Into the Great Wide Open (5 page)

Prick-teaser, Kenny thought, the word rising up into his brain like some stinking bubble of swamp gas. He didn’t want to be like that, wasn’t going to. But still … some ugly suspicion, male pride she was messing with. You owe me a fuck. This whole side of himself that he didn’t like and didn’t make. Inherited from his father, from everywhere, Fred C. Dobbs. De Niro,
Taxi Driver
. Being a man felt like a sickness sometimes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She lit a kerosene lantern, shut the bulb off, and the room went soft, the damp still lingering in the corners.

“You’re apologizing again,” he said. “I’ll build a fire. We can make s’mores.”

“We don’t have the ingredients.”

“Take two Girl Scouts and rub them together,” he said; and saw her face go dark again, just for a second, suspicious. There was nothing much that Kenny could do about it. He was feeling his way in the dark, chutes and ladders, unexpected holes in the floor. A little stack of dry wood, out on the porch, and some kindling. A copy of
Details
on the floor next to the stove.

“Can I use this?” Kenny asked her.

“I don’t know,” Junie said. “It belongs to Cindy.”

“Who’s Cindy?” Kenny asked—his turn to be suspicious, what if she really was? What if Junie really did fuck other women? But even forming the words in his mind made him feel coarse and ashamed. Knowing it was a sickness didn’t keep you from getting it, no more than the common cold.

“She’s an idiot,” Junie said. “You know, the one with the Police tape?”

“Jesus.”

“Well, that’s her. She has to dump her stuff in the cabin with me so she can pretend she’s not sleeping with McHenry, I don’t know why. I mean, nobody’s even
looking
, right? Some little fig leaf, I don’t know.”

“More like a bay leaf,” Kenny said, carefully ripping out full-page
BETTER SEX
ad and crumpling it into a ball; then laying the kindling carefully on top, smaller then larger, then a couple of dry sticks. The fire caught on the first match. He knelt on the wooden floor, watching the paper curl and chatter as it was taken by the flames, the dry twigs burning quickly, the flame mounting. Troubled by a quick memory of the sea, the immense wild thing. From there to this little house, safety, fire and comfort, and he felt for a second that he had stolen her from the sea. The wind in the pines. The smell of kerosene, of age and abandonment and damp. Something, Kenny
thought, anything. Be my sister, be my girlfriend and I’ll be yours. Anything but the same old boys and girls. She came to him and sat on the wooden floor next to him, cross-legged, and in the apron she made from her dress, tented between her legs, she poured a package of M&M’s. Bright green, red and yellow, they shined brightly against the black cotton of her dress. “Vice,” she said. “Do you want some?”

She lay facedown, eyes closed, the black dress open to her waist, a little beyond. The smooth curve of her back—a lovely, natural shape, like the spine of a canoe—was broken by the white bra. Kenny’s hands tangled in it, working his thumbs down the individual vertebrae, loosening the long muscles of her back.

“I can take that off if you want,” she said, without opening her eyes. “If you think that’s a good idea.”

Kenny considered, or tried to; drowsy in the heat, the tin stove glowing cherry red. “Maybe not,” he said. “If we’re going to be good.”

“Maybe we should stop,” she said halfheartedly.

“It doesn’t feel good to you?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It feels fine.”

“Then I don’t mind,” he said, and dug his thumbs into the loosening muscles of her shoulders. Her body relaxed under his hands. Silence. He felt himself concentrated in his hands, in the place where it met her skin, nothing else. She shifted under them, breath coming in time to Kenny’s rhythm; half-conscious, eyes closed, she let herself go. He made spiders of his hands, drawing then releasing, touching the hollow of her spine, all the way down to where it rose again into her ass. His fingers shifted the white cotton of her underwear out of the way for a moment and she didn’t flinch, didn’t draw back. She trusted him. She let him. Kenny thought he could do anything with her at that moment and, just to see, he kissed the back of her neck. She didn’t stop him, didn’t open her eyes. He felt the sharp
stubble of her hair under his cheek, closed his eyes, kissed her again. She tasted like nothing, rainwater. He could feel her hips shifting, small movements. Let his hand trail down her back again, down and under the band of her panties, bare skin, and she was responsive, a live thing moving with him. Now, he thought, now or never. Wanting, not quite daring, afraid that he would break the connection between them. At the same time knowing he should try, take it all the way, take it inside. She wanted him to. She wanted him to stop. Before Kenny could decide, the chance was gone.

