Afterlife (31 page)

For the first time in a hundred letters, he wished he could speak in answer, write back in the flowing hand that used to send letters to Linda herself. To thank his pious mother for the prayers with which she sealed each missive. To tell her that he loved and honored her every day and would one day rear a son who would know her name. All lies, of course, but just for the moment he wished he could tell them. As if he longed to be something else before he died—the gay son who had never left home, who stayed in the closet and took care of family, never moving out of the shadow of the mountain.

Linda read off the final flourishes, God and mother love mixed in passionate exhortation, but managed to keep her own voice carefully indifferent. As if she had learned too well not to be emotional in his presence, any emotion at all, or else he might shut down further. She folded the letter up matter-of-fact and tucked it back in her bag, filial duty done. She made no comment on any of its details and didn't dream of hazarding anything like a reminiscence. So it must have surprised her when he spoke, still looking up the hill and so softly melancholy she barely heard.

“Maybe you'll go back and visit,” he said. “We could send you down for Christmas.”

“Mm,” she replied vaguely, realizing he hadn't included himself, and she would never go back alone. He moved toward the house, locked in his stubborn intensity where she could never follow. She reached into her bag again. “I brought you this.”

He stopped. She held out the spiral notebook that he kept on the shelf under the bedroom phone. “I hid it the day the police came, so they wouldn't take it away.”

He nodded rather formally as he took it from her. Of course they had never discussed it, though he'd never tried to hide it either. He flipped through the pages—first names only, measurements, turnons, the full repertoire of sex talk. Dell laughed. “They would have had a great time trackin' these guys down,” he said. “Whole lotta men out there with cop fantasies.”

On almost every page a phone number was scribbled beside the name. Though he laughed it off as a dirty joke, he could feel the rage like bile in his gut, that the L.A. pigs would muscle in on these lonely boys, accusing them of consorting with a terrorist. Suddenly he thought of Kevin, whom he hadn't talked to in almost a month. He wondered if Kevin missed him.

“It's none of their business,” Linda declared, blindly loyal, her brother against the authorities. Her black mane framed her lean face, not a trace of makeup. She wore an off-white cotton dress with lace inserts at the shoulders, the dress she'd worn the day of her wedding. “Alfonso brought me fourteen hundred dollars,” she went on, dutifully changing the subject now that the notebook was returned. “He hasn't lost any customers, and he wants to know can he buy the truck.”

Alfonso was the hardest worker among Dell's crew, a tree man who could scamper like a monkey. He was the obvious one to take over the business when Dell went underground. Alfonso was sweet on Linda and never failed to pay over her brother's cut. Dell shrugged. He trusted Linda's judgment in business, and only worried that Alfonso Nava might make a move to marry her, and Dell wouldn't be there to stop it. Alfonso might get rich, but he would always be a peasant.

A third time Linda reached into the bag, and this time brought out a camera. Dell frowned as soon as he saw it, cornered, looking as if he would turn and run. “I don't even have a picture of us,” she protested. “If it comes out good, we can send one home, so they won't forget what we look like.” She was talking rapidly, as if he hadn't even mentioned her traveling home for Christmas. What she didn't want him thinking was that she needed a picture before he got sick.

“Maybe later,” he said.

“No,
now
. I don't have a flash.”

She was bathed in the dusty sun that dappled through the sycamore, its palomino trunk rising behind her head. Dell reached for the camera. It was really a picture of her that was needed. But then the dining-room door slammed open, and Sonny Cevathas came lurching out, eyes wild as the Furies. He was heading for the room beyond the garage, and Linda called out to him, “Sonny, will you take our picture?”

He balked. All he wanted to do was get in his room and pound the walls. But something about her plaintiveness stopped him, as if he could hear her fear of where the time would take them if they lost the moment now. He turned. His face was flushed; he was breathing hard, snorting like an animal. Still he might have told them both to go to hell. Perhaps he understood they were all he had left, this marginal bogus family that had ended up at Steven's house.

