Into the Great Wide Open (2 page)

The usual number of earrings, seven or eight in her left ear and three in her right. Her skin, what Kenny could see, was immaculately
white, untouched by the summer that had just gone by; an accomplishment in itself. The fresh-dead look, Wentworth called it. White skin verging on green, bright red lipstick, was the form. Kenny wondered. He sent the thought in her direction: show me your face. She didn’t, the standard fate of his attempts at telepathy. She wore a black wool cardigan over a black blouse of some kind, a little Peter Pan collar, Kenny could picture it. All this was normal, safe suburban rebel.

What set her off from the others was her hair: it was extreme, it was
troubled
. This was a code word for people like himself. Nobody safe would cut it quite so short; or, if they did, they would at least do a little better job of cutting it evenly. Amateur brain surgery, Kenny thought. It wasn’t style. He pictured her under the bathroom light, lifting her own hair between her fingers and then scissoring it off, as close to the scalp as she could. Scalp/skull. The sudden boy in the mirror.

And then the white skin of her neck, the delicate tendons, the dark fuzz of her hair trailing off into short silky animal hairs and then to nothing. One small red spot on her skin, insect bite or fading pimple. And what if she had pimples? But none of the children were ugly, their parents wouldn’t let them be. Blank sometimes, though, generic, she might have a face or she might not. I command you to turn. The usual result. She reached her left hand behind her back and touched the red spot, scratched it lightly with her nails, put her hand back in front of her: long-fingered, slender, inkstained.
Artistic
. Which was almost as good as, almost the same as, troubled. And the length of her hand made him consider her height, which he calculated from the seat back, touching his own shoulders to guess: his own height, or nearly. Long Tall Sally.

Kenny found himself with the beginnings of a hard-on, which happened sometimes in buses and trains. All the bumping and jostling, and his own untrainable dick. Down boy, he commanded. I’m doing something. But his dick wouldn’t listen to him; his dick wanted
to talk about this body he was looking at, about the
white stalk
of her neck giving way to the rounded, damaged head, the short hair against the palm of her hand, pulling her close, tall,
boyish
 … You, he thought, I want you.

Then, when he was not expecting her, she stirred in her seat and stretched her neck and then, bored, turned and looked at the rain outside the window and then back at Kenny, directly at Kenny. He sat there, caught, immobile. Then saw that he knew her. It was Junie Williamson.

“Hey,” she said to him softly.

“Hey,” said Kenny.

“What are you doing here?”

Kenny couldn’t think. It felt like he was wearing his dick on his face. He needed to say something but he couldn’t think of what (the anonymous body suddenly evolving into a person; he wanted the blank body back, the empty place). “It was Wentworth,” he said, just to say something. “You know Mike Wentworth?”

She shook her head; she couldn’t hear him.

“It’s sort of by accident,” he said.

But she shook her head again, shrugged, a social smile. She couldn’t hear him. She disappeared again, leaving him stranded. They could talk later. It didn’t help. Kenny was stuck with a wooden dick, stuck inside himself again, staring out at the houses, black with rain, standing in their skirts of dead grass; but even his melancholy had left him, the comfort of the gray light. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Kenny had a scientific approach to girls, a two-axis system. Girls were available, unavailable, or unknown. There were also desirable, undesirable, or unknown. You could plot the variables. For instance, he had just spent the summer as a lifeguard, at a country club, staring down through his black sunglasses at a pool deck full of desirable/unavailables
in seventy-dollar swimsuits. All summer he watched their bodies, aimed his desire at them; but they were impervious, waterproof, his gaze slid off them. By the end of the summer they were unreal as TV faces. Also: whenever they dressed or drove or talked to one another—they never talked to Kenny—they mostly turned to undesirable/unavailables. This was the biggest category: cheerleaders, young Republicans. They didn’t care for Kenny, Kenny didn’t care for them. They were fine, as long as they were bodies. They were beautiful.

