Saints of Augustine (9 page)

“Yes,” his father said quickly. “I drove to the office. Made some calls.” He chewed as he spoke.

Charlie was surprised at how angry he felt. “You're lying!” he yelled. “I know you're lying!”

It was as if he hadn't raised his voice, hadn't said anything at all. His father chewed, swallowed, stared straight ahead. Then he picked up his water glass. It slipped out of his hand and shattered on the floor.

“Whoops,” his father said. He reached for the chunks of glass.

“Don't!” Charlie shouted. “What are you doing?”

His father was bending over and trying to gather the broken glass with his fingers. The hand he was using to collect the shards left a wide red smear across the floor.

“You've cut yourself!”

“I have not,” his father said. “That's a scratch.”

“Dad—” Charlie was bent over, trying to reach for the glass and his father's hands at the same time. “Don't! Just don't touch anything!” The cut hand was dripping blood. “Let me get a paper towel. Don't move.” He jumped up from his chair and turned his back on the craziness. When he turned around again, a wad of paper towels clutched in front of him, his father was up from the table and walking across the living room, holding his hand against his robe. “Wait!” Charlie hollered. He ran after him.

His father walked down the hall to his bedroom. “Good
night
, Charlie,” he said, and then sat down on the bed, still clutching his bleeding hand.

Charlie ran into the bathroom and got the Band-
Aids from under the sink. “Don't move, Dad. Just let me get this cleaned up, will you?” He knelt down in front his father and pressed the wad of paper towels to the cut and squeezed.

“Ow,”
his father said, as if making a casual observation.

Still squeezing, Charlie looked up into his father's eyes. “I know you didn't go anywhere today.”

“Charlie, please, would you just let me…” He glanced at the bed he was sitting on. “Sleep?”

“Tell me you didn't go anywhere. I know you didn't move your car.”

“You don't know that.”

Charlie peeled back the paper towels. They stuck to the bloody thumb, and when they finally gave way, he saw the puncture wound, still bleeding. “I think you're going to need stitches.”

“I am not!” his father said. He actually started laughing. “
I'm
the grown-up here.
I
know if I need stitches or not. And I don't. Give me those.” He indicated the box of Band-Aids Charlie was holding. Charlie handed them over. His father fumbled with the box one-handedly, and it dropped into his lap.

The egg
, Charlie thought.
Tell him about the egg.
He reached forward and took the box of Band-Aids before his father could pick it up again. There was blood on the box. “Can we please go to the hospital and get your thumb looked at?”

“Charlie—
no.
”

“Fine!” Charlie snapped. “Don't blame me if you bleed to death!” But he calmed himself, pressed the paper towels against the thumb again, and used his teeth to tear open a Band-Aid. He stretched one tightly around the thumb, then opened another, and another, until the thumb was encased and the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

“See that?” his father said, looking down at the bandages. “Just a little cut. You did a good job, Charlie.” He stretched himself out until he was lying flat with his head on the pillow.

Charlie rubbed his face with both hands. He got up and started out of the room, then walked back and sat on the end of the bed. With his back to his father, he said, “Here's the thing, Dad.” He rubbed his face again, and clenched his hands together. “I'm—I'm worried about you. I wanted to see if you were actually leaving
the house, so I—I stuck an egg under your tire. And when I got home the egg wasn't broken, so that means you didn't go anywhere. It means…”

He suddenly realized he didn't want to talk about the egg. He didn't even want to talk about how his father never left the house anymore. What he really wanted to talk about was his mother.

I wish Mom was here
, he imagined himself saying.
I just really wish she was here, because she wouldn't let us get so crazy. I wish we could talk about Mom!

He looked at his father, who was breathing evenly, his head sunk into the pillow, his eyes closed. He'd fallen asleep.

“Damn it!” Charlie said aloud. He glanced down at his father's thumb to make sure the blood wasn't coming through the bandages, then walked out of the room.

Sound asleep. Probably not going to move for hours. There was no reason to cower next to the window with the fan going. Charlie dug his rolling papers out of his nightstand. He rolled and lit a joint standing in the middle of his bedroom, took a long draw, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling.
He's out
of control
, he thought.
I don't even know what to do with him.
He took another hit, then put the joint out, took off all his clothes, and walked across the hall to his bathroom.

