The Painting of Porcupine City (24 page)

“Do you not sub
scribe?
” Robbie said.

“Ah. No. I should’ve, huh?”

“Of course. Then you never miss anything. They hold it for you. —Comicopia?”

“It’s a shop in Boston. Pretty cool. You should check it out.”

“Comicopia,” he said again, forking cake into his mouth.

“Come visit your brother some time. We’ll go.”

“That would rock.”

I looked down at the floor. “You know,” I said to Mateo, “you said you thought the dress was business casual, and yet you’re wearing flip-flops.”

Robbie looked and chuckled. “Lucky,” he said.

Mateo shrugged. “Acceptable? Yes? No?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty against flip-flops anywhere other than the beach.”

“Don’t look at me,” Robbie said, “I tried. My mom made me put on these shit-kickers.” In lifting his foot to show us his new brown boat-shoes, he knocked into the cake table and sent three slices splatting onto the floor.

“Oh.” “Oh.” “Oh my.” Some of the aunts gasped.

“Don’t worry,” I said, clapping Robbie’s shoulder. “Five-second rule, remember?” And in two we were on our hands and knees, scooping.

People didn’t stay long.

The newlyweds and Robbie and me and Mateo and Sandra and her boyfriend and a pair of Jamar’s coworkers sat around the tables arranged in the front yard for an hour or two until it began to rain. Mateo and I and Jamar and Robbie hustled rented tables and chairs from the grass onto the front porch, while Cara and the others took them from us and stacked them against the house.

When that was done we stood on the porch making puddles. Mateo’s white t-shirt had gone deliciously transparent and he stood with his arms crossed to cover his nipples.

“Car, why don’t you go stand in the rain so your shirt goes clear like Mateo’s?” Jamar said, nudging her arm. “Pretty please?”

“I would if I had a tat as cool as those.”

Mateo smiled and turned pink through the hair that clung to his cheeks.

“So—” I announced, feeling ready to get on the road and ready to get this wet boy undressed, “anything you want me to bring back home?”

“I don’t think so?” Cara said. “Oh—yeah, hold on.” She disappeared into the house and returned a moment later carrying a foil-wrapped slab of cake the size of a cinderblock. She held it out. “Can you put this in the freezer when you get home?”

I took it, and my goodness, it must’ve weighed twelve pounds.

We said our soggy goodbyes in the garage, traded damp hugs.

“I’m going to lend you some
Blue Beetle
next time I see you.”

“Make sure you put that in the freezer—not the fridge, the freezer. Remember.”

“Bring me something good from Cancun. A Mexican twink or two.”

“Don’t burn the apartment down. Mateo, make sure he doesn’t burn the apartment down.”

“Nice to see you again.”

“Safe flight.”

“Miss you guys.”

“Miss you too.”

“Congratulations.”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

Waving. Blowing kisses. Running to the car.

We traversed Massachusetts

in the pounding rain, me hunched over the wheel trying to make sense of the four feet of Mass Pike I could see in front of us at any given moment through the dark water knocking back and forth over the windshield. Before we were even halfway home my back was sore and my neck ached. Mateo had put some Brazilian rock into the CD player, a CD he left in my car a few weeks ago, and while normally I thought his music was sexy, not understanding the words was just another layer of confusion right now.

“Can we switch to something in English?”

He’d been looking out the window, drumming his fingers on the edge of my seat. He looked over. The air vents were aimed at him and his shirt looked almost dry. “Don’t like it?”

“I like it but I’m really trying to concentrate on the road. I can’t see a fucking thing.” A blurry pair of red taillights glowed a few car-lengths ahead of us. “Can you?”

“Oh.” He turned down the stereo. “You should’ve said something. I’ll drive for a while if you want.”

“Nah, it’s all right.”

“OK.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Nope.”

“Hmm. OK.” A few minutes later a yellow blotch in the distance revealed itself to be a rest-stop McDonald’s and I pulled off. Ludlow plaza.

“Maybe we should get something to eat,” he said.

“Eat? We ate like four pounds of wedding cake and have a dozen more in the backseat.”

“All that sweet makes me want salty. Like fries.”

“Yeah, fries sound good actually.”

I pulled around to the drive-up ordering speaker thing and found a soggy piece of cardboard duct-taped to the front of it. The sign said, BROKE.

