Call Me Home (9 page)

“You asked if I was scared.”

“Nah,” Honey said.

The East side looked like a whole different game. The foundation had been set for a big house – a house that made the A-frames look like camp cabins, and apparently the whole crew was devoted to it. Jackson tried to imagine who might live in a house like that. A Senator? A business executive? Who, with that kind of money, would come out to this dark little corner of the bottleneck? There were a hundred things he didn't understand. The first being Honey's sad little smile as he let Jackson out of the cab.

Don Newlon was sitting on the edge of the foundation. Jackson had noticed him the other night. Don's skin was an olive color;
he had that dark hair and he'd just shaved his beard from the other night, so there was a shadow of stubble around his jaw; he was so beautiful that Jackson couldn't look at him full on; he just looked at Don's edges. Beautiful Don with his long legs out in front of him like a kid, eating a sandwich. Watching him with the sandwich pissed Jackson off, all of a sudden; how can you eat when you're about to fire someone? All the old adages of his father's – the way that the shift leaders would sell out their wives before they'd lose a profit. “Throw your beads at someone else's daughter.” His father shouting at the Channel 5 news when everyone was protesting the union. That was one thing about his father – he was a union man. The union gave him health insurance and got him off in time for cheap domestics at the bar, and no matter how many times the pressure came for a union bust his father wouldn't budge.

“Hey,” Jackson said. Don held out the hand that wasn't holding the sandwich and Jackson shook it. He had shaken more hands in the last few days than ever before in his life. Don's hands were strong with long fingers. His palms were warm and dry, not too soft. It was a good handshake.

“Hey, Jack. Can I call you Jack?”

“Sure.”

“How's the work going?”

“It's all right.”

“Do you know your way around yet?” Don asked. He was looking at Jackson with his blue eyes and the dark hair was falling into them and Jackson looked away.

Shotgun shacks around the mudflats, the dingy houses that used to be lakefront property. The shady dark arms of the ironworks. The row of failing businesses: Maxine's Shear Perfection; Gold Mine Pawn; the liquor store. The clear teardrop of the new lake.

“Oh, sure,” Jackson said. What was this? “The whole damn bunker.”

“Just like
M*A*S*H*
!” Don said.

“Those were tents.”

Don looked a little wounded. “Right,” he said.

Jackson felt an immediate sense of remorse. He wanted to take it back so that Don would smile at him again. “I loved that show,” Jackson said.
I loved that show?
He hadn't even watched that show, only when he and Lydia tried dressing the television antennae in tin foil and it had picked up the Trinity Broadcast Network and that –
M*A*S*H*
, and neither were the forbidden treasures he'd been hoping for. Jackson had thought of
M*A*S*H*
as an old person's show, he remembered now. Don must be twelve or fifteen years older than him – it hadn't occurred to him until now to wonder how old Don was, but he guessed he was in his early thirties. Older than himself, and younger than Eric. Don had faint lines at the corners of his eyes from the sun or laughter. Jackson looked at them and looked away again.

“Me, too,” Don said, happily.

“Yep,” Jackson said. “Me, too.”

“Ha!”

Jackson fished for a cigarette. His hands were shaking as he lit it. He didn't understand what was going on. It didn't seem like Don was here to fire him, but why else? To try to be his friend? Don looked like the kind of person Jackson normally would have avoided – beautiful – too beautiful, he thought – and capable, too much of getting his way in the world filling up his chest. Jackson could imagine him in a sports bar or out on the street, harassing queers just for the hell of it. Throwing peanuts at a couple fags across the bar. He looked like the kind of guy Jackson hated the most – the kind who would play grab-ass with his douchebag friends and then beat some queer kid down on the street. But that was a lie, too – the truth was he hated them because he was afraid. A beautiful man might see desire on him, might catch a glimpse of something sparking in Jackson that the man felt the need to extinguish. And now Jackson could feel his whole body being pulled toward Don, a warm need in him that he could not let Don see. Please, Jackson thought, looking at Don's square shoulders, his easy smile, don't look at me.

