By six o'clock the last light of summer was glaring hard and bright through the sectional windows. We were all burnished in the sunset and looking like we were about to catch fire, looking as god-like as we felt. Two girls – both of them on the lacrosse team, I think – sat across the aisle, their legs like those of wild animals, like they were designed for sprinting bare through tall grass, for running down and cutting open, for murder. They looked like they had come to rest at the bright end of the world.
The odor of the bus was heavy and acrid and stinking with machine smells. I'd always loved to smell things. I could shut my eyes at any moment and call up the scents of my family: Dad, his coffee so strong that it almost covered the metallic scent which followed him home from the shop, clinging to his hands no matter how he scrubbed them. Mom, with her sugar and garlic palms and her chemical-flower hair. My little sister Toni, lavender soap and fruity chewing gum and the clean athletic smell of teenage girl sweat. The smell of our trailer in High Gorge Park, decaying wood and corroded metal odors masked by vanilla candles kept burning all day long.
Mike had a scent all his own, musky sweet and subtle. Most of the guys I knew stank. Mike always smelled clean.
“I hate this shit,” he mumbled, kicking at the ratty seat-back in front of him. Foam bled in puffy yellowed chunks from the slit red vinyl. He picked idly at it, his mouth set in a line of firm dissatisfaction.
“What shit?” I cocked my head, fearful as always that his displeasure might be in some way traced back to me. I couldn't bear to think of him hating me, blaming me, dismissing me.
“I mean this! This field-trip bullshit.” He looked at me, blue eyes half-lidded and the last of the sunset's golden light drenching his perfect face. “I get carsick, Trevor. You know that, you asshole.” He drawled out the obscenity, stretching it an extra syllable and grinning his easy grin. Not many people could be so charming when they were insulting you.
I had nothing to say. I would have gone anywhere if it meant being with Mike Conner, and gone happily.
The Washington D.C. trip was ostensibly about instilling us with a sense of national pride and ambition before our last year of high school. The PTA got an earful of fascist garbage about how it would make us all all into model Americans. From what I'd heard, though, it was more about getting to stay in a hotel six states away from your parents and figuring out new ways to screw or get high without the chaperones finding out.
All in all, it sounded like it was going to be an interesting weekend.
* * *
I guess that the story actually started earlier that year, right on the cusp of our first millennial summer.
I'd known Mike Conner for pretty much my entire life, but we'd never been especially close. I don't know how it happened, but there was a part of me that had always loved him, a part of me that I tried to deny for a long time. The truth is, I didn't really know I was gay until I fell for Mike.
Here's how it started:
The Verden High locker room was, I guess, a lot like any other. There were olive green lockers, rows of showers over ugly gray tile, eerie drains in the floor with gunky hair caught in them, big metal vents running along the ceiling, all of the familiar sights and smells and sounds. There wasn't really anything special about it. Of course, as they say, looks can be deceiving.
I came in through the clear glass doors with my bag slung over my shoulder, taking in right away the smell of musty air and damp clothing. I could hear sounds of motion in the vast space of the pool coming from down the long hallway, echoing with a subterranean ambiance through the locker rooms.
I changed quickly, stepping out of my shorts and into my swim trunks with the minimum amount of exposure. I'd always been a fairly circumspect child, conscious from a terribly young age of my body and of how it was perceived by those around me – always quite, always calm on the outside. My Dad was one of those guys who swaggered around locker rooms without anything on, all long and flabby in the worst places and swinging his junk like it was the most natural thing in the world. I'd like to blame his lack of modesty on some kind of generational excuse, but the truth is that I have no idea where it comes from. An overabundance of confidence, perhaps. I only know that I will never be like him, nor would I want to be.
The sign hung at the end of the short hall: Pool Users Must Shower Before Swimming. I could see the water beyond, constantly in motion. A man brushed passed me, coming from the showers. He was in his late forties and thickly bearded, a teacher probably. I recognized him, but I didn't know his name. He was tugging and brushing compulsively at his clothes, and seemed to be in a great hurry to leave. He gave me only the briefest of looks on his way past.
