents wore ascots.
I drove Tamar’s car up the expressway, taking the Edens until Forest Road in Winnetka. When I had returned home from LA I felt like I was arriving at someplace new, even though it was the same town I’d always known. But now I experienced it as though I had never left, as if on looking in the rear-view mirror I would see my frail teenage self looking back. I parked at the forest preserves. Evening was falling on the suburbs; my heart was pounding. There were a couple of high school kids sitting around a picnic table who became furtive on noticing me, hiding whatever they were drinking, as if their silence could communicate anything but guilt. I looked at them until one girl burst out giggling. I continued on into the preserves, taking the path, then veering off into the woods. There it was, ahead. The tree house. As I climbed the ladder my eyes began to tear up, because I knew what I was going to find. I pushed opened the trap door.
One thing about Claxton—when we were burning those Christmas trees he never twisted around to look at the fires, like me. Instead he watched them through the rear-view mirror, as if on a little movie screen. I don’t know why he preferred it that way. I didn’t ask, though now I wish I had. I remember the final one we torched. It came to us like a gift. It was almost February; the family must have kept the tree in their home past the municipal collection deadline. We’d gotten so practiced that Claxton could open the car door, lean out and set the device while the car was still rolling. For a while it seemed like this one wasn’t going to ignite, but when it did, it shot up twirling like a tornado of fire that was going to rip through the neighborhood. I’d panicked and driven away, scanning the road for police cars, glancing out of the corner of my eye at Claxton, the halolike flicker off the back of his head dissolving into darkness, his gaze fixed on the mirror, flames diminishing in the distance, then disappearing from sight completely as I muscled the big steering wheel of the Cadillac and turned the corner.
“Forget about the police,” he said. “This is our neighborhood, not theirs.”
“It makes me afraid. I’m only doing this for you, you know.”
“Well, I guess your still my . . .”—I’d looked at him hard at this point—“flamer,” he’d offered tenderly, grinning.
I stayed awake in the tree house all night. By morning I was ready to drag my friend’s body down.
I'm Still Your Fag Page 6