The Brink (16 page)

“The process . . . ?” Henry says.

“Of integrating . . . And actualizing . . . Oh, don't ask me,” Spike says. “I just cook and fluff the pussy willow.” Spike leaves them to get acquainted, his boots—made for heavy construction—clomping down the stairs.

Jed eyes him bluntly with his sharp, blue eyes. “So are you gay?”

Henry sits on other bed. “I was married for twenty-two years . . .” he says, and then stops. He's not sure where the story goes after that.

Jed leans back. “Thank God.”

Dawn Manor's resident guru sits in a leather armchair in the living room, wearing a linen shirt and flowy pants that are basically drapes.

“It's the secrets that kill us,” Bodi says. “And the cure for secrets is stories.”

He's greyhound-thin, with rimless glasses and the flexibilities of a man half his age; every now and again, he lifts himself up on the armrests, like a gymnast on the bars, to tuck his feet and sit cross-legged. Henry has noticed how Bodi touches things—tabletops, shoulders—with intense, appraising grace. Bodi was an antiques dealer in “a prior life,” he told them over breakfast. “It made me understand that everything has a delicacy that must be protected.”

Four men face Bodi in a scattershot arrangement. Across from Henry, Jed sits on his hands and contemplates his kneecaps. Of the group, Henry is by far the oldest.

“How about you, Doug?” Bodi says, his hands resting upwards on his knees. “Tell us the story of your secret.”

Doug's gaze relocates from the window to Bodi. He spooks Henry—in a cowboy shirt and stained jeans, Doug gives off stray voltage, mumbling his reluctance under his breath. Even his moustache doesn't look completely enlisted. Doug works a cigarette from his pocket and Bodi stops him.

“No smoking inside.”

“I just want to roll it between my fingers,” Doug says. “It helps me relax.”

Doug explains that he worked in a shipyard in Bayonne, running the cranes, and “pruning up” in the showers. “I was Jiffy Lube. In and out,” Doug says, and Henry shivers with a revulsion that almost instantly becomes intrigue. Doug's boss showed up in the showers, fucked him, and fired him the next day. “Those were
union
showers,” Doug says. “Asshole was management.”

He lights the cigarette and Bodi says, in a first show of authority, “Put the cigarette out or go outside.” Doug smirks and heads out to the porch.

Bodi threshes his hands, recovering the moment. “Henry, what about you? Would you like to say something?”

Henry looks for an entrance, a beginning to what seems like hopeless years of middle. He sees the ghostly bridge of a forearm reaching into his sleeping bag at Boy Scout camp circa 1963. He remembers, as a teenager, imagining his parents dying in a plane crash so he could live with the tenor Jussi Björling in his Italian castle and hold his penis in his hand whenever he wanted to, the secret root of his talent. Then, with a stab of self-loathing, Henry recalls the certain fold and tuck to the coverlet on the guest bed, the way he remade it every time he raided his cache. “In the early part of my marriage,” Henry starts, and it's like working a stone free from inside him. “I started this extension to my house that I never finished . . .”

At the edge of the driveway, Henry and three others stand in a confused huddle, trying to fix a snow break. Bodi sent them
out to the lawn to work. “Across cultures, across time, men go outside to go inside,” he told them. A day in, and the platitude per minute of speech ratio is getting to Henry. It's as if Bodi has learned to turn every sentence inside out, like a sock.

Henry holds a notched wooded brace while Doug sets two four-by-fours into it. Another man, short and talkative, hammers at the juncture point, missing the nail as much as not. His name tag, stuck to the outside of his jacket, reads “Ronnie!” He works as an inspector for the Transit Authority, which, he said earlier, means he can cruise every truck stop on the Turnpike while getting paid.

“I thought this was supposed to be some singles thing,” Doug announces, blowing air into his fist. “Except it turns out I paid eight hundred bucks to fix this guy's fucking lawn.”

Standing off to the side, Jed giggles in his jacket and loafers.

Doug shoots back, “You think eight hundred bucks is funny?”

Jed retracts his hands inside his sleeves and holes up.

Since the morning, Henry has been feeling increasingly distant, like he has tickets to his life except they're last row, obscured view. What did he come for? None of the men seem like prospects to him; they're all as warped and lonely as he is. With a pang, he realizes he's missing Van, back home, tending to his plants and mail. He must call.

