Lawnboy (24 page)

I touched the cooling silver of her bracelet. Her wrist felt warm as if she were running a temperature. “You have to ask him that yourself.”

She sighed. Her eyes rested on the sleeping boy beside her.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “Come over tomorrow night. Surprise him. Come for dinner. He’d love to see you, I know it.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Why have I been such a wimp about everything?” A triangle of light illuminated her face. Her eyes looked calmer, grateful. I might have granted her a wish.

I walked back to the living room, where I glanced at the TV. I knew it now: everything would work out for the best. I’d get Hector, Peter would get Holly and Ory. I’d make sure of it. We’d all be thankful and relieved, kinder, calmer. Another front was lining up over the Gulf, weather map pulsing, all greens and reds, blinking like a Christmas tree.

***

His plan was this: he’d walk into our respective rooms, pause before our sleeping bodies, then smother us with a pillow. He’d listen to the gulp, stammer, and wheeze of our closing-down systems. Then silence. An absolute reverence. I’d be the first, the harder one. I’d resist, yelling out, driving my fists into his chest. Hector, on the other hand, would be the shocker. He’d take to the pillow, almost tenderly, like a lover, almost welcoming that choke, that heightened sensation before the heart stills then floods. Peter would pause, pondering the drip of the bathroom sink. He’d call up the police. He’d fix himself some coffee, basking in the numbered minutes of his freedom, bare feet up on the coffee table. Minutes later, he’d hear the squad cars pulling over the potholes in the drive. Daybreak.

I woke up, panting. I crept to the window, eyes foggy from sleep. The yard was a reservoir, a lake. Paint cans floated across its surface, loose boards and boxes, all of them drifting, drawn by the imperceptible suck of the culvert.

In the morning, Peter and I sat at the office table, silent. My T-shirt clung to my back. He reached for the box of corn flakes. He poured them into a bowl, spooning them into his mouth, determined to finish them off, not allowing himself to acknowledge that they were stale, virtually inedible. I knew that he was losing money by the day, but this was about something deeper. He might have been our father. I saw it all: his self-denial, his secret cultivation of martyrdom, his exquisite selfishness, his stubborn indifference toward those affected by his decisions. My rage pushed up against my chest, a hard metal plate. I stood, then glanced at his thinning crown before I left the room.

I had to stop. I walked through the corridors, listening to the water streaming through the rainspouts. I thought about what I’d liked about him, what made him interesting, valuable. I thought about his complete devotion to restoring the King Cole property, his ability to bestow all his attention upon a single window, sanding its frame for days on end until it was nearly perfect. I thought about his various interests—the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, the designs of Luis Barragan—how he most likely knew more about these things than anyone else on the planet. I thought about his measured, good-natured rapport with our guests, how he’d once sat for two hours with an elderly couple after the man had experienced chest pains, convincing them he was actually interested in the subtleties of fly fishing, all in an effort to calm them down. But I couldn’t hold all these thoughts in my head at once, and the pictures were already crumbling about the edges, no matter how hard I tried to keep them intact.

Why is it that I hate you so much?

He was everything I didn’t want to become: stingy, closed down, secretive.

I slouched around the pool that night, watching the lights blazing beneath the water. The rain had finally stopped, the ground swollen and sipping. Water lapped over the edge of the pool; the overflow made gulping sounds. Holly’s gold Tercel was parked haphazardly on the grass beneath the royal palm, and I gazed up at the light in Peter’s window, wondering what was happening between them—love or argument, anguish or boredom? A tiny plane jetted across the dome of the sky.

Then something popped.

I looked up. In an instant a spark sizzled across a wire, traveling between the light pole and the office. It was all of ten feet. It happened so fast that I doubted myself—flashes: detached retina?—before it happened again. I couldn’t stop watching. That subtle blue movement: it was as pretty as it was unnerving. My eyeballs ached from its brightness. And then the line sparked again.

What dark fortune: my luck couldn’t have been better.

I pushed at the door to the stairwell. I bounded up the steps, two at a time, then ran down the hall to Hector’s.

