Monstrous Affections (33 page)

James stepped around a thick post. Looked down, where the
floor of the sawmill sloped from wood down to dirt. Light leaked
in through the warping barn-board of the mill’s wall — reflected
off a pool of oily water that had collected at its base. The Cyclops
crouched by that pool — poking with an extended finger at a dark
shape in the water.

The Cyclops rumbled something indecipherable, in a deep and
lazy voice. Mottled sunlight from the pond flickered across the
giant’s flesh.

The Cyclops stood high enough to brush rafters, while at his feet,
the shape rolled and sank beneath the water.

The Cyclops’s nostrils flared and he made a bellows-like huffing
sound as he sniffed. He turned to face James.

In two great steps, the Cyclops had closed the distance between
them. He leaned down, so that his eye — big as James’s head — was
just a few feet off.

James gasped. This close, the Cyclops’s eye was fantastical.
Colours shifted across the broad surface of its iris like oil across a
sunlit pool. As for the dark in its middle, that grew and shrank as
the creature focussed on James —

— the darkness was hungry.

The Cyclops reached around with both hands, and tucked them
under James’s arms. He lifted him like he was a small child. The
Cyclops muttered ancient words as he turned James from side to
side — studying him like he was a doll.

James kicked his feet back and forth in the air beneath him. He
looked down: his toes were at least a dozen feet from the floor. He
could barely breathe, the creature was holding him so tightly. He
stared into the Cyclops’s great eye, and the Cyclops stared back.

Memory drew from him like pus from a swollen wound.

He felt a sob wrack across his body. The Cyclops ran a great
thumb down his chest. When it settled, James gasped. The Cyclops
grinned.

James squirmed in a terrified ecstasy. The giant’s thumb
was thick as a man’s thigh, but far more nimble. The feeling was
primordial — it was as though it yanked him back to the night when
his old friend Elmer Wolfe slept over — and had found his way into
James’s bed — pressed close to him — and then the springs . . .

. . . the bedsprings . . .

They screamed.

The mill was dark when Nick Thorne and Jimmy arrived there. It
was in the hours before dawn — long before the morning shift would
arrive. Nick pushed the boy around the side of the building, and
through the great, blackened doors. It was dark inside.

“You want to lie with men, boy?” Nick cuffed his son hard enough
to send him to the ground. “You like that, do you?”

Jimmy heard himself whimper — and hated himself for making
so weak a noise. He was covered in sawdust. Face-down on the
ground. His father smelled of liquor and sweat. “I’ll show you what
it’s like . . .”

Jimmy tried to press himself into the ground — as though he could
escape that way, by enveloping himself in wood shavings. But there
was no escape. His father’s hand, thick and callused from working
a lifetime in the sawmill, pushed hard between his legs, pushed his
nuts up hard into his abdomen. He gave a cry that sounded to him
like a squeak.

“That’s what it’s like, queerboy.” His father grunted, took back
his hand, and undid his trousers.

“
That’s what it’s like, queerboy
.” The Cyclops brought James close
to his face. He opened his great mouth, and a tongue came out, thick
as a marlin and rough like a towel — touched James’s middle, taking
a taste of him. The Cyclops huffed, and smiled and lowered James
to his own middle. Now James was staring straight into another,
smaller eye. James felt his feet touch the ground, and the giant’s
hand pushed him, guided him forward.

James rubbed his face against the shaft of the giant’s penis. It
was wide as a drum, and the leathery flesh trembled as he caressed
it. The Cyclops moaned. The hand stroked James’s back. It wasn’t
squeezing him anymore. But James knew it held him there as surely
as were it a fist clenched around him. Shaking with fear and lust,
and tears streaming down his cheek, he raised his own arms and
embraced the immense shaft.

The memory kept coming. The vivid, awful memory of his father,
the heroic Nick Thorne, buggering him for what seemed to be an
hour on the floor of this place. To teach him a lesson, he’d said. The
old man had rolled him over before he was done. Demanded . . .

. . . demanded . . .

