Flannelwood

by Raymond Luczak

  She was too busy coughing up pellets of blood.

  I tried to fill the air with idle conversation about my job.

  She was too busy trying not to crave another smoke.

  I waved the air and tried to tell her that I loved her very much and that I would miss her when she was gone.

  She stopped and stared at me. “Don’t tell me that crap. I don’t wanna hear that.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want to see me again?”

  “You always say the same old things. You’re so full of yourself, that’s what you are.”

  “So are you.”

  She looked mortified at me.

  “You don’t love me. That’s what this has come down to. Your fucking cigarettes. You don’t love me. Go ahead and die.”

  I stormed out of the room.

  Sally gave me a major chewing-out over that, but I didn’t care. She didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that I was spending what little money I had left on the bus fares for up north.

  It was the last time I saw Mom.

  Mom, I saw you standing and wavering in the great forest of white birches, except that when I came closer, the trees weren’t what they were. They were the white poles of huge cigarettes staked into the cemetery grounds. They splintered the stone and marble tombstones into flaky crumbles, and out of the smooth trunks came the spidery skeleton branches flapping in the wind, trying not to lose the tantalizing leaves of tobacco already turning red, orange, yellow, brown, the very colors of fire. Yet each time I tried to enter the forest, I found myself hitting an invisible wall. You were inside a box of no oxygen. It was the only way you could survive without nicotine. I longed to shatter that wall and have you smoke my lungs inside out so you could breathe again, and easily too.

  When my phone rang in the middle of the night two months later, I was pissed. It had taken me such a long while to fall asleep this easily, and then this damn phone call. It was Dad. I was quite surprised. He never called me for anything; it had been years since I’d heard his voice.

  “Oh, hi. What’s up?”

  “Mom died.”

  “What?”

  “She died. Thought you should know.”

  “Oh, wow. Um, um . . . wow. Um, when’s the funeral?”

  “Three days from now.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  Fuck.

  I couldn’t sleep the rest of that night. I felt sad that I hadn’t felt her presence when she died. It was so different from when Craig died.

  When Dad picked me up at the bus station, I couldn’t read his wizened face. It had been so long since I’d seen him last. He didn’t say much.

  I didn’t either. I was afraid of scaring him away, much like years later when I would be afraid of doing the same thing to you. When he dropped me off at Sally’s, I knew that he’d still thought of me as unclean, that dicksucking orphan. He was too set in his ways. How can anyone convince someone so stubborn as him, or as you? Would I need to strike a match under the candle of you so that you’d jump from the intense heat of my scrutiny and melt like wax into my arms?

  You are the flame, and I am only beeswax.

  My brothers and I are men, but we are masters of awkwardness when we meet rather by accident. We’d never admit this to each other’s faces, but if we had a say in choosing our brothers, we would never have picked each other. They are men of the land. They are well-versed in the encyclopedia of soil, water, and sun. They know how to fix gardening equipment and tractors and trucks. They inhale the poetry of the weather even when its count-the-syllables-on-the-fingers verse turns bad. With each day in the fields, they write books that will never be edited and published and read. Each moment is a sheet crumpled up and tossed in the wastebasket of nature, never to be seen again and lost to the worms of forgetfulness. They sit with their laconic observations that sound as if translated from a foreign language I thought I’d understood while growing up only to find that I’ve forgotten how to speak it. The land still runs deep in my bones, but the words are the true chlorophyll of my soul. With the sun of truth illuminating each row of seeds I sow, I find the crops of words easy to harvest. Survive easily on such ample feasts I do.

  These men are masters of their own little domains, and I have yet to master my own. They know this, and they keep their distance from me. They know I haven’t come anywhere near the amount of hard labor they’ve put into their own lands, for where are the crops I’ve yet to harvest from my years of so-called laziness with seeding so many words in the soil of my brain? Writers aren’t meant to be gardeners, and yet they are asked to justify themselves over and over again with more than words. Words aren’t tangible, but food on the table is. But these men forget that if it weren’t for writers, they would not have movies to entertain them in the evenings after a long day of toil and soil. To tell a story well takes talent, and because they are men of the land, they find such storytellers easy to dismiss. After all, writers are supposed to be the ones with megabucks, therefore derided. Books are even worse crimes, filled with language of nothing to do with the earth and yet so much to do with the lives of others. I want to tell them otherwise, but how could I if I didn’t have a man like you in my life? They’d see that not all gay people are like me, or like drag queens on television, or muscular men in full leather regalia on motorcycles in pride marches televised so heterosexuals could gawk at us as if we were zoo animals put on display for their pleasure. My brothers would’ve sat quietly in your presence, right there on the veranda looking out on the lonely road in the distance, for they’d realize how wrong they had been about me. I think Dad would’ve liked you very much. He would’ve been shocked to learn that you were gay. But then again if you were very masculine, he’d have felt threatened. Only straight men were allowed to be masculine, because if they weren’t, how would anyone know who was queer? That wouldn’t faze you at all. You would light up a cigar, and you’d be one of them in ways I could never be. I don’t have a face that could hide so much feeling like yours does. I’m not a stoic man. I’m not one of those gruff guys who’ve seen it all and speak in laconic sentences while they drink beer and watch the news on the TV in a rundown tavern. I’m not macho enough.