Suddenly, a brown-black flutter of wings explodes from behind the trees. Canada geese, gathering into a migration.

Jed watches them, his mouth open. “How far do they go?”

“Delaware, Maryland, I think,” Henry says.

“Outside Bethesda, some guy held a knife to my throat until I swallowed,” Ronnie says. “That's Maryland in a nutshell.”

Gunshots pop from behind the Manor, out of view. Henry flinches. Hunters. The geese go wild, squawking. “Shit, it's Vietnam up here,” Doug says.

Then Henry notices that there are tears rolling down Jed's cheeks, and the kid makes no effort to wipe them away. “Are you all right?” he asks.

“It's something that happens sometimes, from my meds,” Jed says. “I don't have control over it.”

A bell peels at the front porch: Bodi calling them inside. Doug collects the tools and shoves them at Jed, saying, “You carry them, since you didn't do jack shit.” The others head back, but Henry lingers with Jed. They're roommates, after all, and this is what roommates do. He notices, at his ankle, a little strip of skin. Even in the cold, the kid's not wearing any socks. Up close, out here in the bracing cold, he sees that Jed is older than he thought, with difficult skin. He's not so much young as preserved. Last night, in bed, Jed told him his father runs a Christian school in Pennsylvania. “Goliath was ‘
uncircumcised
,'” Jed whispered. “That's what the Bible says.” Henry turned off the light and said, “Look, don't give me nightmares.”

Out in the dusk, Henry puts his hand on Jed's shoulder. With an expectant look, Jed follows Henry's hand to his face, registering a proposition.

“Am I attractive?” Jed asks.

Henry removes his hand. “Listen, kid, I'm not looking.”

Jed's face goes flat. “You're too old anyway.”

It's such a senselessly cruel thing to say. Henry leaves him, burdened with the tools, thinking, Go ahead and freeze.

Lunch is Spike in a T-shirt and cargo shorts, delivering their pork chops to the table and flexing his biceps. He could be working the leisure deck of a cruise.

“Should we save some food for Rigby?” Ronnie asks.

The question creates a strange quiet. Bodi straightens and Spike goes to him. Seeing them together, for the first time, Henry realizes this is partly what Dawn Manor sells, the miracle they're there for: two grown men, leaning into each other.

“Rigby passed away,” Bodi says. “She had a stroke two weeks ago.”

“It was horrible and spasmy,” says Spike. “Like,
froth
was coming out of her mouth—”

“Please, Spike . . .” Bodi says. “We'll see you boys in an hour.”

Spike and Bodi excuse themselves through a door marked “PRIVATE,” their area of the house. A lock slides home.

“Guys,” Ronnie says, “who do you think is cuter? Bodi or Spike?”

Doug crashes his fork to his plate. “We just heard about a fucking dog dying.”

Henry decides he has to leave, before he turns into one of these people. He heads to the porch and finds a corner where his cell gets a single dot of service.

“Is there a sling?” Van asks when he answers.

“No.”

“Oh, I thought for sure there'd be a sling.”

“Jesus,” Henry says. “Listen, I need to get out of here.”

“Is it a cult?” Van says. “Tell me and I'll get the Better Business Bureau to do an airlift.”

Henry hears, faintly, the clink of ice in a glass. “Are you drinking?” From the quiet he knows that he's right. But he's in no position to challenge anyone on their contradictions.

“Mmmm,” Van says. “Survey says yes.”

“Weren't you supposed to have your son this weekend?”

Van says his ex-wife just informed him she's moving to Orlando, and that she's taking his son with her. “Now I realize why people kidnap their children,” Van says. “What's the jail time on that?”

“We have to look out for each other,” Henry says. “You're my closest friend.” He winces at the truth of it.

“I know,” Van says, “and I just really feel bad about that.”

Through the living room windows, Henry watches snow streak down, blanketing the lawn. A blizzard is beginning, and for two more days, he's going to be stuck here with these men trying to pry him open. Bodi hands out dozens of red strips of ribbon. They're supposed to tie one to each part of their bodies that has experienced a “wounding.” “I did this at a men's conference in Sedona,” Bodi says, “and by the end, there was just this
sea
of red.”

