Pennsylvania Story

Tennessee Jones

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a town in central Pennsylvania that has been on fire for twenty years. A vein of coal ignited underground that no one could put out. The town is an almost unnoticeable spot on a gray asphalt highway, yellow lines faded away to nothing. Most of the houses are gone, and the ones that are left have been taken over by a strangely symmetrical overgrowth, kudzu obscuring what was once front-yard trees, chimneys, and crumbling storage sheds. Some days the smoke from beneath the ground is visible, other days it is not.

Kenneth and Dale searched for that smoke during a weeklong camping trip. They drove a pickup Kenneth had bought and fixed up with beet harvest money. Kenneth knew about the fire in the way he always seemed to know about things, as if he had simply been born with the knowledge of them. They found the town easily, saw a red fire hydrant growing from a squall of grass, a desolate bus stop bench, but could not find the fire. They talked to an old lady who still lived there, but she claimed she didn’t know how to look for the fire. Talk to my son, she said. Her voice was like bits of freshly dug potato hung on the tines of a fork, bleeding clear juice and covered with mud. She said they were two of twenty people who had decided to stay.

After talking to the woman, they drove over miles and miles of two-lane blacktop to find beer in the middle of the country on a Sunday afternoon. They came upon a mining town called Shamokin, two-story houses stacked up on each other, squeezed between the road and the mountains. They looked like they would fall over, pushed forward by the shadows of the mountains in their backyards.

Just before a little bridge leading out of town, they saw a slag hill with a mining road winding up it. Dale realized many of the big hills they passed were giant heaps of slag coal with trees and bushes taking root in it. The mountains growing themselves up again. He had expressed surprise, but Kenneth had only nodded and told him a little about coal-mining history. The town of Shamokin seemed half made up of those displaced hills.

Kenneth parked the truck by the side of the road and they walked up the mining road. It was creased with big tire ruts, bits of dried red clay crumbling into the crow’s-wing black of the coal. The mining equipment at the top looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time. The debris of teenagers was scattered across the hilltop: fire pits, grayed-out beer cans, turned-out, blackened condoms.

They separated wordlessly to explore. Dale was overwhelmed by the feeling they shouldn’t be there, and it made everything that much more precious. That was one of the things he loved about traveling, how being in a place you would never expect to be in collapsed time, made the past and future converge on the now. Even the ruined mountaintop, invaded and destroyed, became sacred again. He touched the machinery, marveled at it. They had taken many trips together over the years, and the silence of discovery was one of the things they loved sharing with each other.

Landscape tugged at memory in ways that were unexpected. A mountaintop a heartbreak, the desert a forgotten memory, a reservoir the anatomy of someone you’ve always longed to be. Each place was distinct, but sometimes conversation and landscape ran together, so that a certain idea was always bound up in a certain place.

Dale climbed into the sooty cab of a Caterpillar bulldozer. He watched Kenneth poke around in the trash around a ruined building with tin walls, a crooked roof. From that altitude, he could see the matchsticks of trees that had been felled by forest fire on a nearby mountain. And farther away, the horizon defined not by city lights, but by shades of green and purple that would disappear with the setting sun.

Dale heard Kenneth scream and saw vultures, greasy and half-dead looking, boil up into the air above his head. The air touching his spine shimmered and turned cold, the same way it did whenever he saw a big black snake crawling through grass. Kenneth ran back toward Dale, sliding all over the loose slag.

“Fuckin’ vultures flew right in my face,” Kenneth said. “I smelled ’em. Felt ’em.” He reached up for Dale’s hand.

Dale slid down off the bulldozer, trying to cover his smile. He curled his hand into Kenneth’s, pulled him so that their chests almost touched, grinned against his ear.

Kenneth looked back over his shoulder, breath heavy. “Man, that scared the shit out of me.” His heavy knuckles pressed against Dale’s smaller ones. Dale’s body shook and he could not stop himself. He laughed until tears brightened the coal dust on his face.

Kenneth pushed him against the giant tire and put his forearm against Dale’s throat. “You gonna stop laughin’?” he asked.

Dale smiled. “Uh-huh.”

