The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (26 page)

It was ridiculous, what he was going to have me do, if at
that point I had any real idea—and yet, looking at him, I did trust him.
I did trust that everything would be OK if I did what he told me.

After struggling for a few minutes in a space even smaller
than a phone booth, I emerged from the Jeep in full regalia: tights, cape, red
underwear on the outside. I didn’t feel ridiculous at all. Actually, I felt
strong. I felt fucking great.

Griff had ducked through the bushes and while I was changing
he managed to get one end of the green rope to go over the big oak branch above
Zane’s second-story window. It took tying his shoe to the end of the rope and
flinging it up like a grappling hook, but he’d succeeded. I crept through the
bushes, careful not to snag my cape on any branches.

“Well holy shit, it actually fits,” he said with genuine
gladness. He was holding the other end of the rope that snaked down from the
tree and twitched in the breeze. His vest was on the ground and the sleeves of
his hooded sweatshirt were pushed up to his elbows. He reached out and pinched
my cape.

“It’s a little tight on my balls,” I said, plucking at the
red underpants.

“Little tight on the nipples, too, looks like.”

“Shut up, it’s cold out.”

“I’d give anything for a camera right now.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring one.”

“The one thing I didn’t think of.”

There were no outside lights on to illuminate our exploits,
but Zane’s bedroom window was glowing. So were other windows. People were
definitely home. Awake. Ready to catch us. I remembered the night in the
swimming pool, when my mother was suddenly there in the backyard, her hands
clenching the pool fence. Zane’s mother could come through the door at any
moment. At least this time I was obviously wearing underwear.

“Earth to Vince,” Griff said, snapping his fingers up at me.
He was kneeling and jiggled the waist harness impatiently at my feet. “Come on,
step into this.” I stepped through the loops and pulled the harness up around
my red trunks.

“You should’ve gotten a red one so it would blend in,” I
said.

“Haha! Blend in! You’re singing a different tune now that
you’ve got the suit on, aren’t you?” Touching the cape again, he said, “Well it
is
pretty cool.” He hooked a beener
onto the loop at the end of the rope. “The guy at the sporting goods store tied
the knots, and he
seemed
to know what
he was doing, so they should hold. He showed me how to do this. I hope I
remember.”

“Yeah, I hope you remember too, dude.” In the snow lay a
second harness. “What’s that one for?”

“Duh. So you can
rescue
him.” He picked it up and clipped it to mine. Carabiners swung from it, jingling.
“That’ll be fun getting into. The rest is up to you.”

“If he gets in at all.”

“Good point. But don’t worry about that just
yet—you’ll figure out something to say. Just tell him what you told me
last night.”

He picked up the other end of the green rope and pulled it
with him across the yard, tossed it over the hedge and left for a second a
Griff-shaped hole in the hedge. Through a first-floor window I could see a
low-lit dining room table and chairs, and a doorway beyond them. A shadow moved
past.

“OK,” Griff called after a minute. He must’ve been standing
on my bumper or something because I could just see his head over the top of the
hedge. “You’re all connected and I’m going to start backing up to hoist you up.
Ready?”

I gave him a thumbs-up. I could hear the Jeep’s motor rev
and then loops in the rope began to straighten out across the snow. I reached
up and gave the rope a tug to check this bit of engineering when suddenly my
red underwear squeezed my hips even tighter and my sneakers, draped with red flaps
to represent boots, lifted out of the snow. I rose inch by inch, very slowly,
until my feet were ten or twelve feet off the ground, and then my progress
slowed and stopped. Standing on the bumper again, Griff peered over the top of
the hedge to check my progress. When I gave him another thumbs-up he started
laughing, just a smirk at first, then louder, then practically hysterical. His
head disappeared; he was probably doubling over. I knew he didn’t think this
was ridiculous, but rather that it was awesome. Beyond awesome. When he got
himself under control his face appeared again; he was wiping his eyes with his
sleeve.

“Yuck it up,” I told him.

“Sorry. If you could just see yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So another ten feet or so?”

“OK.”

The Jeep revved and I began to rise again.

