Memory drew from him like pus from a swollen wound.
He felt a sob wrack across his body. The Cyclops ran a great thumb down his chest. When it settled, James gasped. The Cyclops grinned.
James squirmed in a terrified ecstasy. The giant’s thumb was thick as a man’s thigh, but far more nimble. The feeling was primordial — it was as though it yanked him back to the night when his old friend Elmer Wolfe slept over — and had found his way into James’s bed — pressed close to him — and then the springs…
…the bedsprings…
They screamed.
The mill was dark when Nick Thorne and Jimmy arrived there. It was in the hours before dawn — long before the morning shift would arrive. Nick pushed the boy around the side of the building, and through the great, blackened doors. It was dark inside.
“You want to lie with men, boy?” Nick cuffed his son hard enough to send him to the ground. “You like that, do you?”
Jimmy heard himself whimper — and hated himself for making so weak a noise. He was covered in sawdust. Face-down on the ground. His father smelled of liquor and sweat. “I’ll show you what it’s like…”
Jimmy tried to press himself into the ground — as though he could escape that way, by enveloping himself in wood shavings. But there was no escape. His father’s hand, thick and callused from working a lifetime in the sawmill, pushed hard between his legs, pushed his nuts up hard into his abdomen. He gave a cry that sounded to him like a squeak.
“That’s what it’s like, queerboy.” His father grunted, took back his hand, and undid his trousers.
“That’s what it’s like, queerboy.” The Cyclops brought James close to his face. He opened his great mouth, and a tongue came out, thick as a marlin and rough like a towel — touched James’s middle, taking a taste of him. The Cyclops huffed, and smiled and lowered James to his own middle. Now James was staring straight into another, smaller eye. James felt his feet touch the ground, and the giant’s hand pushed him, guided him forward.
James rubbed his face against the shaft of the giant’s penis. It was wide as a drum, and the leathery flesh trembled as he caressed it. The Cyclops moaned. The hand stroked James’s back. It wasn’t squeezing him anymore. But James knew it held him there as surely as were it a fist clenched around him. Shaking with fear and lust, and tears streaming down his cheek, he raised his own arms and embraced the immense shaft.
The memory kept coming. The vivid, awful memory of his father, the heroic Nick Thorne, buggering him for what seemed to be an hour on the floor of this place. To teach him a lesson, he’d said. The old man had rolled him over before he was done. Demanded…
…demanded…
There had been a sharp crack! sound before he could do anything else, and his father had fallen down, clutching his skull. A man with a baseball bat was standing behind him. First ordering him off the property — telling him he was trespassing. Saying something about being an “agent of the mill.” Showing a little eye-shaped Pinkertons badge on his chest. Then, seeing Jimmy half-naked in the sawdust, shutting his mouth. The baseball bat came up again, and down again. That was when Jimmy had said it:
“Stop killing him! He’s my Dad!”
“Sweet Jesus,” said the man from Pinkertons.
“Sweet Jesus,” said the Cyclops.
James looked up. The Cyclops moved his hand from his shoulder, let him step back.
“Shit and hell.” Not a dozen feet off, the grey-haired man from Pinkertons stood, blood in his beard and his shotgun raised, along with a fresh troop of detectives. “It’s a monster, boys. Kill it.”
The Cyclops let James go, and turned his great eye to face his attackers. James sat down in the wet sawdust and finally felt the tears — hot and salty and honest — streaming down his cheeks. They weren’t the tears of mourning. Those, James realized, would never, ever come. The roar and light of gunfire and screams filled the cavernous mill. James was nearly deaf from it, weeping in the dark, when the Cyclops turned his gaze back to him.
Now why, wondered James as he gazed up into the Cyclops’s encompassing eye, would anyone stick a spear into that?
James dropped two polished nickels on his father’s waxy eyelids. Gunshots echoed through the valley, as another wave of detectives assaulted the sawmill, and James thought about old Nick Thorne’s death: fighting his way through the flames — looking everywhere but up — before he was plucked into the sky and flung down again, amid the screams of his fellows.
James stepped back and put his arms over his mother’s shoulders. He tried to ignore the stares of the other mourners. He was a mess. He’d come directly here to the Chamblay Cemetery from the sawmill. His shirt and trousers were stained and torn from the night spent in the crook of the Cyclops’s arms, amid the heaps of dead men left over from the first Pinkertons assault. His chin was dark with morning beard. It was quite scandalous — showing up such a dishevelled mess at his father’s burial. He supposed he would have to get used to that when he went back to Hollywood. There would be quite a lot of scandal then. Republic would more than likely, as Stephen had put it, cut him loose once it all came out.
It may as well come out. Because he couldn’t go back to the cage of lies he’d made for himself in Hollywood — to being Captain Kip Blackwell of the Seven Seas — any more than Clarissa the Oracle could go back to the trapeze now that the horror of her own tiny soul was drunk dry, or than Clayton O’Connor could trick the rubes into thinking he were a true strongman, or than Sam Twillicker could live another day once the Cyclops had sucked his soul right from him.
But he would have to take this one step at a time. His mother looked at him with wet, uncomprehending eyes. “What happened to you?” she whispered.
“Quite a lot,” said James as Mr. Simmons’ shaking hands closed the lid of his father’s casket, and his sons prepared to lower the old man into the space they’d carved for him in the earth. James felt himself shaking too, around the great, empty space in him where the sawmill had crouched all these years.
“I’ll tell you all of it this afternoon,” he said.
The Webley
Wallace Gleason walked alone that day.
Some days past, he and Rupert Storey had fought a hot, angry storm of a battle that ended in tears and blood. Wallace had come out on top; for at the end, it was he standing, fists clenched at his side, eye-whites standing out like flecks of ivory against his tanned, dusty flesh. His best friend Rupert was on the ground, red ribbons of snot strung down his chin and into the dirt. Rupert bled; Rupert cried. Wallace did neither.
The dog hunkered low in the grass. And it took note of Wallace walking past the quiet, broken-down shacks that every so often emerged from the woods along this stretch of road.
It was a stretch that one time might have had some life to it. When the Evers Brothers sawmill was up and running, the little houses were full of men and their wives and their children, come to Fenlan to make a good wage. A dog would take note of no one boy more than any other. But this was 1933. The passages of boys were few and far between these days.
Wallace thought he took the road slow and victorious, more man now than ever before. But the dog thought differently. It had not seen Wallace’s prowess in the sand pit, what a beating he had been able to inflict upon his foe. The dog only saw the boy, unsmiling, head down, shuffling along the route that he had taken many times in the company of his best friend Rupert.