Somewhere Over Lorain Road, page 3
When out of earshot of their parents, Tim said things like, “I can’t believe we have to fucking babysit.”
“Yeah. It fucking sucks,” Randy always echoed.
Don said nothing as he followed along, doing whatever his older brothers wanted, because he obviously had no say. And every day they wanted to walk about twenty minutes to a weedy field where dirt bikes screeched along narrow paths, zoomed up and down hills, and careened along curves. Crowds of teenagers gathered to laugh and cheer, while hard rock music pumped.
The boys wore tank tops and shorts, their longish hair parted in the center. The way they looked and walked and the deepening timbre of their voices fascinated Don. The girls wore bikini tops beneath shirts connected with a single button at their midriff, the flaps tied into a knot above their navels.
Don sat with other younger siblings forced to keep close, but forbidden entry to the magic sphere. They played dispirited games in glum groups. Now and then, someone would screw up the courage to approach the teen festivities, only to be driven back with shouts and threats. The older kids smoked cigarettes and tipped back what looked like beer.
One Saturday morning, Don plodded behind his brothers, growing angrier with each step. The dirt bike field bored Don, and he suggested they see a movie instead.
“Shut the fuck up,” Tim growled.
“Yeah, shut the fuck up,” Randy echoed. “Don’t be a shit.”
“Don, we were all as young as you once,” Rich said. “Just suck it up. You’ll get older.” Rich was usually nice, and Don was disappointed he didn’t take his side.
When they reached the field, his brothers raced ahead, expecting Don to take his place with the other children. Still smarting from Rich’s betrayal, he ran instead for the woods towering in the distance, to explore a new place. The trees went all the way to Cook Street, a rural stretch of road punctuated by isolated homes.
He scowled at the distant screech of a dirt bike that sounded like an animal being tortured. When he entered the woods, the whine faded to nothing, swallowed by deep shadows speckled with leaf-light.
A misplaced butternut tree drooped sickly in the gloom. Normally the deepest of greens, its sharp leaves looked jaundiced, and the tree sagged to the mossy ground like a giant, melting bush. Shagbark hickory, honeysuckles, and elms grew slender and stately, while the oaks commanded the sky. The damp woods smelled of rot and new life. An errant maple seed, cast off far too early from beyond the tree line, twirled high between the trunks.
Don wandered, seeing the evidence of the search for Eddie Tedesco everywhere. Tangles of dead limbs and bushes were busted apart, rotting trunks strewn about, and boot prints tamped down the spongy earth. Normally, the ground felt like you could bounce like an astronaut on the moon.
He kicked along until he saw a wide cushion of soft leaves reflecting the sun with neon green intensity, lacing the border of the woods with a backyard. He got closer and gasped with wonder.
Huge ferns grew in a sweep, like something out of a dinosaur book. The searchers had pushed and pulled, and hacked and trampled fronds lay everywhere, but most survived. The massive leaves danced in the delicate breeze, as if excited to see him. Amazed, Don spread his arms and entered the primeval forest. To make this amazing discovery in a place as ordinary and normal as North Homestead seemed impossibly thrilling.
I have to tell Billy about this! he thought with manic delight, before remembering that Billy and his grieving parents remained indoors.
The ferns grew above his head, and he let the fronds brush his face as if he could absorb their power to transcend time and flourish out of place. His fingers brushed the delicate leaves, and he felt grand and glorious. As he reached the edge, he closed his eyes and imagined emerging into a new world, a new life, a thrilling landscape of dinosaurs and volcanoes and giant insects. He raised his arms in triumph.
Across the plain back lawn of a plain brick house, a handsome man stood beside a telescope, watching him.
He darted back among the ferns, feeling impossibly foolish, and his face heated with a flush. It felt important to crouch, to be silent, and he found a spot to hide.
He trembled for a while and cried a bit. His dramatic exit from the fern jungle now seemed girlish and flouncy, the things people said of faggots and homos. He didn’t know what faggots or homos were, but they were so contemptible, he knew he never wanted to be mistaken for one.