“Where you from?” Don asked.

How to answer? “Portland,” he said.

“Missoula,” said Don.

Jackson nodded. He would die if he couldn't come up with something to say. His thoughts whirred and lit on words and then abandoned them again. “Montana,” he said finally. Stupid.

“Yes.”

Kill me, Jackson thought. Please God.

“You coming to the party?” Don asked.

“What party?”

“Saturday night. For Easter.”

“Easter was two weeks ago.”

“Well, it's a party, still.”

“Sure,” Jackson said.

“You ever shot a gun?”

“What?”

“A gun.”

“No.”

Don turned and grinned at him. “We'll fix that Saturday, then.” He stood up, sandwich gone, and gestured toward his truck across the lot. “You want a ride back?”

They rode back in silence. Jackson wanted to throw up. What was there to say? Nothing. Don was the most beautiful man Jackson had ever seen and it had to be written all over his face. Why had Don called for him? Jackson fumbled for a cigarette, lit it, smoked it through the cracked window. If Don had wanted to tell him something he'd done wrong, then why hadn't Don brought it up? If Don had just wanted to see him … Jackson sucked on the cigarette and watched the paper burn down.

Don pulled the truck up to the site and Jackson reached for the door handle.

“Hey,” Don said, and caught Jackson's arm with one hand. Jackson looked down at Don's long fingers, the trimmed oval nails with a hairpin line of dirt under each one. They both did. There was a long beat and Jackson felt a flush come over him, the blood
blooming through his body, electricity and fear. “If you need anything, let me know,” Don said, and dropped his hand. “If anybody gives you a hard time.”

Jackson was suddenly feverishly hot. He didn't know where to look, just nodded at Don and smiled in a way he hoped looked natural. He wasn't being fired. He wasn't being fired. Don had touched his arm. He watched the truck move off down the road, back toward the East side.

Finally, he walked back to the sawhorses to split the rest of the beams, moving mechanically, thinking about Don, his long fingers, his coltish limbs. It had been twenty terrible, wonderful minutes and now he felt ruined and obsessed. The whole of his experience: Chris, a half-dozen anonymous men in Portland, Eric. A certain dark Sunday afternoon in the high school pool, Chris lying across Jackson's lap while Jackson jerked him off, the damp warm chlorine, the wet trail of their footprints shrinking on the concrete. He'd looked down at Chris's half-closed eyes, his warm cock – Jackson had felt so sure he was in love then, with Chris in the cup of his hand. But in all of the too-quick weeks of their friendship Chris would never look at him, not really. He only let Jackson touch him, kiss him, and for a few weeks that had seemed like enough. Until it wasn't. A humiliating bitter taste in his mouth, the lock of hair. Chris looking past him. Later, the men in Portland, faceless, ghosts, numbers: fifty dollars, a hundred. A bottle, a meal. And then that first meeting with Eric, when he'd pulled out his billfold and reached across and touched Jackson's arm, and even sitting across from fat, despicable Eric he'd felt a flush of something. It felt like attraction but really it was something else. Flattery. Hope.

His arm was still warm where Don had touched it. He was nice, Jackson thought, or at least he'd seemed nice. But what did it matter? He was probably imagining that the hand on his arm meant anything. Even if it did, even if Don wanted something from him, Don would want him like Chris and Eric had wanted him. He was doomed.

“Jack!” yelled Ed. He had the air hose wrapped around him,
halfway up the ladder with the nail gun. “What the hell happened? You been taking a shit?” He grinned at Jackson and Jackson laughed. Ed was cool to him. Forget Don, he thought. He wasn't going to think about him anymore, if he could help it. He flipped Ed off, picked up his gloves, and went back to work.

THE BELATED EASTER
party was to be held that Saturday night at A-frame A, the most complete of the new houses. Just a few beers, and then the Longhorn, according to the much-circulated plan.

