“Lonny, I don’t know these guys.”
“That’s all right,” says Maxie. “We’re Lonny’s friends. Ain’t that right, Lonny?”
I say nothing. Lou kicks me square in the shins. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.” But nothing more.
“And when Lonny tells us you go under, man, you give it up nice and easy, don’t you?” says Cuddles.
Metro reaches into his pockets and pulls out a raggedy leather wallet. “I don’t have much money.” He shows the wallet around so we see the single ten spot inside. “That’s all there is. You want it? It’s all I have.”
“No, baby,” says Cuddles. “Keep your money. Right, fellas?”
“Right.”
Metro looks worried. “My watch? I don’t have anything else. Nothing, honest. You can check if you want.”
“We don’t want your watch,” says Lou. His hand falls to Metro’s ass, feeling it. Then to the front, gathering Metro’s balls into a hump, and slowly, ever so slowly releasing them.
“Lonny says you been after him.”
“After him? I don’t understand. What are they saying, Lonny?”
I don’t say nothing, but I want to say something. When I step closer, I feel metal pointing in my side, a blade tearing my shirt. Cold on my skin.
“Yeah,” I say. “You been after me.”
Cuddles steps up. “You wanted to suck his cock? Take it up the ass?”
“Hold it, Cuddles,” I say.
“Naw, you hold it,” says Maxie. “You could be like that too, for all we know. Ain’t that right fellas?”
“Shit, man. You tell him, Cuddles. Tell him he’s crazy to think that. You seen me with that girl.”
“Naw, man. You show us,” Cuddles says.
They hustle me and Metro to an alley near an abandoned building. Maxie and Lou hold Metro by the armpits. Cuddles twists my arm behind my back and from his open breath I know he’s grinning ear to ear. “Aw, man,” he whispers to me. “We just having fun. Gonna shake him up a little.”
“What about me?”
Cuddles says nothing more. He looks at the others.
Maxie pushes Metro to the ground. The alley carries his voice. “You wanted to suck him, huh? Well, suck him.”
Cuddles unzips my pants.
“I didn’t touch you, Lonny. I never touched you.”
“You lying, subway man,” says Cuddles.
“Ask him,” says Metro. “Did I touch you, Lonny? Ever? You can tell them. Please, Lonny. I never touched you.”
All eyes are on me now, and even in the dark I can see the glimmer of Metro’s eyes looking up from the ground. From the sound of his voice I can tell he’s about to cry. Suddenly, the click of knives: Lou’s and Maxie’s. Metro faces away from them and can’t see. I see them, but I say nothing. Cuddles twists my arm further. The pain grabs my voice. His blade against my skin. “I told you I’d get back at you, shithead.”
Pain all in me. Metro jerks forward. “Ouch,” he feels the blade, too. Then Metro’s mouth in my pants. Lips cold on my cock. Then warmer. Smoother. Teeth, saliva, gums. I can’t say anything, even if I want to.
It don’t take me long. I open my eyes. Metro’s head is still pumping at my limp cock, but his pants are down in the back and Lou is fucking him. Lou gets up quickly, zips up his pants. Maxie moves to take his place. I move out of Metro’s mouth, open in a frown this time or a soundless cry. Maxie wets his cock and sticks it in. Cuddles pumps Metro’s face where I was. Metro gags. Cuddles slaps his head back to his cock and I hear another slap. This one against Metro’s ass and Lou and Maxie slap his ass while Maxie fucks him. Lou has the knife at Metro’s back and hips. He traces the shape of his body with the blade. Metro winces. “Keep still, you bastard. Keep still,” Lou says.
I try to make it to the street, but Cuddles yanks me back. He hands me a knife and I hold it, looking meaner than I am. “You ain’t ever had a chance,” I’m thinking and realizing it’s for Metro, not for me. Cuddles finishes and pulls out of Metro’s dripping mouth. His fist lands against Metro’s jaw, slamming it shut. I hear the crack of bone and a weak cry. The next thing I know Maxie, still pumping Metro’s ass and slapping the cheeks with the blade broadside, draws blood, and once he finishes he shoots the blade in, gets up quickly, pulling the knife after him. Lou’s hand follows. Then a flash of metal and fists.