Kenneth smiled back at him and pressed him back against the giant tire, knocked Dale’s feet further apart with the sweep of his boot. He twisted the hand he held behind his back and stepped in so their foreheads touched. Dale sank into the shadow of the wheel well, relished the heavy smell of grease coming from the machine’s guts. From the road, they would look like two men in a fight.

Kenneth dropped Dale’s arm and put both hands around his throat, body pressed tight against him. He felt the shadow of Dale’s erection, was careful not to rub against it too hard. Kenneth’s smile sharpened, his eyes narrowed. Dale’s eyelids fluttered and he looked toward the sky, his head resting inside the wheel. The sky blue, the vultures gone. His fingertips began to tingle, and he sensed the onslaught of what he had experienced with Kenneth in so many different places, the sensation not of leaving his body or consciousness, but of truly finding them, gone almost as soon as it happened.

Dale wanted so much to turn around, brace his hands on the coal-covered tire, feel Kenneth’s hands covered with black dust and carrion wind rake down his jeans, his cheek bruised or flayed open by one of the bolts in the wheel. Instead, Kenneth pulled him forward and split his upper lip open with the force of his kiss. A moment of sacredness in a devastated place, a moment that could make you free or get you killed.

 

The summer after Shamokin, Kenneth invited his dad to visit him at a summer cabin Dale borrowed from an old girlfriend’s grandfather. The cabin was about fifty miles from his dad’s house in Portland, Maine. They hadn’t seen each other in five years, despite Kenneth’s travels. There’s some things I need to talk to you about, Kenneth had said and his father had agreed to come, no questions asked. Kenneth wanted Dale to be there when his father came, but he would be introduced only as a traveling partner.

The plain walls of the cabin stank of the spice of the old man who owned it. Thin, early sunshine filtered through the trees and dappled the floorboards of the porch with light and shadow. On the lake side of the house, the parted curtain allowed a long bar of light the color of warm butter to melt on the kitchen wall. Dale stood with his feet apart, holding a cup of hot water with whiskey and lemon in it. He stared out the open door at Kenneth’s wide back, covered by a hooded sweatshirt too heavy for the season.

Kenneth heard Dale’s heavy boots come toward him over the kitchen linoleum before he swung the wooden screen door wide.

“Want some whiskey?” Dale asked.

“Too early for that.” Kenneth turned around. “Gimme a hour or two.”

Dale grinned. “Be time then to fry up the fish you caught yesterday.” He saw them, split and silver, sizzling in a cast-iron skillet. “Wonder if they’ll taste as good as the ones we had that time in New Mexico.”

“Doubt it. You remember those guys on Birmingham Road, the ones whose house burnt down? They caught it somewhere above the goddamn tree line. No pollution.” Kenneth stopped talking, and his jaw settled into a hard line.

“You know what time your dad is coming here?” Dale asked.

The jaw muscles flickered. “Later on tomorrow, I figure. Probably ’round dark.”

Dale turned to go back into the house. Kenneth picked caked mud from his shoes and was bombarded by smells and sounds that threatened to close up time, to turn the present back onto his childhood, even though the area around him had nothing to do with it. It was a more intense version of the presence he usually found when he traveled, and the timelessness he experienced was the thing that made travel so ultimately appealing to him. It was where real life happened, instead of the other way around. He turned a beer tab in his fingers and wondered how the hell to tell his dad what he thought he knew.

Dale sipped whiskey in the mottled bright kitchen. He poured two dollops of oil into a black iron pan and turned on the flame. His morning drink had turned lukewarm. The cabin was filled with different bits of debris: a rusted hoe with a handle gone so gray it was the color of barn dust that hasn’t seen rain or light for decades; a heavy, opaque whiskey crock; a collection of cloudy glass bottles. There were also what must have been the artifacts of the grandfather’s dead wife: a red-handled potato masher, chipped teacups too damaged for household use, a paring knife with blade worn utterly concave, the handle dark as the shell of a black walnut. It was this last thing he stared at as he cracked two eggs into the heated oil.

Kenneth, less than ten feet away, seemed halfway across the lake, even though Dale smelled the thin smoke of his cigarette when he lit up.

