“Was that you howling?” Jay asked.
“You sleeping up there? How about you come on down.”
“I don’t think we should go,” I said quiet as I could to Jay. At the tree trunk’s base nestled our black backpack. We were stupid to have left it so far away.
“You think that man can’t climb a tree?” Jay said. “He can climb a tree.”
“Get down. Now.”
Jay and I didn’t hesitate any longer; we each held onto a different branch and dropped ourselves to the ground. In the second I was hanging, I felt acutely aware that my bellybutton was showing, that it made a perfect gaping target for the man. I reached for the backpack, but the man told me no. “I’m a quick shot,” he said.
Once we stood before him, a ways off from the tree and our pack, he brought his tail around to the front. It was an alligator, a small one, maybe two feet long, with a rope tied like a leash around its snout. “Dinner,” he said, and the dangling thing twitched angrily. He dropped it and set a foot over the rope. “You’re in my swamp. Tariff to pass. So, give me all your money.” He held out a hand; his skin was tanned a dark, wrinkled brown, like bark. Like the Zimzee. But he was a white man, and even through my fear, I realized that was wrong: Jay’s Zimzee, the one his father had scared him with, was black.
“Sure,” I said, “that’s okay. Jay, give it over. Just give it.”
“We don’t have any money,” Jay said, but his hand burrowed deep into his pocket, where he kept the stolen cash; he fiddled his fingers around in there.
The Zimzee growled and then hawked a loogie onto the ground near Jay’s feet. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Okay,” I kept saying, hoping my voice sounded soothing to the Zimzee, “okay…”
The Zimzee casually reached behind his back for his sawed-off shotgun, then pointed it straight at Jay’s head. “Money,” he said. His eyes went on and on, omnipotent.
Finally Jay pulled the bills out from his pocket and defiantly tossed them at the Zimzee’s feet.
The Zimzee shook his head like we were the dumbest pair he’d ever come across, and probably he was right. He jerked the barrel of his gun towards Jay and said, “Get down there and pick it up and hand it to me nice. Then you get out of my sight. How old is you two, anyways? Out on your own.”
Jay slowly got to his knees and bent, his neck looking vulnerable and dirty, towards the cash.
“Fuck,” the Zimzee said, staring down at Jay. He poked the barrel of his gun against the back of Jay’s neck, right where the tattoo marked him.
The ground was creeping up around my shoe, wetting my toes. In fact, my whole body felt wet, a trickle down my back, my underarms swampy, my groin like a Jacuzzi, like something bubbling in there.
“You piece of shit.” The Zimzee’s voice, a smoker’s growl, grated against the insecty hum of the vegetation. Like proving me right, he pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. When he lit it, the burning smell floated above the thick musty loam where I’d thought for a moment that Jay and I might be the last two people on earth. “You’re one of them, huh? That means a tariff is too good for you. You owe more.” Smoke inched out through his nostrils and for some reason it scared me, to see something solid burned into nothing before this man’s lips.
“But you told us we could go,” I said. “You have our money now. All of it.” I pulled Jay upright so that he was standing beside me again. “That’s everything.”
“You’re those Eye Whites,” the Zimzee said, and the way he talked, it was like he was chomping the tobacco smoke.
“And proud of it.” Jay tried to straighten himself, but his shoulders still curled inward.
A slow, cruel smile cleaved the Zimzee’s face. “You know what you mean by that? You get what you’re calling yourself?”
“I’m calling myself a real man.”
“They took my boy,” the Zimzee said. “Now he’s one of their gang. I don’t know him no more.”
“So they’re around here?” Jay asked, excited. “Where’s their place?”
“Like I said.” The Zimzee spat bits of tobacco onto the ground. “Plain tariff is too nice for an Eye Whites. Here’s what I’ll have you do.”
During those long seconds before he came out with it, I must have aged a decade, because by the time he told us, I knew my adolescence was over.
“I’ll let you get off,” he said, “after the two of you grummet each other here. Give me a look.”
The alligator, Dinner, whipped its body in an attempt at escape, but all it affected was a crackle like small-time fireworks against some dead leaves. This was the universe’s way of getting me back, of bringing it all full circle. We’d met him only a few minutes ago, but I felt as if he’d had us imprisoned for weeks. “But we already paid you,” I said. “We already—”
He interrupted: “That wasn’t really no ask.”
The Zimzee settled himself down on the same termite-occupied log we’d used as a bench the night before. He held his sawed-off shotgun in one hand as if it were a cheap can of beer, not paying too much attention to it, but not about to let it go, either. Dinner lay docile at his feet.
There once was a time when the slightest provocation—when the opposite of a provocation—would get me hard in an instant, but my cock hadn’t stirred in days. Maybe being on the road, or not eating much, or the last time I’d had a boner… something like that must have robbed me of the quick-trigger teenage-given right to an erection.
“He wants to make a sort of live porn out of us,” I whispered to Jay. “That’s all.” For some reason, the idea made me giddy. I could be fucked by Jay in the ass, almost like a reversal of what I’d done to Tosh, and then I would be free and I could go on my merry way and never have to look at Jay’s sick sad hole of a face ever again. I could find my mom and see what she was like and then grow up on the other side of this godforsaken swamp.
“Hurry up, boys. Make something happen.” The Zimzee’s shotgun goggled at us through its barrels, two close-together, stupid looking eyes.
I put my hands up under Jay’s shirt. His body felt softer than it should, with the sharp poke of bones close beneath the puffy skin. I closed my eyes and thought of a porn magazine I’d seen where the ropes were so tight across the women’s breasts that it looked like their flesh was about to split.
Jay said, “I don’t want to do this.”
“Muzzle up, man. Come on.” Never before had I been the stronger of us, but somebody had to keep it together, to get us out of this. I grabbed the front of his shorts. The fabric was grimy, and it felt like I was touching earth. “He could shoot us. I really think he would. We’ve got to.” I thought about Stella; Stella and Jay were sort of the same person, genetically. But still I couldn’t get hard.
Jay’s eyes skittered back and forth, and I could see a wild flit behind his pupils, or maybe I just saw that he’d given up. But he nodded, and that was all the signal I needed to get to work.
“Your hip bones,” I said to Jay as I pulled down his shorts. They rose sharply from the concave bowl of his stomach. “It’s okay. Remember: just concentrate.” Excitement was riling up my stomach. Not the sexy kind, but the kind that told me any minute now, I could be skipping away from this hell and back to civilization. I had to come, and then I would be free. Maybe I’d never come again. Maybe I’d stop using my cock altogether as a personal punishment for the reason we’d left Delaware.
Jay now stood naked before me, but he wasn’t making any moves to take off my own clothes, so I did it for him. There we were, our socked feet against the loamy soil, vines hanging down from the tree above us, two Adams after the apples got chewed. My mother would probably take me to church with her on Sundays; maybe the priest would topple over if I confessed this sin.