Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (27 page)

I bolted to my feet, slung the gym bag over my shoulder, and hurried toward home. Now and then I turned around to make sure he wasn’t trailing me, both relieved and disappointed when I didn’t see his car. Even after I became convinced that he wasn’t at my back (my sudden flight had scared him off), I kept turning around to see what was making me so nervous, as if I might spot the source of my discomfort somewhere on the street. I walked faster and faster, trying to outrace myself. Eventually, the bus I was supposed to have taken roared past. Turning the corner, I watched it bob eastward.

Closing the kitchen door behind me, I vowed to never leave home again. I was resolute in this decision without fully understanding why, or what it was I hoped to avoid; I was only aware of the need to hide and a vague notion, fading fast, that my trouble had something to do with sex. Already the mechanism of self-deception was at work. By the time my mother rushed into the kitchen to see why I’d returned so early, the thrill I’d felt while waiting for the bus had given way to indignation.

I poured out the story of the man circling the block and protested, with perhaps too great a passion, my own innocence. “I was just sitting there,” I said again and again. I was so determined to deflect suspicion from myself, and to justify my missing the class, that I portrayed the man as a grizzled pervert who drunkenly veered from lane to lane as he followed me halfway home.

My mother listened quietly. She seemed moved and shocked by what I told her, if a bit incredulous, which prompted me to be more dramatic. “It wouldn’t be safe,” I insisted, “for me to wait at the bus stop again.”

No matter how overwrought my story, I knew my mother wouldn’t question it, wouldn’t bring the subject up again; sex of any kind, especially sex between a man and a boy, was simply not discussed in our house. The gymnastics class, my parents agreed, was something I could do another time.

And so I spent the remainder of that summer at home with my mother, stirring cake batter, holding the dustpan, helping her fold the sheets. For a while I was proud of myself for engineering a reprieve from the Athletic Club. But as the days wore on, I began to see that my mother had wanted me with her all along, and forcing that to happen wasn’t such a feat. Soon a sense of compromise set in; by expressing disgust for the man in the car, I’d expressed disgust for an aspect of myself. Now I had all the time in the world to sit around and contemplate my desire for men. The days grew long and stifling and hot, an endless sentence of self-examination.

Only trips to the pet store offered any respite. Every time I went there, I was too electrified with longing to think about longing in the abstract. The bell tinkled above the door, animals stirred within their cages, and the handsome owner glanced up from his work.

I handed my father the
Herald
. He opened the paper and disappeared behind it. My mother stirred her coffee and sighed. She gazed at the sweltering passersby and probably thought herself lucky. I slid into the vinyl booth and took my place beside my parents.

For a moment, I considered asking them about what had happened on the street, but they would have reacted with censure and alarm, and I sensed there was more to the story than they’d ever be willing to tell me. Men in dresses were only the tip of the iceberg. Who knew what other wonders existed — a boy, for example, who wants to kiss a man — exceptions the world did its best to keep hidden.

It would be years before I heard the word
transvestite
, so I struggled to find a word for what I’d seen.
He-she
came to mind, as lilting as
Injijikian. Burl’s
would have been perfect, like
boys
and
girls
spliced together, but I can’t claim to have thought of this back then.

I must have looked stricken as I tried to figure it all out, because my mother put down her coffee cup and asked if I was okay. She stopped just short of feeling my forehead. I assured her I was fine, but something within me had shifted, had given way to a heady doubt. When the waitress came and slapped down our check — “Thank you,” it read, “dine out more often” — I wondered if her lofty hairdo or the breasts on which her name tag quaked were real. Wax carnations bloomed at every table. Phony wood paneled the walls. Plastic food sat in a display case: fried eggs, a hamburger sandwich, a sundae topped with a garish cherry.

Michael W. Cox

 

MICHAEL W. COX
’s essays have appeared in
New Letters, River Teeth
,
The New York Times Magazine
,
St. Petersburg Times
, and
The Best American Essays 1999
. His short stories have appeared in
ACM
,
Columbia
,
Cimarron Review
,
Other Voices
, and
Salt Hill
, among other publications, and he has also written a number of academic papers, medical articles, and book reviews. He has won the
New Letters
Literary Award for the Essay and the
Passages North
Waasmode Northern Lights Fiction Prize. He teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, where he is coordinator of professional writing.