I clutched the rope in front of me to keep from tipping
backward. For a moment I could see into Zane’s bedroom—it was cluttered
with posters and towers of white comics boxes like a scaled-down version of
Golden Age—and then it was lost again to blue siding as the rope slipped
along the branch. I reached out and touched the side of the house. Then once
again I soared skyward. The window sill, encrusted in ice, passed my eye-line
again and I could see into the room. It was dim, lit with moving blue pictures
of the television. I couldn’t see Zane.

I tapped on the glass with my finger. The harness was
crushing my balls and I was sure I was wearing it wrong, that it was inside-out
or upside-down or something. Griff lifted me up a few more feet so that I was
directly in front of the window. I was almost looking down into the
room—there was a pair of jeans lying on the brown carpet—when Zane
came into the room. He had on flannel pajama pants and a red t-shirt that said
Everybody loves an Asian boy
. He saw me
and dropped his Doritos. My heart started pounding.

The rope was turning me gently and I rotated away from him
so that I was now facing the front yard and the neighbors’ houses across the
street. I looked down at Griff, who no longer had to stand on the bumper to see
me, at the small cars in the driveway, at the flat expanse of snow below.
Suddenly a foot or two of slack appeared in the rope as it slipped farther
along the branch and I fell that distance with a nut-crushing jerk. The branch
spronged
like a diving board and dumped
down snow and stripped bark. Snow dropped down the back of my neck into my
suit. I went rigid and clenched my teeth.

Behind me the window opened, crunching ice on the sill. It
sprinkled to the ground. I kicked my legs, trying to turn myself around, my
cape swooshing back and forth with the effort. There was a tug on the back of
my neck, pulling open wide the collar of my suit, and even more snow went down
my back. I gasped. The collar was let go with a cold snap.

Then a hand on my harness as Zane gave me a twirl, and I
faced him.

“OK,” I said, “I deserve that.” A clump of snow shifted
between my shoulder blades and made an icy trail along the small of my back. “
Ah.
—Oh my god.”

“What are you doing, Vince?” There was a hint of a smile in
the corners of his mouth, but a severity in his eyes made me feel like this was
all for nothing.

“Can I come in?”

“I really don’t know if I want you to.”

“Please? This thing really hurts.”

He looked down at the ground, then at me. “All right.”

I tried lifting my feet up onto the sill. He grabbed my
ankles and pulled my red-booted legs up into the room. When I was sitting, half
inside, half out, Griff called up to hold on so he could give me some slack.
The Jeep drove forward a few feet and the rope behind me got loose. I ducked
under the top of the double-hung window and slipped inside. It was easier than
I feared but clumsier than I hoped.

I pushed the window closed on the rope and unclipped myself;
the knot fell to the carpet. The bedroom was lit only by the television and a
flickering red candle on the bureau. The aloe plant was sitting beside it, as
if keeping warm.

“This is amazing,” Zane said, but it sounded like a
concession. He idly poked the knob on his dresser drawer. “I don’t know what else
you want me to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.” I sat down on the foot of
his bed and my cape pulled tight under me, choking me. I tugged it away.

“You hurt me, Vince,” he said. “You can’t pull some trick
with ropes and expect me to be your friend again, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Then what are you doing?” He looked sad. I felt like
something to be pitied. “What’s this all for?”

“I guess to apologize.”

He nodded, pursed his lips. He tugged out the drawer a
couple inches then pushed it back in. “Did Griff put you up to this?”

“He puts me up to everything.”

“I was right, huh? You really are in love with him.”

“It’s more complicated than that. He’s straight.”

“I don’t know if he is.”

“He is.”

“Well I don’t know if you understand that he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“What is
gay
and
straight
to someone like you, Vince? Do
those words even make any sense to you? You can’t relate to them. You’re always
going to be waiting for your chance. For him to fall for you.”

“...”

“And in the meantime, all there is is consolation prizes. I
don’t want to be a consolation prize, Vince. Not even yours.”

“Zane, come on, you’re not a—” If I finished the
thought would I just be deluding myself and lying to him? “You’re not a
consolation prize. I’m just stupid.”