  In Miranden’s Funeral Home, Mom lay perfectly composed with her arms crossed on her bosom. She looked a bit thinner than before, but I couldn’t look at her embalmed face for long. Too freaky. It didn’t look like her at all. It was as if the embalmers had found a mannequin, propped it inside the casket, made it up to look like a photograph of her, and called it a day.

  I knelt before her. I didn’t know what to say, what to think, what to pray. It had been a long time since I was inside a church. I’d stopped believing in the lies the Catholic Church had tried to feed me while growing up. I closed my eyes and mentally counted to fifty before I decided I was done with praying.

  I went through the motions afterwards. I saw faces from my past file past me, and they seemed impressed that I was living in the city. They didn’t know that city living wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. I didn’t own a house, and I didn’t have a car. Everyone up north owned their houses and trucks, and they didn’t always have jobs.

  As I nodded the whole time, I kept thinking of how I’d knelt before Mom’s body; what do you say to a dead mother if you were already a ghost among her children?

  The house where I grew up is a stranger.

  There’d been a time when I knew its name and its moods very well: the four-bedroom house called home. Mom and Dad slept in one; two bedrooms were given to us boys, and the fourth one went to Sally. It sat centrally between the garage, barn, pasture, and the farmed fields a bit beyond. On the other side of the road was prairie land that had been left fallow for a number of years. Mrs. Marshall, the woman who owned the property across the road, didn’t want anyone to touch it after her farmer husband died. I loved the wide open feel of that prairie land. Just grasses growing tall and reedy. I loved slipping away with a library book and a blanket acros
s the road and furrowing among the grasses. Some of them were so crooked like roofs that they shielded me from the sun as I read. The word and the land were one and the same.

  Nights when the moon came out to check the land below were pale and quiet. I liked looking through my bedroom window at the way the moon caressed the few clouds before falling asleep. I liked knowing that the prairie field would always be there. When Sammy moved out of our bedroom, I felt freer to stay up and watch. I used a flashlight to read my books. Sometimes the moon was so strong I didn’t need it.

  When I saw my father’s house after years away, it was a shock to see the prairie land across the road filled with a sea of corn. It wasn’t just my mother who’d died; Mrs. Marshall did too. Her kids sold the land for a very good price as the land had been made extremely fertile after having lain fallow for so many years.

  Then the house of memory itself: it was no longer a pale blue. It had been repainted white. The garage, too. The barn was still a rusted red, but it wasn’t old or anything; it was still in good shape. I didn’t see any cows grazing in the pastures. Maybe it was too hot out. I saw some men working the fields, but they seemed to be of darker skin. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard about more and more Mexicans migrating up north where there was hard farm work to be found, and I suspected that many of them were illegals. It seemed that hard physical labor was no longer solely the domain and envy of white young men.

  I stepped into the house. The kitchen counters and table, and dining room table too, were overflowing with casseroles and . . . so much food. Dad said, “That’s for after the funeral.” Wow. I wouldn’t taste Mom’s cooking ever again. I held back my tears and walked throughout the house. So much had changed, and yet not much had. I was the one who had changed. I couldn’t possibly see the house where I grew up the same way again.

  When someone doesn’t change but you do, who do you think is the ghost here?

  The house where I learned to love you has become a stranger too.

  On the day I left after Mom’s funeral, I felt more hollow than ever. I was an empty shell moving through time and space for no reason at all. There were things I had to do, which I didn’t want to do, but society in its illogic had dictated that I must. I’d observed the day before how my brothers held back their tears at the service and the burial in the cemetery on the edge of town, but Sally couldn’t stop sobbing. It was as if she’d been burdened with the task of crying for all of us Badamore men. I felt badly for her, and the detachment I’d experienced from it all worried me. Did it mean that I was a bad son, a traitor who’d turned against his own blood? Did it mean that my lack of emotion over the last few days was my way of punishing Mom for choosing cigarettes over me? Did it mean that I’d lost the ability to feel anything? Had I died too?

  On the bus I sensed Craig’s presence in the empty seat next to me. I looked out the window, watching the farms and fields roll on by. I wanted him to hold my hand, but the air conditioning was warmer than the chill of him breathing the kisses I’d so craved, and I’d longed for them to be disease-free. Of course, I knew that being positive wasn’t the death sentence it used to be, but still. What Craig had gone through was forever tattooed on my heart.

  In the first winter after Mom died, I took a bus to the farthest stop north in the burbs and walked a few miles beyond the outlet mall into the woods. I didn’t know if I was trespassing on private property, but I didn’t care. I needed to go deep into the gnarly and rickety thicket of saplings and trees. Maybe I’d find her barely alive, her face blue from negligence and her hands frostbitten from a lack of affection. Out of her breath would be her last puff of cigarette smoke. When I found her, I’d bend down and perform CPR on her. I’d jackhammer my oxygen right into her mouth, and she’d cough back to life. She’d look up into my eyes with such wonder. She wouldn’t be Mom, but the child she used to be before farm life ruined her enough to accept the ministrations of my father. Her hair was long and flowing like the river she used to play in when she was young. Her eyes were full of the sun I’d rarely glimpsed in her while I was growing up. Her laughs were simple as a cowbell echoing across the pasture. She didn’t know who I was at first. Then she recognized me. “Why did you save me when I was supposed to be dead?”