“Shit, man. Hold it,” I yell. “I thought we was only gonna fuck him. What the hell you guys doing?”
“Fucking him good,” says Lou.
“Stop. For God’s sake, stop.”
But they don’t stop.
“Oh my God. Oh my fucking God.” It’s all I can say, damn it. And I hear my name.
“Lonny?”
“Oh my God.”
“Lonny?” Metro’s voice is weak, his words slurring on wet red leaves. “Help me.”
Lou and Maxie jump together. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
“Yeah,” says Cuddles. He kicks Metro back to the ground where his arms and legs spread like the gray limbs of a tree.
“Oh my fucking God.” I keep saying it, crying it. But it’s too late. The guys scatter into the street like roaches surprised by a light. Running. They’re running. I look back at Metro and he rolls toward me. His still eyes cut me like a blade. “Never touched you,” the eyes say. “Never touched you.”
I hold my breath until my ears start to pound. I hold my head. I run, stop, run again. The knife drops somewhere. I run again. Don’t know where the fuck I’m going, just getting the hell out of there. Don’t see anybody on the street and not for the rest of the night. Not Lou, not Cuddles. Not anybody else at all.
OCTOBER IS RED, MAN. Mean and red. Nobody came back there but me, see. And Metro was gone by then. Somebody had raked the leaves into a clean pile. I ran through it and scattered the leaves again. Once you get leaves and shit sticking on you, you can never get them off. And when you start hearing the scratchy hurt voices coming from them, the red leaves I mean, not patches of skin or a body cut with knives, or a palm of broken fingers, you’ll start talking back, like I do. You stop hanging out at the meat-packing warehouses on lower West 12th or walk the loading platforms mushy with animal fat and slime where your sneaks slip—not Adidas, but cheaper ones just as good.
When I found Cuddles and told him about the talking red leaves, he said to get the fuck away from him, stop coming around if I was gonna talk crazy and dance out of fear like a punk. But I wasn’t dancing. My feet was trying to hold steady on the loading platform but my sneaks wouldn’t let me. You ever hear the scratchy voices of leaves? You ever try to hold steady on slippery ground?
Like I was telling you and telling Cuddles, after Maxie and Lou cut us loose and before Cuddles cut me loose. Mine wasn’t the only hand on his ass or on his face that night. Metro tried to make me. He wanted it that way. They all do. Man, October is a mean, red bitch. I know. But what if it ain’t the only bitch? What if you could answer the leaves and tell them to stop falling ’cause winter is here now. It’s cold, getting colder. Aw shit, man, trees don’t talk.
They had the body marked out in chalk on the ground behind some blue sawhorses saying, “Police Line Do Not Cross.” It was right where we left him. I saw it glowing. “Here’s Metro,” I told myself. Here’s anybody, even me. A chalk outline and nothing inside. A fat white line of head, arms, body, and legs. A body curled into a heap to hold itself. Like the shape of a fallen leaf or a dead bird, something dropped out of the sky or from a man’s stretched out hand. It was amazing. But it was also the figure of somebody. A man. Any man. So I walked around the outline, seeing it from different angles. How funny to see something that fixed, protected from people or from falling leaves or from the slimy drippings from sides of beef. The outline wasn’t Metro. It was somebody like me.
Once I saw the chalk figure I couldn’t get enough of it. I kept coming back and walking slower and slower around it, measuring how far it was from the police barricade and from where I stood l
ooking down at it, sprawled where we left him. But I figured out a way to keep looking at it and not step in the garbage scattered nearby. You know, leaves, rags, tom newspapers, bits of dog hair, blood maybe, and lots more leaves. I went three steps this way and three steps that way, keeping the chalk outline in sight and missing the garbage and dog shit. One two three, one two three. Up two three, down two three. Then I saw one of the neighbors watching from a window and I cut out of there. But I knew by then how to keep the chalk outline of a man and not fall like a leaf.
That night I came back. The chalk shape was glowing brighter under the street lights like crushed jewels. I took off my shirt and pants and didn’t even feel cold. I crossed the barricade and sat inside the chalk. The glow was on me now. It was me. I lay down in the shape of the dead man, fitting my head, arms, and legs in place. I was warm all over.