A trembling started somewhere inside her, the way she had been shivering on the beach, but here it was smaller; a fine tremor that barely reached the surface of her skin. He let his hand trail off her, pulled his body away from hers. She had not opened her eyes, but he saw that she was holding her lower lip between her teeth; she was biting down so hard that it must hurt.

“We should stop,” he said.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t move, but Kenny knew it was over. He stood to put his own shirt on again and found his dick hard in his pants. Of course it had to be. The feeling had been somewhere else: in his hands, the surface of her skin, the look of her bare back in the light of the kerosene lamp. Now his dick was hard as wood. She was light-years away, another planet. Kenny was stuck inside himself again. He tasted old dried sweat in his mouth, and blood.

H
is father was sober when Kenny got back from the beach. He sat at the kitchen table with coffee and the Sunday paper, looking whipped, contrite. He asked Kenny, “Where the hell did you go off to?”

“I was at the beach,” he said, against his will. He didn’t owe his father a thing.

“All week?”

“I stayed with Wentworth a couple of nights.”

“What did you do that for?” his father asked.

It was a two-faced question: either Kenny told the truth—you were drunk, disgusting—and started a fight, or else he lied, and made it his own fault—did it for fun, adventure. The lie was easier, always. The lie was tactically superior, too: his father would be grateful for letting him off the hook. The Tinkerbell theory: if no one mentioned it, if no one said the words, then nothing was wrong.

But that afternoon the lie stuck in Kenny’s throat. Something has happened to me, he thought. “I made it to school all right last week,” he said. “I was half an hour late on Wednesday but apart from that I was 100 percent.”

“That’s good,” his father said. “I don’t want to talk to Ralph J. Briscoe again. Did they give you homework for the weekend?”

Kenny’s mouth was full of the truth, he longed to speak it: I don’t know if they gave me homework or not, I wasn’t paying attention. I left the house because you were falling-down drunk by noon. Something happened this weekend with a girl. I am the Burning Bush, he thought, I am the Mack Daddy. He looked down at his father from a great height, feeling the secret in his chest, feeling pity for him.

“It’s good to see you back OK,” he said; then left, before his father understood what he meant. It was about six-thirty or seven, already night outside. He went upstairs into the hallway, into his room, feeling his way in the darkness instead of turning on a light. In his room, Kenny sat in the dark for a minute. I seem to be different, he thought. I seem to be full of surprises—but then he stopped himself, he didn’t want to think it into the ground. When the lights came on he would be stuck in his room again, stuck in his life, exactly where he didn’t want to be: paperbacks and ashtrays, empty Cokes, the sheets in a wad at the bottom of his bed.

They had lived there six or seven years. Kenny spent his childhood somewhere else, farther out in the suburbs, a house where somebody else lived now. They came here after the divorce, after his mother’s first adventure in the hospital. Kenny, his brother, his father. Now his brother was gone, too, given over to the care of another family, who had taken him to Australia two years ago. They had invited Kenny along as well, but he had decided not to go. It was hard to remember why. His brother’s room was across the hallway, Kenny could picture it exactly, if he wanted to: the souvenirs and relics of a twelve-year-old: baseball mitt, Cindy Crawford poster. Exactly as he left it, like the room of a dead boy.

He stripped his sour clothes off, still in the dark, and felt his way down the hall in the dark; not real dark, but the deep end of twilight. The difference made a difference to him, why? Something about the shadows, the soft gray light, the exact color of depression.
Give the devil a ride
, he thought. Don’t mess. But the temptation was always there, the easy way out. In the bathroom, he started the shower and let it run till it was hot. He was tired, worn-out, dirty, he needed a shave, he hadn’t slept long the night before, lying next to. Junie, the two mattresses from the camp beds pushed together on the floor. Kenny closed the door on the glass shower stall, letting the
water run down over his head in the darkness, eyes closed. He was tired: the inside and the outside of his body, especially his head, felt like different sizes. His inside was too big for his body to contain. Gradually he worked the water to as hot as he could stand it and a little beyond, feeling the sting on the skin of his arms, his neck, his belly. Kenny was still thin, still faintly tan from a summer of lifeguarding. He was
young, attractive
. A woman at the country club had told him. Kenny felt like sex.

