Into the Great Wide Open (9 page)

Kenny had a plan, a dream, a fantasy, something. It came to him one night, stoned: he would write a history of the future. Or maybe an archaeology, depending. When did the future start? Who first thought of it? What were the important events in the development of the future? He thought of the Trylon and Perisphere, the Apollo program. Rounded Packards, Hudson Hornets racing into the future. All that seemed to be over now. We were back on the wheel, samsara: birth, suffering, death, rebirth. The future was
dynamic
, the future was
nuclear
—they were going to get to escape velocity, escape the orbit of the wheel, blast off. In the future they were going to vacation on the moon. They were going to banish disease, they were going to banish suffering. Samsara was to be eradicated. They were going to be directional.

These suburban streets whirled and curved and dead-ended, intentionally; they were meant to keep outsiders from finding any use in them, to keep commerce away, to preserve the common peace. Boy lived in a house like the others. The neighborhood association prevented them from fencing their front yards, painting their houses certain colors, parking their cars on the street—they were to be inside,
with the garage doors shut, a fantasy of order. Boy himself had been forced to sell a perfectly good Jeep when it wouldn’t fit in the same garage with his father’s Thunderbird and his mother’s Crown Victoria. He was a year ahead of Kenny, out of high school but still living at home.

Seven at night, dark, a biting wind. Kenny parked the Reliant on the street, feeling like the neighbors were watching him from behind their closed shades—which they probably were, he thought, nothing to stop them. Boy had his own entrance, his own floor all to himself, down in the basement. Kenny let himself out of the cold and into the thick, jungle smell of Boy’s house. “Hey,” he yelled down the stairs.

“Hey,” the parrot yelled back. “Hey mama!”

“Come on down,” Boy said. “Leave the light off.”

Boy was stretched out on the sofa, the room bathed in red light, barely visible. “Going on?” he said.

“Not much.”

“I hear you’re screwing a lesbian,” Boy said. “Nice work. They said it couldn’t be done.”

Kenny stopped, exposed, embarrassed. I haven’t screwed her, he thought; then realized that not screwing her was worse. He didn’t mean to be out in the daylight with her, Kenny and Junie, didn’t mean to be public property. Now here he was in the spotlight of Boy’s attention. Boy was just trying to be a dick, same as always, but Kenny was ashamed anyway; like she was Kenny’s dirty little secret, a side he didn’t want the world to know about.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the funny papers,” Kenny said, just for something to say. It sounded stupid, even to him.

“Well, are you or aren’t you?” Boy asked. “I mean, this is history in the making. I mean, not just any garden-variety lesbian but Junie Williamson, the famous one.”

“I’ll leave you to guess,” Kenny said, stripping off his jacket,
his sweater, his flannel shirt. It was maybe eighty-five in the basement, maybe ninety, and it smelled like Boy’s basement and nothing else: the damp, rotting-leaf smell of a garden store, snake and lizard shit, marijuana smoke. Boy lit a joint and passed it to Kenny as he sat down across the coffee table from him.

“What’s with the red light?” Kenny asked, and took a hit.

“I’m trying to get these snakes to breed,” Boy said. “I’ll be the first one in captivity if it happens. They’re from Australia, though, so I’ve got to reset the clocks around here to the southern hemisphere. So it’s, what? About three in the morning at Ayers Rock, almost springtime.”

“What about the temperature?” Kenny asked. “I mean, this has got to be too hot for there.”

“Too hot at night, too cool in the daytime,” Boy said, taking the joint, taking a hit. A moment of silence, broken by the bubbling aerators in the fish tanks, the scrabbling of hard reptile claws along the metal floors of the cages. Time always slowed at Boy’s house, you had to get used to the silences. Dope helped. Kenny drifted, thinking about Ray off in Australia himself, even as we speak … traveling upside down, sleeping when he should be waking, like a character in a Superman strip, backwardman, Mr. Mxyzptlk … a kind of dogged sorrow, low-down and blue, the thing that nobody talked about: it didn’t feel that bad, being blue. Sometimes it felt fine. Boy let the smoke out in a thin stream, passed it back to Kenny. “Even in the spring,” he said, “the daytime temps get over a hundred, way over that in the first inch off the ground, when the sun is shining. It can get to one-thirty-four, one-forty. The theory is it’s a clock thing, day length.”

“Science,” Kenny said.