“Got eggs in here,” he yelled. “How many you want. How you want ’em?”

“Gimme two. Fry ’em hard. Brown on the edges if you can get ’em to do that.” He spoke from the doorway, outside the screen door. The way the light fell made him half a silhouette. “’Bout time for some of that whiskey, too, but I can do that.”

Kenneth opened the door and the cigarette smell came with him. Dale loved the smell even though he hated to smoke.

Dale stuck a couple pieces of cornbread and butter into the oven to warm, and cracked two more eggs. Grease spit everywhere.

Kenneth poured two big splashes of whiskey over ice in one of the little ruined teacups. “Cup’s probably fifty years old, wouldn’t you say?”

“I was thinking about that. Maybe. Ellen’s grandma was way up in her seventies when she died.” Dale watched the stove doggedly. “They had this place before anybody else ever thought about coming around. They used to stay here for the entire summer sometimes.”

“Yeah, we had summer people in Kentucky, too. Only they moved in and stayed the whole year. Then after a little while they started making fun of the people who only stayed for a month or two. Nobody thinks of themself as summer people.”

Dale grimaced, slid two brown-laced eggs onto a plate. A piece the size and shape of a thumbnail was missing from the edge. “But everybody is, at one point or the other. Everybody wants a piece of something they ain’t got a right to every now and again.”

Kenneth took his plate and laughed. “Don’t I fucking know it,” he said.

Dale smiled and followed him out the door. “Don’t you wanna take off that sweatshirt?”

“I’m fine.” Kenneth shook his head and turned to the plate resting on his knees. Silence fell between them. Dale watched the sun twinkling on the lake and was irritated by the sharp, flickering light. Kenneth emanated the same distance as before, and Dale realized that was the true source of his irritation. Kenneth’s way of dealing with reality—a kind of flatness that took everything as it came—had a tendency to pervade everything, to make the people around him question their own relationship to the world. The way he read a book or rolled a cigarette was dogged and deliberate, and seemed infused by an understanding of reality both difficult and satisfying. It was as if he had no natural filters to protect him from the onslaught of information he experienced every day. He was doomed to notice everything, and his reactions were slow and distant because of it. Sometimes he seemed to get beyond this when they fucked, in a certain way Kenneth might touch him, as if he was trying to get to a place where being deliberate would no longer exist. In that formless place deliberateness, along with all other things, would be obliterated.

Kenneth finished eating and lit a cigarette, his eyes fixed on a far point on the lake ahead.

Dale cleared his throat. “You wanna talk to me about your dad before he gets here?”

“I decided this after Shamokin. Somethin’ about those vultures got to me. Kept dreaming about them. You know me and my dad ain’t been on the best of terms for a long time. This is a story I ain’t told you, ’cause it was one I just started to remember, the day after we was up on all that mining shit. It’s still hard for me to talk about, but it’s what I got to talk to my dad about.

“I got this picture in my head of being in Texas with my family when I was little. Brown sand, a hotel room right on the beach, big pool right below our window. Me and my mom’s friend’s kid got a room to ourselves. He was about a year older than me. The way I remember him now wouldn’t a been the way I thought of him as a kid. He was tan and real muscley for a kid that age. It made me jealous.

“That kid got ahold on me on our second day there, middle of the afternoon, and pulled my swimsuit to my knees. He grabbed my dick and started working it. I didn’t know what to do, so I let him. He got me on my knees and told me to suck his dick, and then he turned me around and fucked me up the ass. The thing I remember most about that is stuffing my bloody underwear behind the stove so no one would know what happened. I felt guilty. I hadn’t really thought about this in so long, but I can see and smell everything, even the fucking towels they had there.

“That kid fucked me over and over the entire week. He pretended like it was a game, and I’m not entirely sure I didn’t like it. My mom was pissed at me when we got back home because all my underwear was gone. I put it everywhere except for the trash, because I figured that would be too obvious.”

“Nobody ever found out?”

“That’s just the thing, man. I’m pretty sure my dad saw it happen, at least once. Unless I was dreaming it. There was this big window, and that kid would draw the curtains on it so no one could see in. But I think I remember my dad standing in the hallway while that kid was going at me, his reflection on the glass in the lamplight, watching us and jerking off.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. So I think he let it happen. And I think he must have let it happen other times, too. I just don’t understand why.

