Lawnboy (2 page)

I frowned. I felt simple, my tongue swelling fatly in my mouth. Befuddled. I glanced up at the shocked treetops and saw a sun shivering in a glazed sky. When I looked back at him, his eyes, blue with sprinklings of gold, were watching mine. I thought I detected some fear in them.

“I have to ask my parents,” I announced.

I loped through the side door. I crouched in the living room, pressed my nose right down into the quarry tile so I could almost breathe in the dust. I was seventeen years old. Of course my parents didn’t need to know. If anything, they’d be thrilled that I’d finally stopped moping around the house, dreading the resumption of school. I stood, watching the second hand of the clock make three complete rotations. I peered through the slats of the Bermuda shutter. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot. I reached into my pants, gave myself a firm and brutal yank. When I looked down, I noticed the trembling of my hands.

“What did they say?” William called out to me.

I bounded down the walk. I tried to seem matter-of-fact, reckless. “They said fine. Fine. When do you want me to start?”

“Tomorrow.” He grinned, his shoulders drawing imperceptibly backward. “So we have a deal then.”

“Deal.” I extended my hand to him.

But he didn’t take the hand. Instead, he placed his palm flat over my face, then pushed up, and as I started the mower, I decided he was probably the creepiest, most disgusting individual I’d ever met in my life.

***

That night I lay in bed, listening to the house. Ice maker, pool motor, air conditioner, computer, oven cleaner. Everything but voices. It was the fourth day in a row that my parents, Ursula and Sid, hadn’t spoken. I should have been used to it by now, but their silence only seemed to have gotten noisier, so shrill I pictured it puncturing a hole, the size of a meteorite, through the ceiling. I couldn’t be safe from it, not outside, not in my room. I suspected it would follow me everywhere, even after their deaths, till my own death. I glanced at the digits of my clock radio. 10:04. Boy, am I seeing the world.

They shouldn’t have gotten married. They couldn’t stand each other. Anyone could see it in their eyes and their clipped, joyless mouths. Once, seeing intimations of these same expressions in their wedding photos, I thought, with relief—
ah
—so it isn’t my doing. Still, it maddened me that they kept holding on like this. They never dealt with anything. The same way they couldn’t deal with me. I mean, I didn’t mince or prance. I didn’t weave, I didn’t dot my “i’s” with circles or curlicues, but my eminent faggotry should have been obvious to them. Hello, Ursula. Hello, Sid. Knock, knock. Anybody home?

I fooled with my armpit hair. I thought of his face: the mussed-up brows, the deeply cut eyes. He carried a smoky smell about him, as if he were burning deep from inside.

“So where are you going?” Ursula said the following morning. Her voice sounded upbeat, despite the goings-on with my father. At least she’d gotten herself dressed today.

I stuffed a banana muffin in my mouth. “Beach. I’m going with Jane. I’ll be back before dinner.”

She pressed the small of her back into the countertop. She held her pale, slender arms tightly over her chest. “You’re not going to the beach,” she said with a knowing grin.

Crumbs caught in my throat. Did she know? She couldn’t know. “Why do you always have to accuse? You never believe me. You always think I’m plotting, Mom. I think you despise me.”

“Are you going to start with me again? I made a simple psychic assertion. You’re a lousy liar. You can’t hide a damn thing from me.”

“Oh yeah?” I laughed, and slammed out the door.

I stood outside William’s at 8:54 a.m. I was early, but wanted to get it over with. The door opened, and he stood there in a robe patterned with marine flags, a mud masque on his face.

“Lawn mower’s in the garage,” he said with a husky rasp.

I pulled up on the door handle. The mower hunkered beside the pool chemicals—a nice one actually, with pretty green paint and detachable grass catcher. Unlike our lawn mower, a piece of shit that was constantly leaking gas, this one started first try.

I bent over, stretched. The grass, a high-quality Floratam, was pleasantly spongy. I worked up and down, sidestepping sprinkler heads, guarding the tender young trunks of the palms. I started making up a song. I frequently made up songs and sang them aloud, almost yelling them up to the trees.

I studied the sliding windows of the house and realized I wasn’t going to have sex with him. I didn’t know where the warped idea had popped into my head anyway. Once again, I’d allowed myself to get all worked up about someone who was unavailable to me, foreign as the workings of a nuclear power plant. I looked up at the window again. He was just a regular fellow. Lonely. Dumb. A little fun.

