Into the Great Wide Open (16 page)

“Here it is,” said Junie. “I told you, I can only find it by accident.”

She stopped in front of a gigantic Salvador Dalí painting, the Last Supper rising out of the clouds with some sort of geometric structure evanescing behind Jesus. Some kind of parody of church art going on, along with a commentary on art-art, then the Buckminster Fuller aspect … Kenny couldn’t quite make it add up. Plus it was butt-ugly.

Junie said, “I don’t know why, but I really like this.”

He said, “This is like a test or something, right?”

“You don’t like it?”

“I don’t know,” he said; then realized that he was lying to her, and corrected himself. “Actually, no, I don’t like it.”

“This isn’t a test,” she said; a warning.

“What are we fighting about?”

“You’re such a fucking perfectionist, Kenny.” She was close to tears. “This is supposed to be nice, right? It’s romantic. Violins and art and so on, right? But I’m afraid to
like
anything, Kenny. I’m always afraid you’re going to make fun of me.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenny said; and was. The true asshole spirit; thinking of his father, judging the universe from the standpoint of nothing at all. A lover’s prayer. Dear Jesus don’t let me fuck this one up.

“I mean, I guess it’s stupid and everything but I
like
this painting,” she said, “and I brought you down here because I wanted you to see it and now I feel like about a nine-year-old.”

“It isn’t stupid,” Kenny said. “I mean, I don’t think you’re stupid at all. It’s just, I don’t know.”

“You still think I’m stupid for liking this.”

“No, I don’t,” he said; trying to still the voice that did distrust her. She was drawing away, almost gone. He had to hold on to her and couldn’t think of how. “I just don’t like this painting, is all.”

“I got that message.”

“Actually, it makes my eyes want to vomit.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed, like he had slapped her; then against herself she laughed, and shook her head, and they embraced each other; and Kenny noticed once again that she was exactly his height. They rested, heads on shoulders, for a minute, then slid to the floor. Kenny leaned against the wall, under the Dalí, and Junie leaned against him.

“I can’t stand this,” Junie said.

“I know,” he said. “It isn’t you.”

“Well.”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“What?”

“I am
fervently fond
of you. I am
avid
. I am
ardent
.”

“I am somewhat avid myself,” she said. Leaned back against his chest and closed her eyes, left Kenny to puzzle out what exactly she meant. Resting. His hand inside her dress, lost in the loose folds of black cloth. The two of them were literal, always. Nothing between them that was not expressed in bodies. He had just slipped aside her underwear to touch her when the guard came in, to tell them that the concert had started ten minutes before. The guard was polite but firm.

They didn’t dare enter the courtyard, either, since the music had started. They listened from the doorway, watched the musicians through the foliage. If anything the music sounded better from the doorway; at least when he could concentrate. Kenny leaned against the cool marble and Junie leaned against him, shifting and twitching her beautiful ass against him. She was turning into a wicked girl, a very wicked girl. Their empty overcoats sat slumped in the folding chairs, side by side, listening.

This was the saddest story Kenny heard: the girl’s little brother, the one who was puking in the bushes, he read the side of the nonalcoholic
beer can and saw it said less than one half of one percent alcohol by volume. He was ten. He figured that half a percent was better than nothing and probably plenty for him and so he went in with his other little buddy and bought a case and drank it. Now they were puking, undrunk, miserable while the party raged around them.

“Somebody’s bound to call the cops,” Wentworth said.

“You think so?” Boy asked. He looked around. “The windows are closed, mostly. The band’s in the basement. I mean, some asshole could always call the cops.”

“There’s always an asshole,” Kenny said.

“Dude!” said Wentworth.

“Mister Bitter!” said Boy. “I’m not attached, though.”

“Me neither,” Wentworth said. “This is just so … 
seventies
.”

“And that’s the good part,” Kenny said. There was a keg of beer in the kitchen, a band sawing away in the basement. The Cringers went to Kenny’s high school. Their specialty—in fact, their whole act—was dredging up the worst songs of all time and then playing them, mostly in suicide-tempo thrash versions but sometimes at length. The high or low point of their act was a nine-minute dirge version of “Honey,” by Bobby Goldsboro. Everybody hated them. They played at every party. “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Born to Run.”

“It makes me feel like sniffing glue,” Boy said.