After a while, he reflected on the man in his backyard. Did he really have a telescope set up during the day? Before he dashed away, Don had also glimpsed a woven rattan chair, and a small table set with a big glass of iced tea and a notebook fluffing in the breeze.
He moved to the far edge of the fern jungle. With each step, he felt more confident and sure of himself, less worried about having looked so ridiculous. It surprised him to learn that by moving ahead with purpose, you can leave anxiety and shame behind.
A gathering of three scraggly trees and a stump provided the perfect perch to watch the man in secret. Don squinted. The man was studying a plate affixed to the eyepiece end of the telescope, scribbling in the notebook.
It was so strange.
He leaned to get a better look, and his sneakers slipped across something slick, which could be one of a million rotting or crawling things. He cried out.
Far faster than he could respond, Don flew back. His head banged into a tree trunk. As he went down, he thought, this is how you can die by falling. You just have to slip and not have anything to hold on to, and down you go. He always assumed he would be smart enough to find something to hold if he fell, that only dull-witted people didn’t think quickly enough.
He landed in a pile of twigs softened by the mulch of last year’s leaves. From now on, he’d have to give more credit to people who died in accidental falls.
His head hurt and as he sat up, someone crashed through the ferns and soon telescope man was above, looking worried. His shoulders and arms were rippled and rounded in all the perfect spots, and his hair grew bushy brown. His mustache bristled, shooting out over his lip. Don was rooted.
“Hey, kid,” he said, with a deep voice that rested on a soft rumble, like rocks polished in a silk-padded drum.
“I’m okay,” Don replied. He winced at his voice, so small and fearful when measured against the man’s graveled texture.
“Let me take a look here.” He lifted Don to a sitting position and examined the back of his head. “I saw your skull stop that tree. It was a pretty good whack. I heard it all the way across the lawn.”
He smelled the man’s sweat, saw the tight fit of his jeans, felt a rush at the brown hair, shot through with gray, carpeting his chest above the V-collar of his white T-shirt.
“Doesn’t look too bad,” the man said. “You’ll have a bump, that’s all.” He removed his hands, and Don nearly protested. “Can you stand?”
Don nodded.
“Take a few steps.”
Don tried but felt dizzy, and telescope man steadied him. “Let’s get you some iced tea,” he said, taking his hand and leading him to the house.
Halfway across the lawn, Don realized that with Eddie Tedesco still missing, he shouldn’t go into a stranger’s house. Telescope man didn’t seem dangerous. Not at all. Not in the least. He was much too handsome to be dangerous. His fist wrapped Don’s hand, his grip loose but reassuring.
All the same, Don felt a growing apprehension as they approached the wooden deck. Behind the stylish sliding glass doors, blackness loomed.
“Take a seat,” he said, gesturing to the patio step. “I’ll wrap some ice in a towel and get your iced tea. Only be a sec.”
Relieved and delighted, Don watched as he slipped inside, closing the door behind him, which meant that telescope man had air-conditioning.
The telescope was a sleek, white tube with a scope on top. The eyepiece pointed down to a plate attached with a metal arm. Don approached and gasped when he beheld the sun burning with ferocious intensity on the white-coated surface of the plate. It rippled with heat, dotted with sunspots. The fiery corona crackled away in all directions. It looked like a fantastical painting from an astronomy book, but this was real. This was the sun.
“Pretty cool, huh?”
Don jumped.
Telescope man placed a bundled white towel to the back of his head, and Don held it in place. The ice invigorated him, and he finished the whole glass of tea in one long series of gulps.
The man introduced himself as Hank. “Why are you out alone? Aren’t your parents worried about you, what with that missing kid?”
“I’m supposed to be with my older brothers at the dirt bike field, but I could be gone all day and they’d never notice.”
“How late do they normally stay?”
“Around five. Everybody goes home to eat after that.”