There was a long bench against the wall outside the showers. A folded white towel lay there, and a wet shirt wadded up beside, dripping chlorinated water through the bench slats. My brain didn't connect the dots until after I'd rounded the corner. I was not alone. The teacher's footprints echoed, then the heavy shutting of the door as he fled, rattling like a gunshot.
Mike Conner sat hunched over in the corner of the showers, wearing nothing but a tangled swim suit. He looked up when I entered, and there was such an emptiness in his face that I scarcely knew him at first. His eyes red, his mouth red, his body pale and lips trembling. He wiped his mouth, his cheeks coloring. “Trevor?”
“Hey, Mike.” I blushed at once. Just talking to him made me terribly nervous. I went at once to the nearest shower and cranked the knob. The water spat out, far too hot. I stood beneath the scalding water, paralyzed with embarrassment worse than any pain.
Mike gathered himself up, rubbing his nose. He stretched his jaw, massaging it with his hands. “Swimming?” he asked, his voice curiously blank, weary as though emotion were a luxury of which he felt undeserving.
I nodded. My hands were turning red in the heat. If only I could have burned away those feelings beneath the water. If only I could have been free of them. “Who was that guy?” I asked, cocking my head in the direction of the departed teacher.
“Mr. Quinn, you remember him. I'm in his honors class.”
“Oh, right.” I blushed again. Honors class? Did he think I was stupid? Math had never been my strongest subject. “What did he want?”
Michael shifted from one foot to the other. “He wanted to talk about my grades, is all... No problem.” And then he turned away from me, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He turned on the shower opposite mine and stepped into the water, like he was trying to disappear into it.
It was too late, though, I'd already seen: Michael Conner was crying.
That was when I knew I was in love with him, when I saw him crying in the locker room, crying and trying to hide it. And why not? It was easy to fall in love with Mike, most people did, sooner or later. And, as for me, I poured myself out.
* * *
The bus hit a pothole going down the on-ramp and we were all jolted against our seat-belts. One of the chaperones stumbled to her knees in the middle aisle, the bump having upset her in the midst of a lecture on safety and etiquette that none of us had been listening to anyway.
The sun was down and the sky outside was a dusky blue beneath the thin fog. The headlights of the other cars on the road wheeled like pale searchlights as they played on the roadsigns beyond.
Most of the students were talking together in low voices, their eagerness to be away conquering any social antipathy. I was staring at the window, eyes glazed-over, deaf to the world. Molly and Jeffrey were arguing about something, as usual. Scott had his big boots up on the back of the seat in front of him, his toes bobbing to the rhythm of the music from his portable CD player. Mike was reading a paperback novel by the light of the glossy blue florescent bulbs which lined the bus. I pretended not to watch by looking only at his reflection in the window. He had the cutest way of furrowing his brow and leaning in close to the tattered pages when he was focused.
“Have you've ever been to DC before?” I asked, desperate to break the silence betwee
n us. It made me nervous when he was quiet around me. All I could think of were the harsh judgments which were no doubt filing his head.
Mike licked his finger and turned the page. I thought for a moment that he hadn't heard me. “Yep,” he said, finally.
“Yeah? So you've like... seen everything already?”
He held the book against his chest and gave me a look of restrained annoyance, “We went to the Museum of Natural History, but I didn't see any of the monuments or anything. I was eleven.”
“With your Dad?”
Michael's cheek twitched, a muscle in his jaw tightening involuntarily. “I... yeah, with my foster Dad.” He waved the paper-back at me, “Not worth talking about, really.”
I could tell that I was getting on his nerves, but I hardly cared. It was such a rush, just talking to him, I couldn't stop. “What are you reading anyway?” I asked.
“It's about reincarnation,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“Sure, Trev. Reincarnation, tooth fairy, Santa Claus, all that shit.” His voice oozed sarcasm.
“I don't.”