  “You never saved me when I was alive,” I said.

  “That’s because you never needed any saving. Of all my kids you were the strongest. You got out while you could. Go. Go be free.”

  I shook my head no. I unzipped my jacket and wrapped its front flaps around her. She had shrunk small enough that I could barely cradle her inside my arms. She rested her chilled face against mine, and together we trudged through the woods. I didn’t know where we were going, or where we should be going. I wanted to take her to a warm cabin, but there was none to be found.

  As the early evening overtook my steps, I realized that in my arms was nothing but a dead body. It didn’t belong to my mother.

  It belonged to me.

  I dropped it out of repulsion.

  As my other body crashed into the snow, I felt the jolt of ice hit the same spots that the body of me had touched in the snow. I screamed. The body didn’t move; just lay askew like a Raggedy Andy doll. I touched my own face to confirm that I was still alive.

  Yes, I was.

  I turned away, and the longer I moved toward the brightly-lit parking lot outside the outlet mall, the sharper I felt his breath seep into the blood circulating through my body. I’d been emotionally dead for a long time, especially after Craig and now this, but this was ridiculous. I was still alive. I was moving toward my bus stop, and cars did stop to let me through. This meant I wasn’t a figment of imagination. I existed.

  By the time my bus arrived, I sat by the fogged window. People boarded with their overflowing bags of designer bargains.

  As the bus pulled away, I saw in the distance a flicker of shadow. I knew what it was. My dead half was barely alive. Losing Craig had caused him to die, and losing Mom condemned him to the cemetery of my dreams. He needed more than ever my oxygen, my blood. He needed to draw the cigar of my entire soul into himself so he could live. For that to happen, I’d have to die.

  Sometimes I felt so drained from the experience that I’d jolt awake to find Mom sitting in an old coat and a wire cart with wobbly wheels filled with all her belongings stashed into a garbage bag. The stench of her smoking addiction would pervade the entire bus, and all of us would be resisting the urge to touch our twitching noses. She turned and stared defiantly at each one of us until we each had to look away and pray that she’d get off the bus soon.

  Ghosts are everywhere if we forget how to look for them, and there they rise, from the crypts of our dead memories. When we try to remember their faces more clearly, they crumble into ashes in our hands.

  Mom, when you died, your lungs exploded like a balloon pricked with a pin. Its many leaves turned into sheets of paper falling out of spines thickly veined like men’s hands being forced to release against their will. The wings flitted high above us until they, full of coos and woos, turned into white doves beating their wings. They filled the sky so much I couldn’t see the blue behind their fluttering bodies. When I called out your name, Ida Jean Badamore, the birds whooshed right into a single textbook weighing heavily in my hands. I looked at its cover, which was all white save for the title, Woman, in lipstick red. All around me was endless prairie in autumn, in that cusp between harvest and fallow. No road, no tractor, no barn in sight. Not even a lone tree. I opened the book and saw its inner folds of flesh opening wide to fire a thousand and one sperms of fury at me. I felt scalded, and I shivered when the wind turned icy. I felt robbed of speech. I wanted to explain, Mom, that I wasn’t the enemy. You were the reason why I’d chosen to minor in Gender Studies, as I felt unable to understand you as a woman. I wanted to understand why you’d long felt inferior, powerless enough not to act on your dreams. I wanted to comprehend just how society had indoctrinated you against the pox of equality. I looked at the b
ook and found its pages blank.

  Did you want me to write in it?

  Stop saying that I can. I’m not a writer.

  No, Mom, I can’t. I’m a man.

  You can’t expect me to write the authoritative text about the female experience because I’m a man; after all, heterosexual male privilege has destroyed you. You need to change that way of thinking.

  Go haunt not me or another male writer with your stories of woe and wing; go whoosh your wings among the women who know what it feels like to be treated as a second-class citizen yet blessed enough with the compassion for those less than them without romanticizing them with the gift of first-class writing. Let them channel you and impregnate your memory with the music that will outlast your collaborators. The prairie is pure woman, and men have been trying to force it into submission.

  You have wings. You are a goddess among the clouds.

  Situated on the edge of Laronde, the Eagle used to be a saloon for the down-and-out back in the forties, but it was oddly overlooked during downtown’s aggressive urban renewal in the sixties. It stayed shuttered for decades until the mid-eighties when a gay couple bought the building and turned it into what it is today.

  During my college years I heard a lot about the Eagle. It was filled with skanky old men in leather outfits, and they were all ugly with saggy tits. It was so filled with cigarette smoke you couldn’t breathe. It was a dump with a dingy rainbow flag in front. That’s all what it was supposed to be, but I never saw the inside of the place until Craig expressed surprise that I hadn’t visited it.

  He paid my admission, took my hand, and pulled me into the noisy darkness. It was technically our first date.