The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (29 page)

“So you’re a writer?” I said, snapping the lens cap back on
my camera. “I saw on Facebook.”

He laughed. “I knew a writer, once. It’s hard to call myself
a writer after knowing him.” He was lying on his side, leaning on an elbow. “Let’s
just say I’ve written. And I sometimes write.”

“And what have you written, Fletcher Bradford? Anything I
might know?”

“
Porcupine City
?
That’s the only thing that’s been published.”

“I haven’t heard of it. Sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“Actually, I don’t read all that much?”

His eyes bugged. “This date is over.” He sat up and
pretended to start gathering his things.

Laughing, I yanked his backpack away from him and said,
“Nope!” Then we were quiet for a minute, maybe to rein in the playfulness.

“Sometimes I fantasize about writing a book,” I told him. “Is
that weird? I feel like taking pictures is a good way of documenting things but
it’s not very useful for resolving the past. Like with pictures you can only
see what the past actually was, not what it might have been or what it meant. You
know? Plus, you never have a camera in the really important moments, so cameras
leave holes. The really important moments happen in the dark, under the covers—or
in restaurants, I guess. A lot of important conversations involve food.”

“That’s astute.”

“I guess I wouldn’t know where to start, writing a book?”
Absently I pulled my foot onto my lap and wedged a finger between my toes. “Where
do
you
start?”

He thought for a minute. “With an image, I guess. Then it
grows from there.
Porcupine City
, it
opens with a blanket lying against a guy’s hip. He’s sitting up in bed—you
know, the morning after.”

“Was this from personal experience, Fletcher?”

He grinned. “It just always stuck in my head. And eventually
kicked off a book.”

“I have this image in my head of a steaming coffee cup
sitting in a pile of snow. My first roommate, this guy Wesley, he put it there.”

“Wouldn’t the coffee cup melt the snow?”

“Hm. Yeah, I guess. Let’s say it lurches and some coffee
spills out.”

“OK. What happens after it spills?”

“Um. Coffee-slush leaps away from the cup?”

“Then?”

“I guess I don’t know. What should happen?”

He reached under our blanket and plucked a blade of grass.
Closing his eyes against the sun, he tickled it against his lips. “What makes
you hurt? What needs figuring out? That’s what happens after the coffee cup.”
He pursed his lips and pushed the grass between them.

“I guess I’ve had a lot of people leave, in my life,” I said.
“Loves, friends—family, even. I guess— I don’t know, maybe I’d want
to imagine what would happen if one of them came back. Like, maybe if he
randomly showed up. Like poof, right in the middle of a blizzard or something.”

“I’m kind of doing the same thing,” Fletcher said. “This guy
I was with—Mateo. He left us. Under, let’s say, mysterious circumstances.
He and I weren’t dating anymore but I thought he’d always be in my life in some
capacity. I wanted him to be.” He added gently, “His son is my son.”

“I thought you said the other dad was— Was it Jamal?”

“Jamar. Yeah. He is.” He laughed. “Mateo is the bio father.
Jamar and I are— We’re— I know it sounds so complicated.”

“It’s OK. I understand, believe me.”

“That’s right, you have one.”

“I do.”

“Anyway,” Fletcher went on, “I’m sort of working on this book
that’ll let me bring Mateo back, in a way. At least for myself. I started it
when I was flying home from São Paulo.”

“You can write on planes? I would think you’d need a special
place. Don’t writers usually have a special place?”

“I used to use an old typewriter my friend Cara gave me. Now
I just use a little notebook and I whip it out whenever. I like it better. I
like knowing I can give everything I have in the grocery store waiting in line.
Or while I’m waiting for pasta to cook. I like that I don’t need a special
place to be at my best or to write the line of my life. That it can just happen
in any random moment.”

“Deepness follows.”

He laughed. “What?”

“Nothing, it’s an old thing. What’s the book called?”

He said, bashfully, “
Surfboy
Forever
.”

“Was Mateo a surfer?”

“No. No, I don’t think he ever surfed. But there’s something
about how surfers describe connecting with a wave, that I think is very Mateo.
I guess I feel like I can conjure him up through that, even if it’s not
something he actually did.”