“No?” Michael smiled, that half-delighted half-predatory grin of his. He loved to argue, even if he never seemed especially invested in the position he was arguing. Alice used to say that he talked like a lawyer sometimes. Of course Alice was gone now, vanished with her new husband. I still wasn't used to it, the idea that she was gone. It felt sometimes like we were growing up too fast.
“I just... I don't think that souls work that way.”
Mike laughed. "Souls? Jesus, Trevor, you're such a riot sometimes.”
“You don't believe in the soul?”
“You do?”
“I guess I do, yeah.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Trevor, that you're full of shit. I mean that you don't have any idea what a soul is, much less what it means to have one or not have one. I mean that you're only clinging to the backwards ideology of stone age cowards so frightened of their own mortality that they actually convinced themselves that their existence was so special that it would be preserved for eternity. Seriously, Trevor, if there is a god, do you really think that it cares about us? Do you really think that the spirit of these degenerate fucks populating our miserable planet are so worth preserving? Face it, we're nothing but debris waiting to happen. We're fertilizer, and that's all. There's nothing to us but this shell and the fact is that it'll break down one day. It'll die and be gone forever. Anyway... it's still a good book.” He turned away from me, his attention returning to the battered paperback in his hands.
I sat back uncomfortably in my seat, unable to think of how I could respond. I don't know if he actually believed any of what he'd said, with Mike you never could tell. Sometimes he just said stuff like that because he liked the way it sounded. I looked again at his reflection, and through it into the mysteries of the night beyond.
* * *
Something happened between us that day in the showers. I couldn't say what it was or what it meant, but something was different. We started seeing each other more often, it seemed at random. And then we saw each other intentionally. He was always going somewhere, out to the movies, to eat, to shop, and he brought me with him more often than not. He always seemed to have money, even though he complained all the time about how he didn't get along with his foster parents, and that they never gave him anything. It was strange, he'd always seemed ashamed of being from a comparatively rich family, always seemed nervous about letting any of us see it. Something had changed though, just between the two of us.
In July, we took a bus out to Syracuse. He showed up outside my trailer with a wad of money in his hand and told me that I was coming with him somewhere, didn't even say where until it was time to get off the bus. The Carousel Mall, that sprawling complex, towered up above us. We walked through the immense parking lot, and he talked, shouting sometimes over the rumble of the cars:
“Do you ever think about what's going to happen? To America, I mean. I've been reading about the end of the Roman Empire, you know. Fucking barbaric. They fell apart from the inside out, you know. It wasn't the invaders, the Celts or the Mongols or whoever the fuck – I don't remember. It was corruption from inside the empire. I wonder sometimes if we're ever going to get what we deserve. Americans, I mean. We deserve to suffer. Fuck me, I don't know what I'm talking about! Christ! I'm not a religious person, you know, never have been. If there's a god out there, then there's going to be a reckoning someday soon. I swear it.”
I stopped, standing just outside the glass doors of JC Penny's, and I grabbed his shoulder. “What in the world are you talking about?”
He looked at me and he laughed. “Jesus, Trevor, just look around you.” And then he grabbed my shirt in his fist and pulled me close to plant a hard dry kiss on my mouth.
I stepped back, stunned, electricity coursing through my body. He smirked and ducked inside the store. I turned in a daze, the wind cold on my face, and I looked across the parking lot. The clouds were low and gray, the city gleaming with dirty light. There was a fire burning low in the distance, a blaze from beneath the hood of a broken down Sedan. The owner of the car was shrieking at the sky, so far away that his cries were no more to me than the cawing of the wheeling gulls. A child stumbled across the cement lot crying for her mother, tears rolling down her face and a broken toy in her arms.
* * *
I was dreaming about life on other worlds when he shook me awake. I woke gradually. His hand was on my bare forearm, fingertips pressing into my skin. I could feel the downward slope of the road, and I looked out the window expecting to see the flaring city lights of the Capital.
We had come to rest in a parking lot, dark but for the faint illumination of the high and weak lights. Cars flickered by on the highway, as distant and faint as half-imagined ghosts.
