The place appeared virtually the same as the day before; Neil’s sheet twisted into a new configuration, and he’d spilled some pot across his night stand. Yet things seemed different. I danced around the room, toppling stacks of tapes, kicking pillows, shoes, letters from Wendy. I pushed the lamp from the table. It knocked against the floor with the vacant clunk I imagined a decapitated head would make when striking pavement. I ruined his meticulous stacks of pennies. I closed my fist around a baseball trophy, the points and ridges from the tiny gold figurine’s face cutting into my palm. “Most RBIs, Summer 1981,” I screamed, my voice raising with each syllable, and on the “eighty-ONE!” I flung the trophy at the wall. It didn’t break. I ran toward it as if it might scurry off, then threw it again. No luck.
The key, I thought.
It was still under the mattress. It burned its forbidden shape into my hand, catching a ray from the streetlights outside Neil’s window. It turned easily in the dresser drawer’s lock.
The drawer’s contents were divided into two sections. On the left were wads of bills-I noticed tens and twenties among the fives and ones-plus pills, acid tabs, a bag of pot. The right side contained a thick stack of things. Rawhide rode the top of the mountain. I brushed aside some random pieces of paper, skimming through an unintelligible letter from Christopher Ortega and a torn Panthers baseball line-up, the name “McCormick” fourth from top. Finally, I pulled out what looked to be an enviable collection of porno books and magazines.
Neil’s magazines were beyond belief. I couldn’t venture a guess where he’d gotten them. Most boasted glossy, hardcore photo spreads of rough-looking men. I recognized one guy as the ranch hand from the movie; once again, he was being dominated by a mustached muscleman. The others had similar appearances. But these pictorials of older guys sucking and fucking were tame compared to the magazines at the bottom of Neil’s stack. In one, the photos were so amateurish they seemed taken during a tornado. Bracelets and cummerbunds of leather secured a young boy to a wall. In the magazine below it, a grinning, obese man paired up with a different boy, this one sporting closely cut blond hair and freckles. On the cover, under the title of “Free Range Chicken,” the handcuffed preteen knelt before the man. The kid’s jeans bunched at his ankles. I turned the pages, skimming the photos, and saw an arm with an anchor tattoo wrapped around the kid’s body; an erect adult dick pressing against the kid’s obviously terrified face; a close-up of two stubby thumbs as they meticulously separated the kid’s ass like the seam of an overripe peach.
I replaced the stuff as I’d found it. I picked up the trophy again, threw it, watched it fall to the floor and bounce. I wanted to open my mouth and scream. I needed a soundtrack for my rage. There was a tape in Neil’s stereo, so I turned up the volume and pressed play.
I scattered more pennies, gave more kicks to the pillow, and then stopped. Slowly, the things I heard came into strange, acute focus. I had expected Neil’s tape to be some earsplitting, rhythm-heavy band with just the right brand of self-possessed and mournful lyrics to match my mood. But the tape wasn’t playing music at all. Two people spoke in voices I didn’t recognize, the voices of a man and a little boy. The boy giggled, and weird buzzes and blips echoed in the background like noises from a cartoon. This one’s going to be a good one, the boy said. Pause. Then I heard a burp, an extended hiccup at once obscene and undeniably cute. It was the burp, I thought, of a prince in the guise of a toad, of an angel on the outs in Heaven.
That was a bi-i-i-ig motherfucking burp, the older voice on the tape said. Go ahead, into the microphone. Say it.
The child took a deep breath. That was a big motherfucking burp. The kid giggled again, and the adult joined him. In the midst of their laughter, I heard another high-pitched bleep, and I recognized the noise as the sound effect from a video game I’d played years ago. Pac-Man, I thought. No, Frogger. There was a recorded rustling and a bump, as if an arm had brushed the microphone, and at that second I remembered Neil, just yesterday, leaning over his mike at Sun Center, the mouthpiece padded with red foam.
I knew the identity of the child on the tape. It was in the warped vowel of the boy’s fuck, the lilt of his giggle. I loved that voice. Whether then or now, I would know it, and I would love it.
The tape’s voices paused again, and within that silence I heard someone moving in the house. My first thought was, burglar; my next, more realistic, was, Neil. I leaped up, clicked the stereo off, and took the tape out. Written on its label was NEIL M.-JULY 81. It wasn’t Neil’s handwriting. I shuffled to the dresser drawer, slammed it, and returned the key to its precise hiding place.
“Neil?” someone asked, and a shadow entered the room. It was his mom. “Whatever’s going on in here, I have to ask you to keep it down a little, because-” She stopped, seeing I wasn’t her son.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
I put my hands in my pockets, then took them out again. Mrs. McCormick bit her bottom lip. Her face was shiny and apologetic. “I thought you were Neil,” she said. “But that’s okay.” She surveyed the room’s damage, then glanced at my hands, perhaps checking if I was armed.
“There was a fight,” I said. I took the trophy from the floor and replaced it on the table. “I went slightly crazy, I guess. Now it’s time to clean up.” I reached toward the penny avalanche. “The ball games are still going out there. Neil’s great at that job, you know.” I sat on the bed and began stacking the pennies, one after the other, rebuilding the gleaming copper tower on the night stand.
Mrs. McCormick found some letters I’d scattered and put them on Neil’s dresser. A photograph fell from one, and Wendy’s face smiled out, two fingers raised in peace. Neil’s mom saw the picture and watched it, her eyebrows raised. Her movements were labored and effusive, as if she’d just crawled from a sea of bourbon.
“I need to fall asleep,” I said. “I’m so tired.” I wasn’t, really. Somewhere outside the house, a cricket chirped. “Kansas is horrible. All it does is rain here. School is over at last. Do you think my hair color is too severe? Neil won’t give me an honest answer.” These words meant nothing to either of us. I had to say it. “Oh, yeah, I’m in love with him.”
Neil’s mom didn’t look away from the floor. I sat on the bed, and she sat beside me. She inhaled sharply three times, and for a moment I believed she would cry. What did she know about the voices on the tape? What did she know about Neil’s current whereabouts?
“Why are you telling me this,” she said. “I’m his mom.”
“My parents used to claim the word love was useless, that people say it too often.”
Mrs. McCormick hadn’t heard me. “You think I’m drunk.” Something sour and oily covered her voice. “You think I’m drunk, but I’m not. I’m perfectly sober.” In the darkness, she had her son’s precise features: his full lips, his jagged bangs.
Outside, a car sped past, its radio wailing a song from before I was born. I watched the dresser drawer as if it might fly open. “My parents are dead,” I said. Neil’s mom lay back on the bed and patted the space next to her, a signal she wanted me to join her. The thought of doing that terrified me. “I have to go,” I said, or perhaps I thought I said it. I stared at the figurine on Neil’s trophy, its repulsive grin beneath the gold cap. And then I left. Neil’s mom didn’t see me to the door.
At home, I took my journal outside and sat in the damp garden grass. The trailer park gave off an eerie glow, as if it were the chosen setting for an upcoming miracle. Mosquitoes buzzed the air. Dead earthworms scattered the sidewalk like veins. “I’m in love more than ever with Neil,” I wrote. “My heart feels like a cartoon valentine card that some bratty kid’s balled in his fist until it’s become nothing but a ragged wad of paper, then thrown into churning, chopping depths of the trash compactor. If only he liked guys his age and not over-thirty-five men with more hair on their chests than heads. Where’s the razor when I need it?”