“Who did this?” his father said.
Simon shook his head.
His father slapped him, a hard blow that almost knocked him off balance. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “If this doesn’t beat all. Can’t you have anything nice?”
“It’s not my fault,” Simon said.
His father rubbed his lips and stared at the graffiti — that one word over and over, in purple paint, in white: BGHS school colors. He closed his eyes.
“They’re just jealous, is all,” Simon told his father. He looked at that word, the big one on the hood: FAG. The letters were sturdy and authoritative. “They don’t like seeing somebody have something they can’t.”
That seemed to relax his father a little, as Simon had hoped it would. “Well, that goes along with the territory, I guess,” he said. “Goddamn shame, though. I ain’t growing a fucking money tree back there.” He thumbed toward their property, fifty acres of farmland and woods with a small stream coursing through its center.
“No, sir,” Simon said.
“You may have to hitch a ride with your mother again for a while.”
Simon looked at the ground, rubbing his sore cheek. “Okay.”
They went back inside, where Simon’s mother was just putting breakfast on the table: bacon and fried eggs, home fries, sliced cantaloupe and tomato sprinkled in salt. Jefferson Wells liked to eat a roadhouse breakfast every day of the week, called cereal “bird food,” and suffered the occasional pain in his left arm that terrified Simon but also delighted him a little. They ate and didn’t speak, and Simon’s mother chattered cheerily between them, a monologue that required neither response nor acknowledgment. Nobody ever listened to her. When the meal was done, she cleared the dishes and started loading the dishwasher, humming to herself. Later in his life, when she was the only person he could count on to love him — when he realized that she was probably the only person who had ever loved him, period — he’d try to remember details about her, fond memories, things they could share and laugh about. There were devastatingly few. But he’d think about how she liked to sing as she cleaned or cooked, and he understood that she must have had some personality outside the bland housekeeper role she occupied as his father’s wife, because her repertoire was diverse and ever changing, old-fashioned, current: the Rolling Stones and R.E.M., Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash. She’d loved Simon and Garfunkel, and Simon was a grown man with too many bad choices behind him, like train cars, before he realized that he was almost certainly Paul Simon’s namesake — a fact his mother never confirmed and his father would have been furious to discover. One afternoon, when he was still a little kid too young to start school, she’d sung the “Bookends Theme” over and over as she hemmed pants, her voice plain, pleasant: a mother’s voice.
On this morning, though, she merely hummed, an empty, cheerful tune meant to soothe his father and reassure them all. Simon felt his father staring at him.
“You aren’t—” He paused, mashing a fried egg with his fork, the loose yolk running into his pile of home fries, neon and viscous. “You didn’t—” He cleared his throat. “—do anything to encourage this, did you?”
Simon knew to shake his head right away. But he thought about it. He was old enough to know what fag meant, just like the boys who’d vandalized the car knew. He wasn’t sure that he understood what being a fag meant, though — if it should be clear to him as hunger, if it meant that he had to feel only some things and never others — because all of that was mixed up and confused, what could excite or arouse him. None of it made sense.
What made the least sense to him was how yesterday had provoked this. He’d only taken those boys to the place they’d wanted to go, bought them some food, eaten with them, laughed with them. He hadn’t touched them or said anything risky. He’d hardly spoken at all. That they were able to pin him with this word, to see something in him that he hadn’t gotten sorted out for himself yet, that he hadn’t even known he was transmitting — well, it was humiliating. But it also made him afraid. He felt like a wounded animal in a house with a predator.
“Okay, then,” his father said, face wary. “See that you don’t.” Simon met Marty in one of his classes at WKU: his second go at College Algebra, actually. He wasn’t bad at math — wasn’t bad at anything he applied himself to — but college had been good to him, and as long as his father was willing to pay for it, he was willing to take the scenic route to a degree. At twenty-three, then, he was still eighteen credits short of graduating, and he’d be lucky to finish school with a 2.5 GPA. Like it mattered. His father would give him some token position with the stores whenever he finished, and Simon thought that they were both eager to postpone that day as long as possible.
Life, for the first time he could remember, was fine. He had a small apartment off College Drive, a generous food allowance, a nice car — a black Corvette, his high school graduation gift. Not a hand-me-down this time, either. He took twelve hours every semester, the full-time minimum, and always mixed in with his general ed classes something easy and interesting, like Intro to Drawing or Intro to Philosophy. The philosophy class was his favorite, the only class he scored an A in. He’d loved learning about Descartes, with his wild ideas about the world outside yourself, how everything you believe is real could just be the work of some evil genius or puppet master. He’d liked Descartes’ proof of God, too, though Simon himself had an idea that God was a fairy tale, that dead was dead. God must exist, this Descartes guy thought, because imperfect beings are incapable of imagining perfection. Bullshit, really. But Simon thought about his father sometimes — about how it felt to try to be the son his father wanted him to be, and how that effort made him love and hate all the more fiercely — and couldn’t help but wonder.
Marty was a freshman. He was a cool guy — good-looking in an accidental, unawares sort of way, easygoing, witty — the kind of person who wouldn’t have had anything to do with Simon a few years before but now gave him some respect because he was old enough to buy the beer and flush enough to pay for it more times than not. Gullible enough, too, Simon realized. But who gave a fuck? The money was his dad’s, the good times just as good. And despite all of that, he felt a real connection to Marty, felt that what they had was legitimate. A friendship. He knew that Marty’s mother was Mexican and barely spoke a lick of English, that Marty had been teased by other kids when he was little, called a spic and a wetback. “Words their daddies taught them,” Marty had said, and Simon commiserated, though his own father’s arsenal of derogatory terms and ethnic slurs was just short of breathtaking.
They started hanging out nights and on weekends. Marty had a dorm room in Pierce-Ford free on minority scholarship, but he’d crash at Simon’s place most nights after hours of drinking, or pot if they could arrange it; Marty always had those connections. They stayed up till dawn two or three nights a week, sipped beers — Natural Lights when they felt cheap and sloppy, Anchor Steam, Marty’s favorite, when they had a bottle of whiskey on hand. They’d try to remember the saying about mixing the two — “Liquor before beer, nothing to fear; beer before liquor, you’ve never been sicker” — but got the order screwed up half the time and usually ended up doing beer and shots all at once and getting sick anyway. They’d drink and play music; or drink and sit on the front porch of Simon’s building, watching the traffic; or drink and walk down to Mickey O’Shea’s on Cherry Street, where you could often catch a decent band for cheap on Fridays. Sometimes they’d get in the kitchen together and chef up a ridiculous meal that somehow tasted all right anyway, like the time when all they had was saltines and banana peppers and spicy mustard. They could be together and just be, that was the thing. No fake conversation, no showing off or showing up. Simon had never been good with other people, so for something like this to come along — well, it felt fated. Felt like a gift, a reward for suffering so much misery and bullshit in high school.