Lawnboy (5 page)

“Payoff,” I mumbled.

He regarded the clenched skin around my eyes. He glanced away, then looked back at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, gripping my left knee. “Look at all this. How nice of you. You went to so much trouble.” He stood up suddenly, thrust his hands in his pockets. His head pivoted toward the kitchen. “So everything’s okay with you?”

My heart picked up pace. I felt its beating inside my cheeks, teeth, the thickness of my tongue. I tried it again. “I thought we’d sleep together tonight.”

“Not tonight,” he said, yawning good-naturedly. “I have to be up at five-thirty tomorrow. Taping.”

My face flushed upward from my neck. “I’m not talking about sex.”

“The mattress’s broken. I thought I’d sleep out here tonight,” he said, and gestured at the sofa.

What more could I ask for? I stood in the living room while he retrieved a pillow and sheets from the linen closet. My thoughts fractured, as if I’d taken one too many cold tablets in a row. I studied the narrow width of the sofa: no way could we fit together in that space.

“Nighty night,” he said, and kissed me.

“Do you mind if I sleep on the floor?” I pointed to the carpet alongside the sofa.

He looked concerned now, his tanned forehead shining. “Of course not. Are you sure you’re going to be comfortable down there?”

I started stripping down to my jockey shorts. “No problem.”

“Want a pillow?” he said, offering me his own.

“No thanks.”

Soon William was snoring in the dark room. A heaviness settled deep inside my marrow.
Aloneness,
I said to myself.
Aloneness.
I reached up and rested my palm against the warm ridges of his stomach, fingers just touching his waistband for energy, some sign of life.
My hope, my ring of fire.
The earth stood still, frozen.
My torch, my song of gladness.
I took my hand away, sighed. Headlights flashed on the Toulouse-Lautrecs on the wall.

***

Weeks passed. It was summer. Now that I’d graduated, I had some time on my hands. While William went to work, I immersed myself in various projects, the largest of which involved chopping down the singed Australian pines. I wanted to fix things up. Luckily, William didn’t force me to look for work, or to write to any of those colleges that had offered me scholarships, but I was grateful for the absence of pressure, for I needed some time to figure out what I wanted from my life. Doctor, architect, horticulturalist, weatherman, Django Reinhardt scholar—I still could be anything.

Years in the future, I’d look back on this time as our happiest.

How strange, though, to be entirely dependent on someone. Strange to feel absolutely no power next to him. Sometimes I’d be whacked across the brow with the uncanny realization that I had but $425.69 in my savings account. It was nothing, barely enough to cover an apartment’s security deposit. All he needed to do was to kick me out, and I’d be out on my ass on the streets. Hustling, shoplifting, shooting up drugs. But I couldn’t give everything over to him. I couldn’t let myself believe that I was smaller than he was, a petty moon orbiting some planet, even though he was footing the bills. I had the right to make some decisions. It was just as much my house as it was his.

But I wanted to feel more enthusiasm for my new life. My happiness and sadness seemed to live side by side, like roots intertwined, feeding and depleting each other. What had I lost? Whatever happened to that purer emotion, that purer joy: a hot yellow beam knocking me off my feet? It had departed now, for good it seemed. I walked to the window one day and saw three high school boys in huge, sloppy pants roving down the street, laughing and rebellious, throwing a hockey puck, smoking stolen Marlboros. They appeared to be so much younger than I was, with so much possibility ahead, and I wanted to walk with them, wanted them to like me, to call me by my name, if only for an hour.

One afternoon, I sat inside the moldy den. I was flipping through an overdue library book—Sir Isaac Newton’s
Opticks
—when I heard a timid gurgling from the floor. I looked at the pipe. I stood, then peered down inside it. A sheen of greased water. All the houses on Avenida Bayamo had the same pipe inside—a washing-machine hookup. My father had removed ours years ago when Peter had moved into the room, putting up some turquoise beaded curtains. Still, I often dreamt of our pipe. At four, I dropped my favorite trinket, a plastic blood-red fingernail, inside it. Once I wore it over the tip of my finger, extending my hand as if elegant, admiring it before my father and brother. They laughed at me, a drunken puppet, encouraging me to show off for them, before they stopped, uncomfortable.