 

My father kept a boy in the basement. He’d tell me not to go down there, but I’d go anyway, sometimes, and talk to the boy. He’d smoke a cigarette, usually, while he talked to me. He’d tell me things.

We had two basements, really, one indoor, one out. The boy stayed in the outdoor one, for part of one whole summer. Really, it was a fine basement, the outdoor one. It had been a kind of playhouse for me and my brothers, but by the time the boy had arrived we had forgotten about it, to play instead in a gigantic field of horseweed down below our house, beyond the railroad tracks and before the river. Outside the basement door, in a small alcove, my father kept our trash cans; and at night, you’d hear him out there, beneath the window, taking out the bags of garbage. He would take the bag of trash from our kitchen, through the indoor basement and out its side door, and walk the few steps to the trash can. From there you could look into the dark outdoor basement, the door having long since been removed from its hinges — the house came that way when we moved in, the outdoor basement being doorless, I mean. Inside, the front half of the floor was dirt and, often, especially with the rain that seeped in through the bricks, mud. We boys had laid down planks across the dirt, so we could walk to the back half without getting our shoes wet, where one of the previous owners of the house had built a wooden floor elevated about six inches off the ground. There was a kind of half wall in there, too, and a ceiling above the wall, the whole structure being like an indoor tree house — my brother had taken the stepladder from our bunk bed and put it down there in the basement, so we could climb up to the ceiling and sit between it and the bottom side of the front porch above our heads. Inside the half-room in that basement, I would guess the clearance was about six or seven feet — we were all of us small, but to imagine my father in there, with that boy, he might’ve had to duck his head down inside that room. There was an old couch in there, I remember, and a blanket for the couch. The boy must’ve slept on that at night, when he’d come from being out somewhere in the daytime; he’d walk up the railroad tracks — I could hear him, would crawl to my window to watch, unseen, through the screen — up the short hillside path into our yard, in the dark so as not to be seen by neighbors, and on up to the basement, then my father, a while later, taking out the trash and then going on inside for a few minutes, my mother on the other side of the wall from my bedroom, listening to the television set in the summer night, losing track of the time in some mindless plot. And all the while I was supposed to be sleeping, but I’d tick off the minutes my father was inside there — one one-thousand, two one-thousand — keeping time. He never took too long, though more than once I think I heard him, from my bed, go downstairs in the night to get a glass of milk — I’d hear him whisper to mom first, who’d be dead asleep anyway, and then the walking of my father’s feet down the stairs in the creaking night and, fifteen seconds later, the basement door clicking open beneath the window of my room, then clicking shut a few minutes later, etc. One morning as I was eating my cereal across from him, he asked me what I was looking at.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m not looking at anything.”

He went back to his paper.

“Don’t go in the basement,” he said from behind it.

“How come?

“Saw a ’possum there, when I was taking out the trash.”

“’Possum?” I said.

“Might be living in that basement,” he said. “Might be rabid.”

“Might be,” I said. And that was that.

But I stepped inside there one day, in broad daylight but dim inside, because I wanted to see how the boy might be living in there. Summer nights were warm, always, never dipping below sixty, so a blanket and dry clothes would be enough. As I walked in along the planks I could smell his cigarette and knew I was not alone — I hadn’t expected him in there in the daytime, and most days, I expect, he wasn’t there at all — he might be working somewhere, I thought, or maybe be down at the river swimming, I thought, or maybe he’d stop inside the stores down on Main Street and shoplift him a little something — I didn’t know, I could only imagine and he said hello to me. I stopped, let my eyes adjust and then I could see him — him, who I’d seen for the most part only the top of as he’d walk beneath my window, a baseball cap on always, which was off now and lying on the couch beside him. His legs were crossed, I could see as my eyes got better at it, and he was wearing dark pants and a jacket and I could see his cigarette brighten when he put it up to his face, his mouth, lips. Hey youngun, he called, but quietly. Come on over, he said, have a seat — he patted the couch beside himself, mashing his cap then realizing that and grabbing it by the bill and popping it out.