“I was reading that in the paper the other day,” Kenny said. “The ten warning signs. If your child comes home with gold or silver paint on his face …”

They all three cracked up laughing and Kenny didn’t finish. Then they went out to the car and smoked another joint while they were driving around. They went downtown without even knowing what they were looking for but there was nothing: scrap paper blowing around in the cold wind, an occasional wino. Kenny was alone in the backseat of Wentworth’s car, a teal Suzuki, a kicky, college-student
car. Wentworth had a future. He had his applications out. Boy had his applications out. Junie got her SAT scores back the week before and they sucked just as bad as the first time she took them but she’d get in somewhere. She didn’t test well; or maybe, Kenny thought, maybe she was just plain fucking dumb. She was out with Kim that night and Kenny was not feeling kindly disposed toward anyone or anything. He said, “A kicky, college-student car.”

“Dude!” said Boy.

“My parents picked it out,” said Wentworth. “You want to walk?”

“I’m just noticing,” Kenny said. “I bet it gets terrific gas mileage, too. You checked it lately?”

“He’s walking,” Wentworth said. “What do you think?”

“Fine with me,” said Boy.

“OK, I take it back,” Kenny said. “I love this car!”

“Shut up,” Wentworth said.

“Teal!” Kenny said. “Potpourri! Avocado!”

“Shut
up!”
Wentworth said.

“I’m hungry,” Kenny said.

They wound up at the Awful Shoppe, where the cops all ate between shifts and the cooks had prison tattoos. The air inside was saturated with grease and cigarette smoke and something else; it took him a minute to figure out that it was hair spray and perfume, wafting over from the next booth. Kenny snuck a peek and it turned out to be a man in drag. A quick obscure feeling, guilt, or something like it. He didn’t dare look too long and hard or the man in drag would recognize him, would see what they had in common and give them both away somehow. The hands gave him away, the way he flipped his cigarette around. Kenny was denying himself, he felt the betrayal. Somewhere he had joined up with Junie’s party, the party of sex, the revolution of souls, but he couldn’t show himself yet. Kim Nichols in her nonexistent brother’s clothes. And what was Junie doing with her? It was just mentioned, between Junie and her mother. Nothing
direct between her and Kenny. Maybe there was nothing to say; maybe there was no way to say it, maybe Kenny would never know.
Jealous
, he thought; and quickly admitted it. You’re mine now.

“I want to go to Mexico,” Boy was saying. “Copper Canyon, I’ve been reading about it. They say you could put the Grand Canyon into it four times over. And the Terahummerasomethingorother Indians, what’s their name?”

“Who?” asked Wentworth.

“The ones who always win the marathon,” Boy said, which didn’t ring a bell with anybody.

“A swinging senorita in a Mexican bordello,” Wentworth said. “You ever heard of Boy’s Town?”

“Fucking donkeys,” Kenny said. “That was the hot rumor in the seventh grade, anyway, girls fucking donkeys. Various common household pets as well.”

“What?” Boy said, irritated.

“German shepherd,” Wentworth said.

“Then why didn’t he say German shepherd?”

“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “We could ask him—he’s right here, more or less. Mr. Kolodny, why did you give us that fancy bullshit about pets instead of just saying it was German shepherd?”

“It slipped my mind,” Kenny said. “I remembered it was a dog, but I couldn’t remember which kind.”

“Newfoundland,” said Wentworth. “Irish wolfhound. Great Dane.”

“No, Pekingese,” said Boy.

“A brain fart,” Kenny said. “I believe that’s the technical term for it.”

“Or maybe he’s in love,” said Boy.

Kenny scowled at both of them. Like sharks, he thought; they like their water with a little taste of blood.

The food came then and they all tucked in: french fries, milk shakes, chocolate pie. Wentworth didn’t eat any more or less than
Kenny and Boy did but he was fat and they were skinny. There was something pornographic about watching him wolf down his Key lime pie, coffee,
and
a Coke on the side; about watching him pour the real cream into his coffee, the patterns it left, like cigarette smoke, in the dark coffee before he stirred the sugar in. Wentworth was hungry. What was Boy’s vice? Apart from snakes and reptiles, of course. A basement full of penises according to Tom Harris, the English teacher who liked to psychoanalyze his characters. And who will psychoanalyze Tom Harris? He lifted weights, had a fire hydrant for a neck.

“Food and sex,” Boy said.