“After the thing with that one kid, it was like everybody could tell. It’s almost like if it happens once and some part of you secretly likes it, the rest of the world can tell. And then they come to you, they find you whether you want them to or not.” Kenneth finished his drink. “So that’s what I got to talk to my dad about.”

Dale touched Kenneth’s knee. Silence fell between them again and Dale stood up. “Let me go in and get you another drink,” he said.

Dale broke ice out of the metal ice tray and dropped it into their cups. He opened the screen door with his shoulder and handed a drink to Kenneth. Dale sat down beside him, not too close, just so the fabric of their jeans touched. That bare separation seemed to almost hum, and Dale thought, as the smoke from Kenneth’s cigarette swirled around them, that sometimes it isn’t getting exactly what you want, it’s just being able to want with the force of the world.

 

Later that night, after Kenneth poured water over the fire they’d built at the edge of the woods, they fucked like they were camping high in the desert, red sandstone grit blowing into their eyes and hair. Kenneth grabbed up Dale, punched him in the mouth, and brought his lips to knock against the bloody teeth. Big knuckles squeezed tight on Dale’s throat, until his fingertips and eyelids fluttered and one of them shot across the other’s stomach, and then the throat was released, those same knuckles smearing blood across Dale’s cheek. They fell asleep on the weathered mattress in its wrought-iron frame, each dreaming memory. Every movement had already been made; they were just waiting to rediscover it.

Kenneth fell asleep with the smell of a million grasshoppers in the desert in his nose. A few years before they had driven through Utah, and on their way to see the only undammed river in the West, they had come across a migration of grasshoppers. They were huge, black, covering the asphalt completely. They made a sickening popping sound under the tires, and the smell was so pungent they had to turn the car around. He had felt their bodies were right between his teeth, the dark alien blood in his mouth. The thin vein of fluid between his brain and skull turned arid as the shelled wings on their backs.

Where they had turned the car led them to something unexpected: a crater in the earth from some ancient meteorite, two blackbirds over the abyss who had abandoned their wings. They clutched each other talon to talon and let themselves drop, uncoupling and flying at the last possible moment, again and again. The two of them had stood side by side, watching, for as long as it lasted.

 

The next day Kenneth watched the one-lane road for the approach of his father’s truck. Jake had told him what to look for: an old green F-150. When he finally saw it a couple hours after lunch, he stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another one. He wished for an endless row of drinks. “My fucking dad is here,” he said, just loud enough for Dale to hear.

Dale came out onto the porch and watched Jake’s slow approach up the road. The sound of his truck door slamming reminded him of every family dinner he’d ever been to: that little bit of dread at the arrival of each new person. He wore jeans and work boots. His hair was silver, still cut the way he might have worn it as a teenager in the fifties.

Jake must have been a young man when Kenneth was born, Dale thought. He walked up on the porch with the wide gait Dale had copied from other men his entire life, similar to the cocky and defensive walk of his own father. If that way of walking were a story, it would be about escaping from the police, but having to crawl through a quarter mile of shit to do it.

Kenneth met his stride, hating the way he walked differently because his father was there. His steps were just a little too wide, his shoulders squared off too much. His hand clapped loudly on his father’s back. The sound was like a flock of birds lifting off at the same time.

Dale half expected something sinister to snake out of Jake’s rough palm when he shook it, but his smile was genuine enough, the lines around it and his eyes not so much crinkled as greased, and his grip was warm and easy. Dale was immediately aware of how little Jake knew about his son’s sexuality.

“Nice to meet you, Jake,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Dale didn’t quite smile at him, but held his rough hand a little too long.

“You, too,” Jake answered. “I mean, nice to meet you. Today’s the first I ever heard anything about you.”

“You want a beer, Dad?”

“Yeah. Bring us a few out here. It’s hot as hell.”

Jake sat in one of the two old iron chairs on the porch. Someone had painted it many times years before, and the thick layers of paint were visible where it had peeled. He crossed his arms behind his head, and Dale noticed the dark patches of sweat in his pits.