His smile was more of a grimace, but he rolled his shoulders and tossed his hair and reached for the camera. Everyone's younger brother, he herded Dell over to the whitewashed bench. He made a squeezing gesture with his hands to make them sit close together. And when they still kept a shy space between them, Sonny went up and physically pushed them tight. He grabbed Dell's wrist and drew the brother's arm around Linda's shoulder. Then he scooted back ten feet and crouched. They looked hopelessly stiff and formal in the viewfinder.

“Hey, guys, could we lighten up a little please? Why don't you look at each other.”

Suddenly face to face, they smiled as if a sort of reprieve were being granted, however brief, and they were brother and sister again. Sonny snapped once, twice for good measure. Then they faced him, tilting their heads together. Two more clicks. Steven would have loved it, a holiday reconciliation worthy of prime-time, boding well for a white Christmas.

The camera got all there was of it, though. When Sonny sprang to his feet and moved to return it to Dell, brother and sister had already pulled a hair apart. “Listen, I better go clean up,” said Sonny, “or Stevie'll have my ass.” He backed away, still oddly boyish and bobbing his head, riding the last of the nooner's speed, and trotted away to his own room. Dell and Linda hated to see him go, their only witness here to who they used to be. Pride was welling up again, a passion not to intrude, and the queer double shame that they weren't good enough for each other. Before the sun had left the dusty branches of the sycamore, their way would be paved again with egg shells.

“Me too,” declared Dell wearily. “I gotta go put on a tie for Steven's gringo holiday.” He laughed. “Like I'm going to a funeral.” And gently handed the camera back to Linda, all the evidence in their favor.

As soon as Sonny walked into his room and slammed the door, he felt caged, but the cage was good. He'd been ready to pound the walls, but now he shrank from them instead. Not half an hour ago Sean Pfeiffer told him they were finished. Told him in the driveway, standing between the limo and the Mercedes. Right after they'd fucked for an hour, Sonny on his hands and knees taking it like a dog, then standing up spread-eagle against a glass door as he gazed west to the ocean. Another toot and they played Marines, Sean smacking his butt with a paddle as Sonny barked out the count: “… forty-nine, fifty, sir!” As if to see how much heat they could cram in an hour, so that Sean would go off to Palm Springs ravenous. Sonny had brought him the paddle.

And then they were in the driveway, not even time to shower, and Sean handed over an envelope. “I always think it's better,” he said, “to stop these things before the heat goes. End on an up, you know what I mean? Always better to be a little sorry.” Sonny was speechless, his body still on fire from the crystal. He stared at the envelope, as if to will it to be a love letter, with a key to the house taped inside. Sean slipped into the back of the limo and stuck his head out the window. “Don't take this wrong, but you really oughta go see a doctor, show him that sore.”

Sonny let him glide away without even screaming, because above all else he didn't want to look stupid. He was supposed to have understood the deal from the very beginning. In the envelope were twenty new hundreds, so fresh they seemed unreal. At first he didn't feel betrayed or even insulted, only relieved that nobody knew. But by the time he got home, he could actually feel his body crawling with all that he hadn't washed off. He went in the house determined to beg off dinner, pleading sick, but couldn't find Steven. Then the encounter with Dell and Linda, so lost and afraid to touch, and he figured what the hell, at least it would be clean in there. No one at Steven's table was going to put their hands on him.

Now he pulled off his clothes as if he wanted to burn them. The sight of his body in the mirror above the sink made him wince. The red welts on his butt, the head of his dick raw, his swollen nipples, all like a sort of infection. The rest of his perfect body was numb and pale as death, next to the mocking soreness of his love zones. He felt as if he'd raped himself. He'd never done it for money. How far did he have to go to meet his fate halfway?

He began to blow the mucus from his nose, one nostril and then the other, expelling it into the sink, as bloody as Sean Pfeiffer. He was so sick of men, he could hardly breathe. He had a wild flash of understanding how sex criminals sometimes pleaded to have it cut off. Then he stepped into the shower, where the last thing he expected was to come out clean. And when the hot water hit the raw places, stinging like salt in a wound, still he couldn't make it hurt like the lesion in his armpit, which didn't hurt at all.