“Hi,” he said, eyes foggy, half closed. His T-shirt said PUNCTURED. He looked like he was about to lean forward to kiss me. He grinned. The sweet smell of hashish fermented the air, drifting out into the corridor to be taken into the valves of the air conditioner.

“Did you look out the window?” I said.

His face dulled slightly. “What?”

“Come here.” And I grabbed him by the arm, pulled, stepped over the rumpled clothes on his floor. We stood together at his window, watching the wire, hushed, expectant. The quiet blue flashes lit up his face. We were motionless. Were we just seconds away from feeling the floor heating up, burning through the soles of our shoes?

“Shit,” he said.

I folded my arms across my chest. “We have to tell Peter.”

“He hasn’t seen it?”

I shook my head, hard. “No. We have to tell him. Now, right now.
Move.
”

And before he could say we’d handle it ourselves, I was leading him down the hall, nearly pulling him toward my brother’s door. My chest pounded. My forehead boiled. Hector reached for the knob without bothering to knock.

“Peter, there’s—”

I stood directly behind him. He didn’t process it immediately. Peter lying atop Holly, movements furious, ass gyrating, clefting like an opened fruit. They didn’t stop. Peter glanced over his shoulder. His hairline filmed over with sweat. A rank human sweetness saturated the room: it almost had a taste. Holly’s nipples were unusually large and dark, the deepest pink, unutterably foreign to me. She seemed to be too embarrassed to cover herself.

Silently, Hector closed the door.

The line stopped sparking only two minutes before the fire department arrived in full force, radio blasting, beams of red light whirling about the courtyard.

It didn’t happen till the next morning, but when it did, it was worse than I’d imagined. I watched it all from my window: Hector standing on the second-floor balcony, gazing down at Peter, whose arm held her close to his chest, escorting her to her car. “You’re an asshole,” Hector called out hoarsely. “You’re a low-life fucking asshole.” Peter looked up once, stricken, then looked back at Holly, who covered her face before opening her car door. Was this what I’d wanted? It hurt me as much to see it. I felt it deep inside my soul, burrowing.

I didn’t think he’d still count. I didn’t think I’d still think of him, but I did, often in the least expected moments. I might have been walking through Port Royal, immersed in the particularized order of a rose garden, and—
bam
—there he’d be in black leather and chains, throwing stones at me. Or a little farther up the street, squatting atop the bank in the lewdest position, dressed in harness and jockstrap and pretty clothes. I’d be startled for an instant, a dense high crackling like a brushfire inside my head. And then it would pass. He was back in Miami, working the camera at Channel 7, forever settled in his banal, tired habits, which he’d embrace for the rest of his life.

I wouldn’t see him again. Of that much I was sure. I wasn’t so deluded to think there had ever been a chance anyway. Together we amounted to nothing: two specks, ground glass, empty bags blowing across a backyard lawn. At best, we were only an idea, and though the idea might have thrilled us with its daring, we were hardly daring. I couldn’t say our time together had been a mistake, but some things are better left an idea.

Still, if I thought hard enough, I could conjure him. The texture and taste of his back, sweaty and rich, as he came in from the garden. The trembling board of his stomach, brown, vascular, from light years of situps. In my mind I could play him, use him like a doll. My fury spun wild. I could poke out his eyes. I could spray him down with paint. I could strike up a match and toss it at him, watching him running through the woods with his hissing scalp, miles and miles, looking for water, screaming my name.

I walked up Tamiami Trail, two in the morning. Cars careened up the highway, broken fenders dragging up little storms of blue sparks. It surprised me that he still mattered. He kept flaring up: a gas fire, a torch in the center of a cracked path, forcing me to reckon with myself. It seemed to me that I’d been shutting down, that I’d once again relegated myself to monkdom. Sometimes it seemed that the issue of sex had all the force of something much larger than myself, a huge moving glacier that threatened to run me over, consume me with its force. What the hell was I so afraid of? I could convince myself that the search for a lover—or frankly, just someone to fuck—was fraught with such risk and pain that the inevitable mess wasn’t worth it, that it was easier to stay enveloped in my own fog, beating off to muscled images from magazines that had nothing to do with reality. Was it that I was truly afraid of happiness, of what I really wanted? Of what was so easily within reach?