He didn’t say anything for what must’ve been a full minute;
we just stood looking at each other. He let his hand fall away from the drawer.
I knew he was at the crossroads of a decision and I wondered what he was
thinking. Finally his face softened and he looked up. His eyes were moving over
my costume as though he were really noticing it for the first time. He laughed,
a quick short burst, and bottled it again. He sat down next to me on the bed.

“I’m sorry for last night,” I said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“I know I was an incredible jerk. He’s just really thrown me
for a loop.”

“Quite the loop.”

“Zane— I wish there was something I could say. Some
magic words that in a comic would be big and yellow and would make everything
OK between us. But I know there isn’t.”

He looked at me, almost through me. “No,” he said, “there
isn’t. But I can tell you really wish there was. And maybe that buys you a
night.”

“One night?”

“And we’ll go from there.” He looked at my harness and at
the rope coiled on the floor. “So where do we start it?”

“Through that window.”

“Then this is mine?” He touched the extra harness hanging
from my waist.

“That was the idea. If you’re interested.”

I held out my hand; he didn’t take it. Instead he put his on
my
S
. His fingernails were trimmed
low, looked like they hurt. He kissed me. I smiled against his lips.

“What?” he said, pulling back.

“Nothing... I just wasn’t even expecting to be let in, let
alone this.”

“I couldn’t say no to ‘Superman,’ could I?”

“No, I guess you couldn’t. I guess I couldn’t either.” I
thought of Griff shoving the plastic bag through my window. Then I looked at
Zane. His long, dark sideburns matched the color of his soft eyes.

He cleared his throat. “I need some clothes,” he said.
“Because unlike Lois Lane, I’m not going flying in my pajamas.” He squeezed my
knee and stood up.

“When did she fly in her pajamas?”

“In the first movie. When Superman takes her flying in her
nightgown.”

“That wasn’t a nightgown, it was a dress.”

“No. That was a
dress
?
That sheer blue thing?” He kicked down his pajama pants—his boxers were
white with purple stars; I suddenly realized I knew what he looked like
underneath them—and he picked up the jeans that lay on the floor.

“She wore it out afterward with Clark,” I said, “remember?”

“Yeah, but I thought she was still in a starry-eyed
love-daze from flying and forgot to change clothes.”

“Well she was in a daze, but it was a dress.” He still
looked skeptical, so I added, “It was the Seventies.”

He smiled. “In that case, RetroLand, I’ll take your word for
it.”

He pulled on his jeans, stepped into a pair of Chucks,
grabbed his yellow hooded sweatshirt from the back of his desk chair. “Now help
me get this harness on,” he said.

I unclipped the extra harness from mine and held it open for
him. He stepped through the loops with one hand on my shoulder for balance and
hiked the harness up around his waist. I fed the rope through both of our
carabiners.

“I don’t know if this was made to work this way,” I said,
holding his harness with one hand and pulling on the rope as hard as I could
with the other. It seemed secure but of course I couldn’t simulate our combined
weight with just my hands. We hobbled to the window like contestants in a
potato-sack race and opened it. “We may be killed.”

“The snow’ll cushion our fall,” he said, looking down.

“It’s pretty packed down.”

“Then I’ll cushion you.”

“I don’t know, you’re pretty skinny.”

“I’m not skinny, I’m small-boned.”

Griff was leaning against the Jeep, looking off down the
street. I waved and caught his eye. “Ready?” he yelled.

“Almost,” I called. “OK,” I said, turning to Zane, “any
ideas on how we should do this?”

“It sure as hell isn’t going to be graceful.”

Griff was at the door of the Jeep waiting for my signal.

“I think if we sit on the window sill first...”

We each slung one leg over the sill, then the other. It was
barely big enough for two people. Rope coiled across our laps and raised into
the air as Griff backed up the Jeep.

“Get ready to push off,” I said.

“How are we going to close the window?”

“Oh. Good question,” I said, and then I and Zane after me
slipped off the icy ledge into mid-air. We swung suspended, entwined, smacking
the side of the house like a wrecking ball. Zane held his crotch and winced and
then was laughing.