He passed me his blade of grass and then sat up and took a
water bottle out of his backpack.

“Funny,” I said, touching the grass to my own lips, “I’ve
always taken pictures to keep people as they are, maybe to keep them from
leaving. You write stories to try to bring them back.”

***

Later in the morning we snoozed, side by side on our backs
with our heads in the shade of the umbrella, its stem and hook-shaped handle
angling down into the space between our sides. I looked down the length of our
bodies. He was, I thought, the exact same height as me, and our bare feet
rocked side to side beside each other against the hot metal bars of the fence.

I sat up feeling groggy and flushed from napping in the
heat. And I needed to go to the bathroom. I’d spotted a parade of
Port-o-Potties lining the Esplanade, but I would have to step on a lot of
blankets to get there.

Fletcher opened his eyes and leaned up on an elbow when I
was scuffing back into my flip-flops.

“Pee break,” I said. “Want to come?”

“Someone needs to protect the turf,” he said. I might’ve
laughed, but after seeing the race this morning I guessed he wasn’t joking.

I picked up my camera as I was leaving and swung it over my
shoulder. I didn’t want Fletcher to scroll through the photos and find out how
many I’d taken of him sleeping—of his long eyelashes and of the bead of
sweat on his throat and of the tattoo on his forearm that said
Arrowman Is
. I wondered what it would
say when it was finished.

It was well into morning now, a time for breakfast and
cartoons on any other Saturday. I walked along the seams of the giant patchwork
quilt, in the places where blankets met. It seemed the only semi-public part of
a blanket, that inch along the edge, and it was like walking a tightrope trying
not to invade people’s space.

“Hi, hi, excuse me, sorry, hi, sorry, excuse me.” Crossing
from tarp to bedspread to beach blanket, one borderline after another. Stepping
around coolers and beach chairs and toddlers. I waited in line at the
Port-o-Potties, and when I was done I stood at the edge of the Esplanade where
the blankets began and watched Fletcher. He was standing on our blanket leaning
against the fence, looking, not at the Hatch Shell but at the Paint-Day painting
at the base of it, one of the ubiquitous paintings. This one was of the
pink-and-white flowers that cover the Esplanade in springtime. I had seen it
earlier without noticing it. But Fletcher was looking at it. And I thought I
saw his lips moving.

Noon was harsh and hot. The temperature crept past ninety
and the sun pummeled the Esplanade. Fletcher and I huddled together under the
umbrella to keep in the shade. It was arousing being so close to him, touching
him. Time passed and a beam snuck under and striped my ankle.

“Is the sun getting on you?” he said, holding his hand out
to stop the beam from hitting me.

I didn’t say anything, didn’t move my leg, didn’t want to. I
remembered Angel saying that same thing to me once. It wasn’t because Fletcher
sometimes reminded me of Angel that I liked him; it was that he and Angel
shared something I liked: they made me feel looked-after. I lifted my hand and
touched my palm to Fletcher’s, and threaded my fingers through his fingers, and
he squeezed, and he smiled.

We played
Go Fish
.
We took macro photos of a caterpillar we spotted crawling along the fence. We
had a sword-fight with blades of grass while the little girl on the blanket
next door cheered. We played that game where you try to slap the other person’s
hand before he can move it, and I saw Fletcher had blue paint under his
fingernails.

Around 1:00 he said to me, “We’re more than halfway now.
Seven hours left.”

I was pouring water on my head; rubbing my hair still felt
funny with my mohawk gone, even all these months later. “Think you’ll make it,
Fletcher? You getting sick of me yet?”

He held out his hand and I passed him the water bottle. He
took a quick drink and passed it back. “I’m hanging in there,” he smirked. “I
do have to pee, though. Need anything while I’m out?” He kicked his bare feet
into his sneakers and stood up and stretched. He had sexy, agile-looking legs,
a sprinter’s legs.

“Maybe a hotdog?” I pointed to a food cart parked near to
where we’d lined up that morning. “Can I give you some money?”

“I got it,” he said, and he walked away on the tightrope of
borders.

It rained around 3:00 for a few minutes—a sun shower
that felt like a gift. We stood and stretched out our arms like kids in a lawn
sprinkler. It was the first time I really wanted to kiss him. Soon after the
rain stopped we were dry again.

