A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (20 page)

“Yup,” Rocky adds, and it's only a small word, but he soars with confidence. He feels himself smile, his back arch a little. He bites at his thumb and looks down to make sure his fly is zipped.

They move on toward the porcupines. Ellen leads the way. She carries the map and easily decides everyone's destiny. Neither he nor Ellen nor his father can find the porcupines within their enclosure. The three of them lean their faces up to the fence and scour the trees and around the rocks, but can't sight any of the dark barrel bodies.

Warm and frustrated, Wade volunteers to run for snacks, and then it's just Ellen and Rocky walking along a dirt path toward whatever animal comes next. Marsupial. Primate.

It is only midmorning, but already the air is thick and dry as rope, leaden to the taste. People stroll by in clothes that have been cut up for the weather—sleeves and legs and shirttails are raggedly cut off. Parents stop to swathe babies in sun block, then turn and dot each other's shoulders.

Rocky wears a black and white striped legionnaire's hat that his father bought for him the day before in a surfers shop. “Keep the sun off your head,” he told Rocky, and for a while Rocky was irked—more instructions—but actually Rocky likes the way the long flaps off the back of the hat flutter against his neck.

He looks up and the cloud-streaked sky is bone pale and beneath it Ellen's hair is streaming with sunlight and the sweet powdery smell of shampoo. She turns the map sideways and reads the fine print that details the petting zoo. Rocky is engrossed with her every move. It seems that he is seeing the small, everyday movements of a human for the first time. She pushes her sunglasses up onto her hair and then squints at the map. She cocks her head to the right and studies.

Then, in the distance where a group of shaggy cigar-colored camels are bunched together, Rocky spots his father holding a big cardboard snack tray, and he makes a split-second decision. He guides Ellen to the right, just nudges with his shoulder, and amazingly she doesn't even look up from the map. She veers softly right, and they weave strategically among other zoo-goers, then head toward the big cats and the elephant. Rocky doesn't remember what all they see on this loop, but Ellen reads to him and points and makes the morning alive. His skin crackles. His heart tentatively climbs back into his chest where it rustles and whirrs.

Rocky doesn't wear a watch, so he doesn't know how long it is before Wade, sweaty and winded, finally meets up with them in the Reptile House. The ice in the drinks that Wade is carrying has completely melted. Cheese nachos tumble one by one off the cardboard tray and the orangey topping oozes over his thumb.

“Hey, Rocko,” he says, “didn't you see me back there? Where in the heck have you guys been?”

“Everywhere,” Ellen says, waving the map. “Give me a Coke. I'm dying.”

There is a strong sour odor in the Reptile House and the first thing Rocky does is drop back from Wade and Ellen, lift his arm, and smell
to see if it's him. Rocky doesn't know what to expect out of himself anymore—what strange pink appendages might protrude, what swampy smell might emanate. When he checks out all right, he lowers his arm and hurries ahead.

Ellen practically has her face against the glass of a chamber where a long bright-green snake is wrapped next to an almost perfect replica of itself—a dark recently shed skin. She puts her finger against the glass and taps lightly. The snake is frozen and only the thread of its tongue flicks the stagnant air. Rocky doesn't like watching the snake. He chooses a bark-skinned lizard in a tree doing what looks like pushups. Wade shakes his head and moves toward the exit. He says he has a bad case of heebie-jeebies.

That's the way that Rocky ends up alone with Ellen in the Reptile House, going from glass to glass, hardly breathing at all, staying the whole time within a foot of her shoulder.

There are huge propeller-sized fans blowing everywhere around the tortilla factory. The deep, sorrowful smell of grease spreads through the whirring air of the fans, though Josephina, the factory tour guide and a former masa-maker herself, does not refer to it as grease. “Shortening,” she says, her accent hardening the
t
and n's, making the word sound like some exotic ingredient. All of the workers wear nets on their heads, spidery black webs that flatten their hair similarly. The edges of their oversized white cotton aprons wave slightly from the fans, and to Rocky these people look like ghosts as they stand solemnly here or there to catch a breeze.

Ellen must feel the tortillas, of course. Josephina says yes, by all means. Ellen picks one up and holds the soft gold and brown specked treasure up to the light and it becomes a round opaque window. Soon there is flour on her fingertips and a white iridescent smudge on her face. Wade walks up to her, licks his finger, and rubs it over the spot
on her cheek. In an instant Rocky knows how it feels to have his chest crushed, though he realizes it isn't much of a chest yet—bony, hairless, white.

Rocky pushes ahead to the sales office where the tour will end. He sits in a brown molded plastic chair and stews while he waits for the rest of the group. With one foot, he kicks the sole of his other shoe until that foot throbs, but it is a disconnected pain—just a steady chain of blips on a machine somewhere.

The tour group arrives sampling bits of rolled tortillas, powdered sugar and honey on their hands. Wade saves some for Rocky, but he doesn't want any. He shakes his head and moves next to the air-conditioning unit set in the wall. The icy air pours over his arm and even whispers to him.

