Lawnboy (26 page)

The idea of a party at this minute in the world seemed completely beyond my comprehension. I fell back asleep.

I cleaned up the mess first thing the next morning. My rage and longing fueled me, helping me work faster and faster. An unrolled condom stuck to the headboard like something ghostly, mysterious: a jellyfish. As I cleaned, the radio announcer described the late-night shooting of a local teenager in the Crossroads Mall parking lot. His voice was flat, clinical, as if he were reading off a grocery list.

When I finished, I sat at the desk, reached for a piece of motel stationery, and started writing as fast as I could.

Hector,

How not to sound like an asshole, a fool?

Question: what is it you feel for me? When I look into your face, I think, well, of course, of course. And then I’ll see you walking across the blacktop, cocky, not even a hello from you. And what you said the other night: fuck you. Do you think we’re going to keep this up?

Your indifference makes me want to yell.

I want to smear myself in it to show you what it looks like.

I’ll get up again: don’t doubt that for a second. As for you—

I can’t get anything done.

I read what I’d written three times, crossing out words, writing over them. The pen pressed deeply through the paper. Idiotic, ridiculous: nothing sounded authentic to me. Then I ripped the page in two and flushed it down the toilet.

***

Hector was up earlier than expected. He strode back and forth from the Dumpster to the stairwell, gestures infused with an unexpected energy. This wasn’t like him: he usually didn’t get moving till ten or later, not till his two cups of
cafe con leche.
After a few minutes I followed him up to his apartment. Everything was packed up in boxes along one wall; snapshots were stacked on the desk.

Something gnarled in the root of my neck.

“Want this?” he asked.

He offered me the chartreuse shirt with the pointed collar and oversize buttons. It was the very shirt we’d retrieved from the county landfill, to Peter’s protests, many months before.

“Why would I want your shirt?”

“What about these things?” He walked across the room, picked up a magenta House of Field shopping bag. Inside an assortment of gadgets, postcards, magazines, doodads, gewgaws.

“What’s going on?”

“You’re going to freak,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Peter’s onto us.”

“Peter?”

“Peter knows that we’ve been fucking around.”

Something rumbled in the distance—a plane crash? Forest fire? I watched his wiry back through his white T-shirt, the muscles rolling gently in his arms. My adrenaline surged. I brought up my hands to my face.

“He sat me down last night and said that he’d heard us together in 209.”

I whispered, “But that was last week.”

He nodded firmly.

I tugged at the skin on my wrist, twisting it. “Oh
God.
”

“It’s no big deal—
really.
He seemed perfectly sane about it.”

“But—”

“He just wants me to leave.”

The laugh that came out of me was ridiculous, raw—a splutter.

He fastened the buckles of his knapsack. He lifted it once, testing its weight. “I’m going back to New York. I’ve already made the arrangements. I’m staying with my friend Juany.”

My eyes wandered about the room. The thought of it emptied seemed outrageous, dreadful to me. The gnarl spiraled deeper into my neck. “You can’t just leave,” I said.

He moistened his lips. “I talked to my old boss last night. Believe it or not, I have my old restaurant job back.” He smiled now, the brown of his eyes brightening, pupils haloed with amber. “Actually, I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll be good for me.”

My eyes fixed on the wall where his snapshots had been. Already they’d left crisp white squares where the sun had yellowed the paint around them. I’d memorized their positions: Don and Miguel, Julia before the steaming volcano.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

I grabbed his forearm, looking him straight in the eye, and twisted it behind his back. He gritted his teeth and winced. The cords of his veins tightened in his arms. “You almost seem grateful,” I said.

“Hey,”
he cried.

He shook me off, frowning, stomping off. He raised his brows, face cautious, bitter, aloof.

I studied his scuffed boots on the floor. Against my wishes, my eyes started to fill, flood. I pressed the small of my back into the wall. “Jerk,” I said, sliding slowly down to the floor tile.

“Don’t—” he said.

I sat there for a while, watching him rolling his shirts. I’d ruined things. So why not push it further, see how far I could go? I’d crawl around in the muck if I had to. A snake in the slough, a vole.
Let him be disgusted by me.

“I’m coming with you. I’m going to run up to my room to pack some things. What should I bring?”