He eased the hot water open, another eighth of an inch, another. The steam was thick, the water scalding. He scrubbed his body with yellow soap and a coarse cotton washcloth, scouring himself clean, making himself ready for her. Her breath was like nothing, rainwater, neither foul nor chemical. Her neck. The memory of her skin was still in his fingertips, the feel of the coarse stubble of her head against his cheek as he bent to kiss her. His dick stirred at the memory of her, a feel of luxury and sex, and Kenny almost gave in to it; but that wasn’t what he wanted. He shut the hot water off all at once and the cold poured down on him like ocean rain, his body cringing away but Kenny stood to it, saving himself for her. The cold chased the luxurious feeling out. His body was tight, glowing. He turned the light on, reluctantly, and stood in front of the mirror, shaving, trying to imagine Verona: the crowds gathered for the opera in the Roman amphitheater, the old stones and the cats. When the thunderstorm came, they scattered for cover; when it passed, waiting for the sets and lighting to be reset, they passed the time by doing the Wave. So Junie had said, and so he believed.

When he came out of the bathroom, still naked, still in the dark, he saw that the light was on in his bedroom. Kenny went back into the bathroom and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist, like he was ashamed of his own nakedness, which he was not. He was tight, stoic, alive.

His father was sitting on the edge of Kenny’s bed, looking infinitely
weary. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to ask. Are you taking drugs or something?”

He would have laughed, but the memory stopped him: memory of his father’s enormous hand, raised back and ready to strike.

“I’m all right,” Kenny said, hiding his real face: the blank mask.

“You come into the house,” his father said. “I haven’t seen you for a week. You don’t say a damn thing and what you do say, it doesn’t sound like you.”

A sense of embarrassment, growing, like she was standing in the room watching the crude movements of his father’s mind. He felt himself stripped, the purity slipping away from him, the cleanliness already gone.

“Then you’re up here in the dark, I don’t know what you’re doing,” his father said. “So you can see, I’ve got to ask.”

Kenny tried to think of what he might say. His father seemed prepared to wait. He stared up into Kenny’s face from his perch at the edge of the bed, and his head was ponderous, his eyes deep and dark-rimmed, injured. He looked like the survivor of some big dangerous experiment; except, Kenny thought, this experiment wasn’t over yet.

“I can see you thought you had to ask,” Kenny said at last. “I’m fine, though, really.”

“I’ve heard things about this friend of yours, Wentworth, too,” his father said.

“I’m sorry,” Kenny said. “I’m fine, really, I’m all right but I’m tired and I want to get my clothes on. I just don’t want to talk about whatever Ralph Briscoe might have said to you in some conference.”

“He’s not a complete jerk,” his father said. “I know you don’t like him, but it seems like he’s trying to help you.”

The thought of his father and Ralph J. Briscoe, his guidance counselor, teaming up to set Kenny straight was funny at first but
scary afterward. Eagles, sharp talons. Blind to themselves. They wanted Kenny to live their way, they wanted victory. Kenny was
prey
.

“I’m just trying to ask you if you’re a doper,” his father said. “You can get in over your head. I’ve had my problems, you know that, and your mother even worse. I don’t want to see you go through the kind of hell we’ve both been through.”

“Well, thanks,” Kenny said. “I’m all right, though. Can I put my clothes on, now?”

His father rose from the bed, and for a moment Kenny was afraid that his father might strike him; the way the hurt place shies away from danger, years later. Kenny broke his arm once, second grade or so, and still went to protect it whenever he was falling. And he had stepped on his father’s John Wayne speech.

“I’m trying to help you,” his father said angrily. “I’m trying to keep your life from turning to shit. Do you understand that?”

Kenny’s voice was softer and softer. “I do,” he said, turning his face away.
Now
, he thought, expecting the slap, it wouldn’t be the first time. But it didn’t come. His father sighed, a long mechanical sound like a train engine. You are the King, Kenny thought. You are the Elvis of depression, center of the known universe. He was small again, and dirty.