Undesirable/available: it was a shifty line, especially at parties. Either half of the equation could change. That’s what Kenny liked: the moment, the invisible line when things got unclear and suddenly things shifted into unknown. Available/unknown, desirable/unknown. It was like girls who wore glasses, they took them off when they were kissing, when they were doing things, or sometimes Kenny took them off. Partly they were in the way, of course, but partly the glasses came off because it was better not to know. It was better not to name things, just to let touch guide them, skin on skin.

Junie Williamson: unknown/unknown. There were rumors about her, that was all. Kenny knew what the hallways of his high school said about her, knew what they said about her at parties and not much more: the blank place, again, the place for other people to put their desires and imaginations and feelings. Kenny had never really considered her, never thought she might be available or really thought about her much at all. She was somewhere in the outer orbit. They had friends in common, he couldn’t remember who, and they had maybe been at a few parties at the same time: Kenny in the kitchen, Junie in the living room. The haircut was new. Last time he saw her it was neck-length, blunt-cut like everybody else’s. He had mistaken her for everybody else. Suddenly she was visible. He had this feeling: they had been circling around each other, not quite touching. Unknown. It was a disappointment at first to find out that he knew her, the girl in the van; but the more he thought about Junie
Williamson the more he thought that he didn’t know anything more than the rumors.

Junie and Kim. Kim was a short solid girl, with a fierce little smile. She wore her blond hair short, no earrings, no makeup, and she always seemed to be wearing her brother’s clothes: blue-and-white-striped buttondown shirts, blue jeans, penny loafers. Whether or not she had a brother, Kenny didn’t know—she just gave that impression. He was in an English class with her once and they were allies, sitting in the back row and answering all the questions. They were almost friends, boy-and-boy friends though. They used to smoke cigarettes together at the break.

And Kim and Junie were friends, or something.
Friends:
he wondered what he meant. The word was like a blanket, it covered up rather than showing what was underneath. Kenny guessed at the outlines: he had seen them, Mutt and Jeff, walking the hallways together or talking at parties. Junie was a head taller, quiet, strict-looking. He thought of her as awkward without any real evidence. Kim was always the one who was talking, always moving her hands. That and Junie’s new haircut,
boyish
, and he wondered if the hallway rumors were true. Girl-and-girl friendships had a dark side, Kenny had seen this before, a face that was permanently turned away from boys, from parents; turned away from the world at large, a private space between them. It didn’t mean anything, usually, except you couldn’t touch them. Kenny was jealous, a little. Men and boys couldn’t manage this kind of friendship, they couldn’t protect each other. Dick versus dick. Unknown/unknown. She was starting to emerge a little out of the fog: she was Kim’s friend Junie. She had smiled at him. It didn’t mean anything. He thought of her, tall, short-haired (not just short but butchered) and thought: maybe they were wrong, maybe they were right. He didn’t know which way he was hoping for. In between, undefined,
unknown
.

They piled out of the vans at the Girl Scout camp, into the rain in clumps of two and three, wrestling their baggage out of the back of the vans and then racing for the shelter of the buildings. Junie was carrying a camera bag and a tripod, half-unfolded, like a broken umbrella. Kenny lost her in the chinese firedrill. He didn’t see Kim Nichols anywhere, though. He looked.

All this through the window, waiting for Wentworth to come around. He was a committed sleeper, talented. Living in the same house, Kenny had him pegged for about twelve hours a night, fourteen when he tried. Even awake, Wentworth’s eyelids were heavy, his eyes turned inward, his breathing soft and regular. He might drop off at any second. Teachers hated him.

“We’re losing,” Kenny said. “Everybody else is getting the good rooms.”

Wentworth yawned, shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s all boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl anyway. Unless you brought somebody along?”

“You, baby,” Kenny said. “You’re all mine, big boy.”

Wentworth blinked at him, annoyed, and Kenny was momentarily sorry. Big, soft, pink boys like Wentworth were sensitive about fag jokes.