“That’s succinct,” I said.

“
Broke
. Ouch. That must send your copyeditor sensibilities crazy.”

“I’m used to it, luckily. Maybe we can order at the window?”

I continued up. There was no sign there, and no human either.

“Should we go in?” I said, turning and noticing Mateo looking lasciviously out the window. I looked too and, seeing the white brick wall of the building, rolled us farther along. “Do you want these fries enough to get wet again?”

“We should go in. Yeah.”

“No, buddy,
you’re
going in. I don’t want them bad enough to ride home wetter than I already am.”

“OK.”

Around to the front again, I parked as close as I could to the doors. It was a short distance to run but the downpour was at Niagara levels.

“Oh,” he said, pulling his t-shirt, “I just remembered. If I get wet you can see my nipples.”

“They’d be the best thing this place has ever witnessed.”

He looked coy. “Will you go?”

“But I don’t want— All right, fine. Large?”

“Sure, what the hell. Want money?”

“My treat.” As I said it I thought,
Fletcher, you’re whipped
.

He watched through the water rushing down the windshield until I was inside. Then he unbuckled his seatbelt and dove into the backseat, careful not to smoosh the cake. He felt around under the seat and came out with a can. He held it at the window to check the color. Red. Not what he would’ve preferred—alone red looked too aggressive, too graffiti cliché—but it would do in a pinch. His stash in my car was bare-bones. He had others all over the place; this was just one of the many he’d spread throughout my life.

He pulled his legs into the backseat and sat up and peered through the windshield. He saw me in line behind a good four or five people. He had time. He reached forward, grabbed the keys from the ignition, stuffed them in his pocket, bailed.

The rain hit him hard and made his white t-shirt go clear instantly. He didn’t care about that but it’d been a good ploy—I fell for it. The rain was warm. He pushed his hair aside and plastered it against his forehead.

His flip-flops squeaked and muddy water flooded his toes. He ran and slipped and swung his arms to catch himself. He hadn’t intended to run today and that’s the real reason he’d worn flip-flops: because today was one of the few days he could, because at all other times he had to be ready to run. But this was a good new place and he wasn’t going to pass it up just because he was wearing inappropriate footwear.

Now he was beneath an overhang and walking close like a spy against the brick wall, dripping. He touched the wall but it was damp, was catching too much spray from the overhang. He continued around to the back, dragging one hand against the brick until he felt it was dry, shaking the can in his other.

Clacka clacka clacka.
And let the red flow.

I pushed my wallet back

in my pants and popped the bag of fries under my shirt, the paper hot against my belly. I took a breath at the door and dove back out into the torrent. I assumed by now that Mateo had moved to the driver’s seat, so I ran to the passenger side and jumped in—there were worse things than to fall into his lap. But the seat was empty, and so was the driver’s seat. And so was the backseat (apart from the cake).

I put the fries on the dash and squeegeed water off my face with my thumbs. Had he gone in to use the bathroom or something? Unlikely. With my sixth sense for hot guys, especially green-eyed ones in transparent t-shirts, I would’ve noticed.

I tried looking through the windshield but it wobbled like a hallucination. I reached to turn on the wipers and found the keys were missing—so wherever he’d gone, he cared enough to keep the car from getting stolen. Which probably meant he was coming back.

I looked out the window but the rain was so thick it was hard to see anything. So I opened the bag and took out a fry. I munched it and looked at the CD he’d had playing:
Brazilians On The Moon
. The album cover showed five figures in space suits chilling on the Sea of Tranquility, the green-yellow-blue of a Brazilian flag dazzling against the surface of the white moon. I opened the case and plucked out the liner notes—all in Portuguese. I decided that if Mateo and I were going to be boyfriends I’d have to invest in a Rosetta Stone or something.

On the windshield above the bag of hot fries an oval of condensation was growing. I drew an A, pointed it into arrows. ARROWMAN IS. And I’d let him fill in BOYFRIEND.

Suddenly my door yanked open, my finger streaking through the condensation, and he was climbing onto my lap, or starting to, through a curtain of water.

“Oh good you’re back here take this!” He dropped a can at me. “Start the car!” He slammed the door. Three seconds later the driver’s side opened and he jumped in.