I finished up in record time, forty-three minutes. The yard was smaller than I’d expected. I stepped through the gate, sat, and took in the reeking trees: flame vine, soursop, wild cinnamon. My fingers smelled of gasoline, fertilizer. The lawn, green as mouthwash, glittered in the morning heat. Above me, the sky bubbled and fried.

“Nice tune,” William said, stepping outside.

“What?”

“I said I liked your song.”

My stomach folded in on itself. “I wasn’t singing.”

He cuffed the top of my head and laughed. “Do you want to come inside for breakfast?”

My words came out sludgy, like juice squeezed from a freeze-damaged orange. I told him that I had to leave, that I needed my payment, please, but he kept scrutinizing me. I tasted a fresh filling deep in the corner of my mouth. Finally, he reached into his rear pocket and pulled out three ten-dollar bills.

“But this is ten dollars too much.”

“Take it.”

“It’s too much.”

“Just take it. Buy yourself some candy.”

“I don’t need any candy.”.

“Whatever.”

I shrugged. For some reason I felt myself welcoming, letting down the defenses, when I noticed the fractures of light in his eye. I went off. I imagined him capable of all sorts of things. Hangings, slayings, snuff films. Whole freezers filled with kidnapped boys in body bags stacked according to height, weight, race, creed.

“So would you like to come in?” he asked again.

“Sure,” I said, and followed.

***

Something disturbing and immature in my nature wanted to startle people. Perhaps it was because I was essentially unstartling in appearance. I slumped through the corridors of my school, Coral Gables High, a quiet, mealy kid with Dumbolike ears, in flannel shirts, racking up B after B, even though I was most likely a genius. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Edge, had extracted me from the class and said, “You’re too good for us. I’m going to recommend to the principal that you be passed on to the sixth grade.” And she did it, easy as the snap of a finger. These achievements continued until Peter—crying, stoned—left the house for good after an all-night fight with my father. I’m not sure what happened after that.

William and I sat at the kitchen counter. He told me about his ex-wife, Lorna, his daughter, Poppy, at Rollins College, his years in the Episcopal seminary, and his preparations for the priesthood. I was bored out of my skull. I picked up an empty mayonnaise jar. The same image kept drifting across my tired eyelids: a hole in the clouds, torn like a bullet wound, with the sky on fire behind it.

Then I thought about Jane. We were supposed to have gone to the beach. She had to be pissed by now. Or worried. She was always worried about me. Sometimes she told me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be one of those people you read about in papers, carved up like a Christmas turkey, lying in a ditch. She could think what she wanted. But I knew I was protected. Something, somewhere, was watching, keeping me. God. An angel. I could walk through fire, thrive through sickness, pass through the harshest danger, and come out alive.

I looked up. William was smiling. “You haven’t listened to a word I said.”

“What?” I put the jar down. The tabletop was littered with the scraps of the peeled label.

“Tell me about yourself. How’s school?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to give in to him. He thought he had something. He thought I was innocent, powerless, that I was going to lie down and take it. He was wrong. I pictured him lying on his stomach in a warm dark cave. A bowl full of liquid beside his head. How easy it would be to lift the bowl in his moment of peace and kill him.

We were in his room. He sat on the bed while I swayed above him. He unzipped my pants and felt for my dick—a hard, red, glistening muscle. He gripped it, cranked it around. “Beautiful,” he rasped, gazing up into my face.

He started sucking me off. It wasn’t like I’d expected. I mean, I’d fooled around before, but it wasn’t serious sex—not in a bed or anything—and this, I supposed, was serious sex. I wasn’t particularly excited. Maybe I was bored, even disgusted. I concentrated on the motions, trying to pinpoint the smells in the room. I thought: bleach, weeds, sweat, funk, hair.

“Good?” he asked, taking a breather.

“Yeah.”

We continued. We rolled around on the bed, when a thought, a full sentence, occurred to me:
He is getting younger, while I am getting older.
I didn’t know what it meant. I thrust out my leg, kicked over the lamp, then rolled him over on his back, even though he was the stronger. I hiked his legs onto my shoulders, and to my astonishment, started fucking him.

“That’s it,” he muttered. “Fuck your old man, boy. That’s it. Keep fucking your daddy.”

“Shut up,” I whispered. “Just please shut the hell up.”

