‘You do, though.’
We walked another block in silence.
‘I’m never gonna get out of this town,’ Chris said, and sighed. ‘When you come
back from college on summer vacation, you’ll be able to look me and Vern and Teddy
up down at Sukey’s after the seven-to-three shift’s over. If you want to. Except you’ll probably never want to.’ He laughed a creepy laugh.
‘Quit jerking yourself off,’ I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt–I was thinking about being out there in the woods, about Chris saying: And maybe I took it
to old lady Simons and told her, and maybe I got a three-day vacation anyway,
because the money never showed up… and maybe the next week old lady Simons had
this brand-new skirt on when she came to school… The look. The look in his eyes.
‘No jerk-off, daddy-O,’ Chris said.
I rubbed my first finger against my thumb. ‘This is the world’s smallest violin
playing “My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You”.’
‘He was ours,’ Chris said, his eyes dark in the morning light.
We had reached the corner of my street and we stopped there. It was quarter
past six.
Back towards town we could see the Sunday Telegram truck pulling up in
front of Teddy’s uncle’s stationery shop. A man in bluejeans and a tee-shirt threw off a bundle of papers. They bounced upside down on the sidewalk, showing the colour
funnies (always Dick Tracey and Blondie on the first page). Then the truck drove on,
its driver intent on delivering the outside world to the rest of the whistlestops up the line–Otisfield, Norway-South Paris, Waterford, Stoneham. I wanted to say something
more to Chris and didn’t know how to.
‘Gimme some skin, man,’ he said, sounding tired.
‘Chris-‘
‘Skin.’
I gave him some skin. ‘I’ll see you.’
He grinned–that same sweet, sunny grin. ‘Not if I see you first, fuckface.’
He walked off, still laughing, moving easily and gracefully, as though he
didn’t hurt like me and have blisters like me and like he wasn’t lumped and bumped
with mosquito and chigger and blackfly bites like me. As if he didn’t have a care in
the world, as if he was going to some real boss place instead of just home to a three-
room house (shack would have been closer to the truth) with no indoor plumbing and
broken windows covered with plastic and a brother who was probably laying for him
in the front yard. Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have
said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think–that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they
bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those
lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is
so.
30
The back door was locked so I fished the spare key out from under the mat and let
myself in. The kitchen was empty, silent, suicidally clean. I could hear the hum the
fluorescent bars over the sink made when I turned on the switch. It had been literally years since I had been up before my mother; I couldn’t even remember the last time
such a thing had happened.
I took off my shirt and put it in the plastic clothes basket behind the washing machine. I got a clean rag from under the sink and sponged off with it–face, neck,
pits, belly. Then unzipped my pants and scrubbed my crotch–my testicles in
particular–until my skin began to hurt. It seemed I couldn’t get clean enough down
there, although the red weal left by the bloodsucker was rapidly fading. I still have a tiny crescent-shaped scar there.