“And tobacco,” Kenny said, rolling himself a postprandial cigarette, lighting it, staring out the window. Sometimes when he was stoned the words just wandered through—
postprandial
—or formed themselves into pairs and trios, and performed the Lobster Quadrille: navigate, vegetate, investigate knave evaginate.

“Speaking of which,” Wentworth said, “are you really nailing the lesbian?” He was one of those boys who didn’t have any power in himself but when he was around Boy he drew on Boy’s power: they were together, he could say anything he wanted.

“None of your business,” Kenny said.

“I know it’s not,” Wentworth said. “The thing is, I’m curious.
We’re
curious.”

“Youth wants to know,” Boy said.

“Still none of your business,” Kenny said. He was feeling the discomfort they intended to produce; boys in threes and fours, rotating from victim to victim. Not even Boy was exempt. But they didn’t know what Kenny didn’t know: what Junie was doing with Kim, somewhere out in the night.

“That’s the other thing,” Wentworth said. “How come it’s always two girls together in those magazines? It’s always one girl, two girls, hardly ever a guy and a girl.”

“That’s easy,” Boy said. “Dicks are disgusting!”

He said this a bit too loudly, and exactly at the same time as one of those unpredictable moments of general quiet came over the diner. Everybody heard. Everybody quit talking, and the drag queen at the table behind Kenny cleared her throat.

“Well, they are,” Boy said defensively, quieter.

“Ask the man that owns one,” Kenny said. A quick uneasy memory of his father’s apparatus, seen from the perspective of a seven-year-old, glimpsed under the bathrobe or his father getting into the shower. The hairy wrecking ball, back and forth.

“I’m fond of mine,” Wentworth said quietly. “Mr. Lucky and I get along fine.”

“Have you seen him lately?” Kenny asked; gesturing toward Wentworth’s gut, attempting his revenge.

But Wentworth was undaunted. “In the mirror, just today,” he said. “At Boy’s house, as a matter of fact.”

“Don’t start,” Boy said.

Wentworth ignored him. He said, “The thing is, I’ve seen this before, and it’s always been a mystery. This is in the guest bathroom upstairs at Boy’s house, you know, the one with the little seashell soaps? And on the shelf behind the toilet she’s got a little basket of—”

“Potpourri!” Kenny chimed in. They said it together. Boy scowled.

Wentworth went on: “Anyway, there’s a new decor item in the bathroom these days. She’s put a mirror up in a little nest of dried flowers, on the back of the toilet tank, sort of leaning against the wall at the
exact right angle
for you to see yourself when you are pissing. I mean, is this unintentional? It seems like you could guess, you know?”

“On the other hand,” Kenny said.

“Exactly. I mean, do you like to look at that part of yourself while it’s committing that particular act? Does anybody?”

“Well,” Boy started, but didn’t go on.

“It isn’t Mr. Lucky’s good side,” Wentworth said.

Kenny stubbed his cigarette out. A sudden wounding loneliness, a true knowledge that he was in the wrong place; there was nothing for him here. His two-dollar pocket watch said one-fifteen.

“I’m done,” he said. “I’m fried.”

“What are you talking about?” Boy said. “We’re going to Ellen Hunnicutt’s tonight.”

“Not I,” said Kenny. Ellen Hunnicutt was a junkie, everybody knew it, all her friends were junkies. Her family was unbelievably rich and never in town. Her mother didn’t seem to exist. Her father was a big-game hunter who kept a trophy room full of souvenirs: the mounted heads of eland, buffalo, elk, a dozen others; a table made of a silver platter, set on four real zebra legs; an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s foot; the fetus of a hippopotamus, standing on all fours. He had shot the mother but there wasn’t room for her. This was where Ellen gathered her friends, in the trophy room. They watched television, listened to English rock, snorted heroin off engraved silver cigarette-cases. Sometimes they shot each other up in the bathroom. The scene with Ellen’s friends was to look straight but act bent. Kenny went there once in a while, he was never exactly sure why; maybe because he tended to find a girl when he was there. Twenty empty bedrooms in Ellen’s house, at least; standing orders to turn the covers back, so as not to leave stains on the comforters. And Kenny was welcome, a member of the club for some reason he didn’t want to think about. They recognized him for one of their own at Ellen’s house; while Boy and Wentworth didn’t quite fit. He would have felt uncomfortable going with them, even if he felt like it in the first place. “Not tonight,” he said. “What do you want to go there for?”