Kenneth opened the screen door and gave them their beers, dripping from the five-gallon bucket of ice in the kitchen. He loved ice, made special trips to the store just to get it. He leaned against the porch railing, too uneasy to sit down. Dale sighed and took the iron chair beside Kenneth’s father.

“So how long you boys been on the road?” Jake asked.

“We ain’t really on the road,” Dale said. “Just borrowing this place for a little while. It’s in one a my ex-girlfriends’ family. We’ve been on lots of other trips though. Out West and through the south. I’m not much of a hiker, but I like to camp.”

“Oh, uh-huh. I used to have a big army tent, weighed thirty or forty pounds, I used to take Kenneth and his mom out in. ’Member that?”

Kenneth nodded and drank from his beer. He watched how his father’s big hands moved, and looked down at his own.

Dale, terrified of what might rise from silence, kept talking. “Me and Kenneth spent a lot of time out in the desert, too. Two months one time, camping out every night and driving all day. There’s a helluva lot of country to see out West.” Kenneth glared at him from his perch on the porch railing. Dale felt like a child again around Kenneth’s father: the peculiar pull that had plagued him as a child—to both be someone like Jake and to touch someone like him—confounded him in a way he hadn’t felt in years.

Kenneth opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. The afternoon sun leaned onto the porch. The shadows were the fat, edgeless shadows of summer.

“I was thinking we oughta go fishing,” he finally said.

“Sounds all right to me,” Jake said. “As long as there’s more a that beer to take with us.”

“Yeah, plenty a that. Dale, you wanna come?”

He looked at Kenneth’s face, but it told him nothing. It was the same blank look he wore when he was reading to kill time and thought no one was looking at him. “Yeah. I’ll come,” he said.

 

They pulled an aluminum boat out of the shed and dragged it down through the grass in the yard. The sun did its melted-butter trick, and the summer people filled the air with the smell of their barbecues, the noise of their radios turned to the classic rock or new country stations, the trill and bark of their voices, the roar of motorcycles and Jet Skis. They paddled to a quieter place on the lake, a recess of cool and shadow out of sight of the summer cabins. In not too long, that part of the shoreline would probably be developed, too.

Kenneth sat in the middle slat of the boat, with his back to Jake. Dale faced both of them, and he tried not to look into their too-similar faces. He slit his finger baiting a hook with a fat, sluggish grub. Its split body poured sap onto his bleeding finger. Kenneth watched him with trapped eyes. The water close to the shore was colored with the reflections of trees.

Jake chose a long pink night crawler to bait his hook. Dale watched him past Kenneth’s shoulder. The worm sent out little ripples in the water. Kenneth impaled a grub straight through its entire body and cast his line. They shifted uncomfortably, trying to find a way they wouldn’t get their lines tangled. The silence lasted for a long time before Jake spoke.

“This a nice place your old girlfriend’s got, just for the summer. What’d her family do to get the money?”

“Grandpa had a big paper mill. He sold office supplies.”

“How the hell about that! Knocked down half the state and got a freaking summer cabin for it.” He turned up the long neck of his beer. “Glad you all get to enjoy this, at least.”

 

It was after dark by the time they pulled the boat up the dew-damp yard. It didn’t matter they had come back empty-handed. They’d all had too much to drink to care about eating.

They sat on the porch for a while, drinking and smoking, before they went back inside. Most of the lights around the lake were out before Kenneth flipped on the kitchen light. They settled into the living room, and Kenneth and Dale both watched Jake, careful to keep their eyes hidden by the bills of their caps.

Jake made the cabin seem more like home to Kenneth, the home he missed and knew he could never quite go back to again. Jake emitted the spice he and Dale were still growing into. It was a smell Kenneth remembered from childhood. It made Dale think of his grandfather at the end of a day in the field, new sweat layered on old dried sweat. The smell was enough to knock you down some days.

The light in the living room was dim. Yellow enough to hurt all their eyes. Dale turned up his beer, cold from the freezer, and looked down his nose at Jake’s sledgehammer fists. He had to close his eyes, and took another long swallow of beer, cold enough to stab his forehead with an ice pick. Memory flooded in, and he immediately thought of how he might tell it to Kenneth; it was too big to keep inside of himself.