When Mark arrived at three with his store-bought pies, Steven was bearing the punch bowl full of steaming cider into the living room, where all the others were gathered. Mark crouched to the hearth to light the fire, and an overeager Andy knelt beside him and said, “I'll take care of that.” Instantly Mark stiffened and backed off. Steven, grinding his teeth against a possible hernia as he set the punch bowl on the coffee table, wished he could call a time-out. It was only because Andy had brought the wood and laid the fire that he wanted the lighting honors. It was nothing more proprietary than that. Yet Steven could see Mark picking up on the fact that the kid had practically moved in.

Hastily Steven ladled the cider into cups, and Heather plunked a cinnamon stick into each one as she handed them round. Dell came trailing in, looking strangled in his tie, and they were six around the fire as Steven raised his cup, deciding not to wait for Sonny. “Long life, good health,” he said, catching Mark's eye at last and smiling. The group repeated his hearty prayer and drank, cozy as all the last chapters of Dickens.

Then there was a funny moment when they didn't seem to know what to do, all dressed up in the middle of the day. Oh, they were maddeningly polite, right from the get-go. Andy told Mark how great he looked with his Florida tan. Mark lobbed a compliment about Heather's beaded sweater, which prompted from Steven an equal nicety on Linda's account. When they'd exhausted that tack, they took turns tossing out random remarks on the holiday, but kept it light, avoiding for politeness's sake the tortured Strindbergian dreads and scars that so possessed the Thursday group.

Heather recalled the snowy Thanksgivings in Wisconsin growing up, and her father actually slaughtering the bird on the family farm. “And it's really true, they run around with their heads cut off, bleeding all over the place.” She laughed a bit shrill, the cider having gone right to her head. And didn't really notice the strained look that passed between Steven and Linda, or Dell casting his eyes to the fire. Turkey blood had a rather more immediate fix in some of their minds.

Merry and impromptu, Andy started in on the Pilgrims, recalling all the pious clichés of grade school, red man and white man together like brothers, sharing sharing sharing. He ladled another cup of cider and sat by Steven on the sofa, thigh to thigh. Now he launched into the story of John Alden, sent to propose to Priscilla for Myles Stan-dish, pillar of rectitude but a dork when it came to women.

“As far as we can tell, ladies and gentlemen,” Andy enthused, “we have here the only example of romantic love in America between 1620 and the films of Greta Garbo.”

He laid a hand on Steven's knee. Steven shot a glance at Mark, who pretended not to see the knee maneuver, then pretended not to notice Steven's look. When Andy got to the punchline, he turned and put his face up close to Steven and delivered it with breathless histrionics: “Speak for yourself, John Alden.” Clutching the front of Steven's shirt and affecting a swooning passion. They laughed around the fire, but barely. Linda and Dell didn't get the story at all, the cultural barriers being so queer, even if it hadn't been played for laughs.

Steven, rigid as stone, still felt as if the kid was all over him, though they'd resumed the simpler posture of hand on knee. An awful silence was starting to fall, as if they'd exhausted every lead, when they were saved by the creak of the dining-room door. Sonny walked in in a blue blazer and tie, hair spiffed back and squeaky clean, looking for all the world like an Ivy jock.

“I hope you realize, I only eat white meat,” he announced with an impish smile.

At the sight of him Steven remembered the purloined hors d'oeuvres from Monte Carlo, and he leaped up from Andy's smothering proximity and ran to fetch them. He sailed around the kitchen, transferring the cold canapés to a silver tray, rustling up the turkey cocktail napkins, turning a drawer inside out for toothpicks. He couldn't recall exactly why he'd been so angry with Mark. He certainly didn't want him anymore, or anyone else for that matter. He only hoped the day would present an occasion when he could be unbearably civil, and prove to Mark there was no lingering romantic burnish.

The phone rang, and he grabbed it up on a millisecond's ring. It was Margaret: “Okay, we're ready, I got him in the car. He's a hundred and two, but he's talking English.”

“Darling, can you wear the shawl? Angela's coming.”

“Steven, I'm practically wearing overalls. Please don't expect a fashion statement. We'll be there in ten.”