Mysterious Skin (27 page)

“Look down from the sky…and stay by my cradle ’til morning is nigh.” Or so sang the carolers. By the sound of their voices, they huddled together only a few houses from Coach’s doorstep. I scanned the room, thoughts rocketing through my mind so quickly I couldn’t catalog them: there’s the spot where he kept his stack of video games…. Right about there, he first took my picture…The same window where he’d drawn the blinds before he carried me to bed….

I knew I had to talk now. Brian waited, eyes blinking behind his glasses, resembling a kid inside his first chamber of horrors. Holding his hand seemed preposterous, so I let go. If we were stars in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, then I would have embraced him, my hands patting his shoulderblades, violins and cellos billowing on the soundtrack as tears streamed down our faces. But Hollywood would never make a movie about us.

“It took a while to remember you,” I told him. “Eric’s letter mentioned you, and something seemed familiar. But really. I’ve never seen a UFO, let alone stepped inside one. If a little green man had examined me, I doubt I’d forget it.” Brian smiled, his mouth an awkward arc. In the darkness he appeared almost handsome. “So I knew there was some
thing more to your story. And then it hit me, who you were.”

Brian stuffed hands in pockets and unrolled a photograph. “Look at this.” Although the dark loosened its particulars, I could still make out the picture of the Panthers. “That one’s me,” Brian said, circling his face with his finger. His expression in the photo seemed lost, hopeless. “And that’s you.” I almost laughed at my pushed-forth chest, the black sunblock bisecting my face. Brian pointed to the figure next to me, but this time he didn’t say a word. It was Coach. Even in shadow, I could distinguish the baseball cap, the steady and rehearsed grin, the mustache.

“I feel like he’s watching us,” I said. “But as for where he is now, I haven’t the slightest. He coached some summers after the Panthers, but his teams were made up of older kids. I’ve always guessed someone complained, and the Little League people assigned him boys he couldn’t handle in the ways he wanted. So I think he moved after that. I really can’t say. For all I know, he could have suffered a stroke or a brain aneurysm, right here in this room. Maybe his ghost is watching us as we speak.”

Brian seemed to ponder that idea, his eyes examining the room’s china cabinet, its ottoman, stopping at its rocking chair. “He came back for me,” he said. “It was an accident. It was Halloween, and I think some of the older Little League boys were with him. He saw me, he knew it was me. He followed me into some dark trees. It’s the only time I’d seen him, and I haven’t seen him since.” Outside, a car slid past, headlights sneaking into the window to highlight Brian’s face. “Maybe I’ll never, ever remember the rest about that night. The reason is because I was alone with him. But the first time it happened was different. You were there. I’m relying on you now.”

The photograph dropped to the carpet and curled like a scroll. I considered the best way to begin. I felt stranded, as
though delivering a speech to a stadium filled with listeners. “This is crazy, but inside here are things I’ve never told.” I traced an
X
across my heart with my fist. “Eric doesn’t know, Mom doesn’t know. I don’t think anyone can understand, really. And this will sound odd, but when it first started happening, the feeling I felt more than anything else was honored.” Brian looked at the floor, nodding. “He had chosen me, you know? Out of all the boys on the team, he’d picked me. Like I’d been blessed or something. He taught me things no other boy on the team or at school could know. I was his.”

The cats stretched out to lounge at our feet. I resumed my story, gradually leading to the point in the plot where Brian appeared. “I guess he suckered me in. He was there at the right time, Mom was with Alfred, I was learning things early.” Brian nodded still. “Are you following me?”

“Just go on. Don’t stop.”

“Coach took me to movies, told me I was his star player. He stuffed me full of candy and let me win a trillion video games. And then he was there, on top of me on the kitchen floor, rubbing his dick against my bare belly.” I could still feel the scratch of the coarse platinum hairs on Coach’s arms. I glanced to my left; to the kitchen’s features that hadn’t changed: the lemony color of the cabinets, paint spattered at the window’s corners, the chandelier’s green glass teardrops. I had watched those dangling above me, catching the light, on that summer afternoon, the floor beneath me carpeted with cereal.
Here we go.