“I don’t know,” Boy said. “You try this, you try that. If it works, everybody thinks you’re a genius.” He waved the joint off.

Kenny settled back into his chair. Around him in the red-lit darkness were the usual denizens: a pair of Oscar fish in adjoining
tanks, a clawed frog, Nile monitor, a saltwater reef aquarium, a ferret, a nine-foot rock python, frogs and fish and snakes without name—a continuous bench at waist level, all around the room, and every foot of it lined with cages or tanks. A preference for cold-blooded, what was the name?
Poikilotherm
, he remembered. Kenny always wanted to start a band, the Poikilotherms. What difference did it make if he couldn’t play an instrument? He was getting high. The red light was cozy. He heard Junie’s voice, scolding:
a bunch of young Americans getting high …

“What do the rest of them think?” Kenny asked. “About the change in the clock, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see. Most of them, their brain is just a wide spot in their spinal column. You don’t want to go crazy trying to figure it out.”

“Anything going on?”

Boy thought for a minute, then started to laugh. “You’re it, man,” he said. “You’re the biggest news in town. Kenny Kolodny is screwing the class lesbian.”

He felt himself blushing. The red light would hide it.

“I mean, that’s so fucking great,” Boy said. “That’s unbelievable.”

It got cold, stayed cold for two weeks at the end of November and the beginning of December, the last of autumn stripped off the trees. A couple of inches of snow was all but it stayed and stayed—not in town, where it rotted quickly to nothing, but out in the suburbs, in the playing fields and lawns and remnant pockets of forest. Along the river, the winter looked like it had come for good; a real winter for once. The river piled up in dams of ice around the edges of the rocks. The forest, stripped and empty, was quieted with snow. A gray sky kept the planes out.

And really, Kenny thought: why should I care? Winters past, a
season of dead batteries and indoor drinking, of Christmas—reliably the worst week of the year in Kenny’s house—and the shriek of tires spinning on ice. His sneakers leaked. The first warm coat in many winters was the one he bought himself from the surplus store downtown, a castoff of the Czechoslovakian army, black wool. It kept the snow off him but smelled like mothballs, defeat; he pictured winter as a long, painful retreat, a line of black skeletal men moving through the white fields … Kenny read military history sometimes, a leftover vice from deep childhood, and he had noticed that many of the worst things in the world took place in winter: Napoleon’s flight from Moscow, the end of the Third Reich. Wars began in optimistic weather and ended in February mud. Even in December, it was nice at Pearl Harbor.

He let himself be seduced, though, by Junie. She had the clothes for winter, the cups of steaming cocoa to warm up with. She had snow tires on her Accord, and two or three poems by Robert Frost by heart. OK, he thought; I’ll give it a chance. All the while hearing Corso in his brain:
pie glue! pie glue!

(And his father, too: OK, I’ll give nature a chance. OK, I’ll give Europe a chance … that endless ability to judge, from a standpoint of nothing.)

A real winter, at last. Kenny and Junie went down to the canal one afternoon, four o’clock or so, after the indignity of high school. They didn’t talk at school, didn’t see each other more than they had to. Both of them shrunken, tiny versions of themselves. There were no other cars in the parking lot when they pulled up, which was a surprise to Junie. She said, “I guess it’s the weather.”

Kenny looked up skeptically. The sky was low and dark gray, pregnant. The temperature was right in between snow and freezing rain.

“We’ll be fine,” she said. “There’s no problem.”

Kenny had already made up his mind to follow her anyway.
They walked down through the winter woods. In her sweaters and her parka, with her head tucked into a stocking cap, Junie looked like a regular girl; a beautiful, regular girl. He forgot sometimes. Now that her hair was starting to grow out again, you could see her face more easily. Kenny was jealous: he was the one who had seen her, he had a prior claim … They came out onto the canal and it was perfect: hard-frozen, blown clean of snow. Somewhere past the next line of trees, the river was running along; he could hear it; one or two birds. “It’s nice,” he said.

“It’s never like this,” Junie said. “It’s always crowded, or else the ice is bad.”

She sat down on a flattened log and started to peel her boots off. Kenny followed suit with his sneakers. A thick heap of gray ashes inside a square of logs, a place where a bonfire had been. Kenny wished for one now. Some essential loneliness, a season for lonely Scandinavians. He longed for company, a fire, music (though he would have hated the music, certainly; the company, probably; everything but the fire).