There had been a day in the fall when he was a kid that he’d lain on a sledgehammer for hours. He’d been curious about the strings of drying chili peppers strung up on his grandpa’s carport, so he slid one off the string and split it open. Knowing somehow the meat would be hot, he had put the little white seeds into his mouth instead. They lit into his cheeks like embers popping off a campfire. He ran around the house, grass cooler under his bare feet, turned the spigot like it was salvation itself, so hard his white hand would hurt the next day, and found no relief in the pouring springwater. He ran up the cold concrete steps, mouth burning, and in desperation laid his cheeks, first one then the other, on the cold reddish brown sledgehammer that belonged to his grandfather.

He had told the story occasionally for a laugh, but hadn’t remembered what had come after it until seeing Jake’s hands hanging between his knees. He remembered something that had been forever bound up in the heat of where the pepper seeds had touched the insides of his cheeks and burned well into the orange and purple dusk. His cousin, Morgan, the one whom he’d visited a few times after he’d finally packed up and hitchhiked out of the mountains, came upon him and asked him what the hell he was doing. Dale, his cheeks painful, had only sobbed. He had held out the crushed pepper pod, still in his hand, and Morgan had laughed at him. The concrete was too cold on his bare knees, but he couldn’t take his face off the sledge. It smelled like icicles just starting to melt. It might have tasted like chilly sunshine if his tongue hadn’t been on fire.

His cousin had taunted him while he lay there, in too much pain and half panic to move. Then he grew quiet, and the air became heavy and silent the way it might before an especially bad summer thunder-storm, the colors of dusk brought on early, the silence of midnight in late afternoon. They had sat on the lichen-splashed concrete steps a hundred times before, hid in the giant boxwood their grandpa had planted in the backyard when he was just a boy, cracked beechnuts that fell there in late summer. As if it was just as familiar, Morgan lay down on top of him, stuck his warm and acid fingers into Dale’s burning mouth. Dale had felt shock but no real surprise, and the day, warm, but with the hint of coming cool and promise of crisp leaves, had simply become nothing at all. Dale was not there, or here, or anyplace, and the awful burning in his mouth momentarily ceased, even as the air between them mirrored two warring fronts, one hot, the other cold. The feel of Morgan’s hard dick hot against his back and the cool of the concrete as his shirt rucked up over his belly was not something he’d thought about for a long time before seeing Jake and his ham hands. That storm feeling was similar to the heaviness he and Kenneth had experienced in many different landscapes, when it was uncertain whether they would clash together. It was the gravy-thick feeling just before teeth hit skin and blood was shed.

Kenneth watched Dale from his seat beside the little woodstove in the common room of the cabin. The tin flue had been welded clumsily around a hole in the wall. It made him feel a certain affection for the old man with the dead wife who had built the house. They were among the artifacts of their lives; he couldn’t take a step without feeling like he was rattling bones.

He looked at his father’s face and saw they were similar. He was beyond finding something to say to fill up the silence in the room. He looked at Dale, his beer empty, staring at different points of the room. Kenneth saw how he looked at his father, and realized Dale was angling for him. Maybe it had been there since the moment he’d arrived or maybe it was just the booze. He could feel it in the air like poison oak on a vine rubbing against his cheek. Dale, wanting to touch the man who may or may not have been responsible for the way reality would forever be like a freight train he could never quite get on board of—Dale, wanting surely to touch the valleys between the relief maps of his knuckles, wanting to know the shape and line of his pulse. Those were the kinds of things Dale would think about before sucking a man’s cock.

His own hand, wrapped around his almost empty glass, felt tight enough to shatter it. But it wasn’t anger so much as the familiar feeling of reality folding in on itself. Time, forcing itself back up through the rings of trees, announcing, Everything is always here.

When Dale looked up, Jake’s almost-gray DA made him feel peculiarly exposed. There was his older cousin, still hanging over him, a lit bottle rocket dangling from his teeth, daring him to come forward. The smell of beer was suddenly new, the same as when he’d first smelled it, like ocean foam when Morgan had poured it against the resin-veined trunk of a pine tree after he’d taken his first drink.

