The Short History of a Prince (33 page)

Mitch was still groaning, holding his gut, when Walter went to the window, reached for a balloon inside, in the box, tiptoed to the edge of the roof, and dropped the bomb down on Madame’s precious carport. It made a satisfying
flump
along with the splash. He couldn’t see the results in the dark, but he knew it had hit the seventeen-by-fifteen-foot target, eighteen or so feet below. All it took was the first shot to sober up Mitch, to get him doing a soft-shoe number across the shingles to the arsenal.

Some balloons they let drop, straight down, no grace in the fall with the dead weight of the paint. Others they hurled, the smash brought on by their own hands. The Gambles in their breakfast nook, eating their shepherd’s pie, were watching an episode of
The American Family
, Walter tossed one balloon up into the air, using the underhand throw he’d learned out in the alley playing Horse with a basketball.
The balloon was heavy and didn’t make much of an arc. Walter, watching it rise just a little, and slam down to the roof, lost his balance. He felt himself lurching, in slow motion, of course, tipping, a hand, an arm, his head, going over, no strength to fight gravity, no hope to cling by his fingernails to the downspout. In daylight he would not have been alarmed. He wasn’t as close to the edge as he felt himself to be and he was casting left rather than forward. There was Mitch’s hand, in Walter’s own hand, pulling him back from the gutter, pulling him to safety.

“Fuck,” he breathed, holding tight.

“Fuck,” Mitch gasped, letting him go.

It seemed to both of them a nearly fatal slip. Later they joked about Walter falling and becoming a part of the Pollock masterpiece, the cream of brains and intestines, the purple of liver, the deep brown stain of blood, in one shining blot. Out on the roof they quickly dispersed the rest of the balloons. “Careful,” Walter said, as if they needed reminding. They climbed back into the house, and while Walter slowly, inch by inch, let down the creaking window, Mitch put the lids back on the paint. They hid the cans underneath a piece of furniture Walter referred to as the old chifforobe, in honor of Harper Lee. The green rug would cover the spills nicely, and like good children folding laundry they each took two corners and carried it to the disaster. They stole down the attic stairs, one at a time, their hearts beating in the great hollow of their heads. They stepped. And they waited, listening, breathing. They took another Mother-may-I baby step toward the bottom. In the upstairs hall forced air from the register blasted them square in the face and they opened their mouths to it, as if it were water. They squatted and pressed their numb hands to the flood of warmth. There was absolutely no feeling in their hands, but so what? They were red and cracked and when the blood inside them thawed and the slurry began to run they’d sting and smart. So what!

“That bitch is still laughing her goddamn fucking head off,” Mitch said. They could hear Susan, from the kitchen, singing, rather than laughing, singing “Shall we dance?”

It was not easy to make their way down the front steps. They walked as if they had no body between the tips of their toes and their shoulders. Their arms were out for balance, and all of the action was
in their pecking heads and their big toes. Susan was trying to teach Daniel a dance—ballroom figures, Walter said to himself, for people who are trying to patch up their marriage. Some spazzy rumba. They could hear her saying, “One, two, three—that’s right.” Walter froze at the door when she said, “You’ve got a better sense of rhythm than your brother! You’re good, Dan.” He was about to open his mouth to protest when Mitch yanked him out of the house. The door slammed, ringing clear through the night. They heard it slam again and again, as if the noise had its own continuous source, as if it were making ripples, out and out, into the yard, the parkway, the street. Both of them ran down the porch, jumped over the railing into the bushes, where they crouched for a minute, side by side, and did not breathe. Sunshine Gamble took her time finishing her business, and when she was done she trotted to the fence and barked. At her alarm the boys tumbled against each other, Walter on the hard ground, Mitch on top of him.