There had been a sharp
crack!
sound before he could do anything
else, and his father had fallen down, clutching his skull. A man with
a baseball bat was standing behind him. First ordering him off the
property — telling him he was trespassing. Saying something about
being an “agent of the mill.” Showing a little eye-shaped Pinkertons
badge on his chest. Then, seeing Jimmy half-naked in the sawdust,
shutting his mouth. The baseball bat came up again, and down
again. That was when Jimmy had said it:

“Stop killing him! He’s my Dad!”

“Sweet Jesus,” said the man from Pinkertons.

“
Sweet Jesus
,” said the Cyclops.

James looked up. The Cyclops moved his hand from his shoulder,
let him step back.

“Shit and hell.” Not a dozen feet off, the grey-haired man from
Pinkertons stood, blood in his beard and his shotgun raised, along
with a fresh troop of detectives. “It’s a monster, boys. Kill it.”

The Cyclops let James go, and turned his great eye to face his
attackers. James sat down in the wet sawdust and finally felt the
tears — hot and salty and honest — streaming down his cheeks. They
weren’t the tears of mourning. Those, James realized, would never,
ever come. The roar and light of gunfire and screams filled the
cavernous mill. James was nearly deaf from it, weeping in the dark,
when the Cyclops turned his gaze back to him.

Now why, wondered James as he gazed up into the Cyclops’s
encompassing eye, would anyone stick a spear into that?

James dropped two polished nickels on his father’s waxy eyelids.
Gunshots echoed through the valley, as another wave of detectives
assaulted the sawmill, and James thought about old Nick Thorne’s
death: fighting his way through the flames — looking everywhere
but up — before he was plucked into the sky and flung down again,
amid the screams of his fellows.

James stepped back and put his arms over his mother’s shoulders.
He tried to ignore the stares of the other mourners. He was a mess.
He’d come directly here to the Chamblay Cemetery from the sawmill.
His shirt and trousers were stained and torn from the night spent in
the crook of the Cyclops’s arms, amid the heaps of dead men left over
from the first Pinkertons assault. His chin was dark with morning
beard. It was quite scandalous — showing up such a dishevelled
mess at his father’s burial. He supposed he would have to get used to
that when he went back to Hollywood. There would be quite a lot of
scandal then. Republic would more than likely, as Stephen had put
it, cut him loose once it all came out.

It may as well come out. Because he couldn’t go back to the cage
of lies he’d made for himself in Hollywood — to being Captain Kip
Blackwell of the Seven Seas — any more than Clarissa the Oracle
could go back to the trapeze now that the horror of her own tiny soul
was drunk dry, or than Clayton O’Connor could trick the rubes into
thinking he were a true strongman, or than Sam Twillicker could
live another day once the Cyclops had sucked his soul right from
him.

But he would have to take this one step at a time. His mother
looked at him with wet, uncomprehending eyes. “
What happened to
you?
” she whispered.

“Quite a lot,” said James as Mr. Simmons’ shaking hands closed
the lid of his father’s casket, and his sons prepared to lower the old
man into the space they’d carved for him in the earth. James felt
himself shaking too, around the great, empty space in him where
the sawmill had crouched all these years.

“I’ll tell you all of it this afternoon,” he said.

Wallace Gleason walked alone that day.

Some days past, he and Rupert Storey had fought a hot, angry
storm of a battle that ended in tears and blood. Wallace had come
out on top; for at the end, it was he standing, fists clenched at his
side, eye-whites standing out like flecks of ivory against his tanned,
dusty flesh. His best friend Rupert was on the ground, red ribbons
of snot strung down his chin and into the dirt. Rupert bled; Rupert
cried. Wallace did neither.

The dog hunkered low in the grass. And it took note of Wallace
walking past the quiet, broken-down shacks that every so often
emerged from the woods along this stretch of road.

It was a stretch that one time might have had some life to it.
When the Evers Brothers sawmill was up and running, the little
houses were full of men and their wives and their children, come to
Fenlan to make a good wage. A dog would take note of no one boy
more than any other. But this was 1933. The passages of boys were
few and far between these days.

Wallace thought he took the road slow and victorious, more man
now than ever before. But the dog thought differently. It had not
seen Wallace’s prowess in the sand pit, what a beating he had been
able to inflict upon his foe. The dog only saw the boy, unsmiling,
head down, shuffling along the route that he had taken many times
in the company of his best friend Rupert.

The dog launched itself.