“Stop being a sissy,” my father said.

***

We drove down the street, silent. It was a glorious wet night, masses of hot and cold air bumping up against each other. Our tires flung arcs of water onto the grass, the sidewalk. Toward the north, the clouds were underlit with a soft, baby-pink light.

Just outside Publix stood a group of people waiting for the rain to stop. One old lady in a transparent raincoat kept looking at us, not with judgment or curiosity, but with the oddest benevolence. I dislodged a shopping cart from the train and kissed William, just once, on the cheek, in celebration. The world seemed dangerous and hopeful all at once.

He stiffened. His body language changed, its dark energies curling inward. The clouds had shifted, the rain stopped, and a bronze moon—tropical, haloed—hovered above the palms.

I said, “Are you okay?”

His back straightened. He walked through the automatic doors, eyes fixed on the shining banks of limes. He picked one up and rotated his thumb across its green, pocked surface. It might have been a beautiful grenade in his palm.

“Is something wrong?”

He glanced at me as if I’d hurled a glassful of water at him.

He inched the cart forward and picked up a box of pineapple gelatin, pretending to study its contents. His Adam’s apple was hot, gleaming. He held up his hand: he didn’t want to talk to me.

“William?”

“There’s a time and a place.”

“I don’t understand. Nobody saw us.”

He was frowning now. “
Somebody
saw,” he said.

“But—”

“Listen—”

“Is this our first fight?” I asked, more baffled than I’d intended. Was it coming this soon—only weeks into our living together?

He stopped the cart halfway down the aisle. “Evan,” he said. “Now listen to me.” His voice was kinder now, a whisper. “You never know what these people’ll do. They might look friendly enough, but all it takes is one false move.”

I considered his statement. Only a few days ago I’d read about two men in Dallas who’d been scorched with blowtorches after they’d been loitering in a park. Certainly these things happened in the world, but they were rare. Or were they?

“But she
liked
us.” I nodded toward the old lady, who’d somehow wandered back into the store. She, too, was picking up limes. “She wasn’t upset.”

“No, she wasn’t,” he agreed. “But maybe her husband would be, or maybe her son. Her grandson, for instance, might be a skinhead. I’m just telling you, you can’t be too careful.”

I sighed. I sensed she was listening to us. Her eyelids grew heavy as if she were beginning to feel depressed.

“Anyway,” he said, his voice softening. “We aren’t the average couple. Especially in these parts.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not your average sissy interior-decorator couple. I mean think about it—an older man, a younger man. We’re a threat. We push their buttons. We have to watch ourselves every step of the way.”

I didn’t want to watch myself every step of the way. I wanted to be deeper inside my life. I walked ahead, wandering about the freezers, as he straggled by the olive jars, the sardine tins. His anger seethed, completely out of proportion to the matter at hand. What was his deal? I’d only kissed him, for God’s sake. If he wanted to be upset, I could pull down his zipper with my teeth, and take him deep inside my mouth, right here, right now, in front of everyone in the store. Then what would he do?

My throat pulsed. What was I doing with him, anyway? Could I be making a mistake? For all I knew there were already warrants out for his arrest. I walked ahead, my rage heating up my face to the burning point. Would I catch on fire? A cold drop of sweat rolled down my temple. I thought about his wizened shoulders. I thought about his bald spot glistening beneath the glare of hooded lights.
William, William,
I whispered.
How I want to punch a spoon deep into the valley of your back.

“There you are,” he said brightly.

He nudged me with the shopping cart, and I flinched, startled by the intrusion on my thoughts. “Where were you?”

“Look.” Inside the cart were three pints of strawberries, taco shells, a half-dozen chocolate bars—my favorite foods.

“Thank you.”

A mute smiling panic took hold of his face. “I bought these for you.”

“I know, I know.”

Outside in the car, we waited for the light to turn green. A man in the Camaro beside us banged on his dashboard like a conga drum, eyes gleaming as if he were high. He was singing now. Salsa music cascaded from his speakers. William turned to me then and kissed me hard, a bright dense charge coursing through my nerves. The other cars shot forward. The roads steamed beneath the streetlights. How quickly things could change, the world sparkling, full of rollicking possibility.