“Well, I don’t want your brothers and your parents to worry, so at four I’ll take you back through the woods to the field, okay?”
Oh, my God, that’s hours away!
“Are you an astronomer?”
“Yep. Do you want to see what I’m studying?”
“Yes!”
The next day, Don ran ahead as he set off with his brothers for the dirt bike field. He jumped anxiously and shouted, “Come on!”
“Calm down, you little asshole,” Tim barked, but he looked confused.
Randy sneered. “Did you find a Playboy magazine and you want to jerk off?” Tim laughed. Fueled by the approval of the eldest, Randy pumped his fist at his crotch, moaning in exaggerated ecstasy. Tim roared and did the same. Rich shook his head, gave Don a smile, and rolled his eyes.
They didn’t notice that he’d sneaked away yesterday, so when they reached the field, Don ran off without a look back. He raced through the woods and across the grass to where Hank sat with the telescope. Hank seemed welcoming, but Don detected a hint of caution. Hank wore jeans and a T-shirt in the blistering Ohio heat.
“How’s your head?”
“It’s fine. Are we going to look at the sun again today?”
Hank nodded and lifted a book from the table. “This is the book I told you about yesterday. I had to look around for a bit, but I finally found it.”
Don clawed the book from his hands, desperate to see what caused Hank to spend at least a part of his evening thinking about him. He was instantly mortified by his frantic eagerness, and he decided to balance it with nonchalance.
“Yeah, this looks good,” he said, lazily flipping the pages.
After a few beats, Hank said, “You can borrow it while you’re here, but I want to hang on to it, so you can’t take it with you. Do you want some iced tea?”
“Yeah,” he replied, disappointed that the book was not a gift.
“Okay. Why don’t you come inside, and I’ll show you where it is. It’s gotten so hot I want to change into swim trunks.”
Don no longer feared the blackness beyond the doors. It promised cool relief from the heat, and as soon as he stepped inside, it was like an oasis from the sweltering day.
“There’s the fridge,” Hank said, pointing to a black—black!—refrigerator. “Grab a glass from that cupboard. The iced tea is in the fridge. Get some ice from the dispenser. Be back in a sec.”
Don ran his fingers along the undulating, off-white tiles of the counters, grouted by a deep contrasting shade, and he examined the abstract designs in stained glass on the cupboard doors before making his way to the refrigerator.
A hollow in the narrower, left-side panel held two dispensers, and Don read with amazement that they delivered water and ice. He pushed a glass against the tab. An engine roared to life, so unexpected and loud that he jumped back. A single cube, elegantly shaped like a quarter moon, fell from the dispenser and clinked to the floor.
Don tossed it into the sink and watched with alarm as the ice slipped into a baffling circle of black rubber flaps. Was it safe to let an ice cube melt in a sink with an arrangement of rubber pieces at the drain?
Frustrated at all the things he didn’t know, he hopped on the counter and reached into the maw at the sink bottom. He felt sharp blades and pulled up with surprise before trying again. Things squished and slithered but he found and removed the ice cube, astonished at the sight of a strawberry stem stuck to one side, much larger than the wild kind that grew around the chicken coop.
Hank entered the kitchen shirtless, in a pair of shorts that hugged him tightly about the crotch. Don pretended not to notice and stared straight at Hank’s face, holding the ice cube with the strawberry stem. Hank laughed and told him about food disposals and Don felt even more foolish.
“I have to check the telescope coordinates. Why don’t you get our iced tea while I work that out?”
“Sure!” Don scooted off the counter, and Hank became a silhouette in the light streaming through the glass. A halo of curly hairs burst around his form, a corona more thrilling and beautiful than the sun’s. The sight mesmerized Don, and he couldn’t move until Hank was outside and had pulled the door closed.
His hands shaking, Don prepared the iced teas and returned to the telescope.
“I was wondering what was taking so long,” Hank said, as Don trod carefully down the patio stairs.