The police came and got me up. Their voices were soft and mine was soft. They pulled a white jacket over me like some old lady’s shawl. I shrugged a little to get it off, but my arms wouldn’t move. When I looked for my hands, I couldn’t find them. The police didn’t ask many questions, and I didn’t say nothing the whole time. Besides, there was no red leaves inside the chalk, not a single one. At the precinct a doctor talked to me real quiet like and said the leaves would go away forever if I told him everything that happened to the dead man and to me. But they didn’t call him Metro, they called him some other name with an accent in it. A name I didn’t even know. I asked the doctor again about the leaves. He promised they would go away. “What about the blood?” I asked. “Will I step in the blood?”
“Not if you come clean,” he said.
“What about my sneaks?” I asked him. “Will they get dirty?”
MAGIC
Gary Glickman
TWENTY YEARS AGO THIS PLACE WAS CALLED the artists’ beach. Artists did come, perhaps to paint the wide strip of white sand submitting to the waves sometimes gratefully, sometimes unwillingly, steeply, violently, or else to catch the blue sweep of the Gulf Stream, or else the more subtle wilderness of the dune grass where no mansions were. The town was still a frontier then, as far out as possible from the city, just about, before falling off the island into the sea. And the beach was as far as possible outside the town, between villages, so that what went on here, that is, who sat down with, or even lay down with whom on the sand, was not so well overseen as further in, beneath the eyes of high society and local prudery. Thirty years ago Communists took sun and refuge here with other blacklisted sympathizers; homosexuals, surely, and any of the men with long hair or strange grooming back then—a beard, maybe a beret—who would have been stared if not hounded off the other beaches. Forty years ago there were submarine patrols, local volunteers too old for combat who walked the beaches twice a day, dawn and dusk, for any sign of a German invasion. Fifty years ago, and further back for as long as the country can remember—more than three hundred years, according to the locals, the Daytons, the Conklins, the Milfords—the old volunteers were young men with their fathers and grandfathers, hauling whales out of the surf, summer and winter year after year, to be cut up alive into meat. In bad years there were beach pirates, stoking up fires, hoping a ship would mistake the signal and founder in the shallows, although none of the old families will point a finger. That whole time there were slave traders as well, also unmentioned now, and otherwise only the occasional Acabonack wandering out from his woodland camp, gathering shells and hunting deer.
This midnight the cars are as plentiful as during the day, though toward sunset the lot empties out, only retired couples and people with dogs stopping a while to watch the stone blue of the sky sink down into dusk. Now, though, after dark, it is crowded again, as every weekend, with fancy cars from the city: Mercedes, BMWs, Alfa Romeos, as well as the more local wheels—pickups and jeeps and vans with dark glass. At this hour none of the adamant signs are respected: no parking here, no dogs, no picnics, no fires. Policemen leave the place alone, at night at least. The few who do come, come as men, for relief, for company. With the night and the dark ocean so close in this town, loneliness seems always only a few breaths away, even now in high summer as if, like the moist fog rolling in over the fields, lighted by the moon sometimes or by headlights, it could swallow a person up, even safe in his car, could obscure him and blind him just long enough to be fatal.
Voyeurism aside, we have come to walk the dog. It is late enough to be an adventure, but in town the sidewalk is still crowded with teenagers crowding around the movie theater and the ice-cream store, both of them already closed. Even the bookstore has finally closed, although in the light of its window brightly dressed weekenders still stroll up and down with their spouses and even toddlers asleep in strollers, most of them just off the late bus, unwilling yet to go home and concede an end to Friday night. For quiet, and also for enough dark to see the stars, the beach is the only place.
Knowing the answer I ask, “Why are we here?”—as if asking might keep the answer away, or change it.
“Who’s that?” he says.
“What do you mean, ‘who’s that?’ Can’t you see me in the dark?”
“Have a sense of humor,” he says. “I was just kidding. Of course I can see you. Even if I can’t I still know it’s you.”
“How?”
“By your insecurity. Relax, will you? No one’s going to jump out and grab you.”
“But what are we doing here?”
“You know,” he says. “Same as all these guys.”
“No,” I tell him, “I don’t want that. I don’t even think we should be walking the dog here. You know it’s just an excuse. Look at her, she’s scared of all the silent men. They make me nervous too. What are they doing?”