Wade wants one evening alone in Tucson with Ellen. “You don't mind, do you, Rocko?” his father asks him when they're back at the hotel. Wade has stopped and bought himself a disposable razor; he thinks his electric razor will show up when they have more time to look. He is at the mirror, already shaving for the evening. He flicks white lather into the sink and stretches his mouth to one side for a clear smooth run of the razor. He wants to take Ellen somewhere special to eat, he says. “What do you think?” he asks Rocky. “Seafood or French?”

Wade splashes after-shave on his face and the sweet layers of pine hit Rocky like a gut punch. “French,” he tells his father, not even really knowing the word in that moment or why he says it.

As Wade and Ellen hurry to get ready, Rocky glides once through their room, and the car keys are there on the nightstand waiting for him—flashing, metallic, calling to him in the way that jewelry or a lighter calls to the solitary shoplifter. When he drops the keys quietly into his pocket, he feels nothing. He tells his father and Ellen he's going to his room to look at TV.

Instead, he goes down the elevator and out the side door of the hotel. He walks down the sidewalk and feels his skin shrinking, the keys pressing his leg each time he moves. The sun will dip behind the long, purple belt of mountains soon, though it is still unbearably hot outside. A group of older women in stretchy floral swimming suits at a nearby cocktail table wave bright Chinese fans before their faces, which send their blue-gray hair fluttering.

No real plan opens itself to Rocky. Instead, it is the dense oleanders and privets decorating the outside wall of the hotel that open to him—a large shadowy parting between branches. He bends quickly and crawls forward. Close to the ground and with the greenery shrouding him, he is surprised at how comfortable and right this place feels. The leaves turn to him and kindle tiny bursts of the last bits of sunlight. Slowly, the noise of the bushes takes over—the locusts, the lizards, the low pulsing of sap. Rocky stretches out and rubs his cheek in the cool soothing dirt. One of his hands closes over damp leaves and the other takes hold of a ball of dried roots.

Finally, in the thin mauve twilight, out on the sidewalk that stretches big as a runway from where he is hidden, Rocky spots his father's shoes—a worried pair of white canvas topsiders pacing back and forth, then halting, then moving into the grass.

Rocky reaches down and checks to see that the keys are still in his pocket, curls up, tucks a foot under the opposite thigh, then closes his eyes. He listens to his name being called again and again—a frantic singsong message that drifts away toward the pool and then farther: to rocks and weeds and moonlight and beyond—but in the darkness of a summer's night, there is no boy left to answer.

David Walton,
Evening Out

Leigh Allison Wilson,
From the Bottom Up

Sandra Thompson,
Close-Ups

Susan Neville,
The Invention of Flight

Mary Hood,
How Far She Went

François Camoin,
Why Men Are Afraid of Women

Molly Giles,
Rough Translations

Daniel Curley,
Living with Snakes

Peter Meinke,
The Piano Tuner

Tony Ardizzone,
The Evening News

Salvatore La Puma,
The Boys of Bensonhurst

Melissa Pritchard,
Spirit Seizures

Philip F. Deaver,
Silent Retreats

Gail Galloway Adams,
The Purchase of Order

Carole L. Glickfeld,
Useful Gifts

Antonya Nelson,
The Expendables

Nancy Zafris,
The People I Know

Debra Monroe,
The Source of Trouble

Robert H. Abel,
Ghost Traps

T. M. McNally,
Low Flying Aircraft

Alfred DePew,
The Melancholy of Departure

Dennis Hathaway,
The Consequences of Desire

Rita Ciresi,
Mother Rocket

Dianne Nelson, A
Brief History of Male Nudes in America

Christopher Mcllroy
All My Relations

Alyce Miller,
The Nature of Longing

Carol Lee Lorenzo,
Nervous Dancer

C. M. Mayo,
Shy over El Nido

Wendy Brenner, Large
Animals in Everyday Life

Paul Rawlins, No
Lie Like Love

Harvey Grossinger,
The Quarry

Ha Jin,
Under the Red Flag

Andy Plattner,
Winter Money

Frank Soos,
Unified Field Theory

Mary Clyde,
Survival Rates

Hester Kaplan,
The Edge of Marriage

Darrell Spencer, CAUTION
Men in Trees

Robert Anderson,
Ice Age

Bill Roorbach,
Big Bend

Dana Johnson,
Break Any Woman Down

Gina Ochsner,
The Necessary Grace to Fall

Kellie Wells,
Compression Scars

Eric Shade,
Eyesores

Catherine Brady,
Curled in the Bed of Love

Ed Allen,
Ate It Anyway

Gary Fincke,
Sorry I Worried You

Barbara Sutton,
The Send-Away Girl

David Crouse,
Copy Cats

Randy F. Nelson,
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

Greg Downs,
Spit Baths

Peter LaSalle,
Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism

Anne Panning,
Super America

Margot Singer,
The Pale of Settlement

Andrew Porter,
The Theory of Light and Matter

Peter Selgin,
Drowning Lessons

Geoffrey Becker,
Black Elvis

Lori Ostlund,
The Bigness of the World

Linda LeGarde Grover,
The Dance Boots

Jessica Treadway
Please Come Back to Me

Amina Gautier,
At-Risk

Melinda Moustakis,
Bear Down, Bear North