***

The storms continued through the night. An electric smell hovered in the air, smoke rising from the trees. I rolled onto my side and pressed my lips into the warmth of his back. His skin smelled of rainwater, ferns. I thought:
Everything has been leading here. All those nights spent alone, all those nights listening to my parents’ silence—all were in payment for this. I’ll never be happier.

When I was finally adjusting to my new life, when I’d started sleeping eight hours straight without waking at 4:00 a.m. to the burning pit of my stomach, I saw her. The night was hot, sodden. We’d just watched
The Bride of Frankenstein,
and William was in the bathroom, flossing, then rinsing with water and two droplets of grapefruit-seed extract. I sat in the living room, my hands folded on my lap, feeling at peace, feeling entirely and utterly at peace, when I heard the familiar scuff of shoes on the pavement outside.

The curtains shivered in the breeze. I thought of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, lonesome and yearning, lured to the blind man’s cottage by the plaintive call of his violin. Something scrabbled at my stomach. I had the distinct feeling I was being watched, so I stepped toward the window, closed the curtain.

I might have been dreaming. Ursula was standing on the sidewalk, hands in her pockets, waiting for me. Drizzle streaked her orange windbreaker. I stopped dead, then switched off the light.

“Evan?” she called.

I froze, hoping she couldn’t see me. My pulse thudded in my head. Was she really calling my name, or had I just imagined it?

Then I got it: they were waiting for us—my mother, my father, the police. I looked for the squad cars, their engines running, headlights off beneath the trees. They’d shoot him, I knew it. A clean white wound, a pucker, right through the center of his forehead, as I stood off to the sidelines, doubled over in shock.

Then I looked closer. No cars, no police. My mother.

“Evan? I want to talk to you.”

Her voice was sweet, unbearable. I wanted her to come inside. I wanted her to walk away. Her presence brought back everything I’d driven out of my head—that I’d given up a past and a future; that I’d gravely disappointed somebody close to me; that I’d been truly, genuinely missed. I felt it in my gut, an icy deadening ache. Who was she to tell about her sadness? Who was she to talk with about Peter, who hadn’t come home for so many Christmases?

“Why’s it dark in here?” said William, walking into the room.

I looked at his domed forehead, dumbstruck.

“Somebody out there?” He edged toward the window before I could stop him. He gazed across the glittering lawn, the empty floodlit street. His eyes registered nothing, and he turned to me. “Let’s go to sleep, kiddo.”

I stayed before the window while William shooed the dogs to their respective beds. My heart was breaking in two. And then I saw her again, this time her head low, her hair unbraided on her shoulders as she walked down the street to the house of my childhood.

***

I lay on the floor beside the sofa, curled on my side, listening to William falling asleep. I often took refuge in that sound as I let myself go, synchronizing our breathing. Tonight, though, it distracted me. I lay with my eyes open, dwelling upon the singing tires from the distant turnpike. I tried to fix upon the sound of an individual tractor trailer. What was it carrying, where on earth could it be headed at this hour? I pictured star-fruit to Atlanta, contact lenses to Key Largo, walking catfish to Montreal.

Was it Peter’s leaving that had changed her? He’d always been her favorite. Not that she’d admitted it, but I knew how she felt: her eyes glistened whenever she talked about him. He was the first, born after two miscarriages—a terrible labor that almost killed her. She named him after an old boyfriend, an amateur gardener and lineman who’d died on the job. For years afterward she’d stumbled from one thing to the next—secretary, bookkeeper, restaurant hostess. She was even a lounge singer for a time. Still, as much as she’d worked to cheer herself up, she couldn’t get Peter out of her mind. How he’d fallen against the transmission tower. Hanging, lifeless in his safety belt. Turning like the hands of a clock. An aerialist, a four-pointed star.

She’d never loved my father as much as she wanted to. She’d never felt that “gut-level charge,” though when she first saw him, in a shiny red jacket, surrounded by the prettiest girls at the party, she’d convinced herself that he was the one. “I want him,” she’d said to her friend Marilyn. “I want him to notice me.” She was tired, after all, of so much loss, the deaths of Peter and her clinging mother. My father had just been hired in the university’s chemistry department, and all she’d wanted was to rest.