“Same as us. Looking at the stars. Looking for their fathers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What you always talk about. You’ll see.”
“No I won’t. I feel uncomfortable here.”
“No you don’t. It’s only that your eyes haven’t adjusted. You’ve been here before plenty, admit it.”
“But that was during the day. During the day it’s a beach.”
“It’s exactly the same now. The people are the same. The cars are the same. The ocean is the same, so black and nervous. Even the dunes are in exactly the same place. Look, I left my sandals here, and here they are!”
There are sounds of moaning, very much like wind, and then a few whispers. We are not making people comfortable. They walk away.
“Sounds different, though,” I say.
“Well,” he says, “you can hear things better at night.”
There is more moaning, definitely not wind.
“Do you think he’s all right?”
And then a deep sigh, too close to mistake for anything but pleasure.
“Yeah, I think he’s fine. Let’s go see.”
“No,” I say, “you go. I don’t think I’m ready yet.”
“Are you sure you’re all right alone?”
“I’m not alone,” I tell him. “I have the dog. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“I’m concerned,” I say. “For your health.”
“What should I do if I see your father?”
“Do what I would do. Bend over.”
“You sure you wouldn’t be jealous?”
“Look,” I say. “Just tell him it’s for me.”
“I’m sure he’ll love that.”
“I’m sure you will too.”
We kiss, lightly, and separate.
It’s true, my father might be here. Some of the men on the beach look like him. Once, I was running here with the dog, a guy followed me in a Jaguar just like my father’s. He had the same black beard, too, and the same eyes, heavy lids, like Nixon’s. They always seemed to be closed from smiling, but after a while you know better. There he was just like my father, and I was—evidently—just his type. He followed me here, it was jus
t sunset, and I thought, well, maybe he’s my type too; why is this so exciting, otherwise? The guy wasn’t handsome, I could see that even from across the road. If he wants me so much, I thought, he can’t be such a catch—so much am I my father’s son, unloved once, maybe, forever now unwilling to accept love. Still, I was willing to try, until he got out of his car, a dumpy, unhappy man, leering with disbelief. I unleashed the dog and ran away toward the water.
When I look for my father—look for him, that is, not here but with my mind’s eye, rummaging among the old scenes and inscribed moments from the past: rocking on his lap until I fell asleep, for example, the old rocking chair squeaking gently each time he leaned back, thinking up the next line in his song—I am swept along, further and further from any time I can remember well, impatient and unsettling as a quick wind pushing in from an open window. I still see him, occasionally, for dinners across a restaurant table, or for a brief moment outside a graduation, a wedding, a funeral. He was there at home, I know, until age thirteen (my first and almost last wet dream that year—desire right away reached out with my hand to fulfill itself). But his business meetings had gotten later and later, his meals, breakfast and dinner anyway, were brought to him in the bedroom by my mother, who apologized to us with her eyes as she disappeared across the house with his tray, leaving us to our supper watching “Star Trek,” if my brother was home, and something animated and inane, if my sister, whose chair was closest to the television, had her way. The day my father left, calling me from touch football a moment to his vast green Cadillac, he was already long gone. “I’m going away for a few days,” he said, and I nodded and shrugged as if I believed him, just to let him get away smoothly, he had left so long before. “A few days,” was our secret code, his and mine, whether or not my mother and the rest of the world had understood. To make this parting easier, and all of his goings and comings and absences even right there among us, he had been preparing us, in happy moments as well as in trouble, to disregard him, to contradict our perceptions and feel their opposites: to see him when he wasn’t there, to ignore him when he was, to hear the truth when he spoke something else, and to listen in his silence for the answers we needed. He did not eat with us but his place at the table was set; when he did appear it was behind a wall of the newspaper, flimsy and translucent, but which we dared not assault either with our hands or our voices. When he held my hand, as we walked along the street or drove somewhere in the car, he would squeeze it sometimes, returning my squeeze, but soon I would have squeezed too often, asked that way once too much for his response, and then his return squeeze would be dramatic, suddenly demonstrative, but also false, because it signaled his escape, his fingers wriggling quickly from my grasp, lightly scratching my palm, perhaps to fool my hand with affection.
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