Authors: Megan Kruse
Call Me Home (13 page)
“Lydia,” my brother told me, “the way that girls feel about boys is the way that I feel about them. Like I might marry a boy someday.”
“Like gay?”
“Yes.”
“You're a homo?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I thought for a minute. Jackson was looking at me. His hands were shaking, pulling an alder leaf into pieces and letting them drift to the ground.
“I understand,” I said, and I did.
Between us, we knew everything already.
We practiced survival. We stripped the leaves from fireweed and chewed them to a bitter cud. We found tangles of blackberry and drank straight from the creek. We sat in an old rowboat that was abandoned in the woods. In heavy rain we turned it upside down, curled underneath it in the dirt and salal.
We lured a stray dog through the woods with pieces of stale bread and talked to him in low voices. He was skittish and thin and we named him Green for his eyes. When we whistled for him he would appear, a moving shadow between the trees. When we touched his fur with cold, careful hands we knew that he was meant for us.
When we heard voices from the house we went deeper into the woods and looked for bleeding hearts and trilliums on the mud-slick slopes on either side of the creek, and when we found them we did not pick them. We knew how rare they were, how beautiful, and how quickly they would wilt in our hands.
“I hate him,” I told Jackson. “I wish that he would die. I wish he would go to jail. I wish he would move far away and never come back.”
“Sometimes,” Jackson said, “I still love him.”
My brother could look so sad sometimes.
“But I don't think I should,” he said.
I imagined that if our father disappeared then we would move into the forest, Jackson, my mother, and me. We would have the whole woods, and the creek, and the leaves would flash and spin around us. We would have everything.
In spring, when the brush was thick, we followed the creek for three miles, to an old trailer camp. The trailers were empty in the winter, and maybe all year round. Through the windows we
saw the dirty kitchens, the stacks of books, the bare mattresses. I imagined that each one was a different life waiting for us. I imagined that somewhere in the woods I would find the right one. I imagined that it would find me. That it would call me home.
If it was a good day our mother would come into the woods and crawl into the fort. She would pour us invisible coffee from the curl of a leaf.
I was eight years old. Jackson was older, and I understood that all of this was for me, and that my brother was better than most brothers. I drank from my leaf, lying in the crooks of their warm arms. “You were born for just this,” they whispered. They held me between them. “You were born for happiness, for great things. You were born so we could love you.”
WHEN HE WOKE UP IN A-FRAME B, DON WAS ALREADY
gone, due at a job site a mile down the road. Jackson lay there for a minute and then he made himself get up, find his clothes, roll up the sleeping bag, and stow it back in the tool locker. He walked to the dam and stood there smoking a cigarette, shaking out his arms and legs, rolling his neck. The new dam was fresh wood and steel, shivering against the bowl of the lake. He was so fucking tired. In his jeans pocket was a note Don had left him: “Dear Picklepuss, I want you little, I want you mighty, I wish my pajamas were next to your nighty. From, the squirt who is your pal and public enemy no. 1.” He unfolded the note and folded it again, then put on his jeans and jacket and boots and started the walk around the lake to his site.
He had slept with Don three times now. The first time was after the Easter party, when they were both reeling drunk. After that there were four excruciating days of seeing Don at the job site, watching Don leaning against a sawhorse or chatting amiably with the carpenters while Jackson shuffled around the tool truck, his face burning. That was all it was, he kept thinking. Drunk sex. Except that it was drunk sex with his boss, whom he didn't know. Who knew he was a faggot. Don could tell on him, Jackson kept thinking through those four long days: He could tell he could tell he could tell. Jackson knew enough about fear to understand what men did to save themselves from suspicion.
Then, on the fourth day, and just about the time that Jackson
was deciding he might want to quit the crew, Don had strode over to where he was piling wood scraps to burn later, and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder. “Jack,” he said. “Come by the A-frame tonight. I need your help with something.” And of course he'd gone, embarrassed at how excited he was, getting just a little drunk beforehand, and then waiting down the road in the dark so he wasn't too early. It was still drunk sex, but this second time felt important â Don still wanted him, right there on the floor of the same half-built cabin; Jackson himself was something worth repeating; he hadn't been a mistake.
The third time was last night, and after Don had begged him to come inside of him, and Jackson had, breathless, tears at the back of his throat, holding Don's hips, Don had told him that he was married.
Sex was still this giant mystery card, anyway, so what did it matter? All his life Jackson had been puzzling at it from afar. In elementary school, he hung out with girls and boys indiscriminately. He wasn't unpopular. That hadn't been decided yet. It was a poor town. Every kid's jacket was a little short in the sleeves. He touched the little penis of a boy named David and a girl named Martha's flat nipples. That was the sum of all the sex he knew.
And then middle school â those were the years he'd spent mostly with Lydia. He was a late bloomer and a weakling, and on top of that there was a year where he was both weak and chubby, somehow looking both frail and fat. He had a little girl's roll around his hips. He had noodly arms. He had a tiny wasteland of pubic hairs that grew as slow as old-growth.
And finally, high school. Or the first three years of it, at any rate. All of those kids were still there, sweating it out under the fluorescents. He'd gotten prettier. The fat disappeared and he was tall and bony, something girls liked. Did gay men like it? He didn't know. Sex was all wound up with a million other things to him, too â the Marysville roller rink. Licorice whips. A game of foosball with a pimply junior who everyone called Burger â later someone would shit on the foosball table, that was what kind of place it was.
