I nod shyly.
‘He’s a real asshole, ain’t he, kid?’
I nod again and everybody, Dennis included, roars with laughter. Then Dennis
claps his hands together twice, briskly, and says: ‘Come on, we gonna have a practice
or stand around here like a bunch of pussies?’
They run to their positions, already peppering the ball around the infield.
‘Go sit over there on the bench, Gordie. Be quiet. Don’t bother anybody.’
I go sit over there on the bench. I am good. I feel impossibly small under the
sweet summer clouds. I watch my brother pitch. I don’t bother anybody.
But there weren’t many times like that.
Sometimes he read me bedtime stories that were better than mom’s; mom’s
stories were about the Gingerbread Man and the Three Little Pigs, okay stuff, but
Dennis’s were about stuff like Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper. He also had a version
of Billy Goat’s Gruff where the troll under the bridge ended up the winner. And, as I
have already said, he taught me the game of cribbage and how to do a box-shuffle.
Not that much, but hey! in this world you take what you can get, am I right?
As I grew older, my feelings of love for Dennis were replaced with an almost
clinical awe, the kind of awe so-so Christians feel for God, I guess. And when he died, I was mildly shocked and mildly sad, the way I imagine those same so-so Christians
must have felt when Time magazine said God was dead. Let me put it this way: I was
as sad for Denny’s dying as I was when I heard on the radio that Dan Blocker had died.
I’d seen them both about as frequently, and Denny never ever got any re-runs.
He was buried in a closed coffin with the American flag on top (they took the
flag off the box before they finally stuck it in the ground and folded it–the flag, not the box–into a cocked hat and gave it to my mom). My parents just fell to pieces. Six months hadn’t been long enough to put them back together again; I didn’t know if
they’d ever be whole again. Mr and Mrs Dumpty. Denny’s room was in suspended
animation just one door down from my room, suspended animation or maybe in a
time-warp. The ivy-league college pennants were still on the walls, and the senior
pictures of the girls he had dated were still tucked into the mirror where he had stood for what seemed like hours at a stretch, combing his hair back into a ducktail like
Elvis’s. The stack of Trues and Sports Illustrateds remained on his desk, their dates
looking more and more antique as time passed. It’s the kind of thing you see in sticky-sentimental movies. But it wasn’t sentimental to me; it was terrible. I didn’t go into
Dennis’s room unless I had to because I kept expecting that he would be behind the door, or under the bed, or in the closet.
Mostly it was the closet that preyed on my mind, and if my mother sent me in
to get Denny’s postcard album or his shoebox of photographs so she could look at
them, I would imagine that door swinging slowly open while I stood rooted to the spot
with horror. I would imagine him pallid and bloody in the darkness, the side of his
head walloped in, a grey-veined cake of blood and brains drying on his shirt. I would
imagine his arms coming up, his bloody hands hooking into claws, and he would be
croaking: It should have been you, Gordon. It should have been you.
7
Stud City, by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Greenspun Quarterly, issue
45, Fall, 1970. Used by permission of the author.
March.
Chico stands at the window, arms crossed, elbows on the ledge that divides
upper and lower panes, naked, looking out, breath fogging the glass. A draught
against his belly.
Bottom right pane is gone. Blocked by a piece of cardboard.
‘Chico.’
He doesn’t turn. She doesn’t speak again. He can see a ghost of her in the glass,
in his bed, sitting, blankets pulled up in apparent defiance of gravity. Her eye makeup has smeared into deep hollows under her eyes.