“I doubt it.”
“Well,” she says, pulling the straw off her tooth and running a blue tongue across her lips. “You ever heard of tryin’?”
The itching in my gut reaches up to my throat and I picture it getting as fat as Troy’s. But whatever Patricia pours into my drink seems to help me forget. She says she wants a ride on my bike, sits her big denim ass on my handlebars, and as I pedal to the baseball field, her hair flies back into my mouth and chokes me. She smells like candy and gasoline and thinks everything’s worth laughing about.
Behind the bleachers, we pass a car parked in the shade. Night’s coming in with a better attitude than the day, and through a daze of gnats, I see what looks like Troy sitting in the car. I think I hear music. I think I see a boy in the passenger seat snapping his fingers and laughing.
“Who’s that?” Patricia asks.
“Nobody,” I say. “Nobody I ever seen.”
But I feel those ants well up in my throat, and then one of my eyes goes blind. And before Troy can look my way, I yell at Patricia to get back on the handlebars. We go down to where a creek used to be before the world ran dry, and before I can catch my breath, Patricia takes off her shirt, shows me a second’s worth of that pink rosebud on her bra, and pushes me into the brown dust like I’m the smallest guy on the team.
I see blue tongues in my mind, Wiffle ball bats as gold as swords, feel myself working at the soft green of the pool sides, reaching up to that circle of sun where you go to be born or die. I feel Troy’s thumb on my ear and I know something I didn’t know before.
After Patricia leaves, I stay down in the creek bed and keep catching a whiff of candy and fuel. I smoke a half pack of Luckies and look up at the stars where I play I can make out a constellation of my dad. I can see him on the motorcycle, two stars for a muffler, three for his grin, and five for the helmet he shoulda been wearing in the first place.
At dawn, I make up my mind like never before and hop the sawed-off bus to Bar None. When I get there, I watch Troy from behind the one good cottonwood, see how he sits pinched in his chair like he’s being hugged. Thanks to the night before, there’s a new type of smile on his face, one that looks like it belongs in the filter. I wait for him to go look for something up at the so-called lodge, and then I go down to the screen house and stand over his flash cards. I pick them up and hesitate before I fling them above my head.
They go up in the air like a flock of white doves and fall, as if shot from the sky, onto the surface of the pool. And then, off to the side, I see the picnic table, see how in its third groove rests Troy’s glass eye. It’s seen me in action. It knows what went down. It’s taken it all in without a blink, without squeezing out a tear.
The eye feels right in my hand and good in my pocket. It goes with me as I leave the screen house, as I hitchhike back to town, as I pick up my bike from the 7-Eleven where Patricia Smurt pretends not to see me. I feel it at my side, smooth and heavy, as I sit up on the roof of Mom’s and my house with Drake’s slingshot and wait for the back of his head to appear over the little cement patio after work. Let him ask Mom again if I’m a man or a fag. Let him ask it again as I aim that glass eye and answer, “I am. I am.”
STONE FRUIT
ON THE FIRST night of the couple’s retreat, Marta was instructed to whip Dean with a silk ribbon while she scolded him for his transgressions. Dean got down on all fours on the olive-green carpet of the Forgiveness Hall and smiled like a Labrador. He liked attention of any kind.
“Bad, Dean, bad,” Marta said, monotone. “Shame on you for …” Marta paused and searched for something benign to accuse him of, something other than the drinking or the chapter of their relationship Dean referred to as “The Bad Idea” and Marta referred to as “Mackenzie.” Marta gave the ribbon an apathetic flick. “Shame on you for leaving the toilet seat up.”
Dean feigned remorse and hung his head like a shamed dog. Ventura, their assigned Love Coach, raked his fingers through his short red beard, dissatisfied.
“Try to be emotionally specific, Marta,” Ventura said. “For example, when Dean leaves the toilet seat up, how does it make you feel inside?”
Marta twirled the ribbon as if stirring a pot. She wanted to say, It makes me feel like I need to be less of who I am and more of who I’m not, but instead, she said: “It makes me feel like I have to put it down again.”
Dean snickered into his sleeve. He was wearing a new flannel shirt, as well as new hiking boots, both of which he’d bought especially for the retreat. “Everyone will know I mean business,” he’d explained when he brought them home. “This get-up says, ‘that guy is ready to explore the wilderness of love.’”
Marta let her shoulders sag and the ribbon fall. It coiled at her feet like a passive, pink worm. “Tell you what,” Ventura said. “Let’s take a five-minute break. You know: inhale, exhale? Regroup, reconvene?”
Dean sat back on his haunches. Marta stared blankly past the two men, out the window and beyond the front meadow of the retreat to the remote-control airfield across the road. Earlier that day on the way to Forever Together Couples’ Retreat, Marta and Dean had passed the abbreviated runway, where a crowd gathered for the takeoff of a model Virgin Airways jet. Dean, delighted, pulled onto the shoulder to stand and watch, while Marta stayed in the car. She sat in the passenger seat with her arms folded across her chest and stared out the windshield to make it look like she wasn’t interested. If Dean thought she was interested, he’d think she was happy, and if he thought she was happy, he’d think his work here was done.
Outside the station wagon, the miniature jet buzzed up and away. Dean hooted in boyish approval. Marta sat and considered the lone wing of a dragonfly they’d hit somewhere in the middle of Indiana. It was stuck to the glass with its own green blood, but still flapped in the wind, frantic, like it had a shot at getting where it needed to be. Marta knew if she was too cold, Dean would find another Mackenzie, but if she was too warm, Dean would grow thick with self-satisfaction—dense with denial—and Marta would never get at what she wanted: the hard pit inside him. Past his perma-smile and Santa laugh, past his burly arms and baby blues, Dean harbored a stone that needed extracting. When Marta was playful and easy, the stone receded further within. But when Marta meant business, it rose to the surface to meet her, just beneath Dean’s breastbone.
Once, early in their relationship, Dean had nearly handed it to Marta. It had been on their third date, after a late night of whiskey and errant hands, and back at Marta’s place, Dean had picked her up like a child and pressed her deep into the bed. Above her, he looked like he might cry or die, and in response, Marta had put her hands over his heart. That was when she’d felt it, the dark stone of despair rising up and out of him and almost within grasp. She had cupped it beneath her palm as if trapping an insect and Dean had recoiled, but it had almost burst from him. Marta had almost held the real Dean in her hand. That, however, had been three years ago, at the beginning, when risk and romance were the same thing. Now, the only proof the stone still existed in Dean was the way he drank, which was hard and often—a boot heel pressed on the very thing Marta desired.
“That plane was a perfect replica.” Dean climbed into the car in a wave of humid air. He smelled of dry grass and metallic sweat. “I mean, they must have to get permission from the FAA to fly those things. I think its wingspan was at least twelve feet.”
Marta looked in the sky at the retreating toy. “No way,” she said. “It can’t be that big.”
Dean started the car. “It was. I saw it. All the planes up on that ridge were that big. They were this big.” He stretched his arms out across the front seat. “Bigger even. They were big enough to carry house cats.”