I was sitting across the street from a park. The palms were totem poles, their shaggy petticoats hanging lushly in the dark. It was getting hotter. Humidity funneled up from the tropics, coating everything with a slick wet net. Everything smelled of moisture—the grass, the trees, the streets, the buildings. I glanced down at my arm. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a fresh mold growing on my skin, thick enough to be scraped off with a butter knife. At times like this I saw the whole Florida experiment as one vast error; the notion of an entire existence modeled after the one in the North seemed doomed to failure.

Two teenagers were running across the grass, diving near the sprinklers to cool themselves down. Deeper in the woods I saw the outline of a man. He situated himself in a glade of mock oranges, half hidden beneath a limb, only his vaguest outlines visible. He was tall, sturdy. I tried not to stare at him too intently. I pretended to watch a cargo truck with huge yellow letters bucketing down the street. When I looked up again, I noticed that he’d taken one step closer. There was no question that his eyes were fixed upon mine.

I knew what was happening. Behind him, submerged in the dark trees of the park, were other men, all watching, waiting. It seemed nearly incredible that I’d delivered myself here of all places, but I wasn’t about to question the destiny of things. I stood, conscious of the leaden weight in my legs, my trembling hands. Before I allowed myself to recognize my fear, to dwell in the moment of my essential ambivalence, I was walking toward the stranger, staring directly into the glare of the streetlight.

“William,” I said aloud.

My words caught like crumbs in my throat. He pulled me toward him. In no time at all he’d taken off my shirt, and I was lying down on the grass beneath him, the stones digging into my back. His tongue was rough in my mouth. He worked a dry finger inside me, and I drew in my breath, resisting. I wasn’t sure if I wanted this. He was going to murder me, I thought. We were going to be caught or he was going to murder me. I shut my eyes. I saw myself in a plane, looking down at a scar in the earth, an open pit filled with water the color of sewage. The plane circled the pit. A parachute opened, and then I saw myself slipping deep into the water. The stranger lifted me to my feet. He smelled of solder, burnt things. I looked into his grinning face, the gap between his teeth. I felt oddly moved by that for some reason, and he reached for my dick, holding it tight, tighter, and that did it—I crumbled, my back going tight, my legs giving way, and then the release.

I slouched against a palm, listening to the struggle of my breath. The man’s footsteps crunched on the gravel. I recognized something, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Where was I? I stood in the shelter of the glade, watching the man stumbling back to his car. I tried not to be absent. I waited until he was completely out of sight, then wiped myself off, walked over to the Trail, and hitched a ride back to the King Cole.

***

I stood on the abandoned golf course, watching Peter dismantle the old cabana, an outbuilding from the Clem Thornton Boca Palms days. The building inspectors had been hounding him for months, insisting it a hazard, in danger of collapse. I didn’t know what had possessed him to finally take on the project now, at nine in the morning, in 88 percent humidity, but nothing he did alarmed me anymore. He worked the prybar into a seam and pulled. The rotten plywood crumbled like foam in his hands. I thought of people who’d become possessed of extraordinary capabilities in times of crisis, sandbagging their properties for thirty-six hours straight to save their livestock from flood. His energy reminded me of them, though I didn’t know who or what he was protecting.

I stepped beside him and pulled at a loose sheet. Grit blew through the air, catching in my eyes. I blinked it away. He kept pulling down the structure, holding in his breath, deliberately ignoring my presence.

“Not like that,” he said finally.

“What?”

“See what you’re doing?”

“What?”

“You don’t have the right tools.”

Termites crept over the brittle wood, tensing their clear, sticky wings. “Calm down, will you?”

“Gloves.”
He pointed at the nicks in my fingers.

“I didn’t bring any.”

He batted a mosquito from his brow. “Listen, why don’t you check out the pool?”

I tightened my fist in my pocket.

“I’m serious. It’s been raining for days. It’s bound to need some chemicals.”

His eyes were vivid, sea green behind his safety glasses. He was wary of me now. Would we talk about the other night? Did he have any idea I’d partly set it up? Secrets, secrets.