Joyce did not come to the door. They waited. She did not turn on the porch light and open up. She did not call, “Is anyone there?” Mrs. Gamble did not flick the one switch in her kitchen that activated front spots, back spots, garage and carport lights. Only Sunshine Gamble had heard. They lay still, Mitch’s head down over Walter’s left shoulder. They gave themselves the luxury of breath. Walter’s chest rose up against Mitch’s chest. He felt shy breathing a little more deeply, rib against rib, those bones, it seemed, even through the jackets, as articulated as fingers. It was Mitch who shifted so that he could kiss Walter; Walter has never forgotten that it was Mitch who kissed his upper lip and his lower lip, Mitch who licked along the fuzz of his coming mustache. When he tilted his head to follow the beauty boy’s mouth Mitch pushed him down. He kissed Walter’s face, small, feathery kisses at first—worshipful, Walter might have said—and he went on, kissing down his cold white neck. With the cotton glove from his pocket he wiped the one tear falling sidewise to Walter’s ear.

Time stop, Walter wished. Hold and hold on. He was trembling so that the stiff brown grasses next to him waved, as if a little wind had come up. Mitch was at his lips again, playing over them, flicking his tongue, deft and quick, lizard motions to Walter’s open mouth. Fill me, Walter meant to say with the gaping hole of his mouth, I’m ready,
ready to catch the wet pulse of your tongue, my body beating in time, meeting the rhythms of your body. This is how, this is how, this is how we will be one: mouth to mouth, sweet tongue to tongue, flittering hearts below and, farther down, throbbing cocks alert as hunting dogs, straining at the lead.

Without warning, there was the wide sky overhead, Mitch was gone, through the bushes, running low, like a sniper. The cold swept through Walter, through his unzipped jacket, his sweater, his undershirt, the air clinging, like a haze, to his skin. He wasn’t sure he could move, wasn’t sure it might be better to freeze at this point, like an Arctic explorer, having come so far. If he returned, back to the journey, he might have to do something barbaric, abandon the other loved ones or eat his own pup. He was careful not to move his tongue over the smallest ice crystals that had formed around his mouth. There would from now on be a whole new realm to want. He would no longer care for the forest dreams or the comfort of the sun. He would wish again and again for that strip of cold earth under the bushes, the cold stars, the small white crystals around his own lips that had been left as proof.
Mitch was here
.

He felt the chill through him, swirling to his center, the mist of it leaking out and in and everywhere like dry ice, like something you should be able to see. He shinnied slowly along under the porch, kneeled when he came to the grass, stood straight, and walked up the stairs, shoving his telltale hands into his pockets. He was brand-new, improved, unrecognizable even to himself. He threw open the door. “Hi,” he called from the hall. “Hello, everyone. I’m back. I’m really home now.”

Eight

MARCH
1996

W
alter drove to the Easter celebration at Lake Margaret wondering what bit of truth he would dress up in a cockamamy story, what scrap he would inadvertently tell Lucy this time around. Some morsel that would give her that lovely shocked look. He remembered how idiotic he’d felt at Thanksgiving babbling at anyone who sat next to him, and he vowed to keep his mouth shut, to say nothing. He’d try to act like a regular guy and talk about sports, offense, defense, no harm, no foul.

Uncle Ted and Aunt Jeannie were going to the Bahamas in April, over the real Easter Sunday; Jeannie had therefore sorted through her children’s busy schedules and decreed that the family celebrate the holiday at the lake on March 2. Sue Rawson made no bones about telling the relatives that it was just as well to get it over with, the sooner, the better. On that rainy Saturday the relatives gathered to prepare the crown roast, the twice-baked potatoes, the string beans amandine, the pineapple salad and the traditional Lake Margaret Easter dessert. The cake, baked in a lamb mold, was a family recipe that had been traced to a Frances Rose Rawson of Lebanon, New Hampshire, 1816–1903.

Aunt Jeannie had made Ted order brown eggs through his distributor at the Jewel for the cake, and while she beat the yolks with the
1950 MixMaster in the Lake Margaret kitchen she rhapsodized over the ritual. She had eaten the cake every Easter for seventy-three years; she’d baked it herself for more than four decades; she’d never had a failure, never changed the receipt, she called it, by as much as a drop of vanilla or a grain of sugar. The secret, if anyone wondered, was lard. She had looked all over the house for Francie, in the hope that her oldest daughter would come watch the preparation. To Walter she said, “For goodness’ sakes, it will one day be up to her to carry on the tradition, and I’m not sure she knows how!”