Kenny laced himself into Junie’s father’s skating boots and wobbled out onto the ice. “I absolutely suck at this,” he said.

“You don’t have to be good.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t good,” he told her, and fell on his ass. “I said I suck.”

She glided out onto the ice in her white princess skates and in that moment Kenny hated her: the grace, the certainty of her movement. She had brought him here to demonstrate his clumsiness, the distance between them. He knew it wasn’t true. He took her arm and stumbled upright again and there she was.

“Isn’t this
fun?
” she asked, and Kenny gave her the finger.

“These things don’t have any brakes,” he said, leaning on her still, lifting one of her father’s skates off the ice to inspect it. They were giant Bauer hockey skates, black and menacing. Even with a
pair of cotton liner socks and a pair of wool socks over them, Kenny did not quite fill her father’s shoes; a little joke that he had noticed right away.

“You don’t need them, unless you’re figure skating,” Junie said. “Were you planning on figure skating?”

This: a flash of real anger, pure and unreasonable; he was being made fun of. No, I can’t skate. No, I’m not one of you.

“Just glide,” she said. “You don’t have to go fast,” and left him behind; slipping away from him again, leaving him pooled in anger. It passed quickly, leaving a bitter aftertaste. He wobbled slowly after her, trying to find a rhythm for his feet on the treacherous ice. One-two-three-oops-two-oops-two-three-one-oops-shit!—and he down on his ass again, Junie staring quizzically at him from twenty yards down the canal. Humiliation, the gaze of the graceful upon the clumsy. She said, “Do you want me to show you?”

“I just haven’t done this in a while,” he said. “I’ll be OK.”

Giraffe, gazelle, he thought; her white neck unfolding out of her scarf. For whatever reason, she was wearing her glasses today. Kenny hauled himself to his feet again and they started off, Junie in the lead, sometimes swirling back in a flurry of curves and stops. Not that she was that good but she was that much better than Kenny: he cursed and labored, flirted with bad sportsmanship. He reminded himself of his father. The ice was pebbled and cracked, rutted at first with the tracks of other skaters and then with sticks and leaves as they left even the marks of the others behind.

Slowly Kenny found a pace, a cadence of kick, glide, rest that he could settle into. The air, cold and damp when he first got out of the car, now felt soft to him, carrying in its humidity a taste of the ocean. The gray sky lowering. All right, he thought, if I learn to do this, can I be one of you? The doors of the club opening, to let him in; but it would never happen, there was too much she was born knowing that he would never learn, or learn too late, a lifetime playing catch-up and never getting there … They were half an hour from the car by
then, a mile or two, it was hard to tell, and they still hadn’t seen anyone; the river turning in and out of their sight, between the trees on the left-hand bank. Romance. OK, I get it, Kenny thought. Can we stop now?

On cue, she curled toward the bank, where there was an easy way up to the towpath, and a bench for the convenience of summer pedestrians.
A View of the Potomac, 1835
—the river running under cliffs of gray rock, making a big distant sound. He wobbled on his flimsy ankles up to the bench, where Junie was waiting for him, the blood risen into her cheeks, a rosy flush. Her breath was clear, while Kenny’s came in clouds of vapor.

“Let’s neck,” she said. “Let’s pet. Doesn’t this feel good?”

“It’s OK,” he said.

“Don’t be a bastard,” Junie said; a surprise to Kenny, she meant it. Troubled again. She said, “Don’t tell me you don’t like something when I know you do. Don’t fake with me.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenny said. “I like this fine. It’s just all this nature, I don’t know. I like it but I never know what to say about it.”

“Then don’t say anything.”

But I didn’t, Kenny thought; and didn’t say it. This was where they started; where they always seemed to end up was here, a fallen cake of missed intentions. They were OK, they were fine together, just this was never going to be perfect. One or the other of them was always going to screw things up, he thought; but this blue, depressed half-light was where they felt at home. He kissed her on the lips, and she didn’t object.

Her lips were warm with the blood running through her body, her breath was warm. He kissed her again, clumsy, lethal weapons on his feet. Kissed her neck, the hollow at the base of her neck. He could feel the loneliness of the winter woods everywhere around them; this small enclosed warmth between them, and the cold, the scattered scraps of snow, the empty branches. This little house of breath, with only the two of them in it; and the big cold world outside. He slipped
his hand under her parka, under her sweater and found the warm bare skin hidden inside.