Who are you? I asked but without fear in my voice, I’m pretty sure, and he told me his name was Jody, and then he told me, if I wanted to be his buddy, I could go back inside the house and make him a sandwich and bring it on back out here, to his couch. I did exactly what he asked, made him a potted meat sandwich on white bread and even, when he asked, went back inside the house for mustard, so he could spice up the sandwich, he said. I knew right away I would get him real food and not do anything so rank as substitute dog food for potted meat (though some would argue, I knew even then, as to the relative difference between the two), or pee in a glass and tell him that it was lemonade — yes, I had done these things to marginal acquaintances, it’s true and I am not exactly proud of it, and when I think of these things these days I kind of laugh to myself while grimacing at the same time, hoping no such thing was ever done to me, hoping that they are wrong, whoever they may be, when they say what goes around, etc. But you just can’t know sometimes: you cannot file a taste away in your mind and retrieve it, precisely, twenty years later and say my god, that boy fed me dog food, or piss water, or some such thing.

And Jody was grateful and liked my sandwich very much, and then he sent me back inside, promptly, to fix him another and another, telling me that my daddy liked to keep him hungry. You eat good inside there? he asked, and I nodded as he devoured his fourth and, that day, final sandwich, three trips having been made inside by then (odd trip being the mustard). Well that’s good, he said, to eat good, though I must say you are a skinny boy and he was right, I was, it’s true, and have remained then to this day, more or less, a couple of periods of drunkenness having led to weight gain, but get sober and it comes right off, pizza boxes and empty bags of chips aside, in the trash, wherever your trash can might be located. And he and I, Jody, I mean, became fast friends, I bringing him sandwiches each day at the same “bat time,” as he called it, same bat place (I knew the show he referred to but did not know that the reference was humorous — it all seemed sincerely serious to me, just like my sandwich bringing — he was careful to make sure I brought my mother’s plates back inside, not wanting, as he put it, to tip off the old lady).

I was reading a novel that summer about an alien boy who dropped into our dimension from another — he fell through a portal right into a family’s life and, though he did not come to our dimension knowing English, learned it right away, the vocabulary, the grammar, all by listening, processing, and then, one day, by practicing. He was a good boy but frightened, and he wanted, very badly, to find the portal and get back home. I wished my father’s boy might be just such an alien, but he wasn’t. When he’d strike a match I’d look at him nonetheless, searching for signs: pointed ears, high forehead, hairlessness. He had none of that, and in fact he told me he’d only come from down the road apiece, just a few counties away.

He was a funny boy even so, and by that I mean strange. He laughed at odd times, and not a nice laugh either. He was older than me significantly — had I been a little younger, I’d’ve thought him a man. But he wasn’t a man, just a teenager. He asked me one day what my mother was like, and I asked him what did he mean. Is she pretty, he asked, and I said that yes, I thought she was. Does your father think she’s pretty, he asked, and I thought and then I said that yes, I thought that he too thought her pretty. Well that’s a pretty picture then, don’t you think, he asked, and stuck his tickling fingers against my stomach right then, to get me to laugh.

He wore a jacket, that much I remember. There was a blanket in there, as I have said, and a couch. It is painful sometimes for me, when I think back, to picture him in there in the night, alone, nothing but his cigarettes for company. It is possible he did not have many thoughts, and so was not bothered by the lack of things in there in the night, or possibly he had many thoughts and so he could entertain himself for hours on end. Maybe he’d read books and would remember them, or see, in his mind, TV shows he’d already seen, maybe, or maybe he’d remember his home life and the way his parents and he got along. I cannot know, cannot remember not being, as it were, omniscient. Certainly I could create a life for him, if I wished. At the heart of an enigma is nothing but what you put there yourself. He would tell me tales about the road, for he was, he claimed, a kind of hobo. Did he ride the rails, I’d ask, motioning to the railroad tracks just down the hill, and he told me no, of course not, that hopping trains was dangerous. He would tell me of hitchhiking, and of how you could tell who might be friendly, as a driver, and who might not be. It was always men driving alone, he said, who were the friendly ones, and he made his voice kind of crackle then, he’d start laughing, I mean, like it was a private joke with him and he’d not tell me, precisely, what he meant. I’m a mystery to you, he’d say, and he liked that, I could tell, because he nodded and would take a big pull off his cigarette, blow that smoke into the air, nod again and take another big pull. He taught me how to smoke, that’s the one thing he taught me, not being any kind of abuser so much as the object of one or two along the way, or, probably, many. Your father’s a funny man, he’d say, and I could not bring myself to ask Jody to tell me what he meant.