In the shower, he tried to push every thought out his head and down the drain. He dried off fiercely, as if smothering flames.

Back in his room, he stood wrapped in a towel before the mirror over his dresser. His face looked puffy but his body looked thin. He would look like hell in his basketball uniform right now. Good thing he didn't have to wear it. He lit the joint again and dug through his closet, laying out a few shirts. A couple pairs of pants. A tie (he couldn't remember the last time he'd worn one). He glanced at the clock on his nightstand. Plenty of time. Even with all that craziness, he was still ahead of schedule.
Perrin
, he thought, glancing at himself,
you're going to go the distance tonight. It's going to happen. Visualize it.
He put on a CD, took one more hit off the joint to relax, then stretched out on his bed for a power nap.

 

When he woke up, it was nearly ten
P. M
. Foggy, disoriented, he sprang out of bed and scrambled for his
pants. Before he had them on, he grasped how awful the situation was. This was bad. Really bad. He had to call Kate.

But he ran down the hall first and looked in at his father, who was still sound asleep. There was no sign of blood seeping through the bandage on his thumb.

Cursing and storming down the hall, Charlie went back to his room and dialed Kate's number.

Mrs. Bryant answered.

“It's Charlie. I need to—can I talk to Kate?”

“I don't think she wants to talk to you right now, Charlie. Do you?” Mrs. Bryant said faintly, away from the phone. “No, Charlie, she says she doesn't want to talk right now.”

Charlie pressed his hand against his forehead. “Mrs. Bryant, please. I just need to talk to her. I need to explain something.” But what was he going to explain? That his drunk father had cut himself? That Charlie had tended to him and then gotten high and fallen asleep? He had no idea what he would say; he just wanted to talk to Kate.

There was a long stretch of silence on the other end of the line, so silent that he suspected a hand was being pressed against the receiver. Then Mrs. Bryant
came back on. “I'm sorry, but Kate doesn't want to come to the phone right now. She says she'll call you. It's late now, Charlie, so I'm going to hang up. Good night.”

“LINNN-DAA!” Melissa wailed along
with Ernest Borgnine. She crouched next to the television and thrust her arm down over the back of a dining-room chair, opening her hand toward the carpet. Then she made a fist and held it up toward an imaginary Gene Hackman. “You! Preacher! You lyin', murderin' son of a bitch!”

The rest of them clapped and hooted.

“Bravo!” Justin shouted from his seat next to Sam on the couch.

Melissa made a goofy bow, then darted back down to her spot on the floor.

They'd drawn character names, according to Melissa's rules for the film festival. Whenever the group decided a moment in the movie was worthy of a dramatic reenactment, they stopped the DVD, and the person who'd drawn the name had to get up in front of the group and act it out alongside the character. Sam had drawn Belle Rosen, the Shelley Winters character. He'd already had his big moment: getting down on his knees next to the television and clutching his chest, making choking sounds as he faked a heart attack, and then collapsing onto his back. They'd given him a standing ovation.

“More!” Justin had yelled.

“No more,” Sam had said, grinning as he got to his feet. “I'm dead. Now I get to go back to my trailer and…eat bon-bons.”

The evening had been more fun than Sam ever expected, in part because Justin had shown up—and with a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale and a jar of popcorn, to boot. “
Organic
popcorn?” Melissa had said. “So it wasn't, like, doused in nuclear dust?”

“No way,” Justin had said. “It's free-range, too. No cages for those corncobs. They were allowed to walk
around and socialize before they were sent to the chopping block.”

“How humane.” She'd turned toward the living room. “Everybody, this is Justin. Justin, that's Tonya, Ben, Lisa, and Sam.”

Justin had waved at everyone, but his eyes went directly to Sam, who grinned and motioned him over to an open spot beside him.

“Sorry I'm late,” Justin said, his arm grazing Sam's as he sat down. “We haven't capsized yet, have we?”

“Not yet,” Sam told him. “But you missed Tonya doing her Red Buttons power walk around the deck.”

Melissa stuck a baseball cap in front of Justin. “Draw a name. Cliff didn't show up, so there are still two left. You're either Acres the waiter or Reverend Scott.”