I stared, a wad of potato paste in my mouth. “Wha—?”

He held out his hand. “Keys! Keys!”

“You have them! Don’t you?”

“Shit!” He twisted around in his seat, banging against the armrest and steering wheel, squirming to get his fingers into the stiff, soaking-wet pocket of his pants.

Then the flat of a hand was thumping furiously on my window inches from my face.
Thumpthumpthumpthump.
On the other side of the rain-streaked glass someone was yelling, mouth and eyes big and distorted like in a fun-house mirror.

Mateo stopped fumbling for the keys and pressed the locks. He was giggling now.

“What did you
do?
” I said, but of course I knew. I remembered the wall. The white, blank wall. I looked down at the can in my hand, the evidence. I was angry but it manifested as a weary calm.

He stabbed the keys into the ignition and we were moving.

“Jesus, don’t hit him.”

“I won’t.”

And we were off, tearing past the gas station down the ramp to get back on the Pike. The motion sluiced clear the windows enough for me to see a big woman in a dripping McDonald’s cap raise a fist at us.

“You got caught,” I said.

He turned and grinned. Water was running out of his hair and down his face. Plump drips clung to his nose and his chin. “Almost. But that bosomy lady back there came a lot closer than the Boston PD
ever
has.” He turned his head to me, keeping his eyeballs on the highway, and opened his mouth. “Shoot me a fry?”

In Framingham we pulled ahead

of the rain and the night opened clear around us. He picked up speed, shut off the wipers and the air, lowered my window a crack. The glass squeaked against my cheek and I sat up, giving up the illusion of being asleep. We hadn’t said much since the rest stop.

“Home?” I said now, my voice croaking salty from fries.

“Almost.”

A few minutes later my eyes were closed again and I heard him say, “Did you feel that?”

I looked out the window. “Feel what?”

“We just crossed into Boston.”

“Oh.” We were indeed back in the city. I could see the lights. The traffic was thicker. “Was there a sign?”

“Probably,” he said. “But I can just tell. It’s like—I don’t know. An
ahhh
feeling. Like a Coke on a summer day.” A moment later as he rolled up to the toll booth, he reached down into the cup holder for his wallet and gave it to me. “Can you fish out some dollars?”

The apartment was hot and

stuffy and I went around opening windows, letting curtains billow and blinds rattle.

“We can sleep on the pull-out if you want,” I told him. “Living room gets a better breeze. Since we have the place to ourselves.”

We pushed the coffee table and some of Jamar’s boxes back against the wall and tugged out the mattress. Got some sheets from my bedroom. White ones.

“You were quiet on the way back,” he said gently as we unfolded the sheets.

“I guess.”

Rather than mentioning the rest stop, which is what I expected him to be thinking of, or even the wedding graffiti he’d put on the side of the house, he mentioned the cake table. “I should’ve explained,” he said, shaking the sheet over one end of the mattress while I grabbed from the other side, “why I never actually asked you to be my crew.”

I started to say that that’s not the reason I was annoyed, but this topic was worth talking about too. “So do you not want me to be?”

“Arrowman!” He clutched the sheet to his chest balled up in his fists. It was a simple thing but the way he did it—like a Victorian damsel—lightened the mood and made me feel sure that neither this nor the kafuffle at the rest stop were going to impede our night. “It’s just a really big deal for me,” he said, “having a crew. I’ve been working solo for so long. I started the Facts solo. I’m totally ready to be your boyfriend. I want to be that, you know? But crew. That’s big for me. That’s more like—”

“Marriage?”

He laughed. “Because it wouldn’t be
you
joining
me
, or whatever. We’d be joining
together
to make something that would have to be different. And that means I’d be doing something new. And there’d be what I
used
to do, and what I do
now
, a whole different thing. And I’m not sure I’m ready to give up working solo.” The sheet floated into place and we smoothed out the wrinkles; he was so intent on getting each one that my watching him do it smoothed out the invisible ones too, the ones between us. “Do you think the plane could take off in the rain?” he said, tucking the corner under the mattress. He sat down and kicked off his flip-flops. I was surprised that he dropped the topic so quickly, but it at least was tagged, and that was enough for now. The bed was ready. I stood in front of him between his knees and he put his feet on the tops of my shoes.