A thin cord of electricity quavered up my spine. I realized: this is what I’d always wanted. All at once I departed from myself, turning above the bed like a huge ticking wheel, watching us pushing against each other. My breath was sticking in my throat. I leaned over and kissed the harsh sandpaper of his face. I returned to myself, felt him clenching and relaxing around me, then pulled out, coming across his heaving stomach.

I stood before the bathroom mirror. I stuck a coated finger in my mouth, pushing it around my gums, feeding myself. My body felt new: the blood enriching my face, the muscles sharper as if dug by fine tools. I had something. I had a power all along and hadn’t even known it.

But when I walked into his bedroom, I was only the mealy high school boy again. I eased under the covers, punching him softly on his broad freckled back, waiting for encouragement, or something returned, when he only swung away and rolled on some basketball socks with holes in them. His head appeared to be swimming with thoughts. His Dobermans jumped up on the bed, panting, licking at my bare skin.

“Get dressed, kiddo,” he said. “Your parents are going to be worried.”

“But can’t we do it again?”

“No, that’s enough for me.” He laughed softly. “Get dressed. It’s time for you to go.”

“You sure?”

He nodded.

So that’s it, I thought. That’s what you do. I picked up my clothes from the sweaty heap on the floor. He kissed me dryly on the mouth. I left. On the way home I kept repeating:
I went to the beach. I went to the big beach with my friend Jane and saw palms and sand and girls carrying buckets full of tulip shells. I took a swim and ate a snow cone.

Years ago, Jane had wanted me to be someone else. Or at least myself with one big difference.

We were sitting inside the South Miami house of Gwen Marino, the upper-level art teacher. We loved Gwen Marino, her tangle of hair and trailing black scarves and the many Bakelite bracelets she wore on each arm. Not only because she talked openly about the possibility of sex in our paintings (“What these beach roses need”—she’d step back, pulling at her lip, clenching her brow—“is more
foreplay
”), but because she invited us—only
us
—to babysit her daughter Saga, and that very opportunity bestowed on us a stature that all the other lowly worshipers in her cult could only dream of.

Jane was wearing a chopstick through her hair, her deep red lipstick setting off her pale skin. Gwen was out for the evening, on a date with Roy Panner, the industrial arts teacher whom we’d decided was not good enough for her. Saga had long been put to bed, and we sat on the couch, staring occasionally at the film canister of pot and the aqua bong on the end table. Something told us that this had been deliberately left out for our partaking and pleasure, and soon enough we were taking hit after hit, giggling hysterically, staring at the homemade pole lamp as its beautiful pieces revealed themselves to us: discrete, then whole again.

“God, I’m horny,” I laughed. “What the hell’s in this stuff?”

“Yeah,” she said, biting into her lip. “It’s funny. I was just thinking the same thing.”

Instantly I regretted my admission. Casually, Jane pushed the tips of her fingers into the waistband of her jeans.

“What are you thinking?” she said, smiling.

“Nothing.” Then my laughter broke apart as if shattered by a BB.

“You want to fuck me, don’t you?”

“No!”
I said, still laughing.

“Yes, you do. You want to throw me on my back, you little beast, and fuck the living shit out of me.”

If at that moment we’d been distracted by a ringing phone or a distant radio, the urge would have passed and our friendship would have remained just that—something effortless and self-contained. Instead, I leaned over and kissed her wetly on the mouth. Her tongue felt slippery and hot, like my own. I needed to see whether I could pull this off—that is, sex with someone of the other gender. I thought, why not? Why the hell not? She’s my friend, and we care about each other. No one’s going to get hurt here. Why not?

I lay my weight on top of Jane. I unbuttoned the top two buttons of her shirt, then started kissing her, reaching inside for her breasts. Was I doing this right? Was I giving her what she wanted, the reassurance and the strength? I looked down into her face, her open shocked face, and she back at me, and before I could assess, something had changed: I felt foreign to myself, more remote than I’d ever felt before. I was nothing short of a liar. I hadn’t yet told her the truth about myself, for the secret seemed to be enormous. She’d walk away, I knew it. I’d be telling her I wasn’t the person she thought I was, and didn’t we tell each other everything? Didn’t I know about her cramps and her lies and her fights with her parents? Didn’t I know about her doubts, her rages, her fleeting depressions concerning her little sister, Anna, who’d fallen back, thrown up, and died to the dread of her kindergarten as she scissored through a sheet of blue construction paper and constructed a George Washington hat? And didn’t everyone—Gwen Marino included—assume we were a couple just waiting to happen if they didn’t think we were already together?