Doug throws his ribbons to the floor.

“Nobody said this would be easy,” Bodi says.

“Nobody said this bullshit works,” Doug says. “I'm going out.”

But with the front door wide, Doug stops short at the threshold. “Holy fuck,” Doug says. “You might want to look at this.”

Emblazoned across the door, in red spray paint, are letters. It takes Henry a moment to decode them, and then more time to understand that the graffiti refers to them. “FAGGOTS.” He has never been called a faggot before, and now, in shock, he realizes he is hated for a love that he's yet to experience. Bodi rushes out to the porch and whispers, “Who the hell . . .” The whole front of the house is covered in it, a single brutal streak. Some neighbor kid practicing to use fear, Henry thinks. There's a call to the police and a terse negotiation about an incident report.

“How long until they get here?” Ronnie asks.

“Not long,” Bodi says.

“Don't you pay taxes?” Ronnie says. He's clearly terrified. “There should be fences! Fences and guns!”

“You're overreacting,” Bodi says.

“Of course I am,” Ronnie says back. “It's what I'm good at!”

Henry notices Doug has vanished outside, to the lawn. “Should I get him?” During moments of stress, Henry wants assignments, distracting lists. It's the stage manager in him. Before he's out the door, Ronnie hands him a can of mace and whispers, “Remember Bethesda.”

Out on the lawn, the snow slants horizontally in the wind. Henry spies Doug a ways up the drive, hammering at the snow
break. Henry approaches with his hands in his pockets, like a sullen teen, but he feels a passing moment of luck, as though he has stepped out from underneath a bull's-eye. He wonders how Bodi will rescue the weekend. At least, Henry thrills to think, they'll skip the bodywork.

A bright orange flash moves at his periphery and Henry takes an instinctive step back. At the edge of the forest, a hunter emerges from the trees, dressed in camouflage uniform and cap. He carries a goose over his shoulder, its neck twisted like a gunnysack. In his left hand, a double-barrel shotgun points into the ground. The hunter nods to Henry as he turns to a pine tree and unzips his fly.

“You one of the gays?” the hunter calls out, pissing against the tree.

“Yes . . . ?” Henry says, and the hunter nods. “You didn't happen to see anyone around this property did you? There's graffiti all over the house. Just happened.”

The hunter looks back, not bothering to conceal himself on the turn. “Somebody did a little job, eh?” he says, and shakes off, tucking himself back in. “No idea, but I'll tell you this. You know that dog they had running around here? Getting into people's business?”

“Actually, I don't. I just got here.”

“Well, you tell the boys who live here I know who poisoned her.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

The hunter spits something dark and infernal into the snow. “Because everybody's had a dog. Even if it wasn't a dog.”

Some bullshit rural koan Henry won't bother to unravel. He only wanted to slip in and out of this place a better, less-confused person. He never wanted to be a messenger, an actor in anything. The weekend pivots into greater darkness.

“Evening,” the hunter says, and heads back into the trees.

Henry rushes back to the Manor, determined to throw this information off him, rid his mind of it. The dead animal, the graffiti, these aren't his problems. He has his own pile.

When he reenters the living room, Spike has made a fire.

“I need to talk to you,” Henry says. “I just met one of your neighbors.”

Bodi makes him tell the story twice. Ronnie gasps at every detail until Bodi shoots him a chilling look. A hard rap hits the front door, and the men go silent. Henry's pulse skips, imagining a mob outside with torches, pitchforks, hoes—rusty, upstate kind of weapons.

“Don't open the door!” Ronnie yells, and moves behind one of the armchairs. “It's a trap! I saw this movie!”

“Who is it?” Bodi asks.

“Is this Dawn Manor?” a familiar voice asks. Bodi unlatches the door and the radiator in Henry's chest takes a kick, fires on. Van walks into the parlor in his corduroy jacket, hiking boots, a long knit cap folded in his hands like an offering.

“Hey,” Van says. “Did I miss the fun part?”

Spike recognizes the hunter by the detail of the beard, a man named Bailey, and calls. Bailey informs him that one of their neighbors, a widow, paid two high school kids to feed Rigby
a steak laced with ketamine. Retribution, Henry learns, for some damage the dog caused to a pheasant farm.