“Mostly this is prearranged,” Wentworth said. “I mean that’s the point—to have a place to go. Little mommies and daddies. We’ll find somewhere to sleep.” He slapped himself lightly on the cheeks, looked reluctantly out at the rain. He was shy about physical discomfort, a delicate boy. “Sometimes you can get lucky,” he said, still looking out the window. “That’s what they say, anyway. I don’t seem to.”

They ended up in the bunkhouse, a long dim single room with a permanent stink of mouse turds and wet paper bag. There was a wood stove at one end and about sixteen or eighteen iron prison beds, with the requisite gray-and-white-striped mattresses. It was them and two other boys, who stationed themselves at the opposite end, as
far from Kenny and Wentworth as possible. They radiated social failure. Kenny wondered if he did, himself. Like bad breath or something, you couldn’t smell it on yourself. He dug his raincoat out, a faded black thriftstore London Fog, and his Hanshin Tigers baseball cap.

“You look like a flasher,” Wentworth said. “Where are you going?”

Kenny knew where he was going, who he was looking for, but he didn’t want to talk to Wentworth about it. “Take a look around,” he said.

“It’s raining out there.”

“Right. I noticed that. Actually we were driving though it all day.”

“Fuck you,” Wentworth said. “I don’t care if you get wet or not.”

“Dude,” Kenny said. “Actually this is the only raincoat I’ve got. This is the Lone Raincoat.”

Wentworth looked at it, Kenny shrugged: it didn’t matter. Poor boy, a long way from home. It gave him a kind of power, to know he could live through this. He went out into the weather, alone.

It was still blowing, misting. He could feel the ocean somewhere close, out past the dunes. The camp was a scattering of cabins with green roofs, everything brown wood or painted brown. Outdoor signifiers, Kenny thought. Smokey the Bear. The cabins sat in a pocket of sparse, wind-whipped pine trees, a little valley in the dunes. The sound of the wind through them was constant and lonely. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines …

He went looking for her in the main building, where the vans were parked, a long bungalow of round brown logs. Inside, a fire snapped and smoked in the walk-in fireplace, rustic tables and benches, a half dozen of the fungible white children sitting around, playing dominoes, sipping cocoa, talking to one of the counselors.
There was a stereo already playing on the mantel and the same Police tape going again. No Junie. The counselor spotted Kenny and stopped talking, looking up at him with a broad inviting smile. “Hi,” he said loudly.

Kenny nodded, not smiling. The other children looked up at him suspiciously, he had come for their dope, their girlfriends.

“I’m Dave McHenry,” the counselor said. “Come on over, sit down.”

“It’s OK,” Kenny said. “I’m going to take a look around outside, maybe go down to the beach.”

“It’s raining out there,” one of the children said; and the words hung in the air, along with the noise of the raindrops clicking at the windows. It seemed to be contagious, speaking the obvious. Isn’t that a roof up there?

“Later,” Kenny said, and walked out the long way, down the line of bedroom doors in the corridor behind the office. Not here, not here, not here. He felt dislocated: maybe it was the wood fire burning, the smell of smoke and cocoa, the fancy mountaineering baby clothes that the children wore, but he felt like he was going to walk out into an Appalachian meadow. That and the darkness under the pines. Lonely something. Empty hallway. Why am I always leaving the party, Kenny wondered. Why do parties have to end? A picture of his mother’s face, only for a second, in one of her manic phases: grinning like a funhouse clown,
happy
. Nobody knew if it was inherited or not. That was one of the first things they told you.

Outside she was still nowhere. The afternoon had darkened toward evening; Kenny pulled his two-dollar pocket watch out of his black jeans and it said four-thirty. The rain had thickened a little. He set off on one of the trails through the pines, past the outhouse, the little cabins set like dice under the trees. Yellow electric light through the windows, and Kenny outside in the rain. Familiar gray sadness, comfortable as flannel. Kenny was right at home, remembering his
mother’s face, the poem that Mrs. Connolly taught him in English class: I am lonely, I am lonely … Inside, the little mommies and daddies, two to a house. Kenny was outside looking in.