Again that afternoon, Don returned to the dirt bike field before his brothers set off for home, and they hadn’t noticed that he’d been gone.
Hank worked during the week, so Don played among the giant ferns and stared at his house with longing. He didn’t understand the ache in his chest when he thought about Hank’s shoulders, the quivers when he remembered the hairy silhouette, or why he absently rubbed his penis while thinking about these things. He only knew that Hank centered his life, and the feelings Billy caused in him now burned hot on his face and shortened his breath. It exhilarated and frightened him.
The next Saturday, Don raced ahead of his brothers, desperate to see Hank after five days of separation. He didn’t even bother to pretend to head for the spot where the younger kids waited for their older siblings before he charged into the woods.
Hank seemed less welcoming, avoiding his eyes. Fear gripped Don until they set the coordinates and checked the positions of the sunspots against last week’s sketches. Hank seemed to settle into their regular routine, and Don relaxed.
After Don returned with their second refill of iced tea, Hank asked him to sit. He had a strange look on his face.
“You have a crush on me, don’t you?” Hank asked with a gentle smile.
After a beat, Don nodded.
Hank bobbed his head, looking off. “I thought so. I think we understand each other really well, don’t you?”
Don didn’t know what he meant, but nodded again.
“And since we’re friends, I think we should be honest about things, okay? So I’m gonna tell you something that I hope you never forget.”
Don stared with amazement. No one had ever talked to him like this.
“Do you know how long it takes for the light from the sun to reach earth?”
Don shook his head.
“Eight minutes. Now, if a photon of light takes eight minutes to fly from the sun to the earth, it passes Pluto and all the other planets in our solar system after several hours. Guess how long it has to travel through empty space to get to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star?”
Don shrugged.
“Four years. That should give you a pretty good idea of how big the universe is. In the grand scheme of the universe, the sun and Alpha Centauri are two tiny specks so close together you can’t even tell them apart. And yet it takes a photon of light, which moves faster than anything else in the universe, four years just to go from one to the other.”
Don’s mind jumbled with emotions and facts.
“Don?”
Wide-eyed and feeling stupid, Don nodded.
“I don’t want you to ever forget that about the universe, how huge it is, how vast and brilliant it is, and you are a part of it. So always remember that. When a petty little mind here on earth tries to make you feel shitty about yourself for any reason, you just remember that you are a part of this universe. Any time you like, you can look up to the sky and know that you have a place here nobody can ever take away from you. Do you understand?”
Don nodded, even though he didn’t.
Hank looked sad. “I also want to say you can’t come here anymore.” Don rushed to protest, but Hank stopped him. “One day you’ll understand why I have to do this. It has nothing to do with you. It’s about protecting myself, okay? A little boy is missing, and I have to be very, very careful.”
Don pleaded, but Hank was firm. After Don’s protests faded, Hank gave him a quick hug. “I’m going to meet up with some friends, so I’m going to pack up the telescope, okay? It’s time for you to go.”
Don sulked in the grass, sitting cross-legged while Hank carried the telescope inside. He never knew he could feel so horrible and lonely, and his love for Hank battled with rage at his rejection.
Suddenly, a plan popped into his mind and he sat up. All of the terrible emotions drained away, and he grew excited. He looked around, spotted Hank’s book, and quickly hid it beneath his legs, resuming his crouched, resentful pose.
Hank returned to retrieve the chair and table, saying, “Don, it’s time for you to go.” When he didn’t move, Hank said, “I’m going back inside, and then you can leave. You could make big trouble for me if you don’t get home in time and your parents start to worry. I want you to think about that.”
When Hank left, he leaped to his feet, hugged the book to his chest, and took off. If he took the book Hank wanted to keep, he would have to return it the following day. By then, Hank might have changed his mind, or maybe Don could think up some new things to say to make the outcome different.
Among the ferns, he slowed when he realized Hank wouldn’t change his mind, and nothing Don said would make him. He found a quiet spot beneath a fern, and lay down on the fronds, ripped apart like confetti.