“Stop—”

I folded my arms. The light in the room shifted, leaves quivering outside, golden, polished, as if a front were passing through. Drier weather.

“So I was just dreaming this up, then?” I said finally.

“Evan,” he said, a kindly, pitying look in his eyes.

And then I knew. Something thorny pierced the surface of my skin, right through to the center of my chest. My heart felt hot, too big for my body. A cold breeze sluiced through the room.

He picked up his boots, then tossed them off to the side. “My plane’s at six-thirty. Would you do me a favor and let me finish, and then we’ll talk about this?”

I wouldn’t look at him.

He wrapped his arm over my shoulder, holding me tight. I tried to shake him off, but he only gripped harder. His shirt had a smell: dust, fabric softener, cigarette smoke. I almost kissed him on the mouth—a challenge, a protest—before he let me go.

“Meet me at four outside the office. We’ll say our good-byes then.”

“So this is it?”

He shrugged. “Evan, this isn’t the end. Get a hold of yourself. Buck up.”

I walked out the door. I wandered through the woods for hours, walked all six miles out Pan American to the ruined marina. The water in the cove looked smoky, brackish. A dead fish swelled on the surface like a piece of foam. I pulled up a weed and tore it apart in my hands.

When I made it back to my room, my body felt emptied, oddly spent, cleansed. But tired, terribly tired. I stepped before the sink and splashed water onto my face. My eyes were red, my muscles sodden. There was something on my bed: Hector’s House of Field bag. One by one, I laid the various articles out on the floor with a kind of awe—a map of Las Vegas, Laura Nyro’s
Gonna Take a Miracle,
a leather wristband, a postcard of the Lady Bunny milking a cow, a Crown and Anchor Townie Pass, shirts, jeans, hats, belts—trying to make sense of them, pondering their connections.

***

He was gone, once and for all: I’d finally admitted it to myself. He was lost: the one I’d been before I’d left home, before William. It was hard not to think him stupid, insignificant. It was hard not to wish him out of existence. The one who believed he held a secret so extraordinary and vast that he couldn’t possibly tell anyone, not even his best friend, Jane. Who believed that once he broke away from his parents’ judgment and silence he’d find someone to love, and love him back, and his real life would begin. Who felt an inordinate pleasure, an electrical current, when another boy just happened to brush up against his shoulder. Who believed that once he moved past his initial awkwardness and grief and grew into himself, his life would continue to offer him reward after reward.

I thought of his eager, dark face, that enormous secret behind his eyes. I didn’t know what to call him anymore. Dead now. It seemed remarkable to me that he’d ever been called Evan.

***

At four o’clock I stayed behind in my room. I busied myself with my reading, wearing my chartreuse shirt with the pointed collar. I glanced once through the blind. He looked up toward my window, before he swung into the cab’s backseat. I turned away, imagining its lozenge-shaped taillights growing smaller down the driveway. I was determined not to watch.
Go, just go. Enough already.
I refused to have another ending in my life.

I stood at Peter’s open door, holding onto the frame. He sat upon the bed in jeans, unbuttoned denim shirt, and cricket cap—all of which appeared to be too small for him. Were they Hector’s? His chest pearled with sweat. Outside the window, an elaborate white bird—an anhinga?—took off for the sky.

“Do you have a minute?” I said.

He nodded evenly.

All I needed was to look at him. Something rumbled and chugged inside my chest—orange, molten. I couldn’t let it out—
wouldn’t
unless I had to. “I’m not very good at these things,” I said, wetting my lips, standing at the window. Around the pool a towheaded boy pulled a red wagon with a missing wheel, its back axle scraping the asphalt.

The small of my back needled. “What’s wrong with you?” I said.

He blinked. His eyes brightened, their rich green going bluer all at once.

“You let Hector go, just like that,” I said.

“You were doing all his work for him.”

“That’s not why you fired him. Hector, Holly. What’s going on in your head?” My voice sounded hoarse. I started shaking inside, just slightly, cold now, as if I’d downed a pint of something frozen. My arms prickled. I kept them hidden behind my back so they wouldn’t give me away.