Octopus legs, smooth linoleum. He wanted that boy who flipped the little soccer men around. He wanted to be in the middle of all of these small-town boys, these pale, asexual guys â Randy; the wormy little M-P tennis coach; his father's sketchy, nervous friend Larry. Feverish masturbation, cum spilled into pale petal hands, body against fish body. There was the thing with Chris, but Chris was just a confused opportunist who let Jackson jerk him off and who probably had a girlfriend by now anyway. Other than that crush, other than the chlorine smell and the trail of cum across the wet concrete pool deck, all he'd had was Eric, during what would have been his senior year. Jackson had sucked Eric off again and again, and then leaned his face into the pillow while Eric fucked him, but that was all â he was Eric's bottom; that's who he was paid to be. He had sometimes hated it, and mostly just endured it because he knew what it meant: cash. Equals food, equals pills, equals everything. And the truth was that some of the time it even felt good â there was a small, plain warmth, almost tender, to having Eric inside him that many times, week after week.
But now here was Don. Beautiful, married Don. Jackson had never fucked another man before â never been the top, and now he felt it electric inside of him: to have stood over this man, to have watched him beg, to have thrust inside of Don until the noises they both made were indecipherable from joy or sorrow or anger. In those moments Jackson could imagine that the road outside only curved back to the cabin, as though there was nowhere else in the world they might possibly go.
He made it to the site twenty minutes early, and one of the men gave him a hammer and had him pulling nails out of a stack of planks. He liked the feeling of knowing exactly what he had to do, of following orders. He had a job and he could follow orders. He had a place to sleep; it smelled like motor oil and there was sawdust and mud from his boots scattered across the metal floor, but it was a door and a room and bed, and it was free. What did it matter what happened with Don? He wasn't stupid enough to think that they were going to run off together. He wasn't stupid enough
to believe that Don could just walk away from his wife. There were papers, furniture, trappings. Heavy things. He imagined a wedding ring alone could be heavy enough to hold you down.
He hadn't known what to say, last night, when Don told him. Jackson had been lying there on the floor of the A-frame, warmth still spreading through his arms and legs: “I'm married,” Don said, and Jackson didn't say anything, just busied himself pulling off the used condom, setting it carefully next to the shadowy pile of his clothes and the sputtering candle with its flame drowning in its own wax. Jackson felt a burst of shame, thinking of how the candle seemed now â like he'd been trying to make things romantic â which he had.
“Are you angry?” Don had asked.
Jackson considered the question. It hadn't occurred to him to feel angry yet. “No,” he'd said finally, because he didn't know what to say.
“Jack.” Don looked at him, and Jackson nodded. That had seemed like reply enough, and they had gone to sleep.
But now, the nails clicking and screeching against the claw of the hammer, he felt a terrible nagging feeling. What did he want? If he figured it out, would he say it? He had all this guilt inside him all the time. The little things, the big things â they ate away at him with equal, excruciating measure. He'd stolen the candy from Lydia's Christmas stocking one year and that burned at him â what kind of terrible brother, what kind of brute, stole from a six year old? And then what he'd done to his mother and his sister in the end â he deserved nothing, he thought. No mercy, no love, no kindness. Don didn't owe him any explanations.
The site was stirring to life, the men shuffling in, coughing and clanking through the tool locker and someone turning the radio on, fiddling with the bandwidth. Jackson kept pulling nails, his arm a steady piston. He looked back around the curve of the lake toward A-frame B, a stirring in his dick. The man in the house, the man is the house. That rough wood floor was covered deep with scratches and cum and sweat stains, but not so anyone
could see but him. It seemed to him sometimes that he was being carried on a wave that had been set in motion a long time ago, a wave of his father, his mother's fear, his own mistakes. He'd clung to his father's fist and just loped along, ready to push his mother and sister off a cliff, ready to pop open the next of his father's shit beers. Whiskey and beer, what his father drank. He had married Jackson's mother in a yellow suit. He'd given Jackson balsa wood models and then built them all himself while Jackson grew bored. Detail after detail that added up to nothing in particular; all of these things were tied together, and he didn't know where the string began or ended. The little buzz between his legs. The quiet cathedral of A-frame B. All of these things.
The sun was burning through the gray haze, and it was going to be a warm day. A good day. Something his mother used to say â “You get up, and you decide. Is this going to be a good day?” It didn't matter about Don, he thought again. He didn't have any control over it; they'd stay together or they wouldn't â get together or they wouldn't. He knew he didn't have much say in it. It gave him a lonely feeling.
WHEN JACKSON DIDN'T COME BACK TO THE STARLIGHT
Motel, I guessed what he had done. It was as if I expected it all along, and so I waited at the window the next morning. My father's truck slid up like a shark. He waited in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of our car, smoking a cigarette. He had never laid a hand on me, but I looked at him then and I knew he could. He would, I thought. My mother drove the car home and he took me in the truck to make sure that she followed. All the way home, the truck rattled. I held tight to the cold cracked seats. His fists were on the wheel.
When we got to the house, Jackson was there. I'd never seen my brother look the way he did then, guilty and sad. I wanted to hate him, the way I hated my father, for what he had done. “Lydia,” Jackson said to me, and I looked at him. I couldn't hate him even then, but it was like looking through him, or looking at someone I didn't know.
All that next week, my father was in the house. His ears were everywhere. His eyes. Out by the shed, my mother waved me over. She crouched close to the ground. “Lydia,” she said in my ear. “I think that you and I should go.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your brother is eighteen,” she said. “It's time for him to go out in the world alone.”
“He'll stay at home?”
“He won't,” my mother said. “He'll stay with Randy, or he'll go somewhere. He'll know what to do.”
I knew she was right, but there was more. “I need your help,” she said, “to make sure Jackson doesn't notice. I need your help to make sure we get away.” Once I'd agreed I knew that if there was a hell I'd burn in it. Once, I had told my brother everything. Now, I told myself, Jackson deserves this. He deserves this for what he did, and he deserves to be free from you.