We dozed again with our heads under the umbrella and our
legs in the sun. I think I slept for an hour. When I opened my eyes Fletcher
was sitting beside me with his hand hovering over my crotch—no, not my
crotch, my pocket. My keys. I heard him murmur, “The key-touching guy.” And I
remembered how he’d once seen me checking for my keys. I’d meant something to
him long before today, before I even knew he existed.

I yawned and he moved his hand away and looked over at the
Hatch Shell, where the concert equipment was being set up. Brass instruments
were blinding in the sun.

“Fletcher,” I said, leaning up.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” he said, as if he was just noticing me. “We’re
getting close now.”

“What time?” I rubbed my eyes.

“Four-thirty.”

“You called me your key-touching guy.”

“I— Sorry, is that creepy?”

“No. You can call me that.” I reached across the blanket and
held his foot in my hand, circled my thumb around the hard skin that ringed his
heel—it was a presumptuous touch, I suppose, but it didn’t feel that way
to me. “Fletcher, I want to ask you. Are you still, like, hurt?”

“Hurt how?”

I let my hand skid up his calf as I sat up. “I told you I’ve
got hurts. They’re named Boyd and Johnny and Angel and Wes, and they have a lot
of other names, too. I was sort of mean to you when you called me the other
day, with the
I’m married
thing, and
I think it’s because I’ve been hurt. But I’m realizing I’m not so hurt that I
can’t ever— I mean, they’re not the kind of hurts that have left scars.
You know? They felt like that at the time but that’s not what they are. I was
watching you sleep earlier and now I know that’s not what they are. They were
hurts like how it hurts to lift weights. Do you know what happens, when you
lift weights? Your muscle fibers tear. That’s why it hurts. But when they heal
they heal thicker and stronger. And you tear them again with more weight. And
they heal stronger. Again and again, stronger. My hurts didn’t leave scars,
they left muscle.”

“I don’t know if I’m following, Ollie....”

“This Mateo guy. I can tell he’s still on your mind a lot. I
think he always will be. And if anything happens between you and me—and
I’m starting to really hope it will, Fletcher—I know Mateo is going to be
there with us. So I want to know how much he hurt you. I want to know if he
gave you scars or muscle.”

“He hurt me a lot. And I hurt him.” He looked down at his
hands in his lap, and his eyes flicked across his tattoo—
Arrowman Is
. “Muscle,” he said. “I would
never doubt it. Definitely muscle.”

“Fletcher, did Mateo die?”

The question hung in the air for what seemed like a long
time. It took my own breath away and I didn’t know why.

Finally he started to say something, something that must’ve
been more than he wanted to say right then, because he stopped. He looked at
me. Behind his eyes, I knew, were a million stories I someday wanted to hear. He
didn’t answer except to say, “Not yet, OK?” Tears came to his eyes and when he
wiped them away he laughed at himself for crying.

“It’s OK,” I said, “I guess everybody hurts. I guess I
learned that a long time ago, from a wise dude in a wise song. Of course you’re
hurt, and I’m glad you got muscle from it. The better question is, are you
ready? Because I’m ready. I’ve shot a lot of arrows, Fletcher, and—”

“Ollie,
I
called
you
, remember?
I
remembered
you
.”

He reached out and rubbed my arm, my
tricep
,
which for much of my youth had been so hard and thick, but which now felt like
only what I needed it to be.

“What were you doing that day?” he said. “When we met during
the blackout. Where were you coming from?”

“I was sad,” I said. I told him about R.E.M. disbanding that
day, how I’d been walking the city with their songs, how I had listened to
their last new song on the train when he was standing near me.

He said, “You like R.E.M., huh?”

“Since I was a kid.”

“What were you like as a kid, Ollie? You must’ve been a cute
kid.”

“I was a lonely kid.”

“Did you have a mohawk back then?”

“I would never have had a mohawk back then. The mohawk came
later. That’s a story of its own.”

“Tell me.” He lay down on the blanket and stretched out, his
feet on the bar of the fence, his head cradled in the crook of his elbow. “Come
on, Oliver Wade. Tell me everything.”