“Keep it quiet. There are guests in the next room.” His jaw shifted. He pushed it out, attempting to harden his face. He glanced down at the bed, the stained sheets on which Hector and I had lain a few short weeks ago. “What’s the gist of all this?”

“Secrets,” I mumbled.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can’t live like this anymore.”

“Secrets,” he repeated.

He stood before me with his hands in his pockets. His face was dark. I couldn’t tell whether I was making any mark on him. I pictured myself holding a struck match in the room, and the whole place blowing up from what it contained.

“And you?” he said.

“What?”

“What makes you think you’re any more direct than I am?”

The skin vibrated around my lips. My mouth parted, astonished, as if someone had punched it. I imagined it swelling, a rich hurt purple.

“I’m not like you,” I said.

“You don’t have any secrets?”

“I’ll tell you anything.”

He walked to the window, hands working in his pockets. “So what about Hector?”

***

We floated around the motel pool for as long as we could stand it, determined to push ourselves. It was dark. We tried to talk about Mom and Dad; we tried to talk about Hector—but thick with emotion, we couldn’t say much. Our tongues fattened in our mouths. Stubbornness. We stared at each other, lockjawed, ashamed. The pads of our fingers wrinkled. After an hour, we hefted ourselves up the ladder.

Secrets, secrets: welcome to Sarshik’s House of Secrets.

The sprinklers cooled the flower beds, the little piles of mulch. We walked up the outside steps to the second floor. On the landing, Peter stopped and turned to me. “Didn’t I tell you he was going to be trouble?”

“Who?”

“Hector.”

My thoughts stalled. A gibbous moon hung suspended in a cloud.

“Didn’t I? Didn’t I try to help?”

We stood together on the landing. I wanted him to stop, to talk about something else,
any
-thing else, when all at once he was looking at me, eye to eye, standing even closer. My scalp tingled. A pungent, sweet scent wafted off his shoulders. He put his arms around me, embracing me in spite of all my tightness, my resistance. His breaths were warm, oddly comforting upon my neck. He was alive, thrillingly human and real. I gave in to him; I held him tighter. Blood hummed beneath his flesh. My love was so fierce that I felt giddy with it, woozy, a little sick. Then it all started pouring: how I’d have done anything to be him once; how I’d have copied his handwriting, dressed like him, spoken like him; how I’d have waited outside the bathroom door for him just to catch his gleaming wet flanks; how I’d even have died for him, jumped off the roof, or at least pretended to, laughing, the city stretching out just for us like an offering, a bed of candy.

I looked down. Below us, a rolling, scraping sound, and the child I’d seen out the window earlier was pulling his broken red wagon again. He stopped, turning his face up to us (eyes shocked, pale; strawberry-blond bangs) as if he’d listened to our every word. He sat on the curb, put his head down, and pressed his hands together.

An edgy muteness from Peter. He looked away from the boy, shy now, reserved.

“What?” I said.

The streetlight shined on Peter’s forehead. He lifted his face to me, wearied, corners of his mouth raised. A smile?

“Why didn’t you tell me about Ory?” I said quietly.

He tilted his head as if puzzled.

“Ory,” I said. “Your son.”

The muscles relaxed in his jaw. His tongue pushed his bottom row of teeth. An “uhh”—something abrupt, strangled in his mouth, then just as quickly he stopped himself, swallowed, squinting. He moistened his lips. He looked at me harshly, briefly. He took a firm, calming breath, then walked up the steps.

“Peter.”

He turned right, striding down the long dark hall, shoes trundling.

The soles of my feet trembled. I followed. “Wait.”

He paused outside his room and stared downward at the knob. He wrenched his head to the left, opened the door, walked inside. Shut now. The deadbolt clamped. A hushed, liquid wind passed over the roof, then stillness, rest, a single cricket screeking in some corner.

***

Days passed.

I spent most of my free time walking, trudging out through the sawgrass behind the resort. The sky changed as many times as my moods, one evening a brazen pink, the next the deepest indigo: clear funnels—waterspouts—swirled deliriously above the coastline. The longer we were apart, though, the more I dreaded seeing him again. No resolution, no change. The days felt wide and ponderous, emptied cathedrals in which a clock ticked. I walked deeper and deeper into the swamp. The muck—the color of pumpkins—sucked at my sneakers.