The silence in the room gathered weight. Dale sucked the bitterness from his brown bottle of beer, but the taste could not hold back the murky undertow of memory. Kenneth sat in a far corner of the room, his beer warm as bathwater.

“Anybody else need a drink?” Jake asked. “Never mind, I’ll git you all a drink. Always need another one.” He stumbled off to the bathroom.

He lumbered out of the room, but his presence invaded every part of the house. They heard his long stream in the toilet, the way he moved heavily in the kitchen. Kenneth expected to hear one of the old woman’s teacups break.

Dale wanted Kenneth’s father to be gone, and for him to fill up the room at the same time. Something about him reminded him of his cousin, and something of himself. Something he’d always wanted to be, tried to be, was wrapped up in the way he moved, smiled, talked, the easy way he drank a beer. It was the edge of masculinity that shapes itself as archetype, the line of a jaw so perfect it becomes more than just flesh and bone, and is strong enough to reroute desire itself.

Dale imagined himself bending over his lover’s father’s knees, unbuttoning his old jeans, slowly taking out his cock and easing it between his lips. One heavy hand clasping a bottle of beer, toes of his boots pointed toward the far wall.

Kenneth and Dale looked at each other across the room.

Because Kenneth had thought of the desert the night before when he had punched Dale in the mouth, and did not know what else to say, he asked, “Them birds we saw in the desert, you remember them?”

Sounds came from the kitchen; Dale saw the old woman moving within it. He saw her young, saw her in a flash being worn away like the blade of her paring knife. The smell of apple dumplings filled his nose.

“I remember them.”

And he did. Two blackbirds, in the sky over the desert in Utah. They had picked their way over rocks to sit on the edge of where a meteorite had crashed into the earth and made a deep, colorful gouge. So deep it made Dale want to throw up, sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of it, but they’d had to get as close to it as they could. Those birds had come up flying out of nowhere over the chasm. They locked blue talons together and folded up their wings. Then they plummeted downward, toward the center of the stardust crater. They dropped like stones; they dropped like they wanted to die, until they let go of each other and opened up their wings to catch an updraft. They came sailing back up and did it again, over and over. Kenneth said those birds were laughing, making fun of them. Dale had reached out, like he thought he could touch them, and inched closer toward the edge. Kenneth grabbed him roughly, said, “No, don’t do that,” but they’d both been near hysterical, laughing like they could make death a funny thing, the cavern below them the color of sunset. Kenneth let his fingernails bite into Dale’s sweaty forearm, so there were still half-moons in his flesh the next day.

Dale wanted to talk about those crows, but his tongue felt too thick. He wanted to say, That’s exactly what it feels like sometimes when we fuck, but the words hung in his mouth.

Instead he asked, “How’re you holdin’ up?”

“I’m all right,” he said. “Better than I have been for a long time, if you can believe that. Just seeing him again is helping me figure things out.”

Jake walked back into the room with their drinks then. Instead of sitting, he staggered to the other side of the stove, put his hand on the sheet metal flue. His gesture made Kenneth feel protective of it. Jake turned up his beer and swallowed, one hand in the pocket of his jeans. Kenneth remembered some of the stories his father had told him when he was a kid: running through the woods and coming out on a cliff, not being able to stop himself before he went over the edge, saying prayers and then not knowing what had hit him when he landed in cold, black water that carried him until he could pull himself to the shore. Hiding between the mattress and box springs when the cops came looking for him, a couple years before Kenneth was born, the time he’d watched someone in his company go crazy and shoot someone in an alley in Vietnam. The time he’d almost killed a man in their hometown for looking at him the wrong way, touching the snap buttons of his shirt with fingers still grimed with grease, offering to buy him a beer. The way he imagined his father’s knuckles had felt across that man’s face had crept in to the way he hit Dale sometimes, into the way he himself wanted to be hit, to see the clear water of the last undammed river in the West.

“Be out a booze soon,” Jake said, and slumped down into a ruined chair. Kenneth’s hands tightened around his beer again, and he drank it deep.