“After that, there was no turning back. From then on, I’d do anything he wanted. It lasted that whole summer. We were…in love.” Those words were no longer accurate. I tried to spit out a laugh when I said them, possibly because I’d never said them aloud, had only kept them silent, for years, inside my head. But my throat had no laughter left in
it. “I guess I sound like I’m preaching, like there’s a moral here, that I should start bawling and scream ‘my childhood was taken from me.’ But I don’t believe that.”

There was so much more I could tell him, but everything seemed irrelevant. “We were in love,” I’d said, and I wanted to take that back, wanted Brian to speak. I placed my tongue against the inside of my cheek, tasting the steely bud of my wound, soothing the place where the shampoo bottle had smashed my face. I know you want it, the john had said. Had that only been last night? New York seemed lifetimes away.

“The game had started,” Brian said. “I sat on the bench, as usual. I wasn’t good at baseball like you. And then everyone looked up at the rain, sprinkles at first, then torrents, drenching everything. The umpire called the game.”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember that. But no one was there to pick you up.”

“My mother was working, she had planned to leave early to take me home after the game. But she didn’t plan on a rain-out. My father had better things to do. I just stood there, as everyone drove off with their parents. And then you came over, you were beside me in the dugout. ‘We’ll drive you home,’ you said.”

Another car’s high beams lit up the room, briefly illuminating the trio of people in the wall’s framed portrait: a spectacled, orange-sweatered mom, a dad with an overbite and necktie, a baby in blue frills between them. The light stunned Brian. He must have thought the owners had returned, because he shot from the couch, then sat back down. “Sorry. I’m jumpy.” He proceeded to explain that I had to continue the story from here. He called the rest “a blur,” saying it was all part of five hours he’d forgotten.

“You sat in the back of Coach’s station wagon.” I could see him there.
I’ll take you home, Brian,
Coach had yelled to
the backseat,
but first we’ll go to my house.
“He drove to his place. I led you around. But he didn’t want you in the bedroom. That was our special place, I guess, reserved for just us two.” I wanted to believe that. “He was in the mood for something different. He wanted both of us right here, in this very room.”

I paused again, but Brian objected. “Keep going. Don’t stop again until you’ve finished.”

“The routine was the same whenever Coach invited someone else over,” I said. “He used me as the prop to pull you in. I stretched out on his couch, which”—I patted the space between our seats—“was a hell of a lot more comfortable than this. And he took off my clothes. I wasn’t even conscious of being naked; it’s like God or whoever had created me to be that way. And I oohed and aahed to give the impression that what he was doing to me was the greatest thing I’d ever known.” In a way, I thought, it was. Or it had been, at one time, now only part of memory. “That way, you’d be there, on the other side of the room, hopefully wanting Coach to do to you what he was doing to me. He had planned it all.

“In the game he played, I had to do things to you first, like a warm-up. I’d kiss you a little, preparing you, slipping my tongue inside to get your mouth all wet and shiny before he shoved his big soft lips and that thick mustache over your face and nearly ate you alive.”

“I think I remember that part,” Brian said. His voice was a spider’s, hidden away in some far corner’s web. “It came to me with Avalyn. I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d been kissed.” I didn’t know what he meant, but when I started to ask he stopped me. “I’ll shut up. Go on.”

“Coach and I got your clothes off, touched and massaged you all over. I guess you whimpered, made sounds a deaf-mute would make. Coach loved that. His favorite thing
was laying his tongue inside a kid’s mouth, so I presume he sucked around at your tongue awhile. Then things progressed. There was this little game I loved, where Coach would open his mouth as wide as a fist and circle me with it. I mean my dick, my balls, everything.” I expected Brian to blush here, but if he did I couldn’t tell. I only saw his face, limned by the porch light’s deep blue. “He did that to me, and then I tried to do it to you. To show you everything was A-OK. But my mouth was nothing like his. I was just a boy. So he went down on you, sucked and sucked. I watched, amazed and jealous and ten thousand other emotions. You kept your eyes closed mostly, but when they fluttered open they were glassy, far away.”

Brian moved closer to me. I could see his hands shaking, and he bunched them in his lap. Then he took a deep breath, and as he exhaled he made a soft moaning sound. I realized he was trying not to cry. If I had a spirit, I felt it fly out of me then. And if Brian had a spirit, it flew hand in hand with mine, lifting above the couch, passing through the roof, hovering in the black and measureless air that blanketed the house where Coach once lived.