Justin drew the name and unfolded it like a fortune cookie. “Reverend Scott,” he read.

“Good! Acres croaks about ten minutes after the ship turns over.”

Now they were reaching the end of the movie. It was time for Justin/Reverend Scott's big scene. He
scooped a handful of popcorn from the bowl and funneled it into his mouth. “I'm up,” he told Sam, mid-chew. “Wish me luck.”

On the TV screen, Gene Hackman was perched on the scaffolding, about to make his leap for the steam valve. Justin went through a few mock stretches, then stood next to the screen, watching it. When Hackman leaped out and grabbed the valve, hanging from it, Justin pitched himself forward, grabbed the empty cookie plate off the coffee table and held it over his head with his arms fully extended.

They burst out laughing and applauded.

In this position, Justin's T-shirt was riding up, exposing a quarter moon of tanned stomach. Sam's eyes kept going down to it.

“You want another life?” Hackman yelled, and Justin yelled it right along with him, staring up at the plate. “Then take me!” He knew the lines perfectly. His voice overlapped Hackman's in stereo. He turned the plate in his hands just as Hackman was turning the valve. “You can make it!” Justin/Hackman yelled to Melissa/Borgnine. “Keep going!
Rogo! Get them through!” Then he dropped straight down onto the carpet, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

“Encore!” Sam yelled over the clapping.

Melissa's mother entered the room with a tray of brownies. She stepped up to the television and rapped her knuckles against the top of it.

“Mom, we're watching this! It's the crucial moment!”

“I know,” her mother said. She bent over a little as if listening to the TV set. A moment later, Ernest Borgnine and Red Buttons and the rest were banging at the inner hull of the ship. “See?” Melissa's mother said. “They hear me.” She rapped again, and the characters on the screen went wild, banging the hull with pieces of scrap metal.

“Hey, your mom just rescued us with brownies!” Justin said as she left the room.

A blowtorch penetrated the hull, the survivors were rescued, and the brownies were passed around.

“Wow,” Sam said as Justin sank back down beside him on the couch, “you're a regular thespian.”

“It's in the genes,” Justin said. “My parents have
been doing community theater for as long as I can remember. I don't want to be an actor, though. I want to direct.”

“Direct? Wow—that's pretty ambitious.”

“I want to make quiet little intelligent pictures, but I'd also love to direct a disaster film at least once in my life. Big cast, huge sets, explosions. And by the way, you weren't so bad yourself, Ms. Winters.”

Sam smiled, hoping he didn't have brownie smeared on his teeth. “I've been told I give good heart attack.”

“She's great in
Night of the Hunter
. Ever seen it?”

“No. Was it a disaster movie?”

“Well, that depends on who you ask. The studio would say yes. But it's great. There's this amazing underwater shot of Shelley Winters dead in her convertible at the bottom of a lake. How cool is that?”

“I'll have to rent it.”

“We'll watch it together,” Justin said. “I could see it a hundred times.” He bit into his brownie.

Sam caught Melissa's eye across the room, and she grinned, making him nervous.

After the brownies and popcorn were gone, they
were all getting ready to leave when she tapped Sam on the shoulder and whispered, “Why don't you give Justin your e-mail address?”

“Huh?” Sam asked.

“He gave you his at the mall. You should give him yours so you guys can get together—it would be like the reunion of Reverend Scott and Belle Rosen in the afterlife.”

Sam glanced behind him and saw that Justin was close enough to hear their conversation, and he felt his face flush with embarrassment. “I think I'm through being Shelley Winters for a while.”

“That's so not the point,” Melissa said. He glanced at Justin, who gave a little shrug and smiled.

At home later that night, Sam felt ready for anything but sleep. He could have run a circle around all of St. Augustine without getting winded, so much energy seemed to be coursing through his body. He'd finally given Justin his e-mail before they'd left Melissa's, and after checking to see if Justin had written him, he wrote Melissa an e-mail thanking her for hosting everyone, and telling her he was looking forward to
Tidal Wave
, which they were scheduled to
watch on the following Monday—the last week before school started up again.