Dale was bound up in disgust, felt his head begin to swim. He rose from his seat on the old man’s couch. The empty space of it had been bothering him the entire night. The dim light of the small room, the punctuated screams of summer people in the night, radios playing across the lake. Everything. It was late enough for the cool of night to have burned off the heat of the day.

“Kenneth, will you go get me a drink of whiskey to go with this?”

Kenneth looked at him and nodded. He got up and left the room, knowing he could wait as long as he wanted to before coming back. In the kitchen, he closed and opened the refrigerator without taking anything out. He didn’t bother making the drink. The light was too dim and hurt his eyes. He pulled open the dark wooden drawer of silver-ware and took the butcher knife, long and old and oil dark, and held it in his hand. He waited, his other hand grazing the bucket of mostly melted ice.

Kenneth heard Dale’s boot heels clump against the wooden floor in the next room. He imagined him walking straight up to his father, crowding him, pulling the beer from his hands, setting it onto the floor. Dale would come on to him just the way he would to any man in a bar, direct but gentle, the kind of way that if he wasn’t into it Dale could just back away and turn it around on the other guy if he needed to. Kenneth didn’t feel anger, but a kind of wonder and befuddlement that had been with him for most of his life. It was an interest, a curiosity, to know what would happen next. If Dale did fuck his father, would Kenneth get something back he’d been owed for a long time?

Kenneth stepped quietly across the faded linoleum floor and looked into the living room. The doorway was made with wood that had obviously been cut by hand. It might have come from the woods in the backyard. The wood was the color of the shadows lamplight throws in summer dusk.

His beer sweated cold in one hand, and he squeezed the dark-handled knife with the other. Dale was on his knees in front of his father and Jake leaned forward in his chair, like he was waiting for Dale to tell him something. Dale brought forward the bottles, grazed Jake’s cheeks and lips with the round mouths of them. The sound in the house was the change of the seasons.

Jake jerked back his bottle of beer and swallowed long. Dale, distant enough to just be about to tell him something a drunken man would say, was also close enough to kiss him. Kenneth’s heart jumped. His memories folded over.

Jake’s hand dropped, twining tendons, the marks of years of hard work, and he leaned farther back in his chair. Dale said something to him Kenneth could not hear. Dale took Jake’s beer and set it onto the wooden floor, the only sound in the house. Kenneth watched him lay his hands on his father’s brown leather belt. He wondered if it was the one he’d unloosed in the reflection of the mirror in Texas, the same one he’d used to beat him. Jake leaned his head back in the chair; Kenneth couldn’t tell if he’d passed out or not. Kenneth raised his hand to his cheek, almost expecting to find blood.

Kenneth remembered all his summer evenings, suddenly pressed together, the way night had stretched out long and black and made him so lonely, the way he had felt when the boy in Galveston had turned him over. He saw how all the things he’d wanted had not been obliterated but changed, by only a few afternoons.

Kenneth could see his father’s boot heels, worn on the outside, pointing toward him. He thought of the light of storms coming in not over the mountains, but over the ocean. That was why he’d been able to see him, he realized, not because the curtain had been drawn, but because it was dark enough outside to cause his reflection to appear in the lamplight on the glass. That storm had rolled in over the beach in Texas. He’d never seen anything so gray or angry. Nothing with so much hard beauty and potential to kill.

Kenneth stepped backward into the kitchen. He put the knife back on the counter, listened hard for what was happening in the next room. He felt revulsion so deep it turned within him, took him to the place he was always trying to go, that place beyond. He leaned against the counter and unbuckled his belt. He imagined everything happening in the next room by the sounds he could not hear. Kenneth took his cock in hand, and became both wretched and free.

Dale, in the warm lamplight of the living room, existed in the pit where Kenneth had seen the vultures emerge, the shadows of the slag, the fire smoldering beneath a town burning for twenty years. There is a place where damnation ceases to be damned, and he had always searched it out—and occasionally found it—with Kenneth. He glowed the color of a dying star. Nothing had ever come up between his ribs the way touching that man’s belt had. At the same time, he wanted to take it back, to take everything back. That split second before he hit the ground was perhaps more than he could stand.