“Then the other game began. The five-dollar game.” The carolers stood next door now, their voices harmonizing in the December chill.
Yet in the dark street shineth, the everlasting light.
“Coach would make me do things, crazy sex things, and if I could do them I’d get a five-dollar bill. Usually I’d get it even if I couldn’t do them, just seeing my effort was enough for him. And he must have had an extra five bucks that night, because he wanted you in on things, too.”

I waited. I could almost see Coach, standing over us, one hand on my shoulder, one on Brian’s.
Go ahead, Neil.

“We had to fist him. Do you know what that means?” Brian nodded, but by then his face seemed so dazed he
would have made the necessary gesture at anyone. “I went first, of course. To show you. He stood over us, we looked up at him. That always got him off, I guess, seeing those surprised kid faces staring up like that. Or so I gathered, considering all the pictures in his photo album. On that night, the five-dollar bill was mine if I could reach inside him, ram my little fist inside his ass, then wring it all the way to the elbow. And goddamn, I did it. The way it felt—like plunging my arm into a tight, tight sleeve, its insides covered with wet sponges, and then the suction of his ass, squeezing my elbow—it was like his body wanted me inside it, it wanted to devour me whole. I can’t forget that.”

“And then it was my turn,” Brian said. He snarled his words, his voice almost angry. “I did it, too. I know, because I felt the inside of the calf.” His hand—no, his entire body—was trembling.

“Yes, you did it. Coach there, his ass jutting out, his face sort of erased and this blissed-out look replacing it. And you kneeling on the floor, your arm disappeared, gone, the fist and wrist and forearm swallowed up by his body.” I could remember Brian perfectly now, that lost look in his eyes, eight years old. And I’d been right beside him.

And I could remember Coach, as well, perhaps better now than ever before. But something had changed. “Love”—that was what I’d always termed the emotion I carried for Coach. Now it was different, an emotion I had no adequate word for.

I couldn’t go on. “And we put our clothes on, we got in the station wagon, drove you back to Little River, and dropped you off in your driveway. The end.”

“And I had a nosebleed. Don’t forget the nosebleed. It wasn’t from aliens and their tracking devices. It was something else. I want to know how it happened.”

I was sinking into the couch, it was suffocating me. I
stood and stepped across the room to the window. “You were so dazed you couldn’t stand up straight. It was like he’d ripped something free from you, whatever controlled your balance, and when your arm pulled out of him you fell. Weird. You fell face first into my knee, and when we twisted you up onto the couch your nose was shooting this geyser of blood.”

“Like this?” His voice lifted, excited, almost shrieking. “Like this?”

I turned from the window. The blue still shone off Brian’s face, but he had removed his glasses, and his eyes had altered. They glittered and flashed like a puppy’s. And below them, dribbling from one nostril, a stream of blood. It glistened, almost black. As I stared, its flow grew heavier, trickling down Brian’s upper lip, his lower lip, his chin. “Like this?” he asked a third time, and he knocked his knuckle against his nose. The blood spurted then, a gush of it staining his jacket, his shirt, a lilac on the couch’s cushion.

I bounded back to him. “Stop,” I said. I pulled his hand from his face and propped his head into my lap, his nose in the air. I had to stop the bleeding. I swiped my fingers across his face, and his blood made an inky flourish on my hand.

Brian closed his eyes, blood trailing down his cheek and matting his hair. I felt it, damp and warm, seeping through my pant leg. It was Brian’s blood, and for some reason I knew it was pure. No other man I’d held in my arms—and now, not even I—had blood this pure.

His eyes reopened, and he looked up at me. “Tell me, Neil,” he said. “Tell me more.”

I could hear the carolers’ footsteps, their hushed giggles. They approached Coach’s house. We had to leave soon. “One more thing,” I said. “You were so erased that when Coach
gave you the five bucks, you just let the bill drop to the floor. I saw the money lying there, and I picked it up. It was mine.” Brian tried to exhale from his nose, and a bubble of blood widened and popped. “So I owe you, Brian. I’ve owed you that, all these years.” I lifted his head a little, patted my ass for my wallet, found a five-dollar bill.