It was a big boy of a dog, a German shepherd. Maybe some wolf in
it. Wallace was not much bigger. When the dog bounded across the
overgrown lawn of its house, snarling, barking — Wallace screamed.

The dog reared up on its hind legs, its front paws on Wallace’s
shoulders. Their eyes locked. Wallace dropped his grammar
textbook. He stepped back and fell, and scrambled up before the dog
could set upon him.

The dog gave only a short chase. It bounded after Wallace as he
bolted along the dirt road to the crossing where it met the main road
into town. There he stopped, barking twice more, as Wallace ran off
to his school, alone, his grammar text left fanned open in the road
by the dog’s house.

It was only when the boy was out of sight that the dog turned
back.

Rupert Storey walked alone too, and had each morning since his
ignoble defeat at the hands of his best friend Wallace.

On his own, the trip to school went quicker. Having some
brothers meant fewer chores. No longer waiting around at Wallace’s
house each morning this past week meant Rupert had arrived at
school fully a quarter hour earlier.

Wallace found him, leaned against the tall maple tree at the back
of the schoolyard. Rupert was keeping an eye on the Waite sisters,
themselves engrossed in a game of hopscotch with some others in
the Grade Four section of their class . . . none half as beautiful as
those two: Joan Waite, at twelve, a year older than Rupert — dark
hair falling in curls to her shoulders, framing her wide Waite face,
cheekbones that came up in the shape of a heart. Nancy, a year
Rupert’s junior, somehow born with straw-blonde hair, grown to
the middle of her back and braided into a long plait. She had the
same upturned nose, though, the same heart-face, the same golden
freckles, as her sister.

They all played on, not one noting Rupert’s steady gaze.
Rupert turned that gaze on Wallace.

“What?” he said.

“You can come to dinner tonight,” said Wallace.

“Who says I even want to?” said Rupert.

But of course he did want to. Mrs. Gleason put on a fine spread for Wallace, his father the Captain and sister Helen — each night,
not just Sundays. Rupert could sit by Helen, he reasoned, and not
even talk to Wallace if Wallace didn’t apologize with more than a
dinner invitation. So when Wallace asked him if he
did
want to,
Rupert said, “Sure, I guess.” And at the end of day, he waited around
until Wallace got out of detention for leaving his grammar text, and
the two of them headed back together, on a longer route than usual,
to the Gleason farm.

Wallace did say he was sorry but took his sweet time, finally
mumbling it as they started up the long drive to the farmhouse. The
scope of the apology didn’t exactly cover the sins involved.

“Sorry your lip got cut. I don’t know my own strength
sometimes.”

But Rupert figured it for as good as he’d get. “All right,” he said.
“It wasn’t bad as that.”

Wallace half-grinned then and almost undid it. “You cried like a
little baby,” he said.

But when Rupert pushed him, starting something all over again,
Wallace put his hands up. “No fighting today, brother. Today, we got
to stick together.”

“All right.” Rupert let his hands dangle at his sides. They trudged
up the drive to the house and climbed up on the porch. The Captain
was there, sitting on an old cane chair, sipping well-water from a
tin ladle. One suspender dangled off his shoulder; his white shirt
was stained with sweat, which beaded on his sunburned forehead.
Seeing Rupert, he lifted the ladle to him as if in a toast.

“Good afternoon, Captain Gleason,” said Rupert.

“Afternoon, Lieutenant Storey. Corporal Gleason.” The Captain
winked and finished the ladle of water. He dipped it into the bucket
beside his chair and offered it to the boys. It had been a hot walk;
Wallace took it and gulped down half of it, and Rupert grabbed it
away and finished it.

“Can Rupert stay for supper?” asked Wallace when they handed
the ladle back.

“Can Rupert stay for supper? I don’t know. Depends on whether
our Helen’s up to fending off the attentions of her young suitor
tonight.”

Wallace glared, Rupert blushed, and the Captain laughed. “You’re
always welcome at our table, Rupert.” He sniffed the air and said to
Wallace: “Your mother’s roasting pork tonight. With apple. Ought
to be plenty.” Then back to Rupert: “Go on inside. Say hello to Mrs.
Gleason. Keep your hands to yourself with my daughter. Think you
can say Grace?”