Who had an Easter party? Jackson didn't care. He was going to see Don. He hadn't seen him since Honey brought him to the East side on Tuesday; each day that Don's truck didn't appear, Jackson tried to pretend he wasn't disappointed. Now he shaved in the pocket mirror, the one he'd stolen from Lydia, and put on a clean shirt. He did everything slowly, meticulously. He drank the rest of the bottle of wine. What a girl he was. He thought again about the lock of hair he'd given to Chris. In his imagined, more perfect life, he discarded sentimentalities. Into the trash with the birthday cards, faded photographs. A better Jackson would scorn them all.

It was a little past seven when he made the walk to A-frame A. Already the light was draining away; he hadn't remembered a flashlight. The lake was lapping against the shore, a dark, bright line that curved like a knife blade in the dim evening light. The clouds had lifted, and the faintest web of stars was beginning to stretch over the water. There were crushed cans along the path.

When he got to A-frame A, there was already a crowd. Jackson was a little late, because he hadn't wanted to be too early, but now it seemed like he shouldn't have worried. He could hear Jay Donahue and Bill inside, shouting and laughing, already drunk. The floor was still not sanded, but the windowpanes were up, the electrical wiring coursing through like veins. Someone had set up a card table and filled it with bags of chips, open plastic cartons of donuts, and cupcakes. There was a group of men sitting around it, drinking from a small cityscape of open bottles. Don was nowhere in sight. He had the feeling of walking onto a stage.

“Jack!” Bill flagged him over. “You gotta hear about this. Tell him, Jay.”

The whole room smelled of men – a different smell from the high school cross-country locker room, which had appealed to Jackson in another way – wispy, ephemeral slips of running shorts, clean sweat, shampoo. The men in Silver smelled dirtier. Beer sweat, sawdust. No one had touched in the locker room – all of the runners were virginal, clean, and of themselves, communal only in their dedication to noble pursuits: a second shaved from the half mile, a lighter pair of running shoes. The Silver crew touched with beery, cheerful abandon, and Jackson was one of them. Their meaty hands palmed him. Was it possible they weren't thinking of sex? All of the things that had marked him in Tulalip, in Portland, evaporated. It seemed like no one saw. Then there was Don, he thought. Don saw or he didn't. Jackson looked around for him but he couldn't see him. Josh, the crew leader on the north side, was holding up a pen, one of those naked lady pens, and laughing loudly. Jackson laughed loudly, too, slapped his own skinny leg –
A broad! And her top falls off!
Was it really this simple? Men and their simple wants. Josh turned the pen and the woman's top slid down again.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jackson saw Don climb the steps to the open house, knocking his boots against the doorframe. Don was wearing a red sweater that pulled against his stomach, his round shoulders hunched forward. He was carrying a case of beer and smoking a cigarette.

Don didn't look at him. He gave a wide, encompassing smile to the room, and Jackson concentrated on an open fifth of Early Times. He took a long drink, and then another. One of the guys slapped him on the back. “Good man!” he said, knocking his own bottle against Jackson's.

“There was this one crew that I worked on,” Jay was saying, “and I worked with this guy, his name was Cliff, and he had this freakish strength. I mean you don't mess with him, he'll kill you, he's got a full-blown psychopathic streak. And he's working with
this kid, seventeen years old, who's trying to prove himself.” The other men, Bill and Don, and someone Jackson hadn't met, nodded. “And the kid starts lipping off from a sixteen-foot scaffold, and Cliff grabs him by the throat, dangles him over the edge, says ‘I'll fucking kill you.' And the kid says something smart and Cliff grabs him and throws him off and he broke his fucking ankle.” Jay looked around, waiting. “You don't lip off at Cliff.”

“So when the kid's ankle heals he comes back to work. It's hot again, a hundred degrees, and we're doing a roof on the barn, and it's hotter than hell up there. I mean, you can fry an egg. The kid finds a barn swallow nest and knocks it down. They're baby swallows and he just smashes them, and then he puts their bloody, crappy bodies in Cliff's water jug. He wants to show Cliff, you see. It's really fucking hot, three in the afternoon, and Cliff picks up the water jug and it reeks, and he opens it up and its full of dead birds.” Jay opened his mouth wide and laughed.