He was just about to send the e-mail when a message popped up on his screen from nickoftime: Still awake?

Sam had stared at the napkin with Justin's number and e-mail enough times to recognize his screen name. He glanced around the room, as if there were people looking over his shoulder. After a moment, he leaned forward again and typed.

Sam sat back in his chair for a moment, one arm wrapped around his chest like a seat belt, his other hand clutching his jaw. Had he just told Justin he was gay? Was that what was happening here? He tried to think of different things he might type next, but he could really only think of one thing. He leaned forward and typed:

The next morning, Sam felt on top of the world. He and Justin had messaged back and forth until nearly two
A. M
., but he still sprang out of bed at eight o'clock feeling charged up and ready to run a marathon. He felt so different that he made himself
stand in front of the bathroom mirror after brushing his teeth so that he could really look at himself. On the outside, he looked the same as always. Same hair (a dirty-blond mop—would it ever get spiky?), same face (no major zits, thank god for that), same wiry body. But something was different. It must have been on the inside—it felt like an electrical surge that was somehow attached to his message exchange with Justin. When he'd crawled into bed late last night, Sam had felt like he'd spilled his guts and stamped the word
GAY
on his forehead; but thinking back on it now, he hadn't really admitted anything
specific
. In fact, the word
gay
hadn't been typed once by either one of them. Sam just hadn't worded anything that would give Justin the impression that he
wasn't
gay.

Giving someone the idea that you aren't interested in being thought of as not gay is practically the same as telling them you might be gay, isn't it? That was what had happened. And it felt good.

Really, though,
another part of his brain said,
how can you know that about yourself? You've never had sex with anyone—other than your left hand. How can you really
know for sure that you'd like it, without ever having tried it?

Then it occurred to him that it didn't matter. He didn't have to decide what he was. Let whatever happened happen. All he had to know was that he'd had a great time seeing Justin at Melissa's and, somehow, an even better time chatting with him online, and as he left his bedroom the next morning, Sam felt as if he were walking a foot off the ground.

“Hey, Biscuit Face.”

Teddy was standing at the kitchen counter, eating a bowl of cereal. His wispy hair was feathered up wildly around his head. He was wearing a long checkered jacket with a
ROOF-SMART
T-shirt underneath.

No—not a long checkered jacket. A bathrobe, hanging open.

And pajama pants.

“W-what are you doing here?” Sam asked uneasily.

Teddy looked down at his bowl and shrugged. “Having a bowl of cereal.”

“I mean, why aren't you dressed?” He was confused. For one thing, Teddy's car hadn't been in the
driveway when Sam had gotten home last night. For another, this was Tuesday, and his mom worked on Tuesdays. What the hell was this jerk doing in his pajamas in their kitchen, first thing in the morning?

“Well, the same reason you aren't dressed,” Teddy said. He gestured with his spoon toward Sam's tank top and shorts. “I just got up. Most people don't jump out of bed and into their clothes. They
ease
into the day, right?”

Sam just stared at him, as if staring might make him go away. Teddy stared back and spooned cereal into his mouth.

Then his mom's voice broke the awkward silence: “Morning, Sam.”

Sam spun around. She was emerging from the hall. Hannah was following, her arms wrapped around Jasbo's wiggling body. “Why aren't you at work?” he asked. “It's a Tuesday.”

“Well, I know it's a Tuesday. I called in. I'm taking the day off.”

“Well…what's
he
doing here?”

“Not feeling too welcome at the moment,” Teddy said. “I can tell you that.”

Sam watched his mom's face level into a more serious, annoyed expression. “I don't like your tone of voice, young man.”

“Sorry,” Sam said without even trying to sound like he meant it. “I just don't get it. I mean…did he sleep on the couch?”

His mom's face leveled out even more. She glanced at Hannah, who was bent down next to her, spilling the dog onto the carpet. When she looked back at Sam, she said, “Would you like to go back to your room and come out again, in a better mood?”

“I was in a
great
mood!” Sam snapped. He bounced his eyes from his mom to Hannah to the dog to Teddy. It was like looking at a mutated family portrait. Everything that occurred to him to say at that moment would only have made the situation worse—much worse. He stomped around them down the hall to his room and slammed the door.