“Where are we?” I asked, fighting back a yawn.
“Still about two hours out, I think.” Mike was standing impatiently in the aisle, his fingers drumming on the seat-back. “Come on, everybody's getting off the bus.”
Most of the class had already gone outside the pale artificial luminance of the bus and into the darker artifice of the poorly lit sidewalk. They were all talking in low sleepover voices, the mass of their conversation building to a whispering din. One of the chaperones walked down the aisle, waking all the students who were still sleeping with their faces pressed against the cold glass windows, their mouths neatly agape. All my life, I was the sort of person who got woken up by the teacher. And now Mike was standing in the aisle, impatient to go, but waiting. The thought made my chest hurt a little as I followed him out into the cool darkness.
There was a straggling line of students heading down the long sidewalk towards the bathrooms. A few trucks were parked along the sides of the road, their silver faces eerily lifeless with the lights shut off, like bent skeletons in chrome. We walked past a family piling back into a station wagon filled with crumpled blankets and empty juice boxes – all the accumulated detritus of a family vacation spent too much on the road. Out beyond the light there was an old man and a girl walking their dog in the wet grass. The dark creature whimpering for attention, yelping happily as it nipped their heels.
I swallowed the urge to take Mike's hand in mine. I knew he wouldn't like it.
There were dark shrubs on either side of the low stone building, two doors leading into bright rooms. The featureless male silhouette looked naked beside the skirted woman, like he'd been stripped bare. There was a soda machine between the two doors, spilling crimson light on the black sidewalk.
I went into the men's room but it was full so I walked back out. Didn't really have to got anyway.
Mike and Scott were smoking around the corner of the building. Molly was stomping out her reflection in the murky little puddles of water just below the sidewalk. Jeffrey sat at one of
the picnic tables, not looking at anybody. Scott put out his cigarette and spat in the grass. We stuck together, we trailer kids. Even those of us that didn't like each other managed to get along. We were the fuck-ups, the problem kids. We were the trailer-trash and, whether we wanted to or not, we had to stick together.
I asked Mike when he'd started smoking. All summer long I'd never seen him do that. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and offered it to me. It made me cough, and I blushed. He licked his front teeth. “You'd better not tell anybody.” Then he smiled and he blew smoke towards the black sky. We watched it disappear into the darkness of the heavy night.
* * *
It was a miserable August that year. Rained almost every day and by the end of the month the ground at High Gorge Park was a sucking mire that would swallow your foot ankle deep in places. I saw less and less of Mike as the month dragged on. He hadn't said another word about his apocalyptic predictions in the parking lot, nor about the kiss he'd given me.
One day, when the rains were coming down especially hard, I was sitting in my room thinking about him. I heard a crack of thunder so terrible that it seemed to shake the ground, and I rose to look out my window. I saw him there, as though summoned by my thoughts. He was standing at the edge of the pine forest, head bare in the downpour. He wasn't alone. There was a man, an older man it seemed, though his face was shadowed beneath his hat-brim.
Mike seemed to be shouting, his hands curled up in fists at his sides. The older man didn't look particularly concerned about it, his posture was quite relaxed, almost bored. I stared, mesmerized, as the two of them spoke. The rain was coming down so hard that it stood between us like a gauzy veil. The older man stuck Mike across the face, knocking him down on his knees in the mud. I cried out, gripping the bare wood-frame windowsill so hard that I drove a splinter up into the soft flesh of my index finger. Mike got slowly to his feet, and the older man patted him roughly on the shoulder. Mike nodded. Then, with a gesture of something like surrender, the older man handed something to Mike, some small bundle which Mike slipped under his coat.
The two of them parted. Mike stumbled his way through the sludge, back towards the house on the hill. The older man started up road. He was coming right towards me; he was going to walk past our trailer. For a moment I was stuck by the contradictory impulses to rush out at him and to hide beneath the windowsill. I did neither, frozen with my nose to the glass as he came steadily closer.