Francie hated yellow cake and had gone to the woods, in the rain, with her cousin Celeste. At Thanksgiving, Francie had told Celeste about Skip, her twenty-six-year-old lover. Celeste was not a risk taker and she was drawn to the danger of Francie’s story. They walked close under one umbrella and scuffed up the thick carpet of wet leaves. “How long,” Francie asked her cousin, “can a woman put up with a doctor husband who spends all his free time in a greenhouse pinching back leaves and mixing potting soil in a bucket?”

Francie wanted Skip, and she was bound to have him, to leave Roger to the sex life of his stamens and pistils. No one but Celeste knew how far from the fold Francie had strayed, and in her absence Walter stood by the counter watching his aunt sift the sugar onto a square of waxed paper. He was a little bit embarrassed by his contribution to the meal, and he thought he might redeem himself if he paid homage to Jeannie. The rehearsals for
South Pacific
had been going late and he hadn’t had time to make real hors d’oeuvres, to whip up some spinach puffs and stuffed mushrooms. He had sliced carrots, broccoli and celery, and in the center of his sectioned tray he’d placed the plastic carton of grocery-store dip. “I’m sorry about my—crudités,” he said.

She was engrossed in her cake and didn’t care what he’d brought. “Some moments are historical,” she said, folding the egg whites into the batter. “The forty-fifth time I’ve done this, right here, on this exact spot. It should make me feel old, but it doesn’t!”

Walter hoped, as he nodded and smiled, that she would never become feeble or depressed or senile. He hoped she’d make a good end, that her lights would go out when she was her vibrant self, dressed for
a party. As soon as the cake was in the oven and the show over, he excused himself and went into the living room to help his father build a fire. It was not a job that required two grown men, but Robert had asked for a hand. They knelt side by side, crumpling up the paper and blowing on the kindling. It seemed to Walter that his father was suddenly grayer, his brown eyes a little bleary, but when he cracked his smile, his gap-toothed smile, there was that same old light in his face. Walter told Robert that Otten’s basketball team, the Braves, had gone to regionals, and so far won every game. They were almost certainly going to make it to state, led by their star, Bill Pierce.

“Anyone make a stink yet about the team name?” his father asked companionably. “Politically correct and all that?”

“Not yet. No, not in Otten. There’s a scowling redskin over the basket, too. He’s got the scalping look in his eye, definitely not the peace-pipe sort. He’s not someone a self-respecting Injin would want to claim as a Native American.”

The smoke from the fire drifted into the room before it got sucked up the draft and the two men coughed and waved their arms at the haze. Robert slowly got to his feet and went to open the windows. Walter sat back on his haunches and breathed in the fine ash and must and mildew. He figured he was in good shape and could afford to inhale as many Lake Margaret dust mites as he wanted. Every night after school he’d been going at it on his Nordic Track, to the music of
Swan Lake, Serenade
and
Giselle
. He supposed that skiing in place with a soaring heart, his hips banging at the gray padded support, was a disappointing end for someone who had once aspired to be a dancer. Some might say he was pathetic, a flop, clattering away on his exercise machine. On the bright side, his calves were firming up, he’d gained strength in his arms and he’d lost a few pounds. The workout was strenuous enough to drench his clothes and clear his head. He was far from the ideal, but it was the best he could do. His new fantasy was to become Bill Pierce out on the court, and he always closed his drapes so that no Peeping Toms could witness his stab at a jock’s life.

Lucy appeared at Walter’s side as the papers in the grate curled and turned black. He and his father had almost asphyxiated everyone downstairs, but the fire was taking to the wood as if the twigs had
been laid by the Boy Scouts. Lucy bent down, warming her knees and her hands. Walter noticed a gold locket the size of a nickel between her breasts, nestled in the pink fuzz of her sweater.